Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for Austin Kleon

Go on until you fall over

I’ve taped this picture of David Hockney back up in the studio. (Underneath these excellent bumper stickers.) It had a prominent spot on my bulletin board when I was writing Keep Going, and Hockney was one of the key figures I was thinking about when I wrote the book. (In the article the photo was clipped from, Hockney said, “I’ll go on until I fall over.” A motto worth stealing.)

And so, it’s been great comfort to me to find out he’s still out there painting, in quarantine up in Normandy, sending “fresh flowers” from his iPad to friends, reminding us “they can’t cancel the spring,” even urging us to do our own drawing:

I would suggest people could draw at this time… Question everything…. I would suggest they really look hard at something and think about what they are really seeing…. We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress. What is stress? It’s worrying about something in the future. Art is now.

Hell yes. Go on until you fall over.

A succession of moons

This morning I read Billy Barr’s tips for social distancing, gleaned from 50 years of experience living in an abandoned mine in the Rockies. The first one was “Keep track of something.”

Later, my friend Mark sent me a post referencing book nine of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, in which the emperor reminds himself to take the things in the world and “see them from above” in order to keep them in perspective:

You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind — things that exist only there — and clear out space for yourself:

…by comprehending the scale of the world
…by contemplating infinite time
…by thinking of the speed with which things change — each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows.

And it hit me that, duh, looking at the moon checks both those boxes.

Paying attention to the moon phases gives me something to keep track of and helps me think in terms of circular time.

And seeing it up on the sky and thinking about how long it’s been up there and how many generations have looked at it always tends to throw my measly problems into perspective. (Although, I always laugh whenever I think about astronaut Michael Collins admitting he mostly never bothers to look at it.)

Here it was last night from our balcony:

Tonight’s moon will be the brightest of the year. Step outside and take a look!

So shall distance sing!

“Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kid — the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time — or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time… But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?”
—Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville

Twelve years ago, when my wife and I bought our first house, I wrote this:

In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.

When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.

Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)

Twelve years later, present day, my wife and I have been home with our kids for almost four weeks now, in a townhouse not too much bigger than that first house we shared, and I see them all now, only in close-up. There’s very little stepping back, getting perspective.

Before this, I would stand outside my first grader’s school, waiting, and when he would walk outside when the bell rang, for a minute, I got to see him in his own world, for a brief few steps, until he saw me and entered our shared world again. My wife and I would pull up to my pre-schooler’s school early, and see him waiting with the other kids, and it was the same thing: eavesdropping on him in his own world, before he was back to ours.

I’m keeping everyone else in the world at a distance, but the people in my house have never been closer. It’s hard to get any kind of perspective. (This is the only time in my life I’ve envied people I know with ranches and lots of property — a “spread,” as in, “Why don’t we spread out?”)

Here is my friend Alan Jacobs on why he’s reading ghost stories right now:

“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson counseled writers; and fifty years later W.H. Auden spoke of readers like me: “When have we not preferred some going round / To going straight to where we are?” People often cry out for writing that, as we say, “speaks to our condition,” but more often than we might wish to acknowledge we are not prepared to have our condition spoken to directly. Another poet, T.S. Eliot this time: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

When you’re looking at a painting in a gallery, you sometimes find that you need to step back a bit in order to see it whole, to grasp its structure and proportions. You don’t get too far away; just far enough. Perhaps that’s what these stories have been for me: A step or two back from the details of our current predicament gives me the critical distance to process what’s happening with less stress, less mind-warping anxiety.

We were at the kitchen table the other night and my first grader picked up his little binoculars, turned them the wrong way around, and looked at me. “You’re so far away!” he said.

I wish, sometimes, that I had a similar way of zooming out, and getting some more perspective on him. It’s like how one of my camera apps alerts me, when I’m trying to take a picture, “You’re too close!” I need to step back to really see.

I’m typing this now in my front office. The boys are outside with my wife, looking for the slugs and caterpillars eating her plants.

Amazingly, I can’t hear them, but I can see them in my mind.

