Austin Kleon

The 30-minute noticing workout


Here is a slide from my friend Bill Keaggy’s TEDx talk, “How to Find Attention, Mindfulness, and Creativity in the Ordinary.”

After going through some of his own creative work — I highly recommend his books 50 Sad Chairs and Milk, Eggs, Vodka — and the work of others, Bill suggests a very simple 30-minute workout for everyone:

Walk around. Pay attention. Take pictures.

Bill says there’s two ways to pay attention while you’re walking:

  1. “Ambient noticing” — you’re just soaking in everything, taking in the big picture, and letting things come at you
  2. “Purposeful attention” — you have a goal of seeking out specific things, such as colors, signs, sad chairs, etc.

I recommend watching the whole talk:

I was struck by how much Bill’s talk aligns with the work of another friend of mine, Rob Walker. Not just the stuff in Rob’s book, The Art of Noticing and excellent newsletter of the same name, but also his work with Joshua Glenn on Significant Objects, and most recently, Lost Objects.

When Bill talks about his photos of sad chairs, he says, “Chairs are just chairs. They’re not very moving… So you need to add a layer of story. And just a little is enough.”

This is almost exactly the way the Objects projects operate — by adding a “layer of story” to objects, we give them significance, maybe even value, and we cause people to pay attention to them.

(I’m sometimes shocked when friends of mine aren’t friends with each other, as if the connection between them — my brain — is somehow actually real and in the world.)

A spread from 50 Sad Chairs

Bill’s talk also made me think about the different ways we can pull meaning out of our collections of images, including at least:

  1. Juxtaposition, by assembling a gallery of images in multiple next to each other
  2. Addition, by way of annotation — adding text below or drawing directly on the image
  3. Subtraction, cutting up the images, or removing elements (see: my de-signs, which Bill kindly mentions
A spread from Keep Going

As you know if you read me with any regularity, I am a huge believer in the benefits — religion? — of walking. (And I chuckle sometimes thinking about the nominative determinism of Rob’s last name.)

Bill and I actually got to have lunch yesterday and instead of shopping or going to a museum, we took a nice 30-minute stroll down the Shoal Creek Book Walk and east across the hike and bike trail back to his hotel. It was a convivial echo of Wednesday evening when I took the same walk solo to clear my mind (and avoid rush hour traffic) before meeting John Hendrickson at the same hotel.

While I am writing about my friends, let me share something my friend Marty Butler shared with me on one of our recent bike rides.

This is what Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director at the National Institute on Aging, suggests for achieving longevity:

“Just walking outside,” makes an enormous difference, Ferrucci said.

“If I had a jewel to give to people who want to live long and well, I would tell them to get up early in the morning and go out,” Ferrucci said. “That is really the best gift that you can give yourself if you want to achieve longevity.”

“Get out now!” Pay attention. Take pictures.

Filed under: walking

Productive procrastination

Here’s one of my favorite pages from Steal Like an Artist:

I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you’ve left. Practice productive procrastination.

My friend Clive Thompson recently wrote about his own adventures with the method in “How To Practice Productive Procrastination.”

He quotes Saul Griffith:

I gave up on trying to do exactly what I was meant to be doing in favor of always doing something. Frankly, I’m not sure we’re designed to focus on only one thing for eight or ten hours in a row. I’ve always found that it’s useful to have something else to be doing when you’re too burnt out to face the next thing on your list. That way, flipping back and forth between the two projects prevents focus fatigue.

Griffith makes sure that the side projects he’s working on are geared towards helping him learn something new. Clive explains:

The trick is to procrastinate with one of his learning projects — not by zoning out on Netflix. As  [Griffith] writes: “The most important thing is to make sure your other project isn’t ‘browsing on YouTube’ or ‘catching up on Facebook.’ Make it a project that forces you to learn, because you want to.”

