Austin Kleon - Don’t get me wrong

Hey y’all,

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

1. All word nerds have their pet peeves. Mine is: “Don’t get me wrong.”
    
2. I had an extremely eclectic and promiscuous week in reading: I’m somehow reading a 500-page Goethe bio, a comic about cyclopes (I think that's how you pluralize them), an essay collection about the city-state of Los Angeles, and a writing manual of several short sentences about writing.  
    
3. Why I try to re-read Tim Kreider’s “The Referendum” every year.
    
4. Eye candy: illustrations from a 19th century Japanese fireworks catalog, featured in The Public Domain Review’s forthcoming book, Affinities. (I’m a huge fan of the book as a medium for juxtaposing images.)
    
5. Ear and eye candy: How Sun Ra taught us to believe in the impossible. (The brilliant Warren Craghead is listening to every Sun Ra album on Bandcamp and posting a drawing and a review. As of yesterday, he was at album forty-one.)
    
6. Podcast: I enjoyed this conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ezra Klein about one of my favorite topics: what children can teach adults about learning and creativity. (See my diary notes.) 
    
7. The Ransom Center here in Austin, TX has made over 10,000 movie posters available to download for free.
    
8. Steal like Elvis Costello: “Take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy.”
    
9. RIP composer and synth pioneer Peter Zinovieff. (Check out this appearance on the BBC.)
    
10. Goethe’s last words: “More light!”