A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)
Homework every night for the rest of your life
Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)
“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.
Sometimes I collage my kids’ homework in my diary pic.twitter.com/4PdS14Smgb
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 19, 2021
How to talk to someone with a missing imagination
“Imagination is when you close your eyes and think of a door.”
—Dave Hickey
“This is about lack of imagination.”
—Ali Khan, formerly of the C.D.C.
Imagination is simply the ability to make images in your head.
If you’re blessed with an imagination, it’s part of your job to bring better images to the world.
Sunday collage
I may make this a thing.
Shoal Creek book walk
Today I discovered that you can use a stretch of the Shoal Creek Greenbelt trail to walk between Bookpeople and the Central Library. That means if I added less than a mile to one of my epic Greenbelt walks to the Central Library I could almost walk from my house to Bookpeople without using a city street…
Further notes on scenius
“Scenius” is a term coined by musician and producer Brian Eno to counter “The Lone Genius Myth,” or the idea that innovation in art and culture comes from a few Great Chosen Ones. When Eno draws what the traditional model of genius looks like, he uses the example of the symphony orchestra, with God or the Muse at the very top of the triangle, and on descending levels, the composer, the conductor, the musicians, and, finally, the audience listening:
He then draws other organizations in our society that traditionally have hierarchical models:
When he gets to “scenius,” or what he calls the communal form of genius, he draws this:
Here’s what I wrote about it in my book, Show Your Work!:
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.
To put it even more simply: Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.
Our world is an ecosystem in which our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.
This was the message of the great feminist and pacifist Ursula Franklin, who said:
The dream of a peaceful society to me is still the dream of a potluck supper. The society in which all can contribute, and all can find friendship. Those who bring things, bring things that they do well. [We must] create conditions under which a potluck is possible.
When you think about your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your office, your city, your country, your world… are you operating as an ecosystem or an egosystem?
Which model we choose to operate under will determine the quality of our lives, and, arguably, our survival.
Show Your Work! My Creative Mornings Talk
It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was “The Future,” so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)
If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.
* * *
It’s weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they’re someone who’s accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.
But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical — a lot of the time when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.
When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?
Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them — the past has happened, therefore it’s in front of them, where they can see it.
The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s behind them, where they can’t see it.
This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.
The future is hard to talk about because it hasn’t happened yet — it’s behind us, where we can’t see it.
Steal Across America Tour Diary #5: Milwaukee and Lansing
I’m on book tour promoting Steal Like An Artist. See all upcoming dates or follow me on Twitter?
Milwaukee: Everybody in Milwaukee told me that “I didn’t expect Milwaukee to be so cool” is a standard response from visitors. I was no exception! I gave three talks in one day there—breakfast for Spreenker (check out my friend Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes above), lunch for Translator, and after-dinner for the awesome Boswell Books (dig these sketchnotes from Tim Reynolds). Toured the Art Museum (the museum store was sold out of Steal!), walked the lakefront up to Alterra Coffee, and ate at two great restaurants: Belgian at Benelux in the Third Ward district and the best french onion soup I’ve ever had at Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro. Unfortunately, I didn’t drink much beer. Will remedy that this summer when we pass through again on our way to Madison.
Lansing: I only got one night in Lansing, but the crowd at Schuler Books was so great, and I bonded with my cabbie to the airport over our shared love of Elmore Leonard!
You can see more from my tour diary or follow along as it happens on Twitter: @austinkleon
Steal Across America Tour Diary #4: Portland, Phoenix, and San Francisco
I’m on book tour promoting Steal Like An Artist. See all upcoming dates or follow me on Twitter?
Portland: Love, love, loved the gloomy weather. Felt like the kind of weather you could actually get some work done in. Ate a ton of Vietnamese food, a Portland Cream from Voodoo Donuts, an incredible soft-shell sandwich at Clyde Common, drank a bunch of Ninkasi IPA, had my first morning TV taping, gave not one but two talks at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, saw the great John Frame show at the Portland Museum of Art, added a signed copy of Steal to the great library at the Heathman Hotel, shopped Powell’s and the excellent Reading Frenzy, and hung out with a bunch of my friends.
Phoenix: It rained when I was in Phoenix and I had a ton of work to do, so my time there was pretty quiet, but I had some great coal-fire pizza at Pizzeria Bianco, drew Steal in chalk for KPNX, and had a wonderful audience at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe.
San Francisco: I spent four nights in SF and it was my first time in the city, so it probably deserves its own post. Gave a talk at Google, drove around the city with my agent and splendid host, Mr. Ted Weinstein, did the farmer’s market at the Ferry building, walked the Filbert Steps to Coit Tower, window shopped on Valencia Street, drew and gave a talk at Flax Art, ate super burritos and hung out with my friends Lisa, Wendy, Mike, Erika, and Andre, hit the ballpark with the Logsdons, hit City Lights Books, ate a few slices at Golden Boy, had dinner with one of my heroes, the collage artist Winston Smith (that’s a whole story in itself), strolled Chinatown, drank Blue Bottle coffee, drove to Twin Peaks and Golden Gate park, and watched the Pacific.
