Austin Kleon

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The Kleon studio gift guide

Here’s a big list of stuff I like that people who like my stuff might like. (I get a cut if you buy through the links.)

Copies of my books, of course!

Blackwings.  My favorite pencil overall — great for sketching, perfect for making notes in books. Sometimes I like to just sharpen them and sit around and sniff ‘em.

Aqua Notes. They might seem goofy, but I get a lot of ideas in the shower, and nine out of ten of them are bad, but that one that is good, well, it’s worth having something you can write it down on.

 

Leuchtturm1917 pocket notebooks. These are small enough that they fit in my shirt and jeans pockets, and they take a beating. I carry one everywhere. (Pro tip: sometimes you can get the calendars this size on mega clearance — then I just scribble over the calendar part.)

Trodat Professional date stamp. If you read my newsletter, you know how much I love my date stamps. This one is big and heavy and makes a satisfying KER-CHUNK sound when you use it.

Pilot G2 Bold. My favorite pen. (I’m a weirdo: I don’t like to write longhand with less than 1mm of ink.)

Moleskine Daily Diary. This is the notebook I’ve used to keep a daily logbook for over a decade. My logbooks are invaluable to me—easier to keep than a diary and way more helpful. I like the smaller paperbacks, but you can also get a bigger hardcover.

Mitsu-Bishi 9852EW HB – I ordered these completely based on the case and now they’re my favorite for writing in notebooks. I like to saw/break one in half, sharpen the jagged edges, and wrap them in the elastic of my pocket notebook.

Zequenz flexible notebooks. I hesitate to list these here, because they’ve been known to fall apart, but people always ask, so this is the kind I use for my diaries. (Why this brand? They sent me a huge batch once and they worked for me, and I’m superstitious and lazy, so I just kept using them.)

Pentel Pocket Brush Pen. I love drawing with these. They are easy and elegant and they have refills and they last forever.

5 Year Diary. Designed by the brilliant Tamara Shopsin. I write a quote in mine every day.

Prismacolor Ebony pencils. These things are chunky and thick and black. I use them to mark up books, but I also use them to shade backgrounds in my diary comics.

Carl. Angel-5 pencil sharpener. This thing gets pencils super sharp and it makes any desk more cheerful.

UHU glue sticks. Simply the best glue sticks. Perfect for collage.

X-acto basic knife set. Perfect for cutting up magazines for collages. Easy to swap replacement blades.

Kindle Paperwhite. I love paper, but I probably do half my reading on one of these.  (There’s also a new version for kids.)

Wonderboom wireless bluetooth speaker. I love this thing so much. Tiny and waterproof and sounds great. You can link two for stereo sound if you want.

Speedball block printing kit. A very basic kit of tools — throw in some ink and some speedy cut blocks to play on.

Fiskars bone folder and scissors. For the perfect crease and the perfect cut!

Cutting mat. I keep one of these on my desk to protect my desk.

Anker power brick – I love this thing. (And Anker products in general.) You plug it into the wall, and it’ll charge two USB devices, and once those are charged, it’ll charge the internal battery. Take it to go, and you have enough to charge two phones. (I’ve heard this Nano is great for laptops.)

Ear Plugs. In the before times, these got me through long flights, noisy hotel rooms, and nights with a loud newborn. Highest cost/benefit ratio ever. (I got a whole box for Father’s Day.)

Sony H900N noise-cancelling headphones — These things are a bit of a luxury item, but I love them. (The new models are probably even better.)

Logitech Brio 4K. This is the webcam I use for all my speaking gigs. It just works.

Sharpie Fine Point markers. Yeah, I go through a lot of these. Here’s how to break them in.

Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World. My favorite drawing book, for all ages.

Crayola Slick Stix. I don’t know why regular crayons are so popular for kids other than the fact that they’re cheap and they don’t make a mess. (I think I just answered my own question.) Crayons are hard to hold in tiny hands and kids have to really press hard with them to get any kind of decent result. These Slick Stix are easy to grip and they lay down a really silky smooth line. They also have the added benefit of making everything you draw look like a Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Do A Dot Art! My son had trouble making circles early on, so he loved to use these for wheels on cars, faces, etc. They’re a little expensive, but they last a long time, and they mix really well.

Lynda Barry’s What It Is. My favorite book about writing and creativity.

