10 things worth sharing this week ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
DuckDuckGo removed trackers from Mailgun, and one other. More
10 things worth sharing this week
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Sep 4
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A page from my book, Keep Going
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” RIP writer Wendell Berry, who wrote several of my personal fridge poems, including “The Real Work” and “A Warning To My Readers,” which I felt compelled to write out on The Doomscroller (the music is Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Something Blue,” from his wonderful album Surround):
I was privileged to see a very early rough cut of Laura Dunn’s film, LOOK & SEE: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, way back when it was called The Seer. This was in 2015, right after my Steal Like an Artist journal came out, so I took it along and did the “Go to the movies. Draw in the dark” prompt:
It’s kind of wild to look at those notes now: so many of them made it into my work! The bit about how art is elevated and even gains meaning by interruption went into my ideas about so-called “work/life balance,” and the “age of divorce” bit went into my book Keep Going, although I had to cut off the second half:
“This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That’s the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That’s what we do, we people who make things. If it’s a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it’s all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.”
A personal motto of mine, cribbed from Berry: “Every day do something that won’t compute.”
RIP Gloria Steinem. Believe it or not, I once got to have dinner with her when I was a 20-year-old student at Miami University! I was the only man in the room — it was fantastic. I remember the last thing she said to me was, “Give your mother a hug for me!” (I just texted Mom a bit ago, and she recommended My Life on the Road.) When Steinem was asked why she lasted so long, she replied: “I have a sense of humor. That’s crucial. It allows you to laugh at yourself and say when you’re wrong…. I suspect that the people who last the longest, who continue to be trustworthy, are people with a sense of humor.”
RIP David Fair, who co-founded the band Half Japanese with his brother, Jad Fair. I must admit I am woefully ignorant with their ouevre, even though they influenced a ton of musicians I love. I really like Fair’s mini-essay, “How to play guitar,” and this clip from the documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King where Fair insists the band were playing their instruments as well as they could. (As Saul Steinberg said, “What we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her own limitations.”) Half Japanese fans: tell me your favorite songs!
“I think that’s why our music is exciting to people is because we’re excited about it when we make it. We’re having fun, so I think people have fun when they’re listening to it.” Thanks to Dusty Henry’s piece “Twisted Teens Want You to Wake the F*** Up” for getting me into the country-punk with steel guitar duo from New Orleans. I recommend starting with their first album (especially the song “Marionette“) and if you dig that, check out Blame The Clown and Florida Water Blues.
Want to be excited and have fun when making your art? I wrote a book for that:
The kids are alright: How a 15-year-old film buff helps Austin teens discover old Hollywood. (Show your kids old movies, y’all!)
The genius of “What’s Opera, Doc?”
“I’ll tell you who’s a psychopath in all our lives right now: ChatGPT! It love bombs you. It tells you what you want to hear.” That’s Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, promoting his newest book, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.
Ordinary abundance. (To quote Keep Going, again: “The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary.”)
This week’s assignment comes from a typewriter interview with Adam Koford: “Figure out what works for YOU, and try not to be too precious.”
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this human-made, hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
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