Austin Kleon - The summer book

Hey y’all,

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

1. My July pick for the Read Like an Artist book club is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.
    
2. My reading life has been even more promiscuous than usual: I’m skimming and skipping and flitting between Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing, Joel Dinerstein’s The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, and Walter Scott’s Wendy, Master of Art.
    
3. Brian Eno launches his own radio station.
    
4. Why 1980s NYC was such a creative place for music. (Spoiler: it was cheap.) As Patti Smith advised young artists half a decade ago, “Find a new city.”
    
5. I interviewed writer/artist Edward Carey about his work and The School of Greatness interviewed me about mine. (If you can’t get enough of my voice, check out my audiobook trilogy!)
    
6. A look at some of the treasures in the Saul Steinberg papers, including an exquisite corpse drawing from his only meeting with Picasso. (Here’s another one.) I recommend following the Beinecke Library at Yale for more great stuff like this.
    
7. How Edward Gorey came upon his book design style, an excerpt from this terrific review of Mark Dery’s Gorey biography, Born to be Posthumous.
    
8. Netflix: like many, I’ve been sucked into the French mystery series Lupin. The New Yorker profiled the star and producer, Omar Sy. (I was so ignorant when starting the show I didn’t realize the Arsène Lupin books are real, and many are out of copyright, so you can get the ebooks on Project Gutenberg.)
    
9. Podcast: Tyler Mahan Coe’s delivery on Cocaine and Rhinestones took some getting used to, but I had to make time to listen to the episodes about one of my favorite musical duos, Buck Owens and Don Rich. (One secret of a good life seems to be: get you some Don Rich level backup.)
    
10. Father’s day is Sunday, so here’s an art experiment I wish I’d started when my kids were babies. (Feel free to steal it and any other parenting ideas!)