Austin Kleon

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Unread and irrelevant

I posted one of my favorite Ron Padgett poems on Twitter a few days ago and a man I don’t follow went out of his way to tell me that I was “unread” and “obviously haven’t read much poetry” because “Padgett is irrelevant.” He then tweeted me a half dozen long, presumably more important poems, most of them from poets I’d heard of, but none that I bothered to read.

Several times a day I want to put a pixelated arm around a digital stranger and say, “My god, who did this to you? Who gave you these bad ideas? You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right? This way you’re thinking… it’s not really real. Come over here and take a seat. Here is the land where we read whatever we want and we like what we like and we don’t tweet nastiness to strangers. Have some punch and a cookie. Do you feel better?”

A very simple rule

A letter to Emerson’s daughter, excerpted in my new one, Keep Going

I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair. Everything looks better in the light of the morning. Cliché, maybe, but it works.

Most parents know about “the witching hour”: that weird block from 4-6PM when your kids are more prone to meltdowns. When my oldest was young, we white-knuckled through those hours with beer and Seinfeld reruns.

There’s also a weird thing called “sundowning” that happens with to people with dementia. As the sun goes down and the shadows fall, patients tend to get more confused and anxious.

I, too, tend to suffer during these hours, which is why I have my rule. I shared it on Twitter, and a follower replied:

Great rule. I met a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, struggled with depression, and instituted the same rule. Deal with problems in daylight. I apply that lesson at least once a month, for years now. P.S. The guy ended up getting a dual degree from Harvard, is married now

“Deal with problems in daylight.” That’s perfect.

Travel as a political act

“Have you noticed how riddled with fear our country is lately? We’ve never been more afraid. I’m concerned about that. Because when a society is afraid, people with a wrong motive can take advantage of that society and make them become something that they’re not. There’s a lot of fear right now in the United States of America and the most fearful Americans are the Americans that are buried deep in the middle of this country with no passports. This is a concern. Fear is for people who don’t get out much. The flipside of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we travel. I think it’s important for our very democracy… that we get out there, we travel, and we gain an empathy for the other 96% of humanity.”

I caught this talk last night on PBS, and it was so well done that I felt compelled to keep watching past my bedtime. (He’s been giving some version of the talk since 9/11.) It’s pretty brilliant in that it’s both a genuine plea for a saner, more thoughtful politics in this country, but also basically an infomercial for his travel services, his book of the same name, and his classics, Europe 101 and Europe Through The Back Door. (It feels very American to me in that way — both heartfelt and capitalist.) Worth a watch.

To be or not to be

I bought so many Beto signs for our yard I thought I’d cut one up into a campaign slogan that more accurately reflects the dire state of our country.

Someone suggested if I made a bunch and put them next to each other they’d still work as Beto signs:

Man in hole

“A visitor to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Serralves museum in Porto was hospitalised this week after falling inside one of the British artist’s installations, which features a 2.5-metre-deep hole. It is not clear whether he fell into the hole or beside it.”
—The Art Newspaper

“Attendees of previous showings of the work have questioned ‘whether there really was a hole in the floor or whether it was simply a circle painted with an extremely dark black paint.’ Presumably there will be no doubts going forward.”
—Gizmodo

“Ladies and gentlemen: I invented the portable hole for the good of humanity. But let us all hope it will never be used for evil purposes.”
—Professor Calvin Q. Calculus, “The Hole Idea,” 1955

“On Sunday, May 30, 2010, an enormous hole, 60 feet wide and 30 stories deep, opened up in the middle of Guatemala City, swallowing a three-story building, a home, and local reports claimed that one man was killed when the building was swallowed.”
—Atlas Obscura

“Images of the crater, 20 metres across, 30 metres deep and nearly perfectly round, were published around the world — prompting complaints that the picture had been manipulated. But city officials said the crater was both real and round.”
—The Guardian

“HOLEY TERROR STILL ON THE LOOSE.”
—Newspaper headline, “The Hole Idea,” 1955

“You will see this story over and over again. People love it and it is not copyrighted. The story is ‘Man in Hole,’ but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

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