A few days ago this newsletter passed 200,000 subscribers! To celebrate the big number and the summer solstice, I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions. When you go paid, you get a bonus letter every Tuesday and membership in one of the coolest creative communities on the internet. Paid subscriptions also keep the free Friday newsletter going for everyone.
If that’s not a good enough deal for you, at the time I’m writing this, the paperback of Steal Like an Artist is 50% off and only $6.99 on Amazon. I’ve never seen it marked so low. A steal, indeed.
Alright, alright, alright! Here’s this week’s list of 10 things I thought were worth sharing:
I turned 41 last weekend. One of my favorite presents was this vintage stamp carousel that Meghan got me. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I’m told they used to be pretty common in offices. I’ve been spinning it here on my desk, thinking about circular time, nostalgia, volvelles, and Fortuna’s wheel. All the things that go round and round. (Just this morning I was reading The Idler and learned about prayer wheels.)
I’ve been writing like crazy, so I’ve needed things to take my brain off the work at night. We were bingeing Bridgertonbut we ran out of seasons, so now I’ve been sucked into Below Deck, which is absolute trash and perfect for totally watching television. (I’m not alone: the director Steven Soderbergh has frequently listed it in his yearly “Seen, Read” roundups. When asked why he loves it so much, he replied, “It’s about work.”)
I made another monthly mixtape for June. I tried to stick to stuff I like to play by the pool for this one: there’s a couple Junior Murvin tracks, James Brown, the Everly Brothers, Prince, Donovan, The Wailers, and more. You can listen on Spotify or YouTube.
If you love scratchy records: I’ve been doing the dishes to the Walter Martin Radio Hour. I’ve been listening to Walter’s music for half my life — first his band The Walkmen and later his solo records — so it makes sense I’d dig the music he listens to. The first episode has a lot of great New Orleans and Caribbean music, the second concentrates on the songs of Leiber & Stoller, and I’m not done with the third yet, but so far it’s more of a grab bag of Walter’s favorite songs. (My only nudge is that it’d be nice for him to post a tracklist of each episode!)
RIP actor Donald Sutherland, who “recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said, ’This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.’” (I really like him in the video for Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” — here’s the story of how it was made.)
Plenty to steal from the research techniques of John Durham Peters: “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”
Thanks for reading! This is a completely reader-supported publication. We don’t take ads or sponsorships — I only point to the weird stuff that I love. There’s no big team behind this operation, no assistants, just four hands — mine writing, and Meg’s editing. Week after week. If you love this letter, you can help keep it going by becoming a paid subscriber:
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