The comfort of a pencil

Friday, December 11, 2020

“I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones.”
—Patricia Lockwood

I’m at the buy fancy pencils based purely on the aesthetics of the box phase of quarantine.

(Above: two boxes of Mitsu-Bishis and a box of Tombows. Not shown: a box of Bear Claws I bought for my kids. Oh, how I wish I could visit C.W. Pencil Enterprise in NYC right now!)

I didn’t really care much for pencils until a few years ago when my friend Clive Thompson (author of Coders and Smarter Than You Think) turned me onto Blackwing Palaminos. I love those pencils and try to always have one on me, particularly for marginalia and marking up books.

The pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. (Did you know that pencil marks in a notebook will survive a washing machine?)

Here’s Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.

A pencil hero of mine is Edward Carey, who has drawn a portrait every day of quarantine with one of his beloved Tombow Bs.

Edward says:

There is something so comforting about a blank piece of paper and the lines the pencil can make upon it. The pencil is such a humble object but such a versatile one: It can make very faint marks or the blackest black. It is also very forgiving: If you make a mistake, you can rub it out. A pencil can be anything, and drawing requires no great setup—just a piece of paper and a sharpener, and then it can be kings or trolls, philosophers or grackles.

When I saw a show of Edward’s at the Austin Public Library, he displayed his Tombow stubs in an ashtray. (He used to be a smoker.) This amused me, because I often “smoke” a cigarette pencil:

I’ve become such a nerd I bought pencil extenders, which seem ridiculous, but make every pencil 100% better by extending their life and giving you a big fat grip.

And for sharpening, I use my friend Carl, who brightens any table top:

Of course, some pencils you never want to sharpen, like this pencil my friend Katie gave me in college:

You never know where you’ll find a good pencil! The Blanton Museum doesn’t allow pens in the galleries, so they have these plain ol’ #2 golf pencils, which have an almost waxy lead that’s pretty nice to mark with (I keep a pencil in the elastic band of my pocket notebook):

And, indeed, as Edward notes, “a pencil can be anything.” Here are some pots made out of pencils by artist Nick Zammeti:

Here’s a video of how he makes them:

Graphite, it turns out, is a great conductor:

TIL that the graphite in pencils is conductive ??? pic.twitter.com/HqLMRElHcd

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) August 4, 2017

Pencils can tell jokes with unintended messages:

There are all kinds of pencils! Here’s John Waters with his mustache pencil, which he carries with him at all times (photo by Hayley Campbell):

There’s a lot more to be said for pencils (and their sharpening), for sure, but I’ll end this post with John Baldessari’s “The Pencil Story”:

Related reading: “HBs are for architects”

Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable)

Thursday, December 10, 2020

One of my favorite parables about creative work comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Like any great parable, it’s the specificity of image that makes it work for me: You can picture the dusty pottery studio, the scales, weighing all the crummy pots and failed experiments.

It makes me think of the actor Seth Rogen, who joined a pottery studio with his wife last year and has been showing his work by posting pictures of his creations on Instagram:

So it was puzzling to me a few months ago when I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits and he retold the parable, but using a photography class:

ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

“What in the hell?” I thought. Why would you move from something like pottery, which is more concrete, to photography, which is more abstract? (What makes a photo good is more subjective than what makes a pot good — you can still hang a blurry photo in a gallery, but you can’t drink out of a cracked mug.)

Then I noticed an asterisk at the end of Clear’s telling and checked the endnotes. Turns out he had emailed with Ted Orland in 2016, and learned the true origin of the parable:

“Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).”

(Ted Orland, by the way, was an assistant to Ansel Adams.)

Regardless of the form of the parable, the moral has certainly been true with my own work, especially writing and blogging. The frequency of my work — showing up at regular intervals, without worrying about results — has actually lead to better results.

Quantity leads to quality.

Nouns and verbs

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

“When you’re writing a song, nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”
—Chuck Berry

The first exercise in Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song is called a “Word Ladder.” (Not Lewis Carroll’s word game.) It goes like this:

Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
Connect the words that don’t usually go together.

