AUSTIN KLEON is a writer who draws.

Climbing your own family tree

October 6, 2018

One of the most important points of Steal Like An Artist is that you don’t get to pick your actual genealogy, but you can, and must, establish your own artistic genealogy.

Seneca said it better than I did a couple thousand years ago:

We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted, and you will inherit not only their name but their property too. Nor will this property need to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more it is shared out, the greater it will become.

“I’m one of your children,” Philip Glass once said to John Cage, “whether you like it or not.” Glass writes a lot about lineage in Words Without Music:

I sometimes hear about work described in terms of ‘originality’ or ‘breakthrough,’ but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”

(Glass talks a lot more about lineage at the beginning of this interview.)

There are many ways to discover and construct your own lineage. The easiest is what Alan Jacobs calls “swimming upstream.” You pick some artist or writer you love, and you find out who influenced them. From The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:

We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers… If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits…

“I am very influenced by the people who influenced my influences,” says the musician M. Ward, “and I am influenced even more by the people who influenced them.”

Ad Reinhardt How To Look at Modern Art in America — Ad Reinhardt, “How To Look at Modern Art in America,” collected in *How to Look*

Sometimes with an older artist you can swim both upstream and downstream.

When my 5-year-old got obsessed with Kraftwerk, I didn’t quite realize just how perfect of a wormhole they would be into 20th-21st century music. When reading their biographies, he learned that “Autobahn” is a pun on The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and the 1-2-3-4 countdown in “Showroom Dummies” comes from The Ramones, so he wanted to hear their songs. Later, he found out that “Planet Rock” takes the beat from “Numbers” and the synth line from “Trans Europe Express,” so he’s been playing that track over and over. He’d never heard rap music before, so now I’m (carefully) picking out some early hip-hop for him.

At some point, I’m guessing he’ll leap to another tree (eventually you find that they all have the same roots), but for now, it’s fun to watch him explore the branches of this one…

Take your kid to work

October 5, 2018

Kenny Shopsin at The Store with his twin daughters, Tamara and Melinda (from Tamara’s instagram)

Last night I was picking through my stack and started composer Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music. I wound up reading over 50 pages before I passed out. (That’s a lot: I’m a slow reader, especially at 10PM.)

Glass writes about working in his father’s record store and how formative it was for him. His father began as a car mechanic without any formal education, then moved to fixing car radios, then to selling records with a little bench for repairing radios in the back. He wanted to understand why some records sold and why some didn’t, so he’d take home modern classical music and try to figure out what was wrong with it. Instead of diagnosing it, he fell in love with much of it, and started foisting it on his customers. Glass says his dad would come home late, around 9 o’clock, and then start listening to records from 10 to midnight. Glass would sneak downstairs without his father knowing and listen along.

One time Glass ordered four copies of a particularly obscure classical album for the shop. His father got mad at him, but Philip convinced the old man to keep them on the shelves and to let him know when the last one sold. Several years later, his father called and said he’d just sold the last one. “I can sell anything,” his father said, “if I have enough time.”

In an obituary of professional hoaxer Alan Abel, Margalit Fox notes that Abel’s father kept a general store, which is where Abel said he learned the art of hucksterism: “He’d put ‘Limit — Two to a Customer’ in front of the things that wouldn’t sell,” Abel said, “and they’d be gone in a minute.”

In Tamara Shopsin’s memoirs, Mumbai New York Scranton and Arbitrary Stupid Goal, she writes a lot about her experiences growing up with her brothers and sisters in their parents’ grocery store and restaurant. (They now run it.) Her work is filled with the unconventional practice and wisdom of her father. (See my post, “Something to look forward to.”)

My son Owen drawing in my studio — My son Owen drawing in the studio

I try to let my kids spend a lot of time in my studio, so I’m attracted to these kinds of stories. Some of my fondest childhood memories are going to visit my parents in their offices. My parents had a lot of night meetings — my dad was a 4-H agent and my mom was a guidance counselor and school administrator — so I spent a lot of time in abandoned offices, poking around on typewriters and playing with copy machines and raiding office supply closets.

In How Children Learn, John Holt writes about how important it is to let our children into our everyday worlds and our work:

If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.

He laments — and he died 33 years ago — how many of us don’t actually do work that means anything to children (“What do people do all day?”):

[H]ow much children must have learned from watching people do real work, in the days when a child could see people doing real work. It is not so easy to manage this now. So much of the so-called work done in our society is not work at all, certainly not as a child could understand it… It is in every way useful for children to see adults doing real work and, wherever possible, to be able to help them.

I’m thankful to do work that my sons can not only understand, but can emulate.

