Austin Kleon

Spooky season viewing

October is two days away. One of our favorite things to do in my favorite month is watch old spooky movies every night. We have a very specific kind of spooky movie that we love: black and white flicks from the 1930s and 1940s.

A great starting point is to just make your way through the old Universal Classic Monster movies: I especially like Frankenstein (1931), Island of Lost Souls (1932), and The Black Cat (1934).

You can’t go wrong with director James Whale. He made Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

I also really like the movies of producer Val Lewton, especially Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Probably my all-time favorite halloween movie is Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), which must be seen to be believed.

A lot of the really good stuff is from the “pre-code” era: in between the advent of talkies in 1929 and the “Hays Code” of 1934. A lot of these movies go hard and are still pretty shocking: the original King Kong (1933) is a great example.

Hitchcock works for spooky season: I really love Rebecca (1940) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

For a lighter tone, check out I Married A Witch (1942) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

A great person on Twitter to follow for these kinds of recommendations is @nitratediva.

The past few weeks

Everyone in our house is healthy at the moment, and for that I am grateful, but I can’t remember a month with more cosmic nonsense and petty frustrations. Good grief.

Having to write a Tuesday and Friday newsletter brings some order to my life when everything else is chaos. We had a truly epic “tell me something good” thread and I recently wrote about re-watching The Wizard of Oz and my favorite summer reads.

If you don’t subscribe yet, I hope you’ll do so!

The Four Energies

When reading Jane Friedman’s newsletter, I came across this great bit by writer Bill O’Hanlon, from his book, Becoming A Published Therapist:

In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors. The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed. The first two represent the positive energies; the last two, the “negative.”

The energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you”:

  • “Blissed” energy comes from what you’re on fire for and can’t stop doing.
  • “Blessed” means you’ve been gifted something that you feel compelled to share.
  • “Pissed” means you’re pissed off or angry about something.
  • “Dissed” means you feel “dissatisfied or disrespected.”

O’Hanlon goes on to say many of his early books were “written from a combination of pissed and blissed.”

(I can relate: much of my work comes from being a combination of angry and curious.)

O’Hanlon’s point is that ideas aren’t enough, you need energy to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.

The past 100 days

My lunar calendar

“I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
—Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

100 days ago, I announced I was easing up on blogging and fun daily projects like my blind contour drawings, mini zines, and collage houses, to star work in earnest on a new book.

The first 30 days went pretty well. I spent a lot of time with my index cards and worked on  “The Unschooled Artists” piece that ran in the NYTimes.

50 days in, I had a pretty great book proposal worked up that just needed a table of contents to be ready to pitch.

64 days in, I decided to stuff the whole book proposal in the drawer and postpone it indefinitely. (Oops!)

72 days in, I finished up the #perfect31 project, and remembered how good it was to blog every day.

Then I recorded the audiobook trilogy.

And for the past 4 weeks, I’ve been keeping busy with reading and writing and taking care of a bunch of behind-the-scenes business stuff.

So where am I now? I don’t know! Not sure I even care.

In the past 200 days, I feel like I haven’t learned a single surprising thing about myself or changed my mind about much of anything.

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that it probably isn’t going to teach me anything that I didn’t already know before the pandemic began.

Everything that was true before seems even truer now, and here is what was true before the pandemic:

  1. Summer is a season for doing as little as possible. If I get any more of them, I plan to get through them by swimming and reading and generally practicing as much extreme idleness as I can get away with.
  2. You receive what you’re ready to receive.
  3. I have built systems in my life for producing work, and whenever I abandon those systems in the hopes of “getting serious” about something, the results are far, far less than spectacular.

Anyways, there went those 100 days. I’ll make a note to check in on January 7th and see how these next 100 went…

Unfit or inexcusably stupid

Here are a few frames from the Gene Deitch’s animated version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The original Hans Christian Andersen story is essential reading for understanding our times, but, as I have noted before, you must pay close attention to the ending. I would also point out that in the Nunnally translation, the emperor’s new clothes are invisible to anyone “unfit for his position or inexcusably stupid.” (Show me a fairy tale more on-the-nose!)

More block printing


The boys and I sat around the kitchen table this weekend and made some more block prints.

The four-year-old is still too little to do his own carving, so I had him draw on the block and I carved it for him. (His is the skeleton on the right, the others are by the six-year-old.)

20×200 NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEM PRINTS: ON SALE NOW!

