Hey y’all,

On Tuesday I started a new monthly series in which I’ll be sharing favorite books from my shelves. First up: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

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

1. My hipper friends have been telling me for years that if I want to understand contemporary politics, I need to get into professional wrestling. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
   
   

2. Craig Brown’s 150 Glimpses of The Beatles had one of the best endings I’ve read in ages. Love it when a book sticks the landing in a big way. (I’ve just started his 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret.)
   
   

3. Quote Investigator is one of my favorite websites, so I was chuffed to be featured in two recent posts: “That’s All Any of Us Are: Amateurs. We Don’t Live Long Enough To Be Anything Else” and “Nothing Is More Impotent Than an Unread Library.”
   
   

4. I have such a large archive of writing on the blog, sometimes I like to go back and see what I was doing on this particular week in the past. One year ago: Why art requires a sacrifice and a risk. Two years ago: Books with unusual structures. Three years ago: I actually took a break from writing? Four years ago: thoughts on the self-help genre. Five years ago: Why I love my paper dictionary.
   
   

5. I’m flying to Philly in late October for my first out-of-town gig in ages, and you can bet I’m making time to see Jayson Musson’s new show, His History of Art. I still have my MFA on DVD from the Hennessy Youngman days proudly framed in my office. Here’s a great profile of what Jayson’s been up to since then. (Just wish I could catch Nina Katchadourian’s lecture — here are my notes from when she visited the Blanton in 2017.)
   
   

6. As a Texan, I am legally obligated to link to Jody Rosen’s profile of Willie Nelson as he approaches ninety. (There’s a reason I gave him the first quote in Keep Going.)
   
   

7. Not a podcast, but treasure trove of audio: When she found out I love the picture book author James Marshall, my friend Grace Farris sent me this post about a series of lectures Marshall gave to students from 1976-1990. UConn now has recordings all of the lectures digitized and available to stream online!
   
   

8. TV: We’re watching lots of Bluey with the kids. After they go to bed, we love this 24/7 channel on Amazon Prime that streams old episodes Grand Designs. (You can’t search for it, so it’s hard to find — look for the “On Now” section and scroll through it. ) I’m also really into Pluto TV, the “weirdest, freest streaming service” and the remastered episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head on Paramount Plus that have restored the original music videos! (As Neil Postman told us, “The best things on television are its junk.”)
   
   

9. Music: I’ve been on a big Four Tops kick. (And early Motown in general, which was engineered to sound amazing on little dinky transistor radios, and is therefore perfect on a Bluetooth speaker beside the pool.) I think “The Same Old Song” is one of the great postmodern masterpieces of the twentieth century. Here’s the story of how they made “Reach Out.”
   
   

10. “There's no need to be mean to yourself. You can be entirely gentle. It's just that what you have to (gently) remind yourself is that there is, in fact, no secret ingenious alternative to just walking the uncertain and sometimes uncomfortable path forwards.”

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Like this summer, the construction in our backyard feels like it will never end. Here’s our fearless newsletter editor checking out the view from my future writing spot: