Austin Kleon

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100 things that made my year (2017)

Suggested accompaniment: my 2017 playlist on shuffle play

  1. Taking a walk every morning because the demons hate fresh air.
  2. Driving the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco.
  3. Going back to Italy. Walking around Milan and Turin to Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin’ Else.
  4. Antigua, Guatemala.
  5. Austin’s new central library. Walking there from my house through the greenbelt.
  6. Watching the solar eclipse in the courtyard of the Art Institute of Chicago.
  7. Lake Michigan in the summer. The lookout at Arcadia. Sleeping Bear Dunes. The S.S. Badger.
  8. Keeping a good old-fashioned diary. Holding my tongue and loosening my pen. Having a good place to have bad ideas. Taping guardian spirits inside the front cover. Re-reading.
  9. Reading diaries. Thoreau, daily. Kafka. Kaethe Kollwitz. Andy Warhol. David Sedaris.
  10. DJing a one-hour set for KUTX.
  11. Getting more and more into to classical music. Taking my son to free concerts around town. Playing Schumann and Bach on piano. Listening to KMFA. Max Richter’s recomposed Four Seasons. Michael Torke’s saxophone quartet, “July.” Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit. Stories about Beethoven. Drawing comics about Brahms.
  12. Looking at the moon. Knowing what moon phase it is based on how shitty I feel. Using Sky Guide to find constellations. 100 Aspects of the Moon. The lunar Rashomon collage chapter in Lincoln In The Bardo. Mary Ruefle’s essay on poets and the moon in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
  13. Thinking about seasons.
  14. Glueing one thing to another. Finding the simplest cut.
  15. Hannah Höch.
  16. Lance Letscher.
  17. Being lazy. Taking naps. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers. The song “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum!” Raymond Carver’s “Loafing.” Manifesto of the idle parent.
  18. Buying a huge 4K TV at Costco for the bedroom and watching too much television. Binge-watching The Good Place, Halt and Catch Fire, Detectorists, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Catastrophe, and Grand Designs. Watching bad cable movies on the Roku channel.
  19. Killing whole afternoons with 17776 and Universal Paperclips.
  20. Going to Clark’s on a date with my wife and ordering affogato and then watching every other couple copy us.
  21. Common Sense Media.
  22. Listening to good podcast miniseries while working out, like Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect and Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing.
  23. The digitized Corita Kent archives. Getting her GO SLO poster for Christmas.
  24. Accepting that nobody knows what’s gonna happen and working without hope and without despair.
  25. Chuck Berry (RIP) reciting Theodore Tilton’s poem, “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
  26. Not waking up to the news. Not arguing with strangers on the internet. Staying out of the shitstream. Logging off. Not paying for wi-fi. (“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.”)
  27. Bill Withers on why he walked away the music business.
  28. Library extension.
  29. My paper dictionary.
  30. An “organ donor” in our neighborhood giving us an old Hammond for the music room.
  31. A neighbor giving my wife a whole case of ginger beer and drinking Moscow Mules all summer.
  32. Saying I could read 10,000 words on Raffi, then finding Sheila Heti’s profile. Listening to “Bananaphone” on repeat until slaphappy.
  33. Perfume Genius’s “Queen” and No Shape.
  34. Walt Whitman.
  35. Lao Tzu.
  36. X’s More Fun In The New World.
  37. Gang of Four, Solid Gold.
  38. Buying a Rolodex at Goodwill for $2.
  39. Warren Craghead’s Trump drawings.
  40. Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers.
  41. Old George Carlin specials. Jammin’ in New York.
  42. Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne.
  43. Doing something that will outlast them.
  44. Eating perfect chicken fingers on the beach in Grand Cayman.
  45. $7 Tex-Mex lunch specials. City Of Gold. Molly Savage’s Costco food court painting. “The Case for Bad Coffee” and “In Praise of Ugly Food” from Best Food Writing 2016. Stories about Olive Garden.
  46. Valentina’s Tex-Mex BBQ.
  47. Sitting in a booth at Jim’s on 71.
  48. The new Reese’s peanut butter cups with Reese’s Pieces in them.
  49. Cup of Calm tea.
  50. Eating clam chowder at the Legal Seafood bar in the Philadelphia airport.
  51. Hong Ting’s “The Fisherman’s Song at Dusk.”
  52. Denis Johnson (RIP) on homeschooling his kids.
  53. My friend Laura, saying, “Take it year by year, kid by kid.”
  54. Learning how to learn again. Making lists of what I want to learn. Studying something you love in depth.
  55. Art with the kids. Drawing skeletons. Orchestrated drawings. Raising surrealists.
