Basic pleasantries - Austin Kleon

A message for graduates

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Lately, I’ve felt like The Man Without Advice, but a school recently asked me to record a message for recent graduates, so I thought I’d share it here, too.

If it sounds familiar, it’s basically me paraphrasing Steal Like An Artist:

The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As the writer Steven Pressfield says, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”

This is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage. No huge paycheck on the line. No stockholders. No e-mails from your agent. No hangers-on.

You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.

Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts.

I wrote a list of advice for recent graduates a few years ago, but it might need some updates for the COVID era…

Any more advice I have is in my books — if you have a recent graduate in your life, consider getting them the Steal/Show/Keep Going trilogy!

The Man With No Advice

Monday, April 13, 2020

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant…”
— Emily Dickinson

I thought I was done making zines, but I can’t seem to stop! Here is one I made yesterday, with the first line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” (Here’s Dennis Hopper reciting it on The Johnny Cash Show.)

It feels like it should be a time in which people need advice more than ever, but I’m not so sure. (And though I could be seen as a professional propagator of advice, on the whole, I am skeptical of giving it.) I think, in all times, but especially in these, if you sit quietly for long enough, you can hear that voice inside you that tells you exactly what you need to do.

“Advice, wrote David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, “even wise advice — actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.” (I got that from Tim Kreider, who is “Against Advice.”)

Besides, as Steinbeck said, “No one wants advice — only corroboration.” I think my advice books mainly give voice to what the reader already thought but couldn’t put into words. The books are permission slips, in a sense. “Go make some art!”

Then again, some advice is good. I know I always sought it when I was starting out. A reader on Twitter a few days ago told me, “Thanks to your advice I’ve stopped being an artist and I’m making art again.” That was my message perfectly distilled and it made my whole day.

Anyways, this zine is not actually about advice at all. It’s about the power of staying quiet when people ask you how you’re doing what you’re doing. Refusing to answer, Bartleby style. (“I prefer not to!”) Because the thing you’re doing is still very close to you, and it’s still very much alive, and like a wild horse that’s somehow letting you take a ride, you don’t want to spook it. Or it’s a gift being given to you and you don’t want to cheapen it. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it’s something precious to you right now, and you don’t want it out in the air. You want to keep it close and see where it goes. And besides, those who really look close, they’ll get what they’re looking for.

But it’s also about how much easier it is to say these things with art. And how freaking good it feels not to talk, but to make.

Neil Postman’s advice on how to live the rest of your life

Monday, March 2, 2020

I am a big fan of writer Neil Postman — especially Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Amusing Ourselves To Death, which I put at the very top of the recommended reading in Keep Going — so it was a delight to come across his general life advice compiled by his former student and colleague, Janet Sternberg, who worked closely with Postman over the years.

She begins:

A prolific writer, Postman authored numerous books, essays, articles, and speeches. Yet he never formalized in writing certain material that he presented in classes he taught at New York University in the Media Ecology Program. Almost every year, Postman ritually delivered several lectures, among them an enduring favorite which became known as his lecture on “How to Live the Rest of Your Life.” In his own personal notes, Postman titled this material simply his “Final Lecture,” describing it as “a lecture based on the supposition that American culture is in the process of decomposition. Technology has attacked all social institutions and although we may yet revive the culture, the problem to be solved is, how to survive until that happens.”

I don’t agree with all of it, but I’ve cut and pasted some of my favorites below:

2. Do not watch TV news shows or read any tabloid newspapers.

3. Do not read any books by people who think of themselves as “futurists”

7. Establish as many regular routines as possible.

11. “As a general rule, do not take in any more information after seven or eight o’clock at night.”

12. “Work, friends, and family are the areas where what you think and do matters.”

14. With exceptions to be noted further ahead, avoid whenever possible reading anything written after 1900.

16. Weingartner’s Law: 95% of everything is nonsense.

18. Take religion more seriously than you have.

19. Divest yourself of your belief in the magical powers of numbers.

20. “You should distrust writers that English professors favor… read good writers despised by English professors.”

21. Patriotism is a squalid emotion.

22. New is rotten, big is rotten, and fast is rotten.

You can read the whole thing here. Janet was also kind enough to send me a link to his rules on public speaking.

If you want to get a feel for Postman’s voice and delivery, I recommend this 1997 lecture, “The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” which includes his 7 questions for a new technology:

1. What is the problem to which technology claims to be a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?

4. Which people and institutions will be most harmed?

5. What changes in language are being promoted?

6. What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?

7. What alternative media might be made from a technology?

Of course, the best way to get to know a new writer is through their books!