Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Search for "log book"

Search Results for: log book

You can’t create under surveillance

The biggest misinterpretation of Show Your Work! is the idea that you should show everyone everything all the time. Just set up a 24/7 webcam over your desk and let people watch. (I won’t name any names, but when the book was still being written, the title Expose Yourself was thrown out there.)

Not only do I think it’s a bad idea to share while you’re actually doing your work, I think it’s a fast track to destroying your work.

It’s nearly impossible — not to mention extremely unpleasant — to work with people looking over your shoulder. There’s “the indignity of being observed,” but there’s also the observer effect: the idea in quantum mechanics that by simply observing a system, you change it. (This happens all the time in my everyday life: I’ll spook a bird by trying to take a photo, or I’ll praise an in-progress drawing and the kid will run out of the room.)

A few years ago, Tim Kreider wrote of becoming a meme:

You can’t write — or live — if you imagine the whole world watching over your shoulder, waiting for you to screw up, ready to mock or vilify you. Which, thanks to the internet, it now is.

I thought of Tim when I read this recent interview with with Dave Eggers, about his new book, The Every:

My theory is that a human under surveillance can’t create. Not really, at least. The staff at the Every are judged on every movement, every keystroke and each thing their pupils land on. It’s all observed and recorded and measured, and this creates a low-level vibration of paralysis for everyone, for fear of saying the wrong thing or making any kind of mistake that will never be expunged. But to create, you have to tap into the anarchist part of yourself; there can’t be rules and there can’t be anyone looking over your shoulder, and you can’t wonder what a troll in Tallinn will think of your idea.

It’s bad enough trying to create something when nobody’s watching — the worst trolls are the ones that live in your head!

The danger of sharing online is this ambient buildup of a feeling of being surveilled.

The feeling of being watched, or about to be watched.

You have to disconnect from that long enough to connect with yourself and what you’re working on.

“To me, being a genuine writer means that you’re able to shed all human dignity in a moment,” says Chuck Palahniuk. “People depend on you to express something that they can’t express.”

Don’t be afraid to disappear.

Hide and seek.

Input as collage

In Edgar Wright’s outstanding film The Sparks Brothers, Stephen Morris, the drummer in Joy Division, says they were listening to two records on repeat when they recorded “Love Will Tear Us Apart”: an LP of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits and Sparks’ No. 1 in Heaven.

My first reaction was “Whoa!” But the more I think about it, the more the mashup makes sense: isolate the vocal of “Strangers in the Night” and put it over the backing track of “La Dolce Vita.”

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media. (For example, reading art books and physics books at the same time, or watching a lot of westerns and kung fu movies at the same time or looking at paintings in a museum while reading physics papers while watching kung fu movies, etc.)

There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

In Art & Physics, the writer and surgeon Leonard Shlain wrote about his interesting method of “self-education” in the books’ subject matters:

Serendipitously, I discovered a way to heighten my creativity. My habit was to read a popular physics book late at night until the snooze gremlin nudged me with the signal that it was time to call it a day. Prior to falling asleep the following night, my mind relatively empty, I leafed through art books. The next morning, I would often connect images I had seen the night before with concepts in physics contained in my previous night’s reading. Something mysterious happens in the creative process during dreamtime, and I am an avid proponent of the school that advocates, “sleeping on it.”

It’s been pointed out before that dreams and collage work in the same kind of holistic, non-logical, non-linear manner. I love the idea of our brains gluing together the bits while we slumber…

Cool Tools podcast

I talked to Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder for Cool Tools, and it was some of the most fun I’ve had recording a podcast.

We laughed a lot but also went deep into how I feel about technology. (Basically: “The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.”)

The four pieces of my favorite gear I recommended:

You can read more and listen here.

A tingle in the scalp

How do we know when we have something?

* * *

Of his recording work on Thriller, Quincy Jones says, “We simply did what gave us the goosebumps.”

* * *

“Goosebumps are the result of tiny muscles flexing in the skin, making hair follicles rise up a bit. This causes hairs to stand up. Goosebumps are an involuntary reaction: nerves from the sympathetic nervous system — the nerves that control the fight or flight response — control these skin muscles.”

* * *

“Frisson (French for ‘shiver’), also known as aesthetic chills or musical chills is a psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory and/or visual stimuli that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia (skin tingling or chills), sometimes along with piloerection (goose bumps) and mydriasis (pupil dilation).”

* * *

“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and purt science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

* * *

“The tipoff for me is somatic. Whenever a project comes to me, one that is right, that is genuine, I feel a kind of ‘shiver’ in my body, and that tells me that it corresponds to something very deep in me, and that I need to pursue it. That has been my guide with literally every book I wrote. Trusting this kind of visceral reaction means that you are willing to let life ‘come and get you.’ It means who you are is defined from the inside, not the outside. In terms of what’s really important, we don’t have much choice, and that’s as it should be. The decision is made by a larger energy or unconscious process, and when it’s right, you know it… Goethe wrote: ‘Man errs as long as he strives.’ Sit still, meditate, just let the answer arise from the body. (It may take a while.)”
—Morris Berman

* * *

“‘Oh, yes, father,’ he said. ‘I’d like to earn a living, I really would. I’d love to learn how to get the shivers. That’s something I don’t understand at all.’ […]

The father could only sigh. ‘Well, it won’t do you any harm to find out about the shivers,’ he said, ‘but you won’t get a living by shivering.’”
—Philip Pullman, “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About The Shivers,” Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

* * *

“When I make a connection between two disparate subjects, I can almost feel my scalp tingle. I imagine the dendrites in my brain reaching out to make new connections to old knowledge. To me, setting my scalp atingle is one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing…”
—Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics

* * *

I’m waiting for that tingle in the scalp.

Rewinding your attention

In “less search, more feed” style, Clive Thompson recently wrote about “rewilding your attention,” or avoiding what the algorithm is trying to push at you:

My phone keeps trying to autocorrect “rewilding” to “rewinding,” and I’m choosing to take it as a sign: rewinding can be a kind rewilding.

Rewinding your attention, for many of us who grew up in the wilder days of the web, means going back to older ways of attending. (Clive’s solution is also the solution of Rob Walker and some of my other more interesting friends: cultivate weird RSS feeds in Feedly. And read weird books.)

For me, it also means going back to my beginnings, remembering the weird interests that brought me to my work, re-discovering and maybe re-investing in those interests, and sharing them in the way that has brought me so much…

Update: Clive has dropped a list of 9 ways to rewild your attention!

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.