A policy of candor

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”
—Billy Wilder

Statistically, I say “no” to almost all podcast requests. I say “no,” not because I hate recording podcasts, but because I love recording podcasts. You see, I am the rare extroverted writer, and I would much rather talk than write, and I could easily fill most of my afternoons with recording podcasts and never write anything again.

When I do say “yes” to a podcast, my policy is one of candor, of being as straightforward, honest, and frank as I can. I’m not sure if this moves as many units as sticking to talking points, but it’s a helluva lot more fun, and I figure if we’re going to talk for an hour, let’s try to get somewhere interesting.

Life is very short, and we are all very tired. We are especially tired, I think, of not just being lied to, but of hearing people talk like they’ve run everything through their own public relations department. I don’t think it’s just me, but when I hear someone tell the truth these days, I feel a jolt of electricity that makes me feel alive.

Maybe that’s lofty talk from a short man, but there you have it.

So here are a few recent podcasts that were pretty candid, and I thought, went interesting places: Working with Rumaan Alam, Creative Pep Talk, and The Unmistakable Creative.

Tomorrow I’m talking to Jessica Abel, which will be recorded as a live podcast with Q&A from the audience, so my candor might get me into more trouble than usual. ~~Register here.~~ Watch the replay here.

Getting out from under the influence

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Hemingway’s draft of “Hills Like White Elephants”

“Every writer is every writer they’ve loved and quarrelled with who came before, as every parent is every parent they loved and quarrelled with.”
—Hilton Als

Watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway, I was reminded of the great Elmore Leonard, who said, “I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.”

He expanded this thought in a Fresh Air interview:

I had studied Hemingway so closely and learned a lot, but I didn’t agree with his attitude about life, about himself. He took everything, himself, everything so seriously. And, your style comes out of your attitude — what kind of a person you are, you know, your personality, how you see things. Are you optimistic? Are you funny? Are you grim? What? This is all out of your attitude. And once I learned that, then I had to find other writers to study and imitate.

This is an old, old story: the student imitates the master, learns what they can, but then has to move on (often to imitating someone else) if they’re to find their own thing.

This jumping of influences usually happens over and over — Billy Collins says your voice usually comes from copying a half dozen other writers and becoming a blend. (And Hemingway himself once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”)

As I kept watching the documentary, it was emphasized over and over again by the talking heads how influential Hemingway is, how impossible it is for writers not to be influenced by Hemingway. (Once again, our grammar of influence seems to me inadequate. We talk about influence backwards.) It got me thinking I’d watch a whole documentary about writers talking about how they got themselves out from under the influence of their writer heroes.

Another favorite writer of mine who talks about getting out from under the influence of Hemingway is George Saunders. In several talks, he’s talked about being a young man and having a “medical condition called a ‘Hemingway-Boner.’” He describes his early stories as going something like, “Nick walked into the Wal-Mart. It was pleasant.”

In a Talk at Google, Saunders explained that if a writer is lucky, they get to a point where they realize that the voice that they’re imitating simply can’t cover their own worldview. A new voice is needed. “That is a holy moment for a young writer,” Saunders says, “when you start getting full body impatient with your mentor.”

Like Leonard, Saunders discovered that his own comedic worldview didn’t match Hemingway’s more tragic one:

What I got tired of in Hemingway was that he, in his later work especially, he wasn’t funny. He didn’t have any sense of humor actually. He knew very well who the noble, interesting people were and so on.

And my life was not — I never lived a Hemingwayesque moment really.

I remember as a young kid coming out of a funeral– a very sad, terrible thing. But the funeral was being held in a mock Georgian mansion—one of those mansions that had been put up just to be a funeral parlor.

And then you walk out of that, and everyone’s crying and it’s terrible. And across the street, there’s a Chuck E Cheese. And the mouse is on break. And he’s on the side of the building with his head off. And he’s smoking.

So that moment could not show up in Hemingway. He couldn’t do it. He had a stylistic cave he had made for himself.

And I thought, that’s where the gateway to style is. And when you see something in your life, in your heart, in your world that the style of your hero can’t accommodate, then it’s a time for growth.

Or, as Brancusi put it, when he left Rodin’s studio, “Nothing grows under big trees.”

Exhausting dialogue and conversational shortcuts

Monday, April 5, 2021

In a pre-pandemic post, “What to say when you don’t know what to say,” I made a big list of some of my favorite conversational shortcuts that I like to drop to keep conversations from being needlessly confrontational or boring.

Stuff like:

“It wasn’t for me” when somebody asks you what you thought of something you hated that they might’ve potentially liked
“You may be right” when somebody criticizes you and “go to hell” wouldn’t be prudent
“Thank you for saying so” when somebody gives you a compliment

And so forth.

The pandemic just amplifies everything, of course, so now that I barely speak to anyone, I rely on these conversational shortcuts more than ever.

One of my favorite jokes of the pandemic is how bad it is to start a conversation with “How are you?” (Daniel Johnston’s iconic mural seems almost unbearably existential these days.)

