Friday, May 3, 2024

Figure it out

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Figure it out

10 things worth sharing this week

May 3

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Happy 70th birthday to my dad — “figure it out!” is one of his favorite phrases

Hey y’all,

Lightning bugs! Frogs chirping! Cicadas! Summer is coming to Texas.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

I immediately picked up Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing after listening to his interview about editing on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Really beautiful book. If you like books like Illustrators’ Sketchbooks or Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals you’ll dig this one. (I stole the title for Tuesday’s letter.)
I have the print magazine in a pile, but I haven’t get dipped into this massive NYTimes feature about how artists work at all stages of their career. (Thanks to Laura Olin for reminding me of it.)
Good sentences: At lunch the other day I sat next to a poet who was working on the release of her first novel. “I tend to like prose by poets,” I said. “They usually write good sentences.” I’ve just started reading Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, a book of essays inspired by sentences from his commonplace book, but I got distracted by the list of books he mentioned in the introduction about how to write good sentences: Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, Stanley Fish’s How To Write a Sentence, and Joe Moran’s First You Write A Sentence.
The best thing I heard this week: What kind of album would you get if you gave an 11-year-old Logic Pro and played him a steady diet of Kraftwerk and Daft Punk? The answer is TECH, the latest album from my son Owen Kleon. (For fun, I interviewed Owen about the making of the album.)
One of my favorite books that few people know about is Norman Brosterman’s Inventing Kindergarten, which not only tells the history of kindergarten, it suggests that kindergarten’s emphasis on geometry and abstraction had a part to play in the beginning of abstract art and modern architecture. Lawrence Weschler wrote two good pieces on it, “The Kindergarten of the Avant Garde,” and “Back to Kindergarten! A Modest Proposal For a College of the Future.” (Because there are no coincidences, a while back I wrote a post about playing with blocks when you’re blocked that included both Weschler and Brosterman’.)
Music podcast: the great Life of the Record interviewed Richard and Linda Thompson about their masterpiece, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. (You can never have enough music, so here’s a batch of good music recommendations from the folks at Recomendo.)
Gangster movie: I enjoyed the twisted 2000 comedy, Sexy Beast, directed by Jonathan Glazer, who recently directed the Oscar-winner The Zone of Interest.
Fledgling cams: If you haven’t checked the Cornell Lab Bird Cams lately, you’re in for a treat. The eldest barred owlet left the nest and Athena’s great horned owlets are getting big feathers.
RIP novelist Paul Auster. A book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time is Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s comics adaptation of City of Glass.
RIP guitarist Duane Eddy. When Conan O’Brien asked him what was his greatest contribution to music, he answered, “Not singing.”

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my books or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Thanks to Ali Abdaal for continuing to sing the praises of my book Show Your Work!