Bernstein Favorites: Children’s Classics. Terrific introduction to classical music for kids.

On the one hand, this is a stupid time to get into vinyl because it’s so expensive now. On the other hand, it’s easy to build a nice collection because you can get a ton of great stuff reissued. Here’s a mix of some classics I recommend:

Whenever I’m sort of bummed or in need of some inspiration, I love watching good documentaries about art and artists. Here are some of my favorites:

Books make great gifts… they’re particularly good gifts to yourself! If you have a local bookstore, buy ’em there!

Here are some books I’ve read in recent years that I think would help a wide range of people:

You can also see my favorites year by year, for the past decade.

How to survive Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches. The supermarkets are jam packed with people who behave as if they have never shopped for groceries before, and Twitter is full of people who behave as if they’ve never had a meal with someone who doesn’t share their political views.

Regarding the meal, @poniewozik tweeted: “A thing I love about this country is it invented a holiday where millions of amateur cooks have to prepare a freakishly large bird. Like, the same country where people buy pre-made PBJ sandwiches, ONE TIME a year they have to figure out how to roast basically a dinosaur.”

Regarding the company, my friend @erika, the author of Just Enough Research, has it nailed: “Heading out to see your family this week? Don’t fight with them. Study them!” She suggests, if the conversation starts to head south, this magical phrase: “Tell me more about that.”

Say nothing else. Do not argue. Keep quietly sipping your beverage… All the research shows that facts are powerless in the face of contradictory beliefs. You will not win the argument. You have a better chance that Second Cousin Rick will talk himself out of his own theory if he talks long enough.

In the words of Oliver Sacks, pretend you’re an anthropologist on Mars.

Perhaps this perspective comes easiest for writers. (Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”) In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner write that the “anthropological perspective” is exactly what a good education is supposed to provide you. “[It] allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits…”

But the anthropological perspective is not just for surviving Thanksgiving! It’s a way of surviving all sorts of situations involving people who are being assholes. Here’s a trick for cultivating the proper detachment the perspective requires, from Bob Sutton, author of The Asshole Survival Guide:

I’ve got this colleague who does this astounding thing: He pretends when he’s in a meeting and there’s a really nasty person, what he does to detach is he pretends he’s a Doctor of Assholeism. And he says to himself, instead of getting upset, “I’m so lucky to have this fabulous specimen! To be so close up! I just can’t believe it!”

Good luck, my fellow anthropologists! I’ll be at home in my pajamas.

Hurry slowly

“The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time.”
—Junot Diaz

It was my pleasure recently to be interviewed by Jocelyn Glei for her podcast, Hurry Slowly. We talked about analog vs. digital tools, how space affects your work, working by hand, and slowing down. You can listen to our conversation here.

“Hurry slowly” has its roots in an old Latin phrase: “Festina Lente,” or “Make haste slowly,” or “more haste, less speed.” (See: The Tortoise and The Hare.)

Here’s Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, on the phrase:

Festina lente should totally be a model for our age. I came across it just reading about the early days of printing and Aldus Manutius—the great printer who of course figures in the plot of my book. It’s his motto. I’m sure that you could translate it different ways—but the one I liked best is “make haste slowly.” And I just love it cuz it seems like a contradiction, but in fact it’s exactly right. It seems to fit our time really well, but I stole it from a guy 500 years old. Oh wait, maybe this isn’t new, maybe this is not a new feeling.

Here’s Erasmus in his Adagia, 500 years before Sloan:

[Festina Lente] ought to be carved on columns. It ought to be written on the archways of churches, and indeed in letters of gold. It ought to be painted on the gates of great men’s palaces, engraved on the rings of cardinals and primates, and chased on the scepters of kings. To go further, it ought to be seen on all monuments everywhere, published abroad and multiplied so that everyone will know it and it will be before every mortal eye, and there will be no one who doesn’t hold it of greatest use…

Later, Erasmus writes, “Things that ripen prematurely are wont suddenly to go limp. What grows slowly and steadily can endure.” Echoing Erasmus, about 360 years later, is Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry for November 5, 1860:

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.

“Let’s slow down,” Steinbeck wrote in his journal while working on The Grapes of Wrath, “not in pace or wordage but in nerves.”

