Austin Kleon

Where do their images go?

“No ghost can inhabit a stickman. No ghost wants to.”
—Lynda Barry, Making Comics

I don’t really believe in ghosts but I feel like they can be a useful fiction. Ideas, images… it’s much easier to work sometimes if you think of them as things outside you trying to get in. Things that just show up on your doorstep. Things that will go knock on somebody else’s door if you don’t answer.

I wonder, sometimes, when artists die, what happens to all the images and ideas they once received.

Are they all flying around more frantically, now, searching for a receiver?

My brush has felt receptive lately. Like there are a lot of ghosts out there ready to slime the page with ink, if I just pick up the brush and let them through…

Away messages

“Goodbye,” from Bill Knott’s I Am Flying into Myself

I was walking in the cemetery the other day and as I read the tombstones, I thought of how we used to put up “away messages” in AOL’s Instant Messenger. (It was basically a proto-Twitter, come to think of it.) You’d walk away from your computer, the one that weighed fifty pounds and stayed on your desk, and everyone could see how funny and clever you were while you were gone.

Is not a tombstone an away message?

Clive James died.

Whenever an old poet — an old poet — dies, I can’t get too upset.

This is what they’ve been training for! I think. It’s go time!

The great poets and artists spend so much time checking in on death.

Is not every great poem an away message?

Here is a stanza from James’ “Season To Season”:

The trick, I’m learning, is to stay in doubt,
Season to season, of what time might bring,
And patiently await how things turn out.
Eventually time tells you everything.
If it takes time to do so, no surprise
In that. You fold your arms, you scan the skies,
And tell yourself that life has made you wise…

And here’s one from “Japanese Maple”:

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same…

When Mary Beard interviewed James last year, she asked how the Japanese Maple was doing.

“It died!” James said.

Oh well. The poem lives.

The poets go, but they leave us so many away messages.

Be thankful.

“Death,” from Bill Knott’s I Am Flying into Myself

A good editor is hard to find


Here I am with Bruce Tracy at the Guggenheim earlier this year on the Keep Going tour. Bruce edited the last four of my books and it is a sad day for me because today is his last day at Workman Publishing. (He’s off to chill in the woods and freelance.)

From the very first time we spoke on the phone, before we were even officially working together, Bruce has been a great partner in crime. It was on that very phone call (August 2011 — I’m looking at the notes right now!) that he said presentation slides are usually landscape, and books are usually portrait… so how about a square book? Sold!

When I visited him in New York, I brought him a dummy made from James Kochalka’s The Cute Manifesto — the only book I had on my shelf that had the exact trim size we were thinking about. “Can I keep this?” he asked. At the cover meeting, the late Peter Workman supposedly went through a few mocked up covers and pointed to my dummy. “That one.”

Anyways, we worked together for over eight years. A few more good stories like that, but mostly the hard, often unsexy work of patient emails and phone calls and line edits and sales meetings. It was a good run and I’m very grateful.

What’s the value of a great editor? Here’s how Michael Crichton put it, as quoted by Robert Gottlieb in The Paris Review:

In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.

Thank you, Bruce, for standing on the dock and helping me see the ship.

Onwards!

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey


I’d forgotten how much of Beck Hansen’s music I had absorbed until I read Amanda Petrusich’s terrific profile of the musician in The New Yorker. This is my stash of his mid-90s CDs and hand-copied lyrics in my middle school notebook. (My favorite was and remains Odelay.)

This part of his story could’ve been straight out of Susan Orlean’s The Library Book:

Beck stopped attending school when it grew too dangerous….. He started taking the bus downtown each day, to the Central Library. There was an entire room of musical scores, so he taught himself how to read music…. In 1986, when Beck was fifteen, the Central Library caught fire. “Probably the saddest day of my childhood was watching the downtown library burn down,” he said. “That was the moment I thought, I have to leave L.A.—I have nothing here. It was the only place that I could go. I didn’t even have money to go to a coffee shop. I was supposed to be in school.”

Interesting to compare Beck’s childhood to a much younger musician who grew up in Los Angeles outside of school: At home with Finneas.

Bleeding control kit


Here is a photo I took at the Richmond Airport sometime during the Keep Going tour. It’s not exactly a secret sentence, but one way I thought of the structure of the book was: the first half is about stopping the bleeding, and the second half is about beginning to heal…

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