Austin Kleon

Newspaper Blackout is ten years old

This weird little book turned 10 years old this month. Kind of hard to believe. I made most of the poems on the bus to work and on my lunch break at my office job. Years ago I thought for sure it would probably be remaindered and go out-of-print. And yet, it’s still around after a decade. (Perhaps even more amazingly, I get a modest check for it once in a while…)

A few years ago I wrote about what I’ve learned from a decade of publishing. Not much to add to that, except:

1) Make sure when you publish a book you think you can live with it for a while.

2) Try to write books you want to read, yes, but also, if you can, ones only you can write.

3)  Have a little fun with it, if you can.

There really is nothing like that first book…

To wonder rather than know

Mary Ruefle, in a wonderful conversation with David Naimon:

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know.

I suppose the example that comes to mind is: it used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

I really, really don’t like it when people look things up on their iPhones…. I mean, sometimes, of course, I’m no idiot. The encyclopedic nature of the information that’s available is fantastic, but I would still rather wonder than know.

I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know.

We tend to, as human beings, our impulse is, once we know, once we have the answer, we move on. So we’re constantly moving from one thing to the other. I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.

I have an encyclopedia at home. It never occurred to me there was ever anything wrong with it until my friend pointed out it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1910 and it might be a little outdated. I still look things up in it! […]

My oldest son used to ask me questions and when I said I didn’t know the answer, he’d say, “Look it up on the Goggle!” It takes discipline, now, not to look things up immediately, but to sit and wonder…

Then again, when you do look things up, you find more things to wonder about.

Free advertising

A bit of fun with Keep Going and yesterday’s New York Times. (Several people told me they thought this was real at first glance.)

Do what you know how to do

“It seems stupid I would put out an album,” says Fiona Apple, of her terrific new record, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “But this is what I know how to do.”

I love that: “This is what I know how to do.” 

There are people flailing around, shouting, “Oh God, what do we do?!?”

There are people shouting, “I know exactly what we should do!”

And then there are people busy at work, whispering, “This is what I know how to do.”

I want to be in that last group.

Survive the savage sea

cover of the zine

“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

fish poppet

The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian word quarantina, meaning “forty days.” Why did Venetians keep the boats at bay for 40 days? Who knows. Maybe it’s the Bible. Before Noah’s Flood, it rains for 40 days and nights. Moses goes up on Mount Sinah for 40 days. Jesus spends 40 days in the desert.

We’re coming up on 40 days in this house. I keep thinking of Dougal Robertson and his castaway memoir, Survive the Savage Sea. He and his family got picked up on their 38th day at sea. By the time they were rescued, they had hit a kind of groove: they had meat and water stored, and they’d seemed to have moved beyond survival mode.

Our 38th day was yesterday. We’ve hit a kind of groove, too. (“We no longer thought of rescue as one of the main objectives of our existence; we were no longer subject to the daily disappointment of a lonely vigil, to the idea that help might be at hand or was necessary.”)

your spine needs no special magic  

Not that we don’t have our doubts. (“‘Of course, we’ll make it!’ The answer came from my heart but my head was telling me a different story.”)

breathing becomes bewildering

“If any single civilized factor in a castaway’s character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous,” Robertson writes. “It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.”

take lessons from a beginner

I read that book last January. My family and I had moved ourselves somewhere we didn’t belong, and we were waiting for the time when we’d journey back to where we belonged. I thought I was reading it to have some help surviving that moment in time.

in this world its the first time

As it turns out, the book speaks even more to me now.

back cover

Note: This zine was made from a single page of an old National Geographic book about fish, after watching this video about how to make a 14-page zine. Here’s a video of me making it:

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