Hey y’all,

Happy Friday the 13th. I couldn’t resist starting off with this scene I discovered after getting back from dropping my kids off at school. Life imitates comedy.

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

1. How to write a book. (I printed this out for my motivation corner.)
   
   

2. Iggy Pop on his mother’s love. (Compare with the father of 1/2 of Daft Punk.)
   
   

3. Reading: I’m slowly making my way through Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes, which reads to me like a mashup of the numbered structure of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the vibe of Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. (Sold to me by the author’s mood board — the power of showing your work!)
   
   

4. A few years ago, I wrote about reading more than one book at a time and letting them talk to each other. Someone asked me what that actually looks like in practice, so I wrote about a few times when two or more books led to a new piece of writing.
   
   

5. The hottest Gen Z Gadget is a 20-year-old digital camera. (I’m enjoying this strain of “the kids are alright” from the NYTimes. See also: “Luddite teens.”)
   
   

6. Music: Billy Nomates’ Cacti is out today. At the time of writing this, I haven’t listened to it — I’m going out to the actual record store to buy a copy! (I wrote about her in “A shed of one’s own.”)
   
   

7. Movies: I once took my pregnant wife to get a cheeseburger at an acclaimed restaurant in Austin and they wouldn’t serve us ketchup because “tomatoes aren’t in season,” so yeah, the horror/satire The Menu was definitely my cup of tea. (For pizza night with the kids: we liked Matilda (1996) directed by Danny DeVito and shot by cinematographer Stefan Czapsky, who also did a bunch of Tim Burton movies, like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Batman Returns.)
   
   

8. I didn’t watch the Golden Globes, but I caught the heartwarming acceptance speeches of Ke Huy Quan and Jennifer Coolidge, both of which are about resilience and luck and and just keeping going.
   
   

9. RIP poet Charles Simic. I wrote about his friendship with the artist Saul Steinberg.
   
   

10. AI can’t kill anything worth preserving.
    
    

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin