Are we a teardown or a fixer-upper?
10 other things worth sharing this week ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
DuckDuckGo removed trackers from Mailgun, and one other. More
10 other things worth sharing this week
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Oct 9
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“Are we a teardown or a fixer-upper,” lifted type collage, 2022
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
An out-of-town developer tore a house down at the end of my street and cut down every single tree on the lot.¹ As I watched the big T-Rex excavator claw down the walls, a thought ran through my head: If it can be built, it can be torn down. True of houses, relationships, and civilizations.² What got me the most was the smell of the big pile of demolished house. A smell of rot and death. And then the oxblood and rain lilies came up:
“I write to find out what I think about something.” Congratulations to Anne Carson Congratulations to all of us for Anne Carson winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, because now more people in the world will be reading her.³ Perfect detail: she found out she won the prize “in Iceland, where she is listening to the wind.”
“I’ve always felt that if I could have forced myself to draw every day I’d be a better person,” Carson said in her Paris Review interview. “That it would pull me into an honesty and diligence about honesty that I otherwise slack off from. I also get very happy when I’m drawing.” This reminded me of a lovely zine called Drawing from Life that I got in the mail from Chicago artist Kate Broitman. Reading it really made me want to draw… and make more zines! (If you’re in Austin, TX, this weekend, check out Lone Star Zine Fest.)
Letter of recommendation: copying out your favorite poems. By hand is great, but I like to use a typewriter:
from Anne Carson’s “Short Talks”
Another poem I copied this week: Robert Frost’s “October.”
Overwhelmed by box sets: I’m going to have to set aside some time to listen to all the new goodies on The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True reissues. And I love Sean T. Collins’ suggestion for listening to Joy Division’s 16-disc Eternal (Live): Just put the whole set on shuffle! _“_It's the Joy Division concert that never ends and plays all your favorites multiple times without actually repeating itself. Unbelievable.”
“Singing and playing a musical instrument are acts of prayer.” “Art, when it is authentic, is animated by restlessness.” “There is an ontological difference — even before an aesthetic one — between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.” I’m married to a Catholic from Cleveland, and we are both Guardians fans, so Pope Leo XIV’s condemning AI and defending human creativity while also blessing the White Sox is causing us many mixed feelings. ⚾️
“My boys were in middle school, and you’ll do anything, as a parent, to stay close to them.” Legendary football coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city is a delight. I watched the whole YouTube walkthrough with my middle schoolers. Tomlin embodies the “curious elder” spirit I write about in Don’t Call It Art:
Spooky season listicles: Benjamin Dreyer has a two great batches of old scary movies and Sarah Allen recommends some family Halloween movies. (Clue fell flat in our house, but Over the Garden Wall is so good I’m mad we didn’t watch it earlier.)
RIP actress Eva Marie Saint, who died at the age of 102. (We just watched her in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest — a huge pizza night hit!)
Do not miss this typewriter interview with cartoonist Roz Chast!
Thanks for reading. If you love this human-made, hand-rolled newsletter and would like to support my work, you can:
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xoxo,
Austin
1
Jon Mooallem: “In a city, there’s simply too much newness for a human being to perceive without breaking.”
2
Kenneth Clark: “However complex and solid it seems, civilization is quite fragile.”
3
Two friends of the newsletter, Sam Anderson and Elisa Gabbert, have written about Carson: “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson” and “Why Anne Carson, the New Nobel Laureate, Is the Easiest Difficult Poet.”
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