Austin Kleon

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The trouble with months

The clean four calendar weeks of this February reminded my friend Kelli Anderson of “The International Fixed Calendar,” a 13-month calendar which she summarized this way:

• 28 days in every month
• Each week begins on Sun. / ends on Sat.
• Dates fall on the same day of the week every year
• To total 365 days, there’s a floater day
• From 1928-1989, Eastman-Kodak made all employees use it (wut??)

Here’s how the case was made in 1927 in an issue of The Outlook:

A “MONTH” does not mean anything. A day means something, A year means something. But a month? In the vernacular, what do you mean, month?

We cannot scrap our days or our years without scrapping the sun. We could but we do not want to scrap our weeks. Religious tradition, long habit, and convenience combine to make the week a very acceptable division of time. But we can (and, if we once come to see the awkwardness and inconvenience of them, we will) scrap our months….

A month is a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, or human experience. It is an inaccurate and varying measure of time that is a constant annoyance in business and a misleading unit in science. It has no religious significance.

A month is nothing but just a bad habit.

Harsh! But, I mean, they’re not completely wrong. Months are wacky! The idea of carving up time into new, industrial-friendly units seems insane, but then, all calendars are a little insane…

In Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours, she writes:

Mankind has always had trouble with calendars. As human beings our personal experience of time may be infinitely elastic, but as societies we have always needed calendars, to fix future dates and record past ones. The earliest attempts may date back thirty thousand years. The trouble is that the natural markers of the passage of time — days, lunar months, and solar years — are all incommensurables. Attempts to combine them in a single calendar inevitably run into trouble. Taking the day as 1, the lunar cycle is approximately 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes, and the solar year 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes. The seasons and the calendar have always had a tendency to drift apart.

One of my favorite pages from Keep Going

Going back to that issue of The Outlook:

Long before the Christian era the Egyptians had a better set of months than we have. Then came along Julius Caesar and robbed February of a day and named one of the longer months after himself. Then came along Augustus Caesar and he took to himself the month that followed Julius’s, but because he wanted a month that was just as big as Julius’s he added a day to it. To do this he stole another day from February. Then he changed around some other days and left the set of calendar months in a jumble. And ever since then we have been putting up with this arbitrary arrangement as if it were as fixed as the tides and the circuit of the earth around the sun.

Now that every day is Groundhog Day, man-made time seems even more oppressive to me. With every new month, I think, “This’ll be the one!” and five days in, I want to murder it, and murder the calendar along with it.

If we have to have calendars, I do enjoy ones that that break me out of old ways of thinking about time. Last year, I had a lunar calendar hung up in my office, but this year we put up an astrological calendar that a fan sent me, not because we believe in astrology, but just to make time feel a little different, a little novel.

See also: Circular time vs. Linear time. Filed under: time

The Medium is the Massage

Designer Scott Boms recently donated designer Quentin Fiore’s hand-annotated mechanical (in publishing, a mechanical is like a prototype for the book) of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage to Letterform Archive in San Francisco and let us all have a look:

I acquired this after the passing of Marshall’s wife Corinne as we were cleaning out the McLuhan home in Wychwood Park in Toronto. It was stuffed in a cardboard box in the basement and long forgotten…. The story goes that Marshall made barely any edits to Fiore and Agel‘a proposal, including the typo in the name of the book itself, though there are a handful of written annotations through this mechanical.

Designer Kelli Anderson posted a video on her Instagram stories of Boms flipping through:

Kelli added a bit more background to the famous story about the title (from the McLuhan estate’s website):

“Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover ‘Massage’. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!’ Thus, there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.”

(As the Oblique Strategies tell us: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”)

Then again, here’s Quentin Fiore being interviewed by Steven Heller in 1988 (from this supplement to The Electronic Information Age Book):

SH Where did the title come from?

QF From McLuhan. What McLuhan intended by “massage” is that technology takes over us completely. To some people this seemed demeaning: to think that a piece of junk like a television or computer can change their lives. I mean, they couldn’t understand how man fashioned the shovel, and then the shovel proceeded to fashion man. Many people can’t stomach this.

Pancake moons and grounds galaxies

pancake moon
From Alternate Moons, by Robert Pufleb and Nadine Schlieper

Alternative Moons is a book of moon photos with a surprising twist: the moons are actually pancakes.

Kelli Anderson posted this flip-through on her twitter:

At the end of the book is a recipe for cooking up your own batch of moons.

I immediately felt them akin to my grounds galaxies — photos of coffee grounds on my kitchen counter, manipulated in the Photoshop Express iOS app and Instagram:

I love making these images during breakfast — thinking about the cosmos in the most mundane, domestic, earliest moments of the day…

Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

(There’s a good flour/flower pun there, but I’ll leave it.)

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…)

Paper is a wonderful technology


This afternoon I popped into the Ransom Center and came across a wonderful little section showcasing interactive design elements in early paper books. Above is a “volvelle” (from the Latin word volvere, a verb meanting “to turn”) made around 1575 by Leonhard Thurneisser. (Hand colored!) If I understand correctly, it’s basically gigantic “horoscope calculator,” designed to show readers how the heavens will influence their lives. (A visual echo: Brian Dettmer’s book autopsies.)

Below is a 1570 printing by John Day of Euclid’s The Elements of Geometry, complete with foldable diagrams. The book is open to the point where Euclid explains what makes a pyramid a pyramid. (Looking at both these books I was reminded of my friend, the paper whiz, Kelli Anderson, and her new book.)


Across the room, perhaps not as visually spectacular, but no less beautiful to me, was this pocket notebook that belonged to Sam Shepard:


“Paper is a wonderful technology for the storage and retrieval of observations,” writes Walter Isaacson. In his recent biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the penultimate item on a list of lessons he draws from the artist’s life is: “Take notes on paper.”

Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts.

I went home and wrote in my notebook. My paper notebook.

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