Austin Kleon

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Big mood

I posted this yesterday and was met with a wave of positive replies. (“I feel seen,” “same,” “relatable,” “TRUTH,” “I thought it was just me,” etc.)

It was just a silly post, but it made me think of all the times on book tour when somebody would step out of the signing line and say, “You put into words what I was already thinking.” This should be taken as a compliment. Steinbeck said what we really want as readers is “corroboration,” for another human being to essentially say, “No, you’re not alone.”

Of course, the only way as a writer to get there is to truthfully articulate what you, in particular, think or feel. Then, hopefully, the readers who think and feel the same — or are inclined to — will find you.

A panel from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, November 12, 1959

As for that torn feeling, between compassion and disgust, love and misanthropy: Always, always, I repeat to myself, “Be the light or reflect it.” (If you can’t be a sun, generating your own light, be a moon, reflecting it.) “I’m trying, Ringo,” Samuel L. Jackson says in Pulp Fiction,  “I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.”

Peanuts, remixed

It’s the 70th birthday to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, one of the greatest works of American art. (The very first strip ran on Oct. 2, 1950.) In celebration, I thought I’d post a batch of my remixed Peanuts strips I make in my diary, which are made from cut-up Page-A-Day calendars I buy every year. Be forewarned: They’re pretty weird. 

Links to four zines worth of them: 

See also: “Cutting and pasting the comics”

Take this job and shove it

In his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris writes about this paradox at the heart of American parenting: On the one hand, we think of childhood as a place that should be free of labor — we’ve decided, collectively, that it’s inhumane for our children to slave in sweatshops or dig in a coal mine —  and on the other hand, between the classroom, homework, and the extra-curricular activities picked to make a child the perfect college applicant, American kids work all the time.

[I]t takes a lot of work to prepare yourself to compete for twenty-first-century employment. Adults are happy to remind kids of this, telling them, “Put your nose to the grindstone,” “Stay on the right path,” “Treat school like your job.” When it comes to the right to organize, the dignity of labor, or minimum-wage laws, however, students are forced to be students rather than workers.

Maria Montessori said that play was the work of the child, but it’s obvious, now, that we see school as their job.

I’m inspired by students who walk out on their jobs. Students like Greta Thunberg, who started school striking on Fridays, protesting her government’s inaction on climate change.

Last year she said that “a number of members of parliament have come out to the steps to express support for her position, although every one of them has said that she should really be at school. Her parents think so, too, she said—that she should really go to school.”

And yet:

Here’s a lighter, funnier story from legendary soul singer Jackie Shane about school as unpaid labor:

“I don’t like to be played… At school I was a fast runner. Ooh! Honestly, I’m not bragging, I could run. I just sort of leaped through the air. They asked me to run [in an inter-school competition]. I said, “How much does it pay?” They said, “Well, Jackie, this is your school.” I said, “No, no, no, no! I don’t own this school. If I’m going to perform, I want to be paid.” Everybody said, “Child you’re too much.” No, I found out early that you cannot be too much in this world. You can’t. It’s impossible. If you don’t get your gethers together, people will take advantage of you. I told them “What do you mean my school? I’m not getting a nickel. No, no, no, no honey, you’ve got to give Jackie some money.” All of that nonsense and patting me on the back and giving me a slice of pizza. Give me some money!”

Cold feet

My first Peanuts collage of the year. It hits me over and over again how there’s rarely anything “random” about collage — your eye is caught on images because of who you are, what you’re inclined and trained to look for.

It reminds me of Tristan Tzara, describing the seemingly unoriginal cut-up method as a way towards originality, or Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing, who writes that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible” and that the “act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves” as anything else. “It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.”

And, of course, there’s what you choose to share…

How beautiful they go to their graves

Production cel from It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

“How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves…. How beautiful they go to their graves!”
—Thoreau, October 12, 1853

Thoreau, our great chronicler of the seasons, wrote a lot about the falling leaves in October, noting all the different colors and hues. Their colors aside, he thought, like many things in nature, they could teach us something about accepting our own internal seasons, and our mortality.

October 22, 1853:

Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches…. The year’s great crop. They teach us how to die.

October was a the time he thought about the end of life. On October 20th, 1857, he meets a poor old man who has gathered apples in his shoes. “This man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church’s sacraments and memento mori’s.”

October — Harvest Time — was also a month for Thoreau to contemplate his “harvest of thought.”

October 14, 1857:

I take all these walks to every point of the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. I am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me. My crop is not their crop. I am not gathering beans or corn. Do they think there are no fruits but such as these? I am a reaper; I am not a gleaner.

And on October 24, he writes, “My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground…. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.”

