The world between my ears
10 things worth sharing this week
The year is 50% over. Summer has only begun. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“If I'd known I was going to be around this long I would have taken better care of myself. So drive safely and don't abuse alcohol, drugs or candy.” The letter that changed my life. (Huge thanks to everyone who donated to Winston Smith’s GoFundMe. We bumped him over 75% of his goal!)
I’m 65% through War and Peace. [Spoiler alert!] Napoleon is marching to Moscow, so I grabbed my copy of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and read the section featuring Charles Joseph Minard’s infographic depiction of Napoleon’s march, which E.T. says “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”
“Myself, I feel very safe.” My review of The Phoenician Scheme: as long as Wes Anderson makes movies, I will go see them in the theater. (Definitely stick around for the credits, which are as artful as the rest of the movie, and highlight the fact that they borrowed actual paintings for the film’s shooting.)
“A remarkable library of around 9000 books, the vast majority of which have been carefully and systematically defaced.” The Roy Gold Collection.
If you’re in New York, Jillian Hess tipped me off that my book Newspaper Blackout is featured in an exhibition of Mary Ruefle’s Erasures at Poet’s House. (If you like their interview with Ruefle, do read my own typewriter interview with the poet, and check out the whole series while you’re at it. We’ve got some more good ones on the way!)
Recent podcast appearances: I talked about art and theft on the TED How To Be A Better Human podcast and about the cost of making things on 50 Fires.
“It's just not Harry's world out there. It's like we've become an enemy to anything wondrous.” Pizza night shenanigans: After watching the not-exactly-classic 80s flick Harry and The Hendersons with the tweens, we watched a bunch of 80s music videos and drug PSAs, which, if you’d like to experience for yourself, I made into a YouTube playlist. (Trivia: 7 foot 2 inches tall Kevin Peter Hall played both Harry and the alien in Predator.)
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” My 12-year-old read Jurassic Park in a few days, so I was researching which other Michael Crichton books he might like, and my friend Matt Thomas told me this wild fact: “Crichton is the only writer in history to have a #1 book, #1 film, and #1 television series at the same time, and he did it twice.” (Crichton said one of my favorite things about why you need a good editor.)
TV: We loved Dept Q. on Netflix, a dark British crime thriller based on the books by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen. Matthew Goode is great (it’s funny to me that he wanted to bring James Bond back to his dark roots, because Detective Morck is similarly repugnant yet charming), but the real heart of the show is Alexej Manvelov’s character Akram. Highly recommended!
RIP journalist Bill Moyers. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking about his interview with Toni Morrison on love and writing, when she said: “While it may be true that, you know, people say, ’I didn’t ask to be born,’ I think we did, and that’s why we’re here. We are here, and we have to do something nurturing that we respect before we go.”
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xoxo,
Austin
PS. Signed a bunch of my books this week at Bookpeople here in Austin, TX — if you’d like a signed/personalized copy, you can place an order online.
You are reading War and Peace, which caused me to go back to the 1970's, when I was in college. My "for fun" classes, the ones unrelated to my major, were Russian Lit, especially the 19th century...Tolstoy. I was entranced. I re-read the paper I wrote on my manual typewriter , comparing characters in four of his books. What a treat to go back in time. Fun side note. The winter of 1977, I took my first plane ride on my first trip outside of the US. Had to take Amtrak to Canada to get the plane, Soviet Aeroflot. (It wasn't allowed in the US due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.) I went with a small group of students to Moscow and Leningrad (its name then). I went as a literary romantic-seeing all the places I'd read about and all the places I'd heard about. Tolstoy opened my world.
I have to be careful of when I read your newsletters because, if I let them, they can take over the day on which I read them. Each one takes me on travels I would never have found on my own. Your words bring joy, delight, laughs, wonder, new ideas, fresh takes on old ideas, sobering thought, delightful glimpses into your family and work life, and more entries for my already never-ending TBR list. Thank you!