Austin Kleon

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

A moving mixture of personal memoir and art writing, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City looks at the topic of loneliness by weaving her own story of a rough stay in New York with the work and stories of four different NYC artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz.

This is a book you might want to read with a laptop nearby so you can study some of the artworks that come up along the way, even something like Hopper’s Nighthawks, which you’ve probably seen dozens of times, but have you really looked? (Something I never noticed that Laing points out: there’s no visible door to the outside.)

You might also put on this YouTube playlist and pull up this pinboard to get a visual representation of some of the books’ contents:

I read this back in 2016, but I imagine it has a different and maybe even deeper resonance for readers during a pandemic. Not long after finishing the book an acquaintance of mine mentioned that she’d been alone for a couple of weeks recently and sort of forgot what it was like to function in the world, something Laing writes about:

If you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being. Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers. The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it a disproportionate risk.

This is one of the themes of the book: when you most need intimacy — the opposite of loneliness — not only is it nowhere to be found, but the longer you stay away from it, the less and less you are equipped to bring it about. I would also add that the times you feel like a little disconnection, it’s impossible to get it — there were several times when I was distracted from reading the book by the hollering din of my wife and kids from across the house that I thought, “Gee, a little loneliness — or at least solitude — might be nice.”

Laing quotes from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:

At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I’d rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I’d never even seen before in my life started running after me…. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that’s when I got what you might call a ‘following.’

In “Open House,” off Songs for Drella, Lou Reed sings of Warhol, “I like lots of people around me… but don’t kiss hello and please don’t touch.” Laing writes of Warhol’s use of machines to distance himself from too much intimate contact — stick a tape recorder or a camera in between you and the person you’re interacting with, and it serves as a kind of filter:

Collage comes up a lot in the book — gluing broken or different things together — and it turns out that some of Henry Darger’s process wasn’t all that different from Warhol’s:

[Darger] started with found images, sometimes backing them on card or doctoring them in subtle ways, especially by painting over them, adding hats or costumes, or simply piercing the eyes. Next, he progressed to collages, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines and pasting them into increasingly complex composites. The problem with this technique was that each component image could only be used once, meaning that he had to find more and more raw materials, either at the hospital or by going through the trash. It was wasteful of resources, and also frustrating, having to surrender a favoured image, to commit to just one picture, just one scenario.

This is where tracing came in. With tracing, he could liberate a figure or object from its past context and reuse it dozens if not hundreds of time, inserting it by way of carbon paper into a diversity of scenes. I t was economical, a thrifty process, and it also let him magically posess the image in a way that scissors didn’t, transferring it first on to tracing paper and then again through the blue sheets of carbon into the painting proper. One of his favourites was a doleful little girl holding a bucket, one finger in her mouth. Once you’ve spotted her, she crops up over and again…

I knew nothing at all about David Wojnarowicz when I first read the book. His story, and the story of how AIDS basically decimated a whole NYC subculture in the 80s and 90s, was the one I found most moving in the book. (Laing quotes a lot from his memoir, Close To The Knives, and later wrote a very moving piece about his work in Funny Weather, also putting his face on the cover.)

So, other than art, how does one combat loneliness? What types of connection should we look for? In his great review, Dwight Garner quoted Laing on checking her Twitter feed (she quit Twitter a few years ago, but her Instagram is lovely):

“It was the first thing I looked at and the last, this descending scroll from mostly strangers, institutions, friends, this ephemeral community in which I was a disembodied and inconstant presence. Picking through the litany, the domestic and the civic: lens solution, book cover, news of a death, protest picture, art opening, joke about Derrida, refugees in the forests of Macedonia, hashtag shame, hashtag lazy, climate change, lost scarf, joke about Daleks: a stream of information, sentiment and opinion that some days, most days maybe, received more attention than anything actual in my life.”

Sometimes the data stream makes her feel joyous. “At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy.” Civic as well as personal space has been circumscribed. Ms. Laing describes Manhattan cafes “populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops.”

It’s interesting, looking back at my notes, the few things that I took here and there for Keep Going. For example, this quote about walking from Greta Garbo, taken out of its rather dark context (Garbo was stalked and photographed by a paparazzo):

“I would rather be outside walking that to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.” And again: “Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.”