20x200 Austin Kleon

I am very happy to announce that my 20×200 Newspaper Blackout Poem prints are now on sale!

These two poems were hand-picked by Jen Bekman and Sara Distin. They dug deep into the archives to find them. (Read an e-mail from Sara introducing them.)

* * *

“The Figure Skater” (2007) [ Buy now! ]

The Figure Skater 20x200 print

From my artist’s statement:

I made this poem during a vacation in South Carolina from an article about Paula Abdul’s reality show, Hey, Paula. Go figure.

* * *

“How It Works” (2008) [ Buy now! ]

How It Works 20x200 print

From my artist’s statement:

It’s rare that I find poetry in the business section, but this one came from an article about hedge fund investing. Like many of my poems, it’s about my wife.

* * *

This is the first time (except for the book pre-order) I’ve had anything for sale online, so if you’ve ever enjoyed this site or my work, I hope you’ll order one or two.

Can’t afford the $20 right now? Do me a favor and blog or tweet ’em.

Thanks, y’all!

GUEST BLOGGING AT THE BOOK DESIGN REVIEW

The Book Design Review

In addition to staying up til 1AM getting these 20×200 prints going, I’m guest-blogging this week for one of my favorite blogs: Joe Sullivan’s The Book Design Review (@theBDR). I‘ve made two posts so far I made three posts:

All of the posts got me thinking about how to best present books online and make it easy to spread them around the internet. It was really fun: Joe has some really smart readers, so be sure to check the comments.

I’ll update this post with links as I go along. Next up is the design of John Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics and its successful transition to the book collections.

PS. This is how my second post on the Blogger’s Kit began (with doodles, of course):

beginning of a blog postsee it bigger

WINNERS OF THE SEPTEMBER NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEM CONTEST

This month, I decided to announce two co-winners and two runner-ups. The first co-winner is Peter Boet, a civil engineer from Grand Haven, Michigan, for his poem, “Clue.”

peter boet blackout poem winner

Here’s Peter on the making of his poem:

After scanning the article a couple times, the words that stuck out for me were “revolver” and “dining room” because they reminded me of the board game Clue. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard, although I think I did check. I was searching for Mr. Green when I stumbled upon Mrs. White hanging out near the lower left hand corner. Thankfully, most of the article had to do with games and winning so I was able to tie them together.

The second co-winner is Stephanie Cheng, a third-year med student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, for her poem, “The Walrus Makes a Toast.”

Here’s Stephanie on the making of her poem:

I find myself checking the site between patients during slow clinic days. One of my favorites was “Adventures in the Batsuit” (both the original and the retooled). The allusion to Batman makes the poem so rich, providing a whole backstory on which to comment. So when I saw the words “oyster” and “steam(er)” in the newspaper text, I immediately thought of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and the rest of the poem fell into place from there. Because I don’t get to write a lot of non-medical stuff these days and am subsequently full of literary rust, it felt delightfully perverse to use someone else’s words and twist them to tell my own story.”

I find it fascinating that the two best poems in this month’s contest were both references to pop culture, and both poets had a similar approach to making their poems: they found a few words that recalled a strong association, and then they filled a poem in around them. That’s often the method that yields my best poems, too.

The runner-ups were Brandon Gillin of South Royalton, Vermont, and Charles Toeppe of Monroe, Michigan. (Three winners from Michigan this month! Crazy!)

Congratulations, Peter, Stephanie, Brandon, and Charles! Y’all will get your free books next September.

And a big round of applause to everyone else who entered the contest. It’s a ton of fun reading all your submissions.

If you haven’t entered yet, have no fear: there are two more contests coming up: one starting this Wednesday, October 1st, and one in November.

Become a fan on Facebook!

Subscribe to the NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS RSS Feed

IPOD VS. CELL PHONE

Clyde Haberman from the NYTimes interviewed a bunch of MacArthur Genius Fellows about cell phones, Ipods, and other gadgetry disconnecting us from physical reality, and this is what Jonathan Lethem had to say:

“Nonconnectivity becomes a commodity, something to cherish….You won’t hear different, particularly from novelists. You need so much ruminative time to build these elaborate alternate realities. Every novelist is running away from the telephone. Has been for 100 years.”

Not me. If anything, I run towards them. I see a crazy woman walking down the sidewalk wielding a cell phone? That’s the one I follow. She’s bound to say something nutty. Just the sort of thing that might spark a story.

My rule: save the Ipod for the car. On foot, follow the cell phones.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

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