Austin Kleon

10 good books I read this spring

We had such a wonderful winter, and then…well, you know. Despite the pains of quarantine, I got a lot of reading done this spring. Here are 10 good books I read, in the order I read them:

A Love Letter To Texas Women
Sarah Bird

A lovely, slim book about Texas and the women who live here. I love her scenes of day-dreaming while wandering the aisles of HEB and how she writes about “neighboring,” the quality she most admires in Texas women, the “bone-deep instinct to be friendly to anyone who might cross one’s path.” (Rooted in the loneliness and struggle to survive in an often hostile frontier.) [Buy indie]

 

Dunce
Mary Ruefle

I’m a huge fan of Ruefle’s essay collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, but it’s taken me a while to fall in love with her poetry. This collection did the trick. I love Ruefle’s sense of wonder, her way with images, and her sense of humor. (And her erasures, of course, which she’s as crazy about as I am.) [Buy indie]

 

Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton

Are you detecting the pattern here? At the beginning of quarantine, the writers who gave me the most comfort were women grappling with art and domesticity. Other diaries I read: Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life and Anne Truitt’s Daybook. The three diaries speak to each other in really interesting ways, and I recommend them all. [Buy indie]

 

Growing Without Schooling, Vol. One
John Holt

John Holt started his newsletter in 1977, “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.” I read an issue every day, tweeting out my favorite bit. A remarkable countercultural document of parents trying to figure out how to help their children learn from home at a time when homeschooling was, in many states, illegal. (Read my blog post about it.)

 

How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto
Tom Hodgkinson

We’ve had Hodgkinson’s manifesto hanging on the fridge for years now, but I’d never bothered to read this. Tons of references to some of my favorite books, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. I also enjoyed Hodgkinson’s book about parenting, from The Idle Parent. [Buy indie.]

 

Life Among The Savages
Shirley Jackson

Speaking of parenting, I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Raising Demons. (I also enjoyed the introduction of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson.) [Buy indie.]

 

The Annotated Alice
Lewis Carroll

This books collects Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, along with excised chapters, alternate illustrations (thought Tenniel’s are, in my opinion, unbeatable), and other ephemera. The stories are worth reading on their own, but the annotations give you a good context for what Carroll was doing. [Buy indie.]

 

The Swallowed Man
Edward Carey

I’ve written about Carey several times on this blog, and his novel, Little, was one of my favorite reads of 2019. He sent me an advance copy of The Swallowed Man, which tells the story of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale. (Come to think of it, I owe him a blurb. How about this: “I can’t think of another working author who is so deftly weaving pictures and words into such wondrous and weird tales. I’ll read anything he publishes.” Like Little, this book contains illustrations drawn by the main character, something I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody else do outside of children’s literature. (Somewhat related: John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, an exploration of drawing in which Berger creates what he thinks Spinoza’s lost sketchbooks might’ve been like.)  [Pre-order indie.]

 

How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand

My wife read this in architecture school, and we’ve had this on our bookshelf for over a decade now. I’ve gotten a lot of it through osmosis, but I figured since I was working on these house collages, now was the right time to read it. So good! Like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, its lessons apply far beyond architecture. I think designers, in particular, would benefit greatly from reading it. Maybe my favorite book of the spring. [Buy indie.]

 

Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich

I picked this up so I could participate in the book discussion going on at The Convivial Society. (I read his book Deschooling Society years ago and it made a big impact.) Illich’s books are short, but they’re so dense with ideas, it can be slow going. Published in 1973, more relevant than ever.  (Other great books I read that addressed art and social issues: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.)

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Learn to be alone

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal said that almost 400 years ago. (Today is his birthday.)

There’s a wonderful chapter in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation called “Learn To Be Alone,” on the importance of solitude.

Merton writes that solitude is not “something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul.”

Solitude, for Merton, is “a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”

He describes “a mechanism” for finding solitude that resembles Joseph Campbell’s “bliss station”:

There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men.

“Learn to be alone” was also Andrei Tarkovsky’s reply when he was asked, “What would you like to say to young people?”

I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

“Loneliness,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets, “is solitude with a problem.”

As I wrote in Keep Going, visiting this place is not about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about finding the quiet strength every day to center yourself so that you can do your work.

(The zine in this post was made from a page of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The text quoted is from Clark’s writing about Montaigne. The art is Albrecht Durër’s “Apocalypse.”)

You do the talking

I had this long blog post typed out and then I thought, Can’t I just let my collage do the talking?

More houses for Meg

Another batch of diary collages. I’ve made 18 so far, going to see how many I can make, until I get bored. Then maybe we’ll make a fake Zillow website and sell prints? I dunno. There’s a book to write, and I’m procrastinating. (Noticing in this batch how each house is really just an excuse to make a garden.)

See more houses here.

Doing the work that’s in front of you

A decade ago, I read an interview with Jessa Crispin, talking about her work on Bookslut, and what she said stuck with me:

I’m very Midwestern in that I just do the work that is in front of me. I just did the work that was in front of me for six and a half years. Somehow, there were just always readers, and I’m appreciative that they exist.

I don’t know if she’d still say she works that way (I should ask her) but it’s the way I’ve worked all these years, and the way I continue to work: I just do the work that’s in front of me.

In 1939, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to some students called “Learning During War-Time.” (Collected in The Weight of Glory.) He addressed whether it was worthwhile to think about literature, art, etc. — what we might, in the contemporary vernacular, call “non-essential” work — when civilization seemed on the brink of collapse. He thought it was.

At a certain point in the lecture he talks about the various enemies of doing our work. One of them is frustration, the idea that we might not have the time to finish everything we want to get done in this life.

“Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment,” he said. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

It is my 37th birthday today, and what I really crave, more than anything, is a continuity to my days. Not an accumulation, the sense that they’re adding up to anything, not necessarily, just a continuity. The sense that one day leads into another leads into another leads into another on and on and on. That they make some kind of chain.

Robert Creeley has a poem, a kind of haiku, really, called “One Day” that goes like this:

One day after another—
Perfect.
They all fit.

Quarantine be damned. I did yesterday’s work yesterday. I’m doing today’s work today. I’ll do tomorrow’s work tomorrow.

And so on.

Doing the work that’s in front of me.

The one long slow idea book

I started Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind this morning, but I had to stop and copy out this passage from her introduction, explaining why she likes to use collage and juxtaposition to build up her text:

But as a reader myself, I have always most enjoyed books that I can be interactive with. I like to fiercely agree with one idea—and fiercely disagree with the next. That kind of dynamic relationship requires a lot of ideas coming at once, from which the reader can pick and choose. Nothing bores me more than the one-long-slow-idea book, and I promise to never write one.

Yes! That’s it! The “One-Long-Slow-Idea Book.” What a snooze.

I, too, promise never to write one, not on purpose. (Though, I don’t begrudge anyone who does — it can be quite lucrative.)

I would like to write a One-hundred-Short-Fast-Ideas book.

Better get back to it…

Humpty Dumpty

Here are some collages made with my 5-year-old’s discarded drawings of Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

My copy of The Annotated Alice tells me that the original Humpty could’ve been a cannon which was on top of a tower that collapsed after bombardment, an alcoholic drink, and a children’s game. I like what Humpty Dumpty tells Alice about using big words: “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”

Errol Morris once said of journalism, “It’s the Humpty-Dumpty dream of putting the world back together again, to make sense of it.”

(He could’ve been talking about collage.)

Morning walk joiner

Our morning walks have been particularly good this past week. The Texas spring is still going strong, and it’s not too hot, not yet. I thought I’d make a “joiner” (from my Instagram stories) in the style of Hockney to celebrate.

Children’s drawings from 1937

Children’s graffiti, photographed by Humphrey Spender, 1937

My recent Mass Observation obsession has led me to these little treasures from 83 years ago, all posted by the @MassObsArchive account. (Some of these children could still be alive!)

Above, some children’s graffiti in Bolton. Here’s a tiny gallery of pictures of Bonfire Night:

And here’s a drawing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was released that year: 

Filed under: Kids art

Mass Observation

In The Spendid and the Vile, his new book about Winston Churchill, London, and The Blitz, Erik Larson uses many diaries and accounts from the archives of Mass Observation, described by Larson as “organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with the goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life.”

“When I realized that this was in existence,” he recently told Rolling Stone, “I died and went to heaven.”

The organization — a very official-sounding word — actually began its life in 1937 as a kind of avant-garde anthro-poetic project by three dudes with wildly different backgrounds, as detailed in Caleb Crain’s wonderful and weird history, “Surveillance Society,” published by The New Yorker in 2006. (Crain’s blog has more background and links.)

The original cast of characters was: “Charles Madge, a poet, journalist, and card-carrying Communist; Humphrey Jennings, a Surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker; and Tom Harrisson, a renegade anthropologist more at home with cannibals than with academics.”

The group began with a letter to the New Statesman and wrote several more manifestos, detailing their plans to perform “an anthropology of ourselves,” and draw up “weather-maps of public feeling.” They wanted to get a real picture of everyday life and get regular people, in large numbers, to do the poet’s work of pulling the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

In a 1937 article in New Verse, called “Poetic Description and Mass-Observation,” they claimed that “In taking up the role of observer, each person becomes like Courbet at his easel, Cuvier with his cadaver, and Humboldt with his continent.”

Subjects suggested to be studied:

Behaviour of people at war memorials.
Shouts and gestures of motorists.
The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behavior.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.

Though they didn’t set out to chronicle wartime, the hundreds of diaries and surveys submitted during the war years ended up becoming an invaluable record of Britain in WWII.

They published several books, a few of which have been reissued by Faber, including First Year’s Work, May the Twelfth and Britain.

Children’s graffiti, photographed by Humphrey Spender, April 1938

For a taste of some of the early Mass-Observation material, head over to Bolton Worktown, which has a wonderful selection of photos taken by Humphrey Spencer of the town of Bolton. (Bolton was the subject of one of the Mass-Observation books, The Pub and The People.)

To see the wide variety of the materials in the Mass Observation archives, check out their Twitter feed: @MassObsArch.

Mass Observation is still going, by the way: on May 12th this year they asked people all over the UK to document their experiences with COVID-19.

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