My Pixar visit could fill up its own post, too. @DrWave gave Ted and me a tour of the campus and the amazing exhibit of Brave pre-production art, then I gave my talk, signed and sold out of books, met another one of my heroes, Steve Purcell, and spent a small fortune in the gift shop.
You can see more from my tour diary or follow along as it happens on Twitter: @austinkleon
ADVENTURES IN THE BATSUIT (RETOOLED)
I edited this down from an old one…
SELDOM-HEARD MUSIC
Here’s a cool little slideshow of eight graders doing newspaper blackout poems…
DAVID HOCKNEY’S SECRET KNOWLEDGE: COLLAGE AND THE RETURN TO AWKWARDNESS
I came to David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, like many other beautiful books, by way of Edward Tufte. It’s a fantastic book with the basic thesis that from the early 1400’s on, painters and artists were employing the aid of optics (mirrors, glasses, lenses) to achieve a new stunning realism. If you want a great introduction/summary of the findings in the book, Lawrence Weschler’s article, “Through the Looking-Glass: Further adventures in opticality with David Hockney,” is available for free in full-text with color photos from The Believer online.
While I enjoy the mind-blowing content of his argument, what I enjoy most is Hockney’s way of looking. He came about his thesis by comparing color photocopies of 400 years of paintings and drawings side-by-side in a gigantic graphic collage timeline:
[Hockney] cleared the long two-story high wall of his hillside studio (the studio retains the general dimensions of the one-time tennis court over which it was built), installed a photocopier in the middle of the space, and, drawing on his brimming private horde of art books and monographs, effectively proceeded to photocopy the entire history of European art, shingling the images one atop the next–1300 to one side, 1750 to the far other, Northern Europe on top, Southern Europe below–a vast, teeming pageant of evolving imagery (and in some ways Hockney’s most ambitious photocollage yet).
It was from this gigantic collage that he was able to pinpoint a period at which painting seemed to change — somewhere around 1430, painting obtained an “optical” look.
Hockney argued that that look dominated European painting for centuries–just how far back he wasn’t yet sure–and that it only lost its hold on Western artists with the invention of the chemical process, in 1839, after which painters, now despairing of matching the chemical photograph for optical accuracy, finally fell away: awkwardness returned to Western painting for the first time as generation after generation of artists –impressionists, expressionists, cubists and so forth–endeavored to convey all the nuances of lived reality (time, emotion, multiple vantages, etc.) that a mere photograph couldn’t capture.
The wall, or art history from 1400-1900 becomes a three-part story: you have pre-optics (awkwardness), optics (the disappearance of awkwardness), and post-optics (the return of awkwardness).
“Awkwardness,” Hockney was saying, wheeling around, “the disappearance of awkwardness, the invention of chemical photography, and the return of awkwardness. The preoptical,” he wheeled once more, “the age of the optical, and then the post-optical, which is to say the modern. And look here.” He led me over to the corner where the two ends of the procession abutted. On the one wall he’d posited, as endpoint, Van Gogh’s portrait of Trabuc (1889); next to it, on the other, was a Byzantine mosaic icon of Christ from about 1150.
These two images together just blow my mind. It just makes so much sense. Here we are in a world where everything can be captured in perfect detail from a camera, and it takes the human hand to render it in some kind of form that actually seems closer to our experience. We don’t see life from one fixed-focus lens. We see it from two eyeballs, two ears, etc. And this is why, I think, we still love the human awkwardness of cartoons, or abstracted drawings: it can produce an experience that a photograph can’t.
Anyways, there’s a ton of other great stuff in Hockney’s book and Weschler’s article. Highly recommended.
WHOEVER GOD TOSSED YOU TO
“After all the things that happened, described and undescribed, if I told you I still loved the father would you understand it? How there was a wire of love running inside of me that I just could not find to pull? It was the side effect of being someone’s child, anyone’s child, whoever God tossed you to.”
—Lynda Barry’s CRUDDY, Chapter 24
“Birdseed” is turning into a tiny epic. As long as something makes Meg laugh, then I know I’m on the right track…
This morning she had to drive to Oberlin to consult a co-op about greening a house, so I went with her. In the bookstore, I read the first pages of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For the New Millenium, his last lectures he wrote before he died, and Barry Hannah’s second novel, Ray. Both are authors I’ve set aside for studying. But where to begin?
I decided not to buy the bargains, and went into the coffee shop next door to read Cruddy. Then I spilt coffee all over. It might’ve been the caffeine, might’ve been the book.
On the way out of town, Meg and I talked about how we want to have a little house in a small college town, a highway trip away to a city with some culture.
One day. Happy weekend, everybody.