  56. Getting permission from Nina Katchadourian’s show Curiouser at the Blanton.
  57. Soul music. Sam & Dave’s “Soothe Me.” The Impressions’ “Keep On Pushin’.” D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Al Green doing “Here I Am” on Soul Train. Sam and Dave on German TV in 1967. James Gadson’s drumming for Bill Withers.
  58. Bill Knott’s short poems. (And bonus poems.)
  59. Jackie Shane’s motto, explained during her monologue on “Money,” on Any Other Way: “Do what you want, but know what you’re doing.”
  60. Discovering Walter Murch and In The Blink of an Eye.
  61. Watching old Val Lewton horror movies on Filmstruck.
  62. Blogging every day since October 1st.
  63. Paper.
  64. Laura Walls’ biography of Thoreau.
  65. Getting a new stereo and CD player. Discovering how amazing CDs sound after streaming for so many years.
  66. Going to End of An Ear with my son and buying him Kraftwerk and LCD Soundsystem CDs.
  67. David Rakoff’s Half Empty and his rant about Rent.
  68. Tidying up here and there, but also embracing mess.
  69. Slowing down.
  70. The harp of Mary Lattimore. (And her Instagram.)
  71. Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen really loud in the car. (Emotion and “Cut To The Feeling.”)
  72. Books about exploring. Thoreau, again. John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic. Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost.
  73. Apocalyptic songs. William Onyeabor’s “Atomic Bomb.” (RIP.) Sonny and The Sunsets’ “Dark Corners.” Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric?” Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting.”
  74. Watching movies in the theater. Blade Runner 2049. Paterson. The Last Jedi. Baby Driver. Singin’ in the Rain.
  75. Watching movies in bed. Get Out. The Handmaiden. The Lobster. Time Bandits. The Thin Man. My Man Godfrey. In Order of Disappearance. The Limey. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Christmas in Connecticut.
  76. Re-watching old favorites. Moonstruck. Lebowski. Only Lovers Left Alive. The Apartment. Heat. Groundhog Day. It Happened One Night. Young Frankenstein. Coming To America. When Harry Met Sally. Magic Mike XXL. Royal Tenenbaums. Creed. John Wick!
  77. Starting a fight club with my recycle bin.
  78. Seeing coyotes and roadrunners on our morning walks. The legend of Steve.
  79. The pilot at the Atlanta airport who went out of his way to show me an art installation.
  80. Not telling people how it’s done. John Cage’s parable about not teaching.
  81. Edna St. Vincent Millay reading “Recuerdo.”
  82. James Patterson blurbing himself.
  83. How Esther Pearl Watson paints her characters nude before adding clothes.
  84. Tana Hoban’s books about signs and symbols.
  85. Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s “You May Want To Marry My Husband.” (RIP) Her daughter Paris’s Instagram. Paying attention to what you pay attention to.
  86. Seeing friends during SXSW and the Texas Book Festival.
  87. Drawing comics on the iPad Pro.
  88. Getting to read great books before they’re released. Alan Jacob’s How To Think. Tim Kreider’s I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
  89. Having a weekly library routine. Going to Miss Monica’s story times at the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill with the kids and hitting P. Terry’s after.
  90. All the funny things my oldest son said. “Your skin keeps your bones from getting dirty!” At the pool: “She wouldn’t talk to me… She must not have any teeth!” At the playground, a kid told him that Jesus was dead, and he said, “So is Beethoven!” Playing him Ray Charles: “Papa, This is making me dance!” Referring to bowling as “pinball.” Seeing our monogrammed towels: “K is for Kraftwerk!” The time he called Leonard Bernstein “Bernie Einstein.” Shouting in frustration, “Who in the world made this stupid screwdriver?? It says ‘Made In China’ but it doesn’t say who made it!!!” The time he walked in on me watching Blade Runner, and he saw Deckard eating with chopsticks, and he said, “That guy is KNITTING HIS NOODLES!” Seeing snow: “I like how snow looks in real life!” The time I told him I thought he’d like marionettes, and he said, “Does she know a lot about bones?”
  91. My two-year-old conducting Beethoven.
  92. Silence. Sleeping with an eye mask and ear plugs.
  93. Teaching myself, finally, to solder. Soldering broken toy electronics back together.
  94. Recording songs on my old Tascam 4-track with my five-year-old, with titles like “Skeleton Girlfriend” and “I Don’t Want To Be Dead (Like Beethoven Is Dead)”
  95. An epic 30-minute UNO game with my wife.
  96. Drinking champagne on ice in a pint glass.
  97. A bowl of cereal when you can’t sleep.
  98. Getting up in the night to take a pee and looking out the bathroom window at the moonlit backyard.
  99. Giving it five minutes. Changing my mind.
  100. Reading books.

