Austin Kleon

The fog horns

This morning in the studio I’m blasting this wonderful field recording of surf and fog horns in San Francisco in 1987. (One of my favorite memories is sleeping in the Presidio and listening to the bridge horn blow all night, like some giant monster snoring out in the bay.)

As I was listening to the horns blow over and over, I realized they could be a track of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II. I got my keyboard out and learned the notes of each horn:

The recording notes that there are four distinctive horns, but I only hear three notes: a low Bb, a higher Db, and an E in the middle, which raises up a half step at the end to an F.

Tonight I think I’ll lie in bed and read Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Fog Horn,” in which one of the characters makes up this story:

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”

Something to do

I was feeling angry and despondent yesterday, and I drew these two cactus plants on our back porch and immediately felt a little bit better. (Drawing is part of a cure.)

In this video, John Green talks about drawing and productivity and thinking about time and why he’s attempting to draw 170,000 circles. My friend @craghead, one of my favorite drawers, had a great response:

I love that he talks about drawing as more than representing – as a process, as discovery, as a battery recharger…. My wife says to me – “Go draw something” and then I draw a leaf or a synth or something and I fell better. Even drawing Trump helps. We are so lucky to have drawing.

There’s an essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations called “Something To Do,” in which she thinks about why she writes. She comes around to this very simple truth: “It’s something to do.”

Of the pandemic and lockdown, Smith writes, “The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

On a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend, however, Smith says she discovered that writing was more than a hobby — Can you imagine? Being Zadie Smith and still thinking of writing as a hobby? — it’s something she needs to do to stay alive.

I, too, am grateful to have something to do, whether it’s making a zine or drawing a cactus or writing this blog. Like Smith, I am not by my nature an activist, and so, as she puts it: “I just do the thing I can do.” The work in front of me.

Churchill’s free verse


Winston Churchill’s speech in response to Germany’s invasion of Britain

Today I learned that Winston Churchill had his speeches typed up in what looks like free verse (or “Psalm form,” as his office called it) so that he could plan and rehearse the rhythm and the pauses. (More here.)

NPR:

Churchill wrote every word of his many speeches — he said he spent an hour working on every minute of a speech he made. At the Morgan Library are several drafts of a single speech from February 1941, when England stood alone against the Nazi onslaught and Churchill appealed to President Roosevelt for aid. The first draft looks like a normal typescript; the final draft, says Kiely, “looks like a draft of a poem.”

Here’s a draft of Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech, compared with the final “Psalm form”:

Another thing I learned about Churchill: he took up painting at the age of 40 to battle his depression and wrote a book about it called, Painting as a Pastime:

Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so – before you die.

God bless the English and their penchant for hobbies!

Books with unusual but brilliant structures

The other day I was noodling on this notecard, thinking about how I would go about structuring a book based on a kind of non-linear system in which all the pieces needed to work together, and I asked Twitter and Instagram, “What book do you love that has an unusual but brilliant structure?”

I got hundreds of responses, mostly fiction. (Pamela Colloff noticed this right away and asked for non-fiction recommendations, starting another great thread.) Many weren’t really what I was looking for — lots of people recommended the Choose Your Own Adventure books or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which are all brilliant in their own ways, but I was mostly interested in non-fiction that reads like a linear book, but has a structure that is weird but brilliantly maps to the subject matter.

John McPhee’s diagrams

There’s John McPhee, of course, the master, who learned to diagram structure from his English teacher, and shares many of his “inscrutable blueprints” in his book on writing, Draft. No. 4.

A new-to-me book I picked up immediately was Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

One of my very favorite writers, Sam Anderson (author of Boom Town), gave his list, which reminded me I still need to read Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (I recently read two other works of Zuihitsu, Essays in Idleness and Hojoki), Anne Carson (Nox and others), and Annie Dillard. (My youngest loved The Monster at the End of This Book.)

Recent non-fiction mentioned that caught my eye: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, and Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House.

Fiction mentioned that I’ve been meaning to read for years: Tristram Shandy and The Rings of Saturn.

Old favorites mentioned: Richard McGuire’s Here, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, and the fragmented collage-like books of Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts) and Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness.)

One intriguing recommendation: Emerson’s essays, like “Circles,” which the recommender claimed could be read out of order, by paragraphs or sentences. (I’ve been meaning to read more Emerson after my year of Thoreau.)

You can poke through more of the recommendations, here, here, and here.

Happy reading!

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