Austin Kleon

The year in notebooks

Here’s what a year of my notebooks looks like. This year I needed them more than ever.

The big ones are my diaries, the medium-sized one is my logbook, and the little ones are my pocket notebooks. (Before 100 people email me: Here’s a list of all my favorite gear.)

Yes, I keep three notebooks. A notebook turducken.

I carry the pocket notebook around all day and scribble every dumb thought I have as the day progresses.

I write or draw 3+ pages every morning in the diary. (Here’s an example of what it looks like inside and why I keep one.)

I usually start a notebook with a guardian spirit.

I have a silly ritual of weighing my notebook before and after I use it.

When I can’t write or draw, I make collages.

I’ve been keeping a notebook for almost 25 years now. And yes, I do re-read them — they’re where many things in my books begin.

If you’re looking for a New Year’s Resolution, keeping a daily notebook is a pretty solid one. It can be hard to get started, so a few years ago, I made The Steal Like An Artist Journal to help. Start with just one page a day and go from there. You might be surprised where your notebook takes you.

The days stack up:

Filed under: Notebooks. (h/t to Mo Willems for the idea)

Do nothing for as long as possible

I sent this Oblique Strategy to a friend who asked what he should do on his 3-week vacation.

The nerd that I am, I have a small library of books about doing nothing: Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle and The Idle Parent, Roman Muradov’s On Doing Nothing, Kenko’s Essays in Idleness, Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, etc.

Even though I feel an enormous laziness in me, I find after about one afternoon of doing nothing I’m ready to go back to work. My laziness is somehow connected to my productivity, like they’re two poles, keeping my life’s rope tight enough to walk on. (Tim Kreider: “I’m the most ambitious lazy person I know.”)

my favorite neighborhood yard sign

I used to laugh at my friend John T. Unger when he said “relaxing makes me tense,” but it’s making more sense as I get older. I prefer drawing to meditation and walking to sitting still.

It helps that I play for a living, so I don’t need much of a break from The Work.

What I’d really like is a break from work with a lowercase “w”: answering emails, scheduling interviews, making deals, etc.

But that stuff I can always blow off for an afternoon or two.

No vacation needed.

Tales of Beethoven

“Art alone deterred me. How could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?”
—Ludwig van Beethoven

Today is Beethoven’s 250th birthday! Well, nobody knows for sure what day he was actually born, but he was baptized on Dec. 17th, so Dec. 16th is generally accepted as the day we celebrate him.  (Check out all the Peanuts strips about Beethoven’s birthday on this wonderful site about Charles Schulz’s use of classical music. I would love to turn this into a book.)

a page from the massive Russian hardcover edition of my book, Show Your Work!

Classical music can be hard to get into for a lot of people. One thing that has helped me is to read stories about the composers and what they got up to. (Composer Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirits is a great starting point.)

Beethoven is ridiculously fun to read about. He’s one of those musical artists who is so ubiquitous and popular that I never really got around to studying him, but once I did, holy moly, he became one of my favorites. Not because his tumultuous life is something to emulate. He was abused as a child and was notoriously difficult and ugly and sometimes abusive in his personal life. (The last musical notes Beethoven ever wrote were next to the words, “We all err, but each one errs differently.”) Like Bach, who also had a rough childhood, the fact that he was able to make such beautiful music out of such emotional chaos is remarkable.

The problem with Beethoven biographies are that some of them are absolutely massive. (Swafford’s acclaimed bio is over a thousand pages.) Years ago, I picked up John Suchet’s 300-page Beethoven: A Man Revealed, and it felt more than enough to whet my appetite. (The excerpts below are all Suchet.)

The rest of this post is some of my favorite Beethoven stories:

a portrait of Beethoven by my son Jules, drawn at age 4

The funny thing about Beethoven is that many of the myths you’ve heard are actually true.

First off, it’s true that he was mostly deaf when he wrote his most glorious music, including the 9th symphony and the late quartets, which is totally freaking mindblowing to me.

He was so deaf he carried a notebook around and had people write their questions in it so he could have conversations:

one of Beethoven’s conversation notebooks, which I cover in my talk about notebooks

…his deafness led him to carry a notebook, so-called “conversation books,” for people to write down their questions. His nephew Karl wrote in one of these, “You knew Mozart, where did you see him?” And in other conversation book a few years later, “Was Mozart a good pianoforte player?” It [the instrument] was then still in its infancy.”

Of course the utterly maddening, infuriating, frustrating fact is that Beethoven spoke rather than wrote his answer, so we have no idea of what he said.

a page of my diary (this story made it into my book Keep Going)

It’s also true that Beethoven was sort of a slob and he looked totally crazy at times, waving his arms, composing in his head, and shouting to be heard.

