Writing is listening - Austin Kleon

Listening is the whole deal

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Adam Moss in the afterword to The Work of Art:

THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what to do; the work would “speak” to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders. Tony Kushner asked his Angels alter ego, Louis, to explain the play to him; Cheryl Pope waited for the mother in her picture with no face to tell her whether she wanted a face. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.

Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves, taking whatever their imagination spewed forth, recognizing it and translating it back—simplifying it, usually—so their conscious self could go about manipulating it. And this attending (“I was just taking dictation,” said Kushner, a common sentiment) was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That’s what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles —they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.

Or, as Anni Albers put it: “the listening to that which wants to be done”:

In the comments of my newsletter on interviewing and wanting to be a better listener, a reader told me about an acronym people in the coaching world use frequently: WAIT, which stands for “Why Am I Talking?”

There’s something about this acronym that is more helpful and hits much harder than my usual “Shut up and listen” mantra.

I’ve taken to giving myself temporary tattoos on my arm:

I just spent the week doing promotion for the Steal Like an Artist 10th anniversary, and WAIT took on a different meaning: Why am I talking here? What am I trying to do with my words? It sort of kept me “on point.”

We are just about to break ground on my new studio. Construction always takes about twice as long as you think it will, so the WAIT on my wrist tells me to relax, stay calm, the days will accumulate.

Related reading: Hit pause

Books that suck you in and books that spin you out

Monday, March 29, 2021

Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

Moby-Dick, for example, is a book whose force seems to me centripetal: after being pointed to it by other books, I found myself returning to it, again and again. It sucks me in.

The Writer’s Map, on the other hand, a glorious current read of mine, is a book whose force feels centrifugal: two chapters in, and I already have a long list of books and to chase down. It spins me out.

Both kinds of books can be extremely valuable to the reader, and I don’t think one kind is necessarily better than the other. I’m also not sure that these forces are objectively observed. One reader’s centripetal book could be another’s centrifugal, and vice versa. It’s also possible that a book can both suck you in and spin you out.

This, by the way, is not an original theory of mine. I first heard it from my friend Matt Thomas, over a decade ago. “Good movies, I find, are centrifugal,” he once tweeted. “That is, they spin you out—to other movies, ideas, art, people.” He’s also tweeted that he finds Facebook centripetal (it sucks you in) and Twitter centrifugal (it spins you out).

I asked Matt where he got this idea, of media with centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he pointed me to Susan Douglas’s book about radio, Listening In. I searched the whole book and only found this reference:

“Listening, argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”

(This passage speaks to Murray Schafer on sound, but that’s for another blog post.)

Again, I don’t want to place a value judgment on a book based on its centripetal or centrifugal force, but I do think that a centrifugal book can be of lesser quality and still retain its value, as its value is found in the things it spins you out to.

Matt suggested to me that there’s a third category of work: the work that doesn’t spin you at all, the work that doesn’t move you in any direction, the work that barely has any force to it.

These books are to be avoided.

Silence as ear cleaning

Thursday, January 28, 2021

“Silence is a space for something to happen.”
—Ursula Franklin

You know, I don’t think I’ve actually ever watched John Cage perform “4:33.” Even a minute and a half is enough to chill me out and clean my ears. (This clip is from the video artist Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage.)

“The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable,” writes Murray Schafer in Ear Cleaning: Notes on an Experimental Music Course. “The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open.” In the chapter, “Silence,” Murray writes, “Silence is a pocket of possibility.”

Man likes to make sounds and to surround himself with sounds. Silence is the outcome of the rejection of human personality. Man fears the absence of sound as he fears the absence of life. There is nothing so sublime or stunning in music as silence.

The ultimate silence is death.

Silence feels so good to me these days it’s like what the French call, “la petite mort,” or “little death.” Relief. Release. A clearing out. An emptying.

One incredible thing about Derek DelGaudio’s *In and Of Itself* is that this title card actually worked on me

“An artist has to understand silence,” says Marina Abramovic. “An artist has to create space for silence to enter his work. Silence is like an island, in the middle of a terrible ocean.”

“Now I will do nothing but listen,” wrote Walt Whitman, “To accrue what I hear…”