Tuesday’s newsletter was about making indexes on the fore-edge of your books and notebooks. Some truly nerdery, which was fun to write about. Read the letter here.
June mixtape
Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. (Loudon Wainwright III’s Grown Man.) I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.
For this one, I was going for summer pool vibes. I started with the Junior Murvin track that I think I’ve played every day of this month.
All these songs are streaming online, so you can listen on Spotify or Youtube:
SIDE A
– junior murvin, “roots train”
– the marvelettes, “the hunter gets captured by the game”
– james brown, “super bad”
– donovan, “epistle to dippy”
– the everly brothers, “gone, gone, gone”
– junior murvin, “give me your love”
– prince, “the ballad of dorothy parker”
– deerhoof, “running thoughts”
SIDE B
– the knife, “heartbeats”
– wailers, “duppy conqueror”
– new order, “thieves like us”
– bacao rhythm & steel band, “PIMP”
– lefty frizzell, “always late”
– mulatu astatke, “tezetaye antchi lidj”
Listen to more monthly mixes.
Portrait of the artist at forty
A drawing of me reading by my 8-year-old son Jules is at the top of my most recent newsletter.
Messages from the compost heap
Every time I pass the local community garden I think of Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap.”
I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the creative process.
10 good books I read this spring
Here are 10 books that helped me through the spring, listed in the order I read them:
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Ian MacDonald
Have you heard of the Beatles? They were pretty good. This is probably the best book about the band I’ve ever read. I love how saucy MacDonald gets: of “A Day in the Life,” arguably the high point of their achievement, he writes, “More nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced.” Of Paul’s granny music: “If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER.” A highlight for me is when MacDonald points out that how many of the big British bands of the sixties were made up of kids who went to art school. (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, etc.) You could blow up the chronology stuffed in the back and make another book out of it.
The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
edited by Huw Lewis-Jones
A downright gorgeous book. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with maps and even started my own collection of imaginary maps way back in 2008. If I’d have owned this book when I was doing my undergrad thesis, who knows, maybe I’d be a novelist? The Writer’s Map would pair well with Peter Turchi’s book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.
The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli
Beautifully written — which really means it was beautifully translated from the Italian by husband/wife team Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. I found out while writing this post that Segre died unexpectedly this year. Rovelli said, “They not only captured perfectly my meaning but they could completely render the feeling and sound of my Italian — and improve it, because their English language is remarkably beautiful and rich.” (I also read the couple’s translation of Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.)
The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Another book about time, specifically, an exploration of Judaism as a religion obsessed with the architecture of time. As the rabbi explains, each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to. I picked this up after reading Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What, and the two books together influenced me to rethink how I go about my weekends.
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson
The great reading project of my spring was reading Richardson’s trilogy of biographies: Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (so good which was so good Annie Dillard wrote him a fan letter and they wound up getting married), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (which I swear reads in spots like he was showing off for his new partner), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (I also read his short biography of his mentor, the biographer Walter Jackson Bate.) Emerson is my favorite of the three and set me on a path of rethinking my indexing and filing systems. If you’re new to Richardson’s work, I might start with First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process.
The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live
Sarah Susanka with Kira Obolensky
This is a book I found while picking through my wife’s shelf of architecture books. It was partly inspired by two of my all-time favorite books — How Buildings Learn and A Pattern Language — and it has a very simple but strong premise: when it comes to houses, the quality of the space is more important than the quantity of the square footage. (Our family lives in a small 1949 bungalow, so the idea obviously appeals.) Before you buy a new house or remodel, give it a read.
Conversations of Goethe
Johann Peter Eckermann
This was a favorite book of Emerson and some of the other transcendentalists. Eckermann was 31 when he met the 74-year-old Goethe, and this book is a record of their conversations over nine years. Like many old books, this book is a great reminder that human beings have always been hilarious — I love how Eckermann will ask a question and Goethe goes into these long monologues that read almost stand-up routines. “The truth must be repeated over and over,” Goethe said. “My merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into a confused world.”
Weather
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is one of my favorite books about art and motherhood, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to read her followup. (Both could go on my list of good books you could finish in an afternoon.) The book was written before the pandemic, but it contains a brilliant sentence that sums it up: “And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.” (Try to get the hardcover with a jacket by John Gall.)
