Austin Kleon

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The electric toothbrush theory of relativity

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

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)

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.

See also: “The Hard Way.”

Beyond survival mode

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!

You do not have to be good

Words to live by. (From chapter 5 of Keep Going)

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Here she is reading it:

She grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, about a half hour southeast of where I’m typing this. When she gave a (rare) reading in Cleveland, she joked, “I have to read ‘Wild Geese’ or I shall be chased from the city.”

She said she wrote it while in Cleveland, trying to coax a student to practice the end stop lines technique. “You write one and I’ll write one,” she offered, resulting in “Wild Geese.”

Later in the reading she was asked what it takes to be a poet.

“Read a lot of poetry; find poetry you really love. Don’t be afraid to imitate it. That’s how we learn most everything in the world — love and imitation. The second part is to seek primary sources, to go out into the world. Go to the art museum, yes, but go out into the forest, too. Pay attention to the world.”

This really is the great message of her work: Pay attention. And pay attention to what you pay attention to. (The message of most great art, really.)

It’s spelled out in her poem, “Sometimes”:

It’s there in “A Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

It’s there in “When Death Comes”:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

I think she did it right. And showed us how we can, too.

The opening page of The Steal Like An Artist Journal, painted by Heather Champ

The teachings and the teacher

Yesterday some friends and I (all dudes — this detail will matter later) were discussing the art of acting. None of us are actors, but we all like movies, and we were wondering where a layman might go to figure out what acting is about, what “good” acting is, etc.

One of my pals brought up my drawings of Jeffrey Tambor’s acting workshops.  We attended them together at SXSW 2010 and SXSW 2012. Two of my favorite events to draw. Tambor was funny and wise and I found myself reciting some of his lines for years after. (One piece of advice in particular has stuck with me: “Worrying is not preparation.”)

In 2014, my pal @mattthomas attended one of his lectures and tweeted out his notes. I copied notes from his notes:

Tambor’s morning routine: – wakes up and drinks a cold cup of coffee that’s next to the bed from the night before – reads for a half hour

Tambor: “You wanna have a good life? Work, love, and thrive with people who get you.”

Tambor: “If you’re any good, you’re going to be fired.”

Tambor talking about how he used to, in his darker moments, destroy his projects with worry.

That third bit reads a lot differently today, given Tambor’s firing from Transparent.

I think about this old, old problem all the time now: What happens to the good teachings of men when those men do bad things?

I don’t care about the men themselves. They may or may not get what they deserve. (I’m getting too old for heroes, anyways, and celebrities, actors, comedians, they’re people, yes, but they’re also projections.) I am, selfishly, yes, thinking about what I have taken from them. How perhaps-not-so-good-in-hindsight men have helped me become a better man. What does one do with that knowledge?

“Worrying is not preparation” has long become a mantra in our house — it’s helped us through some bad, bad days. (It is not lost on me that this wisdom was gathering in an acting workshop — a place where you go to learn about pretending to be something, performing a role.) What do we do with it now?

Different people have different answers. And I have mine: “Worrying is not preparation” belongs to me now. As a phrase or a unit of meaning, a meme, or whatever, it has, by being used by me and my partner, become ours. Its usefulness has made it ours.

It’s like they say in A.A. and Levon sang in The Band: “Take what you need and leave the rest.”

The need I will take is the teaching. The rest I will leave is the teacher.

In the meantime, I will keep looking for and learning from better men, or better yet, better women.

A good time to be a pack rat

Edward Gorey’s salt shaker collection
Edward Gorey’s salt shaker collection

Marie Kondo mania is in full swing again thanks to her Netflix special. I haven’t watched the show yet, but I read her book at the beginning of 2016, and wrote two posts in 2017 on the connections between messiness and creativity — “Tidying Up” and “The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for.” They eventually became chapter 8 (“When in doubt, tidy up”) of Keep Going, which begins:

(If you want the rest, you’ll have to pre-order the book.)

Thinking back to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, what disturbed me most — as a writer and an artist — was the idea that how you feel NOW in this very moment is the most important factor in whether you should keep or discard something.

Books are the obvious example (already covered here), so let’s take photographs: Kondo says to keep a certain amount of photos from an event, and toss the rest. And yet, I recently looked through a box of loose photos from my wedding, and I found all kinds of interesting photos that didn’t interest me when I was putting together our wedding album.

You’ve probably experienced something similar: A photo you didn’t think was interesting at the time, later on you find it more interesting than the stuff you chose to frame. My friend Clayton Cubitt once tweeted something along the same lines:

I realize that nowhere does Kondo explicitly say this, but there is a kind of anti-collecting streak in the book. Most artists are collectors, if not hoarders, and we don’t just collect the things that “spark joy”: we collect things (objects yes, but also hunches and ideas) that we’re unsure or ambivalent about. Things we get the feeling we could use later.

It tickled me recently to read this piece, “Edward Gorey, Pack Rat”:

When he wasn’t writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. “We ask the docents not to use the word ‘hoarder,’” says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House’s newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey’s pack rat tendencies. “But he really did hoard interesting things.”

I suspect that, like Gorey, every creative person has just a tiny bit of a pack rat in them. (I like that Gorey referred to his collecting as “accumulating.”)

It may be a bad time to be a pack rat, but it’s also a good time: CNN reports that Goodwill donations are way up. So “Get in, Losers, We’re Going Thrifting.”

This is a chord, this is another

“I just learned ‘Imagine’ on the piano,” tweeted @acupoftea yesterday, “and I would like to officially rescind any energy I’ve spent being impressed with people who can play ‘Imagine’ on the piano.” I chuckled, and then she followed up with, “If you want to demystify pop music, learn, like, four chords and just play them in a different order & rhythm each time.”

That immediately made me think of the famous zine graphic above, included in the book Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-1980. Toby Mott explains:

[It’s] an illustration from a fanzine called Sideburn #1, which was a drawing made by Tony Moon just to fill the space. It’s a drawing of three guitar chords and it says, ‘now form a band’. That fanzine is extremely rare, but the drawing is often quoted by lots of musicians as the impetus to do something, and it’s seen as a key message of punk,” says Toby. “You didn’t need to have been to music school or be particularly proficient or skilled. It was much more about the energy and drive to do something. It’s a rallying call to the troops.

Nice to know the story behind a drawing that always puzzled me. Why are the markings on the frets and not in between them? And why A-E-G? What songs can you even play with those chords? (Answer: AC/DC’s “TNT” and T-Rex’s “Bang A Gong.”)

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