Austin Kleon

Learning to pray with James Martin and Mary Karr

A few nights ago I had a glass of wine and doodled while I watched Mary Karr interview James Martin about his new book, Learning To Pray:

Once upon a time, before Martin’s newest book, I asked Karr for a reading list on prayer and she obliged:

See also: On praying, whether you believe it or not

The stream I go a-fishing in

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Musician James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem has taken up fishing during the pandemic.

“I’m somehow able to get outside myself,” he says, “unburdened for a few hours by whatever it is I really should be doing, while I, instead, do this repeated motion, over and over…”

He says that there’s “a meditative quality to the work” and he often repeats to himself, “Slow is fast. Slow is fast.”

“I needed for time to be meaningless so I could justify spending a few weeks learning how to do this new thing.”

It tickles me that he talks about learning to fish the way some people would talk about learning to play music.

I’m also thinking, well beyond the pandemic, we can declare time “meaningless” any time we want, and give ourself permission to learn new things…

Filed under: fishing

Take me back to the canyon

Three weeks ago, my family and I spent a short weekend at Laity Lodge. I’ve been dreaming about it ever since.

We splashed in the Frio. Hiked in the hills. Watched the sun paint the canyon orange then go dark until the moon climbed up over the side. Gazed at the stars.

Ate wonderful food. Played the old Steinway. Explored the library, found one of my books next to Alan Jacobs and Kierkegaard. Stared at the campfire. (“It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!” Jules exclaimed.) Laid around and listened to the birds and read books.

There’s no cell signal on the property, so you’re just blissfully cut off from the outside world. I found it didn’t take very long at all for my mind to clear out there. Part of this, I suspect, is the 3-hour trip through the hill country and driving through the river before you get to the property. It’s a cleansing.

With free headspace, I thought a lot about my new book. I didn’t anticipate writing at all, but I filled a bunch of notebook pages with maps like this.

After we left, I texted Alan and asked him, “Once you leave the canyon, how do you not spend every day wishing you were back in the canyon?” He texted back, “I totally and absolutely miss it every day.”

Thank you to Gate, Steven, Grant, and the rest of the crew who showed us such wonderful hospitality and gave us such a good gift in a rotten time.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching

In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The book was my father’s; he read in it often. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.

A few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read.

“Well, you’re in the right place,” I said.

We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.

“Lao Tzu?” I said. “I love Lao Tzu.”

We walked together from section to section. I browsed; she talked. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:

Eventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing.

“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”

Every poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders.

And Le Guin’s footnotes are perfect:

If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu.

This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Or this one:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.

* * *

Every Saturday Friday* I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

* In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’m cutting my daily blogging, and hopefully all my online time, down to Monday-Friday.

Look for the helpers

We are living through a disaster down here in Texas, and I am thinking, as I do often, about Mr. Rogers’ mother’s words of advice:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.“

I thought about Mr. Rogers when I saw this message from Thor Harris yesterday morning. Thor is one of the helpers. The folks at HEB are helpers. The Texas Game Wardens are helpers. Look for the helpers and you’ll find them.

For those outside of Texas, Mr. Rogers had more to say about talking to kids about tragic events:

Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. [We] have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything. And that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time.

See also: “How much do we tell our kids?”

It ain’t Grand

“For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
—Hedda Sterne

A few weeks ago, when the sun was shining and everything wasn’t covered in ice, my friend Marty Butler and his family masked up and came over to visit Coconut The Owl. We talked for a long time, the way people starved for conversation do,  and eventually we got to the subject Texans can’t avoid: Texas. We were talking about Austin, in particular, and how the beauty of this place is subtle.

“Texas isn’t Grand,’’ Marty said. “If you want Grand, you need to go west to Colorado or Montana or something.”

The bright side of this, we agreed, was that here you learn to really pay attention, to track subtle changes in the environment, to fire up your eyebeams and search for beauty.

Yesterday I was reading an interview with one of my heroes, the cartoonist John Porcellino, and he said this, about the midwest:

“It’s not like the Rocky Mountains where it’s going to hit you over the head with, ‘Look how majestic I am,’” Porcellino says. “It’s Paw Paw, Illinois. That beauty is there and that majesty is there, but it’s a thing that you have to learn to recognize. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.”

This is something he learned from our shared hero, Henry David Thoreau, who taught us that we receive what we’re ready to receive, and that it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.

Though I have lived in Texas for 14 years, I have never been an evangelist for the place. I came here by chance, and now I live here by choice. (Mostly because a woman I love loves it, and I’d rather live in her world…) But the place has been good to me, and in my own way, I have come to love it. (You know how Texan you are based on how mad you get when people badmouth Texas.)

Here is what I love most about Texas: It has taught me how to find beauty. How beautiful things grow out of shit.

An orange extension cord run to the end of a driveway, offering power to anyone who needs it.

How, without traffic, you can really hear your neighbor’s windchimes ringing in the frozen, silent air.

The icicles on Coconut’s house.

Even now, iced over and on our knees, I can still find beauty, because Texas has trained me to look for it.

It ain’t Grand.

It’s my home.

Pointing at things

John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting: A Painting by William Bowne (1969)

The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things:

Of course, all art is, in a sense, pointing at things! The artist sees something and she points to it so you can see it, too.

Hedda Sterne, in an interview with Art in America, said she thought art was about, saying, “Hey, look!”

The intention, the purpose, is not to show your talent but to show something…. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them.

Something similar from Corita Kent: “I just make things I like bigger.”

Sterne emphasized that she pointed away from herself. To Bomb magazine: “I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.”

It’s the same for writers: Good writing is often just pointing at things.

In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people who want to make writing less hard should just think about showing people something that you’ve noticed. “Look, over there,” your writing should ask, “can you see?

“When you write,” says Steven Pinker, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.”

“Which sounds obvious,” says Burkeman, “except that it makes immediately clear how many writers are doing something else.”

Academics are often more focused on showing off their knowledge, or their membership in an exclusive circle…. Journalists are often trying to inflame your anger, or rally support for some cause.

“The reader wants to see,” Burkeman says, “your job is to do the pointing.”

It is the same for blogging, says Robin Rendle: “blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.” (I like his ordering: not falling in love and then pointing, but pointing and then falling in love. Loving something by paying attention to it.)

a page from

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.

Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

A house for Coconut

Here is a photo of Mike Wilson, a carpenter from South Austin, installing the house we had built for Coconut the Owl  last month. Mr. Wilson used to build owl boxes for his carpentry clients, but now he makes them to fill his days in retirement. His phone is full of photos of owls from the back yards of happy customers. “I’m not making a fortune,” he told me, “but I’m making a fortune in friends.”

Mr. Wilson has built over 800 (!!!) owl boxes for folks all over. He builds two a day and installs two a day. We got box #833. He told me he wants to get well past a thousand. “I just want to keep going,” he said.

The boxes are custom-built with reclaimed wood for smaller Eastern Screech Owls like Coconut, mainly to help protect them from bigger predators, like the Great-horned Owl, but also to encourage them to stick around and have babies.

Mr. Wilson said his quickest box installation to owl inhabitant time was 14 hours, but it took Coconut a little longer… or so we thought.

Here’s a video of her still in the palm tree, chilling in the sunshine on February 3rd.

And here’s a video of “her” four days later, on Superb Owl Sunday, except she was looking a little skinny and angry.

Three days later, on February 10th, she’s looking like herself again, but still not in her house.

And then, two days ago, before our big winter storm, Coconut was looking really mean and miserable. We were getting really worried about her. Why didn’t she go sit in her box?

And then, yesterday… a miracle! Coconut was in her house, looking radiant! I immediately texted Mr. Wilson some photos.

Mr. Wilson was quick to point out that it seems we’ve been looking at two different owls — Coconut, and what appears to be her MATE. Yes, in a perfect Valentine’s Day twist, what appeared to be Coconut in a sad, miserable state, was probably just… well, her husband, basically.

UPDATE (2/20/21): Several people have written to me noting that screech owls puff up when they’re happy and “go skinny” and weird when they’re trying to blend in with the tree. Well, dear readers, I am happy to inform you that we have visual confirmation that there are, indeed, two owls living in the box!

So now we’re all snowed in, and Coconut looks cozy, and it appears that the chance for Owl Babies is looking very, very good!

PS. If you live in the Austin area (he does not ship!) and you want Mr. Wilson to build you an owl box, email me and I’ll give you his number.

The old way

photos from my great-grandpa’s farm

My grandma Laura Helen Wilson Davis (b. 1924) died this week. On December 15, 1999, I interviewed her and my great uncle Phil (1919-2004) for a school project about their childhood living on a farm in Ohio during the depression. Phil was 80 years old, and grandma was about to turn 75. I was 16. These are my notes on what they told me.

* * *

The family was my great-grandma and great-grandpa, Austin and Jessie Wilson, and their seven children, Wells, Paul, Wayne, Phil, George, Laura Helen (my grandma), and Bob.

Every year the farm had about 100 acres of corn, 100 acres of wheat, and 100 acres of pasture. No tractors until they were out of high school. Great-grandpa liked to work with horses — he’d plow corn with two horses in one row.

They had a car, a 1916 Chevy, but no truck. Great-grandpa used to put baby calves and sheep in the back of the car.

They sometimes rode in a horse and buggy, but only for fun.

They milked cows in the morning before school. They worked in the garden, carried water to the animals.

The house had a tin roof, later replaced with slate. There was glass in the front door, so they could see who was coming. When the boys would wrestle, they’d have to put a board in front of the glass to keep them from kicking it out.

They didn’t have electricity until the Rural Electrification Administration, when they got the first lights and radio to their house.

They had little round stoves in almost every room of the farm house that burned coal and wood. In winter the snow would blow in on their beds. They had their windows open all summer. No fans until electricity.

The kitchen had a wood-burning range. When it was too hot, great-grandma used a little kerosene stove.

They took a tub upstairs with a sponge.

Because they had so many children and boys with shirts to launder, they had a gasoline-powered, one-cylinder washing machine.

They had a party line phone with a crank you turned and talked to the operator to connect you. Sometimes the women at home would just talk to the operator.

They stored food in the cellar. Potatoes, canned vegetables, fruit, and meat.

They made ice cream in a hand-turned freezer. Sometimes they went in to town to get a cone.

Great-grandpa didn’t drink anything but water and milk. No soda, root beer, or alcohol. No tobacco. He said he didn’t want to ruin good water by putting coffee in it.

The boys wore corduroy knickers, knee pants, and a shirt. They wore bib overalls to do chores. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, so grandma wore dresses. In the winter, grandma wore long underwear under her stockings and snow pants over her dress. Sometimes kids would dry their wet clothes on the register at school.

Grandma went to high school in the same building where I went to elementary school. In school she studied math, physics, English, history, bookkeeping, Latin, French, and physical education. Professors from the university gave free lessons, so she took violin and played in the orchestra..

They had a wind-up phonograph, but they mostly made their own music. The brothers sang in The Wilson Brothers Quartet, and everyone played an instrument: Wayne on violin, Paul on the saxophone, Wells on the piano, Phil on the trumpet, George on the clarinet, grandma on the piano.

As a high school graduation present, Phil got a radio that was 3 feet tall. It worked on something like a car battery and he had to take it to the nearest town to get it charged up.

Every Sunday morning, they would go to church. Sometimes great-grandma would stay home to cook. Sunday afternoons, there was always lots of company. People visited with each other.

They played basketball in a big round barn on the farm. My grandma met my grandpa when he came over to play ball with her brother George. My grandma played in high school for two years until the state of Ohio decided basketball was too dangerous for girls. That broke her heart.

In summer, they would go to the swimming hole at the creek and play marbles under the big maple trees. The ground was bare from so many kids running around.

It was better to live on a farm during the depression. They lived pretty well. There wasn’t much money, but they always ate. They got agricultural gas rations, so they could drive the car. My grandpa lived in town, and my grandma would bring him milk, butter, eggs, and chickens from the farm.

They always got the local newspaper, and great-grandpa got the Columbus paper, too, to know what was going on. People weren’t as interested in current events until WWII. Another time it was good to live on a farm: farmers tended not to get drafted.

Most folks thought FDR was good for the people. (Except for the “red-hot Republicans.”) The WPA and the CCC really helped.

When the oldest, Wells, went to college it was a big event. It was the first time my grandma saw her mother cry. Several of the boys went to Ohio State. Route 23 was a dirt path, and they would hitch rides up to Columbus and rent rooms. Sometimes they mailed clothes to be cleaned and ironed and mailed back. They came home for a good meal.

I asked them what they thought of young people today, and Phil said, “I think they’re growing out of their pants!”

Neither of them ever thought about making it this far.

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.

There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.

The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.”  So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

I can’t remember if this blackout poem was inspired by the book or not…

One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)

It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.

* * *

[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]

* * *

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

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