Austin Kleon – Page 237

If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

It’s been said a million times — it’s one of the main points of my books Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! — and yet, it still seems to be controversial or confusing to young people who are starting out: If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

“You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.”
—J.K. Rowling

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
—Stephen King

“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
—Annie Proulx

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books.”
—Cormac McCarthy

“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.”
—Terry Pratchett

“Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”
—William Faulkner

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.”
—Ray Bradbury

“When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. Readers ask me all the time the traditional question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?” I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’”
—Philip Pullman

“Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
—Nora Ephron

“I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks.”
—Rosecrans Baldwin

“I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”
—Adam Phillips

“I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
—William Giraldi

“If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader much longer than you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read…”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction

“If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.”
—Fran Lebowitz

The electric toothbrush theory of relativity

Monday, January 21, 2019

At some point in time, I forget when, my wife bought us electric toothbrushes.

Here is how the electric toothbrush works: The manual divides your mouth into four zones and when you turn on the toothbrush you are supposed to clean one zone for 30 seconds until the brush vibrates and you move to another zone until your 2 minutes are up and the motor stops.

One thing I quickly learned practicing this sleek mode of oral hygiene is that I have no internal sense of how long 30 seconds actually takes. Sometimes 30 seconds is barely enough time to touch all the zone’s teeth and sometimes by the end I feel like I’ve repeated the zone’s row over and over.

I often spend the 30 seconds harmonizing with the tone the motor emits. I took the toothbrush over to the piano one day and determined it plays in the key of C, although if you switch it into sensitive mode, it drops a half a step down to B. I pick different songs, but I’m never sure how many lines I can get in before I have to switch zones. (I’m reminded of how my wife used to measure the length of her commute by how many times she could play Calexico’s cover of “Alone Again Or” on repeat.)

If I can’t keep a sense of what it’s like to pass 30 seconds, how am I supposed to have a sense of a morning, a day, a week, a month, a year?

“A year is short,” writes someone who traveled nonstop for a year. I’m not so sure I believe her. This toothbrush has unloosened any confidence I have in what it takes to pass any length of time. The worst part is that I can’t go back again: my teeth just don’t feel clean anymore without it.

Let the chips fall where they may

Sunday, January 20, 2019

A draft of JFK’s remarks at Amherst College, 1963

Well, here is a coincidence: after I blogged about the Richard Serra quote on coming to a Y in the road in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do and how it reminded me of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” I read further into the book and came across John F. Kennedy’s speech on the role of the artist in American life. He gave it in 1963 at Amherst College for the groundbreaking of a library named in honor of… Robert Frost. Not only that, but Koren notes that Kennedy quoted “The Road Not Taken” in his remarks:

All this requires the best of all of us. And therefore, I am proud to come to this College whose graduates have recognized this obligation and to say to those who are now

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I hope that road will not be the less traveled by, and I hope your commitment to the great public interest in the years to come will be worthy of your long inheritance since your beginning.

And so, it seems, Kennedy, a big Frost fan (Frost supported him in the race against Nixon and spoke at his inauguration), sort of got the poem wrong, too, or at least just quoted the famous bit.

No matter. The rest of Kennedy speech is worth reading:

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world….

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

Read the rest here, or listen to it, below:

The toughest route (and the road not taken)

Saturday, January 19, 2019

I came across this quote in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do. It’s excerpted from a longer quote by Chuck Close in the book, Inside The Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York.

I found another interview with Close in which he phrased it just a bit differently:

Every time you come to a fork in the road, don’t think. Automatically take the harder route, and pretty soon you’re off on someplace of your own, and no one else’s rules apply.

After reading both quotes, my mind immediately went to Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled,” which, I realized, I’d never really read before, and knew little about.

First off, it is not called “The Road Less Traveled,” but “The Road Not Taken.” Here’s how it was originally published in 1915:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

When you actually read the poem, you realize it’s not about what most people think it’s about. In fact, critic David Orr wrote a whole book about how nearly everybody gets it wrong. Here’s an excerpt, titled, “The Most Misread Poem in America”:

Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

Frost himself warned readers, “you have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.”

And get this:

Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one.

(Some of you who watch The Good Place, might now be thinking of Chidi, the chronically indecisive philosophy professor.)

So, going back to the Serra quote which originally captured my attention: what he and Close are talking about is how to set yourself apart from the pack and put yourself into unknown territory. (Essentially, pragmatic advice for market differentiation.) What Frost is getting at is something much murkier: No matter what path you take, you’ll tell some kind of story about it later, which may or may not be true.

Beyond survival mode

Friday, January 18, 2019

There’s a turn in Dougal Robertson’s Survive The Savage Sea that really touched me. It comes on the family’s 25th day as castaways: the sea calms down and there’s a “glorious sunset and a peacefulness of the spirit.” The group takes turns singing songs to each other. And then:

I felt that we had already gone beyond thinking in terms of survival. We had started living from the sea as an adapted way of life… we no longer thought of rescue as one of the main objectives of our existence; we were no longer subject to the daily disappointment of a lonely vigil, to the idea that help might be at hand or was necessary. We no longer had that helpless feeling of dependence on others for our continued existence. We were alone, and stood alone, inhabitants of the savage sea.

Nina Katchadourian talks about how much of the book (her favorite) is really about what it’s like to be a family, and I think that’s why this scene touched me so deeply.

There are moments with children, even in a boring, safe, suburban existence like mine, where you just feel like you’re in Survival Mode. And every once in a while it lifts and you feel like you’ve moved beyond just surviving, and you feel like you’re actually living. The children eat their food. You all tell stories and laugh. Books after tubs with no whining. You’re a quartet, and you’re all performing the same music.

The reasons these evenings are so wonderful is because they are so rare, and in such stark contrast to those Survival Mode days, when you’re just trying to get rid of the day as well as you can.

I’m now thinking about a passage that comes later in the “Analysis” section, when Robertson offers his thoughts on surviving in castaway situations:

If any single civilized factor in a castaway’s character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.

“A well-developed sense of the ridiculous”—I cannot think of a better trait for a parent!