Austin Kleon

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Listen to the voice

“Neighbors,” 2014

I’m still thinking about that interview with Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk:

The show’s most frequent listener these days might in fact be Ray himself. He said he still listens to the show “all the time,” mostly to hear his brother’s voice and remind himself about times they had together. To remind himself of the jokes they shared. To remind himself of the good times.

“I love to hear his laugh, and I love to hear his take on things,” Ray said. “It’s a rare opportunity that I’ve had to still communicate with my brother that most people don’t get.”

A few years ago at I heard Cord Jefferson tell a story at Pop Up Magazine about a voicemail his mother left him a month before she died of cancer, and about “the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away.” (At one point he cites a study that concluded a Mother’s phone call is as comforting as a hug.) “It seems increasingly worth considering what we’re missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love.”

My wife and I used to make homemade audiobooks with our phones and play them for the boys in the stroller. Now the boys can read on their own, and I wonder whether those recordings will survive, whether anyone will ever listen to them again.

My mom has an old tape of me at age 5, singing Christmas songs for her. A few years ago, I archived it onto a CD so she could play it on her boombox whenever she wants.

My first grader has recorded songs for several years now, and he’s so obsessed with recording everything around him that he asks me at least once a day to record something on my phone. Until this moment, I haven’t realized what a favor he’s been doing me. I can listen to his little voice wherever I am, whenever I want, as long as my hard drives last.

Give yourself a decade

For people who want something, 2016

My agent was standing in front of this display at the Book Passage in Corte Madera and he said to me, “You’ve had a busy decade, young man.”

I was reminded of some advice I heard from cartoonist David Heatley, well, about a decade ago: “Give yourself a decade.”

On the one hand, it went so fast. On the other hand, it’s felt like forever. So it goes.

Related reading: “3 Thoughts on a Decade of Publishing.”

Earn it in reverse

My wife sent me this interview from The Cut with Disney heiress Abigail Disney about what it’s like to live with more money (that you didn’t earn) than you’ll ever need. I sent it to my editor, who said, “At first, I wondered why I was wasting my time reading this and by the end I wanted to know this woman.”

Disney talks a lot about how being rich alienates you from people of all regular walks of life, and describes the steps she’s taken to make sure she doesn’t lose touch with reality. “Just like I watched my father increasingly surround himself with yes men, I started to deliberately surrounding myself with no ladies.” (See: “The Need for Eyerollers.”)

At one point, talking about her fortune, Disney says, “My philosophy is you try to earn it in reverse.”

I love that. Whatever luck you’ve had, you might feel like you don’t deserve it, and, actually, you might be right. (If you’ve read my 3 thoughts on publishing, you know one of my favorite lines is from Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”)

Many people would tell those who’ve had good fortune, “No, you do deserve what you have! Don’t give into imposter syndrome!” I like this other approach, which leads you to new work: Why don’t you try to earn it in reverse?

Neighbors


RIP Luke Perry. I made this poem back in 2014. Burroughs was convinced that the cut-ups were a form of time travel, and the longer I make them, the less crazy he sounds…

Oh no we’re still us

This is one of those rare New Yorker cartoons (by Will McPhail) you clip out and stick on the fridge. I thought about it the other day when I read the obituary for Dean Ford, lead singer of the Marmalade:

I wanted to start over. I wanted a new life. The trouble was, I brought myself with me.

That’s the beginning of a country song, right there. Here’s an old poem of mine to go with it:

It’s like Thoreau wrote in his journal (he could’ve written some country songs):

It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.

The cruelest month

“Summer gets to be an old story.”
—Henry David Thoreau

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but in Austin, Texas, it’s September. Summer is winter here, and summer isn’t even officially over until September 22. The cursed sun pays no heed to anything official. You’re not out of the A/C until Halloween at the earliest. September here is just a cruel joke. When Northern Instagram fills with scarves and pumpkin spice lattes, your only solace is shorts in February. (Awful in its own way.) “Hot and sunny every day,” Bill Hicks mocked. “What are you, a fucking lizard? Only reptiles feel that way about this kind of weather.” It’s nothing right or natural. Nothing to be celebrated. Only endured.

Dark Days

Part of the problem with depression is that it’s somewhat beyond description, and almost impossible to fathom for those of us who haven’t experienced it. I’ve been bummed, sad, melancholy, etc., but never actually depressed or suicidal, and I never really began to understand depression until I read William Styron’s 80-page memoir, Darkness Visible:

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description… it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

Styron does his best to describe it for the reader:

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

I might also recommend Allie Brosh’s comics, “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two,” collected in her book, Hyperbole and a Half:

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.

(I have not read Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, but I loved his book Far From The Tree.)

A few of my friends have written about their experiences, including Mike Monteiro and Clayton Cubitt.

I wish y’all well. Hang in there.

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