Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Search for "log book"

Search Results for: log book

The “This Sucks” Hammer

In the most recent episode of Song Exploder, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross talk about their creative process in the studio. Reznor discusses his history with addiction, how he used to be afraid of failure in the studio, but how he now trusts “the process” to getting him somewhere. Maybe most importantly, he says that when the ideas are really coming, he’s learned to give them enough time to come forth, without worrying too much about whether they’re good or bad. “There’s plenty of time to bring out the ‘This Sucks’ hammer,” he says.

Every artist has to balance between at least two modes: call them, for lack of better terms, the creative mode and the editorial mode. In the creative mode, you don’t worry about whether things are good or bad, you just let them happen. In editorial mode, you go back and look at what you’ve got, and you ask the questions, “Is this good? Does this suck?”

Lynda Barry’s essay, “Two Questions,” from her brilliant book, What It Is, explores why and when the editorial mode appears and how you can make it go away long enough to get things on the page.  It’s essential, Barry says, “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.”

Donald Barthelme says the same in his classic essay, “Not-Knowing”:

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the… process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…

Fortunately for Reznor, he says he has been able to offload most of the editorial mode onto Atticus Ross, so he can stay in the creative mode — he’ll even leave the room for 20 minutes while Ross is assembling pieces of what they’ve recorded in Pro Tools (Oblique Strategy: “Go outside. Shut the door.”):

The different mindsets, or different hats one has to wear in this environment: one of them is the subconscious, follow the Muse, eyes closed, and another one, that’s radically different, is the editorial. “What sucked? What was good? What’s the piece that fits with that?” I love having [Ross] do that part, because I can stay in the other mode of not trying to analyze exactly what’s going on, and still stay subconscious. It keeps this momentum going where neither of us are bogged down too much. Our skill sets compliment each other. So, it’s him arranging stuff. I just kind of bang into things.

This is a terrific argument for collaboration, and the power of two, but for those of us who work solo, we have to try to split ourselves into two different people. We have to play the two different roles, inhabit the two different mindsets, wear the two hats. The easiest way do this, I’ve found, is to split up the modes in time: Write something without stopping, let it sit for 24 hours, or even a week, or even a year, then come back to it with the red pen. Or, make something in one space, then take it over to another space to fiddle with it. (This is why I have separate analog and digital desks in my studio: analog for creative mode, digital for editing mode.)

Most important of all, though, is to keep the “This Sucks” hammer out of reach until you’re ready for it.

The artistic recluse

Granted, it was published in The New York Times Style Magazine, so one doesn’t expect any deep Marxist analysis or whatever, but nowhere in Megan O’Grady’s essay “Is the Age of the Artistic Recluse Over?” does she suggest that maybe, just maybe, the reason there aren’t so many “artistic recluses” these days is that it’s actually pretty expensive to be a recluse, and people like Thomas Pynchon, who O’Grady calls “the last of our great literary recluses,” are able to retreat into a private life, shut off from the public, because they can actually afford to.

You could step back for a minute and question whether some of the artists O’Grady calls out in the essay are (or were), by definition, actual recluses. Over at Vice there’s the subhead for “Thomas Pynchon and the Myth of the Reclusive Author” saying “it’s not as if the man is some kind of ghost.” I don’t personally know a whole lot about Pynchon, but Thoreau, the author in the batch whose life I can claim to be solidly familiar with, only lived at Walden for two years, and even then, he entertained guests, attended family dinners, etc. He spent most of his life deeply involved in Concord life, teaching children, surveying land, and lecturing around New England. (O’Grady claims Thoreau’s form of civil disobedience was “to withdraw instead of to Tweet,” but I wouldn’t call publicly speaking out in support for John Brown and abolition and spending a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government waging an unholy war withdrawing.)

Heck, even Emily Dickinson, who starts the piece, has had her reclusive myth re-examined. Check out “The Networked Recluse,” an exhibit and catalog dedicated to capturing “the fullness and vitality of Dickinson’s life, most notably her many connections—to family, to friends, to correspondents, to the literary tastemakers of her day.”

But setting aside the question of whether “the age of the artistic recluse” ever actually existed, the essay really seems to be lamenting how this generation of authors not only embrace social media, but also engage in self-promotion and self-publicity, cultivating “a cyclical relationship with the spotlight, intermittently stepping into and receding from it.” While O’Grady seems to see self-promotion as an artistic or personal decision (she calls herself one of a group of “technological Bartlebys who would prefer not to post the contents of our closets/bookshelves/hearts on social media”), I see it more and more as a market-driven one: if there’s a mythical age that’s disappearing, it’s the one in which the author didn’t have to self-promote their work or build their own audience. (O’Grady says, “No one wants to imagine Virginia Woolf on book tour, or Joseph Cornell submitting to a magazine profile” — do people want to remember Hemingway doing booze ads?)

