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I enjoy these quiet June days in Austin, Texas, when it’s not too hot yet and town has emptied of students and neighbors taking early vacations.
Reminder: Father’s Day is next weekend — my books or a gift subscription to this newsletter make excellent gifts!
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“I think that keeping a journal, diary or daily reminder is one of the best independent methods for self expression, knowledge and experience. A journal can be started at any time in your life and the longer it is maintained, the more valuable it becomes to you...” The daily journal of 80-year-old Raymond Herbert.
Collage problems: You might be surprised how many people ask what I use to paste photos and clippings into my notebooks. I recommend UHU glue sticks.
“Children learn through play. Adults play through art.” Brian Eno in conversation with Amanda Petrusich.
I devoured Dan Nadel’s Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life. A few years ago, I read an article about Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen, and wrote their “Distinctiveness Rule” down in my commonplace book: “You can change either the taste or the form, but you can’t change the taste and the form.” That’s what’s so interesting to me about Robert Crumb’s impact on comics, as put by Nadel himself: “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form. Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.” (I’m now reading the companion anthology, Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004 and plan to re-watch Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, Crumb.)
I also gobbled up David Shields’ How We Got Here, which attempts to trace the history of ideas — from Melville to Dostoevsky to Bloom to Zizek to Bannon — that brought us to this contemporary moment when “truthiness” rules the day. I read it as a kind of sequel to Shields’ Reality Hunger, in which he argued that we crave “reality” because we experience hardly any for ourselves. (The way Shields uses quotes to build his argument was a big influence on Steal Like an Artist.)
I know lots of people with books out! Matt Bucher’s The Summer Layoff looks like the perfect Kleon poolside read. (The Belan Deck was on my best of 2024 list.) I have been meaning to re-read Milton’s 350-year-old poem, so Alan Jacob’s Paradise Lost: A Biography comes at a great time. (“Read at whim!”) And Steven Bauer and Elizabeth Arthur have rebooted The Three Investigators series of mysteries for young readers. (Steven is the writing teacher who taught me to “Apply ass to chair!”)
Two cases for nominative determinism: Rob Walker talked to the NYTimes about ways to trick yourself into taking a walk (I like the 30-minute noticing workout!) and public transit and walking advocate Alissa Walker was a guest on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney answering the question “Is Uber Bad?” (Speaking of, here’s an insult you may borrow from me: “waymo.” To be used when you meet someone and nobody appears to be behind the wheel, so to speak. As in, “Look at this waymo over here.”)
Movies: We watched Paddington in Peru right after we watched Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and I was reminded once again of Heather Havrilesky’s 2013 essay, “Stop Blaming ‘Jaws’!”: “Every story now has to involve a threat to the entire globe. This is meant to raise the stakes, but it actually lowers them…” Personally, I cared a lot more about what happened to Paddington’s Aunt Lucy than whether The Entity was going to destroy the world. (I did, however, spend a good deal of time afterwards with Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme stuck in my head.)
RIP poet Alice Notley. I think I’ll make her words be this week’s assignment: “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against … everything.”
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