Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play…” I had the pleasure of writing the foreword to Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s new monograph Citizen Printer, and the folks at Letterform Archive gave me the okay to share the whole thing: “A Man of Letters!”
“The magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’” In the shack with Robert Caro.
I laughed out loud at cartoonist Edward Steed’s collection, Forces of Nature, even at the cartoons I’d already clipped out of The New Yorker. (Yet another beautiful book from the wizards at Drawn & Quarterly.)
“If you just pick up your guitar, there’s just immediately . . . something to do. You play one note, and it’s like a question: What are you going to do next? The guitar will ask you the question.” That’s guitarist Bill Frisell, whose work I’ve made a note to dip into. (He reminded me of a collage I made: “Reach for your instrument!”)
“Everyone wanted to play guitar, no one wanted to play bass.” I’ve got a good weekend pattern going where I spend Sunday afternoon reading a short music book in the pool. Last weekend was bassist Stuart David’s memoir In the All-Night Café: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian's Formative Year. (Suggested to me by Franz Nicolay when I interviewed him about his latest book, Band People.)
Sunday’s for reading, but my Saturday plans include hitting a little kid’s birthday party. If you ever need a birthday present for a little kid, my go-to is a box of Crayola markers (or Slick Stix) and Ed Emberley’s Make A World, the greatest drawing book of all time. When my friends have babies, I send them a copy of the complete George and Martha. (I think James Marshall is an underrated genius.) When I recommend other books for little kids, I like to focus on stuff that’s fun to perform, like Millions of Cats, Room on the Broom, and Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin! For pure visual delight, try Leo Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow or Hervé Tullet’s Press Here. When the kids get a little older, I love classic 20th century, well-drawn stuff by Richard Scarry (my kids wore out Best Nursery Tales Ever, What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go), William Steig (Shrek! and his other classics are great, but don’t sleep on C D B! and Pete’s A Pizza), Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, and Tomi Ungerer (I love The Three Robbers). As for contemporary picture book makers: I love Oliver Jeffers and Jon Klassen — The Hat Trilogy is one of my absolute favorites.
Do not do what I did and read your 4-year-old Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, unless you want to wind up with a 9-year-old goth who draws amazing comics and devours series like Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived and Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales and occasionally re-reads Mark Dery’s biography Born to Be Posthumous for fun.
My 11-year-old coder/musician recently read all the books of xkcd creator Randall Munroe. He wasn’t a huge fan of Thing Explainer, but he tore through How To, What If? and the sequel, What If? 2. (If there’s ever a How To sequel, he says thinks it should be called How 2.) He’s in middle school now and getting a ton of use out of his Kindle Paperwhite. His backpack already weighs a ton, and he can easily pull out his Kindle when there’s downtime in class and read into the night when his brother is asleep. (Our bedtime rule is: you can stay up reading, you just have to physically be in bed.) He’s currently on book two of Neil Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy.
“When I’m cutting glass, time doesn’t exist.” It took her 70 years to find her inner artist. At 82, she’s in her studio every day.
Your word of the week is “verbify.” (“Forget the noun, do the verb.”)
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xoxo,
Austin
PS. Here is a PSA from my book Keep Going:
Of all the interesting things mentioned in this post, the article about the 82-year old glass artist Norma Geddes moved me the most. Anything can happen at any time in a life (thank God).
I picked up Amos’s book after reading Tuesday’s newsletter. The book itself is a work of art! It’s fabulous and filled with so much history. What a wonderful person and a wonderful read. Thanks for sharing Austin!