Austin Kleon

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100 things that made my year (2018)

  1. After angsting for a few years over whether I’d ever write another book again, giving the “How To Keep Going” talk in March and spending the rest of the year turning it into my next book.
  2. Getting a real telescope for my 35th birthday. Seeing the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter with my own eyes.
  3. Watching my youngest son draw. My wife embroidering his accident.
  4. Putting together a plug-and-play studio for my oldest son. His amazing jam, “Loveheart.”
  5. So much Kraftwerk. Buying the 3-D Catalogue set for the kids. Kraftwerk in the studio. Kraftwerk in space. Early Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk fan art. Kraftwerk mixes. Even Kraftwerk covers, like The Balanescu Quartet’s Possessed and Senor Coconut’s El Baile Aleman.
  6. The Lang Stuttering Institute at The University of Texas. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. 
  7. Visiting Los Angeles the weekend before Malibu burned. Driving the PCH in a stupidly large rental car. Walking El Matador beach. Finding a “correct” Mexican dive next to the Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena with Mike Lowery. Driving the 134 west from Pasadena when Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” came on 93.5 KDAY. Walking around Los Feliz at night with a strawberry ice cream cone. Hiking to the observatory in Griffith Park with the Flynns. Touring the Corita Art Center. The menu at The Best Fish Taco in Ensenada. Reading Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood on the flight back. Listening to 2Pac’s “To Live & Die In L.A.” for a month afterwards.
  8. The Bill Callahan show at the Austin Public Library.
  9. Library tourism. The Chattanooga Public Library. The Eastham Public Library on Cape Cod.
  10. Driving the 6A through Cape Cod to Provincetown. Clam strips. Lobster rolls. Clam chowder. Taking the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and running into an old Austin friend in the bookstore.
  11. Listening to Prince’s Piano & a Microphone 1983 while doing the dishes and pretending he was playing for me in the next room.
  12. Sonia Harris’s ginger, lemon and maple syrup tea.
  13. Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy strips.
  14. San Francisco. Burritos in the Mission. Driving the PCH. The boys chasing birds on Rodeo Beach in The Headlands. Celebrating Jules’ 3rd birthday at Presidio Bowl.
  15. Abandoning the notion of linear progress. Creativity as a spiral. Creativity as a renewable energy. James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Giving up on genius. Not being a noun, but doing a verb. Not discarding anything of myself. Wearing many hats. Replacing that dreaded question, “So what’s next for you?” with another question: “What do you want to learn?” Shooting the arrows, then drawing the bullseye.
  16. Thinking of the studio as a garden where ideas grow.
  17. Hot plates. Dart Bowl enchiladas. Torchy’s queso almost every time I came home from the airport. Ramen Tatsu-Ya. Takeout from Maudie’s.
  18. Eating Gus’s Fried Chicken with Drew Dernavich during SXSW, then walking all the way home through the greenbelt while talking to my dad on the phone.
  19. That shopping center at Airport and North Lamar — eating at the revolving sushi bar, shopping next door at Kinokuniya, having dessert at 85C Bakery.
  20. Cheap pies from the grocery store.
  21. Drinking boulevardiers. Baileys on ice.
  22. My wife’s St. Patrick’s Day feast with corned beef, red cabbage, and soda bread.
  23. Watching Coco with the boys.
  24. Seeing Phantom Thread in an empty theater in suburban Baltimore. Watching it at least 3 more times throughout the year, and it getting weirder and funnier each time. Listening to Jonny Greenwood’s wonderful soundtrack.
  25. Pusha T, Daytona. The Beatles vs. Wu-Tang Clan. DOOM XMAS.
  26. This Here is Bobby Timmons.
  27. Every time I got to hip someone to Kenneth Koch’s “You want a social life with friends.”
  28. Looking for like-hearted people vs. like-minded people.
  29. Not thinking about my life after dinnertime.
  30. Making collages. Robots from the Restoration Hardware catalog. Comics from my son’s Peanuts calendar. Swapping speech balloons.
  31. Re-thinking art as a process of falling in love with your material. Letting the materials tell you what they want to be.
  32. Giving it five minutes. Doing a 30-second fact check.
  33. Thinking of the blog as a refrigerator and thoughts as nest eggs.
  34. “…and some sausages!”
  35. Having a bag of tricks for getting writing done. Willing to be bad. Playing with blocks when I’m blocked. Pulling cards when I’m stuck. Starting a project with a new banker’s box. Opening a fresh pack of index cards and pushing them around. Hanging a bulletin board above my desk with pictures of my heroes. Pressing the sleep timer on my clock radio. Smoking a fake cigarette pencil. Knowing that first draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist. Remembering that beautiful things grow out of shit. That you don’t drive ideas, they drive you. Scooping up the residue of the process. Procrastinating. Wearing clothes with pockets.
  36. Interviewing Mac and Laura from Superchunk.
  37. Having breakfast with The Dead Milkmen.
  38. Visiting Valerie Fowler and Brian Beattie’s studio.
  39. The creative magic of diner booths and mundane retail spaces.
  40. Hanging out with my boys in the studio. Taking them to work. Taking them to the art museum. My oldest’s amazing zines, like “How To Make Your Life Go On Forever.” Making fart collages. My youngest’s incredible drawings and his sweet singing voice. Having the boys draw side by side. Making art out of bugs. Thinking about how being a parent is like being an artist. Drawing all the ridiculous things they say.
  41. Drawing this diagram to explain complexity and how families grow.
  42. Real wealth.
  43. Pop-Up Magazine at Hogg Auditorium.
  44. Delivering a new talk, “Creative is not a Noun,” during the Scratch Conference at the MIT Media Lab.
  45. Marvin Gaye rehearsing “I Want You” while lying down on a couch.
  46. David Marchese’s interviews. This interview with Jaron Lanier. This interview with Kate Bush in 2005. Kevin Shields showing off his guitars. Desert Island Discs with Sister Wendy.
  47. The ease of Spotify playlists. The Blitz Club. The Atlanta Soundtrack. Songs from every year, 1925-2018. A mix for restaurants. My 2018 songs.
