Austin Kleon

The reader approaching middle age

“Peak,” 2014

I’m turning 40 in a few months and trying not to think too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.

Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, “I think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now it’s just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? I’m supposed to pay for this? Lol”

I had a good laugh at this. It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) or Teen Vogue or AARP.

This would be the publication equivalent to Kevin Kelly’s advice, “When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.”

I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friends for youth spies and for an elder perspective, I ride bikes twice a week with a 75-year-old who is still mad that Dylan went electric.

Everything changes, always, but I’m enjoying this age at the moment.

One year of biking

Golden hour on the way to the Austin FC game

Last March I fell in love with riding a bicycle, and since then, I’ve blogged about my adventures here and there.

A batch of thoughts and things I’ve learned off the top of my head, many inspired by Grant Petersen’s Just Ride and Bicycle Sentences, which have a kind of punk, unfussy ethos that meshes with my own:

1. If you’re new to biking, just go to the bike shop and try out some bikes and buy whatever’s in your budget. Don’t fuss over it too much. After six months of riding you’ll know what you really need and want.

2. Better to ride up a hill than to ride into the wind. You’ll overtake the hill eventually, but you can’t overtake the wind. Also: Everywhere seems flat until you try to bike it. There is no flat. (Kevin Kelly said this to me.)

3. Get a basket or a pannier. I always ride with one of my bags now. You never know what you’ll want to pick up when you’re out riding. Biking is this perfect pace between walking and driving — you take in more than you would walking, but it’s still easy to spot things and stop and investigate.

4. Start a bike gang. It will make you happy. Easiest way to do this is start riding regularly — taking off at the same time and place — with one other person. Pretty soon you’ll have a gang. Give your bike gang a stupid name. My bike gang is called The Turtles, because our sensei, Hank, aka Master Splinter, who is 75, always says, “Off like a herd of turtles!”

5. A two-hour ride is plenty long. Anything longer than that is vanity and wankery and needs to be broken up with lunch or beers. Better for a ride to be too short than too long.

6. If your friend asks you if you want to ride, drop everything, if you can, and go out. Always worth it. Some of the best rides I’ve had were with my pal Marty in the middle of the afternoon when we probably should’ve been working.

7. I don’t know what it is about men, but two men can ride and have an intimate conversation with each other, but 3 quickly becomes a locker room, somehow, unless somebody’s being left out. (I like to ride in the back when we have 3, it’s like having ambient chatter and camaraderie, but I can withdraw into my thoughts a bit.) Even numbers, like 4 riders, means you can pair up and have conversations.

8. Keep a bike that you can hop on without much fuss so you can go out for short rides whenever you want. It’s nice to have a simple, fun, extra toy-like bike for errands and joy rides.

9. Look out for dogs, children, and Lexus drivers. All wildly unpredictable.

10. Riding a bicycle is a beautiful paradox — it requires you to become one with the machine while also making you feel more human.

I probably have more that I’ll remember the minute I hit “publish” on this post, but that feels like enough for now.

Nobody said it better than Mark Twain: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”

Happy riding.

A journal is a magic space to hang out

The journal of Paulus Berensohn

A reader sent me this video of artist Debra Frasier talking about how she creates a picture book:

Towards the middle of the video, she talks about how critical her journal is to her process, how it’s “this active space where a kind of magic happens… it’s not a scrapbook, it’s not a diary, it’s this place.”

She learned to think about journaling this way from her mentor, the artist Paulus Berensohn, a dancer who turned to pottery. (He wrote a popular book called Finding One’s Way With Clay.)

There’s a documentary about Berensohn called To Spring From The Hand, and the website is full of all kinds of interesting stuff about his life and work.

In the mini documentary, Soul’s Kitchen, Berensohn talking about his journal and bookmaking workshops. He says:

The journal is not so much a way of diarizing one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out, with your imagination, your intuition, your inspiration.

His emphasis on the journal as a place reminded me so much of what I’ve learned from Lynda Barry: that the page is a place where you go wandering around. (Because I don’t believe in coincidence: I wrote that post on this day 4 years ago.)

Debra Frasier makes an appearance in the documentary and she explains what Paulus taught her:

That you have this antenna that knows where you’re going before your body knows where it’s going. So if you have this journal space, and you allow yourself to trust whatever is drawing your attention, and put it into that journal, it gave me a way to magnetize the question, be alert to the answers, and have a place to store it.

Berensohn himself said making a journal was “like building a nest,” which reminded me of Thoreau’s idea about nest eggs.

Recently I saw a piece about how Americans don’t hang out anymore.

But not only do we not seem able to hang out with others, we can’t even hang out with ourselves.

Your journal is a place to do that.

(And I suspect that if you can hang out with yourself, you can get a little bit better at hanging out with others.)

On this date

One of my new studio routines is to re-read my diaries on today’s date. (Something I learned from reading Thoreau’s diary.)

So, today, for example, when I got in the studio, I went to March 27th of each year 2017-2022 and read what was there. There are almost always weird connections and things worth writing about.

I thought it would be fun to be able to this with my blog, too, which is much older than my diaries, so I used ChatGPT to help me write a WordPress widget that shows me “On This Date” posts from the past few years on my sidebar. 

3 posts it turned up that spoke to each other:

2019: Unboxing my copies of Keep Going for the first time.

2017: My notes on a show by Nina Katchadourian, who was a big influence on Keep Going.

2008: “Overheard on the Titanic,” a post that ended up being my most famous blackout poem and opens Keep Going.

 

It will be fun to check the blog every day for the next year and see what comes up.

Exercises like this reinforce my belief in the cyclical nature of time.

* * *

Update (3/28/2023): Today serves me the original “How To Keep Going Talk” from 2018 and “Potential Reactions” from 2015 that made it into the book. And from 2019, “The Page is A Place,” which is spookily similar to a post I wrote this morning, “A journal is a place to hang out.”

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