Austin Kleon

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I am a compost heap

Ann Patchett’s short memoir of her writing life, “The Getaway Car,” collected in her book, This is The Story of a Happy Marriage, is one of the best things on writing I’ve read.

I particularly loved this bit, stealing like an artist meets a gardening metaphor:

You will take bits from books you’ve read and movies you’ve seen and conversations you’ve had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you won’t even realize you’re doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.

Of research, for example, she writes, “I try to shovel everything I learn onto the compost heap instead of straight into the book.”

I’ve often thought that an artist has to be like the Mr. Fusion device Doc Brown uses in Back To The Future, but I like the compost heap even better.

The cool thing about a compost heap is that you can throw whatever organic matter you want on it. (“Hold on to your anger,” Thich Nhat Hanh told bell hooks, “use it as compost for your garden.”)

If you’re just throwing stuff on the compost heap, you don’t have to worry about being pure, or perfect. (“Writing…always, always only starts out as shit,” David Rakoff said. It’s like “reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.”)

And, as Brian Eno told us, “Beautiful things grow out of shit.”

3 stories about artificial intelligence

drawing by my son Owen, age 5

1. Composer and Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford was asked to respond to the “10th symphony” created with artificial intelligence. “At the end of the symphony I found myself more philosophical than annoyed,” he writes.

The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most… When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do… Here’s my assertion: True intelligence is in a body. Intelligence outside a living body, as some sort of abstraction, is innately impossible, or should be given another name.

Swafford points out (like Nick Cave has) that part of the beauty of Beethoven is, “in contrast say to Mozart and Bach, with him it’s often as if you can hear the effort, the struggle, hear in the notes what it cost him to rise above the universal mediocrity.”

He writes of his late friend, the painter Francis Gillespie:

She would spend a year or more on a painting of flowers, struggling to represent them with virtually photographic accuracy. In fact, as she knew perfectly well, she didn’t have the technique to do that. “I’m really sort of a primitive,” Fran would say grimly as she worked. But what makes her paintings hers is exactly the grand failure of her attempt. Her pictures are beautiful, close to photos, but always a little off, and the offness makes them singular.

Ted Gioia calls this “an aesthetics of imperfection.”

In this story, the human has something the machine can never have.

2. In Sam Anderson’s profile of Laurie Anderson, he notes that the artist has “become obsessed, lately, with artificial intelligence.” She worked with researchers to make text engines in her style, the style of her late husband, Lou Reed, and an Anderson/Reed blend of the two. Anderson says a 1/3 of what the computer spits out is junk, 1/3 is boring, but 1/3 is “surprising, even authentic, some kind of fresh magic.”

Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would save the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could have one whenever she needed it. So she read them and then let them go.

At one point, Laurie Anderson reeds a poem the machine spit out in Reed’s style. It’s not bad. “Wonderful,” she says. “Just great. He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that. The line is pretty thin for me.”

(This scene reminded me of something out of Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.)

In this story, the machine gives the human a combination of something it had and something it never had.

another robot by Owen

3. I am sympathetic to Swafford’s assertion that “intelligence is in a body” and “the aesthetics of imperfection.”

I also know that some of my favorite art came out of the interplay between human and machine. It is between the two that a third thing emerges — Beethoven, after all, was wrangling notes out of a machine with keys.

I think it is worth noting the difference between analog and digital machines. Analog machines, I would venture, give you more mistakes that you can work with — a brush runs out of ink, and the dry texture gives you new marks, Lee Perry blows ganja smoke and dirt on a tape reel, and new sounds emerge. (You throw dirt in a laptop and you’ll simply fry the machine.) That said, even digital machines  and pieces of software have quirks and we ascribe them personalities, and work with them.

I would also note the difference between words and music. Words are more abstract than music. They are more easily fed into a computer and spit back out. They also must be interpreted by us — when we read the poem in the style of Reed, summoned from the computer, it is already an abstract, linear text. We must interpret the words. Music is not interpreted. It is what it is. It is heard.

I confess I have gone from being cranky to curious about A.I., and I wonder what sorts of grunt work it could do for me. (Could it spit out a book proposal?)

In my story, the machines help us to honor what is not machine-like in us.

You can’t create under surveillance

The biggest misinterpretation of Show Your Work! is the idea that you should show everyone everything all the time. Just set up a 24/7 webcam over your desk and let people watch. (I won’t name any names, but when the book was still being written, the title Expose Yourself was thrown out there.)

Not only do I think it’s a bad idea to share while you’re actually doing your work, I think it’s a fast track to destroying your work.

It’s nearly impossible — not to mention extremely unpleasant — to work with people looking over your shoulder. There’s “the indignity of being observed,” but there’s also the observer effect: the idea in quantum mechanics that by simply observing a system, you change it. (This happens all the time in my everyday life: I’ll spook a bird by trying to take a photo, or I’ll praise an in-progress drawing and the kid will run out of the room.)

A few years ago, Tim Kreider wrote of becoming a meme:

You can’t write — or live — if you imagine the whole world watching over your shoulder, waiting for you to screw up, ready to mock or vilify you. Which, thanks to the internet, it now is.

I thought of Tim when I read this recent interview with with Dave Eggers, about his new book, The Every:

My theory is that a human under surveillance can’t create. Not really, at least. The staff at the Every are judged on every movement, every keystroke and each thing their pupils land on. It’s all observed and recorded and measured, and this creates a low-level vibration of paralysis for everyone, for fear of saying the wrong thing or making any kind of mistake that will never be expunged. But to create, you have to tap into the anarchist part of yourself; there can’t be rules and there can’t be anyone looking over your shoulder, and you can’t wonder what a troll in Tallinn will think of your idea.

It’s bad enough trying to create something when nobody’s watching — the worst trolls are the ones that live in your head!

The danger of sharing online is this ambient buildup of a feeling of being surveilled.

The feeling of being watched, or about to be watched.

You have to disconnect from that long enough to connect with yourself and what you’re working on.

“To me, being a genuine writer means that you’re able to shed all human dignity in a moment,” says Chuck Palahniuk. “People depend on you to express something that they can’t express.”

Don’t be afraid to disappear.

Hide and seek.

Input as collage

In Edgar Wright’s outstanding film The Sparks Brothers, Stephen Morris, the drummer in Joy Division, says they were listening to two records on repeat when they recorded “Love Will Tear Us Apart”: an LP of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits and Sparks’ No. 1 in Heaven.

My first reaction was “Whoa!” But the more I think about it, the more the mashup makes sense: isolate the vocal of “Strangers in the Night” and put it over the backing track of “La Dolce Vita.”

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media. (For example, reading art books and physics books at the same time, or watching a lot of westerns and kung fu movies at the same time or looking at paintings in a museum while reading physics papers while watching kung fu movies, etc.)

There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

In Art & Physics, the writer and surgeon Leonard Shlain wrote about his interesting method of “self-education” in the books’ subject matters:

Serendipitously, I discovered a way to heighten my creativity. My habit was to read a popular physics book late at night until the snooze gremlin nudged me with the signal that it was time to call it a day. Prior to falling asleep the following night, my mind relatively empty, I leafed through art books. The next morning, I would often connect images I had seen the night before with concepts in physics contained in my previous night’s reading. Something mysterious happens in the creative process during dreamtime, and I am an avid proponent of the school that advocates, “sleeping on it.”

It’s been pointed out before that dreams and collage work in the same kind of holistic, non-logical, non-linear manner. I love the idea of our brains gluing together the bits while we slumber…

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