Austin Kleon

Free drugs

I get a couple of books in my mailbox every week. Some weeks more than a couple. Most weeks they’re books I have no interest in ever reading, and some weeks I get books I would’ve shelled out $50 for, six months before their release date.

I receive enough free books in the mail that if I read them all, I would never have to buy a book again. This seems ridiculously unfair, considering that not only do I have enough money now to buy books (and I buy quite a lot, because, hey, they’re a tax writeoff), but when I actually had time to read them, I couldn’t afford them, and nobody wanted to send me any. (Thank God for the library.)

In the movie Love Actually, Billy Mack, an aging rock star, is told by some TV show hosts to keep it clean because they are broadcasting live and children are watching.

Billy straightens up and says, “Hi kids. Here’s an important message from your Uncle Billy: Don’t buy drugs.”

He turns to smile at the hosts, who look relieved. Then he turns back to the camera, goes slack, and says, “…become a pop star and they give them to you for free!”

Read more than you write, live more than you read


Last night I was reading a new book by a writer I admire and a voice in my head kept asking, “How? How is he so good?” and another voice kept replying, “Because, he’s lived longer, thought harder, and written more than you, you buffoon.” (Factoring out in-born talent, of course.)

It reminded me of Junot Diaz, who, when pressed for advice, said, “Read more than you write, live more than you read.”

Hygienic


I tend to romanticize art scenes like Paris in the 20s, or New York in the 70s, and my wife likes to remind me how all my favorite artists back then were basically living in squalor. One time I was looking at photos of The Factory, and she said, “Probably wasn’t any toilet paper in the bathroom.”

Another time we were visiting Manhattan, dreaming of what it’d be like to live in the big city, and my friend Drew convinced us to cab over to Brooklyn to attend a party some young cartoonists were throwing. These guys, at least a half dozen of them, were living in the same apartment above a fried chicken place. Their windows looked right out onto the elevated train. One guy was on the couch, eating cereal with his feet up on on a crate, and the bottoms of his socks were black with filth. I don’t think we stayed long.

I was reminded of the filthy socks when reading about how Frances McDormand makes sure the fellow actors in her troupe stay in decent, clean hotels.

“We’re avant-garde,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we have to be unhygienic.”

How to take a nap

When the Coen brothers were asked about their creative process, Joel Coen said, “We do a lot of napping.”

Maurice Sendak: “I love napping. Working and napping and reading…”

William Gibson: “Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.” (Dali liked that state, too, and the story is he used to lie down for a nap with a spoon in his hand, so that when he nodded off, he’d drop the spoon and it’d wake him up.)

Not all naps are created equal.

Me, I like the caffeine nap: Drink a cup of coffee and lie down for 15 minutes. Keep your notebook handy.

It inspired this page from The Steal Like An Artist Journal:

But my favorite nap, the one that really leaves me feeling like a million bucks, is the one described by Philip Roth:

Let me tell you about the nap. It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said – I was maybe nine – he said, Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you and you’re going to sleep better. Well, as with everything, he was right. And so I now do that and I come back from the swimming pool I go to and I have my lunch and I read the paper and I take this glorious thing called a nap. And then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know and it’s bliss. It’s absolute bliss.

And to put you in the mood, here’s one of my favorite photos of Kurt Vonnegut, napping fully-clothed, thank goodness:

I can’t stop looking at the moon


This morning I took another picture of the moon. It was at the top of the sky — I couldn’t see it without breaking my neck — so I lied down in the driveway on my back, lining up my iPhone camera with the eyecup on my binoculars, fiddling with the exposure and focus on Camera+.

A neighbor drove past on his way to work, and I wondered if he saw me, and, if he did, what on Earth he thought I was doing.


Back in the house, drinking my coffee, I checked my camera roll and tried to pick the best shot. I started thinking about how I like looking at all the little moons together more than any single moon.

Taking one picture of the moon isn’t all that interesting, but seeing all the pictures of the moon you’ve taken together, that’s a little more interesting:


The artist Penelope Umbrico, of her gigantic collages of moon photographs uploaded to Flickr, says the opposite: “Seen individually any one of these images is impressive. Seen as a group, however, they seem to cancel each other out.”


We disagree on that point, but I sure do like what Umbrico has assembled in these pieces, especially when she starts sorting by color:

The moon actually doesn’t give off its own light, it only reflects the sun’s, so add that fact to the atmospheric conditions and the time of day you happen to see it, and it’s always taking on some interesting color. (I have started to prefer morning moons to evening moons.) When you read books like Bernd Brunner’s Moon: A Brief History or watch movies live Moonstruck, you realize how much of that reflective quality is essential to how we feel about it: the moon reflects our own light back at us, in a way.

I can’t really remember when I started going so nuts for the moon. I think it started when we moved into this old house. We used to live in a townhouse that didn’t have much of a view of the night sky from any of its windows. Then we moved into our current house, which sits on a bigger lot, surrounded by suburban ranch houses, so there are better sky views to be had. But I think it really has to do with our master bathroom, which has a window you can look out of while you pee. I get up in the middle of the night and peer out into the backyard, and when the moon’s out, it always makes me feel a little wild. A bit mysterious. A bit less willing to go back to bed.

