Austin Kleon

Pluck the day

Today I was reminded of this passage from Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, The Anthologist:

But here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day–it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things–so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant–pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

my son Jules, picking tomatoes

If you look that passage up online, the ending thought is usually left out (even I forgot this part):

And yet if it hadn’t been wrongly translated as “seize” would we remember that line now? Probably not. “Pluck the day free”? No way. And would we have remembered “gather ye rosebuds” without the odd mistake of the “ye”? Probably not. It’s their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.

Emphasis mine.

Eric Carle, collage artist

Carle painting tissue paper

The great Eric Carle has died. I’m not sure how many people know this, but he was actually a collage artist:

My pictures are collages. I didn’t invent the collage. Artists like Picasso and Matisse and Leo Lionni and Ezra Jack Keats made collages. Many children have done collages at home or in their classrooms. In fact, some children have said to me, “Oh, I can do that.” I consider that the highest compliment.

I begin with plain tissue paper and paint it with different colors, using acrylic paint. Sometimes I paint with a wide brush, sometimes with a narrow brush. Sometimes my strokes are straight, and sometimes they’re wavy. Sometimes I paint with my fingers. Or I put paint on a piece of carpet, sponge, or burlap and then use that like a stamp on my tissue papers to create different textures.

These papers are my palette and after they have dried I store them in color-coded drawers. Let’s say I want to create a caterpillar: I cut out a circle for the head from a red tissue paper and many ovals for the body from green tissue papers; and then I paste them with wallpaper glue onto an illustration board to make the picture.

He then added to the collages with crayon — for example, the lines coming out from the body of The Very Hungry Caterpillar:

There’s an absolutely wonderful episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood in which Fred Rogers visits Carle’s studio and they paint together:

Rogers: In this, there’s just no mistakes, is there?

Carle: No, you can’t make mistakes really.

You can also see him cutting and drawing in this trailer for the excellent short documentary, Eric Carle: Picture Writer. (Check to see if your library has access to Hoopla.)

There is a deep, lovely interview with Carle in Leonard S. Marcus’s underrated book of interviews with picture book illustrators, Show Me A Story! (Marcus also wrote the introduction to The Art of Eric Carle.)

The interview begins with this beautiful description of Carle’s studio:

Carle is a precise and energetic man whose large studio hums and clatters at one end with the high-tech whir of computers and scanners, and at the other with the old-fashioned rustling and scratching sounds the artist working with papers, pens, and brushes have generated for centuries.

I was drawn to what Carle said about the importance of chance:

Sometimes you have to listen to chance. You have to look at the crack in the wall. You might follow the crack and be surprised to find a picture in it. It’s like the children’s game of looking at a cloud and seeing an image, say, of a sheep, in the shape of the cloud.

Carle kept files full of hundreds and hundreds of his papers, organized by color, and he said that often he’d go with the first paper he found in the top of the drawer:

I believe in chance. You carry a cup of coffee across a room. You look at it and it spills, or you don’t look at it, and it doesn’t spill. It’s that type of chance I have in mind.

Like many authors, he had a love/relationship with making books. He said it often took a torturous year (or more) to get the idea, but often only a week to actually produce.

In contrast to the pain of publishing, he spoke of the meditative quality of glueing and painting his papers: “It’s like being in an alpha state: total peace.”

A zine about Miles

In the Before Times, I would occasionally make a mini zine to put in my son’s sack lunch before he went to school. Here’s a zine I made for him about Miles Davis. (It’s Davis’s birthday.) I am struck often by how when you make things for others, they wind up speaking to you.

First we read, then we write

a page from Show Your Work!

I don’t read a lot of long biographies — I usually hate anyone after about 250 pages — so it is remarkable that yesterday I finished my month-long project of reading Robert D. Richardson’s trilogy: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

Richardson originally set out to write about William James, but he didn’t feel like he had the intellectual firepower, so he decided to do Thoreau first. It took him ten years, as did all 3 books: his method was to “read everything his subjects had read, in the sequence in which they read it, tracing their intellectual development.”