  48. David Sedaris’s Calypso.
  49. Parquet Courts, Wide Awake!
  50. Drag City records on streaming services.
  51. Reading music books to take my mind off writing. Duane Tudahl’s Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions. Lizzie Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom. Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach. Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music.
  52. Non-fiction written by poets. Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
  53. Songs that make me want to break down and keep going at the same time. Jonathan Richman, “The Morning of Our Lives.” Wire’s “Outdoor Miner.” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.” Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “On and On.” Schumann’s “Traumerei.” Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer.”
  54. Keeping a diary every day of the week for over two years. Cheerful retrospection. (The why and the how.) Reading diaries, especially visual ones, and especially on the day of the year they were written. Thoreau’s journal. Tape for the Turn of the Year. The Assassin’s Cloak. The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies. Heidi Julavits’ diary, The Folded Clock.
  55. My oldest starting a diary, only it was just stuff I say that he doesn’t like.
  56. Re-reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me and getting mad as hell.
  57. Voting.
  58. Iggy Pop’s cockatoo.
  59. Feeding off the trolls and feeling sorry for them. Making an enemy of envy.
  60. Celebrating my sixth Father’s Day. Remembering that children try out every single emotion on you first. Remembering that it’s not a vacation with kids along, it’s a trip.
  61. Having something to look forward to. Even a bowl of soup.
  62. Walking, walking, and more walking. Frederic Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Garnette Cadogan’s essays, “Walking While Black” and “Due North,” Thich Nhat Hahn’s How To Walk.  Taneda Santoka’s little book of diaries and haiku, For All My Walking.
  63. Randomly coming across Rick Steves’ wonderful lecture, “Travel As A Political Act,” on PBS late at night.
  64. Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland.
  65. Comedian Nate Bargatze at Hilarities.
  66. Dreaming up a sitcom about a Millennial Thoreau.
  67. Worrying less about getting things done and more about things worth doing. Learning for learning’s sake. Trying to be worthy of my life. Remembering my heroes. Trying to find better images. Having no time for despair. Being the light or reflecting it. Staying alive and getting weird.
  68. Checking in with death. Learning from the leaves. Remembering that “now is the envy of all of the dead.”
  69. Surviving the dark days. Taping this Mary Karr poem on the fridge: “Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”
  70. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
  71. Art. Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin. Ed Ruscha at the Ransom Center. Jerry Saltz’s life as a failed artist and 33 rules for being an artist. David Lynch: The Art Life. Agnes Martin, Paintings, Drawings, Remembrances. Chris Ware’s Monograph. John Berger, Confabulations. Agnés Varda and JR’s Faces Places.
  72. Having a good old-fashioned hobby. Knitting at the end of the world. Working hard at play. Working hard at making it not feel like work.
  73. Looking at maps. (While knowing there is no map.)
  74. Paying attention. Looking at stains on the wall. Seeing by turning things upside down. Reading right to left. Seeing moons in pancakes and galaxies in coffee grounds. Looking at the world one piece at a time. Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Making your own connections. Listening closely.
  75. Keeping up the weekly newsletter and (trying) to keep up with all the good newsletters out there. Audrey Water’s HEWN. Matthew Ogle’s Pome. Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press. Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations. Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files.
  76. Reading good fiction before bed. Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Melville’s “Bartleby The Scrivener.” Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Edward Carey, Little. (And seeing his show at the Austin Public Library.)
  77. Becoming a fan of writers on Twitter before I even read their books — people like @EmilyRCWilson and @TedGioia.
  78. Hanging out with friends in Chicago and Evanston. Walking along Lake Michigan. Finally meeting Matt Thomas and having lunch at Lou Mitchell’s.
  79. Being in publishing for a decade and having a million copies in print.
  80. No line at the barbershop.
  81. Getting my photo taken by Clayton Cubitt.
  82. Re-watching favorite movies. Jaws (in July, before flying to Cape Cod). The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Stop Making Sense. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Top Gun. Heat. Much Ado About Nothing. When Harry Met Sally. The Terminator. The Birdcage.
  83. Making The Last Waltz a Thanksgiving tradition.
  84. Last-minute trip to NYC. Sunset in Battery Park then walking for hours afterwards. Stuffing my bag with bagels from Russ & Daughters and Pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s for the plane ride home. (Get two. Always get two.)
  85. Wandering the grounds of Laguna Gloria after taking my son to art lessons. Seeing the peacocks.
  86. The remixes of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album.
  87. A photograph of Paul McCartney moving his own microphone.
  88. Music to write to. Bach. Brahms. Mary Lattimore, Hundreds of Days. Chilly Gonzales, Solo Piano III.
  89. Remembering that I don’t have to live in public. Thinking about what can be lost when we share what we love.
  90. Watchin’ teevee. Atlanta: Robbin’ Season. Better Call Saul. Queer Eye. The Defiant Ones. Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife. Grand Designs. Billions.
  91. Nacho Libre.
  92. Luke Pearson’s Hilda books.
  93. Horace’s Epistles.
  94. Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Reading Kitchen Confidential. Giving him the last words in Keep Going.
  95. Taika Waititi’s movies: Boy, What We Do In The Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor…
  96. Thinking about how paper is a great technology.
  97. Hanging out with Alan Jacobs at Magnolia in Waco on a long drive north.
  98. Our trip to Cleveland.
  99. Building driftwood sculptures with the boys on the beach.
  100. Watching the sun set over Lake Erie.

