When you hear it

10 things worth sharing this week

A mixtape for April

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. “A total solar eclipse is so much more than something you just see with your eyes. It's something you experience with your whole body.” There’s a good chance it will be cloudy or raining here in Texas during the total solar eclipse on Monday. If we won’t be able to see the eclipse, we can still feel it and hear it: “During an eclipse, crickets will chirp and frogs will chorus, thinking night has fallen.” The Eclipse Soundscapes Project will be studying the eclipse’s effect on the acoustic environment. Some will turn the eclipse into music. There’s even a device called The Lightsound which allows the blind and low-vision community to experience the eclipse through sonification.
   
   

2. Ear candy: With all that in mind, I titled my eclipse-inspired April monthly mixtape When You Hear It. You can read about the spooky things that happened when I was making it, listen to all the tracks on YouTube, and most of the tracks on Spotify.
   
   

3. “If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop.” I wrote about the book Art & Fear, a profile of songwriter and “SEO Speedwagon” Matt Farley, and the prolific painter Steve Keane in Tuesday’s letter on quantity and quality. (Loved the comments!)
   
   

4. “What is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people…“ I’m currently reading psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s A Life of One's Own, a very strange and interesting book published in 1934. Milner used seven years of writing in a diary to investigate what made her happy and what she really wanted out of life. W.H. Auden found the book “as exciting as a detective story.” (You can read excerpts from the book at The Marginalian.)
   
   

5. “One learns who one is, and it is at one's peril that one attempts to become someone else.” RIP writer John Barth.
   
   

6. Great movie: I liked Percival Everett’s novel Erasure a lot and I had a good feeling I was going to like the movie adaptation, American Fiction, but I didn’t anticipate just how much I was going to like it. Wonderful flick.
   
   

7. Pizza night with the kids hit: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the 1954 Disney live-action film starring Kirk Douglas. I’ve been meaning to watch the making-of featurette, Operation Undersea. I liked the movie so much I’ve even started reading the novel. (After spending last summer with Don Quixote and Dune, this summer I want to read more old-school adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe.)
   
   

8. Saxophone Colossus: I’m very excited to read The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins.
   
   

9. RIP cartoonist Ed Piskor, creator of Hip Hop Family Tree.
   
   

10. A final thought from Adam Phillips in On Giving Up: “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.” Please stick around this week. This world is better with you in it.
    

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xoxo,

Austin

A stack of Show Your Work! copies for a speaking client