Austin Kleon - Keep calm and make ugly art

Hey y’all,

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

1. Keep calm and make ugly art.
    
2. My friends at Bookpeople here in Austin, Texas are offering signed, personalized copies of my books. They ship everywhere, but you have to order before November 22 to get them in time for the holidays. (I highly recommend Keep Going and The Steal Like An Artist Journal as gifts for friends or colleagues who are burned out right now.) Every book gets a drawing.
    
3. I’m enjoying dipping into The Daily Henry David Thoreau, even though I was already in the habit of reading his daily journals. The book was edited by Laura Dassow Walls, who wrote an amazing biography about him. (Please do not write to me about his laundry.) 
    
4. An interview with Spencer and Jeff Tweedy about their new books and what they’ve learned from each other. Jeff’s How To Write One Song is pretty good, but don’t sleep on Spencer’s Mirror Sound: The People and Processes Behind Self-Recorded Music, a beautiful book that would make the perfect gift for a musician. 
    
5. An interview with Brian Eno about his music for anxious times. (I’m very happy that Faber is re-issuing his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, which was a big influence on my book, Show Your Work!)
    
6. Critic Dwight Garner on collecting quotes in his commonplace book for his book, Garner’s Quotations.
    
7. If you have HBO, I really enjoyed the first two episodes of How To With John Wilson, which is like a lo-fi film essay about how weird and wonderful it is to live in NYC. (This review of the episode about scaffolding rightly points out a similarity to one of my favorite documentaries, Los Angeles Plays Itself.)
    
8. Some soothing ear candy: a Chris Abrahams quarantine concert on solo piano and Robert Fripp’s Music for Quiet Moments.
    
9. RIP actor Sean Connery. RIP singer/songwriter Billy Joe Shaver. RIP poet Diane di Prima. 
    
10. Some reminders, if you need them: Not everything will be okay, but some things will. Beautiful things grow out of sh*t. Be the light or reflect it. Stay alive, get weird. The world’s more interesting with you in it. Do what you know how to do. Go on until you fall over.