Austin Kleon – Page 570

MAKE IT EASY FOR THEM TO ENGAGE WITH YOU

Monday, July 10, 2006

Clive Thompson wrote a great article for CBC about how the Myspace/Google/bloggo culture is changing journalism. Here’s the meat:

…newspapers and broadcasts and magazines that open themselves up – that make it easy for the audience to pass them around and share them – will thrive. Those that close themselves off to the audience’s cut-and-paste culture will slowly die. Want proof? Compare the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. The Monitor has a hard copy circulation of barely 71,000, a pale shadow of the Journal’s mammoth two million readers. But online, the Monitor dominates: It is proportionately 377 times more frequently linked-to than the Journal. That means it enjoys proportionately far higher traffic, far higher online influence, and far more attention from search engines like Google.

How did the Monitor accrue this advantage? By being promiscuous. The Monitor leaves all its stories permanently online for free, while the Journal locks its behind a pay-to-see wall. Bloggers thus almost never link to Journal articles, while they love to link to Monitor articles. Because it makes itself so amenable to blogging culture, the Monitor taps into pass-around culture and these rolling cascades of popularity. (Granted, the Journal is undoubtedly assuming that what it loses in online audience it gains, financially, by having a more exclusive readership. But that’s no way to influence the world, when the world now lives online. And given the steady migration of advertising online, it may not even be the soundest financial ploy.)

So this is how journalists in the future will capture the protean attention-span of society: They’ll make it easy for the online world to engage with them.

I think the key here is generosity with your audience: the more online content you offer to your readers, the more brand loyalty you will build, the more product you will end up selling. It seems counter-intuitive, but really, sometimes giving things away for free can do worlds of good for your endeavors.

Online presence is everything, whether you’re peddling papers, comics, or burritos.

MY NEW UKULELE

Monday, July 10, 2006

ukulele
see it bigger

I’m sick of hauling my acoustic guitar down to the beach, where fear of theft and salt water damage keeps me from playing it anyways, so yesterday, we drove over to Guitar Center and bought a ukulele. (Sean, get ready for dueling solos.)

Guitar Center brings back nostalgic memories for me, as in my adolescence, I spent all Christmas or birthday money there, on various gadgets. It’s a wanking wonderland there, and the din from everyone’s noodling solos is strangely conforting.

TRYING TO REPAIR SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T EXIST WITH TOOLS YOU HAVE TO INVENT

Saturday, July 8, 2006

A sober and thoughtful response to the news of Western’s demise was printed in the Columbus Dispatch today. Here is the nicely-summarizing meat:

The Western program comprises about 1 percent of Miami’s student body but contributes about 10 percent of the honors students…

Two reviews found the program not without flaws but still worth preserving; Barron’s Best Buys in College Education, Eighth Edition, calls it one of Miami’s two strongest programs (the other being the School of Business), and yet an ad hoc committee recommended its closure.

Western is charged with being too expensive, but it is by no means the most expensive program at Miami. It is charged with not drawing enough admissions, but last year the Miami admissions office prohibited Western from recruiting directly from high schools, while still claiming that Western is primarily responsible for its own recruitment. When the transparency of the evaluation process was called into question, a lawyer gained access, via the Ohio Public Records Act, to 1,500 pages of relevant documentation and concluded that indeed, the process had not been open at all.

The University Senate passed, 40-6 with no abstentions, a resolution calling for a further year of study without any other action being taken; it was overruled by the administration — an unusual move, as the Senate exists to deal with academic matters. At every turn, the facts seem to support at least a more detailed evaluation not only of the Western program but also of the decisionmaking process.

Michael Conaway from Union, N.J.: kudos to you.

Hays Cummins and Chris Wolfe have been working on a “Plan B” to try to salvage whatever can be salvaged from the old program for the new, and kudos to them, too. They’re good guys with a lot invested in Western.

But oh, more I think about it all, the angrier I get.

Meg was particularly angry when she heard the news. She was an architecture student, but it was the community life at Western that kept her at Miami. Otherwise, she would’ve split. So you’ve got a couple whose lives would’ve been totally different without Western.

It’s no wonder I’ve been harping about this so much.

The great point that’s been made over and over: it’s not only past, present, and future Western students who suffer from this decision, it’s really everyone at Miami.