In fact, he once got arrested by the police when he got lost in the suburbs of Vienna and he started peeking in people’s windows to try to orient himself. A local musician had to be brought into the police station to identify him.

You did not want to rent a room to Beethoven:

There were, certainly, instances of him being expelled from a lodging because of complaints from other residents about his habit of working through the night, pounding on the piano keys to try to hear his music, banging on the apartment walls. He had to leave one apartment after getting in a stonemason to knock a hole in a wall and install a window to give him a decent view, without permission from his landlord.

(My kids adore the Beethoven Lives Upstairs, which is based on these stories.)

another portrait of Beethoven by my son Jules, drawn at age 4

You did not want to challenge Beethoven to a piano duel: he once embarrassed a guy named Daniel Steibelt so bad that Steibelt had to leave Vienna. He never came back.

You probably didn’t want to mess with Beethoven in general.

He once told a critic: “What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.”

He once stood outside of a palace shouting that his patron, living inside, was a donkey.

Another time, he broke a chair over a patron’s head and then got mad when the dude wouldn’t give him any more money.

an engraving of Beethoven his friends said looked the most like him

But my all-time favorite Beethoven story is one of sibling rivalry.

Beethoven’s brother once ended a letter, “From your brother Johann, Landowner.” Beethoven ended his reply with, “From your brother Ludwig, Brain Owner.”

Sick music and sick burns!

Speaking of siblings: one of the reasons I know so much about Beethoven and I’m a classic geek now is that my sons got obsessed with Welcome To Symphony, a book that explains the orchestra by using Symphony No. 5. Here’s an orchestra drawing they collaborated on:

My oldest hummed the opening Symphony No. 5 so much I put little pieces of cheat tape on his tiny toy piano:

Of course, nothing compares to hearing an orchestra perform Beethoven. One of the highlights of my musical life was watching Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic rehearse the 9th symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2015:

Anyways, I dig Beethoven and you should check him out if you haven’t.

The one tricky thing about his music, his symphonies in particular, is that they’re terrible background music. They’re so dynamic and intense they demand your attention.

So if you want to just Chill With Beethoven, or try something not so popular, try the late quartets.

This playlist Teju Cole made is also lovely:

The stories are great, but nothing beats the music.

Ditching work to do your job

George Harrison’s handwritten lyrics (note the “scoobiedoobie”)

Here’s a wonderful story about the origin of “Here Comes The Sun” from George Harrison’s memoir, I Me Mine:

“Here Comes the Sun” was written at the time when Apple [Records] was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that.’ Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun.”

a spread from my diary

Playing is part of the artist’s job description, and sometimes you have to ditch work to do your job.

Sometimes you have to play hooky so you can actually learn something.

(Thanks to @garethchughes for this story and the title of the post.)

Drawing to remember

“Harlan Pepper, if you don’t stop naming nuts…”

I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.

I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)

Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:

If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.

If you want to remember something, try drawing it.

Schedule send

A blind contour self-portrait

I am scheduling this blog entry to post on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020 at 8 a.m. CT.

By the time you read it, I could’ve pressed “schedule” a few hours ago, or a few weeks ago, or even a few months ago. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but whenever you read it, it will be new to you.

In an age of instantaneous messaging, I find this enormously freeing. A nice gap between writing and publishing, sending and receiving.

A bit of technology that has changed my life: Gmail’s “Schedule Send” function.  (Yes, I still use Gmail, even though I know better.)

If I answer emails in the afternoon, I schedule them to go out at 8AM the next morning. This means I don’t get a bunch of replies overnight and it often gives me time to add or edit the email before it goes out.

The problem with sending messages is that they’ll get answered with new messages. If I pick a time to write all my messages, but delay sending them, that buys me even more time to be blissfully unmessaged.

I know this sounds selfish, and it is, but Schedule Send also allows me to be courteous to others: I love the world too much to send it email on a weekend. I might write dozens of emails during a weekend, but none of my correspondents will receive an email on a weekend. This is as it should be.

My dream is to never have to answer email at all.

John Waters says real wealth is never having to deal with assholes, but real wealth for me would also mean no email.

“I don’t even have an e-mail address,” Umberto Eco once said. “I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.” (This was 25 years ago, by the way.)

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things,” Donald Knuth says on his website. “But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

One day I will either have the real wealth or the courage to follow their examples, but for now, Schedule Send makes me feel a little richer.

Related reading: Answering letters

Scraps from the master’s table

My 5-year-old often gets frustrated with his drawings, crumbles them up, and throws them across the room. I pick them up when he isn’t looking and paste them in my notebook.

Yesterday he helped me with my diary:

Joe Brainard’s I Remember

I remember Saturday night baths and Sunday morning comics.

Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a 150-page memoir in which every sentence begins with “I remember…” Here’s a recording of him reading from it:

 

It seems like I Remember would make a great Twitter feed, but unlike something Moby-Dick, I think the sentences lose some of their power out of context. There’s a propulsive force to the book that runs on repetition and accumulation: little mundane bits and pieces adding up to something sublime.

(The book is reproduced in full in this lovely Library of Congress edition of his collected writings.)

Here’s the first page:

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

The comfort of a pencil

“I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones.”
—Patricia Lockwood

I’m at the buy fancy pencils based purely on the aesthetics of the box phase of quarantine.

(Above: two boxes of Mitsu-Bishis and a box of Tombows. Not shown: a box of Bear Claws I bought for my kids. Oh, how I wish I could visit C.W. Pencil Enterprise in NYC right now!)

I didn’t really care much for pencils until a few years ago when my friend Clive Thompson (author of Coders and Smarter Than You Think) turned me onto Blackwing Palaminos. I love those pencils and try to always have one on me, particularly for marginalia and marking up books.

The pencil is a wonderful piece of technology. (Did you know that pencil marks in a notebook will survive a washing machine?)

Here’s Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.

Edward Carey’s spent Tombow B stubs

A pencil hero of mine is Edward Carey, who has drawn a portrait every day of quarantine with one of his beloved Tombow Bs.

Edward says:

There is something so comforting about a blank piece of paper and the lines the pencil can make upon it. The pencil is such a humble object but such a versatile one: It can make very faint marks or the blackest black. It is also very forgiving: If you make a mistake, you can rub it out. A pencil can be anything, and drawing requires no great setup—just a piece of paper and a sharpener, and then it can be kings or trolls, philosophers or grackles.

When I saw a show of Edward’s at the Austin Public Library, he displayed his Tombow stubs in an ashtray. (He used to be a smoker.) This amused me, because I often “smoke” a cigarette pencil:

I’ve become such a nerd I bought pencil extenders, which seem ridiculous, but make every pencil 100% better by extending their life and giving you a big fat grip.

And for sharpening, I use my friend Carl, who brightens any table top:

Of course, some pencils you never want to sharpen, like this pencil my friend Katie gave me in college:

You never know where you’ll find a good pencil! The Blanton Museum doesn’t allow pens in the galleries, so they have these plain ol’ #2 golf pencils, which have an almost waxy lead that’s pretty nice to mark with (I keep a pencil in the elastic band of my pocket notebook):

And, indeed, as Edward notes, “a pencil can be anything.” Here are some pots made out of pencils by artist Nick Zammeti:

Here’s a video of how he makes them:

Graphite, it turns out, is a great conductor:

Pencils can tell jokes with unintended messages:

There are all kinds of pencils! Here’s John Waters with his mustache pencil, which he carries with him at all times (photo by Hayley Campbell):

There’s a lot more to be said for pencils (and their sharpening), for sure, but I’ll end this post with John Baldessari’s “The Pencil Story”:

Related reading: “HBs are for architects”

Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable)

One of my favorite parables about creative work comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear: 

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Like any great parable, it’s the specificity of image that makes it work for me: You can picture the dusty pottery studio, the scales, weighing all the crummy pots and failed experiments.

It makes me think of the actor Seth Rogen, who joined a pottery studio with his wife last year and has been showing his work by posting pictures of his creations on Instagram:

So it was puzzling to me a few months ago when I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits and he retold the parable, but using a photography class:

ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

“What in the hell?” I thought. Why would you move from something like pottery, which is more concrete, to photography, which is more abstract? (What makes a photo good is more subjective than what makes a pot good — you can still hang a blurry photo in a gallery, but you can’t drink out of a cracked mug.)

Then I noticed an asterisk at the end of Clear’s telling and checked the endnotes. Turns out he had emailed with Ted Orland in 2016, and learned the true origin of the parable:

“Yes, the ‘ceramics story’ in ‘Art & Fear’ is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in ‘Art & Fear’ it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).”

(Ted Orland, by the way, was an assistant to Ansel Adams.)

Regardless of the form of the parable, the moral has certainly been true with my own work, especially writing and blogging. The frequency of my work — showing up at regular intervals, without worrying about results — has actually lead to better results.

Quantity leads to quality.

Related reading: Something small, every day, the John Cage parable that changed my life

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