My agent gives book proposal workshops, and his first piece of advice for people who want to publish a book is: “Get famous first.” (He also says to remember that “all publishing is self-publishing.”) The state of the publishing industry is such that if a young writer today wants her book published by a major publisher, chances are she will need to bring along a pre-built platform and a previously gathered audience for her work. A major part of putting together a book proposal today is gathering up Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and newsletter subscriber counts.

It’s not as if it’s any different in other industries, such as music. (Heck, it’s probably worse.) In Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, he quotes Taylor Swift’s 2014 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.” Harris points out that older Americans “like to complain about the way many young people obsessively track our own social media metrics, but it’s a complaint that’s totally detached from the behavior’s historical, material causes.”

Even if you’re already famous, social media and self-promotion is part of the job and a necessity for sales. With magazines and other major news outlets declining, there are fewer and fewer places in which advertisements or publicity for books would even make a dent in the reading public’s consciousness, even if publishers were inclined to spend the money. (They are not.) Like all workers, artists have to take on more and more of a workload with less compensation.

The tension for the artist in contemporary life is the same that it has always been: How do you secure a living for yourself while maximizing your art-making time and energy? Some would say, “Well, forget about social media, then. Forget about self-promotion. Forget about sales. Keep your overhead low, get a day job, and just write.” That can be good advice, depending on the writer, and it’s advice I have given in the past. The problem is that it’s increasingly impossible for any American worker to secure a living, let alone keep one of the steady jobs that previously sustained artists, allowing them the free time, mental space, and chance for disconnection that much writing requires. (I think of Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor, working at the V.A. hospital in Cleveland, and the words of Jack Donaghy: “Lemon, we’d all like to flee to the Cleve.”) But “keep your day job” only works if there are actually decent day jobs.

No, it takes money and a room, so the working artist is going to have to hustle, one way or the other. O’Grady praises Kazuo Ishiguro for his “resistance against the role of artist-as-performer” in his “quietly myth-demolishing” article in The Guardian about how he wrote The Remains of The Day during a “four-week period of seclusion in 1987 he and his wife called the ‘crash.’” Good for him, but he already had two prize-winning novels on his resume. (And “The Crash” was made possible by his wife’s willingness and ability to keep all things domestic going, and, one presumes, a cache of saved money.) It’s admirable to see an artist pulling back from the techno-hustle, but it’s also admirable to see a working artist able to artfully balance their creative process and self-promotion without becoming a hollow shell or a piece of human spam.

Which brings us back to “the artistic recluse.” Yes, the best way to drop out and become an “artistic recluse,” even if it’s temporary, is to already be famous, and, more importantly, flush with cash. If you can’t live with your family, like a Thoreau or a Dickinson, you’re gonna need money, honey. Dave Chappelle, who spends most of his days on a farm in Yellow Springs, summed it up in a joke on one of his recent comedy tours: “I’m just back out here to make enough money to disappear again.”

Diaries are evidence of our days

“Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life…”
—William Zinsser

2018, if we make it there, will be my 10th year of keeping a daily logbook. What’s a logbook? In the old days, a logbook was a place for sailors to keep track of how far they’d traveled. Mine is just a simple list of the things that happen each day, a sort of reverse appointment book. Every morning I sit down and list what I did, who I saw, what I read/watched/listened to, etc., the previous day. (Because I know everyone will ask, here’s the kind of notebook I use.)

The logbook started, like many creative endeavors, out of sheer laziness. My memory is terrible, so I wanted a record of my days, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble of keeping a “real” diary. The logbook was a way for me to keep a diary without really thinking… or feeling. (Now, I keep a pretty intense notebook and diary, but I still keep my logbook, too.)

What the logbooks have turned into is an index of my life. I consult them to reminisce about important events, like the days my kids were born, but I often consult them for really mundane stuff, like looking up the last time I replaced the air filter on the furnace.

For better or worse, I can tell you what happened to me on every day of the past decade.

I thought about my logbooks this morning when I read about how a Russian chemist’s diaries are being used as evidence of Russian doping in the Olympics. The New York Times article starts like this:

The chemist has kept a diary most of his life. His daily habit is to record where he went, whom he talked to and what he ate. At the top of each entry, he scrawls his blood pressure.

