Austin Kleon

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To Feel Something That Was Not Of Our World

Nina Katchadourian, Savaging the Sea #33, 2020

When I saw Nina Katchadourian at the Blanton in 2017, she mentioned that one of her favorite books of all-time is Survive The Savage Sea, the true story of a family who gets stranded at sea after a killer whale attacks their ship. “It’s about what they talk about and how they stay alive and the world that is the sort of raft they’re stuck on together, which to me is a sort of metaphor for family.”


I read it, because that’s the kind of nerd that I am, in 2019, during our 8-month “Lake Erie sabbatical,” when we felt like castaways, ourselves. (See: “Of course we’ll make it!” and “Beyond Survival Mode.”) When the pandemic hit, the book took on an even deeper meaning, and I wrote about the book on our 40th day of quarantine. (See: “Survive The Savage Sea.”)

A few months after that, Nina wrote to me to tell me about this daily conversation she had started with Douglas Robertson, the older son, who wrote his own book about the experience, Last Voyage of the Lucette. Every day she would call Douglas and they’d talk about what happened on the corresponding day when they were castaways — he’d even read her passages of the book, which she said was uncanny, since her mother had read her the book aloud when she was seven. 


To Feel Something That Was Not Of Our World, Nina’s show up now at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, is the result of those conversations. If you’re lucky enough to live there, you can book a tour, but for the rest of us, we can experience a lot of it virtually: there’s an orientation video you should watch first, a 3-D tour, and a walkthrough tour that Nina gave on Zoom a few weeks ago.

So delightful to see such a personal labor of love from one of my favorite artists!

Filed under: Nina Katchadourian

Our stutter

My 8-year-old son who stutters has a Korg Volca Beats drum machine that has a “stutter” function. The stutter function makes every beat sound cooler, much like my son’s stuttering has made my world sound cooler, and I find it poetic that the stutter function’s knobs are “time” and “depth,” because I feel that my son’s stutter, over time, has made me deeper.

There’s a wonderful This American Life segment, “Time Bandit,” about the musician JJJJJerome Ellis, who says:

Sometimes I refer to it as “my stutter,” but sometimes I refer to it as “the stutter.” […] Because to me, stuttering is not bound to my body, that it is a phenomenon that occurs between me and whoever I’m speaking to. I like to think of it like it’s something that we share.

Ellis’s distinction sank in so deeply that I made it my own and misremembered him saying, “our stutter.” Because that’s what it feels like in this house: We have a stutter. It’s something that we share.

Our Stutter.

* * *

Around Christmastime, my son started stuttering differently and more frequently.

“Why are you so glitchy?” my 5-year-old asked him. “I’m worried about you.”

We might’ve been worried, too, except that we’d been through it before. The previous Christmas, we’d called Dr. Courtney Byrd at the Lang Stuttering Institute here in Austin, Texas, and she assured us that it was perfectly normal for stuttering to change during the holidays and that even good, exciting events can cause changes in stuttering.

So now, when Our Stutter changes, our listening changes.

We listen with more love.

That is not to say that our patience is endless. My son, like many an 8-year-old, talks all the time. Sometimes we wish he would shut up already and let us have some peace!

Which reminds me of another Dr. Byrd story. I once said to her, “I’m just glad it hasn’t stopped him yet.” And she replied, “There is not ‘yet.’ If we keep doing what we’re doing and we do it right, there is no ‘yet.’”

There is no yet. As somebody who is constantly imagining the worst, that stopped me dead in my tracks. You could write a whole book with those words: There is no yet.

* * *

I continue to be grateful for Our Stutter. Our Stutter has opened me up, sent me down new paths of inquiry, introduced me to new ways of thinking, put me in touch with some amazing people, and made me aware of a whole world that I was missing.

A lot is going on in the stuttering world right now. We have a president who stutters!

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation was so impressed with Dr. Byrd’s vision at the institute that they gave a huge amount of money to establish a new center for stuttering education and research. As part of the celebration for this event, I was invited to join a Zoom call full of writers and creative people who stutter. I was blown away by their stories, and how often their stuttering influenced their creative work.

If you are new to the stuttering world, welcome. If you’d like an orientation, I highly recommend this list of work by and about people who stutter by journalist Barry Yeoman.

Filed under: stuttering

Killer Coconut

I’m stressed out. Let’s look at pictures of Coconut, the screech owl who lives in our palm tree.

The big event last weekend: Coconut slept all day clutching breakfast. (Some people thought it was a neighborhood chicken, but it looks more like a pigeon to me.)

 

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Mostly, I’m still amazed by how chill Coconut is. My wife actually goes out and talks to it — this morning she said it was a good bird and we were happy to have it here and Coconut closed its eyes and puffed up its feathers. The only person Coconut isn’t extremely chill around is our 5-year-old, but honestly, no sentient creature with a working brain wouldn’t keep up their guard around him.

A kind commenter on Instagram alerted me to some of Coconut’s cousins elsewhere in Austin: Merlin and Minerva, two screech owls who have their own webcam and return to their box each year to hatch owlets. We’re hoping we can do the same for Coconut and its mate. (A box is being built as I type!)

Phew. Okay. I feel less stressed already.

Filed under: Coconut The Owl

Siblings with and without rivalry

When I was going through my diaries of the last presidential administration, one of the first clippings that caught my eye was this one from when Serena Williams beat her older sister, Venus in January 2017. I knew next to nothing about the sisters at the time, but the power of this image and caption was was so strong, and in such opposition to the “winners and losers” worldview of the new president, that I had to clip and save it.

