Austin Kleon – Page 201

Take this job and shove it

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

In his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris writes about this paradox at the heart of American parenting: On the one hand, we think of childhood as a place that should be free of labor — we’ve decided, collectively, that it’s inhumane for our children to slave in sweatshops or dig in a coal mine — and on the other hand, between the classroom, homework, and the extra-curricular activities picked to make a child the perfect college applicant, American kids work all the time.

[I]t takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, “Put your nose to the grindstone,” “Stay on the right path,” “Treat school like your job.” When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers.

Maria Montessori said that play was the work of the child, but it’s obvious, now, that we see school as their job.

I’m inspired by students who walk out on their jobs. Students like Greta Thunberg, who started school striking on Fridays, protesting her government’s inaction on climate change.

Last year she said that “a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school.”

And yet:

Here’s a lighter, funnier story from legendary soul singer Jackie Shane about school as unpaid labor:

“I don’t like to be played… At school I was a fast runner. Ooh! Honestly, I’m not bragging, I could run. I just sort of leaped through the air. They asked me to run [in an inter-school competition]. I said, “How much does it pay?” They said, “Well, Jackie, this is your school.” I said, “No, no, no, no! I don’t own this school. If I’m going to perform, I want to be paid.” Everybody said, “Child you’re too much.” No, I found out early that you cannot be too much in this world. You can’t. It’s impossible. If you don’t get your gethers together, people will take advantage of you. I told them “What do you mean my school? I’m not getting a nickel. No, no, no, no honey, you’ve got to give Jackie some money.” All of that nonsense and patting me on the back and giving me a slice of pizza. Give me some money!”

The thief of playtime

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Here is an I.W.W. “stickerette” produced in the 1910s, protesting the exploitation of children in textile mills.

I can’t help but think of it when my first grader complains about going to school:

“The day felt like a week!”

“I don’t get to think about what I want to think about!”

“It takes me away from my music!”

His protests aren’t that school is all that bad (he has a great teacher and a sunny classroom) but it’s just too long.

It’s like Chris Rock said in Kill The Messenger: “There ain’t enough time when you got a career. When you got a job, there’s too much time.”

Here’s Jenny Odell (author of How To Do Nothing) on how she tries to slow down time for the students in her classes:

I can’t give my students more time in their lives; but what I try to do is change the way they think about and value it in the first place. My class typically includes students who aren’t art majors, some of whom may never have made art before. I give them the same advice every quarter: Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all. There is no Soylent version of thought and reflection — creativity is unpredictable, and it simply takes time.

Emphasis mine. The first grader knows it already, and all too well… and it’ll only get worse!

A copy of a copy

Saturday, August 31, 2019

Yesterday the 4-year-old brought his book of Coco sheet music into the studio and I copied a statue of Ernesto de la Cruz for him to color.

Today he came in and wanted to copy my copy. He had trouble starting, so I drew Ernesto’s head and torso, and he finished up his legs, arms, and guitar. I like our copy of the copy even more:

This happens a lot when I’m drawing solo: I’ll attempt a drawing of something from life, and then if I copy that drawing, simplifying the lines, I get something more reduced and interesting.

Now I’m wondering what a third step would look like. A copy of a copy of a copy…

Related: Copying is how we learn.

Thoreau’s laundry

Friday, August 30, 2019

“No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.“
—Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

“Thoreau” was trending on Twitter yesterday, not because anyone was actually reading him or grappling with his ideas, but because his “mom did his laundry” and “brought him sandwiches” at Walden.

There have been many takedowns of Thoreau and many defenses of him. (I recommend this essay and Laura Walls’ wonderful bio.) But “over the question of the laundry,” Rebecca Solnit wrote an attempt to “exonerate” him in 2013. (The essay, much like this blog post, was provoked by getting mad at something someone said on social media. It was published in Orion under the title “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved.” Poke around a little online and you’ll find it. It’s funny and good.) The essay begins:

There is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did her own washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. The laundry of the poets remains a closed topic, from the tubercular John Keats (blood-spotted handkerchiefs) to Pablo Neruda (lots of rumpled sheets). Only Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are not so clear.

She goes on to list “a long parade of people who pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau,” even though it is unclear, even amongst Thoreau scholars, who actually did do Thoreau’s laundry.

Do we care who did the chores in any other creative household on earth? Did Dante ever take out the slops? Do we love housework that much? Or do we hate it that much? This fixation on the laundry is related to the larger question of whether artists should be good people as well as good artists, and probably the short answer is that everyone should be a good person, but a lot of artists were only good artists (and quite a lot more were only bad artists). Whether or not they were good people, the good artists gave us something.

“None of us is pure,” she writes, “and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.”

Solnit points out that unlike other lit’ry men looking for a woman to look after them, Thoreau never married and “did little to make work for women.” In fact, though we obsess over his two years at Walden, Thoreau was an integral part of his household throughout his life, both supporting his family and gaining support from them. (Which is, you know, the whole damned point of a family.)

It’s also the case that the abolitionist women in Thoreau’s life did a whole lot of influencing on him. “The Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

“This,” Solnit writes, “is the washing that really mattered.”

I know how to write forever

Thursday, August 29, 2019

“I know how to write forever. I don’t think I could have happily stayed here in the world if I did not have a way of thinking about it, which is what writing is for me. It’s control. Nobody tells me what to do. It’s mine, it’s free…”
—Toni Morrison