Previous years here.

Caveman drawings


Our two-year-old, Jules, our little caveman, started drawing dozens of skeletons a few days ago, and in response to my posts about them, an Instagram follower commented, “They’re like ancient cave drawings.” I immediately thought of the work of Sylvia Fein, a painter who wrote two really interesting books about children’s artwork: Heidi’s Horse, a record of her daughter’s drawings of horses from the ages of 2 to 17, and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking, which compares children’s drawings to the cave paintings and drawings of our ancestors. The books can be hard to track down, so here are a few examples from First Drawings, below:


I love these books because they honor the work of children’s drawing — their play — by paying close attention to it, and they show how the development of children’s visual thinking echoes the development of our species’ visual thinking. Children do the work of developing powers that we have evolved over thousands of years, all in the span of a decade or two.

I also love these books because they are about intense looking and observation, and they explore their arguments through simple juxtaposition. I know of at least two other books — both favorites of mine — that use this method: David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge, which compares post-photography painting to medieval pre-optics paintings, and Norman Brosterman’s Inventing Kindergarten, which compares the art of kindergarteners to the art of modernist artists and architects.

Sylvia Fein is a terrific painter who, to my knowledge, is still working at the age of 98. Here’s a 2014 documentary about her life and work. There’s a wonderful moment when she speaks of discovering working in miniature when her daughter was very little: “I was just in heaven. Everything seemed to go together: my life and my painting.” I’m inspired by the way Fein was able to integrate motherhood and art-making. (Above is my favorite painting of hers, obviously a self-portrait, from 1947, called “Lady With Her Baby.”)

The only thing remotely similar to Fein’s book Heidi’s Horse that I can think of is a 1939 exhibit at the MoMA, Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity, which showcased the work of Dahlov Ipcar, from the age 3 to 22. (She was, by the way, the first woman with a solo exhibition at MoMA.) Ipcar’s parents, William Zorach and Marguerite Zorach, were both artists, and they saved much of the artwork she made as a young child. The press release of the show outlines a goal very similar to Heidi’s Horse: “it shows the creative growth from infancy to adulthood of an individual who is neither a genius nor a prodigy.” 

Ipcar wrote about her unique upbringing in her essay, “My Family, My Life, My Art”:

My parents had always encouraged me to develop my own style of art. They both had undergone conventional art school training, but when they became involved in the modern art movement, they found they had to unlearn everything they had been taught…. They had deliberately left me unschooled in art, wanting to see what would happen if I were left alone to develop in my own way.

Ipcar and Fein share another connection: they both found a way to integrate their life and art-making. It came naturally to Ipcar, who recalled painting in the studio alongside her mother, and later, painting with her own children:

People always ask me how I managed to paint when my two boys were small. My children were a joy to me, and there was no problem working with them around — I just let them play at my feet as I painted. They would even run toy fire engines up and down my easel, but it didn’t bother me.

This is very much what I am attempting here, at the kitchen table, at this very moment, while the two boys draw quietly beside me, long enough for me to press “Publish.”

