Austin Kleon

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What to say when you don’t know what to say


No matter how much you love to talk, conversation can be difficult, and every conversation, in person or online, has the potential to turn ugly or needlessly confrontational or boring or painful and so on. It’s for this reason that I keep handy a collection of conversational shortcuts, to help me know what to say when I don’t know what to say.

When someone asks my opinion about something I could not stand but I don’t want to get into how much I couldn’t stand it: “It wasn’t for me.” (A variant: “Not my cup of tea.”)

When someone expresses their loathing for something that I love: “Oh, well. More for me!” (Stephen Colbert on why he doesn’t  proselytize: “Hey, more Jesus for me.”)

When someone criticizes me and telling them to go to hell isn’t prudent: “You may be right.” (This stolen from Jerry Saltz, who says, “It has a nice double edge that the person often never feels and that gives pleasure.”)

When someone gives me a compliment: “Thank you for saying that.” (If the compliment seems to be a bit much, and I’m feeling saintly, like George Saunders saintly, I might add his line, “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m really going to try to make it true.”)

When I don’t know something: “I don’t know!”

When I am told of someone’s good fortune, which I may or may not be happy to hear: “Good for you” or “Good for them.”

I try never to ask what people do for a living in a conversation, but when I want to be polite after someone tells me what they do: “Wow. That sounds hard.” I stole that from Paul Ford, who explains how it works in “How To Be Polite”:

Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you.

(I’m lying now: I’ve never actually tried that last one, but I really want to.)

Those are all the ones I can think of right now. Feel free to send me your own.

The Yamaha

For the first time since my first son was born, I am living in a house without a piano. What I have now is a Yamaha “electronic piano,” a decades-old leftover from my pre-piano, pre-children days. The Yamaha is a hefty plank of plastic with “weighted” keys that make a sad thunky plastic sound when you play them. Unlike the vegan cashew queso my wife made for dinner the other night, it is a poor substitute for the real thing.

But The Yamaha, for now, is what I have, so I am making the best of it. The Yamaha has ten different voices: 2 pianos, 2 electric pianos, 2 organs, strings, 2 harpsichords, and a vibraphone. I hate the two pianos and never play them. The organs make the room sound like church.  The other voices I can work with. As with many things in life, I like it more the less it tries to pretend to be something it’s not.

Can you have a moment of transcendence on such a sub-par instrument? I got close the other night. I was practicing some Bach, and I felt something like, I am putting my fingers on the same keys as Bach. He wrote these notes down 250 years ago, and now I am playing them. I may be doing a clumsy job, but I am making him come alive again.

I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “frozen music”:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And I thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who is writing a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead. The title comes from a lecture by W.H. Auden, who said:

…one of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

I suppose you break bread with the dead using whatever tools you have on hand. Sometimes it’s a fine, dusty hardback, and sometimes it’s a free ebook on your Kindle. Sometimes it’s an old wooden piano, and sometimes it’s The Yamaha.

We made a book trailer

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtzWVhFgOqJ/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

We were having dinner and I was trying to think up ideas for a Keep Going book trailer and I thought, “Why not just have Owen letter it?” (He’s six.) I asked him and he said sure and we shot it right there at the kitchen table and I edited it on my laptop in the bathroom while he took a tub. (I’m not sure if it’s going to be the book trailer, but it’s a book trailer!)

Not waving but drowning

Holy hell, this poem. I’d read it before in All The Poems, but hearing her doing the voices gave me chills.

She wrote it, she said, after reading a story in the newspaper about a drowned man whose friends thought he was just waving. (I’m thinking of John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” now, and wondering just how many pieces of art have come from the newspaper. In Gimme Danger, Iggy Pop makes fun of Andy Warhol for suggesting to him, “Why don’t you… just sing what it says in the newspaper?”)

“A lot of people pretend, out of bravery, really, that they are very jolly and ordinary sorts of chaps, but really they do not feel at all at home in the world or able to make friends easily,” Smith explained. “Sometimes the brave pretense breaks down…”

It’s impossible after hearing the poem not to look around at the world and wonder who is waving and who is drowning.

Here is a longer video interview in which she recites the poem and also sings:

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