Austin Kleon

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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:

Make bad art, too

Sol Lewitt’s letter to Eva Hesse

“A lot of bad art is going to come out of this nightmare — including my own — and that’s okay.”
—Dean Haspiel

In Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art, he wrote:

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

A fine message! But I’d also make a plug for something else: when the going gets rough, make bad art, too.

Don’t listen to people who remind you that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague— we’re living in King Lear!

When 9/11 and Katrina hit and she lost a bunch of her close friends, Lynda Barry got really depressed, and all she could do is doodle:

I found myself compelled, like this weird, shameful compulsion to draw cute animals. That was all I could stand to draw. You know, just cry and draw cute animals…dancing dogs with crowns on, you know? And, like, really friendly ducks. But I found this monkey, this meditating monkey, and I found that once – when I drew that monkey, it’s not that it fixed the problem. But it did shift it a little bit, or provide me some kind of relief. And that’s when I started to think, maybe that’s what images do, because I believe in all my – with all my heart they have an absolute biological function…

And here’s Sol Lewitt in his famous letter to Eva Hesse (collected in Letters of Note), which I quoted in Keep Going:

You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO… Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.

“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something. 

(And when that doesn’t work, sit on the damned couch and watch some stupid television until you pass out.)

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