Austin Kleon

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The digestive system

A question I get asked a lot: “How do you manage to find all the stuff that you put in your weekly newsletter?”

I’ve gone over the how before, but the how might not be as interesting as the why.

The why is explained in my book, Show Your Work!:

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.

The longer I write this blog and the newsletter, the more I try to focus on what I genuinely love. The stuff that really nourishes and feeds me.

I could probably grow a bigger “audience” with the most recent creativity tips and life hacks or whatever, but that’s not why I started doing this.

I started doing this to find my people. The people who care about the same things that I do.

In other words: You.

Thanks for being here.

Drawers

I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure this out, but when I moved into my new office, I realized it’d be really handy if I kept my pocket notebooks and logbooks and other materials in drawers that I could easily access, instead of on a shelf or in a box somewhere out of reach. (In the past, I’d stored blank notebooks and new pens and other supplies in there, but those are things I only need once in a while…)

The top drawer is my favorite: it’s where I keep little bits and scraps of paper that I can use for collages later…

In other news: I like words.

Discovering the masterpiece right in front of you

While reading Alan Jacobs’ newsletter, I came across the story of a woman in her 90s who’d kept a painting above her hotplate that turned out to be a Cimabue worth six million bucks. (Cimabue was born in Florence in 1240. Vasari tells a story that he found Giotto  drawing sheep from his flock on a rock and asked if he’d like to be his apprentice. )

I admit it’s not as exciting, but I also recently discovered a masterpiece hanging in my house. My wife and I bought this poster at a Botticelli show in Florence in 2004. We call her “The Botticelli Woman,” and she guards our front door:

In the 15 years that she’s hung in our entryways, I’ve never actually bothered to look up what painting she’s from. Then I was flipping through a book of Botticelli paintings at the thrift store and saw Pallas and the Centaur:

She’s always had a calming effect on me, and yet, I always had the feeling she should be guarding the place. Well, turns out my intuition was correct: That poster is a helluva crop! “The halberd,” that crazy axe-looking thing she’s holding, “was a weapon carried by guards rather than on the battlefield.”

How many things do we keep around our house whose histories we know nothing about?

Backing up

I got a “First strike! Three strikes and you’re out!” copyright notice from Tumblr yesterday morning, and my first thought was, “Oh good, maybe I can totally forget about my Tumblr now.”

One of the biggest regrets of my online life is the gap half decade or so I moved most of my blogging activity over to Tumblr from this self-hosted WordPress blog. Tumblr (and Twitter) has been my public notebook — there are blog tags there that have become book chapters and many more that still might. If they delete my Tumblr, it’s a decade of public research gone bye-bye.

Believe it or not, you can actually back up your Tumblr blog now direct from their site. My blog took all night to export and the download wound up weighing in at 3.75GB. (The biggest surprise was all the .mp3 files that came through: they made a 10-hour playlist in iTunes!)

You can also download your Twitter archive and it comes with a handy index.html file that you can search and browse.

All this stuff will go away one day. Like I said in Show Your Work!:

Own your turf, own your turf, own your turf. (And try to back up whatever you’ve posted to turf you don’t own.)

Interview with Texas Monthly

Listen to “#86 Austin Kleon: "Scumbags and Lowlifes Can Create Beautiful Art”” on Spreaker.

I had a fun and very candid chat with Andy Langer on Texas Monthly’s The National Podcast of Texas. (Listen here or wherever else you listen to podcasts.)

To quote Tristan Tzara, “thought is produced in the mouth.” Only an extrovert or a poet would say that, and, unfortunately, I’m both. Sometimes I don’t know quite what I think until I say it. (And often what I say out loud is articulated much better in the books.)

Here’s a part of our conversation about what I saw on book tour that I was happy to see highlighted:

“People are anxious about feeling like they should be doing more. Information is not their problem. A lot of these people that I meet, they’ve read all the blogs, bought all the books, and they know they’re supposed to get up and do their three morning pages and share something every day. They know they’re supposed to write down their dreams and thoughts and do their bullet journal. They know they’re supposed to be doing this stuff, but what they really need is someone to just take them aside and remind them this is supposed to be fun. This work we’re talking about isn’t about running an Etsy shop. It’s about like feeling like a human being. It’s hippie stuff like that people really need someone in my position to share. They need someone to say, ‘I watched three hours of Justified last night.’ You would be amazed how many nights I spend drinking whiskey and watching reruns of my favorite shows. The purpose of this work is not to build a side hustle. It’s about being a human being, and there are just so many people out there right now that just need a little bit of affirmation.”

On a sidenote, it was good to visit the Texas Monthly office, too, because they gave me one of my first reviews almost a decade ago.

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