Austin Kleon

Once through, cleanly

Frank Chimero’s description of how he designs a poster:

I’m a big proponent of ‘once through, cleanly’. You think about your idea, sketch, then put some glue in your chair and bang it out in one sitting. All of my best work happens this way: posters, collages, essays, outlines for talks, and so on. The work seems to be more cohesive and the energy more concentrated and palpable. If you sit down and what you make is bunk, you walk away, come back later and start over. You don’t keep any of what you’ve done before, you only retain the memory of what went wrong. It’s a silly method, but it works for me.

This is how my best work comes, too: Everything I’ve done that’s good has come really fast and furious after a (seemingly endless) period of messing around and aborted attempts.

For the book I’m working on, in between drafts, I didn’t do any cutting and pasting: I started with a clean document each time, and retyped anything I was keeping from a (printed out) previous draft. This forced me to re-read everything and fix things up as I went. Every draft was start-to-finish, and each draft had a kind of momentum to it. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t a shitty first draft, just that I started each draft with clean potential.

As always: Everybody’s different. Whatever works.

Chance has always been my best assistant


Director Agnès Varda in Faces Places. (Streaming on Netflix.)

I think, of course, of John Cage, and “chance operations,” and how Steven Johnson says “chance favors the connected mind.”

Also, Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World:

More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens.

How I put my weekly newsletter together

Every week, I get emails that start, “I think your newsletter readers would be interested in…”

Let me stop you right there. That’s not how this works.

I don’t send out a list of 10 things I think my readers would find interesting. I send out a list of 10 things I find interesting that I think my readers would find interesting, too.

It might not sound like a big difference, but it is. I could easily fill a newsletter with stuff I think people would like, stuff that would get clicks, etc.

But that is not what I do — in the newsletter, in my books, or on this blog.

I have always lead, first, with what I find interesting and/or helpful, and I assume, if I write about it well enough, the people who find me and my work interesting/helpful might find it interesting/helpful, too.

This is the point of The “So What?” Test in Show Your Work!

So, if you were compelled to pitch me something for the newsletter (which I don’t, by the way, necessarily recommend), the right way to do it would be to share something you think I would like, as in, “I thought you might find this interesting…”

Because people often ask me, maybe now would be a good time to briefly explain how I put the newsletter together:

First off, I don’t have an assistant. It’s just me and my computer in the garage.

I set aside an hour (or two) every Thursday to work on it.

I open up the template I use in Mailchimp, and I’ll usually start by adding an image at the top (probably pulled from my Instagram), which will suggest a subject line.

Then I start with a blank list of ten:

And I fill it.

First, I check this blog and see if there’s anything that I think is worth linking to. (Because I blog every day, there’s usually something, and often 3-5 things, but sometimes not. For example, my post about sausages will not, I’m afraid, make it in the newsletter.)

Then, I’ll check my logbook for any music, movies, or books, etc.

Then, I’ll go back through my Twitter feed, looking for interesting articles, etc.

If I have any big news to share or speaking dates coming up, that gets the #1 or #10 spot, depending.

If it was a slow week, I might go through my Instapaper to see if I faved anything.

And that’s it, really. I’ll send a test email, check links, and schedule it for Friday morning.

People ask how I’m able to do this week after week, and it’s really just about:

  1. A scheduled time & a repeatable format (simple list of 10)
  2. A system of sharing, keeping track of, and revisiting stuff I come across throughout the week (flow -> stock)
  3. Sending out a newsletter I’d actually read, full of things I’m genuinely interested in (write what you want to read)

If you don’t already, you can subscribe here!

…and some sausages!

In the movie 20,000 Days on Earth, Warren Ellis and Nick Cave are sitting around talking about their love for Nina Simone.

Ellis tells his friend’s story about seeing Simone looking pissed off backstage and asking her if he could get her anything.

“Yeah!” she said. “I’d like some CHAM-pagne, some CO-caine… and some sausages!”

It’s become a meme at our house.

“Can I get you anything, darling?”

“Yeah! I want some champagne…”

I thought about that story again when I was watching Phantom Thread, and Daniel Day-Lewis orders that ridiculous list of breakfast items:

At the very end, he adds, “…and some sausages!”

Artists need pockets

In Steal Like An Artist, I pointed out that David Hockney had a special pocket sewn into his suit coats for sketchbook, and the musician Arthur Russell had pockets sewn onto his shirts so he could carry around a pen and a pocket notebook for musical ideas. (You can see his penchant on display in the photos above.)

I thought about Russell yesterday, when I saw designer Kelli Anderson (author of This Book Is A Planetarium) tweet that women’s clothes with no pockets are “a vestigal decision to disempower.” Women’s clothes without pockets, she says, imply that the wearer:

• isn’t expected to build anything
• is invited to contribute her appearance, first and foremost
• should be controlled/surveilled

Like the oblivious man that I am, I’d never given the issue a thought.

In the “Politics of Pockets,” writer Chelsea G. Summers explores the history of pockets, linking to a bunch of cool sources, and summing it up:

Men’s dress is designed for utility; women’s dress is designed for beauty. It’s not a giant leap to see how pockets, or the lack thereof, reinforce sexist ideas of gender. Men are busy doing things; women are busy being looked at. Who needs pockets?

In “Jane Jacobs, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Power of the Marimekko Dress,” critic Alexandra Lange (I can’t wait to read her book, The Design of Childhood) writes about how she noticed that Jane Jacobs and Georgia O’Keefe wore the same dress… with pockets, of course:

Maybe this is a footnote, but it is a fascinating one. In 1963, the same year that O’Keeffe probably bought her dress, Eugenia Sheppard, the fashion critic for the New York Herald Tribune, called such dresses “a uniform for intellectuals . . . Marimekko is for women whose way of wearing clothes is to forget what they have on.” Who could be more desirous of forgetting what they had on than women such as Jacobs and O’Keeffe, who had so much to do? And who would better understand their needs—skirts for riding, pockets for paper and pen—than powerhouses such as Annika Rimala, who designed their dress…

When I was poking around the Twitter responses, I came across this dad, who said he sews giant pockets into his daughter’s school uniforms.

(I will restrain myself from complaining about the contemporary scorn of cargo shorts…)

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