And I miss them!

Heading out for Wonderful (RIP Bill Withers)

I love Bill Withers’ music so much. I cried a little when I heard he died and made him this little garden in my diary later in the day.

He seemed to be that rare artist who was as beautiful a man as he was a singer and songwriter. My friend Brian Braiker told this story of growing up across the street from him:

I knew Bill. I grew up across the street from him in LA. Carpooled with his kids. Bill was a genius, yes. A poet. He was also unreasonably kind and generous. Gentle but with a sadness. Once I baked him a thank-you pie with apples from my dad’s tree — he had given me tickets to some thing at the Greek. When I showed up with the pie he said “oh shit, Red baked me a pie!” (He called me Red.) Then he invited me inside and we talked for maybe two hours. He was a talker. He loved to tell stories. My mom called looking for me and he said “you can’t have him back!” And I kvelled. When I was little I only knew him as the guy who sang “Just the Two of Us,” a song I didn’t really have any feelings for either way. When I studied abroad my junior year, I found “Still Bill” at a thrift store. Then I got his greatest hits. I was HOOKED. I came back from Europe (it would have been 1995) and was excited to tell him I had gotten really into his music. He said, “Man, Red had to go all the way to France to discover me! I was across the street the whole time.”

It’s incredible, when you look at the words on the page, how he spun great songs out of such simple, everyday language:

Lean on me
when you’re not strong
and I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on
for it won’t be long
’til I’m gonna need
somebody to lean on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdizl63aols

There’s a 2009 documentary about him called Still Bill that I recommend watching. One of his quotes inspired chapter 9 in my book, Show Your Work!:

“Sellout… I’m not crazy about that word. We’re all entrepreneurs. To me, I don’t care if you own a furniture store or whatever—the best sign you can put up is SOLD OUT.”

There are a bunch of other quotes I could’ve used. In fact, I’m surprised I never used this one:

It’s okay to head out for Wonderful, but on your way to Wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through Alright, and when you get to Alright, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you’re gonna go.

Or:

Thoreau said most men live lives of quiet desperation. I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.

 

There’s also an incredible 2013 interview on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn that I’ve listened to several times. In fact, I have transcribed the ending in full, below. (Thorn told me yesterday that it was “the most powerful thing anyone has ever said on my show.”)

My father was this coal miner, but he was always interested in reading. Never got a chance to go to school. But he read. And, you know, dignity was very important to him. The first thing that I had to resolve in my life and the one thing that was very important to me, I had to sort this out: ‘Can I go into this thing and avoid the minstrel-ness of it?’ This is a business. And you got some cold pimps that will mail you out until you die in your grave. You got as many thieves in this stuff… There’s a life you have to run. And you do the best you can. And hopefully, as a human being, you improve. I’m 70-years-old. I’m not some kind of mindless troubadour. You know? I have an intellect I have to manage, I have some thoughts I have to manage, I have a life I have to maintain. I want to know where my stuff is. You know? I want to know who I am. I don’t want to be some simple-minded blues boy. You can bleep this out: ‘Kiss my ass with that shit.’ So I’m doing the best I can. To grow and improve my lineage as a species. So I got some responsibilities that require that I be available. I never had the benefit of a formal education, but I’ve always wanted to better myself. I can speak the language. I can write it, make it rhyme for you, if you want to. You know what I mean? Somebody said, “Education is the sum total of what you know.” That’s everything from tying your shoe to whether you can do quadratic equations or not. So, I’m not saying this should be a template for everybody, but that’s just the kind of person that makes sense for me to be. Hopefully the music that I made is useful to somebody. I mean, I get nice letters from people that say, ‘Hey man, my grandmother died, and the song helped me.’ I like that kind of stuff. As a result, it was important to me, as best I could, to try to wind up with a life that had some stability and some dignity in it… I made some choices earlier… that I wanted to be a whole person. Not just this entertainer thing. It doesn’t fill up my plate. I love it — who wouldn’t like it? But it doesn’t fill up my plate.

So long, Bill. You fill up my plate.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.