Austin Kleon – Page 305

3 quick thoughts about walking

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Alissa Walker — a case of nominative determinism if there ever was one — is on Jocelyn Glei’s Hurry Slowly podcast this week, talking about, yes, walking. If you’ve read much of this blog, you know I’m a huge proponent of walking, so I found lots of good stuff in there, especially this little tool you can use to draw a mileage radius on a Google Map to determine your “walkshed.” (A “walkshed” is a walkable area around a point of interest.) Alissa, who lives in Los Angeles, recommends drawing a 2-mile radius around your house to discover your own walkshed and things in your neighborhood you might not have thought walkable.

I had a few thoughts while listening to Alissa, most of them influenced by my recent adventures living in the SW suburbs of Austin, which, like Los Angeles, is not known as the most walkable city on earth:

1. Walking is a way to be present. Not just present as in mindful, or in the moment, but present as in presenting yourself — being seen in a particular place. My wife and I live in push our boys in a huge red stroller around our neighborhood every morning, and almost every time we meet someone who lives in another section of our neighborhood they’ll say, “Oh! You have the big red stroller. I see you out walking.” One time I passed some people participating in a neighborhood 5k, and a guy said, “I see y’all on my way to work—you do a 5k every day!” There is, in E.B. White’s words, a bit of “the indignity of being observed,” but there’s also a sense of identity that comes from being “those people.”

2. Even crummy suburban spaces can be interesting on foot. This is something I learned while reading John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. There are all kinds of bizarre spaces in the suburbs that you don’t come across because you’re in your car. I find a good deal of SW suburban Austin visually repulsive when driving, but I have a favorite six-mile walk I take from my SW Austin neighborhood to the central library, where I had to sort of weave my way behind our neighborhood in a strange suburban no man’s land, past a La Quinta, over the highway, then across the pedestrian bridge, and through the greenbelt to downtown. I see all kinds of weird stuff. (Also: When Alissa said that she likes to “infiltrate as many structures as possible” on her walks, I remembered how much I’d like to also make a case for the weirdness of walking a shopping mall.)

3. You can park with a walkshed in mind. Even when I have to drive on errands, I’ll try to park somewhere that I can do everything I want to do on foot. This, in its own way, can be a kind of exploration. Even a suburban parking lot has bizarre zones in between box stores where you can find bits of weirdness. Sometimes I come across stores that I’ve driven by literally dozens of times but never noticed.

Most things are more interesting when you can see how they work

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Soup

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Yesterday I was not, to put it in Dostoevsky’s terms, worthy of my sufferings. So I went out for ramen. I took Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with me. My copy is an old paperback that belongs to my father-in-law. I’m borrowing it. I have been borrowing it for over a decade.

The first time I read the book was 8 years ago on lunch breaks in the library at the law school I worked for. I loved it then, not just for the words or the message, but for my father-in-law’s teenage underlines and perfect cursive marginalia. I knew my wife when she was young had read the same copy, and I wished that she had made her own underlines, maybe with a red pencil, to differentiate them from her dad’s, and then I would’ve added my own, maybe with a blue pencil. Instead, I took notes on a few index cards and left them as bookmarks.

I was about to crack it again yesterday, when my bowl of ramen came out quicker than I expected. So I let the paperback sit there on the counter as I slurped soup.

Frankl writes a lot about soup. In the concentration camp, soup was life. A cigarette could be traded for a bowl. Cooks would favor some prisoners by ladling from the bottom of the pot for bits of potato or peas, while shorting others by skimming off the top broth. The men told jokes about how they envisioned attending dinner parties in the future where they would suddenly forget themselves and beg the hostess to serve the soup “from the bottom!”

I took my time with the ramen. It was so delicious that at the end I lifted the bowl with two hands and swallowed the very last drop. I felt my spirits lift immediately.

I re-read the book at home this morning, adding my own notes and underlines this time, but in that moment back at the restaurant, I decided I didn’t really need the book. What I needed was the soup.

A person this was not lost on

Monday, January 15, 2018

My friend Alan Jacobs recently quoted Zadie Smith: “To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

Materials, man

Sunday, January 14, 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about materials. Obviously, a painter’s material is paint, a sculptor’s material is bronze or clay. But what of the other, more abstract arts? For example, a stand-up comedian will refer to her material. What, exactly, is that material? Jokes? Stories?

What is a writer’s material? Here’s Annie Dillard:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ”Do you think I could be a writer?”

”Well,” the writer said, ”I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ”I liked the smell of the paint.”

More and more I think that our work — and happiness in our work — is to be found in not only identifying our material, but thinking of it as actual, tangible material that you can see and and hear and touch and smell and even taste and manipulate with your hands. This is easier to do if the material is physical, which is why I think so many writers write longhand, or print out their rough drafts to edit with a pencil, or read their work aloud.

An artist has to have a kind of sensual relationship with her material. She has to find material she can fall in love with, or, maybe even better, she has to love the material available to her. The stuff that’s lying around. (There’s a saying: “Attention is the most basic form of love.”)

Yesterday, I was flipping through a big stack of newspapers, looking for images — material! — and I came across this article, “The Materials Man of the Emirates,” about artist Hassan Sharif: “Sharif’s art insists that nothing is wasted if you make waste your creative source.” As Sharif found out, your material could be, in fact, what others consider trash. That is part of the artist’s job: finding treasure in the trash.

Anni Albers, in a 1938 bulletin for Black Mountain College, wrote about “Working With Material.” She said that modern civilization has caused us to lose touch with our own creativity. Her advice: “we must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness, and experience the most real thing there is: material.”

Over 40 years later, she asked, in “Material as Metaphor,” “How do we choose our specific material[?]” Her answer: “Accidentally.”

Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey their rules and their limits. We have to obey, and adjust to those demands. Ideas flow from it to us and though we feel to be the creator we are involved in a dialogue with our medium. The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become. Not listening to it ends in failure.

She speaks of her own path:

In my case it was threads that caught me, really against my will. To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over. I learned to listen to them and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.

What she learned, in the process of working with threads, she was then able to apply to other materials, for example, learning how ink wants to be with paper. She emphasizes that you really have to work with your materials, understand what they want to become. They will tell you what they want to be if you listen to them. “The finer tuned we are to [them],” she says, “the closer we come to art.”

Materials, man…