This is the key to the Jessica Hische quote, below. The “work” can be “comfort work,” but it should be actual work…


See also: “The Trouble With Being Lazy” + “This is how I make a book”

Fire and focus

One purpose of good writing is to make you not take the things in your life for granted. Two of my favorite writers have recently written about fireplaces.

Elisa Gabbert wrote an essay about wanting a house with a fireplace, a longing she says is “a form of homesickness.”

I love looking at a fire. If there’s a TV on in a bar, I’ve noticed, and there almost always is, the movement pulls your eye to it, no matter how boring what’s on is. A fire is the same, but a fire is never boring. It’s mysterious that it isn’t. Or maybe it’s not mysterious. It’s this miracle life-giving thing you can build in your house, the same thing cave people built in their caves.

Alan Jacobs wrote about the fireplace as a focusing point in a home: “Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household.”

The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson often says that our evolutionary descent predisposes us to be fond of certain actions, like throwing objects at other objects and sitting around a fire telling tales. The latter impulse, he believes, draws us to the movie theater, where we gather in the darkness facing a bright light and enjoy stories — but while that provides a certain form (or simulacrum) of communal connection, it’s the television that becomes the replacement for the family hearth….

When I decided to put our TV over the fireplace, I didn’t realize the symbolic heft of my decision. But one evening, when I mused that it would be easier to show a fireplace video from YouTube than actually build a fire, all the ironies suddenly came home to me. 

While I love our pizza and a movie Friday night ritual in front of the TV, there is nothing like a good, real fire.

Our two places for fires: our fireplace and our firebowl

January has been full of cold(er) weather and grandparent visits, and one of my very favorite parts of each visit was building a fire and sitting around it. 

As Elisa writes, it is never boring. It somehow brings out the best I everyone. One night my 10-year-old and spent a whole hour carefully rolling up newspaper into long tubes and throwing them on the fire and watching them burn.

One time when we were sitting around a campfire out in west Texas with the clear star-filled sky above us, Jules, then five years old, exclaimed, “It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!”

Whether you tell stories around it or not, every fire is a kind of story — there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.

At the beginning: the anticipation, the starting, the possibility. (See: Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, about a man who starts a fire every morning and sits and thinks.) 

In the middle: the excitement of the crack and whip of the flames.

At the end: I love how fire gets really good when the logs burn up and the flames die down and what’s left is the hot coals, perfect for s’mores. (In his book In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki writes, “Without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost and with it the pleasure of family gatherings round the fire.”)

We love fire and we love using fire as a metaphor. (Most recently: Fire of Love.)

We speak of “the fire inside.” I have had trouble focusing lately, and it occurs to me just now, at this very moment, that maybe the reason I haven’t been able to focus is that I don’t have a fire inside. 

Sometimes a fire is forced on us from the outside, as with a housefire or a wildfire. (In the writer’s life: a personal tragedy or triumph, a chance encounter, or merely the need for sustenance will light a fire under one’s ass, so to speak.)

But more often than not, our fires inside have to be built. They have to be started, and fed, and maintained.

And you can’t just dump wood in a big pile and expect it to burn. You have to be mindful of the structure of the pieces, to give them proper space and air.  

Perhaps, instead of worrying about focusing, I need to worry about building a good fire.

I suspect if the fire is there, the focus will come.

(Input and output.)

A living comet

A panel from Fantastic Four #48

NYTimes writer Shannon Hall on “How to Watch the ‘Green Comet’ in Night Skies”:

Comets are clumps of dust and frozen gases, sometimes described by astronomers as “dirty snowballs.” Most are believed to originate from the distant, icy reaches of the solar system where gravitational agitations sometimes push them toward the sun — an interaction that transforms them into gorgeous cosmic objects.

When they leave their deep freeze, the heat from the sun erodes their surfaces, and they start spewing gases and dust until they host a glowing core, known as the coma, and a flamelike tail that can stretch for millions of miles.

“They’re alive,” Laurence O’Rourke, an astronomer with the European Space Agency, said. “When they’re far from the sun, they’re sleeping, and when they get close to the sun, they wake up.”

