The folks at City Lights recorded my recent interview with Peter Turchi and posted it to YouTube. I enjoyed it very much. (The last time we spoke was 2015!)
The Less Good Idea
Listening to an interview with artist William Kentridge, he explained the origins of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an “interdisciplinary incubator space” he started in Johannesburg.
The name comes from a Twsana proverb: “When the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”
From the Centre’s website:
Often, you start with a good idea, It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.
The Centre hosts all sorts of events, in person and online. I was unaware, for example, that Kentridge and Walter Murch had collaborated. Here’s their recent conversation:
On piracy and bootlegged copies of my books
On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, comedian Simon Feilder became fascinated by how many bootleg copies of famous books were for sale in stalls around the city. So he bought a copy of a book he already owned to compare: Steal Like an Artist. He made this video about it:
Feilder asked me to be in the video, but I told him it was better without me! He cleverly found this old tweet and included it:
If you pirated STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST when you were young and broke now’s a great time to pay me back and get a fancy hardcover ?https://t.co/eIyOzSlrS9 pic.twitter.com/tBcwCL6hCE
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 8, 2022
I laughed, upon re-reading the tweet thread, how many people admitted that they had pirated it and now they were buying a copy. Success!
A batch of quick thoughts:
- Cory Doctorow has always written well on this subject. (He often quotes Tim O’Reilly: “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”
- As an author, you can think of every pirated copy as losing a sale, or you could think of it as gaining a reader. If you zoom out a bit, over the long run, gaining a reader is much more valuable than selling a book.
- A bit bright-sided, perhaps, but there are some weird examples out there of how piracy actually leads to more sales. There are also historic texts that we wouldn’t have today if it weren’t for illicit copies.
All that said: Book sales keep my kids fed, man! Please buy them or borrow them from the library. (Remember: Libraries buy books! And you can often request that the library order a book you’re interested in.)
Roget’s Thesaurus: A library of words
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.
“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”
Read it here.
Going through the motions
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- …
- 618
- Older posts→