Austin Kleon

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The Rolodex Project

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Last year I bought an old Rolodex with the original cards in it for $2 at Goodwill. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, then I came up with the idea of listing my favorite artists and telling my kids about them. I leave it on my desk and whenever I have some extra time, I pull it out and add a few entries.

Here are some of the cards:

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PS. I found out you can still buy new Rolodexes and new cards for them!

Virtuoso

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I’ve been enjoying learning Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” (“Scenes of Childhood”) on piano. Here’s the music for the first piece:

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Planting iris

Photo Mar 23, 2 34 32 PM

Here’s the complete section of Leonard Woolf’s Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939:

I will end… with a little scene that took place in the last months of peace. They were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

Thanks to Olivia Laing, author of the wonderful book The Lonely City, for the tip on Twitter.

Get out now

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a page from Show Your Work!

“GET OUT NOW. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people…. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run…. Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore…. Abandon, even momentarily, the sleek modern technology that consumes so much time and money now…. Go outside and walk a bit, long enough to forget programming, long enough to take in and record new surroundings…. Flex the mind, a little at first, then a lot. Savor something special. Enjoy the best-kept secret around—the ordinary, everyday landscape that rewards any explorer, that touches any explorer with magic…all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.”
—John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic

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