Some of my favorite writers use older technologies to force themselves to slow down: Lynda Barry used a paintbrush and red ink on legal paper to write the first draft of her manuscript for Cruddy. This page hangs in my bedroom:

“People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster,” says David McCullough. “Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.”

“The real issue with speed,” writes film editor Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

Finally, here is one of my favorite works by Corita Kent, which she sent to LBJ in 1963 “after reading that his wife Ladybird had been telling him to slow down.”

Top image: my friend Marty’s back yard — photo taken in 2010.

The hard way

For years now, I’ve been collecting stories about artists whose physical differences or disabilities have led to their signature work. Examples:

  • Chuck Close, along with his paralysis, “suffers from Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces.” And yet, he’s most famous for his face paintings, which help him remember faces.
  • Tommy Iommi, guitar player for Black Sabbath, after he lost fingertips in an industrial accident, was inspired by Django, and formed homemade prosthetics, and detuned his guitars down to C#, so there was less tension on the strings. This detuning is part of what makes Sabbath’s guitars sound so heavy, and thus we have heavy metal…
  • Henri Matisse’s failing eyesight and health led him to make his “cut-out” paper collages
  • The guitarist Django Reinhardt lost the use of 2 of his fretting fingers, and played all of his solos with two fingers
  • Regina Spektor has very small hands, and while studying classical piano, “scores had to be rearranged, her left hand taking on part of the role of the left.” After a while, it became clear that “the life she expected was perhaps not so attainable.” So she quit classical piano, but sat at the piano and wrote songs instead. (“The gift of small hands” as a NYTimes profile called it)
  • Art Spiegelman has amblyopia, or “lazy eye,” which flattens depth perception. He says he suspects it’s one of the reasons he’s a cartoonist—because the world looks flat to him
  • Walter Tandy Murch (father of film editor Walter Murch) a magical realist painter, was almost blind in one eye from a teenage accident, his vision as if “seen through translucent plastic”

This list is, of course, terribly incomplete, and man-heavy. (Please email me or tweet at me if you can think of other examples.) I’ve also done a poor job of including other creative types, like inventors, scientists, etc.

(There are all sorts of stories of inventors and artists with impairments related to their work. Beethoven’s deafness is the classic example, and while reading Damon Krukowski’s The New Analog last night, I found out that two of the men who developed the telephone had connections to the hearing-impaired: Alexander Graham Bell’s mother was deaf, he taught in a deaf school, and married one of his deaf students, and Thomas Edison was deaf in one ear, almost deaf in the other.)

One of my favorite contemporary examples is Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, who has been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome since 1987. For almost 25 years, she’s been confined indoors with crippling vertigo. She can’t go out and do research, she can’t attend literary festivals or book signings, or do any of the “normal” stuff that most authors do.

In a NYTimes profile, Wil S. Hylton writes:

It may be tempting to think of Hillenbrand as someone who has triumphed in spite of her illness. The truth is at once more complicated and more interesting. Many of the qualities that make Hillenbrand’s writing distinctive are a direct consequence of her physical limitations. Every writer works differently, but Hillenbrand works more differently than any writer I know of. She has been forced by the illness to develop convoluted workarounds for some of the most basic research tasks, yet her workarounds, in all their strange complexity, deliver many of her greatest advantages.

For example, she can’t go to the library and read old newspaper microfiche, instead she orders old vintage newspapers off eBay and reads them in her living room:

Hillenbrand told me that when the newspaper arrived, she found herself engrossed in the trivia of the period — the classified ads, the gossip page, the size and tone of headlines. Because she was not hunched over a microfilm viewer in the shimmering fluorescent basement of a research library, she was free to let her eye linger on obscure details…

…It was in those vintage newspapers that Hillenbrand discovered her next book. “I happened to turn over a clipping about Seabiscuit,” she said. “On the other side of that page, directly the opposite side of the page, was an article on Louie Zamperini, this running phenom.”

Since she can’t travel, she can’t do interviews her subjects face-to-face, so she relies on phone interviews:

This would seem to almost any reporter a terrible handicap. One hallmark of literary nonfiction is its emphasis on personal observation. But Hillenbrand found that telephone interviews do offer certain advantages… “I thought it was actually an advantage to be unable to go to Louie,” she said. Because neither of them had to dress for the interviews and they were in their own homes, their long phone calls enjoyed a warmth and comfort that might otherwise be missing. She could pose the deeply personal questions that even her father had trouble answering.

