Without hope and without despair

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. Raymond Carver liked to quote Isak Dinesen, who said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. “Someday,” he wrote, “I’ll put that on a three-by-five-card and tape it to the wall beside my desk.” The poet Tess Gallagher said Dinesen’s words were a “quiet banner of determination” that flew over the last decade of Carver’s life. I used to have an index card with the words on my bulletin board, but it got lost somewhere, so I made a new one and pinned it up.
   
   

2. “There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see.” That’s Dinesen, again, quoted in Javier Marías’s Written Lives, a book of short essays about writers. “Although I have enjoyed writing all my books,” Marías wrote, “this was the one with which I had the most fun.” I had a lot of fun reading it, thanks to Elisa Gabbert’s annual year-end list of every book she read. (Her favorite novels on the list are two favorites of mine: Dayswork and Lonesome Dove.)
   
   

3. I made my own year-end lists, in case you missed them: 100 things that made my year and a separate list of my favorite books, music, TV, and movies. (I got so many questions about the notebooks at the top of that letter that I wrote a whole letter about my notebooks and what goes on in them.)
   
   

4. A list of everything new in the public domain.
   
   

5. Pizza night blockbuster: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a stop-motion masterpiece. I recommend this behind-the-scenes look by the BBC. (I love that the animators keep their fingerprints in the shots to show that human hands made the film.)
   
   

6. Soundtrack: I found The Inner Game of Tennis more seductive than Challengers, but I love the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack, which just won a Golden Globe.
   
   

7. Music book: I picked up Peter Ames Carlin’s The Name of This Band is R.E.M., and it’s really good so far. (Also good is The Reverend Al Green’s cover of “Everybody Hurts.”)
   
   

8. It’s been very cold in Texas, so I’ve spent all week building fires in our fireplace, experimenting with the top-down method, and dipping into The Book of Building Fires. Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, friends and family are dealing with the horrors of the wildfires in Los Angeles. Sending love to y’all. (Here’s Alissa Walker reporting from the city.)
   
   

9. The NYTimes asked Colson Whitehead what he hoped to see in 2025, and he replied, “I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.”
   
   

10. That’s fair, but a little bleak, so let’s give the last word to Rilke: “And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.” (Or: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.”)

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. Because time is a flat circle, here was the newsletter one year ago: