Austin Kleon

It ain’t Grand

“For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
—Hedda Sterne

A few weeks ago, when the sun was shining and everything wasn’t covered in ice, my friend Marty Butler and his family masked up and came over to visit Coconut The Owl. We talked for a long time, the way people starved for conversation do,  and eventually we got to the subject Texans can’t avoid: Texas. We were talking about Austin, in particular, and how the beauty of this place is subtle.

“Texas isn’t Grand,’’ Marty said. “If you want Grand, you need to go west to Colorado or Montana or something.”

The bright side of this, we agreed, was that here you learn to really pay attention, to track subtle changes in the environment, to fire up your eyebeams and search for beauty.

Yesterday I was reading an interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist John Porcellino, and he said this, about the midwest:

“It’s not like the Rocky Mountains where it’s going to hit you over the head with, ‘Look how majestic I am,’” Porcellino says. “It’s Paw Paw, Illinois. That beauty is there and that majesty is there, but it’s a thing that you have to learn to recognize. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.”

This is something he learned from our shared hero, Henry David Thoreau, who taught us that we receive what we’re ready to receive, and that it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.

Though I have lived in Texas for 14 years, I have never been an evangelist for the place. I came here by chance, and now I live here by choice. (Mostly because a woman I love loves it, and I’d rather live in her world…) But the place has been good to me, and in my own way, I have come to love it. (You know how Texan you are based on how mad you get when people badmouth Texas.)

Here is what I love most about Texas: It has taught me how to find beauty. How beautiful things grow out of shit.

An orange extension cord run to the end of a driveway, offering power to anyone who needs it.

How, without traffic, you can really hear your neighbor’s windchimes ringing in the frozen, silent air.

The icicles on Coconut’s house.

Even now, iced over and on our knees, I can still find beauty, because Texas has trained me to look for it.

It ain’t Grand.

It’s my home.

Pointing at things

John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting: A Painting by William Bowne (1969)

The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things:

Of course, all art is, in a sense, pointing at things! The artist sees something and she points to it so you can see it, too.

Hedda Sterne, in an interview with Art in America, said she thought art was about, saying, “Hey, look!”

The intention, the purpose, is not to show your talent but to show something…. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them.

Something similar from Corita Kent: “I just make things I like bigger.”

Sterne emphasized that she pointed away from herself. To Bomb magazine: “I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.”

It’s the same for writers: Good writing is often just pointing at things.

In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people who want to make writing less hard should just think about showing people something that you’ve noticed. “Look, over there,” your writing should ask, “can you see?

“When you write,” says Steven Pinker, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.”

“Which sounds obvious,” says Burkeman, “except that it makes immediately clear how many writers are doing something else.”

Academics are often more focused on showing off their knowledge, or their membership in an exclusive circle…. Journalists are often trying to inflame your anger, or rally support for some cause.

“The reader wants to see,” Burkeman says, “your job is to do the pointing.”

It is the same for blogging, says Robin Rendle: “blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.” (I like his ordering: not falling in love and then pointing, but pointing and then falling in love. Loving something by paying attention to it.)

a page from

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.

Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

A house for Coconut

Here is a photo of Mike Wilson, a carpenter from South Austin, installing the house we had built for Coconut the Owl  last month. Mr. Wilson used to build owl boxes for his carpentry clients, but now he makes them to fill his days in retirement. His phone is full of photos of owls from the back yards of happy customers. “I’m not making a fortune,” he told me, “but I’m making a fortune in friends.”

Mr. Wilson has built over 800 (!!!) owl boxes for folks all over. He builds two a day and installs two a day. We got box #833. He told me he wants to get well past a thousand. “I just want to keep going,” he said.

The boxes are custom-built with reclaimed wood for smaller Eastern Screech Owls like Coconut, mainly to help protect them from bigger predators, like the Great-horned Owl, but also to encourage them to stick around and have babies.

Mr. Wilson said his quickest box installation to owl inhabitant time was 14 hours, but it took Coconut a little longer… or so we thought.

Here’s a video of her still in the palm tree, chilling in the sunshine on February 3rd.

And here’s a video of “her” four days later, on Superb Owl Sunday, except she was looking a little skinny and angry.

Three days later, on February 10th, she’s looking like herself again, but still not in her house.

And then, two days ago, before our big winter storm, Coconut was looking really mean and miserable. We were getting really worried about her. Why didn’t she go sit in her box?

And then, yesterday… a miracle! Coconut was in her house, looking radiant! I immediately texted Mr. Wilson some photos.

Mr. Wilson was quick to point out that it seems we’ve been looking at two different owls — Coconut, and what appears to be her MATE. Yes, in a perfect Valentine’s Day twist, what appeared to be Coconut in a sad, miserable state, was probably just… well, her husband, basically.

UPDATE (2/20/21): Several people have written to me noting that screech owls puff up when they’re happy and “go skinny” and weird when they’re trying to blend in with the tree. Well, dear readers, I am happy to inform you that we have visual confirmation that there are, indeed, two owls living in the box!

So now we’re all snowed in, and Coconut looks cozy, and it appears that the chance for Owl Babies is looking very, very good!

PS. If you live in the Austin area (he does not ship!) and you want Mr. Wilson to build you an owl box, email me and I’ll give you his number.

The old way

photos from my great-grandpa’s farm

My grandma Laura Helen Wilson Davis (b. 1924) died this week. On December 15, 1999, I interviewed her and my great uncle Phil (1919-2004) for a school project about their childhood living on a farm in Ohio during the depression. Phil was 80 years old, and grandma was about to turn 75. I was 16. These are my notes on what they told me.

* * *

The family was my great-grandma and great-grandpa, Austin and Jessie Wilson, and their seven children, Wells, Paul, Wayne, Phil, George, Laura Helen (my grandma), and Bob.

Every year the farm had about 100 acres of corn, 100 acres of wheat, and 100 acres of pasture. No tractors until they were out of high school. Great-grandpa liked to work with horses — he’d plow corn with two horses in one row.

They had a car, a 1916 Chevy, but no truck. Great-grandpa used to put baby calves and sheep in the back of the car.

They sometimes rode in a horse and buggy, but only for fun.

They milked cows in the morning before school. They worked in the garden, carried water to the animals.

The house had a tin roof, later replaced with slate. There was glass in the front door, so they could see who was coming. When the boys would wrestle, they’d have to put a board in front of the glass to keep them from kicking it out.

They didn’t have electricity until the Rural Electrification Administration, when they got the first lights and radio to their house.

They had little round stoves in almost every room of the farm house that burned coal and wood. In winter the snow would blow in on their beds. They had their windows open all summer. No fans until electricity.

The kitchen had a wood-burning range. When it was too hot, great-grandma used a little kerosene stove.

They took a tub upstairs with a sponge.

Because they had so many children and boys with shirts to launder, they had a gasoline-powered, one-cylinder washing machine.

They had a party line phone with a crank you turned and talked to the operator to connect you. Sometimes the women at home would just talk to the operator.

They stored food in the cellar. Potatoes, canned vegetables, fruit, and meat.

They made ice cream in a hand-turned freezer. Sometimes they went in to town to get a cone.

Great-grandpa didn’t drink anything but water and milk. No soda, root beer, or alcohol. No tobacco. He said he didn’t want to ruin good water by putting coffee in it.

The boys wore corduroy knickers, knee pants, and a shirt. They wore bib overalls to do chores. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, so grandma wore dresses. In the winter, grandma wore long underwear under her stockings and snow pants over her dress. Sometimes kids would dry their wet clothes on the register at school.

Grandma went to high school in the same building where I went to elementary school. In school she studied math, physics, English, history, bookkeeping, Latin, French, and physical education. Professors from the university gave free lessons, so she took violin and played in the orchestra..

They had a wind-up phonograph, but they mostly made their own music. The brothers sang in The Wilson Brothers Quartet, and everyone played an instrument: Wayne on violin, Paul on the saxophone, Wells on the piano, Phil on the trumpet, George on the clarinet, grandma on the piano.

As a high school graduation present, Phil got a radio that was 3 feet tall. It worked on something like a car battery and he had to take it to the nearest town to get it charged up.

Every Sunday morning, they would go to church. Sometimes great-grandma would stay home to cook. Sunday afternoons, there was always lots of company. People visited with each other.

They played basketball in a big round barn on the farm. My grandma met my grandpa when he came over to play ball with her brother George. My grandma played in high school for two years until the state of Ohio decided basketball was too dangerous for girls. That broke her heart.

In summer, they would go to the swimming hole at the creek and play marbles under the big maple trees. The ground was bare from so many kids running around.

It was better to live on a farm during the depression. They lived pretty well. There wasn’t much money, but they always ate. They got agricultural gas rations, so they could drive the car. My grandpa lived in town, and my grandma would bring him milk, butter, eggs, and chickens from the farm.

They always got the local newspaper, and great-grandpa got the Columbus paper, too, to know what was going on. People weren’t as interested in current events until WWII. Another time it was good to live on a farm: farmers tended not to get drafted.

Most folks thought FDR was good for the people. (Except for the “red-hot Republicans.”) The WPA and the CCC really helped.

When the oldest, Wells, went to college it was a big event. It was the first time my grandma saw her mother cry. Several of the boys went to Ohio State. Route 23 was a dirt path, and they would hitch rides up to Columbus and rent rooms. Sometimes they mailed clothes to be cleaned and ironed and mailed back. They came home for a good meal.

I asked them what they thought of young people today, and Phil said, “I think they’re growing out of their pants!”

Neither of them ever thought about making it this far.

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.

There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.

The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.”  So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

I can’t remember if this blackout poem was inspired by the book or not…

One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)

It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.

* * *

[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]

* * *

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Smells of the lamp

A blacked-out baseball card from Baseball Card Vandals

When I wrote about Claude Debussy’s burn on overworked musical pieces, “They smell of the lamp, not of the sun,” I didn’t realize that he was quoting a very old idiom. From a 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 

Smells of the lamp
Said of a literary production manifestly laboured. Plutarch attributes the phrase to Pytheas the orator, who said, “The orations of Demosthenes smell of the lamp,” alluding to the current tale that the great orator lived in an underground cave lighted by a lamp, that he might have no distraction to his severe study.

In Lives, Plutarch writes about how Demosthenes wasn’t necessarily quick on his feet with speeches — if he was asked a question in public, he wouldn’t stand up and talk about something he hadn’t thought about, but took time to go away to his study and work out arguments. 

For this, many of the popular leaders used to rail at him, and Pytheas, in particular, once told him scoffingly that his arguments smelt of lamp-wicks. To him, then, Demosthenes made a sharp answer. “Indeed,” said he, “thy lamp and mine, O Pytheas, are not privy to the same pursuits.”

In another translation: 

…many of the popular pleaders used to make it a jest against him; and Pytheas once, scoffing at him, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp. To which Demosthenes gave the sharp answer, “It is true, indeed, Pytheas, that your lamp and mine are not conscious of the same things.”

And another story about his lamp:

And to the thief nicknamed Brazen, who attempted to make fun of him for his late hours and his writing at night, “I know,” he said, “that I annoy you with my lighted lamp. But you, men of Athens, must not wonder at the thefts that are committed, when we have thieves of brass, but house-walls of clay.”

Now I am conflicted, as a burn that is about overworked creative efforts was originally pointed at a dude who was probably just introverted and studious and thoughtful and against bullshittery!

(Always learning.)

Searching outside the algorithm

For years people have asked me, re: this blog and the newsletter, “How do you take in so much?”

I’m not sure I take in any more than anybody else, but I do try to stick with my genuine, self-directed interests and I also have systems for saving it and processing it.

Your output depends on your input, so one way to make your output more original or interesting is to make your input more original and interesting.

This sometimes requires actually staying intentionally ignorant of what everybody else is tweeting and posting about and getting outside the algorithms of social media.

“People forget that non-algorithmic browsing is still an option,” says Ann Friedman. “I subscribe to magazines in print and directly visit the websites of publications I like.”

My friend Alan Jacobs recommends subscribing to quarterly magazines. “Quarterlies don’t, because they can’t, deal with the newest news: they offer more considered, more reflective responses to the world we live in.”

The non-algorithmic searching I miss the most is the serendipity of the stacks: digging through thrift stores and book stores and record stores.

I miss that digging and scratching.

For now, it’s all about more search, less feed.

Learn to play the fool

 

“It’s simple,” writes George Leonard in the “The Master and the Fool,” the epilogue of his book Mastery, “To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”

By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, signifying the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being.

“Consider for a moment,” he continues, “the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because your parents, your peers, your school, your society, have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process.”

A page torn out of Steal Like An Artist

If you share a home with anybody long enough, eventually, you will be revealed to be the fool that you are. “Everybody plays the fool sometime / There’s no exception to the rule.” I think a happy home is one in which each member’s individual foolishness is tolerated, maybe even encouraged and developed, but, no matter what, loved. We all live with fools, and we must “suffer them gladly” in order to let them grow. And if we want to grow, we, too, must learn to play the fool, and suffer ourselves gladly.