Only now do I realize that this clipping is even deeper with meaning, for it’s the result of “this African-American family organizing itself, as a unit, in order to lay siege to perhaps the whitest sport in the world and pulling it off somehow.”

And I’ve since learned that while the sisters may be rivals on the court, they’re extremely close and supportive of each other in their personal life. “She is the only person I will talk to after I lose,” Serena has said. “Serena still copies everything that I do,” Venus has said, “but I also copy everything that she does. It’s a codependency.”

I am raising two brothers, so I am obsessed with sibling relationships, especially creative ones. (For example, how many filmmaking teams are made of brothers: The Coens, The Maysles, The Quays, The Rosses, etc.) I loved the recent Bee Gees documentary for its portrayal of the way siblings can blend together into a special entity, but how they can also tear each other apart. Noel Gallagher, who knows something about the subject, has a great line: “When you’ve got brothers singing, it’s like an instrument that nobody else can buy. You can’t go buy that sound in a shop.”

There seems to be a tension between mutual love and support and a bit of rivalry and competition that encourages the development of each sibling, and the trick of the dynamic, as with so many other things in life, is to keep the tension right: too slack and everything falls apart, too tight, and everything snaps.

The title of this post is a riff on the book by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

Spend time on something that will outlast them

a stack of my notebooks in a crate
RIP The Trump Administration 2017-2021

I have exactly one thing to thank our outgoing president for: my diary habit.

I have always kept notebooks, but starting in January 2017, I started keeping an old-fashioned, bonafide diary. 3+ pages every morning, no matter what. (Before anybody asks me what brand of notebooks I use, just shop here.) I realized early on in this administration, I was going to need a good place to have bad ideas, a place not Twitter, to shout into the void.

spreads and a stack of my diaries
A spread from the back of my book, Keep Going

My diary habit led to starting to blog daily again in October 2017, and by February 2018, I had the “How To Keep Going” talk written. That talk led to Keep Going the book, which came out in 2019. So, I guess I could thank the ex-president for the end of the trilogy, too, considering I wrote it as an answer to the question, “What if we have to live through a second term?” (I did not anticipate that “second term” would be swapped out for “global pandemic.”)

spend time on something that will outlast them

I forgot, somehow, that the original ending of the talk was: “Spend time on something that will outlast them.” This was based on the Leonard Woolf “Planting Iris” story I wrapped the talk with:

For the book we went with the more — positive? — line, “Plant your garden,” which was a better container for thinking about seasonal time. I still like that original line, but I would change it now to: “Spend time on something that will outlast them this.”

“This” is whatever the this is in the phrase, “this, too, shall pass.”

What seeds are you planting now that will flower long after this pandemic, this administration… maybe even this life?

I’m hopeful and I’m happy, today, but I still have the same mission:

Stay alive, get weird, and plant your seeds.

Disgust with civilization

“Disgust is a survival trait…”
—Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun. 

I think often of this Kurt Vonnegut piece that ran in the first issue of Backwards City Review:

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.

It was music.

I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out.

It was disgust with civilization.

What disgusts you is important information. It tells you something is wrong. What to avoid. It gives you a path.

I feel like my readers see me as a fairly positive person, but I doubt they know how much I am driven by my disgust. 

The trick is: I take the thing I’m disgusted with, imagine the opposite, and push that out into the world.

Identifying poison, privately, but sharing nourishment, publicly.

After all, aggravation is my muse.

* * *

After posting this, I realized today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I will be celebrating by re-reading “Transformed Nonconformist,” from his collection of sermons, Strength To Love, which contains the oft-quoted line, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (You can read the interesting background behind the book at Stanford’s King Institute.)

A Coconut update

My brains are mush and my nerves are frayed, so let’s look at some Coconut pictures:

 

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Coconut is an eastern screech owl who has taken up residence in the palm tree behind our  house. Unlike me, Coconut is extremely chill and unperturbed by world events and loud children. (Even a random snow day didn’t throw Coconut.)

 

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I started a TikTok just so I could post videos of Coconut every morning and every evening. (I double-post them to my Instagram Stories.)

 

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For some reason, Coconut doesn’t like to return to the tree on Saturday mornings. Meg usually finds it over in the bamboo near the fence. We’re working on getting an owl box put up so it (and its mate?) will stay longer. We’ve read that some screech owls come back year after year to have babies.

 

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Different cultures have different ideas about what the appearance of an owl means. I’m not sure what Coconut means… yet. Just trying to enjoy each morning I walk outside and Coconut is up there.

Hard to believe, hard to leave

I’m coming up on my last days in the office of the house we’ve been renting for the past few years. It’s so peaceful in there — I was editing a client video today, and it felt hard to believe that anything ugly was going on in the world. Very grateful for this room of my own, and even though I’m about to build a new backyard box to work in, I will miss this bliss (way)station.

Snow day in Texas

This morning my neighborhood filled with the whoops of Texan children running out into the snow. For some of them, it might’ve been the first snow they’d ever seen in real life. (One kid exclaimed, “It’s like slo-mo rain.”) I’ve lived here for 14 years and I’ve never seen it snow like this.

First, I went to go check on Coconut The Owl, who didn’t look thrilled, but was hanging in there:

Then, we dug mittens and boots out of the closet and had a bonafide snowball fight. We also made a Coconut out of snow:

And now we’re inside and cozy and I plan on doing nothing for as long as possible.

Every time it snows down here I think of this line from Lonesome Dove:

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