But maybe Miami doesn’t deserve what it had. Who knows.

“The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn’t exist with tools you have to invent on the spot.” I read that quote by George Saunders (from an interview with Fugue) right after I read the Dispatch piece.

I’m not sure what exactly it has to do with Western, but it sure as hell seems to fit.

U GOT THE LOOK*

Friday, July 7, 2006

deleted panels from Calamity

Looks different around here, huh?

It’s been years since I made up the old header, and I had some spare art from work on the book, so I decided it was time for a change. Let me know how you like it.

I remember Lynda Barry talking about major writer’s block and having the revelation, “How can you write a book when you don’t have the book to write it in?” So she went out, got a big notebook, made up the cover, and started making a book.

The package is important.

* * *

Here’s Lynda talking some more about making CRUDDY:

I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it….My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.

If I am obsessed with Lynda’s advice, it’s only because it’s so good. You have to leave your book at the drawing board. Leave it, leave it, leave it. Make it play. Dream it.

This is tougher to do than it sounds.

What Lynda taps into though, is that you have to DISTRACT yourself somehow from what you are doing, you have to trick your brain into thinking you’re not working, and with me, I can’t distract myself in Microsoft Word. That stupid ass cursor blinks and blinks and all of the time I am thinking, my God, my God, I am wasting my life.

I’ve yet to get my sumi-e set, but I’m going to, SOON.

* * *

I don’t know about you, but around our place, we need a vacation. In a couple weeks we’ll be headed down to the beach with my mom, and I’m bringing absolutely nothing related to the book. For one week, I’m going to read whatever I want, eat a bunch of seafood, walk the beach with Meg and Mom, and swim in the ocean.

Fresh eyes is what I’m hoping for when I get back.

Here’s my reading list so far:

CAT’S CRADLE, By Kurt Vonnegut (reread)
CASH, By Johnny Cash
CASE HISTORIES, By Kate Atkinson
MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS, By Maureen McHugh (paperback, re-read)
Something by Elmore Leonard, probably GLITZ, RIO BRAVO, or THE HOT KID
And something by Haruki Murakami, if I can get a cheapo paperback…
And added thanks to Corey: CANDIDE, by Voltaire (preferably Chris Ware’s design)

I need just one or two more books to read, so if you’ve got any suggestions, send them my way. Nothing taxing, nothing thick. And NO graphic novels, because I’m trying to get back into reading prose.

We’re due for a Half Price run soon.

*Yes, that’s a Prince reference.

WRITING ON THE WALLS

Thursday, July 6, 2006

A description of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oaks:

On the walls behind the writer’s desk, the day-by-day outline of ”A Fable” is famously hand-lettered by Faulkner on the wall….After her husband had finished writing ”A Fable,” Estelle Faulkner, according to legend, rashly ordered the wall repainted, over the outline. Using photographs as a guide, the outraged writer redid it and afterward, shellacked the wall, for the sake of permanence and posterity.

Doesn’t that story remind you of a mom who refuses to paint over the pencil markings on the wall tracking her childrens’ height over the years?

Recently I’ve had the urge to write on the walls.** But that’s the bitch about renting: you want to get your deposit back.

The Next Best Thing? Whiteboards. I started keeping a whiteboard above my desk to keep track of projects, submissions, and to-do lists. Then I got the idea to keep a dry-erase marker in the bathroom by the mirror, for those in-the-shower inspirations (I tend to have a lot of those.)

I was in there today, reading Chris Ware’s ACME NOVELTY collection, and it occured to me that writing on the wall might be the most primitive and accessible art-form, starting with the caveman in Ware’s “Our History of Art,” and ending, perhaps, with Rocket Sam, who, in an awesome gag strip, flies a spaceship all the way across the galaxy just to leave vulgar graffiti on a cave wall in another planet.

It’s not necessarily the desire to be heard, it’s the desire to be seen. And some institutions pick up on that and exploit it. At the Google headquarters, they have dozens of communal whiteboards, where employees can swap ideas and leave graffiti.

Whenever we do buy a house, I’m going to leave a nice section on the wall in my office to scribble. Maybe put up a couple of whiteboards in the foyer.

* * Before you start reading this, you might want to go listen to or watch some TV On The Radio. My sentences are beating to their drums.