Finally, because of her vertigo, she often finds herself unable to read, and so she has to listen to a ton of audiobooks:

Hillenbrand sometimes longs for the tactile pleasure of the printed page, but she believes her immersion in audiobooks has actually improved her writing. “It has taught me a lot more about the importance of the rhythm of language,” she said. “Good writing has a musical quality to it, a mathematical quality, a balance and a rhythm. You can feel that much better when it’s read aloud.”

Saul Steinberg said, “what we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” I am not sure where I am going by collecting all of these examples, and I certainly do not mean to romanticize these artists or their conditions, merely point out that by (creatively) dealing with them, the artist came up with something new, or great.

What lesson or takeaway there is for the rest of us, if one exists, I’m not sure of yet, other than confirmation of the title of Ryan Holiday’s book: the obstacle is the way…

* * *

Additions:

  • (9/18/2019) After a tonsillectomy, Ernest Tubb couldn’t yodel like his hero Jimmie Rodgers anymore. So he started writing his own songs.
  • (7/21/2020) Film director Martin Scorsese couldn’t play sports or run too much with the other kids, so his parents took him to the movies. (He developed a habit of observing people from a distance…)
  • (3/29/2021) Pianist Leon Fleisher lost the use of his right hand, and turned to playing left-handed pieces and teaching, eventually regaining his use of both hands again
  • (3/29/2021) Composer Molly Joyce, who lost use of her left hand in a car accident and found a toy organ with chords on the left, keyboard on the right, which became a signature sound

On this day


I bought this handsome NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journal a few months ago when I saw that John Stilgoe had written the preface. (I took it as a BUY NOW sign: I’d read his book Outside Lies Magic earlier this year liked it quite a bit.)

It’s a highly edited and condensed version of the complete 47 volumes of Thoreau’s output, but I still wasn’t sure how to read the thing. I couldn’t imagine actually reading it front to back. Then I noticed that the left-hand page headers refer to the approximate date, but the right-hand page headers refer to what age Thoreau was when he wrote the entry. This seemed like a fun game: Let me see what Thoreau was writing when he was exactly my age.

Then I thought it’d be fun to just follow along with his life day-by-day and year-by-year, almost like turning The Journal into one of those 5 year diaries that you see in stationery stores. I’d stick post-it notes on the current date of each year of the journal, then check the tabs each day to see if there’s an entry.

This turns out to be a terrific way to read Thoreau, because he was so obsessed with observing nature and the changing seasons. You see, for example, how Thoreau repeats himself, noting the fallen leaves in October. (“How beautifully they go to their graves!”)

Yesterday, I read the entry for October 20, 1857, exactly 160 years ago, in which Thoreau writes beautifully about meeting a barefoot old man carrying a dead robin & his shoes full of apples:

I got such a kick out of reading this way I wondered what other books I had lying around the house that I could turn into a daily devotional. How about my Big Book of Peanuts?

I mean, of course a collection of daily newspaper strips, originally written to be consumed on one particular day, makes for good daily reading. (Think of all the “Page-A-Day” Peanuts calendars.) But there’s another reason they’re so great to read day-by-day: Peanuts function as a sort of coded diary for Schulz. This is explained by Bruce Eric Kaplan in the introduction to his collection, This Is A Bad Time:

[T]hese drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great….Every morning… I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings…

This connection between daily comic strips and diaries is made more explicit in the work of someone like James Kochalka in his sketchbook diaries, American Elf. I have all 14 years on my iPad now, so it wouldn’t be hard to read them in the same way I do the Peanuts collection. Strangely, I find that having a digital collection of the strips makes me want to reorganize the entries in non-chronological ways, like, reading every strip that includes leaves or clouds.

I have an ebook of Andy Warhol’s diary, and I like to search it whenever I’m in a spot that I know he had some connection to. (When I was in Milan, I typed in “Milan,” and landed on his entry for Monday, September 17, 1979, which contains the question, “Why would anybody want to go to Milan?”)

Anyways, I’m wandering towards a point: To read collected works is to also grapple with the question of how (or when!) to read collected works.

This, by the way, is the end of the Peanuts strip published on Oct. 20, 1962, 56 years ago:

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