Austin Kleon – Page 249

The magic of diner booths

Monday, November 12, 2018

This weekend my hotel room had this very weird little booth space right against the TV that turned out to be perfect for writing.

I rarely work in coffee shops, but I love sitting in diner booths — there’s something about being tucked in on 3 sides that makes me really want to just sit and work.

I’m not the only one.

Here’s a fun story about Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder, who got kicked out of the writing room for chain-smoking:

Separated from his fellow writers, the long-haired genius, according to Simpsons creator Matt Groening in an episode’s DVD commentary, found a diner he liked, and would write from the same booth every day whilst drinking “copious amounts of coffee.” However, California soon banned smoking inside public places, and Swartzwelder found himself with nowhere to go. Instead of finding a new place to write, he simply purchased the booth, installed it in his home, and continued his work as if nothing had changed.

And here’s David Lynch, from Catching the Big Fish:

I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

I dunno, I might have to recreate a diner booth in my next studio…

Open tabs are a time machine

Sunday, November 11, 2018

GIF by Jennifer Daniel | via GIPHY

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet, he writes that “Our Browser History Is the New Memoir”:

If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

I have a laptop that I use sporadically, so every time I open it, the tabs in my internet browser show me who I was 24, 48, or even 168 hours ago. It’s a tiny form of (unexpected) time travel. (When you dip into an old diary, you’re expecting to take a little time trip…)

Years ago, I figured out a way to help my future self:

1. Put a Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard in the freezer
2. Forget that it’s there.
3. Open the freezer.

How funny that forgetting — something we mostly see as a bad thing — sets the stage for later surprise and delight…

Some Laws for nature journaling

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Henry David Thoreau’s journal, opened to November 11, 1858

From a writeup of a talk by John Muir Laws on nature journaling:

For each thing you record, note these three things:

Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it

Creativity: “It reminds me of…” (or more simply “IRMO”): You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those

Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.

We are verbs, not nouns

Friday, November 9, 2018

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
—bell hooks, All About Love

In Keep Going, I have a chapter called, “Forget the noun, do the verb,” and after seeing it on the poster, a reader asked if it was inspired by Stephen Fry. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I did a little googling.

In 2010, Fry was interviewed by “14-year-old Eden Parris in an interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled young readers to meet their TV heroes.” During the course of the interview, he “warned Parris that language could shape and limit people’s ambitions”:

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Of course, this would’ve been perfect for the book, but that is one of the universal laws of writing books: once you finish them, you find all the stuff you should’ve included but left out based on your ignorance.

The quote I did put in is from R. Buckminster Fuller’s classic, I Seem To Be A Verb:

Back in 2013, The New Statesman ran a piece called “What Atheists Can Learn from Believers,” in which the writer Karen Armstrong emphasized religion as a verb. “Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work.” She pointed out that in the modern west, there’s this idea that you have to believe first, and then do. But no, “we have turned faith into a head-trip,” when, originally, the English word “belief” meant something like, “commitment.”

“Credo ut intellegam – I commit myself in order that I may understand,” said Saint Anselm (1033-1109). In the late 17th century, the English word “belief” changed its meaning and became the intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition. Religious people now think that they have to “believe” a set of incomprehensible doctrines before embarking on a religious way of life. This makes no sense. On the contrary, faith demands a disciplined and practical transcendence of egotism, a “stepping outside” the self which brings intimations of transcendent meaning that makes sense of our flawed and tragic world.

It’s remarkable to me how much you could apply what Armstrong is saying to creativity or making art. “If you don’t do religion, you don’t get it,” Armstrong says. Religion is something we do, a “practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart.”

“It’s a practice,” Mary Karr says of her own faith. “It’s not something you believe. It’s not doctrine. Doctrine has nothing to do with it. It’s a set of actions.” I remember once, when asked to make a case for religion, she replied, “Why don’t you just pray for 30 days and see if your life gets better?

So many people think you have to first call yourself an artist, know who you are and what you’re about, and then you can start making art. No, no, no. You do the stuff first, then you can worry about what it is, who you are. The important thing is the practice. The doing. The verb.

We aren’t nouns, we are verbs. Forget the nouns, do the verbs.

A new connection (Corita + Thoreau)

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Corita Kent, *The Stamp of Thoreau*, 1969

When I toured the Corita Art Center last weekend, I kept seeing evidence of Corita Kent’s thoughts on the seasons (I wrote about them in Keep Going):

I’d noticed Thoreau quotes in Corita’s work before. She seemed to especially like these lines from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” She used the quote in at least two different pieces over the years:

So I asked (former) director Ray Smith if she knew of any explicit imagery with Thoreau. She led me straight to a drawer with The Stamp of Thoreau piece (from Corita’s series, A Set Of Heroes And Sheroes) that you see above.