In his book Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton writes:

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

Emphasis mine. I love this passage, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. My own marriage is a comedy of survival, one of shared jokes and shared foolishness. My wife has let me be the fool I am to learn what I need to learn.  

But nothing has taught me about the connection between learning and foolishness more than sharing a house for the past 8 years with my little pint-sized artists, who seem to show more creativity in one day than I do in a month.

Here is how Tom Vanderbilt puts it in his new book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning:

Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they’re less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won’t ask.

“Beginner’s mind” is a reference to Suzuki’s wonderful book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which I quoted in Show Your Work!: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

an award for signaling the refusal of mastery and an insistence on processing and becoming

In that book I also wrote that mastery isn’t enough for the searching life of the artist. “You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.” (In some cases, literally: I’m thinking of Erik Satie, going back to the academy after he was already known as a composer.) And this starting over, or beginning again, learning something new, requires a willingness to look like a fool, or a “curious idiot.” 

In one of his letters to Reginald Golding Bright collected in Advice to a Young Critic, the playwright George Bernard Shaw encouraged the aspiring writer to “resolutely” make a fool of himself: 

You say you are scarcely competent to write books just yet. That is just why I recommend you to learn. If I advised you to learn to skate, you would not reply that your balance was scarcely good enough yet. A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself. You will never write a good book until you have written some bad ones.

In any new venture, you must be willing to be bad for as long as it takes.

Elsewhere, when Shaw was asked how he became a great orator, he replied, “I learned to speak as men learn to skate or to cycle—by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it.”

If you can resolutely, doggedly, learn to play the fool, you will learn how to learn again.

Blogging as a forgiving medium

a poem from Newspaper Blackout

Artists speak of unforgiving mediums.

“Pastel is the unforgiving medium,” wrote Irving Petlin, in Notes on Pastel: 

I am attracted to pastel as a medium because of the gamble involved in its execution. There is a fascination with the processes of control and risk enacted on a surface, a surface building toward the last plunges of color that bring everything already developed there into focus—the color bolt that finishes a picture.

I am on Twitter, still, despite my better judgment, and it seems to me to be The extremely unforgiving medium in my life. 

It is risky compositionally. You can delete a tweet, but you can’t edit a tweet. You can add to a tweet, but it’s hard to improve upon it.

It is risky socially. Every tweet is an invitation for scrutiny if not consultation if not correction if not misunderstanding if not rancor. Forgiveness, even if we agreed it still existed in the wider culture, I think we could probably agree it doesn’t really exist on Twitter. (“Never Tweet” is not terrible advice.) 

And yet, like Petlin, I think I am attracted to “the gamble involved” in the unforgiving medium’s execution. Sometimes it yields gold. Sometimes a tweet leads to the next good idea or a new friendship or mutual appreciation. Sometimes tweets become blog posts that become book chapters. 

If Twitter is the unforgiving medium in my life, where are the forgiving mediums?

My notebooks would be one.

Even my published books, since they go through a long editorial process of people who care correcting me, and if there’s a typo, we can fix it in the next printing.

Another forgiving medium? Compared to Twitter, I’d make a case for blogging. 

Blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.

If you missed something, you can fix it.

For example, a few days ago I posted about Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers. One reader pointed out (on Twitter) that it wasn’t a tree in the poster, it was a utility pole.

Fixed!

Another reader pointed out (on Twitter) that there was an The Art Assignment video about Russell’s work.

Added! 

The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate. 

But most importantly, I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve. 

Being wrong publicly is the easiest way to learn what you need to know. The trouble is: it’s also the easiest way to get yelled at or shamed or “canceled,” as they say. 

To do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs forgiving readers.

Every newsletter I send, for example, is a gamble. It can’t be edited, only issued a correction in the next one. But my readers, on the whole, tend to be a caring bunch. (If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t subscribe.) Corrections are often made privately, over email. 

In the book Fare Forward, a collection of letters David Markson sent Laura Sims, Markson begs Sims not to send him any print-outs from the internet.

“HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?”

Twitter, to me, is very much that “First-Draft World” that Markson bemoaned. But blogging feels to me like a world of endless drafting, endless revisioning.

A much more forgiving medium.  

(I look forward to editing this post.)

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.