My reading year, 2017

I read so many good books this year, but here are 15 favorites:

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

Earlier this year Postman’s son Andrew wrote an op-ed with the title, “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 — it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World.” Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

 

Lao Tzu & Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching

Every one of these poems reads like a subtweet of the president. Le Guin’s footnotes are great, too: In response to “having a lot of things, a lot of money: / shameless theives. / Surely their way / isn’t the way,” she writes, “So much for capitalism.”)

 

David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

An imaginative, extremely readable book of short stories. I read at the very beginning of the year and it has stuck with me. (I think about these two afterlives a lot.)

 

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

All of Jansson’s work makes me want to move to Finland and live on an island. Less fanciful than my beloved Moomin comics, these stories have an undercurrent of sorrow to them. Really gorgeous book.

 

Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life

There’s been a lot of anti-Thoreau sentiment in the past years (heck, Kathryn Schulz published an article in the New Yorker called “Pond Scum”), and I didn’t even think I liked Thoreau, but Walls does a beautiful job of painting a portrait of a writer who was deeply rooted in and connected to his place, who tried his best to carve out a “deliberate” life for himself. (Pair it with NYRB’s reader edition of Thoreau’s journal, which I’ve been reading daily.)

 

Tamara Shopsin, Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Certainly my favorite book cover of the year, the graphic designer’s memoir drops you right into a kid’s eye view of 1970s Greenwich Village. With it’s chunked sections and hand-drawn illustrations, it gave me the same kind of quick, skippy joy I get when reading Vonnegut.

 

Stefan Zweig, Montaigne

Zweig wrote this before his suicide, while exiled in Brazil during World War II. To get Montaigne, Zweig said, “you should not be too young, too deprived of experience and life’s deceptions, and it is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought conveys the most precious aid.”

 

Alan Jacobs, How To Think

I read this book twice: first, when Alan asked for a blurb, and second, when I offered to interview him at Bookpeople upon its publication. It’s a brisk, 150-page plea for sanity. Alan is a rare writer: one who not only genuinely loves to write books, but also genuinely loves teaching.

 

Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

I had a couple of magical Manguso readings this year: On a summer trip to San Francisco, I bought this in the morning at Christopher’s Books in Potrero, and then read most of it later that afternoon in the Yerba Buena Gardens. Later in the year, I found a used copy of Ongoingness: The End of A Diary in a market in Antigua, Guatemala, and read that in one sitting, too.

 

Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, The Disaster Artist

I’ve been watching The Room for years, and I first read Bissell on the subject in Magic Hours. This was a total behind-the-scenes trip, and it is no surprise to me that the movie based on it has gotten great reviews. (I still haven’t seen it.)

 

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

A short, brilliant book about film editing that has quite a few lessons for writers, too. (It would make an excellent companion to Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies.) I first read about Murch in Lawrence Weschler’s book about his adventures in astrophysics, Waves Passing In The Night, which I picked randomly off my local library’s New Arrivals shelf.

 

Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten

This is not only a beautifully produced illustrated history of Friedrich Froebel’s institution, it also presents a compelling case that kindergarten influenced the origins of abstract art and modern architecture. (The juxtaposition of children’s art with paintings and blueprints reminds me of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge.)

 

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

I learned about this 1937 bestseller while reading Will Schwalbe’s Books For Living. It’s basically a book about the ancient Chinese art of chilling out and living a good life. (One thing: If you pick it up, just skip chapter 8 and Lin Yutang’s sexist views.) The book celebrates other writers who got me through the year — Thoreau, Whitman, Lao Tzu. I find it fitting that the only other person I knew who’d ever read it was the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who said in 2010, “If you read 1 book this year… make it this… no words to describe.)

 

David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls

I read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks.

 

Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

I love reading and thinking about Los Angeles, and I love writing that’s smart and trashy, so I liked this a lot.

 

Okay, jeez, it was a good reading year, so here are 15 more:

  1. Ian Svenonius, Censorship Now!!
  2. Warren Craghead, TrumpTrump: Volume 1
  3. Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
  4. Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
  5. Damon Krukowski, The New Analog
  6. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
  7. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
  8. Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
  9. Paul Karasik & Mark Newgarden, How To Read Nancy
  10. David Rakoff, Half Empty
  11. Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life
  12. Ellen Ullman, Life In Code
  13. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days
  14. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (read out loud with my son, Owen)
  15. Roberts & Kastner, eds., Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser

Phew! If you need them, here are some tips for reading more.

