10 things worth sharing this week
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| Hey y’all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: “Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about creative propagation: I wrote about watching Meg perform cactus surgery and what we do with the thing that sticks out about our work.
I seem to be revisiting my teenage years of wanting to be a philosophy major: I’ve been reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and researching Artistotle’s “The Doctrine of the Mean,” which I think I might make into a zine for Tuesday’s letter. (A Mean Zine?) All this reading is feeding into my theory of creative tensions.
Jessa Crispin on how the “superhero entertainment system” not only creates a lot of not-so-good work, it creates a not-so-great audience. (Bill Hader: “I remember going to a movie once and being, like, ‘Why are we going to this?,’ and this guy I was seeing the movie with goes, ‘Well, we’ve got to be part of the conversation,’ and I was, like, ‘No. I don’t want to be a part of a f***ing conversation.’”)
I thought a lot about the re-packaging of old properties and the selling of nostalgia when I read an advance copy of Box Brown’s book, The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood. I think it’s Box’s best book and nonfiction comics at its finest: Well-researched, perfectly paced, clean lines, fun drawings. A+.
A Van Gogh painting gets renamed thanks to a chef/painter. (Thanks to reader Mary for this one!)
Summer is right around the corner, and I’m dreaming of escape. During the pandemic, I got really into castaways and people lost at sea and bonafide hermits and the lady who lived in a cave for 500 days. (A gentle reminder for myself and all of us: instead of going to those extremes, you could just keep a sabbath.)
“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
Retina scans and cosmic eggs.
As I predicted last week, the owlets have fledged!!
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