A year of drawing

My son Jules woke up two Christmases ago and started drawing. He was 2. (His birthday is in March.)

Inspired by Sylvia Fein’s book Heidi’s Horse, which collects her daughters drawings from toddler to teenage years, I thought it’d be interesting to see how his drawings developed over the next 12 months.

January

From the very beginning, he has had unlimited, unrestricted access to markers and paper. From the very beginning, he has often drawn for over an hour, becoming extremely angry if we interrupt him. Here is a batch of skeletons — his great subject!

February

Here are some skeletons he drew on our outdoor couch cushions with sidewalk chalk.

They were so good we couldn’t bear to clean them off, so my wife got out her sewing machine and embroidered them. (This is how Jules got Boing Boing’d at age 3.)

March

Here he is drawing along to Super Simple Draw in a hotel room.

Here’s a robot copied from Super Simple Draw. (Later in the year he would become fond of Ed Emberley books.)

April

Here he is in April, drawing along to Kraftwerk videos while singing “Man Machine” at the top of his lungs.

May

In May, he started drawing his favorite nursery rhymes. (Here are Jack & Jill.)

His drawings got incredibly gestural and emotional around this time.

June

Here he is copying Mo Willems’ pigeon. (Here’s his brother’s blog post about it.)

Later in the month, he drew our family as skeletons at the pool. I became fascinated by how he would draw people in his life using the moves he picked up drawing other characters.

July

Here’s another drawing of us in the pool.

Here he is with his brother drawing side by side.

July was also the month he got obsessed with The Scream.