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
Several people recommended this to me after my post about indexing and file systems. Not sure if I’ll go for a full Zettelkasten or not, but it’s one of the better books I’ve read about writing. (I really wish I’d read it in college.) Like a book it’s influenced by, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it’s deeper and more Zen than you might expect. Ahrens’ insight is simple, but huge: if you arrange your writing and reading life correctly, you never really have to stare at a blank page or start from scratch.
Wendy, Master of Art
Walter Scott
I feel like you can’t go wrong with a good sendup of art school. Anybody who went is like, Oh god, this is too real, and anybody who didn’t can laugh and feel smug. The only comic book I read this spring, which makes me want to go out and catch up with everything I’ve missed.
* * *
As a bonus, here are some pictures and sound I enjoyed…
TV: I loved Hacks and The Knick.
Music: the new Pharaoh Sanders record was wonderful, Vikingur Olaffson made me fall in love with “Bruyères” on the piano, and while I’ve loved Violator since college when my drawing teacher played it on repeat, Depeche Mode 101 turned me into a huge fan of the band.
Documentaries: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and The Donut King.
Buddy comedies: Midnight Run and Plan B.
Swashbucklers: Captain Blood and The Duellists.
Movies that were as great as people said they were: Sing Street, The Mitchells vs.The Machines, and Sound of Metal.
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See more of my favorite books and sign up for my newsletter for weekly recommendations.
Learn to be alone
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal said that almost 400 years ago. (Today is his birthday.)
There’s a wonderful chapter in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation called “Learn To Be Alone,” on the importance of solitude.
Merton writes that solitude is not “something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul.”
Solitude, for Merton, is “a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”
He describes “a mechanism” for finding solitude that resembles Joseph Campbell’s “bliss station”:
There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men.
“Learn to be alone” was also Andrei Tarkovsky’s reply when he was asked, “What would you like to say to young people?”
I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
“Loneliness,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets, “is solitude with a problem.”
As I wrote in Keep Going, visiting this place is not about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about finding the quiet strength every day to center yourself so that you can do your work.
(The zine in this post was made from a page of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The text quoted is from Clark’s writing about Montaigne. The art is Albrecht Durër’s “Apocalypse.”)
No input, no output
“I’m a professional dilettante,” Jim Jarmusch says. “It’s my job is to gather and absorb things that interest me.”
Jarmusch talks a lot about “Strummer’s Law,” four simple words he learned from his friend Joe Strummer (who he directed in Mystery Train): “No input, no output.”
Meaning, we’re going to hear a band, we’re going to go to a museum, or we’re going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We’re going to get some input, because if we don’t, then we have nothing. It’s a circle. It’s a respiratory thing.
And:
When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, “If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don’t just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people’s shoes.
Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like his quote in Steal Like An Artist:
See also: Brian Eno on “import and export,” “Input and output,” and “Problems of input are problems of output”
Beautiful things grow out of shit
It’s Juneteenth, our government is willfully tearing children from parents, and I’m thinking of Henry David Thoreau, as I often have since reading Laura Walls’ splendid biography.
Since last October, I’ve taken up the habit of reading a page a day from his journals. It shocked me, at first, how much I enjoyed Thoreau’s company, as I had pegged him as a fussy nature-lover (I consider myself an easygoing indoorsman). He is, in many ways, just that, but so much more.
I find him completely relatable: He’s overeducated, underemployed, loves plants, is upset about politics, and lives with his parents. (Pretty sure I could write a whole sitcom reimagining him as a millennial in contemporary America.)
On my birthday, I turned to the June 16, 1854 entry, and found the raw material for what would become “Slavery in Massachussetts,” a speech he’d give a few weeks later on July 4, standing under a “black-draped, upside down American flag.” Towards the end of the speech, in an echo of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson (“We do not breath well. There is infamy in the air…[it] robs the landscape of beauty…”), he summarizes his despair:
Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.
But then, he turns back towards nature, to contemplate the water-lily. Here’s Laura Walls:
In an extraordinary final turn, he willed himself toward hope: “But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity.” Pure to the eye, sweet to the scent, yet rooted in “the slime and muck of earth,” the lily became his emblem for “the purity and courage” that may yet—that must yet—be born of “the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity” In offering his audience this American lotus flower, the sacred Buddhist emblem of enlightenment he had found lighting his path of Concord, Thoreau was offering them the core of his own being and belief, and the story of his own redemption.