One of his mentors, Walter Jackson Bate, taught him his 100 chapters of 5 pages each method of composition:

I had a wonderful teacher at Harvard, W.J. Bate, who wrote very great biographies of Keats and then of Johnson, and his advice to me when he discovered that I was daring to write a biography was to write in short takes; if at all possible, to write in short pieces so that the reader feels that he or she is getting somewhere. I mean, that’s a big, heavy book. And people have busy lives and they have lots else to do, and if you can sit down and read four or five pages and feel like you’re getting somewhere instead of these big 30 or 40-page or 50-page chapters, it makes a book readable that might not otherwise seem so.

He passed that advice — be kind to your readers and respect their time — on to his students and other biographers: Write 100 pieces of one to two thousand words on the parts of the life you care about the most, and don’t worry about what order they’re in until you have the pieces.

Now, imagine writing a book so good that Annie Dillard sends you a fan letter, and after “two lunches and three handshakes,” you get married and spend over 3 decades together. (Richardson died last year of complications after a fall. A posthumous book comes out next year.)

Emerson is dedicated to her, and, I could be making this up, but there are several sentences sprinkled here and there that I swear are him showing off for her. (Or, you know, just being really good.)

Here’s his answer to how being married to Annie Dillard changed his writing:

What changed? Everything. I could write a book, but I won’t. I learned from her that you have to go all out every day, every piece. Hold nothing back, the well will refill. She gave me the key to Emerson in one word: Wild. Emerson is wild. I also learned you don’t have to write every day, but you have to go in the room with the piece every day. She told me she looked at submissions from her students for any two words together that she’d never seen together. And finally, I learned I needed to read more. I read maybe 50 books a year that are not part of what I’m writing. She reads many times that. Most days, I’m not even good enough to get into one of her classes.

Adorably, he wrote a short biography of her, too: “She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket-maker.”

If you haven’t read any of his books, before tackling one of these bad boys, I might start with his slim but dense volume of Emerson on the creative process, one of the better books about writing I’ve read, whose title also sums up his method: First We Read, Then We Write.

Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have

John Locke’s system for indexing commonplace books

“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.”
—Logan Heftel

When I was working on Keep Going, I wrote about “the importance of revisiting notebooks,” detailing the notebook method I’d learned from the Two Davids — David Thoreau and David Sedaris — how to get down daily thoughts and mine them for material for larger pieces. At the end of the piece, I wrote:

I have no index for the notebooks (unless you count my logbook), and no way, really, of knowing what’s in them, a condition worsened by my terrible memory, and the fact that one of the reasons I like keeping a diary, as Henry Jones, Sr., said, is because I don’t have to remember what’s in it. I plan on starting an index in the coming weeks, and updating it for each new notebook.

Reader, I… never started that index. And four years later, here I am, my dumb ass, trying to write another book, staring at a crate of notebooks, literally thousands of pages, with no idea what’s in them, really:

a stack of my notebooks in a crate

I have filled pages, but I have missed a crucial step: indexing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who encouraged his friend Thoreau to start a journal and the man who had the most success with the journal > lecture > essay > book method, kept elaborate notebooks just for indexing his other notebooks. He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.

Emerson called his notebooks his “savings bank,” and over four decades, he spent an enormous amount of time in the vault, not just writing, but re-reading what he’d written and indexing.

The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that interested him throughout his life.

As time went on, it took Emerson longer and longer to put lectures and essays together, simply because he had this vast trove to work with. He had no typewriter, no word processor, no computer. Everything was done with ink and paper. His indexes were massive, running hundreds and hundreds of pages. “These indexes themselves, never printed—with one exception—represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.” He wound up with 263 volumes on his shelf.

It could be dreary work, doing all this indexing, but it was crucial as he worked up to a new work. (Emerson’s creative process is so fascinating, Richardson wrote a wonderful slim volume about it, called First We Read, Then We Write.)

I am fascinated by the notebook and filing systems of other writers. In my experience, it’s very easy to write every day and get ideas down, but it’s not so easy to keep track of it all.

(A wild example, I’ll let you click through to read: In his excellent memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt writes about his father’s elaborate system of notebooks that allowed him to write hundreds of erotic novels.)

Comedian Phyllis Diller had “gag file,” which is now housed at The Smithsonian:

Phyllis Diller’s groundbreaking career as a stand-up comic spanned almost 50 years. Throughout her career she used a gag file to organize her material. Diller’s gag file consists of a steel cabinet with 48 drawers (along with a 3 drawer expansion) containing over 52,000 3-by-5 inch index cards, each holding a typewritten joke or gag.

In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comedian showed off a similar “joke bank”:

For the past thirty-some years, Rivers has been filing each and every joke she’s written (at this point she’s amassed over a million) in a library-esque card cabinet housed in her Upper East Side apartment. The jokes—most typed up on three-by-five cards—are meticulously arranged by subject, which Rivers admits is the hardest part of organizing: “Does this one go under ugly or does it go under dumb?”

George Carlin’s file folders

These filing systems are all analog examples, but one of my heroes, George Carlin, embraced an analog/digital system:

I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder… When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it….[In my filing system there are files for all kinds of subjects] but then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles….It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.

“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”

No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.

On Twitter the other day I saw someone point out that the longer you listen to Song Exploder, the more you discover that the Voice Memos app on the iPhone has probably had more of an impact on songwriting than any other piece of software. But recording things in Voice Memos is just one step. The next is listening back to things, finding diamonds in the rough.

Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants, aka the lead singer and songwriter for The Presidents of the United States of America, says he dumps all his raw song ideas into an iTunes playlist and then puts it on shuffle while he’s washing dishes. (I read that Brian Eno does something similar: he makes a tremendous amount of music, and then hits shuffle when he’s answering email, etc., and whatever catches his ear, he investigates.)

Like William Blake said, you either create your own system or get enslaved by another’s. In some sense, this very blog is a system for me to find out what I have: I take material from my notebooks and turn it into blog posts, and the posts become tags, which become book chapters, etc.

But I have a ton of material that never makes it online, and I need to get it out of my notebooks and into an indexed and fully searchable system. I think this will be easiest if I do it as I go, and keep it simple: the minute I finish a notebook, go back and type the whole thing into a .txt file and save it. (And back it up.)

I suspect that rather than being totally dreary, this transcribing step can also be a creative step, and I will see patterns of thought, generate new ideas…

New growth

“Spring cannot be canceled.”
—David Hockney

After the catastrophic ice storm we had in February, it is enormously heartening to walk around the neighborhood 3 months later and see all the new growth and life. One plant at the end of my street that was hacked down to the ground is so tall now that I have to look up to see the top:

The prickly pear cacti that looked like they’d been melted in the microwave have now, in some places, grown a few layers of nubby neon paddles.

There are new fronds spiking out of the top of my battered windmill palms in the backyard.

And although Coconut and her mate have flown elsewhere, a cardinal has made a nest in one of the orange trees my wife has growing in a planter on the back porch. (We have named her “Claudia Cardinale.”)

Spin art

Back in March, I wrote about centrifugal and centripetal forces in reading: books that suck you in, and books that spin you out:

Little bits and pieces have come back to me that I want to collect here.

First, my friend Matt Thomas, who planted the idea in my head in the first place, told me he thinks about what kind of force a piece wants to have when he’s creating it. He asks himself, “Do I want to suck people in or spin people out?”

Matt also points out that these terms — centripetal and centrifugal — are helpful to keep in mind when consuming media of all kinds. There’s media designed to suck you in (social media, slot machines, etc.) and there’s media designed to spin you out (the “spin,” or propaganda, of public relations, etc.).

William James thought we had centrifugal and centripetal forces inside of us:

He identified two human tendencies, the centrifugal, or “expansive embracing tendency,” and the centripetal, inward-moving or “defensive.” He noted that these tendencies represented two different modes of self-assertion, the expansive representing the sympathetic mode, the centripetal the self-sufficing mode, and he wondered, inconclusively, if the two together might add up to self-respect.