August

He started drawing the characters from a Coco coloring book, even though he still refuses to watch the movie again, and screams whenever I mention it. (When you draw things, you’re in control of them.)

He also started drawing the human body.

September

Here is a photo of our kitchen floor on a day in September, to give you an idea of what one day’s worth of drawings looked like.

My wife and I would sweep them up with a broom at the end of the day.

This is around the time I got so fed up with the boys one afternoon I made the (extremely questionable) decision to read them Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (He can now draw the whole book from memory.)

October

Drawings of musicians — his other great subject!

November

A drawing from life made while waiting for his brother to finish art class at Laguna Gloria.

December

Finally, here he is on December 30, a year and 5 days after picking up his marker, drawing along to YouTube videos of Orchestras playing Benjamin Britten’s “A Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra.”

I find it remarkable, at this point, how drawing for him still has nothing to do with the results. He does not care what you do with his drawings after he’s done making them. How he draws is intense and adorable at the same time: he will put down a few lines, and then stand back and shake while he admires them.

I find it endlessly fascinating watching him draw. And inspiring.

My reading year, 2018

Here are 20 good books I read in 2018, in no order other than the order in which I read them:

Tape For The Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons

In 1963, Ammons got a roll of adding machine tape from the hardware store and decided to write poems on it every day until the tape was used up. I started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th.

 

Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson

Beautiful stories.

A perfect swan song.

 

Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie

Takes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals.

 

A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman

I originally thought Keep Going would have more about the senses in it, so I picked this up for research. Very dense, lush book.

 

Prince and The Purple Rain Sessions
Duane Tudahl

A day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it.

 

A Philosophy of Walking
Frederic Gros

A sausage-fest, but a good sausage-fest. (Compliment with Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust or Keri Smith’s The Wander Society or Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse.)

 

You & A Bike & A Road
Eleanor Davis

A comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. If I had to pick, this might be my favorite book I read this year. (I also read How To Be Happy and her newest one, Why Art? Both very much worth reading.) She’s on fire, and I can’t wait to read what’s next.

 

Meet Me In The Bathroom
Lizzie Goodman

An oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.

 

Calypso
David Sedaris

I mean, what’s there to say? The dude makes me laugh out loud… and he keeps getting better and better. (I also enjoyed the visual compendium of his diaries.)

 

Confabulations
John Berger

Considering how much Ways of Seeing influenced me, I’m ashamed I haven’t read more Berger. This was the last book he published before he died.

 

Monograph
Chris Ware

A gorgeous, gigantic tome dedicated to the work of one of our great Midwestern artists.

 

Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances
Arne Glimcher

By far the most expensive book on this list. (I bought it for my wife years ago, but I’m not sure she ever read it.) Gorgeous printing, with life-size facsimiles of Martin’s notebook pages bound in with the regular pages.

 

Priestdaddy
Patricia Lockwood

I was a year late to this, but it’s as advertised: Smart, smutty, and laugh-out-loud funny.

 

Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies
Duncan Hannah

I loved this book, which was edited from Hannah’s actual diaries that he kept as a young man in 70s NYC. My only gripe is that the book doesn’t include images of the actual notebooks, which are wonderfully visual.

 

The Hildafolk Series
Luke Pearson

It’s a rare, wonderful thing when stars align and you love reading the same books as your kids. (Last year: Jon Klassen’s Hat Trilogy) Pearson’s Hilda comics are like a cross between Miyazaki and my beloved Moomins with a dash of unschooling. Magic.

 

Words Without Music
Philip Glass

Devoured this one, and afterwards, was surprised it took me so long to pick it up. Glass writes about so many of my favorite topics: creativity, day jobs, parenting, lineage, etc. Totally accessible, and made me want to listen to more of his music.

 

The Folded Clock: A Diary
Heidi Julavitz

I’m not so sure that Julavitz and I would get along together at a party, but dang, I liked her book.

 

Eve’s Hollywood
Eve Babitz

What I wrote about Slow Days, Fast Company in last year’s roundup works here, too, so: “I love reading and thinking about Los Angeles, and I love writing that’s smart and trashy, so I liked this a lot.”

 

Little
Edward Carey
A strange, gloomy work of historical fiction with wonderful Gorey-like, Gothic drawings. (I was delighted by the show at the Austin Public Library.)

