The way you wanted to feel

10 things worth sharing + last chance for 20% off

Hey y’all,

The paperback of Steal Like an Artist is still 53% off (!!!) and only $6.99 on Amazon.

Also, I’m extending the 20% off summer solstice sale on paid subscriptions until July 4. You can subscribe yourself or give one as a gift or even get one for your whole group:

Here’s this week’s list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. I had this beautiful thought the other day: It’s not that riding my bike makes me feel like I’m 10 years old again — it’s that riding my bike makes me feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old. (One of my favorite pieces of parenting advice: You have to give yourself what you needed when you were a kid, and give your kids what they need now.) Summer is a great time to think about what you really wanted when you were a kid… and gift it to yourself.
   
   

2. “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?” asked the psychologist Carl Jung. “Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” I’ve been reading Jung’s Map of the Soul, an introduction to Jung’s work by Jungian psychoanalyst Murray Stein. I heard about the book when I was reading The Believer and came across Mimi Lok’s article about how the K-pop group BTS wrote a whole album based on the book. (It sold almost 5 million copies and was the world’s bestselling album of 2020.) Stein, who turned 80 last year, had never heard of the South Korean boy band, but he quickly became a fan and even wrote a more accessible book for BTS fans, Map of the Soul 7: Persona, Shadow, and Ego in the World of BTS. (He also recorded a whole series of podcasts about BTS on the podcast Speaking of Jung.)
   
   

3. “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.” The notebooks of novelist Orhan Pamuk are something to behold! They will be collected later this year in a book called Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022.
   
   

4. I would love to see this Wanda Gág show at the Whitney. (I read her book Millions of Cats to my kids “millions and billions and trillions” of times.)
   
   

5. A nice batch of books came across my desk this week: I’m sure Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time will provide me with even more gardening metaphors (I love her book The Lonely City); I’ve been working out more and thinking about the connection between exercise and creative work, so I’m strangely compelled to read Lou Reed’s collected writings about his tai chi practice, The Art of the Straight Line; and Drawn and Quarterly have reissued my beloved Moomin comics by Tove Jansson into yet another accessible form factor with Moomin Adventures: Book One. (If you want to treat yourself, just trust me, and get the Moomin Deluxe.)
   
   

6. Explorations in graphite: I believe in the comfort of a good pencil, so of course I was going to be fan of my pal Wendy MacNaughton’s “Pencil Skills.” (Just remember: “HBs are for architects.”)
   
   

7. Comics as time travel: Robert Zemekis has released the trailer for his adaptation of Richard McGuire’s brilliant graphic novel Here, “the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.” I have no high hopes for the movie, but I’d love it if people got turned onto McGuire’s work, and maybe even get curious about the original comic, which is a masterpiece. (A deep cut for fans is the little-known 2000 color edition.)

   
   

8. Cutting: I can add the playwright Bertolt Brecht to my list of writers who collage. (I had no idea he was friends with George Grosz and John Heartfield.)
   
   

9. Movie: I enjoyed Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which was not what I expected it to be. (In a good way.) I loved how Linklater was able to weave his ideas about philosophy and the self into a genre movie. (I wrote more about him and his ideas about time in a recent newsletter about revisiting old work.)
   
   

10. RIP Bill Cobbs, one of the great “Hey, it’s that guy!” character actors, and like me, a former Clevelander with a June 16 birthday. One thing he was known for was how much he elevated the material he had to work with. A prime example is Air Bud, a recent pizza night blockbuster, in which Cobbs managed to deliver a performance with dignity and grace in a movie about a dog that plays basketball.
    

Thanks for reading this hand-rolled, ad-free, anti-algorithm, completely reader-supported publication. You can help keep it going by becoming a paid subscriber. When you go paid, you get a bonus letter every Tuesday and membership in one of the coolest creative communities on the internet. The summer 20% off sale ends soon, so take advantage while you can:

xoxo,

Austin