Laing herself sums it up: “What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open…”

There’s so much good stuff in the book, I can’t begin to quote it all, or explain how it all weaves together. Here are my little brick notes I took while reading:

* * *

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

How much do we tell our kids?

A Smokey Bear poster

I have a friend who saw a Smokey The Bear “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES” poster when she was a kid and took the emphasis literally. She said she started worrying all the time about forest fires because only SHE could prevent forest fires — it said so on the poster! She’d see a story about a forest fire on the news and cry, “It’s my fault!”

I think about that story a lot these days.

How much do we talk to our kids about what’s going on? How much information do you give them, especially about the things they can’t control?

* * *

Last summer, the boys had drawings published in the NYTimes. I loved working on this piece, which was about how powerful making art can be in uncertain times. “Much of the art they make is their way of processing fear and anxiety about the uncontrollable terrors going on outside our house,” I wrote.

A producer at Good Morning America saw the drawings and asked if they could interview the whole family. I said no to having them on camera, but I agreed to a solo interview. We talked for 45 minutes to an hour over Zoom. We covered lots of stuff. I tried to encourage her to think of art as a way of exploring emotion as much as expressing emotion, but she kept asking me, “Aren’t you worried about your kids? Aren’t you disturbed by these drawings?” I finally, almost shouting, said, “No, no, no! I would be more worried about them if they DIDN’T draw.”

Here is the final piece, in which they turned children’s drawing into a tool of emotional surveillance:

Pro tip: if you want your kids to be less anxious, don’t let them watch an hour of morning news waiting to see their drawings on TV! My boys had never seen TV news, and they couldn’t believe their eyes. “More tornados!” shouted Jules, who eventually left the room before his segment appeared.

The experience shook me, but it was a good lesson.

* * *

When I was reading old issues of John Holt’s Growing Without Schooling newsletter, I came across this piece he wrote in 1979. “Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked,” he begins. “How much of this should I talk to my children about?”

W.H. Auden, in his essay about Iago in The Dyer’s Hand, makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” 

Our boys (now 5 and 8 — age makes all the difference when you’re talking about “children” or “kids”) don’t do Zoom school and we still don’t watch news on the TV, so they have no idea, really, about what’s going on, other than what we tell them.

And we don’t tell them much.

I realize this is an enormously privileged position to be in.

“I am trying / to sell them the world,” Maggie Smith wrote in her poem, “Good Bones,” but I’m not trying to sell my kids the world, I’m trying to make them a world.

I am trying to give my kids the sanest childhood I can. I am trying to give them an experience of a safe, non-judgmental home, full of love and books and art-making, arranged so that they can spend maximum time doing things like drawing and playing and dreaming.

Because I think a good, healthy childhood is something that can’t be taken away from you. Knowing that you are safe and loved is something you can carry forward, no matter what happens.

My hope is that if my boys know what it is to be loved and cared for, to be accepted and to have agency over their attention and their efforts, they won’t go looking for identity in dumbass facist ideology peddled by pathetic men who have nothing real to contribute to the world.

They’ll start knowing how insane the world is soon enough. For now, let them play.

And if it all goes bad in the future and they have to fight over a can of beans in an abandoned grocery store, they will remember what life can be like.

That knowledge is important. It’s knowledge that artists give us: They don’t just show us what life is, they show us what it can be.

Parents can be artists, too.

Photo of a bell hooks quote (from Outlaw Culture) by @museummammy, aka Kimberley Drew, author of This Is What I Know About Art.

100-day Practice and Suck Less Challenge

Download a PDF of the poster

After posting my 30-day Practice and Suck Less Challenge, I came across violinist Hilary Hahn’s 100 Days of Practice project: She posts a video of her practicing for 100 days on her Instagram with the hashtag #100daysofpractice and invites others to join her. (Similar to the 100-Day Project, which is coming up Jan. 31.)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Hilary Hahn (@violincase)

So, if you’re feeling ambitious and want to do a 100-day challenge, I made a new free, printable poster for you:

Download the PDF

This challenge is not just for musicians, by the way: I first discovered it on Teju Cole’s Instagram stories. He wrote:

Hilary Hahn’s back-to-basics attitude to practice resonates with what I’ve tried to do with my writing in the past year.

I’ve gone back to fundamentals. I ask myself about openings, adverbs, commas, vocabulary, line lengths, sentence fragments, rhythm, voice.

