Austin Kleon

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A quote a day

an outtake from Lynda Barry’s Making Comics
an outtake from Lynda Barry’s Making Comics in my office

Because yet another notebook is just what I needed in my life (I think that makes 4 daily notebooks), I ordered one of Tamara Shopsin’s lovely 5 year diaries (added to my gear page):

I’ve been using mine not as an actual diary, but as a kind of commonplace book, writing a favorite quote I read or line I hear in it every day, like so:

I love books like The Daily Thoreau and Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom, so this idea (stolen from Dan Pink) instantly appealed to me.

I like flipping back through my entries and seeing if there are any threads or themes that run through the week:

I’m curious to see whether the quotes in the following years will speak to others on the same page, and what kind of juxtapositions will pop up. I could easily see this becoming my most treasured notebook. (You can get one here.)

Lynda Barry’s What It Is

In the spring of 2006, the writer Dan Chaon invited my wife and I to Oberlin to see a cartoonist named Lynda Barry speak. She took off her boots in the middle of a chemistry lab and read from a book named Cruddy:

this is how I drew in 2006: making fake woodcuts with a Wacom stylus and Macromedia Flash

Afterwards, my wife and I spent a few hours at a bar with her and Dan and a few other students afterwards, and I feel very much like I’ve run my whole career off that encounter. The way Lynda thinks about images and pictures and words just snapped everything together for me, showed me a path forward I didn’t know existed. She was the first artist who taught me the value of thinking and exploring on the page with your hands.

I read everything of hers I could find and What It Is was a book I anticipated like no other.

I bought the Tin House issue with an excerpt later that fall. (A side note: That amazing issue also intro’d me to Graham Rawle and Mary Ruefle.)

In 2007, I got in line early at the comic shop to snag a copy of the activity book excerpt Drawn and Quarterly put out for Free Comic Book day.

a spread from the Tin House issue, hinting at the brilliance to come

When What It Is came out in 2008, it was overwhelming — every page a handmade collage, blowing my mind.

Later, Lynda would find an even more perfect merging of form and content in the books modeled on her composition books, Syllabus and Making Comics, but What It Is holds a special place in my heart. The book changed me forever and Lynda is my hero.

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

The Vampire Test

Here’s an animated excerpt from my audiobook about a test that will tell you who and what you should let in and out of your life. (Also on Instagram.)

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1336388678122344450

It may be easier or harder to practice during a pandemic, depending on your situation. (I often joke in talks, “Children don’t count. Their job is to suck you dry.”)

I got the idea for the test from a story in John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:

[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.

I also cribbed a little from this Lynda Barry interview:

My friend Frank Chimero pointed out this is also #3 on Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work,  “SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.”

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

What’s really funny is that the book came out in 2014, way before the What We Do In The Shadows show, which features one of my all-time favorite characters, Colin Robinson, a self-proclaimed “energy vampire”:

You gotta look out for these people. Once you start noticing them… they’re everywhere!

Related reading: Human vantablack, finding nourishment vs. identifying poison

Make bad art, too

Sol Lewitt’s letter to Eva Hesse

“A lot of bad art is going to come out of this nightmare — including my own — and that’s okay.”
—Dean Haspiel

In Neil Gaiman’s Make Good Art, he wrote:

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

A fine message! But I’d also make a plug for something else: when the going gets rough, make bad art, too.

Don’t listen to people who remind you that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague— we’re living in King Lear!

When 9/11 and Katrina hit and she lost a bunch of her close friends, Lynda Barry got really depressed, and all she could do is doodle:

I found myself compelled, like this weird, shameful compulsion to draw cute animals. That was all I could stand to draw. You know, just cry and draw cute animals…dancing dogs with crowns on, you know? And, like, really friendly ducks. But I found this monkey, this meditating monkey, and I found that once – when I drew that monkey, it’s not that it fixed the problem. But it did shift it a little bit, or provide me some kind of relief. And that’s when I started to think, maybe that’s what images do, because I believe in all my – with all my heart they have an absolute biological function…

And here’s Sol Lewitt in his famous letter to Eva Hesse (collected in Letters of Note), which I quoted in Keep Going:

You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO… Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.

“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something. 

(And when that doesn’t work, sit on the damned couch and watch some stupid television until you pass out.)

Comp book double take

I did a double take yesterday when I came across these images of the student notebooks of 16-year-old Oliver Sacks. (See more of his notebooks from later in his life.) They reminded me so much of one of Lynda Barry’s composition book pages, like, for example, this one she posted yesterday:

It’s Lynda herself who’s primed my eye for these kind of connections. She’s taught me over the years what thinking on the page looks like, when the thought is making the line and the line is making the thought…

My eye was also primed by their shared fondness for cephalopods. (The squid on the right hangs in our bathroom — I look into its eyes every time I take a pee!)

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