Austin Kleon

My year with Thoreau

As a Great Indoorsman, for most of my life I’d ignored the work of Henry David Thoreau. I owned a copy of Walden, but never read it. In 2015, the New Yorker published a “Why do people even like Thoreau?” piece with the subtle title, “Pond Scum,” and I felt validated in my ignorance.

Then, last year, Levi Stahl started raving about Laura Walls’ biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, and I got him to send me an advance copy. The book blew my mind — it’s one of those perfect bios that’s intensely researched but highly enjoyable to read. (I read it so much my wife made me put sticky notes over Thoreau’s “creepy” eyes.) The Thoreau rendered by Walls is fully human, and the book is really a perfectly-timed portrait of an American trying to keep his soul in chaotic times.

Walls gave me a whole new way of thinking about Thoreau, but maybe her greatest gift is that she got me to pick up his published journal. Here’s what I wrote about it in Keep Going:

A dip into Henry David Thoreau’s journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parents—he sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!

I set out on a daily reading of the abridged journal in the fall last year, and just recently lapped myself. (I’m still going, re-reading, and finding new passages to underline.) If you follow this blog, you know I’ve blogged at least a dozen times in the past year about my reading.

As a writer, there are two basic instructions I take from the journals:

1) Take long walks. Get out. Try to arrange your life in a way that you can get out for longer than you even think you can.

2) Go home and write in your journal about what you saw and heard and felt and thought about.

Repeat as necessary. (And when you’ve written enough, go back and pilfer your journals for good material to publish.)

I still haven’t read Walden or his other books (I’ve read a few essays), but his journals have had a huge (unexpected) impact on my life in the past year. He seems to me one of those authors who gets judged by the fact that his disciples (annoyingly) steal the wrong message from him. For me, it’s not: go live on the land out in the woods, it’s: How can you live deliberately? How can you be part of the world in a way you can live with?

He also, in his haughtiness, sort of doomed himself to cries of hypocrisy. (In response to people who say, “But his mom did his laundry!” Walls responds, “No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.”)

Yeah, he could be a prick, he was wrong about quite a bit, and I doubt we’d even get along if we met, but he’s been a constant companion to me in the past year. He’s taught me to walk, walk, walk, to look more closely at everything, to love the seasons, and to not let your inner life be destroyed by the status quo or the awful actions of your country.

I love him.

The magic of diner booths

This weekend my hotel room had this very weird little booth space right against the TV that turned out to be perfect for writing.

I rarely work in coffee shops, but I love sitting in diner booths — there’s something about being tucked in on 3 sides that makes me really want to just sit and work.

I’m not the only one.

Here’s a fun story about Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, who got kicked out of the writing room for chain-smoking:

Separated from his fellow writers, the long-haired genius, according to Simpsons creator Matt Groening in an episode’s DVD commentary, found a diner he liked, and would write from the same booth every day whilst drinking “copious amounts of coffee.” However, California soon banned smoking inside public places, and Swartzwelder found himself with nowhere to go. Instead of finding a new place to write, he simply purchased the booth, installed it in his home, and continued his work as if nothing had changed.

And here’s David Lynch, from Catching the Big Fish:

I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

I dunno, I might have to recreate a diner booth in my next studio…

Related: Community and creativity in mundane retail spaces

Open tabs are a time machine

GIF by Jennifer Daniel | via GIPHY

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet, he writes that “Our Browser History Is the New Memoir”:

If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

I have a laptop that I use sporadically, so every time I open it, the tabs in my internet browser show me who I was 24, 48, or even 168 hours ago. It’s a tiny form of (unexpected) time travel. (When you dip into an old diary, you’re expecting to take a little time trip…)

Years ago, I figured out a way to help my future self:

1. Put a Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard in the freezer
2. Forget that it’s there.
3. Open the freezer.

How funny that forgetting — something we mostly see as a bad thing — sets the stage for later surprise and delight…

Some Laws for nature journaling

Henry David Thoreau’s journal, opened to November 11, 1858

From a writeup of a talk by John Muir Laws on nature journaling:

For each thing you record, note these three things:

Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it

Creativity: “It reminds me of…” (or more simply “IRMO”): You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those

Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.

Read more.

We are verbs, not nouns

In Keep Going, I have a chapter called, “Forget the noun, do the verb,” and after seeing it on the poster, a reader asked if it was inspired by Stephen Fry. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I did a little googling.

In 2010, Fry was interviewed by “14-year-old Eden Parris in an interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled young readers to meet their TV heroes.” During the course of the interview, he “warned Parris that language could shape and limit people’s ambitions”:

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Of course, this would’ve been perfect for the book, but that is one of the universal laws of writing books: once you finish them, you find all the stuff you should’ve included but left out based on your ignorance.

The quote I did put in is from R. Buckminster Fuller’s classic, I Seem To Be A Verb:

Back in 2013, The New Statesman ran a piece called “What Atheists Can Learn from Believers,” in which the writer Karen Armstrong emphasized religion as a verb. “Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work.” She pointed out that in the modern west, there’s this idea that you have to believe first, and then do. But no, “we have turned faith into a head-trip,” when, originally, the English word “belief” meant something like, “commitment.”

“Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.

It’s remarkable to me how much you could apply what Armstrong is saying to creativity or making art. “If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it,” Armstrong says. Religion is something we do, a “practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart.”

Paul Thek, “96 Sacraments”

“It’s a practice,” Mary Karr says of her own faith. “It’s not something you believe. It’s not doctrine. Doctrine has nothing to do with it. It’s a set of actions.” I remember once, when asked to make a case for religion, she replied, “Why don’t you just pray for 30 days and see if your life gets better?

So many people think you have to first call yourself an artist, know who you are and what you’re about, and then you can start making art. No, no, no. You do the stuff first, then you can worry about what it is, who you are. The important thing is the practice. The doing. The verb.

We aren’t nouns, we are verbs. Forget the nouns, do the verbs.

A new connection (Corita + Thoreau)

Corita Kent, The Stamp of Thoreau, 1969

When I toured the Corita Art Center last weekend, I kept seeing evidence of Corita Kent’s thoughts on the seasons (I wrote about them in Keep Going):

I’d noticed Thoreau quotes in Corita’s work before. She seemed to especially like these lines from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” She used the quote in at least two different pieces over the years:

Corita Kent, different drummer, 1967
Corita Kent, Thoreau, 1971

So I asked (former) director Ray Smith if she knew of any explicit imagery with Thoreau. She led me straight to a drawer with The Stamp of Thoreau piece (from Corita’s series, A Set Of Heroes And Sheroes) that you see above.

Ray Smith in the print archives at the Corita Art Center

This was one of those great moments when I realized there was actually an unmade connection between two artists in my creative family tree:

That was then filled by another artist I love:

Everything is connected, but the connections only matter if you make them!

Listening to your materials

Jon Klassen (author of the fantastic Hat trilogy) shares this quote with people who ask him how to get kids writing and drawing more.

He explained in a tweet thread:

i take “the dictation of the materials” to mean that there are things that certain forms or tools “like” to do more than other things. certain kinds of mediums make for certain kinds of drawings, a picture book format makes for certain kinds of stories (loosely speaking).

being able to analyze what the materials WANT to do is such a huge part making anything & seems like rather than getting kids to specifically write something or draw something, getting them to think about that is way more broadly useful.

because you end up applying it yourself. you are a material with strengths and weaknesses. being able to look at what you’re working with objectively and decide what to make based on that is such a huge part of this job, at least it has been for me.

(relating to getting kids writing/drawing, materials give parameters. like giving them only a black marker means they might start thinking about drawings that only need that – what picture does that marker WANT to make? now they are solving a problem instead of “draw something!”)

(where that applies to writing, for me, was the absence of narration. i don’t know what to do with it, so i’m left with dialogue. what do stories with visuals and only dialogue WANT to do? they want to be about lying a lot, apparently.)

I’ve written a lot more about Albers and her idea of materials dictating the work in my previous post, “Materials, man.” (For more on materials and kids making stuff, check out “On Chuck Jones, Parenting, and Art Supplies.”)

Learning to see by looking at the world one piece at a time

This excerpt from Aaron Rose’s documentary Become A Microscope shows Corita Kent with her students, using what she called “finders” to learn how to see with fresh eyes. “You have to look at the world [in] small pieces at a time,” she said. “Look at it. Just a small part of the world.”

The Finders are described in the wonderful book based on her teachings, Learning By Heart:

[The finder] is a device, which does the same things as the camera lens or viewfinder. It helps us take things out of context, allows us to see for the sake of seeing, and enhances our quick-looking and decision-making skills.

An instant finder is an empty 35mm slide holder. Or you can make your own by cutting a rectangular hole out of a heavy piece of paper or cardboard—heavy enough so that it won’t bend with constant use. You can then view life without being distracted by content. You can make visual decisions—in fact, they are made for you.

When I visited the Corita Art Center yesterday, I was delighted to find out that they use Finders as their business cards:

Monarchs, migrations, and modulations

1. Our neighborhood was filled with monarch butterflies last week. “More monarchs are expected to fly through Austin than have in 10 years,” says a report from KUT. “Thanks to exceptionally good weather up north, where monarchs lay their eggs during the summer.”

Monarch butterflies are making their way through Texas to wintering spots in Mexico…. Think of Austin as a rest stop for migrating monarchs. Just as you need to fill up your tank when you drive down I-35, monarchs need to stop to eat. In the fall, they fill up on the nectar of certain flowers; in the spring, it’s milkweed they need to lay their eggs on. Austin adopted policies to grow milkweed in the spring and summer and encourage the growth of native pollinator plants.

2. Flying from Austin to Los Angeles this week, I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor? At the beginning of the documentary, Fred Rogers is shown sitting at a piano and talking about modulation — a fancy word for changing keys. He shows how some key changes are more difficult than others — C major to F major is pretty easy, for example, but F major to F# major not so much. He felt that his job was to help children through the modulations of their lives.

3. Migrations and modulations. Movement and change. “Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined,” Fred Rogers says to the camera. “But it makes sense to me.”

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