I take one element at a time and examine it until I know better what I’m doing with it. Like analyzing a golf stroke or baseline jumper.

Always beginning

Beginner’s mind.

Begin again.

There’s something so heartening about watching masters of craft practice. Above is a video of pianist Angela Hewitt, who lost her “best friend” when movers dropped and smashed her beloved piano:

While she waited, she had to endure cancelled concerts because of the UK coronavirus lockdown, her principal residence being in London. Hewitt said she managed to stay sane by posting daily Twitter videos of herself playing easy pieces on her practice piano in her flat, and said the phone videos – some of which were viewed more than 140,000 times – provided a new way of connecting to a mass audience.

Always, always — remain a student!

Nobody to tell you what not to read

A poster for the ALA’s Banned Books Week, 2013 (I did not make this, btw)

Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that a school in Massachusetts has banned teaching The Odyssey and other “classics.” My friend Alan Jacobs, who wrote a whole book about the importance of connecting to the past through old books (but not a defense of the classics), wrote:

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

I have this romantic vision of some young, unknown artist, somewhere, either now or in the future, binging on the forbidden fruits of our past — all the taboo books and movies you’re not supposed to read or watch or talk about because they’re not appropriate or correct or they were made by the wrong people  — and stealing all the right moves from them, the stuff that other young artists won’t get exposed to because they don’t teach it in school or put it on reading lists, and mashing those good bits all together into something new that blows our minds. This artist might not even do it intentionally, but rather, out of ignorance — because they don’t know any “better,” and they don’t have anybody telling them what’s worthy of their attention. I don’t know where they’re supposed to find these materials — hopefully in a library — but maybe they’ll discover them in a trash heap like Wall-E.

It’s happened before. Ever since reading his short stories last October, I have thought a lot about Ray Bradbury, who didn’t have anybody telling him what not to read:

Bradbury never went to college — that’s one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.

Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre’s imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before.

I’m thinking, too, of someone like Patricia Lockwood, one of the more original voices out there, who never went to college.

I have long felt that your own education is as much about the order in which you come into contact with things as anything else:

…it’s not just the holes, but the order you fill them in. For instance, if you read the canon straight through, from Homer to McCarthy (or whoever), how original would the connections in your mind be? Better to start with one author you love, who speaks to you, and move in every direction, backwards, forwards, sideways…the juxtapositions you see and the connections you make in your brain will be more unique.

For example: Did you know that Herman Melville didn’t read Shakespeare until he was 30 years old? That’s why we have Moby-Dick.

And now we try to teach it to 15-year-olds…

Throw out the instructions

My kids got this Crazy Forts set for Christmas. We got out the instructions…

…but following them felt too much like the pain of putting together IKEA furniture, so we threw the instructions out and just started making free-form sculptures with them, admiring the shadows they cast:

Speaking of IKEA — they should get whoever does the step-by-step instructions for their Mario app to do their furniture assembly instructions:

I kind of hate branded LEGO kits, by the way. Whenever I put them together for my kids, I basically feel like a slightly-less-stressed version of me when assembling IKEA furniture. Raul Gutierrez, of Tiny Bop put it well:

The best toys — Tinkertoys, Lego, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs — allowed us to build and rebuild almost endlessly. With my kids, I noticed that these kinds of toys have become increasingly rare. Lego bricks are sold primarily as branded kits. Instead of a pile of blocks that could become anything, they are now essentially disassembled toys. Instead of starting with a child’s imagination of what could be, play is now fixed on a single endpoint, predetermined by Lego’s designers.

Because the universe has a sense of humor, the minute I copy/pasted this quote, my son Owen came in to show me this Frankensteined plane he’d made with his brother “out of scraps”:

The kids are alright.

UPDATE 1/6/2021: Jules wanted a toy owl, so I made Coconut The Owl one out of one of his LEGO Super Mario kits:

Hen laying egg

I found a bunch of these used fireworks out on our soggy New Year’s Day walk. I took them home and disassembled them and stuck them in my notebook until I had time to sit down this morning and make a collage.

Thoreau talked about thoughts as “nest eggs” — the fake eggs you put in a chicken coop to get a hen to lay more next to it:  “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.”

Something catches your attention — a scrap of material, or a scrap of thought — and if you save it, it becomes a nest egg… more things will gather around it until you have something new.

