In and Out of The Whale

In this week's newsletter: fish tales, ear and eye candy, and more... 

In this week's newsletter: fish tales, ear and eye candy, and more... View this email in your browser Hey y'all, Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:  Yesterday was Herman Melville's 200th birthday. His masterpiece, Moby-Dick, basically ruined his career and he died mostly forgotten. (Here's how The New York Times covered him over the years.) Jill Lepore recently published a lovely essay about his domestic life. Other than Melville's books, all of which are free and in the public domain, I recommend Bryan Waterman's 5 tips for reading Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Philbrick's short book, Why Read Moby-Dick? and the Twitter feed, @mobydickatsea.     A while back I wrote about Melville's marginalia and reading the right book at the right time.   Jean-Michel Basquiat once copied out the entirety of Moby-Dick's table of contents.    Poem: "Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale"   I read The Book of Jonah a couple of times, and finished Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the book, Pinocchio is swallowed by The Terrible Dogfish (or a "shark," in the translation I read), but in the Disney movie, he's swallowed by a sperm whale.     "Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together..."   Frank O'Hara said, "Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!" Writer Elizabeth McCracken (author of one of my favorite books I read this year) does one better: she and her daughter go to the movies together.   To watch: the new Ursula K. Le Guin documentary is playing on PBS tonight. (Also: you might want to give The Master another viewing, although I remember liking the teaser trailers for that movie more than the actual movie.)    Ear (psycho)candy: I've been blasting The Velvet Underground's Matrix Tapes in the studio.   Get lost in 40 years of the Fresh Air archives. Thanks for reading. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to someone who'd like it or, even better, buy them a copy of Keep Going! If you're seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here. xoxo,  Austin Austin Kleon is the author of Steal Like An Artist and other books. Subscribe to this newsletter   Copyright © 2019 Austin Kleon, All rights reserved. My mailing address is: Austin Kleon 19885 Detroit Road Box #222 Rocky River, OH 44116 You're getting this email because you signed up for it at austinkleon.com. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. Amazon Affiliate links offset the cost of sending these missives.