Austin Kleon

Batteries

“New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.”
—Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

The 4.99-year-old has never been completely in touch with his body.

It seems to help him to think of himself as a machine: When he was obsessed with combustion engines, we’d use the four-stroke cycle as a metaphor to get him to poop, as in, “Okay, you ate dinner, that was the intake stroke, now it’s time for your exhaust stroke.” (Don’t ask me about the compression and power strokes.)

Now he’s going through a major robot phase, so he pretends to be a robot, and when he wants attention or affection he’ll ask us to “open up his panel” and fix his electronics. In the morning, he’ll say, “My battery was really low last night, but now I’m recharged.”


A few days ago, we had the boys all strapped into their seats and car wouldn’t start. My wife discovered that one of them had switched the dome light to ON and it had slowly drained the battery.

I’d never jumped a car before. I learned that there’s an order to which you connect the jumper cables. (BGGB: Bad +, good +, good -, block.) Once you get the car started, if the battery’s still good, you have to drive the car for a while in order for it to recharge.

This seemed like a decent enough metaphor: If your internal battery’s dead, you can jump it with a healthy battery, say, a friend, or a book, or a movie, etc., but then that battery can’t do all the work for you. You have to do the work of staying in motion, get things back up to a healthy level. You need gas, good tires…

See, all metaphors can only go so far. Best of all, I think, is getting beyond the metaphor completely, if that’s possible.  Being a human in your body.

No batteries, just a renewable energy.

On this day


I bought this handsome NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journal a few months ago when I saw that John Stilgoe had written the preface. (I took it as a BUY NOW sign: I’d read his book Outside Lies Magic earlier this year liked it quite a bit.)

It’s a highly edited and condensed version of the complete 47 volumes of Thoreau’s output, but I still wasn’t sure how to read the thing. I couldn’t imagine actually reading it front to back. Then I noticed that the left-hand page headers refer to the approximate date, but the right-hand page headers refer to what age Thoreau was when he wrote the entry. This seemed like a fun game: Let me see what Thoreau was writing when he was exactly my age.

Then I thought it’d be fun to just follow along with his life day-by-day and year-by-year, almost like turning The Journal into one of those 5 year diaries that you see in stationery stores. I’d stick post-it notes on the current date of each year of the journal, then check the tabs each day to see if there’s an entry.

This turns out to be a terrific way to read Thoreau, because he was so obsessed with observing nature and the changing seasons. You see, for example, how Thoreau repeats himself, noting the fallen leaves in October. (“How beautifully they go to their graves!”)

Yesterday, I read the entry for October 20, 1857, exactly 160 years ago, in which Thoreau writes beautifully about meeting a barefoot old man carrying a dead robin & his shoes full of apples:

I got such a kick out of reading this way I wondered what other books I had lying around the house that I could turn into a daily devotional. How about my Big Book of Peanuts?

I mean, of course a collection of daily newspaper strips, originally written to be consumed on one particular day, makes for good daily reading. (Think of all the “Page-A-Day” Peanuts calendars.) But there’s another reason they’re so great to read day-by-day: Peanuts function as a sort of coded diary for Schulz. This is explained by Bruce Eric Kaplan in the introduction to his collection, This Is A Bad Time:

[T]hese drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great….Every morning… I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings…

This connection between daily comic strips and diaries is made more explicit in the work of someone like James Kochalka in his sketchbook diaries, American Elf. I have all 14 years on my iPad now, so it wouldn’t be hard to read them in the same way I do the Peanuts collection. Strangely, I find that having a digital collection of the strips makes me want to reorganize the entries in non-chronological ways, like, reading every strip that includes leaves or clouds.

I have an ebook of Andy Warhol’s diary, and I like to search it whenever I’m in a spot that I know he had some connection to. (When I was in Milan, I typed in “Milan,” and landed on his entry for Monday, September 17, 1979, which contains the question, “Why would anybody want to go to Milan?”)

Anyways, I’m wandering towards a point: To read collected works is to also grapple with the question of how (or when!) to read collected works.

This, by the way, is the end of the Peanuts strip published on Oct. 20, 1962, 56 years ago:

Sound like someone you know?

Which direction the earth spins


With fall arriving, finally, the almost-five-year-old has become interested in the seasons. I ordered Gail Gibbons’ The Reasons For Seasons, and we made paper planet balls and talked how the Earth tilts on its axis, and then, some magic happened: I realized I had no freaking idea which direction the Earth spins! No idea at all. But I didn’t pull out my phone. I sat there with the ball and thought about the sun rising in the east, setting in the west, and I figured it out, along with a few other things. It feels so amazing, as a grown adult, to teach yourself something just using your sense and your senses.

Once again, by helping him learn, I myself am learning how to learn.

Partial to the partial


The two-year-old banged on the front door and shouted “Moon!” this morning, so, as we do, we went out to take a look. Crescent, waxing, almost new. It resembled all the wonderful photos people had taken of the crescent-shaped shadows that the partial eclipse cast earlier this year:

Full moons have their charms, but I am drawn towards the phases in between them, just as I am drawn, or even biased towards, art that exists only in part, art that is in-progress or unfinished, cut-up or fragmentary, incomplete or imperfect…

I am partial to the partial.

* * *

Photo links: [siding] [siding] [colander] [saltine cracker]

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.”

Leonardo’s lists

Remember: You can be woke without waking up to the news.

A sampling of one of Leonardo’s to-do Lists:

  • Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle
  • Examine the Crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
  • Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner
  • Draw Milan

Here’s one of the first pages from The Steal Like An Artist Journal, filled out by me:

See also: Walter Isaacson’s new biography and Michelangelo’s grocery list

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:

Recent posts

Connect