Better in context

A good meme takes a snippet of something and makes it funnier or more interesting out-of-context.

Like television shows, I prefer the trashy, funny ones. What I can’t really stand are the memes that take themselves too seriously. Something “deep” like a moody black and white photo with a long quote laid over it. I often look up the original context for the quote and find the quote is either: a) fake b) wrongly attributed c) sliced up to make it more palatable. Worst of all, the meme is very rarely as funny or interesting as the original context.

Take the Bob Dylan quote above. Here’s the original 1991 interview. Dylan was asked if he was more happier at 50 than 30:

“Oh, man, I’ve never even thought about that,” Dylan said, laughing. “Happiness is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I’m happy, I’m happy – and if I’m not, I don’t know the difference.” He fell silent for a few moments and stared at his hands. “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’ Now, that must be a happy man. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be – that’s much more important than just being happy.

Emphasis mine. The meme maker, in this case, cut out the most interesting part of the quote, the part with actual tooth (“yuppie words”!) that separates it from being a Hallmark sentiment.

This Patti Smith meme was of particular interest to me, as I used the first part in the “Build a Good (Domain) Name” section of my book, Show Your Work!  The text is actually “correct” — Smith did say all those words — but the “life is like a roller coaster” cliché comes later in the speech.

What the meme doesn’t tell you is that Smith got the advice from William S. Burroughs — not the first name you think of associated with the word “clean”:

When I was in my early twenties, I was lucky to have William Burroughs as a friend and mentor. Once I was with him and I asked him this question: “What should I aspire to?” and he thought, and he said: “My dear, a gold American Express would be good.” But after that, he said very thoughtfully, “Build your name.” And I said, “William, my name is Smith.” And he said, “Well, you’ll have to build a little harder.” But what William meant when he told me to build my name. Build a good name — because a name is not to get famous. He wasn’t talking about celebrity — he was talking about let your name radiate your self, magnify who you are, your good deeds, your code of honor. Build your name and as you go through life, your name will serve you.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I encourage people — especially young people — to do “a 30-second fact check” on self-serious memes like this.

Good net citizens:

  • Source-check what they share
  • Share from the best source possible
  • Provide source/claim context to people they share with when necessary

It takes almost no time at all: just put quotation marks around a distinctive part of the text and enter it into a search box. You’ll learn more a lot more from looking up the source of these memes than you will from the memes themselves.

30-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge

“Lower your standards for what counts as progress,” writes Adam Grant, “and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.”

To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less.

To celebrate the New Year, I made a new 30-day challenge, free for y’all to download and print:

Download and print the PDF

Someone once asked me to distill all of my books into one piece of advice, and, off the top of my head, I said: “Try sitting down in the same place at the same time for the same amount of time every day and see what happens.” (This challenge is modified from The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)

Something small, every day, adds up to something big over time.

What should you practice? Whatever you want to suck less at. You can practice drawing, you can practice kindness, you can practice praying.

Me? I’m gonna practice the piano:

Happy New Year! Please feel free to share this challenge with anyone you think could use it.

If you liked this challenge, you’ll love my books.

100 things that made my year (2020)

  1. Having a piano in the house again.
  2. Seeing my kids’ drawings published in the New York Times.
  3. Recording an audiobook during a pandemic in my bedroom closet.
  4. The magic of solvable problems when life seems impossible. Learning to solve a Rubik’s Cube. All the things you can tighten with a $10 socket set from Home Depot. Fixing things with the screwdriver somebody used to steal my car a decade ago. Sashiko. Modding my date stamp so it can live another decade.
  5. Abandoning the notion of linear progress for circular time.
  6. The hawk that hung out in our yard for nine hours.
  7. Getting into zines again by making them for my son’s school lunch, then later staying home and making a whole flock of zines.
  8. Getting interested in quilting. Making tape quilts and letting them take me where they want to go.
  9. The calm of collage. Sticky note collages. Making houses for Meg. Making collages based on my sons’ mispronunciation, “Chronovirus.” Turning scraps into poetry. The person who mailed me extra UHU sticks. Remixing Peanuts. Thinking on the page.
  10. Blind contour drawings. Learning to spot false lines.
  11. The joy of blackout poetry.
  12. The comfort of a pencil. Buying pencil extenders and a pencil sharpener named Carl. Writing with a Mitsubishi 9852EW. (Even though “HBs are for architects.”)
  13. Having great books to read. (So many they get their own list.) Mercifully short books for when reading is hard. Books with unusual structures. Turning books into time capsules. Reading like Rossellini. Reading promiscuously. Practicing bibliomancy.
  14. Making bad art. Making ugly art.
  15. Not doomscrolling. Airplane mode.
  16. Finding nourishment instead of identifying poison. Thinking about mental gumbo and how ideas spread like the plague.
  17. Filling notebooks. Having a diary to scream into, instead of the void of social media. Reading about Mass Observation. Keeping records so you can check them later and assure yourself you’re not crazy, the culture is. When my plague journal got too dark, turning to cheerful retrospection.
  18. Schedule send.
  19. Pedernales Falls. How bright the stars are in Dripping Springs.
  20. Long date walks and lunches with my wife for the two months the kids were in school. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Subs at Homeslice. Sushi at Komé. Little Deli. Taco Deli. Bagels at Nervous Charlie’s. Bubble tea and Kinokuniya. Enchiladas at Mother’s (RIP). Walking to the nursery and drawing plants and pansies.
  21. Watching my kids make Valentines for their classmates.
  22. A calendar I saw in a school office captioned, “Weekly Breakdown,” and thinking, “Yeah, I should schedule mine.”
  23. School pickups and talking in the car.  How my son would pick a new song for us listen to on the way home and how he’d discover B-sides I didn’t know about by artists I love, like “Nannou” off Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker and “Watchlar” on Cocteau Twins’ Iceblink Luck. Listening to the new Four Tet and Autechre albums together.
  24. How much I miss being out in the world with the kids. Dart Bowl. Reading the graffiti and eating enchiladas in the cafe. (RIP.) Drawing at The Blanton. Hot dogs at Costco. Having a milkshake at In-and-Out and watching Owen make music in Garageband before Stuttering Institute. Going to the Ransom Center during his sessions.
  25. Drawing in the dark at Pop-Up Magazine. Meeting Esther Pearl Watson and hanging out with Liana Finck.
  26. Old friends. Dinner at Manuel’s with Edward Tufte. Tacos outside with Julien. Visiting Ryan Holiday’s new bookstore in Bastrop. (Picking up gummy worms on the way home from Bucee’s.)
  27. Our last weekend in the world before lockdown: a date day viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire at the Alamo Drafthouse, a dinner party at Steven and Eugene’s, and Jules’ 5th birthday party with tacos and donuts in Ramsey Park. (A lady saw the party balloons — a “5” and an “0”-shaped donut — and asked if it was my 50th birthday.)
  28. Writing a whole book proposal to Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” on an endless loop. (Then throwing it out.)
  29. Music, music, music. My 2020 playlist. Cymatics! Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Deerfhoof’s “35-minute live-in-the-studio medley of covers,” Love-Lore. Perfume Genius’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. Yaz, Upstairs at Eric’s. Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yasuaki Shimizu’s Kakashi. Robert Wyatt’s Shleep. Billy Nomates. The Dirty Projectors’ 5 EPs. Daniel Lopatin’s soundtrack for Uncut Gems. Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies. Ethiopiques. The new Nine Inch Nails ambient albums. Barker’s Utility. The piano of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Duke Ellington’s Piano Reflections. The epic yearly surveys by Fluxblog. Aphex Twin’s piano works. Cardi B’s “WAP.” David Wise’s “Aquatic Ambience.” Christmas music on KUTX. Miumiu’s cover of “I Wish You Love.” Harry Styles’ cover of “Sledgehammer.” Owen Kleon’s single “Emoji,” and his album, Personality.
  30. The comedy of survival. How every age needs a Diogenes. Marc Maron’s standup special, End Times Fun.
  31. Lowering my expectations. Not thinking about much after dinnertime. Trying to stick to what I know works.
  32. Eating so much Cap’n Crunch I sent away for free figurines.
  33. Talking on the phone instead of Zoom.
  34. Watching skate videos as a way to travel to cities I miss.
  35. Spring. Watching our cacti blossom. Red admiral butterflies.
  36. Discovering the word “estivate.” Getting in the pool with the kids every day of summer. Listening to the “Poolside ’86” mix one the Wonderboom that Meg got me for Valentine’s Day. Floating on this dorky pizza raft like the one Andy Samberg has in Palm Springs, writing in my Rite in The Rain waterproof notebooks.
  37. Good newsletters. Sasha Frere-Jones. Laura Olin’s lists of ten.
  38. Ted Gioia and Dust-to-Digital on Twitter.
  39. Sturgill Simpson, who gave me my quarantine mantra: “Think I’m gonna just say home and make art, not friends!”)
  40. My quarantine queen and king: Mary Ruefle & David Hockney.
  41. Quarantine Book Club! Mike Monteiro’s #perfect31 record challenge on Instagram.
  42. Totally watching television: Ted Lasso. Better Things. What We Do In The Shadows. Sex Education. How To With John Wilson. Ghosts. Cobra Kai. Deutschland ’83. Teenage Bounty Hunters. Toast of London. The Great. Normal People.
  43. Good movies: Tampopo. Dolemite Is My Name. Master and Commander. My Octopus Teacher. Dick Johnson Is Dead. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart. 24 Hour Party People. The Grand Budapest Hotel. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Wild Nights With Emily. The Old Guard. John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. Mission Impossible: 1-6. The Speed Cubers. The Nice Guys. Marshawn Lynch: A History. Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins. Lured. I Married A Witch. Arsenic and Old Lace. Kind Hearts and Coronets. Dial M For Murder. The original 1940 version of Gaslight. Apollo 11. The Life Aquatic. The Matrix. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. That Thing You Do! What About Bob? 
  44. Watching old favorites in black and white.
  45. Opting out of Zoom school. Letting the kids go feral instead. (You could count the days they were fully dressed on one hand.) The Idle Parent Manifesto. Dreaming up a new curriculum. Reading old issues of John Holt’s homeschooling newsletter, Growing Without Schooling. Remembering that boredom is a pit stop. Thinking about how not all screen time is equal. Looking up stuff in the dictionary. (“How do I spell….”) Watching them read in patches of sunlight on the floor — the best distance learning.
  46. Getting rid of the day the best that we could. Building a climbing dome and a rope swing in the back yard. Drawing together. Making comics together. Finishing or collaging their abandoned drawings. Finishing each other’s Garageband tracks. Owen making beats out of rain drops and thunder. Each one clacking away on his own typewriter. (“I’m going to be an author like you, papa.”) Drawing them while they play. Making noise tracks on our four-track. Printmaking with vegetables. Playing Scrabble and exploring inappropriate language with Bananagrams. Watching Spongebob Squarepants. Harry Potter. Exquisite Corpse. Having a new Wayside School to read. Issues of OKIDO. Painting blocks of the Three Little Pigs. Putting a multi-colored wifi light up the noise nook. Dusting off the Wii and playing Dr. Mario and Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Country. (Huge mistake! They are now video game junkies.) Keeping conversation cards on the kitchen table. Floor Is Lava. What’s On My Butt? Those Usborne “See Inside” books. Sticking to the best parenting advice I’ve ever heard. The Portal. Playing hide-and-seek. Fights with fake snowballs. A parent who said to me, about lockdown, “We are learning things about them that we didn’t know.”
  47. How caring leads to loving. A heart-shaped love. The brief period in which my youngest wanted to give us “100 kisses” before bed.
  48. Acknowledging the grief of it all.
  49. Giving each other haircuts.
  50. Breakfast in bed.
  51. The $3 box of spaghetti actually tasting 3x better than the $1 box.
  52. Chicken parm sandwiches.
  53. Banana bread. (Owen: “It’s amazing how something rotten can become delicious!”)
  54. Our Bill Rebholz San Marzano tomato print.
  55. An alarm clock with big blue letters so I don’t have to reach for my phone.
  56. Watching Meg’s citrus trees grow fruit.
  57. Breaking in Sharpies.
  58. Running the numbers. Rearranging the furniture.
  59. Quarantine uppers and downers: Vitamin D in the morning and magnesium at night. Getting a coffee subscription in the mail. Gin and tonics in a pint glass full of ice. Drops from Milk Barn Farm.
  60. Simple questions for better decisions: Instead of asking, “Will this make me happy?” asking, “Will this enlarge me or diminish me?” Instead of giving feedback, simply asking, “What did you really want to say?” Instead of asking, “Can I finish?” asking, “Can I keep going?” Instead of asking, “What can I know?” asking, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” (That last one’s W.H. Auden.)
