Austin Kleon

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The Yamaha

For the first time since my first son was born, I am living in a house without a piano. What I have now is a Yamaha “electronic piano,” a decades-old leftover from my pre-piano, pre-children days. The Yamaha is a hefty plank of plastic with “weighted” keys that make a sad thunky plastic sound when you play them. Unlike the vegan cashew queso my wife made for dinner the other night, it is a poor substitute for the real thing.

But The Yamaha, for now, is what I have, so I am making the best of it. The Yamaha has ten different voices: 2 pianos, 2 electric pianos, 2 organs, strings, 2 harpsichords, and a vibraphone. I hate the two pianos and never play them. The organs make the room sound like church.  The other voices I can work with. As with many things in life, I like it more the less it tries to pretend to be something it’s not.

Can you have a moment of transcendence on such a sub-par instrument? I got close the other night. I was practicing some Bach, and I felt something like, I am putting my fingers on the same keys as Bach. He wrote these notes down 250 years ago, and now I am playing them. I may be doing a clumsy job, but I am making him come alive again.

I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “frozen music”:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And I thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who is writing a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead. The title comes from a lecture by W.H. Auden, who said:

…one of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

I suppose you break bread with the dead using whatever tools you have on hand. Sometimes it’s a fine, dusty hardback, and sometimes it’s a free ebook on your Kindle. Sometimes it’s an old wooden piano, and sometimes it’s The Yamaha.

The ideal routine

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.”

It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to bed at 10:00 p.m. If I’m at the beach there would be one ore two long walks on the beach in that day. This is a perfect day for me.”)

I’m sure that life got in the way a lot for her, just like it does for all of us. In fact, I was just thinking about her take on interruptions the other day when a mother wrote to me about the crush of having young kids and trying to work. I sent her this quote:

“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades…”

I love how her schedule doesn’t exclude mundane ordinary things like housework or dinner. “An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she said. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”

I also love how much time is set aside for reading. (Stephen King says he writes all morning and reads all afternoon.) It’s too easy when you’re writing full time to feel like you should stuff every single minute with writing, even when you know reading is a huge part of your job.

“Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs,” Nate Silver once advised young journalists. “It’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.”

Even after you achieve great things, that guilt might still linger. Here’s director Paul Thomas Anderson:

I still have trouble reading a book during the day because it somehow feels indulging… You know, like oh, my – this is so naughty. I’m actually reading at 10 o’clock in the morning. I think it’s just your upbringing – something about like you got to go to work, and you’ve got to – and move on. And still even – this is how I make my living. I still feel guilty. 10 o’clock, I mean – and it’s – but I’ve sunken into the pleasure of it – to think, my God, I’ve got my life in a way where I can read a book in the middle of the day.

I love that last sentence so much. I’ve always thought a great question for sorting out your life is: “What do you want your days to look like?”

If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first

It’s been said a million times — it’s one of the main points of my books Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! — and yet, it still seems to be controversial or confusing to young people who are starting out: If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

“You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.”
—J.K. Rowling

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
—Stephen King

“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
—Annie Proulx

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books.”
—Cormac McCarthy

“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.”
—Terry Pratchett

“Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”
—William Faulkner

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.”
—Ray Bradbury

“When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. Readers ask me all the time the traditional question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?” I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’”
—Philip Pullman

A hacked street sign in LA, 2015

“Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
—Nora Ephron

“I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks.”
—Rosecrans Baldwin

“I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”
—Adam Phillips

“I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
—William Giraldi

“If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader much longer than you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read…”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction

“If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.”
—Fran Lebowitz

The agony of list-making

I don’t post my year-end reading list until the end of the year, but I definitely start working on it this early. (This year’s biggest problem: I’m devouring Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and if I keep up at this pace, I’ll have to bump something from the list above.)

Last year I wrote about rethinking making lists entirely, and this year in August I posted a list of favorite reads (so far) of 2018, but I’m still loathe to finish this year’s final list. Reading has become more and more of a private thing for me as the online universe has disintegrated: The page is where I go to not be judged, but to be understood (a book is a mirror, etc.). The minute you make some kind of public list you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of judgments and scrutiny about your habits.

