Trashy mementos

10 things worth sharing this week.

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. On Tuesday, I shared my spring diary walkthrough. Reader Anne M. recommended a “trashy memento journal” made up of “those little things you don't want to throw away, but aren't necessarily precious or significant enough to keep in a memory box.” I like this idea! I am a big fan of trash and, in the words of Torchy’s Tacos here in Austin, “Making it trashy.”
   
   

2. A good perspective on making art and being creative in these NOT/BUT comic strips.
   
   

3. Two great book recommendations from my better half (and newsletter editor) Meghan: The first is a galley she stole from me — the fabulous sentence-spinner Elizabeth McCracken’s forthcoming novel, The Hero of This Book. The second is Barry M. Prizant’s Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism, written with friend of the newsletter, Tom Fields-Meyer, who also wrote Following Ezra, a memoir about raising his autistic son. Uniquely Human is a really helpful and hopeful book — even people with neurotypical kids in their life will get a lot out of it.
   
   

4. My son and I are still playing a bunch of chess. (I just bought a nice portable chess set so we can play at the park with friends and out by the pool.) I’m also working my way through Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. I’m intrigued by the design of the book: on the right-side spread of the pages, you’re presented with chess problems and then you turn the page for the answer. When you get to the end of the book, you flip it around and the prompts continue. Very clever, and I marvel at how it was laid without desktop software in the late 60s. (I’d love to know more about that era of paperback publishing — I probably should re-read The Electronic Information Age Paperback.)
   
   

5. I’m loving these Musgrave 600 News pencils that my friend Matt Bucher gave me.
   
   

6. Ezra Klein talks to journalist Sean Illing about media and democracy and two of our favorite thinkers: Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. (Illing and I agree: Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is probably the first book you should read to understand how we got here. Highly recommended.)
   
   

7. Marc Maron interviews director Michael Mann. I don’t know what it is, but summer just makes me want to sit in a dark room and watch his movies. We just re-watched Heat with the surround sound cranked and I’ve got Heat 2 on hold at the library. (This summer, I’m wondering whether Mann has read William James. Last summer, Mann and Carlo Rovelli got entangled in my brain.)
   
   

8. “I want to create something that people can explore and work out for themselves. I’m very bored of everything being explained.” Four Tet on his 155-hour Spotify playlist. (I’ve been playing his record New Energy a bunch.)
   
   

9. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with earworms is to just play the damned song that’s stuck in my head and then whatever comes on afterwards. I got “The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill” stuck in my head, so I just went ahead and put on The White Album and listened to it all the way through. Those Beatles, man… they were pretty good! (A while back I wrote about how much I like the new remix.) Other spins on an old favorite: all the bonus tracks on the “definitive edition” of New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies. (A great non-album single from that era: “Thieves Like Us.”)
   
   

10. RIP photographer Lourdes Grobet, who became best known for her photos of Mexican wrestlers. I recently checked out a cool book of her work from the library. (Wish I’d have known about her before making my pansy luchadores!) Incredible thing I learned from her obit: her son, Xavier Grobet, was the cinematographer on Nacho Libre, which was based, of course, on the life of Fray Tormenta, one of the wrestlers his mom photographed. Here’s a nice interview with her and I love this photo of her painted cactus.
    

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:

Remember Moby-Dick this week: “Like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”

See you in August. (Next week.)

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Thanks to newsletter reader @lizmathenyfcps for this lovely photo of my books hanging out with some plants: