Austin Kleon

The woke shop

Drawing (with what I think is a typo) by my son Owen (6) last year

In The Believer, writer Kashana Cauley examines the origins of the term “woke”:

The Oxford English Dictionary credits William Melvin Kelley with the first printed, political use of woke, in a 1962 New York Times article titled “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” about white cooption of black language. But twenty years earlier, in a 1942 edition of Negro Digest, J. Saunders Redding used the term in an article about labor unions. A black, unionized mine worker told him: “Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer.” Barry Beckham’s 1972 play Garvey Lives! is often cited as another early example of the word’s political meaning. A character exclaims, in reference to Marcus Garvey, “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other black folk.” This is the version of woke that I grew up with: a call to study and act against anti-black oppression.

(Sidenote: Kathryn Schulz wrote a really interesting piece in the New Yorker about what happened to William Melvin Kelley, noting that he published his debut novel, A Different Drummer, a few weeks after the “woke” op-ed, at the age of 24. He and his wife moved around, from Paris to Jamaica, converted to Judaism, homeschooled their kids, and eventually moved back to the US to settle in Harlem. He was 32 when his last published book was released. “He wrote constantly for the next forty-seven years, never published another book, and died a year ago, at the age of seventy-nine.”)

“Stay woke” sort of hit the wider pop consciousness in 2008 with Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher Melody” (Listen closely: Is the refrain, “I stay woke” or “I’d stay woke”?):

You can also hear it in Childish Gambino’s 2016 track, “Redbone”:

(The Genius annotation for “Redbone” notes this funny exchange on Donald Glover’s fantastic show, Atlanta: “Everything made up,” says Darius, “Stay woke.”)

“Stay Woke” became the rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and then hit the mainstream, with (white) people like Jill Stein and, dear lord, Jack Dorsey, using it, causing many to say, “It’s Time To Put ‘Woke’ To Sleep”:

A word meant to imply a constant state of striving, course-correcting and growth has been heard now, for almost a decade, as a static and performative state of being.

In this recent interview with Erykah Badu (who I love, btw), titled, “Erykah Badu Helped Define ‘Wokeness.’ Now She’s a Target,” she talks about her sense of the phrase:

[W]hen we say that it means we just pay attention to what’s going on around us, and are not easily swayed by the media, or by the angry mob, or by the group. You know: Stay focused, pay attention…. Stay woke just means pay attention to everything, don’t lean on your own understanding or anyone else’s, observe, evolve, eliminate things that no longer evolve. That’s what it means. Stay conscious, stay awake. It doesn’t mean judge others. It doesn’t mean gang up on somebody who you feel is not woke. That’s not evolved.

The space in between the writing

“You don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.”
— Jenny Diski

Walker Percy’s problems of reentry

A page from Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos (filed under: spirals)

In Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, he writes, “Exhilaration comes from naming the unnamable and hearing it named.” I was exhilarated as a reader at the point of the book when he explains a phenomenon I’d thought about, but never had a name for: “reentry.” (Actually, I had used that word before, but only when talking about being on the road and then coming back home to family life — never for the making and consuming of art itself.)

[W]hat is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

Percy points out that “the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers.” Percy then lists a bunch of reentry options, such as anesthesia (drugs), travel, sex, suicide, etc. (One needs to remember that the whole book is both brilliant and tongue-in-cheek, which can be hard, especially for American readers. “People in America are so binary,” said Ian Svenonius, whose books I love and also keep you wondering is-he-serious-or-joking? “They think that if something’s funny that it’s not serious. If you can manage to be funny, that doesn’t mean that things don’t mean anything.”)

One of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of a daily routine and the Groundhog Day approach to working is that it attempts to minimize these exact problems of re-entry that Percy outlines. By scheduling little doses of daily transcendence in which you work on your art, you can pop in and out of your everyday life without becoming a horrible parent or drug addict or total maniac. (Many argue that that’s just the price of Great Art, but I’ve never never bought it.)

Connect Four


It rarely happens, but everyone once in a while I make something that absolutely, positively, 100% sums up everything I’m feeling at the moment.

Then I post it on Instagram and take a nap.

The religion of walking

Jason Polan’s desktop wallpaper

Here is a beautiful passage about walking from Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway:

In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.

Filed under: walking

Love what you do in front of the kids in your life

“Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
—Jim Henson

“Attitudes are caught, not taught.”
—Fred Rogers

Fiona Apple once admitted that she doesn’t want kids, but she spends a lot of time buying and reading parenting books. The interviewer said, “So you’re the parent and the child.” Apple replied, “Well, I mean, you always have to be.”

Every time I read a piece like Pamela Paul’s “Let Children Get Bored Again,” I want to cross out the word “children” and write “us.”

Let children us get bored again.
Let children us play.
Let children us go outside.

Etc.

The problem with parenting tips is that the best way to help your children become the kind of person you want them to be is by surrounding them with the kinds of people you want them to be. This includes you.

You can’t tell kids anything. Kids want to be like adults. They want to do what the adults are doing. You have to let them see adults behaving like the whole, human beings you’d like them to be.

If we want to raise whole human beings, we have to become whole human beings ourselves.

This is the really, really hard work.

Want your kids to read more? Let them see you reading every day.

Want your kids to practice an instrument? Let them see you practicing an instrument.

Want your kids to spend more time outside? Let them see you without your phone.

