My hotel didn’t have my room ready when I arrived, so the fabulous librarians at the Richmond Public Library let me hang out in their board room and work this afternoon. I like these digs!
Youth Spies and Curious Elders
Not too long ago, I was hanging out at my friend Josh’s house, and his son Oliver was explaining the video game Fortnite to us.
“Isn’t the object of the game just to kill people?” Josh asked.
“No, dad,” Oliver replied, “the object of the game is to stay alive.”
I immediately thought of John Waters’ Make Trouble:
[A]s you get older, you’ll need youth spies that will keep you abreast of new music that nobody your age has heard of yet or body-piercing mutilations that are becoming all the rage—even budding sexually transmitted diseases you should go to any length to avoid.
He’s made this joke in lots of places, but here he is underscoring the heart of the joke: his insistence on holding onto is his curiosity:
I have youth spies, people that report to me and I give them poppers for good information. But mostly I’m still interested in life. I don’t think it was better when I was young. I think the kids that are 15 and getting into trouble are having as much fun as I did. So I’m still curious. I don’t have fear of flying. I have fear of not flying. Always thinking that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday.
Waters is what I call a Curious Elder — someone who manages to retain their curiosity as they age and stays interested in what young people are up to. The curious elder isn’t interested in judging youth, they’re interested in learning from them.
For the Curious Elder, “The kids are alright” isn’t an observation, it’s an attitude.
I do wonder sometimes if it’s easier to maintain this attitude if you aren’t a parent. Then again, there’s Brian Eno, a Curious Elder and parent, who I remember telling a lovely story about his daughter playing him Portishead’s “The Rip” in the car and becoming obsessed with it. Here is Eno on approaching the future with the attitude of a Curious Elder:
The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.
Emphasis mine. Revel in your mystification!
And of course, the flip side is true for youth: Be curious about what came before you and spend time listening to and learning from your elders — there’s a lot of wisdom and experience they have to share…
Amazing Grace
“A gift that cannot move loses its gift properties.”
—Lewis Hyde, The Gift
I have a truly gifted musician friend who is burned out and contemplating doing something completely different for a few years. I told him to go see Amazing Grace. It’s a movie that made me think about our gifts and how we use them and what responsibility we have to share those gifts with the world. (Honestly, for all the brilliance of the Hilda af Klint show, I felt closer to The Spirit in the theater than I did in The Guggenheim.) The making of the movie is also a story about how it often takes a third party to bring our great gifts to the larger world.
A portable routine
Madeleine Dore interviewed me for her site Extraordinary Routines:
With his daily life currently in flux while on a two month tour for his latest book, Keep Going, writer and artist Austin Kleon has been thinking about how to create a portable version of his routine.
“I think routine is so important, especially when you’re getting started creatively, but for me right now, I almost need checkboxes and rituals more than I need routine.”
Currently, the daily checkboxes include writing in his diary, publishing a blog post, taking a walk, and reading a book.
Such a sequence has been influenced by the ‘the two Davids’ – Henry David Thoreau and David Sedaris, who essentially share the same approach to the writing process. That is, spending a large majority of their day walking. “Thoreau took these insanely long four to eight hour walks and then he would come back and write about them. Sedaris will wake up in the morning and will write in his diary for a couple of hours about the day before. Then he walks and picks up trash on the street for seven or eight hours a day.”
This repeatable process of collecting ideas, recording them in a diary, and then turning findings into public lectures and books is something Austin has duplicated in his own way. “I always keep a pocket notebook on me, and then I diary in the morning, and then create a blog post, and those blog posts will become talks, which then become books. You don’t have to worry about what to write about, you just write every day and things begin to develop.”
Whether in the form of checkboxes or a routine, this process makes the morning hours crucial to his creativity. “The most important thing for me to do is to write my diary and to write a blog post. If I have done that, then the day in some ways is a success.”
Read the rest of our interview here.
The days stack up
My logbooks and my diaries from the past couple of years.
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