In The Dialogic Imagination, M.M. Bakhtin used the terms to describe what happens in the life of a language. Centripetal forces unify and centralize a language, and centrifugal forces push it apart and towards chaos. He said “every utterance” has both these suck and spin forces, and every utterance is a “contradiction-ridden” and “tension-filled” combination of these “two embattled tendencies.”

What has blown my mind the most while investigating these terms is that in physics, centripetal force is a real force, but centrifugal force is an “apparent” force:

“The difference between centripetal and centrifugal force has to do with different ‘frames of reference,’ that is, different viewpoints from which you measure something,” said Andrew A. Ganse, a research physicist at the University of Washington. “Centripetal force and centrifugal force are really the exact same force, just in opposite directions because they’re experienced from different frames of reference.”

If you are observing a rotating system from the outside, you see an inward centripetal force acting to constrain the rotating body to a circular path. However, if you are part of the rotating system, you experience an apparent centrifugal force pushing you away from the center of the circle, even though what you are actually feeling is the inward centripetal force that is keeping you from literally going off on a tangent.

As far as I understand this, what we call centrifugal force is actually just inertia working against centripetal force.

So, for example, if you’re driving fast and you steer into a tight curve, the force you’re feeling pushing you outwards is really just the inertia of your body still moving in the direction you were going in before you took the curve.

(Newton’s First Law is the most important one a creative person can memorize: “a body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.”)

Nerds and science teachers like to harp on this misunderstanding, but I believe misunderstanding can be its own creative act, and using the terms out of their context can lead us to new understandings. I like to think about how much poorer my intellectual life would be if the thinkers above didn’t steal these terms and export them to new places.

I hope this post has spun you out nicely.

My new book club: Read Like an Artist

I’m starting a new book club called Read Like an Artist, hosted by the folks at Literati. 

Every month I’ll chose a book from an eclectic mix of creative nonfiction, novels, artist memoirs, comics, and more, all of which speak to living a more creative life.

You can choose to get the books mailed to you in a handsome package each month, or pick a digital-only, buy your own book option. Either option gets you access to the Literati app, where our discussion will happen.

The fun begins on June 1st, but you can sign up now.

(Unfortunately, only people in the US can sign up right now. Literati tells me they’re working on international memberships. If you have any more questions, please contact Literati!)

My first pick for the club is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

It was really hard picking the launch book! Like choosing a first song on a mixtape, or the first sentence for a book — you have to set the tone. I wanted a book written by a woman who’s a working artist. The club starts in June, so I wanted a book that was deep, but could also be read on the beach. I wanted a book that’s a little weird but still accessible and I wanted a book that speaks to my belief in the creative power of idleness. (A northern Winter is for hibernation, a southern summer is for estivation.)

When I watched Odell’s original talk in 2017, I knew it could be a good book, but the book took off in a big way. Readers were loving it and sharing it and it was selling well by word-of-mouth, but then Obama named it one of his favorite books of 2019, and eight months after publication it finally hit the NYTimes bestseller list. (For the record, it was on my 2019 list, too.)

A bit of trivia: How To Do Nothing came out in April 2019, the same time that my book Keep Going came out. Jenny and I crossed paths at the very beginnings of our book tours in a morning talk show green room in Portland. We took this selfie together:

Anyways, I like reading books a lot more than I like writing books, so a book club seemed like a great idea.

Books are my creative fuel, and reading is at the very heart of my practice as a writer and an artist. Not many people know this, but I used to work the reference desk in a public library. In many ways, I still feel like a librarian: a big part of the joy of my work is pointing my readers “upstream” to the books I love. 

I hope the books I choose will be both useful and beautiful, but most importantly, I hope these books will be fun to read.

I firmly believe that reading should be fun.

Join me!

(And, again, if you have any questions, please contact Literati!)

Fresh air and sunshine

There’s old book smell and then there’s moldering in a smoker’s basement old book smell. For the latter, I find an afternoon splayed out in sunshine and fresh air will do wonders. Wouldn’t try it on any rare or delicate books, but for the merely out-of-print stuff I have to buy used, it’ll do. (I usually spend my days avoiding the Texas sun, but it has its uses.)

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