 

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib and I were born in the same year and grew up within a 45-minute drive of each other in Ohio, but our worlds were so very, very different. Columbus — a city I never felt much affinity for, despite its proximity in my youth — is one of the main characters here, and the book exposed me to a different side of it.

* * *

Here are 20 other good books I read, many of which, on another day, or in another month or year, could be in my top 20 (again, listed in the order in which I read them):

Note: I usually don’t post my favorite reads until the very end of the year, but I’m poking through this annotated Walden and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey right now, so I think it’s safe to say I won’t finish any other books before 2019 arrives.

See the past 13 years of my reading, here.

The residue of creativity

A few days ago, my friend Wendy MacNaughton (who has a terrific new column in the New York Times) posted this “Mistakes” jar, filled with eraser shavings “and tears.”

Einstein supposedly said that creativity is the residue of wasted time, but I think a lot about the residue of creativity. Sometimes that residue is a work of art, but more often than not, it’s a tiny trail of waste —debris, dust, shavings, clippings, trash, etc.


I love it when artists collect and display this residue. (Sometimes they even sell it.) One of my favorite parts of Edward Carey’s show at the Austin Public Library was a bowl of his pencils, used all the way to the stumps.


Years ago, I saw a show of book carver Brian Dettmer, and there was a box of his X-acto blades on a pedestal. (He estimates he goes through “15-50 blades a day, usually switching over to a new blade every ten minutes to half hour.”


In 2013, designer Craighton Berman ran a funny, tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter called “The Campaign for the Accurate Measurement of Creativity.” It included a “Sharpener Jar” — “a product designed to quantify creative output.”


Since I wrote Show Your Work! in 2013, I’ve been interested in how artists share their process, how social media allows you to share when there’s nothing, really, to share, and how sometimes the scraps and ephemera from our process can turn into their own attractions. (Above: Amanda Palmer’s sticky notes posted while working on The Art of Asking: “[I] was trying to find a way to share their colorful beauty without also revealing their content.”)


Oh, and while I’m riffing: “Butt Pattern,” from the #MTAMuseum (more here) is this idea of process-residue-as-art taken to its most extreme and funny conclusion.

My year with Thoreau

As a Great Indoorsman, for most of my life I’d ignored the work of Henry David Thoreau. I owned a copy of Walden, but never read it. In 2015, the New Yorker published a “Why do people even like Thoreau?” piece with the subtle title, “Pond Scum,” and I felt validated in my ignorance.

Then, last year, Levi Stahl started raving about Laura Walls’ biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, and I got him to send me an advance copy. The book blew my mind — it’s one of those perfect bios that’s intensely researched but highly enjoyable to read. (I read it so much my wife made me put sticky notes over Thoreau’s “creepy” eyes.) The Thoreau rendered by Walls is fully human, and the book is really a perfectly-timed portrait of an American trying to keep his soul in chaotic times.

Walls gave me a whole new way of thinking about Thoreau, but maybe her greatest gift is that she got me to pick up his published journal. Here’s what I wrote about it in Keep Going:

A dip into Henry David Thoreau’s journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parents—he sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!

I set out on a daily reading of the abridged journal in the fall last year, and just recently lapped myself. (I’m still going, re-reading, and finding new passages to underline.) If you follow this blog, you know I’ve blogged at least a dozen times in the past year about my reading.

As a writer, there are two basic instructions I take from the journals:

1) Take long walks. Get out. Try to arrange your life in a way that you can get out for longer than you even think you can.

2) Go home and write in your journal about what you saw and heard and felt and thought about.

Repeat as necessary. (And when you’ve written enough, go back and pilfer your journals for good material to publish.)

I still haven’t read Walden or his other books (I’ve read a few essays), but his journals have had a huge (unexpected) impact on my life in the past year. He seems to me one of those authors who gets judged by the fact that his disciples (annoyingly) steal the wrong message from him. For me, it’s not: go live on the land out in the woods, it’s: How can you live deliberately? How can you be part of the world in a way you can live with?

He also, in his haughtiness, sort of doomed himself to cries of hypocrisy. (In response to people who say, “But his mom did his laundry!” Walls responds, “No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.”)

Yeah, he could be a prick, he was wrong about quite a bit, and I doubt we’d even get along if we met, but he’s been a constant companion to me in the past year. He’s taught me to walk, walk, walk, to look more closely at everything, to love the seasons, and to not let your inner life be destroyed by the status quo or the awful actions of your country.

I love him.

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