Unnecessary obstacles

10 things worth sharing this week

An illustration from chapter 3 of Keep Going

Hey y’all,

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

1. I was delighted (and a little overwhelmed, honestly!) by the response to last Friday’s announcement of my next book, Don’t Call It Art. Many people asked if they could order signed and personalized copies — the answer is yes! You can pre-order from Book People here in Austin, Texas and I’ll not only sign and personalize as many as you want, I’ll draw in them, too, like I do in all my other books:
   

   
   

2. “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”¹ That’s Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, a favorite of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, whose new book The Score: How To Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game both thrilled and exasperated me. I’m still processing it, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now I’ll just say: I think it’s such a pleasure to see an academic write in a conversational voice and swing for the fences with a book that appeals to a general audience. “All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,” he says, and it’s hard not to love a writer who’s so passionate and articulate about his pasttimes. (See: my letter, “Your hobby looks exhausting!”)
   
   

3. The funniest thing I watched all week was Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching, a full-length documentary streaming for free on YouTube. (I think Nguyen would love it — it’s about what happens when a scoring system takes over a pleasurable hobby!)
   
   

4. “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.” Like everybody else, I was thrilled by Alysa Liu’s gold medal-winning free skate at the Olympics and the story about how she went away so she could come back. I was reminded of the words of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” If you’re playing the game you want to play the way you want to play it, you’ve already won.
   
   

5. Oliver Burkeman has a helpful term he calls “unclenching,” which he describes as “a psychological ’move’ that involves relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty.” He’s been writing really great newsletters on the theme, such as “The freewriting way of life” and “Nobody’s ever ready,” which was about avoiding the anxiety around whether you’ll get “left behind” if you’re not into A.I. Great mantra: “Unclench!”
   
   

6. Pizza night: Watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a good excuse to show the boys this 1974 BBC clip of Terry Gilliam on his cutout animation technique.
   
   

7. “There is always, in every piece I do, something wrong.” RIP French composer and musique concrète legend Éliane Radigue. (Here are essays on her life and work by Louise Gray and Geeta Dayal.)
   
   

8. “[She] described the book she’d like to see written, the book she said she’d want to read. She went into what I could only describe as a literary jazz riff for about 20 minutes. Her tempo increased as she spoke. She concluded by saying, ‘So, if that’s what you want to write, if you want to write a book about the cathedral within, then that’s a book I want to buy.’” RIP editor and publisher Ann Godoff.
   
   

9. “I want things to be intentional and slow. I don’t need them to be optimized.” I spent part of the weekend painting a cassette rack Meghan bought me to hold my mixtapes, so yeah, I enjoyed this story about a man in Los Angeles repairing old tape decks.

   

   I guess I’m in my yellow phase?

10. If you’d like a weird peek inside my brain (and how this newsletter often comes together) I wrote about how I get into something new.
    

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

Pre-order it now!

1. I think Suits’ definition also works for art (another form of play): “[Making art] is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”