There’s no guarantee that your kids will copy your modeling, but they’ll get a glimpse of an engaged human.  As my twitter pal, Lori Pickert, author of Project-Based Homeschooling, tweeted a few years ago:

parents keep trying to push their kids toward certain interests when it works so much better to just dig into those interests yourself

oh, wait .. those aren’t YOUR interests? so you don’t want to dig into them? they aren’t your child’s interests either; why would THEY?

joyfully dig into your own interests and share all the ensuing wins, frustrations, struggles, successes

let your kids love what they love

when you share your learning and doing, you don’t make them also love (whatever); you DO show them how great it is to do meaningful work

If you spend more time in your life doing the things that you love and that you feel are worthwhile, the kids in your life will get hip to what that looks like.

“If adults can show what they love in front of kids, there’ll be some child who says, ‘I’d like to be like that!’ or ‘I’d like to do that!’” said Fred Rogers. He told a story about a sculptor in a nursery school he was working in when he was getting his master’s degree in child development:

There was a man who would come every week to sculpt in front of the kids. The director said, “I don’t want you to teach sculpting, I want you to do what you do and love it in front of the children.” During that year, clay was never used more imaginatively, before or after…. A great gift of any adult to a child, it seems to me, is to love what you do in front of the child. I mean, if you love to bicycle, if you love to repair things, do that in front of the children. Let them catch the attitude that that’s fun. Because you know, attitudes are caught, not taught.”

It’s like a Show Your Work! lesson for parenting: Show the kids in your life the work that you love.

Assume away

LEO BLOOM: Let’s assume, just for the moment, that you are a dishonest man.
MAX BIALYSTOCK: Assume away.
—The Producers

It bears repeating: Miserable human beings with whom you wouldn’t want to spend a second in real life are capable of making something great that is beautiful or useful to you. That is, in fact, the whole point of art. (It’s currently an unfashionable belief, but it’s true.)

Whatever you love about a writer or an artist’s work, that really is the best of what they have to offer you. You don’t want the whole human, trust me. You really want that thing they offered up to you: The art.

The other day a young reader emailed me, “I know I am assuming things, but I really think you are happy because you love what you do and your website has these very positive and happy vibes!!”

I stared at the email and thought, How am I going to break this to her?

Little did she know that she had caught me at what is turning out to be a particularly low point in my life. But I didn’t want to dump any of my shit on her, so I just sent her Wendell Berry’s “A Warning To My Readers” and left it at that.

Why wasn’t I consulted?

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”:

“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

I’ve taken it to appending the phrase (and acronym: WWIC) to all random tweets and Instagram comments and it instantly turns them comedic. “You suck,” becomes, “WHY WASN’T I CONSULTED? You suck.” See how much easier that is to deal with? WWIC highlights that here is a lonely soul lost in the cosmos, shouting into the void, reaching out for any kind of contact, or sign that they exist.

Scroll down, swipe left, “thank u, next.”

On solitude, and being who you are

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back):

Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose.”

Collage, the way I do it in my notebook, is the art of making connections between two seemingly unrelated things lying around. It’s a physical manifestation of the way I think. I made this one while listening to an interview with Cal Newport, who’s out there promoting his new one, Digital Minimalism.

Newport was talking about a definition of solitude he borrowed from the book Lead Yourself First: Solitude is “freedom from inputs from other minds.” (That’s not exactly how they put it in the book, but I like the word “freedom.”) According to the authors, Kethledge and Erwin, solitude is a “state of mind,” a spiritual condition, not necessarily a physical one. Here’s how Newport explains it in Digital Minimalism:

Many people mistakenly associate [solitude] with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

So, under this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.

Pete Shotton, a long-time friend of John Lennon, once talked about how Lennon couldn’t bear to be left completely alone — he always wanted someone around, even while he was writing. He’d always have the TV on or a friend around. But they didn’t need to be interacting, really. Lennon just wanted to feel another body in the room.

I’m like this. I like to have somebody else around when I’m working. I especially like it when my six-year-old comes around and we “parallel play” — we work on our own things, across the studio from one another. (I also like to have other people in the room in the form of a book. When I’m stumped when writing, I pick up one of them and start reading.)

On the other hand, I’ve been experimenting with very ways of courting old-fashioned all-by-my-lonesome solitude in my own life. Meditating by the lake. Going for long walks without headphones. I’m not sure they’re valuable to me as productivity measures. How they’re valuable can’t necessarily be measured with any kind of output or progress. These practices don’t help me be with my thoughts, they help me get rid of them. They help me empty out, drain the anxiety and rage out of my head. (Demons hate fresh air.) They let me be in my body. Without thought.

If I want to have some thoughts or do something with them, I’ll head over to my bliss station.

Thinking, after all, is not just about pushing ideas around in your head. Writing and collage are ways of thinking by pushing ideas around on the page.

Sometimes I don’t even think I can think without seeing it on the page.

And sometimes I don’t know who I am until I’m down on the page.

Oh, there I am.

February resolutions

January was the month with a thousand days that would not die, but now it’s February and these tweets by my friend Mark Larson popped up in my head:

What good is February? I used to think. February is a good month to die. February is a month for florists, with its Valentine’s Day bouquets and funeral arrangements.

“Late afternoon in early February,” wrote Alice McDermott, in The Ninth Hour, “was there a moment of the year better suited for despair?”

Now I think of February as an opportunity. Only 28 days in this month. A good month for a 28-day challenge. Good month for something small, every day. A good month to what we are and what we want to be. Good month to get off my ass and do something productive with my despair.

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