Austin Kleon

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Suckcess


“Success is for creeps.” —Bobcat Goldthwait

We all know what “success” is, or at least we have our own definitions of it. (For me, it’s closing the gap between what your days look like and what you want your days to look like.)

So what’s “suckcess”? Suckcess is success on somebody else’s terms, or undeserved success, when something that sucks becomes successful, or when success starts to suck.

It’s what Jean Cocteau was referring to when he said, “There is a kind of success worse than failure.”

It’s what Pink Floyd sings about in “Wish You Were Here”:

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts
Hot ashes for trees
Hot air for a cool breeze
Cold comfort for change
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Or The White Stripes, in “Little Room”:

Well you’re in your little room
And you’re working on something good
But if it’s really good
You’re gonna need a bigger room
And when you’re in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sitting in your little room

Don’t scorn any success, or you’ll turn into Ignatious J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces: “I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”

Just be sure you’re not chasing suckcess, and if you get it, get rid of it as soon as you can.

How to raise a surrealist


A few years ago, I copied this Magritte painting* on my son Owen’s chalkboard, and captioned it, “How To Raise A Surrealist.”

I have discovered that little jokes like this often turn out to be forecasts, or tiny prophesies.

A case in point: Our son Jules has begun captioning the things that appear on our morning walks. A squirrel is “squirrel,” and an apple is “apple,” but the jack-o-lanterns on porches are “October,” and fake skeletons hanging from trees are “x-rays.”

What I know now is that you don’t need to raise a surrealist — children are born surrealists, and we talk them out of it.

* Used on the cover of John Berger’s brilliant book, Ways of Seeing

Crop rotation

From Sam Anderson’s great profile of writer John McPhee:


I grew up surrounded by farm fields — soy beans or corn, depending on the year. When the beans were in, you could still see the horizon, and everything felt wide open, but when the corn was high, the horizon was gone, and you were walled in…

Afterlives

There are two afterlives from David Eagleman’s wonderful book, Sum: 40 Tales From The Afterlives, that I think of often:

The first is the one in the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.”  So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

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