It reminds me of something Brian Eno says: “Beautiful things grow out of shit.”
Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work.
If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
This is an unpromising beginning. What can I start? What seeds can I plant in this muck?
MAKING LITHOGRAPH PRINTS
Making lithographs of a Newspaper Blackout Poem from Austin Kleon on Vimeo.
More footage from our printmaking extravaganza last weekend in San Marcos. This time, it’s Clif Riley making lithograph prints of “Visual Thinking.”
VIZTHINK AUSTIN 6-18-2008
Here’s a little map I did during the second-ever Vizthink meetup in Austin last night. Local graphic facilitators Marilyn Martin and Sunni Brown moderated, and they did a great job. Met some good folks, learned a few things…it was a good time. If you’re an Austinite interested in visual thinking, keep your eyes and ears open for the next meeting at the Vizthink site.
Oh, and by the way: my post “For Successful Powerpoint Presentations, Look To Cartoonists” was chosen as the winner to the Vizthink prompt, “PowerPoint: A powerful tool poorly used or a poor tool overused?“
They said,
He not only had an interesting take on the topic but his post actually spun off a good amount of discussion on his own blog and beyond.
So thank YOU, my brilliant readers. Your comments make everything posted here much smarter. Cheers!
SAUL STEINBERG’S CINCINNATI MURAL
The Enquirer has a long article about the restoration of Saul Steinberg’s 75-foot-long “Mural of Cincinnati” owned by the Cincinnati Art Museum. The piece was commissioned in 1948 for a restaurant at the top of a downtown hotel. When the hotel sold in 1965, it was donated to the museum, but it hasn’t been seen since 1982. The mural will be displayed as part of the fabulous Illuminations exhibit that’s coming on July 21st.
I’d love to go see it, but I don’t know when we’ll get down to Cincinnati before the big Austin move. Here’s a decent (at least it’s large) black and white detail:
If you live anywhere near Cincinnati, I really urge you to see this show.
NO, I WOULDN’T GO A-LONE INTO AMERICA
We went to see The National at the Beachland Ballroom last night. They sounded great…
…but boy do I get sick of standing around at rock shows. Especially on a Monday night. You pay your $15, you show up at the show time, and then you have to sit through 2 crappy opening acts before the band you paid to see goes on, by which time you’re either a) too tired or b) too drunk to care what’s going on. Can’t we do away with opening acts or keep them down to one? Can’t we show some kind of movie or have some kind of reading/standup/entertainment while all these lame sound guys and roadies test the drum kits and set out bottled water? For now, the rule is: show up two hours past the start time, and you’ll be okay.
Anyways, check out the National. Good dudes from Cincinnati, who studied design at UC (you can tell–their album covers are beautiful). Their new album is streaming on their Myspace page.
DO WHAT YOU ARE
A friend of a friend, Jeff Johannigman, of People Type Consulting, recommended this little gem of a book.
Do What You Are uses the Myers-Briggs system to give career advice based on your personality type. My dad and stepmom have taught Myers-Briggs for years, and it really is a helpful system to start thinking about “what makes you tick, and what ticks you off” (my stepmom’s words). I’m usually skeptical of this kind of stuff, but I have to say, the listings for my specific personality type in Do What You Are were spot-on. (Information Graphics Designer was right at the top of the list.)
You can learn more about Myers-Briggs at the foundation’s website. If you dig Jung, you might dig Myers-Briggs. They also have an online test to determine your type.
If you’re looking for a new career or just looking for a new job, Do What You Are — combined with the old standard, What Color Is Your Parachute? — is a great starting point.
EXCALIBUR
Feast your eyes on the best birthday present ever: a 6×8 Wacom Graphire drawing tablet. Meg got it to replace my dinky 4×5 that I’ve been using for ages. This baby sits nice and heavy-duty on my lap, it’s got programmable buttons…oh, am I excited to get back to work on the book!
- New Shalom Auslander and Etgar Keret columns.
- Silverblatt discussing Beckett on Bookworm: reading Beckett’s prose opens you up to the comedy in the plays.
- Dan Bejar (Destroyer) talks. Meghan refuses to look at pictures of him because she wants to keep her image of him singing in a Transylvanian castle.