Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for Miscellany

Perspective

Travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief.

None of us know what will happen (weekly newsletter)

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

  1. A little pep talk from Laurie Anderson.
  2. I enjoyed Jan Swafford’s new introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit.
  3. I revisited Jason Fried’s post, “Give it five minutes,” after being reminded of it in my advance copy of Alan Jacobs’ How To Think.
  4. The Atlantic reprinted Annie Dillard’s classic essay, “Total Eclipse,” also found in her recent collection, The Abundance. Reading it actually made me not want to experience a total eclipse at this particular point in my life. (I already feel darkness rushing towards me. See: Ross Andersen’s terrific piece, “The Eclipse as Dark Omen.”)
  5. Sarah Manguso, author of a recent favorite of mine, 300 Arguments, recommends singing in a choir, as does Brian Eno, who says it’s the key to a long life. Here’s Eno, Michael Stipe, and Stephen Colbert singing “Lean on Me.” (Bonus: Douglas Wolk on what makes Brian Eno’s early albums special.)
  6. Poem: “To ask the hard question is simple… / But the answer / Is hard and hard to remember.”
  7. Worth watching: I Called Him Morgan (streaming on Netflix), a documentary about jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, his wife, and his untimely death. Here’s video of his trumpet solos and playing with Art Blakey.
  8. Ear candy: An online trove of 25,000 digitized 75RPM records.
  9. Austin’s new central library (photos here) is finally opening in October and I am pumped.
  10. How my son is helping me learn how to learn again.

Thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, forward it to a friend, buy a book, or tweet me some love.

If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.

xoxo,

Austin

You can be woke without waking up to the news

A friend of mine said he didn’t know how long he could wake up to such horrible news every day. I suggested to him that he shouldn’t wake up to the news at all, and neither should anyone else.

There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour (or two or three or four…) of our day.

If you’re using news or social media to wake up, try this instead: When you wake up, don’t pick up your phone. Head to the bliss station, play with your kids, write in your notebook, draw, pray, meditate, take a walk, eat breakfast, listen to Mozart, get showered, read a book, or just be silent for a bit. Even if it’s only for half an hour, give yourself some time in the morning to not be completely horrified by the news.

It’s not sticking your head in the sand, it’s retaining some of your inner balance and sanity, so you can be strong and fight.

You can be woke without waking up to the news.

(This post turned into a section in my book, Keep Going.)

What is not machine-like

“REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.
—Jacqueline Svaren, Written Letters

Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but we’ve been there and done that, and besides, he was delight-full of crap, like all great artists, because when I stood in front of those big silk-screened flowers last week they sure didn’t feel like they were made by machines. You could sense the human behind them…

“These are not yet automata.”
—Studs Terkel, Working

I remember a few years ago how triumphant I felt when the Twitter spam account @horse_ebooks turned out to be a human pretending to be a machine. Some were disappointed, but the feed seemed too weird and beautiful to me to be completely random. I was happy to see a human behind it.

“The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
—Wendell Berry

I like my machines just fine, but I’m not interested in turning into one. I’d like to remain a person. I truly believe one of the most subversive things you can do today is spend as much of your time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like in you.

All nerves

“I really don’t think the artist is an intellectual. I believe that the artist is a set of nerves.”
—Wayne White

I was paging through a catalog of the photomontage work of Hannah Höch when I came across “Angst,” a very simple collage she made in 1970 using a photograph from a 1960 Life magazine article, “Harriet’s Celebrated Show of Nerves”:

It’s not my absolute favorite collage of Höch’s, but the source material fascinated me: the article is about a college janitor who donated her body for dissection after eavesdropping on an anatomy professor complaining in one of his lectures about the availability of corpses to study. (More of the story here.)

On the second page of the article was an image that totally spooked me, because I’d seen it before — I’d found it online back in February, when my son Owen was going through a “human body” phase. I printed it out and gave it to him to copy. I then asked him to write “ALL NERVES” above it:

The drawing currently hangs in my studio. When I look at it, I think about our times, how bombarded with electrical signals we are, how close some of us are to a nervous breakdown, how we all seem to be in the business of getting on each other’s nerves —“the nerve of these creeps!”

Then, sometimes the drawing says to me: Your nerves are all you’ve got. Don’t lose your nerve. Steady your nerves. Touch a nerve.

I think of Frank O’Hara, who said of writing poetry, “You just go on your nerve.”

And Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “If your Nerve, deny you— / Go above your Nerve.”

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.