Austin Kleon

The Prelude


It’s Bach’s birthday (well, sort of), so I celebrated by playing the Prelude in C Major, my favorite piece for warming up on the piano. (It’s also the piece that pianist James Rhodes uses to teach beginners how to play.)

The alleged bomber blew himself up last night, and I thought today that I was going to sit down and blog about violence, about how hard I am trying to cleanse my house of violence, how violence is not just guns and bombs and knives and fists, but how many kinds of touch can be violent, how words can be violent, how you can stab your salad violently. How I’m not just trying to raise “gentlemen,” I’m trying to raise gentle men, men who have a full range of emotions and expression available to them. But it’s just so hard. Even if they’re home with me all day right now, I can’t protect them. They were born into a country steeped in violence. A country where killing machines are sold in convenience stores. A country that has a longtime habit of dropping bombs on innocent children just like them. A country that sees kids their age shot to death in classrooms and won’t do a thing about it.

The only thing I feel like I can do is make my home a haven, a place where we celebrate things of beauty and rationality and love and peace. Bach’s music is one of those things. James Rhodes went through unspeakably ugly things as a kid, and he has said when he heard Bach on a cassette tape, it “acted like a force field.” When I’m playing Bach, and when I’m listening to Bach being played, the world makes sense, if only briefly. After I play a Bach piece, I feel as though somebody has scrubbed my brain with a Brillo pad.

His music is so amazingly beautiful, but Bach didn’t grow up in some idyllic setting. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who’s written a biography of Bach, says that previous Bach biographies have painted rosy portraits of the composer, not allowing that a mere human could create such heavenly works. But his research has turned up evidence that Bach grew up in a “thuggish world.” (Don’t we all?) Bach was able to do what all great artists do: take their pain and despair and channel it into works of such beauty and truth that they turn us away from our own despair and towards the light. Artists like Bach do us the greatest service of any true artist: they give us encouragement to keep living, to keep going.

A game of chicken


My friend Dave, a few months ago, he asked me, “So what are you excited about right now?” And I couldn’t give him a good answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

I relayed the question to my friend Curt, and he shrugged it off, and said, “That just means you’re looking.”

A few weeks later, I found it. I found the thing to get excited about. The thing to work on.

I was so incredibly excited about the thing I was working on, because it felt completely, 100% my own, coming to me fast, as if it already existed. As if it had always existed. I had an energy, a borderline mania, working on it. All of my parts were in alignment. It felt like I had something that I needed years ago that I think other people need, too. I worked for a solid month, and I came up with the thing, and I delivered the first version of it, and it worked. It was right. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.

And then… I let myself be talked out of working on my vision of the thing into working on something else that seemed only slightly different, but wrong. It was as if, overnight, all my energy, all of my excitement, had been sucked out of me. And I struggled for a week, trying to see the thing that I was supposed to work on. And I couldn’t see it.

This morning I walked past the bomb site and something in me snapped. What the hell am I doing? I asked my wife. She said, “You’ve let yourself be talked out of working on what you know you’re supposed to be working on.”

Now I’m back. And I can see it. And I can see a way of working on it, of making it exist, and putting it out into the world.

And nobody’s going to talk me out of it.

This post was a tantrum. (We all have them sometimes. Forgive me.)

Shook


A bomb exploded in my neighborhood last night on a sidewalk I walk every morning with my wife and two sons. We’re all okay. The boys are oblivious, thankfully, but my wife and I are a little shook. I wanted to get down a couple thoughts:

1. Breaking news is not only borderline useless, it can be downright harmful in a crisis situation like this. Any useful, reliable information we got last night was from the official Twitter feeds of the Austin Police Department and Austin-Travis County EMS.

At one point, I watched a Facebook livestream by local news station KXAN, which was literally just a camera pointed at lights and sirens while a reporter asked witnesses for personal information offscreen. The people in the chat were sharing the phone numbers they heard, joking about calling the witness themselves to get the lowdown. Later, KXAN reported that the neighborhood was going to be evacuated, which was inaccurate and caused unnecessary alarm.

We’ve received text alerts and phone calls on our landline over the past 12+ hours to stay home indoors. Nothing other than those official alerts has been crucial for keeping our family calm or safe.

In the future, if I’m in a situation like this, I plan on making sure my crew is safe, then tuning into official sources until things calm down.

2. Our neighborhood NextDoor has proven to have all the good and bad features of any social media site. The main thread in which neighbors are sharing information was posted by a neighbor immediately after she went outside and was told to get back in the house because there was a bomb. Other threads have popped up, but the software gives you no way to combine threads, so things have gotten chaotic. Posts there have cycled between being helpful (“An FBI agent came to the door and told me…”) to selfish (“When can I leave for work?”) to alarmist (“My guns are loaded!”) to agenda-pushing (“It’s time to go back to a gated community!”) Regardless of the spirit in which they were posted, I’m not sure I could call any of the posts there absolutely essential, save for the official messages. Reading most of the posts, if anything, just made me more anxious and confused. It’s so tempting to seek out and share more information, but more information doesn’t necessarily help.

3. Nature doesn’t care. It’s such a beautiful day outside right now. The neighborhood is still officially locked down, so we missed our morning walk. I walked the perimeter of our house, checked our cars and every corner, and then we went into the backyard and my youngest and I sat in the hammock with the sun on our faces while my wife did a little gardening. The police chopper circled around and around, and at one point, the hawk that flies through the neighborhood seemed to chase it. Life goes on and we’ll go on.

A wartime log


The New York Times ran an obituary today for Anthony Acevedo, who was a 20-year-old American medic when he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He was sent to a Nazi labor camp, and when the Red Cross sent him a care package with a diary and a fountain pen, he started keeping a diary of his time. (The diaries were produced by the YMCA in Geneva — inside reads: “A WARTIME LOG FOR BRITISH PRISONERS.”) The obituary notes that “risked his life by keeping his diary” but he felt “he had an obligation to maintain it.” “He hid the diary in his pants or under hay in the barracks.”

The Times ran this single page, but The United States Holocaust Museum has the whole diary digitized and available online. In addition to the grim details of Acevedo’s experience, there are several drawings:

Even some drawings from pinups in the back:

It’s amazing how just clicking through the digitized images, you get a feel for this diary as a book, an artifact. The Times notes, “The book, with its yellowing pages, became a sort of plaything at home, with crayon scribblings by his children on the last page.” Those scribblings don’t seem to be included in the museum’s scan, unfortunately, but they reminded me of how Charles Darwin’s children doodled on the original manuscript for On the Origin of Species, and how the Hawthorne children scribbled in Sophia and Nathaniel’s marriage diary:

 

I should note, there are several other diaries in the Holocaust Museum’s archives. I’ve saved a search for digitized diaries in English here.

Searching for “Wartime log,” I found another (illustrated) wartime log by Wally Layne drawn in the same style of YMCA book. (I wonder how many soldiers were inspired to keep a diary just by receiving those packages from the Red Cross?) And, of course, now I’m thinking of this WWII poster, from 1942:

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