Austin Kleon

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Yesterday, I was looking at this Stairway to Nowhere in my hotel — the kind of “luxury” hotel with lots of fancy finishes and no ice in the ice machine — and I was thinking about the news, and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind, as it often does these days:

Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes…

“It’s strange people think they need Arendt or Orwell to figure things out,” Jeet Heer tweeted not long ago, “when everything was spelled out in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”

The story was published almost two centuries ago, in 1837, along with “The Little Mermaid,” as the third installment in Andersen’s Fairy Tales Told for Children. You might remember the child shouting out the truth, but you might not remember the whole ending:

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.

“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”

“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.

After I finished the story again, I thought of 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose autism informs her approach: “I don’t fall for lies as easily as regular people, I can see through things.”

To the politicians, she says: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”

But will anybody listen? Will anybody change? “Is my microphone on?” she asks.

Children are able to see through our bullshit, but if we don’t respect them and listen to them, we learn nothing from them, and nothing changes. The Emperor is allowed to proceed, because “the procession has got to go on.”

An alternate world

“You wake up in the morning, look out at the day – blue sky, fluffy clouds – then go online and ten minutes later you have lost the will to live.”
—Nick Cave

Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files is my favorite newsletter, and today’s letter was so beautiful I wanted to share it here. It’s about giving our children a way of avoiding despair and coping with the onslaught of apocalyptic news and other assorted garbage in our streams every day:

I have always seen it as a kind of parental duty to show my own children beautiful stuff, and in doing so reveal to them an alternate world. By beautiful, I mean interesting, inspiring, ambiguous, challenging and sometimes dangerous things that exist within the world of art. I feel that the online world provides us ready access to a vast and ever-deepening barrage of bad shit, where the cruel reality of the world is well covered. This continual onslaught of negativity can erode our souls and the souls of our children. My job is to show my children that there is a whole universe that exists beyond the grim issues of the day. This is not to divert them from certain truths, but rather to remind them that the parallel world of art and the imagination can literally save their lives, as it certainly saved mine.

Read the whole thing here.

Big wolf energy

The 4-year-old is obsessed with The Three Little Pigs and his Big Bad Wolf drawings are so good that whenever things are going right my wife and I have started joking, “It’s that Big Wolf Energy!”

Art at the airport

TSA madness aside, Atlanta might be my favorite airport in the country right now because of all the wonderful public art they have on display throughout the terminals.

Yesterday, I got off a flight and saw one of Brian Dettmer’s book autopsies. (Part of very cool “the book as art” exhibit in Terminal E.) This morning I saw their permanent display of Zimbabwean stone carvings in Terminal T. (Picture above.)

A few years ago as I was walking between Terminal A and B, a pilot stopped to show me the “Flight Paths” exhibit.

“A piece of art located in a prominent spot in the airport will be seen by as many people in a week as visit MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) over the course of a year.”

Imagine if airports across the country filled their walls with art, played Eno’s ambient music over the speakers, and tuned all their horrible airport TVs to Turner Classic Movies…

Diner diary

One of my favorite things ever is to sit in a diner with a cup of coffee and a notebook and record whatever comes into my head. (See my posts “The magic of diner booths” and “Community and creativity in mundane retail spaces.”)

Diners are especially comforting to me on the road. You spend so much time in motion, it’s nice to sit still and let the world move around you. To catch your breath and catch up with yourself.

The food doesn’t hurt, either. (This is Pam’s Farm House, outside of Raleigh, NC.)

Want quick knowledge? Visit the children’s section

Here’s a unposed stack of books I found on our coffee table over the weekend. (When we have obsessions around here, we give in to them, completely, and feed them many, many books.)

I often think about how the kids’ books do a better job of informing and entertaining on various subjects, so I got a kick out of this bit from Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, who admits he was “never a diligent student”:

I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge. I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it.

I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.

Another Jeopardy connection: the Ken Jennings books illustrated by Mike Lowery are a big hit with our nonfiction-loving six-year-old.

(via @mattthomas)

Phones smash, notebooks bend

Robert Macfarlane’s notebooks

Robert Macfarlane shares the notebooks he accumulated while working on Underland, and why he sticks with paper:

People sometimes ask me why I don’t use a phone to take notes when I’m ‘out’ in the field. The answer is that phones smash, while notebooks bend. I also like the way that notebooks record where they’ve been not just in terms of what’s written in them, but also in terms of the wear they bear as objects.

In a wonderful thread on Twitter, Alastair Humphreys shared one of his, soggy from the field:

A soggy notebook of Alastair Humphreys

Here’s one of my own notebooks, which got soaked while encountering the wilds of my washing machine:

And elsewhere on Twitter, user @bernoid shared their nature journal to much fanfare. (They take a hybrid digital/analog approach: Photos out in the field, drawings later in the notebook.)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Paper is a woonderful technology.

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