Things to share this weekend (11/30)

how important are books, 2024 creative gifts, banana/duct tape, writing as thinking + notes on reading

Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan

My Thanksgiving involved debating the word “hoboken” was a good name for a city or not, and then on Friday we went on a double-decker bus through the slow crawl of Times Square…

Are books a waste of time? The Atlantic

• I don’t think so, but college kids do. Related.

Best book covers of November at LitHub

• And some of the books may be worth reading, too

2024 Kleon Studio Gift Guide from

Austin Kleon

• One of my favorite creators, Austin has some great suggestions

• Such as the 5-year diary format

A banana and duct tape went for $6.2M dollars at an art auction

• Artists! They’re clever lol

Writing as a way of thinking at Every

• When you turn the vast, interconnected network of thoughts, feelings, and ideas in your mind into a line of words, you find sequence, order, and story. You expose fallacy and fuzziness. Externalizing your thoughts pins them down, and once they are pinned you can bring your whole mind to bear on them, over and over, to clarify and improve them.

From me:

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Notes on reading/watching:

• Still reading:

  • Health and Safety by Emily Witt

    • Author feels a bit too old to be going out to warehouse clubs in Brooklyn, and also a lot of drug talk, not really sure why I’m reading this, kind of a modern writer’s life I guess

    • I’m about halfway through and she goes to Berlin for a bit, I’m starting to get into her style

  • The Writer Who Stayed by William Zinsser

    • So I went to the bookstore and traded in a few books and almost bought Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, but they only had new editions and I was like “nah, I can get this cheaper” so then I went through some of the literary non-fiction and essays and found this book of magazine columns from the early 2010s by Zinsser who was an old school film reviewer, columnist and later wrote a lot about writing

    • I love compendiums like this, it gives me inspiration for this space, I’d recommend this book

• Watching

  • The Sopranos

    • I’ve never watched The Sopranos, and I gave it a semi-hearted start a few months ago, but now have watched 2 or 3 in a row in season 1

    • I haven’t found too many other things to watch

    • I’m getting into the rhythm of it, it feels like a large commitment, but everyone keeps saying it’s good, and I generally like “prestige TV” so I need to go through with it

What do you want for Christmas?

Ok, keep going—

-Josh Spilker