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Putting down my Rubik’s Cube to type. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Thoreau was saying: if you’re beginning to die within, take measures right now. There must be some cabin in the woods¹ within you. There must be some space where you can regenerate yourself and remember what is most essential to you.” That’s writer Pico Iyer, a talking head in the Ken Burns-produced PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau. Other talking heads include Michael Pollan (“[Thoreau’s] big project as a writer is to wake us up”), Rebecca Solnit (she has the best response to the “But his mom did his laundry!” fun bunch choir), and Laura Walls, who wrote the wonderful biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life. I fell asleep several times, but my kids made it through all 3 nights of one-hour episodes! Our only trouble was that the ending was so heavy-handed we all went to bed depressed. (I’m going to get through Walden some day, but what I really love are his journals.)
Lighter fare: the teenager and I went to see Project Hail Mary, a good ol’ popcorn movie. Ryan Gosling says his performance was inspired by Chaplin in Modern Times and Val Kilmer and his t-shirt game in Real Genius, so I added both of them to our pizza night queue. (We liked The Martian a while back, another adaptation of a novel by Andy Weir. The teenager read both.) Funny thing: when I was signing at BookPeople the other day, Isabel told me that nobody wants to buy books with movie tie-in covers — they want to be seen reading the original!
Ryan Holiday’s 5 years of lessons from running a bookstore.
I know a bunch of people with new books out: My blurbs are on the back of Mason Currey’s Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life and Grace Farris’s See One, Do One, Teach One: The Art of Becoming a Doctor (she’s at BookPeople next week), and I was in the first draft of Jenny Lawson’s How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, but I think I got cut, LOL. (She’s at BookPeople later this month).
Zine-lovers of Austin, TX: This weekend is Staple! The Independent Media Expo. The special guest is Tara Booth, whose book Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It was one of my favorite things I read last year.
Music-lovers of Austin, TX: On April 22, I’m interviewing Hrishikesh Hirway (host of my favorite podcast Song Exploder) onstage as part of the release show for his new album. You can get tickets here.