Austin Kleon

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Diary of a 5-year-old

We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.

Coffee with an old friend

Back in February I sat down with Mike Rohde and recorded a conversation for his Sketchnote Army podcast about how I work. It was recorded on an iPhone in a noisy coffee shop downtown, but it has a casual, candid feel to it that I enjoyed.

I was right in the middle of writing the talk that would become my new book, and while I don’t talk about the book at all, I talk a lot about the process of getting to it: going back to daily blogging, putting out the newsletter, having a repeatable daily practice for generating work, reading Thoreau’s journals, watching Ralph Steadman draw, etc.

Listen here.

Reading right to left

After I wrote about looking at things upside down, a reader relayed what his daughter was learning in army cadet training: “In the field, troops are told to scan from right to left. As we generally read left to right, doing the opposite aids in detecting anomalies in the landscape and potential threats to safety.”

Here’s photographer Dale Wilson (emphasis mine):

One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a descent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.

More on reading right-to-left here.

Inscrutable blueprints

If you read John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, you’ll come across several diagrams like the ones above. “McPhee creates them for everything he writes,” wrote Sam Anderson in his terrific profile. “Some of the shapes make almost no sense — they look like the late-stage wall sketches of a hermit stuck in a cave. Others are radically simple.”

McPhee learned the technique from his high school English teacher, Mrs. McKee, who made him do three writing assignments a week. “We could write anything we wanted to, but each composition had to be accompanied by a structural outline, which she told us to do first. It could be anything from Roman numerals I, II, III to a looping doodle with guiding arrows and stick figures. The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs.”

These little inscrutable blueprints reminded me of the diagrams scattered throughout the notebooks of Paul Klee (collected in The Thinking Eye [PDF] and The Nature of Nature [PDF]):

I was also reminded of Sylvia Fein’s First Drawings, which collects cave drawings alongside children’s drawings and work by famous artists:

Artists need pockets

In Steal Like An Artist, I pointed out that David Hockney had a special pocket sewn into his suit coats for sketchbook, and the musician Arthur Russell had pockets sewn onto his shirts so he could carry around a pen and a pocket notebook for musical ideas. (You can see his penchant on display in the photos above.)

I thought about Russell yesterday, when I saw designer Kelli Anderson (author of This Book Is A Planetarium) tweet that women’s clothes with no pockets are “a vestigal decision to disempower.” Women’s clothes without pockets, she says, imply that the wearer:

• isn’t expected to build anything
• is invited to contribute her appearance, first and foremost
• should be controlled/surveilled

Like the oblivious man that I am, I’d never given the issue a thought.

In the “Politics of Pockets,” writer Chelsea G. Summers explores the history of pockets, linking to a bunch of cool sources, and summing it up:

Men’s dress is designed for utility; women’s dress is designed for beauty. It’s not a giant leap to see how pockets, or the lack thereof, reinforce sexist ideas of gender. Men are busy doing things; women are busy being looked at. Who needs pockets?

In “Jane Jacobs, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Power of the Marimekko Dress,” critic Alexandra Lange (I can’t wait to read her book, The Design of Childhood) writes about how she noticed that Jane Jacobs and Georgia O’Keefe wore the same dress… with pockets, of course:

Maybe this is a footnote, but it is a fascinating one. In 1963, the same year that O’Keeffe probably bought her dress, Eugenia Sheppard, the fashion critic for the New York Herald Tribune, called such dresses “a uniform for intellectuals . . . Marimekko is for women whose way of wearing clothes is to forget what they have on.” Who could be more desirous of forgetting what they had on than women such as Jacobs and O’Keeffe, who had so much to do? And who would better understand their needs—skirts for riding, pockets for paper and pen—than powerhouses such as Annika Rimala, who designed their dress…

When I was poking around the Twitter responses, I came across this dad, who said he sews giant pockets into his daughter’s school uniforms.

(I will restrain myself from complaining about the contemporary scorn of cargo shorts…)

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