Austin Kleon

10 good books I read this summer

Here are 10 books that helped me through the long summer, listed in the order I read them:

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Larry McMurtry

“Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” McMurtry’s first book of essays, published in 1968, after his novel, The Last Picture Show. Belongs on the shelf next to Wright’s God Save Texas and other great books about this insane state I happen to live in. (Related reading: The Pirate Gardener.)

 

Smile: The Story of a Face
Sarah Ruhl

“Imperfection is a portal. Whereas perfection and symmetry create distance… imperfection and the messy particular had the power to open the heart.” I loved Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, so I was delighted to read an advance copy of her memoir, which comes out next month. A playwright, McArthur “Genius,” and mother of 3, she writes beautifully about the intertwining of her art and everyday life.

 

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
Rosecrans Baldwin

“Less of a city than a country. Less of a community than a climate. Less of a metropolis than an eighty-eight-city nation-state.” I picked this up because I am fascinated by all things Los Angeles. (I try to get out there to see my friends at least once a year, but it’s been over two years since I’ve seen the Pacific!) LA is one of those cities that everybody has an image of, but I really had to have it explained to me before I could get my head around it…

 

Cyclopedia Exotica
Aminder Dhaliwal

As an almost-lifelong four-eyes, I love thinking about vision and I love comic stories that take full advantage of the medium, so Dhaliwal’s book about a world in which Cyclopes are a minority group was right up my alley. “I remember saying to a friend, I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that’s, like, so old. Is it even worth doing?” Dhaliwal said in this profile. Lucky for us, she kept going.

 

Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg

“Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization,” Klinkenborg writes. “Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you.” This is simply one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read. Up there with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and other classics. (Related reading: “The most important thing you do.”)

 

Walkman
Michael Robbins

Great cover. I read this poetry collection one poem at a time, one poem per meal:

“I wish I had a shed out back…
I don’t mean
some romantic Unabomber
shit, just a shed.”

Big same!

 

Prince and the Parade and Sign O’ The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986
Duane Tudahl

I am a recording nerd who grew up obsessing over books about The Beatles’ recording sessions, so I tore through the official the Prince archivist’s second volume chronicling the Purple One’s unbelievable output at what was arguably the height of his powers. (Read along with this Spotify playlist!) Tudahl’s volume about the Purple Rain sessions inspired another playlist and made my favorite reads of 2018. I will read as many of these as he puts together.

 

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke

These can be lonely times, and this was the right book at the right time for me. Somewhat unclassifiable — my favorite kind of book! —  it’s not a traditional comic in panels, but more a kind of illustrated nonfiction essay. Made me want to re-read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and pick up Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. I’m now a big fan of Radtke’s work, and I look forward to reading her first book, Imagine Wanting Only This.

 

Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica

I’d known about Jess’s work for years, but never really spent much time getting to know it in detail. This is a gorgeously-produced collection of the San Francisco collage artist’s work — the fold-out poster and extra booklet reminded me of some of Chris Ware’s book design. Other books about the artist I picked up: Jess: To and From the Printed Page and An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle.

 

Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light
Leonard Shlain

Alain de Botton once said that the least interesting thing about religion is whether it’s true or not, and I feel that way about Shlain’s thesis that great artists anticipated leaps in physics — sometimes by several centuries. What is thrilling to me as a reader is to watch a sharp mind work through the history of these two fields and juxtapose their developments. (There’s a nice afterword in new editions about how the surgeon came to be a writer.)

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Don’t be afraid to disappear

a blackout poem that reads don't die simply disappear a while
a blackout from Show Your Work!

I didn’t catch the Emmys last night, but I was moved by this acceptance speech from Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You: 

“Write the tale that scares you. That makes you feel uncertain. That isn’t comfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”

(Silence is a space for something to happen. And it is unpredictable! It takes courage to disconnect, not just to get over FOMO, but to get over the fear of what you might discover about yourself when writing.)