When it’s my morning to get up with the boys, one of the first things we’ll do if the moon is out is run out the front door into the driveway to take a look. They’ve grown up on books like Papa, Please Get The Moon for Me, and The Moon Seems To Change and The Moon Book, so they share in my joy, for now. And one of the best moments of any day is when, unprompted, my two-year-old will stick his index finger in the air and shout, “Moon!”

The Dunning-Kruger Prayer


The Dunning-Kruger effect, which seems to explain so much of our current moment, is paraphrased here by John Cleese: “The problem,” he says, with some people, “is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.”

You see, if you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are…. [Knowing] how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means—and this is terribly funny—that if you’re absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it.

Or, here’s Charles Darwin, almost 150 years ago, in The Descent of Man:

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The terrifying thing is that we live in a world in which the most confident—confident, as in con(fidence) man—often weasel their way to the top. I’m not sure that this hasn’t always been the case for at least the past thousand years, some of my evidence coming from the Chinese poet Su Shi, aka Su Tung-Po (1037-1101) in one of my favorite poems, “On The Birth of a Son”:

Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Hence, the above prayer, which was part of last summer’s art show: “Let them be smart, but not smart enough to know how dumb they are because then they are really screwed.” (At least when it comes to worldly suck-cess.)

Then again, here’s another prayer, one for decent human beings, who can be humble enough to learn and improve themselves, and just maybe, the world:

See also: You probably don’t deserve it

Suckcess


“Success is for creeps.” —Bobcat Goldthwait

We all know what “success” is, or at least we have our own definitions of it. (For me, it’s closing the gap between what your days look like and what you want your days to look like.)

So what’s “suckcess”? Suckcess is success on somebody else’s terms, or undeserved success, when something that sucks becomes successful, or when success starts to suck.

It’s what Jean Cocteau was referring to when he said, “There is a kind of success worse than failure.”

It’s what Pink Floyd sings about in “Wish You Were Here”:

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts
Hot ashes for trees
Hot air for a cool breeze
Cold comfort for change
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Or The White Stripes, in “Little Room”:

Well you’re in your little room
And you’re working on something good
But if it’s really good
You’re gonna need a bigger room
And when you’re in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sitting in your little room

Don’t scorn any success, or you’ll turn into Ignatious J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces: “I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”

Just be sure you’re not chasing suckcess, and if you get it, get rid of it as soon as you can.

The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for

In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.”

“Keep your folders messy,” Steven Johnson says in Where Good Ideas Come From. This is also the secret to what he calls his “spark file,” the document he keeps on his computer to generate ideas:

The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single, chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You’ll be shocked how many useful hunches you’ve forgotten.


Film editor Walter Murch, in his brilliant book, In The Blink of an Eye, writes about how different kinds of editing machines affect his process of piecing together movies out of hundreds of hours of film. The most convenient and efficient machines — the “random-access” machines that can pull up any individual scene with a few keystrokes — are not necessarily the ones that are the most helpful to him.

“The machine gives me only what I ask for,” he writes, “and I don’t always want to go where I say I want to go.”

Like Letscher with his collages, Murch wants the material to guide his work, to tell him what to do next. Linear editing systems, in which he had to load a whole 10-minute reel of film in order to find what he was looking for, gave him many more moments of serendipity:

[I]n the mechanical, linear search for what I wanted, I would find instead what I needed—something different, better, more quirky, more accidental, more “true” than my first impression. I could recognize it when I saw it, but I couldn’t have articulated it in advance.

There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Here’s writer Irving Welsh, on why he doesn’t organize his record collection:

“I don’t organize my CDs and vinyl by genre or alphabet anymore…. Having it all haphazard means I can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else, which is cool. I believe that art is as much about diversion as focus and planning.”

In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie talks about the importance of messiness when re-visiting her chaotic notebooks:

[I]f I had kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled, it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot—do it yourself—girl and not really sister—August— with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.

The theme, again, is that speed, efficiency, and convenience (a.k.a. the opposite of “trouble”) is often at odds with creative serendipity.

This is exactly why I still keep paper notebooks and make time in my writing process to dive back into them time and time again: because I often don’t know what I’m looking for, and even if I do, what I actually find is more often than not better than what I set out to find. If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.

How to raise a surrealist


A few years ago, I copied this Magritte painting* on my son Owen’s chalkboard, and captioned it, “How To Raise A Surrealist.”

I have discovered that little jokes like this often turn out to be forecasts, or tiny prophesies.

A case in point: Our son Jules has begun captioning the things that appear on our morning walks. A squirrel is “squirrel,” and an apple is “apple,” but the jack-o-lanterns on porches are “October,” and fake skeletons hanging from trees are “x-rays.”

What I know now is that you don’t need to raise a surrealist — children are born surrealists, and we talk them out of it.

* Used on the cover of John Berger’s brilliant book, Ways of Seeing

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