Austin Kleon – Page 171

Books + gear

Sunday, February 16, 2020

As a wannabe musician, I especially I love it when people post photos of my books in their studios with music gear.

Hit pause

Saturday, February 15, 2020

A reminder: Give it five minutes. Do a 30-second fact check. Take a moment and pause.

Here is a heart-shaped piece of cactus I found on yesterday’s walk. I’ve just finished Iain Gately’s excellent essay on the iconography of love, “A Heart-Shaped History,” all about how the ♥ became the near-universal symbol for love:

The ♥ in geometric terms a cardioid, is common in nature. It appears in the leaves and flowers of various plants, it is formed by swans when they touch beaks, by doves as they unfold their wings, by strawberries, cherries and beet-roots in cross section, and is suggested by various portions of the human anatomy.

Lots of tasty historical tidbits follow — the Egyptians, for example, left hearts inside of the corpse so the Goddess could weigh them in the afterlife, the Greeks’ Eros shot his arrows at people’s eyeballs instead of their chests, the ♥ replaced the grails in the first decks of cards, etc.

As far as accuracy goes, Leonardo da Vinci produced the first well-rendered depiction of the heart in 1498. (Scientists wouldn’t figure out what the heart actually did until a century later.) Leonardo drew a seed next to one of the drawings in his notebooks, and wrote, “The heart is the nut which generates the tree of the veins.” (Isaacson devotes a whole section to Leonardo’s heart studies in his biography.)

Isaacson points out this page, where Leonardo draws a heart inside of his longtime companion, Salaì:

At the top is a drawing of the heart’s papillary muscle and a description of how it shortens and elongates when the heart beats. Then, as if he were being too clinical, he let his mind wander and pen begin to doodle. And there, in loving profile, is a drawing of Salai, his beautiful curls flowing down his long neck, his signature receding chin and fleshy throat softly modeled with Leonardo’s left-handed hatching. In his chest is a section of a heart, with its muscles sketched in. An analysis of the drawing shows that the heart was sketched first. It seems as if Leonardo drew it, then sketched Salai around it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

On reading more than one book at a time

Thursday, February 13, 2020

There are many different ways to read, and many different ways of reading that generate new writing. (For example, reading with a pencil.) One of my favorite ways is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.

Here’s Octavia Butler:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Here’s Richard Powers:

I like to keep one work of fiction and one of nonfiction going at once, and I’ll use them to triangulate against each other to conjure up some third space.

Reading this way is a form of input as collage.

Like walking through the city all day, you’re bombing your brain with lots of different inputs, recognizing patterns, and pulling a thread of meaning out of it all.

My kids do this naturally, by the way. They’re very promiscuous with their books, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. (I heard from one reader who said she was admonished in elementary school for reading this way. Her teacher told her parents she should have no more than two…)

This method is easily transferred to listening, watching, etc.

More: “Storing up images”