Austin Kleon

Keep calm and make ugly art

In his latest newsletter, L.M. Sacasas writes about the “emotional roulette” of checking social media. “You never quite know what news you’ll encounter and how it will mess with you for the rest of the day.”

Worse is “doomscrolling,” the endless surfing we do “when we give ourselves over to the flood of information and allow it to wash over us.”

Whatever else one may say about doomscrolling, it seems useful to think of it as structurally induced acedia, the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of the infinite scroll (or the pulldown refresh, if you prefer). Acedia is the medieval term for the vice of listlessness, apathy, and a general incapacity to do what one ought to do; ennui is sometimes thought of as a modern variant. As we scroll, we’re flooded with information and, about the vast majority of it, we can do nothing … except to keep scrolling and posting reaction gifs. So we do, and we get sucked into a paralyzing loop that generates a sense of helplessness and despair.

In his essay about Iago in the The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, W.H. Auden makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?”

I’m usually good at avoiding doomscrolling and the Pavlovian pull and release of refreshing Twitter (ever notice how there’s very rarely anything refreshing about refreshing?), but the election has destroyed most of my willpower. I’ve been busying my hands with The Cube and soothing my brain with the calm of collage, especially “ugly” ones like this one:

Some kind souls on Twitter said, “How do you consider this to be ugly?” The product might not end up ugly, but the process is my attempt to make ugly or “bad” art, which I think is often much more fun and more helpful than trying to make “good” art. (“Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph.”)

I’ve also been doing a lot of doodling on notepads. (In addition to all my notebooks, I keep one of these little legal pads on my desk for random notes.) Drawing  is something to do and it is part of a cure and when you draw the world becomes a little bit more beautiful. (If you need some guidance, try a blind contour drawing or my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s four drawing exercises to help with a hard day.)

Here I’ve combined collage and drawing: I ripped a picture of Abe Lincoln in half, pasted one half in my notebook, and as I was copying the second half, got the idea to make his hair shaggy… and then add a barber? Who knows where these images come from…

An alternate obit

My aunt Becky died this week at the age of 72.

I have read a lot of obituaries, but hers is the first I have written.

While I was writing it, I thought a lot about constraint and form and perspective. How we get to know a person and how impossible it can be to communicate the sum of who they were, with all the multitudes they contained.

People see you through their own lenses. You’re as many different people as the number of people who know you, and for any life, there are many possible obituaries.

Thank goodness for structure. I felt very lucky, piecing together the information the family sent me, that there is a general form to obituaries, with a few variations.

I was also thinking about an alternate obituary — the obituary I would write if I didn’t have all this good information.

What do I remember about my aunt Becky?

Primarily, I remember her as a Reader. She loved to read and she dedicated her life to teaching her students how to read.

She had the no-nonsense-ness of a teacher. She carried the wisdom — and the authority! — of someone who’d done the reading.

Nobody does the reading anymore. Becky did.

I remember her giving excellent gifts, maybe a book she’d picked up during a trip to Colonial Williamsburg or Monticello. (Jefferson: “I cannot live without books.”) I definitely remember her gifting me books about the Beatles when I was obsessed with them.

And the Santa cookies. Aunt Becky baked the absolute greatest Santa cookies. Whatever address we had, she’d mail them to us every December. Scroll up and look at them again. Each wrapped individually in a little plastic cookie sleeve. Made by a woman who knew what she was doing.

What gifts she gave me! Books and cookies.

What more could this nephew want from his aunt?

When I share, I learn

I had a long, lovely chat with doctor and YouTuber Ali Abdaal this week. He read my book Show Your Work! in 2016 and said it inspired him to start sharing online. (He now has over a million subscribers and makes more money as a YouTuber than a doctor!)

One of the topics from the book we discussed is how much you learn when you have the courage to share what you have learned, regardless of your level of expertise.

It was certainly true of our conversation, as I learned something really interesting from Ali: he says he gets way better results with his YouTube videos when he titles them, “How I Remember Everything I Read,” instead of “How to Remember Everything You Read.” There’s something about using the first-person pronoun that opens things up, lets him speak from his own experience, and lets viewers feel like they can take what they need and do their own thing.

photo by @hiemilykiana

Here is how Ali summarized the first lesson from Show Your Work!:

Stop worrying about becoming an expert before you start. Teaching that comes from a fellow student is often more impactful than teaching from an expert. C.S.Lewis once said “fellow schoolboys can teach fellow students just as effectively as the teacher”. It’s the difference between saying ‘I’m an expert and I’m going to teach you something’, and saying ‘I’m a fellow student and I’m going to share what I’ve learnt and maybe you can take something from this’.

In his recent piece, “How Nick Quah Became the Podcast Whisperer,” my friend Rob Walker wrote about how Quah went from outsider to industry expert by starting a newsletter on his lunch break:

By his own account, Quah’s actual qualifications for taking on the role of public thinker on podcasting were nil. He’d never made a podcast, had no background in radio or audio media of any kind. In fact, he was not long out of college and a few months into his first media job, an entry-level gig at Business Insider that he describes as closer to market research than journalism. He was basically some random guy with a new off-hours hobby…. Within a couple years of starting his newsletter, this random guy was able to quit his day job and become, for lack of a better word, a full-time expert…

Rob writes, “More than ever, expertise seems to have become a DIY affair; strategic and determined obsession can replace specific credentials or a tangible track record.”

Again, it’s not about being credentialed or being an expert, it’s about seeing a space open up, starting to do work that needs doing, sharing your ideas, and sticking around long enough so people show up and you can interact with them in a meaningful way and build something lasting.

Part of this is also forgetting about job titles and focusing on the work that should be done. Here’s a brief clip from a longer conversation I had with Nelda Sue Yaw about an idea from my book Keep Going:

The crucial thing, I think, is that if you do get the job title, if you do become something like an “expert” or “professional” in your field, you must retain an amateur’s spirit and remain a student, so that you can benefit from the best thing about having your work out in world: the “free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

Art takes you where it wants you to go

I’ve been making more of tape quilts patchworks in the morning to clear my mind and keep my hands busy.

“I have to have something to with my hands to keep me satisfied,” says 93-year-old quilt artist Laverne Brackens.

Brackens says her designs often come to her in dreams. She then wakes up in the middle of the night and arranges her vision to be sewn the next morning. “You’d be surprised at what you can do with the material,” she explains. “The quilt takes you where it wants you to go, not where you want to go.”

I find that’s true of all of my work, too. Anni Albers said you have to let the materials lead:

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done. The dictation of the materials.

It’s as true for people who work with words as thread. Here’s an excerpt from Irish poet Ciaran Carson’s obituary:

Mr. Carson — who was also a translator, working in several languages — viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration.

“The kind of examination question which used to be put, ‘What did the poet have in mind when he said …’ is an assumption that the poet clothes his thought in verse,” he told The Spectator in 2012, “whereas the poet often doesn’t know what he has in mind: He follows the language, and sees where it might lead him, which is usually a very different place from what he thought at the onset.

“If you know exactly what you are going to say in a poem,” he continued, “that poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no interest or fun, in saying what you already know.”

When I came across artist Bisa Butler’s quilts, which are based off of photographs, I wondered if there was still room for this kind of exploration. “I like working from black-and-white photos,” she says, “because it gives me the freedom to put in the colors I feel belong there.”

Lovely.

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