For those who didn’t win anything or who weren’t even nominated, there’s Yeats’ “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”:

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

Back to the bliss station to make the next thing…

Sally Mann’s Hold Still

My October pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Sally Mann’s Hold Still. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

Sally Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. (While best known for her photography, Mann holds a BA in literature and an MA in creative writing.) This book covers her long, interesting life and career, including her friendship with the painter Cy Twombly (there’s a surprising scene of him people-watching outside of a Walmart) and her struggle to make art while being a mother to three children. It’s not often that an artist can tell their own story in prose that sings, and that’s what makes this book so special to me.

This book was on my list of 5 great books about art and motherhood, and a portion of the book also reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art:

Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral…

On this subject, the story has a sad afterword, which I will leave readers to discover for themselves.

To join our discussion, sign up for the club!

What does a seed look like?

what does a seed look like?

Here is a zine inspired by my friend Steven Tomlinson. (Steven also inspired one of my favorite bits in Steal Like an Artist.) Most of what I learned was from The Book of Seeds. (If you scroll to the end of this post, there’s a PDF you can print out with a video tutorial to make your own!)

  

Here is a PDF of the zine that’s free to download and print so you can make it into your own booklet:

Download the PDF

Here is a video showing how to fold and cut and fold and glue it into a booklet:

Filed under: zines + seeds

Comics and facial recognition

While taking a photo of Kristen Radtke’s wonderful book, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, I noticed my iPhone camera was trying to recognize some of the faces in the comic. 

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Humans are programmed to see faces in almost anything. But I got to wondering how realistically drawn a face had to be in a comic strip for the machine to recognize it. So I pulled out one of my comics anthologies and did some tests:

The funniest and most meta recognition was in this strip of James Kochalka’s American Elf, in which he draws himself realistically:

When it came to Love and Rockets, I expected the machine to recognize Jaime, but not Beto. I was wrong:

Another sampling of cartoonists whose faces got detected, clockwise, from top left: Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, and, surprisingly, Ben Katchour.

My initial hunch — that the more abstract a face is, the less chance the machine would recognize it — turns out to be generally true, but not completely.

For example: @dribnet on Twitter pointed out that you can create a drawing that looks abstract to humans, but gets picked up by face detectors,” which he’s done here and here:

I don’t have anywhere that I’m going with this, I just thought it was interesting…

Prince and Pessoa’s heteronyms

Reading Duane Tudahl’s books about Prince’s recording sessions, it’s mind-blowing to realize just how much music Prince was making all the time, sometimes recording two to three songs in one day.

Prince had so much music in him that it was impossible for the record company’s machinery to absorb it into the release schedule, so he wrote and recorded music to give to other acts. For these acts, he channeled different parts of his personality, and he adopted many alter egos and pseudonyms, such as: Camille, the sped-up voice you hear on tracks like “If I Was Your Girlfriend”; Jamie Starr, credited with the production of Vanity 6 and The Time; Alexander Nevermind; Christopher; Joey Coco; and more.

In a weird reading convergence, I’m also reading Richard Zenith’s biography of the writer Fernando Pessoa, Pessoa: A Biography. The first section of the book is a “Dramatis Personae,” listing the dozens of fictional authors that Pessoa invented, the most famous of which were Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa gave them all “biographies, individualized psychologies, religious and political points of view, and distinctive literary styles.”

Too radically different from him to be considered simple pseudonyms, as if only their names had changed, Pessoa called them “heteronyms,” and in a “Bibliographical Summary” of his works published in 1928 he explained the conceptual distinction: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.”

Applying these definitions, one wonders which of the names in a list of Prince’s dramatis personae are pseudonyms and which are heteronyms, and whether Prince himself knew. (He told Oprah in 1996, “Recent analysis has proved that there’s probably two people inside of me. There’s a Gemini. And we haven’t determined what sex that other person is yet.”)

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