One needs to go looking for new alternatives, so I enjoyed this Kat Vellos post on Instagram:

“It’s good to hear your voice” or “I’ve been looking forward to talking to you” seem like good replacement options to me, and I plan on practicing them this week, as I have a rare string of daily phone calls coming up.

Looking at Vellos’ chart made me think of one of my favorite artifacts from my youth: the soundboard. Soundboards were Flash apps that you could pull up on your computer and use for prank calling people.

The funny thing about the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboards is that in the original Terminator movie, the Terminator is shown actually picking his dialogue:

During radio tours, when I’d talk to maybe two dozen radio DJs on the day of a book release, I used to have fantasies of making my own soundboard by recording myself answering frequently asked questions and playing them back during interviews.

Conversational shortcuts are like having one of those old soundboards in your head. It makes conversation a kind of game, where you pick the best option to keep the conversation going.

dialogue options from one of the *Monkey Island* games

Which brings me to another favorite artifact from my youth: the dialogue screens in the LucasArts adventure games I spent endless hours playing.

Because the games were designed so you never actually lost or got a GAME OVER screen, you could spend a long time trying out all the different dialogue options, going down the dialogue tree, or “exhausting the dialogue,” to try to uncover funny jokes before advancing the story line. (Here’s more from legend Ron Gilbert on the dialog trees in the LucasArts games.)

example of a simple dialogue tree from Wikipedia

Conversations with other human beings are, of course, by nature more chaotic, and there are an infinite number of paths one can go down.

“The best conversationalists are people who are hoping to end up somewhere they didn’t expect,” goes a line of dialogue in The Chairs are Where The People Go. “It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before.”

*Blondie* with *Garfield* dialogue (one of my remixed comics)

That thrill, that wondering what will be said next (by the other person or by you!) is the very thing that makes for great conversation. But it means that all parties involved must be given room to speak and finish their sentences. It also means that sometimes you have to throw out your little conversational shortcuts, your pre-recorded dialogue, and let go.

“I can’t help wondering what we might have said if we hadn’t been stopped,” wrote Steve Martin, of a time he was famously interrupted onstage. “Maybe we were just around the corner from something thrilling. Isn’t that the nature of a live conversation? It halts, it stutters, it doubles back, it soars. We might have found a small nugget, something off topic or unexpected.”

*Wizard of Id* with *Hagar the Horrible* dialogue

One possible danger of thinking of conversation as a game is that you don’t actually shut up and listen to the other person, because you’re busy pulling up a list of possible dialogue options, like the Terminator. You have to train yourself to really listen, to let the other person speak, and to let their last words echo for a bit, remaining comfortable with a bit of “dead air,” and only then coming back with a response. (Great options are: “Jeez, I don’t know!” or “Gosh, I’ll have to think about that!”)

Finally, it can be very hard to know how to end a conversation. (I always laugh at regional variations in how people try to end conversations, like the Midwesterner passive-aggressive penchant for saying, “Well, I’d better let you go!”)

I would like to end this particular ~~conversation~~ monologue with the secret of great interviewers and perhaps the most important conversational shortcut: silence.

Give yourself what you needed then and give your kids what they need now

Thursday, April 1, 2021

One of my very favorite lines about being a parent comes from Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree: “Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.”

So I was primed for the punch of this thread from Tiersa McQueen (@tiersaj):

Carl Jung said that nothing had a bigger influence on the child than the unlived life of the parent. Those unlived lives linger. (I am struck often by how many artists are raised by people who didn’t fulfill their own artistic ambitions. Most recently, Twyla Tharp, in Twlya Moves, talking about her mother, who was a pianist, and groomed her daughter for a life in the arts, driving her all over Indiana for lessons, etc.)

One must be careful to not transfer unwanted dreams onto their children, maybe even more so when your children are inclined to doing the things you, too, love. (One of my sons loves music and video games, the other loves stories and drawing. You can imagine the dreams I have for them, dreams that I find it best to keep to myself.)

It’s a dance. You have to give yourself what you needed, but give your kids what they need now. Build the world you always wanted, but make sure there’s room in it for the world they want, too.

(And know it will change and be constantly in flux, day by day.)

Weirdos who left Texas and brought back art

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

After I wrote about the painter Julian Onderdonk for Texas Highways, editor Michael Hoinski asked me if I’d write another piece, this time about The Texas State Museum of Asian Cultures in Corpus Christi. This posed a particular problem, as I have never visited to Corpus Christi, nor do I plan on traveling there, or anywhere, anytime soon.

What happens when I spend all day in weird old Texas archives pic.twitter.com/DP2FBzmJ8q

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 27, 2021

I scratched around online and scratched my head wondering how I was going to find anything interesting to say about a museum I’ve never visited until I came across this video of the museum’s founder in the wonderful Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

“Bringo!” I thought, and suddenly, because two is a pattern for me, a weirdos who left Texas and brought back art theme emerged. (I admit I had the Mütter Museum and Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders in mind, and this idea that often a museum starts with the obsessions and collections of a single individual.)

You can read the piece here.