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A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I'M READING / LISTENING TO / LOOKING AT ON THE NET.


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Feb 08
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Probably it would be unwise to say too much about my job. After all, any “artist” with a profession is bound to have an ambivalent attitude towards it: one loves it sometimes for not being one’s art, and hates it sometimes for the same reason. I don’t think that, if one needs money, being an artist is sufficient excuse for shirking the job that feeds one, and I try to do mine conscientiously for that reason alone….The best thing to do is to try to be utterly schizoid about it all – using each personality as a refuge from the other.
— Philip Larkin on having a day job

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Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.

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Mattthomas: “Graduate school in the humanities is a trap”: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

austinkleon: all 3 of those articles have been fantastic and absolutely devastating

Mattthomas: Agreed. Yet I bet no one in my program, faculty or grad student has read them.

austinkleon: I have been greeted w/ outright hostility for forwarding them!

Mattthomas: I am reminded of this image from PLANET OF THE APES

austinkleon: LOL

Mattthomas: “Graduate school in the humanities is a trap”: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

austinkleon: all 3 of those articles have been fantastic and absolutely devastating

Mattthomas: Agreed. Yet I bet no one in my program, faculty or grad student has read them.

austinkleon: I have been greeted w/ outright hostility for forwarding them!

Mattthomas: I am reminded of this image from PLANET OF THE APES

austinkleon: LOL

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Tasty Touring » Tasty Up Trailer Tour

Fun little video showcasing some of Austin’s great food trailers. Pay attention, those of you visiting for SXSW. (Also: I drew the picture on the nametags.)

Feb 07
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Herb & Dorothy - a film by Megumi Sasaki
Great documentary. A beautiful portrait of a couple who decided what was important to them, and made it work with what they had. From the NYTimes review:

Once upon a time, a postal clerk with an enthusiasm for art history married an open-minded librarian. From the outside, little distinguished Herb and Dorothy Vogel from any other middle-class couple in midcentury New York. But by the early 1960s, if you were to squeeze inside their modest Manhattan apartment, dodging the cats and turtle tanks, you would bump into the most astonishing company: the work of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis and dozens of other artists who would come to represent the crème de la crème of Minimalist and Conceptual art.
The story of how this collection — a large portion of which now resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — came to be is the subject of Megumi Sasaki’s modest, touching documentary, “Herb & Dorothy.”
Herb & Dorothy - a film by Megumi Sasaki

Great documentary. A beautiful portrait of a couple who decided what was important to them, and made it work with what they had. From the NYTimes review:

Once upon a time, a postal clerk with an enthusiasm for art history married an open-minded librarian. From the outside, little distinguished Herb and Dorothy Vogel from any other middle-class couple in midcentury New York. But by the early 1960s, if you were to squeeze inside their modest Manhattan apartment, dodging the cats and turtle tanks, you would bump into the most astonishing company: the work of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis and dozens of other artists who would come to represent the crème de la crème of Minimalist and Conceptual art.

The story of how this collection — a large portion of which now resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — came to be is the subject of Megumi Sasaki’s modest, touching documentary, “Herb & Dorothy.”

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It is almost like a church, because you’re going to that room, you know your purpose, you know what you’re going to do in there, and you don’t have to take anything in with you that you don’t want to take in there.
Sade on the recording studio, but it could really be Sade of any sacred creative space

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Sarah Palin’s cheat notesMy guess is that this will make her seem even hotter to her natural audience.
Sarah Palin’s cheat notes

My guess is that this will make her seem even hotter to her natural audience.

Feb 06
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Bands always have t-shirts at their shows, but I have yet to see a writer sell shirts at a reading.

Feb 05
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No More Heroes 2 for the WiiFINALLY a Wii game comes out that I give a shit about. How in the hell did I not know this was out? I loved the first one. Gotta get this.
No More Heroes 2 for the Wii

FINALLY a Wii game comes out that I give a shit about. How in the hell did I not know this was out? I loved the first one. Gotta get this.


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…it was named by my wife, Julia Sheehan. She liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview.

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Newspaper Blackout

Newspaper + Marker = Poetry. Pre-order it now for $10 on Amazon.com