Surprise! This month’s pick for our Literati book club comes with a mini piece of blackout art.
Still plenty of time to join us… sign up here.
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Surprise! This month’s pick for our Literati book club comes with a mini piece of blackout art.
Still plenty of time to join us… sign up here.
Ten years ago, I was working on the book proposal for Steal Like An Artist. Next year we’re releasing a 10th anniversary edition, so I’ve been digging in my archive for inspiration while writing the afterword.
The “archive” in this case is just a banker’s box. Most of the book was written fast an the computer, so there’s not as much fun material (false starts, deleted scenes, etc.) as there is when you open the boxes for the other books.
Most interesting might be the gigantic stack of index cards, many of which appear in the back of the book. (It was funny to see “Gesamtkunstwerk” scribbled on this card, as the word is in the zeitgeist thanks to this review.)
The index cards serve to show just how long I’ve been obsessed with the ideas I’m still writing about. (For example, there was a card about centrifugal books.) Steal was a book that tried to cover a lot of ground with very few pages, and there were so many seeds tossed in there that I was able to grow entire books out of some of them.
It makes me laugh to see how simple the illustrations are. (I got a lot of mileage out of Photoshop’s “invert” function.) I really wanted the book to just feel like a fancy zine.
I’ve had a decade now of people asking what “font” I use. Everything was just marker on typing paper. (“But what kind of typing paper?” my friend joked on Instagram.)
My favorite object in the box is the “dummy” I made for my editor, Bruce Tracy, by printing out a dust jacket for a book with the same trim size. (The Cute Manifesto by James Kochalka.) The legend is that design had a few options in the cover meeting and the late Peter Workman pointed at my dummy and said “that one.”
In the old days, my publisher would send me reprint notices on a postcard. (They stopped at the 10th printing. I think the book has gone through at least two dozen reprintings at this point.)
As for the book itself, it doesn’t even feel like I really wrote the thing. There are more years now between me and the me who wrote the book than there was between the me who wrote the book and the 19-year-old me he was writing it for. Time to finish up this afterword, put the archive back on the shelf, and write something new…
While I very much like the idea of writing “shitty first drafts” and making something crummy and fixing it later, that’s not really how I write most of the time.
My process usually is: I procrastinate, endlessly, and work things out in my head, and then sit down and agonize sentence by sentence until the thing is finished.
Something that works better for me, especially since I draw and make visual art, too, is: “Just make something, anything.”
This is something a creative director said to me when I worked in marketing: Move from idea to manifesting the idea in some object as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter if it’s a shitty sketch on a napkin, or a model out of toothpicks, or a paragraph typed into the Notes app, or whatever it is, the important thing is to make some thing. When you have the thing, it’s out of your head and you can look at it for what it is, figure out what it needs to be.
For example, I was trying to work out a structure with the elements “Time, Space, Materials” and “Head, heart, hands” and “Past, present, Future.” My son was playing with a Spin Art kit he got for his birthday, so I used his discard pieces and made this dumb spinwheel thing that doesn’t even really make sense, but it was something, and something is better than nothing:
Now it sits on my desk, and I play with it and think with it while I still try to figure out the piecce.
The only trouble with this system is that I am an imperfectionist — I think most of things I make are most beautiful in their raw state, living in my notebook, and someone should just publish it as is! (My delusional dream is that one day my books will look just like my notebooks.)
The owls are gone again and I am sad. (Although it’s nice to know that Merlin and Minerva, not too far away, just hatched chicks!) I asked the six-year-old to make a “lost owl” flier and maybe that would help bring them back. This is what he drew. I am someone who is sometimes unfeeling, and because he seems, sometimes, to feel everything, he can often show me what I’m feeling in his drawings. For this reason, among many others, he’s been my favorite artist since he picked up a piece of chalk.
Read more: Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers
An update on Coconut and Mr. Coconut, the screech owls who live in our yard: this morning we spotted both of them sitting in a tree by our driveway. They were sitting very close to each other, and preening, so cross your fingers that these love birds are figuring it out this time. (They did this same thing about a month ago.)
A first for us: last night Meg and I had the amazing experience of seeing both owls out on separate trees, calling to each other. If you turn the sound way up on this video, you can hear Coconut’s singing voice:
Omg, y’all. Not only did we see both owls tonight, about 30 feet apart in different trees, but if you turn the video way up on this video you can HEAR Coconut. ? ? #coconuttheowl pic.twitter.com/Ok0efE1dUC
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) April 8, 2021
If you can’t get enough of the Coconuts, check out Merlin and Minerva, who live not too far from here. (Minerva is sitting on eggs and has a live stream!)
Read more about our adventures with the owls here. For day-to-day updates, follow me on Twitter or Instagram.
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