***

[Update: 4PM: I had no idea that Thoreau actually collected his thoughts on fall in the 1862 essay, “Autumnal Tints.” See this piece, “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s ‘Autumnal Tints,’ 150 Years Later.” This is one of the amazing things about reading Thoreau’s journal before you read the published work — he pilfered so much from his daily writing that you know exactly where sentences and sections come from, and it’s fascinating to see how he changed them.]

Cutting and pasting the comics

One of my favorite prompts inThe Steal Like An Artist Journal asks the reader to remix a comic strip:

My son got a daily Peanuts calendar for Christmas, so for fun I’ve been taking the old pages and making collages out of them:

I like to take two or three strips and mash them up: this one has a panel from January 16, 1968, text from Jan. 10 and 13, and most of the January 12th strip:

This one is made up of a bunch of extra leftovers:

I really love how surrealistic they get when you squeeze two images of the same character into one panel:

And how just swapping a few bits of text can change a strip’s meaning completely (and make it autobiographical — this was originally about Charlie Brown waiting for his dad to get off work):

This one starts with a piece of text from some litter I found on my walk:

It’s interesting how in the process of cutting it up, you really learn a lot about Schulz’s strip: how wordy the balloons are (something Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller famously complained about), how everything belongs to one world and is easily re-arranged and re-combined. Heck, even the characters can be spliced into each other: here’s Charlie Brown with Linus’s hair:

It seems like this kind of thing would be a great exercise for the classroom. I’ve done a variation in workshops in which participants take single panel cartoons from the comics section and swap the captions, like this example in Gary Larson’s The Prehistory of the Far Side:

The Far Side and Dennis the Menace used to be side by side in the Dayton Daily News. One day, back in August of 1981, someone “accidentally” switched their captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.

Here’s a Lynda Barry caption from One! Hundred! Demons! pasted on top of Charles Burns’ “The Smell of Shallow Graves” (both reprinted in this NYTimes article):

The demons hate fresh air

That’s Linus taking a walk, from a Peanuts strip published on October 8, 1970. Here’s Linn Ullmann, in an interview with Vogue, on her father Ingmar Bergman:

 My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.

Get up, get out, go to your work.

(Thanks to Matt.)

On this day


I bought this handsome NYRB edition of Thoreau’s journal a few months ago when I saw that John Stilgoe had written the preface. (I took it as a BUY NOW sign: I’d read his book Outside Lies Magic earlier this year liked it quite a bit.)

It’s a highly edited and condensed version of the complete 47 volumes of Thoreau’s output, but I still wasn’t sure how to read the thing. I couldn’t imagine actually reading it front to back. Then I noticed that the left-hand page headers refer to the approximate date, but the right-hand page headers refer to what age Thoreau was when he wrote the entry. This seemed like a fun game: Let me see what Thoreau was writing when he was exactly my age.

Then I thought it’d be fun to just follow along with his life day-by-day and year-by-year, almost like turning The Journal into one of those 5 year diaries that you see in stationery stores. I’d stick post-it notes on the current date of each year of the journal, then check the tabs each day to see if there’s an entry.

This turns out to be a terrific way to read Thoreau, because he was so obsessed with observing nature and the changing seasons. You see, for example, how Thoreau repeats himself, noting the fallen leaves in October. (“How beautifully they go to their graves!”)

Yesterday, I read the entry for October 20, 1857, exactly 160 years ago, in which Thoreau writes beautifully about meeting a barefoot old man carrying a dead robin & his shoes full of apples:

I got such a kick out of reading this way I wondered what other books I had lying around the house that I could turn into a daily devotional. How about my Big Book of Peanuts?

I mean, of course a collection of daily newspaper strips, originally written to be consumed on one particular day, makes for good daily reading. (Think of all the “Page-A-Day” Peanuts calendars.) But there’s another reason they’re so great to read day-by-day: Peanuts function as a sort of coded diary for Schulz. This is explained by Bruce Eric Kaplan in the introduction to his collection, This Is A Bad Time:

[T]hese drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great….Every morning… I sit down and think about why I am disgruntled or why I am not as disgruntled as I was yesterday and out come these little drawings…

This connection between daily comic strips and diaries is made more explicit in the work of someone like James Kochalka in his sketchbook diaries, American Elf. I have all 14 years on my iPad now, so it wouldn’t be hard to read them in the same way I do the Peanuts collection. Strangely, I find that having a digital collection of the strips makes me want to reorganize the entries in non-chronological ways, like, reading every strip that includes leaves or clouds.

I have an ebook of Andy Warhol’s diary, and I like to search it whenever I’m in a spot that I know he had some connection to. (When I was in Milan, I typed in “Milan,” and landed on his entry for Monday, September 17, 1979, which contains the question, “Why would anybody want to go to Milan?”)

Anyways, I’m wandering towards a point: To read collected works is to also grapple with the question of how (or when!) to read collected works.

This, by the way, is the end of the Peanuts strip published on Oct. 20, 1962, 56 years ago:

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