Here’s how it worked when I tried it:

Nothing that great, but that’s not the point. The point is to loosen up and play with language to get your brain going. Tweedy writes:

“I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities…. I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language.”

“Nouns and verbs” is also the really basic advice I give to people who are trying out blackout poetry for the first time.

For example, here’s one I started by just underlining nouns and verbs that popped out at me:

And that led to this:

And seeing that, I realized with a little Photoshop cheat (is it cheating if there ain’t no rules?) I could “fix” it to this:

Not my best work, but, again, not the point. Plus, it only took me 10-15 minutes. (By the way, exercise #2 in Tweedy’s book is called “Stealing Words From A Book.” Stealing has, of course, always worked for me!) Give it a try next time you’re stuck.

Nouns and verbs, y’all. They’ll take you right through.

Related reading: “A bag of words” & “We are verbs, not nouns”

The Vampire Test

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Here’s an animated excerpt from my audiobook about a test that will tell you who and what you should let in and out of your life. (Also on Instagram.)

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1336388678122344450

It may be easier or harder to practice during a pandemic, depending on your situation. (I often joke in talks, “Children don’t count. Their job is to suck you dry.”)

I got the idea for the test from a story in John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:

[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.

I also cribbed a little from this Lynda Barry interview:

My friend Frank Chimero pointed out this is also #3 on Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work, “SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.”

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

What’s really funny is that the book came out in 2014, way before the What We Do In The Shadows show, which features one of my all-time favorite characters, Colin Robinson, a self-proclaimed “energy vampire”:

You gotta look out for these people. Once you start noticing them… they’re everywhere!

Morning pages (and variations)

Monday, December 7, 2020

“Of all the self-help tools I’ve tested through the years,” Oliver Burkeman (author of The Antidote) writes in his latest issue of The Imperfectionist, “one has proved more enduring than the rest: Morning Pages.”

Julia Cameron writes about morning pages in The Artist’s Way and her shorter spin-off, The Miracle of Morning Pages. She says:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4pyiB-kq0

Schoolhouse Rock (and De La Soul) taught us: 3 is a Magic Number.

Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
The faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number

Is this some Hippie Shit? Yes. But, as Oliver notes, it is Hippie Shit that seems to work!

I do three pages minimum in my diary every morning. It’s not exactly freewriting, more old-fashioned diary, mixed with the occasional comics and diagrams.

My method is cribbed from The Sedaris Method: write things down all day in a pocket notebook, then wake up the next morning, fill out my logbook, and then write longhand about yesterday.

When I don’t know what to write about I answer “The Best Thing” prompt or draw until I feel like writing. (This morning I wrote about banana bread and palm trees.)

I often do some combination of mind-mapping or what Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction calls “clustering”: starting in the middle of a page, writing a word, putting a box or circle around it, then writing another word, etc., until I have a tree or web. (Maps are magic, too.)

I do this very slowly, and let one thing sort of lead into the other. It’s like emptying out the junk in your brain. The reason I sometimes prefer it to straight prose on notebook paper is that you can more easily see the connections between all the weird crap on your mind. (There’s a blank “mind map” in The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)

I recently found out that the director Harmony Korine does a deranged version of this kind of non-linear map-writing to come up with ideas for his films. Watch the video above (if you dare) to see it in action.

David Byrne, “A History of Mark-Making, ” 2002

In David Byrne’s book of tree drawings, Arboretum, he writes that diagrams like these are “an eclectic blend” of:

…faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.

Emphasis mine. (See: “The value of nonsense.”)

“There’s a general attitude here that’s well worth cultivating,” Oliver writes, “a healthy scepticism toward the part of your brain that’s so enthusiastic about controlling how things unfold. You just do the pages, and something else does the rest.”

Here, I think, is something else valuable to be uncovered from the morning pages: just as you let go and let the pages unfold, in some small way, you’re also training yourself to let your day unfold. To, hopefully, be as improvisational and playful in filling your day as you were about filling your notebook.