Austin Kleon – Page 231

On Twitter yesterday I came across the trailer for Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, and I noticed this poster of the Milky Way with the caption “YOU ARE HERE” tacked to his wall. It reminded me of the Hubble photograph in the Seinfeld writer’s room and the astronomer’s perspective. Later in the trailer:

DAVID LYNCH: How would you describe yourself?

HARRY DEAN STANTON: There’s nothing. There is no self.

LYNCH: How would you like to be remembered?

STANTON: It doesn’t matter.

The significant detail the transcript doesn’t show you: He was smiling when he said it.

Do what you want (just know what you’re doing)

Saturday, February 23, 2019

The great Jackie Shane died yesterday. I highly recommend the Numero Group’s collection of her work, Any Other Way. The liner notes are terrific (great stories about her upbringing and how her mother helped her figure things out when she was young), and there’s a live cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money” on there in which she breaks into one of her wonderful monologues:

You know, when I’m walking down Yonge Street, you won’t believe this, but you know some of them funny people have the nerve to point the finger at me and grin and smile and whisper. But you know that don’t worry Jackie because I know I look good, and every Monday morning, I laugh and grin on the way to the bank because I got mine. I look good, I got money and everything else that I need. You know what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing. As long as you don’t force your will and way on anybody else, live your life because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy. Because when we leave here we don’t know where we’re going… I’m gonna live while I’m here.

What a legend. She gave one of her last interviews not too long ago. Here’s my favorite song of hers, the first one I ever heard, called “Any Other Way”:

Marble runs

Friday, February 22, 2019

I think I could tell my boss to go to hell and quit my job and just construct elaborate marble runs for the rest of my life. (Although, now that I’m thinking about it, a book is kind of like a marble run — if you assemble it right, the reader drops in and flies through it…and maybe wants to go again at the end?)

An intercourse with the world

Thursday, February 21, 2019

“I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”
—Werner Herzog

A few days ago a woman on Twitter asked me, “Do you find it ironic that your biggest impact has been made not with your art, but your art and writing ABOUT being an artist?”

I immediately thought of W.H. Auden, who died almost half a century ago, but said, “It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (He wrote a funny poem called “On The Circuit” about his speaking gigs.)

But to answer the original question: I don’t even think of myself as an artist anymore. I’m a writer who draws. (A title I stole from Saul Steinberg.)

All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.

Being a professional writer now means I can be a professional reader. Montaigne said he made bouquets out of other men’s flowers, but he was the one who provided the string to tie them together. I like that image, except bouquets eventually die, and the great thing about books is that they are paper bouquets that never die: they can be torn to their pieces and rearranged indefinitely.

Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!

But again, what’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?

It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.” Oliver Sacks snatched this phrase up for his end-of-life reminiscence in Gratitude:

I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

What more could you ask for?

Werner Herzog on reading and writing

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

I picked up Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed a week or so ago, and it’s taking me forever to read because 1) it’s 500 pages long and I’m slow, and 2) it’s so dense with insane stories and great wisdom about creative work that I’m constantly stopping to underline sentences.

He describes himself as an autodidact, who “never felt comfortable in school” and “never trusted teachers”:

I’ve always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we’re forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves — to quench a thirst — are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.

“When he was in school,” his mother says, “Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed.”

But over and over, in the book, and in other interviews, he has one unwavering piece of advice for filmmakers: “Read.”

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.

He gives his Rogue Film School students a “mandatory” reading list and he brings two books with him on film shoots: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and Livy’s account of the Second Punic War. (“The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage.”)

He talks a lot about approaching his screenplays with a literary sensibility, often abandoning traditional structure for prose descriptions of scenes. He’s convinced that Conquest of the Useless, his diary of making Fitzcarraldo, will outlive all of his films. “I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema,” he says. “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.”

It is a really terrific book.