Austin Kleon

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Shell games

Shed Your Skin Like the Golden Cicada
When you are in danger of being defeated, and your only chance is to escape and regroup, then create an illusion.
—The 36 Strategies

Summer afternoons in Texas with a 5 and 3-year-old have me at my wits’ end. Yesterday, their mom was off on errands, so I suggested the grossest activity I could think of: Let’s go around and collect the cicada shells stuck all over our porch, fence, and trees. We wound up collecting over 50 of them, and then we were trying to decide what on earth to do with them.

Twitter alerted me to a Japanese high school student who made a cicada monster:

A few summers ago, we put them on the kids’ chalkboard and tried to make comics with them:

Then we put them in one of the boys’ cars and made a timelapse video out of them (which I lost, sadly):

After all this, I was reminded of Ladislav Starevich, who made stop-motion animations using dead bugs, like The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912):

Boredom has its creative benefits.

The season of lies

Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:

1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”

The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.

2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.

Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.

I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:

  1. All photographs are posed.
  2. The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
  3. Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
  4. False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
  5. There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
  6. Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
  7. Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
  8. The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.

If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.

If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.

(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)

Taking a break


I’ve been blogging every day since October 1st of last year. (About 41 weeks. If pregnant, I’d be overdue.) When I began, I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d ever write another book again, but I wanted to, and I had this feeling that maybe, if I posted here every day, I’d get work up my chops enough that I could do it.

And I did it! A few days ago, I finished approving the copyedits for my next book. I’m rewarding myself with a few weeks off. Time to clear my head and hang out with my family. (And give a few talks.)

No blogging. No tweeting. (I will be sending out the newsletter, so if you want to hear from me, subscribe.)

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you in August.

The Scream (tracing an obsession)

My kids have obsessions. Deep, drawn-out obsessions. And sometimes, as with my 5-year-old and Kraftwerk, we get so far into the obsession that I can’t even remember when or how the obsession began.

Our 3-year-old’s latest obsession is drawing Edvard Munch’s The Scream. WTF?

It all began when he was inspecting Welcome to Mamoko and came across this picture of an art thief. (Oh, the irony of life.) he zoomed in and pointed it out to my wife. “Painting!”

So, my wife printed out a photo of the painting from the internet, and he immediately began copying it. (Copying is how we learn.) The above picture was drawn on June 15th.

Here’s a drawing from July 7th — four weeks later! He was still drawing the scream.

The next day, we took him to the Blanton Museum, thinking maybe we’d see some weird expressionist painting that would be a good substitute. No such luck.

But then we were walking past the window of the gift shop and he stops and shouts, “Mama!” What does he point to? A frickin’ finger puppet of The Scream. In a huge pile of other finger puppets!

So the obsession continues. Who knows how long it will last?

Yesterday, I was lettering the cover for my next book, over and over again. I tried to channel Jules drawing The Scream.

I kept thinking about how much of my work is just being obsessed. Giving myself over to things that interest me, not just for a few days or a few weeks, but for months and for years.

It’s thrilling to watch my kids have the time and space for their obsessions. To see where they go. They keep teaching me how to learn.

The best thing (cheerful retrospection)

When I write in my diary, I often try to start with Paul Chowder’s advice in the novel The Anthologist, paraphrased this way by author Nicholson Baker, and quoted in Steal Like An Artist:

If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it–you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you–that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad. I mean, you never know…

Sometimes the Best Thing is not even something I did, but something I watched or listened to:

Sometimes the Best Thing is a stretch:

And sometimes I can’t even come up with it:

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