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The October Country

10 things worth sharing this week

Oct 18

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Hey y’all,

The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy is only $9.99 on Apple Books and the paperback of Steal Like an Artist is still only around $8 on Amazon.

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

“October Country,” wrote Ray Bradbury, is “that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”
I borrowed Bradbury’s title for a mixtape of songs that sound like October to me. You can listen to the playlist on Spotify.
It’s finally open-the-windows season here in Texas, which means I’ve caught various earworms from passing cars in the past couple of days. Bop Spotter is a musical surveillance project that captures such earworms on a single street corner in San Francisco with a solar-powered Android phone running Shazam.
Election sign art: Nina Katchadourian’s Monument to the Unelected. (Here’s a look at a recent installation in Phoenix.)
“Baseball is for watching.” In A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, the poet Donald Hall wrote about watching baseball every night and reading in between innings. That’s what I’ve been doing during the playoffs, cheering on the Cleveland Guardians and reading chapters of Roland Allen’s The Notebook.
“Baseball” was one of the early episodes of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, one of my all-time favorite radio shows. I’ve been listening to a bunch of old episodes courtesy of this archive. Most recently: “Divorce,” “Moon,” “Work,” “Flowers,” and “Mail.” (There is, of course, a “Halloween” episode, but I’m saving it.)
I wrote about how I look at art and having a good day at the museum. (I loved the comments on this one, and how y’all do museums with and without kids: bring your sketchbooks, keep it short, get a treat, mimic poses, tell stories, talk to the guards, “find the butts,” and if a show is busy, walk all the way to the end and travel backwards!)
Great band: I caught a song by Austin trio The Point while listening to KUTX and had to check out their live session in Studio 1A — really wild stuff. They’re opening for Thailand psychedelic band Khun Narin on Halloween night at Antone’s, the first night of Levitation Fest. (The story of how Khun Narin made their first album is really interesting.)
One of my favorite things to do is play modern-ish music over old silent movies, so I don’t know how I just found out about Silents Synced, a project of the Blue Starlite Drive-In here in Austin that dubs alt-rock over classic silent films. They’re doing Nosferatu X Radiohead right now and just announced Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. X R.E.M. (Which is funny to me, because I’ve actually watched Sherlock, Jr. while playing Radiohead side project The Smile’s Wall of Eyes.)
This week’s assignment: Go ahead and moan, if you need to. As Marcel Proust wrote, “It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind…”

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm, completely reader-supported publication. If you want to help keep it going, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. I thought after last week’s voting on a name for my new book truck, y’all might enjoy these book truck names from the trucks at my local Yarborough Branch of the Austin Public Library: