Austin Kleon

A portrait of the artist as a young father

My friend Paige took this photo of me with my boys in 2015. Pretty much sums it up.

It’s my sixth Father’s Day. I’ve been in the game long enough that I no longer worry about being a “good” dad, I just want to be a decent one, or at least not a bad one. (Michael Chabon: “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”) A few years ago I made myself this mug:

I wish I had a bunch of wisdom saved up about being a Decent Enough Dad, but it’s just so damned hard, I feel like I know next to nothing. (I find being a decent dad to be way, way, way harder than being a decent writer or an artist. Part of the problem is that you won’t really know if you did a decent job until a decade or so passes.)

I’m thinking this morning of this page from Tibor Kalman’s monograph, Perverse Optimist:

He dedicated the book to his children, “who have made me change my mind about everything.” He wrote, of he and his wife Maira’s decision to have them:

We chose to increase the complexity of our lives by having children. The greatest benefit of having those children has been to look at the world through their eyes and to understand their level of curiosity and to learn things the way they learn things.

Here are a handful of things I think I know about being a dad:

1. Work, children, or a social life. You may pick two at a time. (Nobody wants to hear this.)

2. When you add a member to your family, more than anything else, you increase complexity.

3. If you spend time with children they will teach you to look through their eyes.

4. Copying is how we learn, so “teaching,” or telling what children they should be doing is far less powerful than doing things you want them to do and behaving in ways you want them to emulate.

5. Your kids will not only teach you more than you’ll teach them, if you do it right, you might even learn how to learn again.

6. “The Pram in the Hall” stuff is garbage. A bad equation. By all means, use your children as an excuse to get out of petty stuff you don’t want to do, but don’t you dare blame them for not doing The Thing.

7. If you let them, they will inspire the hell out of you.

See? I couldn’t even make it to ten. Maybe in a few more years…

PS. I see, after pressing PUBLISH, that I failed to type the word “love” in this post. It’s the one-word summary of this whole freaking enterprise.

Let them say it for you

When I’m writing in my diary I like to draw one of my memento mori comic characters and let them say the awful words floating in my brain.

I do this with many bad thoughts, especially my Bad Editor voice. (“This is terrible,” “you suck,” etc.)

It’s a silly little trick to get the thoughts out of my head and no longer feel any responsibility for them.

The last thing you want to hear


It’s a great tradition in American life to cherry-pick Bible verses to shore up your political positions, and as Alan Jacobs points out, if you’re happy with those in power, you drop Romans 13:1, if you’re unhappy, you drop Acts 5:29.

In A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut observed that no politicians seem to want The Beatitudes or The Sermon on the Mount printed in public buildings. “‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”

That reminds me of this wonderful excerpt that Alan posted from Kierkegaard’s journals:

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? […] I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars!

Plug and play studio

I grew up playing music and have slowly acquired a bunch of recording gear over the years, like this Tascam Portastudio 4-track cassette recorder. I bought in high school and spent endless hours hunched over it. The thing still works!

My 5-year-old and I have recorded some tunes on tape, but he really loves recording in Garageband on the iPad. I don’t blame him: I’m constantly amazed at how powerful the iOS version is.

I wanted to build us a little plug & play recording station and resurrect some of my old equipment (old keyboards, SM-57s, some condenser microphones), so here’s what we’ve set up:

So, for about a $150 investment, I can have all my old microphones, bass guitar, and keyboard plugged in at all times, and all you have to do is plug in an iPad (or an iPhone!), fire up Garageband, select the inputs, and go. I’ll often make a drum pattern with the built-in sequencer, then record myself singing and playing my old Yamaha piano through the MIDI input. It’s fun to do the basic tracks, unplug the iPad, then sit on the couch with headphones and do the mixing.

I’m constantly amazed at the technology my kindergartener has access to, but, as always, the hardest thing about music isn’t the recording technology, it’s writing a song worth recording!

A seat down front at some bad play

America had a particularly idiotic day yesterday (I mean, pretty much every day in this country seems dumber and meaner than the last one) and I thought of a line in Horace’s Epistles (translated by David Ferry) summing things up after the ancient poet has described man’s relentless pursuit of money:

All for a seat down front at some bad play?

The Adventures of Johnny Broom

When I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, I kept thinking about how some of the stories about Johannes Brahms would make perfect Kate Beaton comics (a la “Chopin and Liszt” or anything in Hark! A Vagrant or Step Aside, Pops). I doodled a few in my sketchbook:

I’m currently learning his Waltz in A Flat, which is just beautiful:

A fun fact: Brahms was Charles Schulz’s favorite composer, but he thought Beethoven was funnier for Schroeder’s obsession:

Next up: reading Swafford’s biography of Brahms…

Dark Days

Part of the problem with depression is that it’s somewhat beyond description, and almost impossible to fathom for those of us who haven’t experienced it. I’ve been bummed, sad, melancholy, etc., but never actually depressed or suicidal, and I never really began to understand depression until I read William Styron’s 80-page memoir, Darkness Visible:

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description… it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

Styron does his best to describe it for the reader:

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

I might also recommend Allie Brosh’s comics, “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two,” collected in her book, Hyperbole and a Half:

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.

(I have not read Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, but I loved his book Far From The Tree.)

A few of my friends have written about their experiences, including Mike Monteiro and Clayton Cubitt.

I wish y’all well. Hang in there.

Summer reading assignment

I indulge in silly little writer fantasies, like rehearsing my answers for the “By The Book” column in the NYTimes. (“If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” Lydia Millet had a good answer: “This president? Yes. One book.”)

On Twitter, Erika Hall asked, “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” She got good answers, many of which might be on my list: Amusing Ourselves To Death, A People’s History of the United States, The Fire Next Time, etc.

If I gave a summer reading assignment to every American, here’s what it would be:

  1. Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
  2. Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
  3. Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)

That’s it.

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