Browse my past twelve reading years.

How to be happy


Just some notes to myself:

  1. Read old books. And re-read classics. Steal old stuff.
  2. Go for long walks. Get out every morning because the demons hate fresh air.
  3. Play the piano. If you get stuck, you can always go Bach.
  4. Make art with the kids. They will teach you.
  5. Watch screwball comedies. Quick-fire fun romantic stuff like It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, His Girl Friday, The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, etc.
  6. Listen to soul music. It never fails you.
  7. Write in your diary. On paper. And go back and revisit it.
  8. Take naps. And take them the right way.
  9. Look at the moon. It gives you perspective.
  10. Make dumb lists. (When in doubt, tidy up.)

Making lists (checking them twice)


I’m working on my 2017 year-end list. (Above list is from September, so no spoilers.) 3 years ago I got up on a high horse about how ridiculous it is for readers who aren’t professional critics (or affiliate bloggers) to make their year-end lists before the actual end of the year. (Do none of these people read books in December?) It’s a dumb thing to make a big deal about. People love year-end lists before the year’s end (including me, honestly) because they can see what they missed, argue, add to their Christmas lists, buy and write-off their taxes while they still can. It’s mostly harmless, so who cares?

I’ve been keeping a list of my favorite books for over a decade now, and the question on my mind is whether I should bother making a year-end list at all. I mean, I love sharing books I think deserve an audience — it’s the best part of putting out my weekly newsletter — but I’ve begun to weary of ranking books. (My favorite year-end list features no ranking at all: Steven Soderbergh’s media diary.) Reading is such a unique, personal experience, created by the author’s text, the quality of the printing (or e-device), the setting, and the mind (and mood) of the reader. Ranking books in any way, even by gathering up a top ten list, seems, at best, arbitrary, at worst, harmful to the spirit of what makes reading so awesome.

Still, I love a good list, and I love looking back on the year and making a list. I’ve always thought the best lists are more like a diary or a snapshot of a moment in somebody’s life, like John Porcellino’s Top 40 he’ll put in the back of King-Cat:


Reading JP’s lists give you another glimpse into who he is, beyond his comics. (For the past 3 years, I’ve ripped him off with my year-end top 100 lists.)

So I’ll keep on, but I’m going to try, as best as I can, to acknowledge that each of these lists is just a moment in time, just a snapshot of how I feel when I make them. I love the idea of the year-end list as an “interchangeable set of favorites” in the words of Stephanie Zacharek, who wrote of her year-end list: “If I’d eaten something different for breakfast on the day of making up the list, my number 2 might have been number 1, or vice-versa.”

One other thing: I’d like to go back occasionally, revisit my lists, see how they hold up. I’ll usually make a top 10 list of books, and then add on another list of 10 more good books. Often it’s this second list of books that contains the most interesting stuff. To quote Zacharek again:

 [T]he end of a critic’s, or a moviegoer’s, list is where the oddball magic really happens. The movies here are the stragglers, the drifters, the hobos that not all of society loves. These are movies that may have been kicked off the list, put back on and kicked off again – they don’t ask for easy membership in any club. These are movies that may have reached us in ways we can’t quite parse, even after we’ve spent hours or days thinking and/or writing about them. If all top-10 lists are subjective (and all are, no matter how pompous some critics may be in presenting their choices), the tail end of the average list is truly the untamed wilderness, the place for inexplicable passions, for wooliness, for massive quantities of “What the f—itude?”

So, let’s have a little fun at the end of this post, and revisit a few years:

2016. It’s hard to believe John Cage’s Silence, Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp: A Biography, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own didn’t make the top 10. Jeez.

2015. Great year. No complaints!

2014. I messed this one up. I mean, seriously? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son didn’t make the top 10? I’m an idiot.

2013. Another good year. I’d bump up Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Ellen Ullman’s Close To The Machine.

2012. Solid.

2011. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is way better than some of the books on the top 10.

2006-2010. Too painful to think about!

Stay tuned for 2017.

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