Every day is “take your kid to work” day around here. Sometimes that’s a burden, sometimes it’s bliss, but it’s always full of meaning.

Finding your way with maps

October 4, 2018

Illustration from a vintage Hammond Atlas

I love maps. I love looking at maps and I love thinking about maps and I love collecting maps.

When I was studying at Cambridge, I was writing essays for my tutor about Dickens and Dostoevsky, and they were just awful. I think my tutor thought I was a moron. (Or just an American student. Same thing.) Then one day I came in with a rough hand-drawn map of the London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. He said my scribbled map was the best work I’d done.

I knew then, I think, that my talent was going to be for using pictures and words together, and maps would serve as useful inspiration. A decade ago, I published a blog post collecting a bunch of fictional maps, and I’m thinking of them again, thanks to a beautiful new book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands.

David Lynch’s map of Twin Peaks, from Nigel Holmes’ *Pictorial Maps*

A few bedtimes ago, both the 5-year-old and I were just lying in his bed looking at maps and talking about him. A rare moment of bliss. (His book was entitled, simply, Maps.)

A while back I read an article about how to you have to get children to fall in love with the world before you ask them to save it. (Gary Snyder: “The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.”)

Part of the author’s research was looking at maps children of different ages make of their worlds. He describes the cartography of the different age groups:

From ages four to seven, children’s homes fill the center of their maps, and much of their play is within sight or earshot of the home. Children often describe the worms, chipmunks, and pigeons that live in their yards or on their blocks, and they feel protective of these creatures.

From eight to eleven, children’s geographical ranges expand rapidly. Their maps push off the edge of the page, and they often need to attach extra pieces of paper to map the new terrain they are investigating. Children’s homes become small, inconsequential, and often move to the periphery of the map. The central focus in their maps is the “explorable landscape.”

cFrom 12 to 15, the maps continue to expand in scope and become more abstract, but the favored places often move out of the woods and into town. Social gathering places such as the mall, the downtown luncheonette, and the town park take on new significance.

As Michael Chabon once put it, “Childhood is a branch of cartography.”

Jean Michel-Basquiat’s directions to a collector’s house

Here’s Rebecca Solnit talking about why she loves paper maps (author of, among other books, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas):

Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you. You are yourself a map.

Many of my favorite artists use maps in their work. Saul Steinberg is famous for his view of New Yorker provincialism, but he drew tons of other maps, including the one above, which was never actually published in his lifetime. Beautiful.

“Maps are arguments,” says Denis Wood. Maps tell stories. (They can also lie.)

Years ago, I found this online migration map that shows you how people move in and out of different counties.

Three maps that tell three stories.

The top map is Cleveland, where I used to live. Everybody’s leaving. It looks like an explosion.

The middle map is Austin, where I live now. Everybody’s moving here. It looks like a black hole.

The bottom map is Pickaway County, Ohio, where I grew up. Hardly anyone leaves. Hardly anyone moves in. It looks like a puddle.

A “beat map” of Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” by Owen Silverwood

I’m interested in how maps can move beyond geography towards mapping other things in the world. Here’s one of my favorite maps of all-time, from a 2005 Harper’s:

I love looking at those diagrams and thinking about the stories behind them. (For example, where is the single dots, depicting the virgins?)

Just this week I became obsessed with the plot maps on the back of new editions of the Choose Your Own Adventure series:

Around the same time I got interested in maps, I discovered “mind mapping,” and started making my own mind maps of the books I was reading:

my map of Edward Tufte’s *Beautiful Evidence*

When pictures and words are laid out in the same space — broken out of the linearity of normal type — you can see new relationships between them and come up with new ideas. I find this kind of drawing with pictures and words to often be way more powerful than simply writing longhand.

Map from Victor Papanek’s *Design for the Real World*

Years ago, I read Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, and it had a big impact on me. (I later got to interview him about his work.) Turchi suggests that writers are cartographers, in a sense: they help people figure out where they are in the world.

I continue to be taken with this idea. I think of my books as way-finding devices: they show you how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

When people show you who they are, believe them

October 3, 2018

Here’s Maya Angelou and Oprah, in their pajamas, in 1997, talking about what Oprah calls her most important life lesson: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”

I was reminded of the line when Hanif Abdurraqib (author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us) tweeted about Kayne saying outrageous things:

people are saying what they mean to say, and they are doing it with intentions. whether those intentions are to provoke attention or outrage or whatever else…. writers, inventors, creators, politicians. people who know what they’re saying and why they’re saying it. The great lie of people speaking without direct and clear intentions is one (of the many) to stop falling for…. when someone says some wild shit, I’m going to assume they know exactly what they’re trying to articulate & why. It is foolish for me to assume otherwise. Whether or not someone “should” or “shouldn’t” be speaking on something is beyond the point…. it’s hard to see people keep arriving at places of frustration or heartbreak or disappointment because they chased after the romanticized idea of a person despite that person repeatedly telling and showing people that they are not that romanticized idea.

I’m also now reminded of this Paul Noth cartoon I clipped out of the New Yorker to explain 2016 if anyone is around in the future to ask about it:

The right book at the right time

October 2, 2018

I’ve been re-reading Moby-Dick again. In some ways, I like thinking about the writing of Moby-Dick as much as I like reading it.

Right now I’m most interested in Melville as a reader. Moby-Dick began its life as a more straightforward whaling adventure, but at some point, driven by his epic reading habit, Melville got really ambitious, and expanded it into the monster it is now. Although it would prove financially disastrous, Melville felt pulled beyond writing what he knew would be popular with his contemporaries. (“What I most feel moved to write, that is banned, —it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”) A lot of this feeling was exacerbated by the quality of the books he was reading. (Let that be a lesson to you: read the Big Dogs, and you might be doomed by your lit’ry ambitions!)

Here’s how David Herd puts it in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition:

Coming to literature relatively late in life, Melville did so not with the reluctance of an unwilling recipient of some institutionally imposed reading-list, but with the wide-eyed eagerness of the autodidact, hungry for the resources of the world’s great books… Melville never made any mystery of his sources, passing them on (not showing them off) in the ‘Extracts’ with which Moby-Dick begins: the Bible, Montaigne, Shakespeare…. [T]he more he read, the more Melville wanted to emulate what he read… he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works. And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby-Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.

In Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick narrows it down just a bit, and points to two giant reading events that changed the course of Melville’s writing. First, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and read his stories. Second, he read Shakespeare for the first time:

Hawthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”

Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.

(You can see some of these notes on the wonderful website Melville’s Marginalia.)

William Giraldi sums it up in “The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia”:

Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.

sam anderson marginalia — Sam Anderson’s marginalia in Annie Dillard’s *Living Like Weasels*

While reading about Melville’s reading habits, I thought of Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, and perhaps our greatest contemporary celebrator of marginalia. Just yesterday, Sam wrote a beautiful little tweet thread about coming across the right book at the right time:

I was at my favorite place (@Powells) and found this beautifully tattered 1st edition of [Annie Dillard’s] *Teaching a Stone to Talk*. Realized I’ve read pieces of it but never the whole thing. So I spent $14.50, cracked it open on the plane home, & got IMMEDIATELY EXTREMELY ECSTATIC.

He goes on to sample some of his favorite excerpts, and then gets to the magic of books catalysts for writing:

maybe the best thing: reading this made me want to write. Some of my best writing—including the 1st stuff I ever published—started as marginalia in my favorite books: Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Zora NH, DFW & on & on. Them doing their voice flows into you doing your voice.

In conclusion, books are the best technology. This cost less than $15, put me in a totally new & better headspace w/in 15 seconds, & I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Also, it started me writing an essay of my own. And that was just the first 5 pages.

Melville’s notes in the back of Shakespeare vs. Anderson’s notes in the back of Dillard

This, again, is the magic of reading with a pencil: it occupies a space somewhere between reading and writing, a crucial step towards turning reading into writing. And reading the right book at the right time with pencil in hand can lead to your best work.

Hang it on the refrigerator

October 1, 2018

I found this quote from a 2002 Jeff Tweedy interview hanging in my old room at my mom’s house earlier this summer. It’s from Newsweek, which means I must’ve read it in print. (My mom had a subscription.) Here’s the whole quote:

To say I’ve never been inhibited by expectations would be a lie. It’s more daunting to contend with yourself. It’s like saying I don’t even need to write songs because the greatest songwriter in the world has already done this—Bob Dylan. But he’s dealing with himself, too. The internal stuff is the stuff that kills you. I want to write the greatest song in the world sometimes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wanting to do that, but I think you’re better off when you realize you have no control over it. You just gotta keep making s–t up, scribbling—like sitting down and drawing with my kids. It reminds me to do that in my songs. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. I think it looks great. Let’s hang it on the refrigerator.

I have always felt like this blog is my refrigerator. I make something, or I clip out something I like, and I put it on the refrigerator. The next day, I go and find something else to put on the fridge.

One year ago today I started daily blogging again. That was 350 posts ago. (I took a break for two weeks in July.) When I begin, I had no idea what to do next. Now, I’m back to the same point — once again, I have no idea what to do next — but I have a book coming out next year to show for it. I know that book wouldn’t exist in the shape its in if I hadn’t gone back to what works for me: Putting things on the refrigerator.

The irony of this metaphor is that we now have a big stainless steel refrigerator in our kitchen. The front isn’t magnetic; therefore, it’s totally worthless for hanging art. Maybe that’s a good thing to keep in mind: Make sure your refrigerator doesn’t get too fancy…

Posada/Grosz

September 30, 2018

At the Mexic-Arte Museum this afternoon I came across this 1905 broadsheet with José Guadalupe Posada woodcuts. The skull in the bowtie immediately reminded me of the creepy capitalists in George Grosz’s work. (See the detail below from his 1921 drawing, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master.)

September diary

September 29, 2018

Filed under: diaries

Exile

September 28, 2018

When Jane Jacobs’ sons were in danger of being drafted into Vietnam, the Jacobs family emigrated to Canada and eventually became Canadian citizens. An interviewer at Metropolis later asked if this was disruptive. Jacobs answered:

Well, it would have been disruptive if we had thought of ourselves as exiles. People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really. We thought of ourselves as immigrants. And it was an adventure and we were all together.

“We wanted to be a part of where we were,” she said. “Being an exile is having it fixed in your mind that you’ve just come to a place as a stop-gap measure.”

Exile worked for me until I had children. I could be in the city, but also apart from it. I could detach whenever I wanted to. I could hide out. Make my own world.

Even with babies, exile still worked. I was home with them. No need to send them anywhere. I could swaddle them up and keep them close. Pull the shades down and stay in.

Now they are growing up, and they want — they demand — to be a part of the world around them. They want to go outside and turn over every rock. They want to meet and befriend everyone on the sidewalk.

I never resent my kids, but, in my darker moments, I resent the way they have made me vulnerable to my surroundings. Suddenly, I am at the mercy of my street, my neighborhood, my city, my state, my country.

My children are natives, but I am still in exile.

It’s time to immigrate… or return home.

An enemy of envy

September 27, 2018

When I heard art critic Jerry Saltz say this during his Longform podcast interview, I immediately got up, wrote it down on an index card, and pinned it above my desk.

In another interview, he explains:

When I was an artist, I used to walk around feeling sorry for myself, always. Looked at every loft, every apartment. Hated everyone I saw. Everyone. Hated you if you had a better apartment. Hated you if you had more hair. Hated this one for being tall. Hated that one. Everybody had it better than poor me. They had more money. Oh, I was cynical. I knew why she was getting what she got and he got what he got, and I was eaten alive by this envy. Eaten alive, and now I tell young artists and writers: “You must make an enemy of envy today. Today. By tonight, because it will eat you alive.”

I agree with him: it will eat you alive if you keep it inside. I think one thing you can do is spit it out, cut it out, or get it out by whatever means available — write it down or draw it out on paper — and take a hard look at it so it might actually teach you something.

Over at The School of Life, here’s a bit about how Friedrich Nietzsche felt envy could be useful to us:

Nietzsche thought of envy as a confused but important signal from our deeper selves about what we really want. Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential, which we disown at our peril. We should learn to study our envy forensically, keeping a diary of envious moments, and then sift through episodes to discern the shape of a future, better self…. The envy we don’t own up to will otherwise end up emitting what Nietzsche called ‘sulfurous odours.’ Bitterness is envy that doesn’t understand itself.

So, first, don’t deny your envy, and second, if you can, try to examine it.

My life coach: Clint Eastwood in *Unforgiven*

My favorite writing on the subject of envy is the “Jealousy” chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. “Jealousy is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer,” she writes.

Some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.

She says the only things that seem to help with jealousy are: “(a) getting older, (b) talking about it until the fever breaks, and (c) using it as material.” As an example of (c), she points out a favorite poem of mine: Clive James’ deliciously nasty poem, “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” It begins:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized…

The narrator of the poem goes on to admit, “Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,” but in his case it will be “due / to a miscalculated print run, a marketing error — / Nothing to do with merit.”

A good deal of this can be traced to problems of ego. Here’s how Zen Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan puts it in season 3, episode 1 of Chef’s Table:

Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. There is no way you can’t open up your creativity. There is no ego to speak of. That is my belief.

Easier said than done.

You could try to practice the opposite of jealousy, which is something like the concept of “mudita”: “Mudita is word from Sanskrit and Pali that has no counterpart in English. It means sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others.”

Easier than that, even, is to just pretend. Have a script that you rehearse and repeat when necessary.

Practice these words:

“Good for him.”

“Good for her.”

“Good for them.”

“Good for you.”

(That last one is sometimes the hardest.)

You say these words, and then you keep your head down, and you do your work.

And should you get everything you always wanted, remember the words on a pillow Joan Rivers kept in her apartment: “Don’t Expect Praise Without Envy Until You Are Dead.”