  61. Neil Postman’s advice for how to live the rest of your life. Emerson’s advice: “Work and learn in evil days.” Thomas Merton’s advice: “Learn to Be Alone.” Alasdair Gray’s advice to stay in touch with who you wanted to be when you were little.
  62. The poem, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.” How poetry changes over time.
  63. Having something to do. Doing what you know how to do. Doing the work that’s in front of you. How every time we make something, it’s a tiny triumph. How quantity leads to quality.
  64. Knowing that not everything will be okay, but some things will.
  65. Accepting that nobody knows anything. (Eric Seidel, quoted in The Biggest Bluff: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”) Wondering over knowing. Hitting pause.
  66. Praying, whether I believe or not.
  67. Voting.
  68. How I searched in the street for my lost wedding ring, was totally distraught, and then it turned up in the washing machine.
  69. Breaking bread with the dead. Picturing history.
  70. Writing about lost loved ones. Jason Polan. Charles Portis. Bill Withers. Jan Steward. Milton Glaser. John Baldessari. Aunt Becky.
  71. Listening to music with the volume turned down low.
  72. Listening to the brush. Listening to the fog horns. Listening for hawks on our walks. Listening for another world.
  73. Pen pals. Answering letters. Addressing an envelope as a reminder to write a letter. Sending mail via USPS. Ruth Asawa stamps. Making collages out of mail.
  74. My trusty Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.
  75. The Tile thingie my wife bought me to stick in the back of my pocket notebook so I can find it when I lose it.
  76. Reading a Ray Bradbury short story every night of October.
  77. Drew Dernavich’s rejection pile. Thinking about how every piece of art I love exists because someone didn’t throw it in the fire or somebody pulled it out of the flames.
  78. Willem Defoe’s “You don’t like me cooking?!?” monologue in The Lighthouse.
  79. Learning how the days of the week got their names.
  80. Learning how to play Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” on piano. Getting the Phantom Thread soundtrack on vinyl and discovering it included sheet music.
  81. Learning from non-fiction books for kids. Drawing to remember what I’ve learned.
  82. How my local grocery store was more prepared for the pandemic than the federal government.
  83. How the pandemic led to experimenting with online events. Making a good Zoom rig out of stuff I already had, plus adding the Camo app, a decent ring light, and a document camera.
  84. Signing books outside Bookpeople on their picnic tables.
  85. Books I wrote that I can’t read. Seeing my books with music gear. Figuring Keep Going would be the book of mine people turned to during quarantine, and being surprised that it was actually Show Your Work! (“Nothing matters and nothing works.”)
  86. Calvin’s chickens. Bird feeders for humans.
  87. Scheduling time to make a collage so I can listen to a podcast, like Between the Covers or Recording Artists or Broken Record.
  88. Edward Carey’s daily quarantine drawings.
  89. Thor Harris starting a band with his next door neighbor Antonio.
  90. The work of Amos Kennedy, Jr. Watching him build his “pile of bricks” printmaking studio in Detroit. (And his hilarious fundraising video.)
  91. Talking about how much artist Corita Kent has influenced my work.
  92. 15 years of blogging. 14 years of marriage.
  93. Rituals, no matter how silly. Morning walks, no matter what. Morning pages, no matter what. Pizza-and-a-movie night. Spaghetti night. Starting a notebook with a weigh-in. Notebook affirmations.
  94. Every day, giving yourself a little present.
  95. Moonlight on the bedsheets. Keeping track of the moon. Seeing the Great Conjunction. My wife’s reaction to seeing the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
  96. Coconut the Owl.
  97. Having an office to retreat to. (My dad, talking about his contractor: “He got a lot done, but nothing’s finished.”)
  98. Breathing through the nose. Doing nothing for as long as possible. (Owen: “I exist just as well as you do!”) Taking naps.
  99. Doctors who make house calls.
  100. Stayin’ alive.

Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

A Happy New Year’s message from our backyard

We had a downright magical encounter in our backyard the other day that I want to tell you about:

 

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A post shared by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon)

Coconut is an eastern screech owl that lives in our palm tree. We’re not sure how long it’s lived there or if it’s a boy or a girl. It naps all day and then flies off around sundown to hunt. Here are some more pictures:

We can’t stop looking! Feels like an end-of-year miracle. A wild bout of luck. An omen of better days. Happy New Year!

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