Austin Kleon

Embrace bewilderment


Here is a sign I saw on yesterday’s ride through the Johnson Creek Trail here in Austin.

I thought of the poet Rumi, who wrote: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

@austinkleon

A message from my favorite sign

? original sound – Austin Kleon

My riding partner is traveling, so I’ve been taking slow, solo rides.

Wandering the streets (and trails) with a wandering mind.

Getting somewhere I didn’t know I was going — that’s the goal, in rides like these, and in making art.

Here is another sign I saw on my way home:

Filed under: signs

A message for graduates

I recorded this message a few years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, based on some pages from Steal Like An Artist:

The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As the writer Steven Pressfield says, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”

This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage. No huge paycheck on the line. No stockholders. No e-mails from your agent. No hangers-on.

You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.

Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts.

If you need a last-minute graduation gift, might I suggest the new 10th anniversary edition of Steal and maybe a gift subscription to my newsletter?

Is a bike ride creative?

“I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of – bicycling!”
—Thomas Hardy, 1896

Is a bike ride creative?

Sometimes it certainly feels that way.

You pick a time, you get your gear together, and you set out to see what happens.

Same with writing and drawing: You set aside some time, you get out your pens and notebook, and you see what happens.

Paul Klee said drawing was taking a line for a walk.

Or maybe a ride?

A drawing is a paper trail.

If you use a ride tracker, at the end of the ride, you can see your trail traced on the map.

The trails look like abstract drawings or wire sculptures.

A drawing made with your bicycle!

Mixing colors

Whenever I empty out a black ink cartridge that comes with one of my beloved brush pens, I think about adding another color to my set. This week I added a green by filling about 2/3 of the cartridge with lemon and the last 1/3 with blue:

It’s pretty, but it’s also interesting how easy it is to get green by drawing yellow and covering it with blue. Also, I really like the constraint of the CMYK brushes.

What I could really use is an orange. (Magenta on top of yellow just gets a vibrant red.) I think the same mix ratio (2/3 lemon, 1/3 magenta) should do the trick. Will report back later!

Update (6/2/2022) I mixed some orange, too:

Not bad!

PS. Here’s how I fill them using a blunt-tipped syringe:

Bicycles and re-enchantment

a picture of a river and a bicycle
A picture from this morning’s ride

In an essay called “Talking About Bicycles,” C.S. Lewis recounts a “friend” telling him about the different “ages” of his riding a bicycle: first, the bike meant nothing to him, then he learned to ride it, and became enchanted, then, by riding it to and from school, he became disenchanted. Now, taking up the bicycle again, he became re-enchanted.

I think there are these four ages about nearly everything. Let’s give them names. They are the Unenchanted Age, the Enchanted Age, the Disenchanted Age, and the Re-enchanted Age. As a little child I was Unenchanted about bicycles. Then, when I first learned to ride, I was Enchanted. By sixteen I was Disenchanted and now I am Re-enchanted.

I feel this very deeply. I also feel it in terms of the city in which I cycle: I’m not sure I was ever fully enchanted with Austin, but I certainly became disenchanted with it. And now, somewhat thanks to the bicycle, I am re-enchanted with Austin.

There is magic here because there is magic everywhere… if you know how to look for it.

(Thanks, Alan!)

Mapping your books

A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)

Homework every night for the rest of your life

Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)

“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.

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