In the diaries, mundane details of his life, like going out to buy a cold medicine and complaining about the Olympic cafeteria food, are juxtaposed against juicier details, like mixing drug cocktails and transporting athlete urine. Here’s a picture of the diary, flagged by attorneys, I’m assuming:

If you want to keep your thoughts secret but archived… do it on paper! The chemist told The Times that he kept the diary on paper “mindfully… not on the computer.” (A crazy detail is that he wrote the diary with a black and gold Watermen pen given to him by his friend, Russia’s former antidoping chief who “died suddenly” after his announcement he was writing a book.)

Whether involved in a scandal or not, diaries are evidence of our days.

Tidying up

I have this Oblique Strategy hanging up in my studio. Note that it says WHEN IN DOUBT. It doesn’t say ALWAYS. Tidying up is for when I’m stalled out or stuck. Tidying up a studio is, sorry Marie, not life-changing or magical, it’s just a form of productive procrastination. It’s avoiding work by doing other work.

The best thing about tidying is that it busies my hands and loosens up my mind so that a) I get unstuck with a new idea or I solve a problem in my head b) I come across something in the mess that leads to new work, like whenever I come across an unfinished poem that’s been buried in a stack of papers or blown across the garage by the air conditioner:

The best studio tidying is a kind of exploring — I’m re-discovering spaces as I sift through the objects that occupy them. The reason I tidy is not to clean, but to come into contact with something special that I’ve forgotten that I can now use. This is a slow, dreamy, ruminative, reminiscent form of tidying.

When I come across a long-lost book, for example, I open it to random pages, give it a browse, see if it has anything to tell me. I often stop tidying because I get swept up in reading. This is the exact opposite of the kind of tidying Kondo prescribes:

Once you have piled your books, take them in your hand one by one and decide whether you want to keep or discard each one. The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not.

This might be a good time to mention that while The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up can work wonders on your sock drawer or your kitchen pantry, I have serious doubts about its usefulness to artists and creative people. Some of my favorite artists not only have messy studios, they have intentionally messy studios, because they understand that creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

You think that if your studio is tidy, it will free you up to be more efficient, and therefore, you will produce more. Maybe that will help you if you’re a printmaker pulling prints, but it won’t help you come up with an interesting design for the next print.

It is always a mistake to equate productivity and creativity. They are not the same. In fact, they’re often at odds with each other: one is often most creative when one is least productive.

Of course there’s such a thing as too much clutter. It’s hard to work if you can’t find the tools you need when you need them. My friend John Unger has an interesting take on this, by making a distinction between tools and materials:

My rule is— keep your tools very organized so you can find them. Let the materials cross pollinate in a mess. Some pieces of art I made were utter happenstance where a couple items came together in a pile and the piece was mostly done. But if you can’t lay your hands right on the tool you need, you can blow a day (or your enthusiasm/inspiration) seeking it.

Let’s return to books. “Books are made out of other books,” as Cormac McCarthy says. Books are, for the writer, a material. And you never know which one you’re going to need, which is why writers like Nassim Taleb advocate for an “antilibrary,” or a library full of books you haven’t read. This requires collecting books, and collecting books that you’re not sure you’re even going to need. Sometimes, a library is better if the books aren’t organized. Coming across unrelated book spines on the shelf can lead to even more ideas. (See Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project.)

Also: art is not only made from things that “spark joy.” Art can be made, also, out of what is ugly, or repulsive. (Says the man who just yesterday collected litter on the side of the road and taped it into his notebook. Garbage in, art out.)

I wrote in Steal Like An Artist that artists are collectors, “not hoarders, mind you, there’s a difference,” but I’m starting to suspect that the difference is pretty small. (I come from a long line of pack rats.)

While I find the Kondo craze mostly benign, I do think there’s something insidious about what Ian Svenonius calls the “war on hoarders,” in which Americans are being convinced to give up all their paper books and CDs and other material clutter and embrace the digital cloud, accessed by sleek machines sold and controlled by powerful corporations.

“ALL POWER TO THE PACKRATS!” Svenonius exclaims in Censorship Now!! He knights hoarders as “the only thing standing between the incomprehensibly rich, all-controlling, degenerate, digital despots and the absolute destruction of any deviant or alternative consciousness.” (Let’s not forget that Winston Smith’s first transgression in 1984 is owning and writing in a paper diary.) If part of the artist’s job is to be that alternate consciousness, then we must keep our weird stuff around — stuff that other people find no value in.

“Stuff is important,” said George Carlin. “You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a PLACE for your stuff. Everybody’s gotta have a place for his stuff. That’s what life is all about, tryin’ to find a place for your stuff!”

So, yeah, tidy up. But not too much.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.