Austin Kleon

Reading with a scalpel and glue stick

I read books with a pencil, but I read the Sunday NYTimes Book Review with a scalpel and a glue stick.*

I cut out good quotes and paste the author’s name below. Then I stick them in a little envelope in the back of my commonplace diary. Sometimes two scraps talk to each other, like this African proverb and fortune cookie.


Occasionally, when I don’t have a good line for the day, I dump out the scraps from the envelope and see what I’ve got. Sometimes if you push the scraps around they talk to each other, too.

Afterwards, the cut-up book review makes these weird little picture and caption combos, which are almost more interesting than the things I cut out…

* Brands of scalpel and glue sticks are in my gift guide.

The mothers of Matrix by Lauren Groff

I liked Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix so much I wanted to know more about it, and luckily, right after I finished it, a lecture she gave at Notre Dame was posted online.

It’s one of the best talks I’ve heard from a fiction writer. A centrifugal lecture that both explains how the work came to be and spins you out to its inspirations like footnotes.

I drew a bit of it, to help it sink in:

“My art is an art of synthesis,” she says, noting that should be of inspiration to other writers. “You just keep synthesizing and eventually you come up with something.”

The novel was inspired, mainly, by three historical women: Marie de France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Hildegard of Bingen. Groff said she saw George Cukor’s The Women on a plane, started thinking about The Bechdel Test, and the very next day, saw a lecture by Katie Bugyis, author of The Care of Nuns. They began a friendship which lead directly to the book.

Matrix hits that perfect blurb-y mix of “timeless and timely,” so it was interesting to me that Groff was working out her feelings about historical fiction and time in fiction while writing it. She quotes Ali Smith:

When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.

Matrix plays with time in interesting ways — it does the zoom in/zoom out thing that I love in fiction, where the writer covers a lot of ground, a whole life, by zooming into scenes and then zooming out and jumping forward in the character’s life (and backwards into flashbacks).

Speaking of time, Matrix is a book that is perfect to read when you’re up late in the night or early in the morning, and your mind is in the state of a sleepy nun. It makes me wonder what time of day/night Groff wrote the book…

The way she talked about discovering the labyrinth as a structure reminded me a bit of Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze. (I was also thinking about Peter’s book when watching Six by Sondheim, and the composer started talking about his love of  old games and wordplay.)

Anyways, I loved Matrix, it’s one of my favorite things I read this year, and I can’t wait to catch up on the rest of Groff’s work.

My chat with David Epstein

Here’s video of my chat with David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Our conversation, as we had hoped, ranged all over the place. Of particular interest to me:

1. He told me he reads a lot of fiction to try to pick up interesting approaches to structure. He credited his experience helping a film editor friend who had a hand injury — literally sitting there all day and clicking the mouse for him — as hugely instructive.  (This didn’t surprise me, as I learned a ton about writing from film editor Walter Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye.) He also said that he’s taken fiction classes.

2. As for his reading diet, he said he reads The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and New Scientist to sort of get leads on what to read next.

3. He keeps “a book of small experiments,” where he forces himself, if he gets in “a rut of competence,” to try out and learn new things.

Here are my prep notes:

Thanks, David! Check out his newsletter, Range Widely.

Street art


Walks around my neighborhood have been extra-good lately. After declaring it art, I decided this Budweiser can needed its own museum label:

The text is from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium:

Calvino is talking about writing and reading, but he could also talk about my approach to walking.

If I go for a walk, the day never feels like a waste. Each walk is a little adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. On your walk, you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll bump into. This week I met Cindy Schiffgens, who was on the sidewalk painting one of my favorite houses:

Many are disenchanted with this city we live in. I find that a neighborhood walk is a method of re-enchantment. “Outside lies magic.”

A partial eclipse of my heart

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”
—Lauren Groff, Matrix

Here is the moon as it looked through my telescope at 3AM this morning. Less than 12 hours earlier, I looked up while I was raking leaves and saw this:

Yes, that’s right: Coconut the Owl has returned to his owl box. I watched him fly off at dusk last night, but there he was again this morning when I woke up.

Looks like he and Mrs. Coconut weren’t lost after all. The drawings worked. My spirit has lifted. We’re so happy to have him back.

Lifted type collages

“I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them.”
—Ray Bradbury

I’ve been working on a series of collages made from type I (literally) lift out of magazines. They’re sort of inspired by the word paintings of Wayne White and printmakers like Amos Kennedy, Jr.

What I do is, I keep a list of phrases in my notebook I want to make and then when I have a minute or I’m burned out, I make one.

Sometimes they’re phrases we say a lot around the house. (This one is stolen from one of my favorite movies, Withnail and I. I say this in mock outrage a lot to my kids.)

Sometimes they’re more abstract. (I took the Target tape off a package.)

Sometimes it’s a phrase I can’t stand. (“Don’t get me wrong.”)

Sometimes my wife suggests one like “They can’t all be winners.”

 

Sometimes I notice a phrase everybody starts saying.

I like to do conversational shortcuts and the passive-aggressive phrases you hear a lot in the South and the Midwest.

These pieces are very different than my other work, so it’s not exactly clear to me what I should do with them. Not sure they’re right for a book, but maybe I can work my way up to a dozen or so and make a notecard set or a series of posters out of them.

That’s  the thing about new work, it’s not really your job to judge it, you just keep the channel open and let the stuff come…

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