Emphasis mine. (Thanks to Meg for this.)

Filed under: astronomy

Where you look is where you go

a hawk I saw last month on the Walnut Creek greenbelt

When you’re biking you have to look out for a thing called “target fixation”:

Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. It is associated with scenarios in which the operator is in control of a high-speed vehicle or other mode of transportation, such as fighter pilots, race-car drivers, paragliders, and motorcyclists. In such cases, the observer may fixate so intently on the target that they steer in the direction of their gaze, which is often the ultimate cause of a collision.

As with biking, so with life. Thoreau said that we find the world we look for, but if he rode a bicycle, he might’ve said, “ where you look is where you go.”

AI can’t kill anything worth preserving

The title of this post was stolen from John Warner, whose book Why They Can’t Write was recommended to me by a friend. He tweeted a really excellent thread about how AI’s “correct-seeming” prose is an opportunity to rethink and improve how we teach students writing. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the highlight for me:

(James Brown summarized this as “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” It has become the default setting in American life.)

Warner wrote a followup post, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving” that is also worth your time. Warner’s big idea is that students aren’t actually being asked to “express express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose)” but are rather being asked to produce “writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format)” which do fine on standardized tests, but don’t prepare them for writing at the college level, or writing anything that, you know, an actual human being would want to read.

“We made a mistake thinking it was a good thing to train students to write like an algorithm,” he writes. “Now we know we have to undo that mistake.”

Some of his suggestions are to “make the work worth doing,” to “value the process, rather than the product,” and to “move away from what an algorithm can do and towards how humans learn and develop.”

This strikes me as excellent advice not just for teachers, but for writers and artists of all kinds.

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.

How you think it is to be a human.

As Warner puts it, writing “is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.”

Emphasis on embodied. Head, heart, and hands.

“As human[s], we are wired to communicate,” Warner writes. “We are also wired for ‘play.’ Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.”

Whether you’re into AI or not, it’s worth spending some time honoring what is not machine-like in you.

And if you’re going to spend time with machines, be sure to spend time with machines that make you feel more human.

Letting books talk to each other

A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite ways [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.”

Someone recently asked me what it looks like in practice. I am loathe to muddy it any further with explanation, but here goes.

A mundane and far-from-perfect example: I was reading Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes and she mentioned the brain’s “default mode network,” something I don’t know anything about. I may or may not have paid much attention to it, but I had just finished John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World and remembered that he wrote about it, too.

Now, if I’d just read about default network mode in either of those books, solo, I might’ve just ignored it and moved on with my life, but the fact that two books in succession mentioned it made me think I needed to investigate it further.

Lo and behold, Steven Johnson wrote about it for the NYTimes several years ago and also in his book Farsighted. Now I have another book to dip into, and three books on different subjects talking about the same thing. That’s enough for a blog post, at the very least.

In this case, it was chance and happenstance, but you can sort of tweak your reading life in such a way that these sort of things happen more often. If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worth going into, but I realize it might not be so obvious to others.

Reading this way is a form of “input as collage,” and of course, you can take a multi-media approach to it: I remember last year I watched Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing while I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and I can’t identify exactly how, but they spoke to each other in some way that glued them together in my mind. (Later, I found out that Murdoch was a big Shakespeare freak.)

Another example: Yesterday’s blog post on Simic and Steinberg exists simply because Charles Simic died and I was going around the house trying to find all the books in the house of his I could find.

On the back cover of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks I noticed that Simic’s portrait was drawn by Saul Steinberg. A quick google of “Charles Simic” and “Saul Steinberg” made me remember that I have a catalog of Steinberg’s with an intro by Simic. So I pull that book out and read the intro and find out they were friends. A few more googles and I have everything Simic wrote about his friend (I think) at my fingertips.

As I read those pieces, they started talking to each other, and suddenly I had something to write about.

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