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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one,” writes Rob Sheffield in his memoir, Love is a Mix Tape. “I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new.”
A good tape, Sheffield writes, “puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs.” I put on my ”Oahu” mixtape after dinner and everybody in the family said, “I feel like we’re driving around the island again!” Thinking of putting on my June mixtape just to feel a little sunny this afternoon. (Listen on Spotify or Youtube.)
I was feeling bombed out last weekend, so I made a wintry, childlike mix from a sealed cassette called Nurturing Your Inner Child. (You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.) I’m deep into writing my next book about what I learned about creative work from my kids, so the mix had a bit of a magical effect on me and I made a bunch of progress. This is the power of a good mix, and music in general: you can create the world you want to inhabit.
One of the songs in that mix is “Pygmy Love Song,” by the Cameroonian writer and musician Francis Bebey. (You’ll recognize it if you watched the TV show Our Flag Means Death.) There’s an absolutely charming Youtube video of Bebey explaining how he plays a one-note flute on that track. I’ve watched it so many times I’ve memorized some of his lines. “You ask the flute to speak to you.” “Savage people live in cities.” “Who made the train?” “I’m teaching you! You should be paying me!” (Another fun song he plays the one-note flute on is “The Coffee-Cola Song.”)
Poem: “Even this late it happens: / the coming of love, the coming of light.”
TV: Severance is finally back for a second season tonight on Apple TV. I enjoyed Rachel Syme’s profile of actor Adam Scott in The New Yorker. (My favorite detail: writer Dan Erickson had the idea for the show while working at a door-parts company — “What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done?” — and he was still doing Postmates deliveries on his scooter while developing the show with director Ben Stiller. “The day he and Stiller pitched the show at Apple’s L.A. office, Erickson was broke enough that he took a Postmates order on his way home.”) Another writer Ben Stiller collaborates with is the excellent George Saunders — they’ve been trying to do something with Saunders’ (wonderful) debut collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline since 1998 — and I think you can detect a little bit of Saunders’ influence in Severance. (If you like the show, also check out Saunders’ collection, Pastoralia, and maybe all his other books, while you’re at it.)
The writer Lucy Sante is sharing some really excellent essays about how she writes in a series she calls “How To Sit Down.” (As I was taught: “Apply ass to chair.”)
Pizza night hit: the family liked Mousehunt, a very strange 1997 dark comedy directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Nathan Lane and Christopher Walken. It’s basically Home Alone but Kevin is a mouse. (The IMDB description includes the excellent word “stumblebum.”)
RIP Sam Moore, one half of the soul duo Sam & Dave. I love so many of their songs, but especially “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby.” One of the greatest 45 singles of all-time, IMHO, is “I Thank You” / “Wrap It Up.” (The A-side was covered brilliantly by ZZ Top, whose “Got Me Under Pressure” I had on a loop last week.)
Writing a book is like driving through Texas: you can do it all day and you’re still not out of it. If you have some writing to do, check out this list of 100 quotes that helped me write last year.
Thanks for reading. Every one of these newsletters is like a mixtape, made with love. Hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, and anti-algorithm, it’s all possible thanks to the support of readers like you. If you want to help keep it going, buy my books, hire me to speak at your event, or, best of all, become a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
PS. A fun thing that came in the mail: the Korean translation of my book Keep Going. (It blows my mind that my books have been translated into over 30 languages — all those books I wrote that I can’t read!)
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