Overall, I think the best move (as a non-critic, at least) is to go with an unranked list. Music writer Ted Gioia, for example, switched to an alphabetical ordering for his Best of 2018 list. “I am doing this because each of these albums deserves recognition and the sequential ranking tended to focus too much attention on just a few recordings.”

I also like Gioia’s explanation for why he still makes lists:

Like any music lover, I enjoy sharing my favorite music with others. But in the last few years, a different motivation has spurred me. I believe that the system of music discovery is broken in the current day. There is more music recorded than ever before, but it is almost impossible for listeners to find the best new recordings….

I have nothing so noble for a cause, but let’s face it: I’ll suck it up and make this year’s, if for no other reason than because I’m a list junkie and a completist.

The most valuable book on my nightstand

I have a lot of books on my nightstand, but the most valuable is the one I like to read that never fails to put me to sleep within three to five pages. Previously, it was Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Currently, it’s Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. These are books that have good sentences but structures that knock me out — not in the “wow” sense, but the “ZZZ” sense.

When my wife can’t sleep she reads A Bird in the Hand, a book of chicken recipes.

Whatever works, man…

The right book at the right time

Melville’s marginalia
Melville’s marginalia

I’ve been re-reading Moby-Dick again. In some ways, I like thinking about the writing of Moby-Dick as much as I like reading it.

Right now I’m most interested in Melville as a reader. Moby-Dick began its life as a more straightforward whaling adventure, but at some point, driven by his epic reading habit, Melville got really ambitious, and expanded it into the monster it is now. Although it would prove financially disastrous, Melville felt pulled beyond writing what he knew would be popular with his contemporaries. (“What I most feel moved to write, that is banned, —it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”) A lot of this feeling was exacerbated by the quality of the books he was reading. (Let that be a lesson to you: read the Big Dogs, and you might be doomed by your lit’ry ambitions!)

Here’s how David Herd puts it in his introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition:

Coming to literature relatively late in life, Melville did so not with the reluctance of an unwilling recipient of some institutionally imposed reading-list, but with the wide-eyed eagerness of the autodidact, hungry for the resources of the world’s great books… Melville never made any mystery of his sources, passing them on (not showing them off) in the ‘Extracts’ with which Moby-Dick begins: the Bible, Montaigne, Shakespeare…. [T]he more he read, the more Melville wanted to emulate what he read… he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works. And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby-Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.

In Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick narrows it down just a bit, and points to two giant reading events that changed the course of Melville’s writing. First, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and read his stories. Second, he read Shakespeare for the first time:

Hawthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”

Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.

(You can see some of these notes on the wonderful website Melville’s Marginalia.)

William Giraldi sums it up in “The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia”:

Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.

sam anderson marginalia
Sam Anderson’s marginalia in Annie Dillard’s Living Like Weasels

While reading about Melville’s reading habits, I thought of Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, and perhaps our greatest contemporary celebrator of marginalia. Just yesterday, Sam wrote a beautiful little tweet thread about coming across the right book at the right time:

I was at my favorite place () and found this beautifully tattered 1st edition of [Annie Dillard’s] *Teaching a Stone to Talk*. Realized I’ve read pieces of it but never the whole thing. So I spent $14.50, cracked it open on the plane home, & got IMMEDIATELY EXTREMELY ECSTATIC.

He goes on to sample some of his favorite excerpts, and then gets to the magic of books catalysts for writing:

maybe the best thing: reading this made me want to write. Some of my best writing—including the 1st stuff I ever published—started as marginalia in my favorite books: Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Zora NH, DFW & on & on. Them doing their voice flows into you doing your voice.

In conclusion, books are the best technology. This cost less than $15, put me in a totally new & better headspace w/in 15 seconds, & I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Also, it started me writing an essay of my own. And that was just the first 5 pages.

Melville’s notes in the back of Shakespeare vs. Anderson’s notes in the back of Dillard

This, again, is the magic of reading with a pencil: it occupies a space somewhere between reading and writing, a crucial step towards turning reading into writing. And reading the right book at the right time with pencil in hand can lead to your best work.

Reading with a pencil

Oliver Sacks’ writing in a Noam Chomsky book

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

 There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”

Mark Twain’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

Sam Anderson marginalia

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s notes on Puzo’s The Godfather

In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…

My notes in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Suttree

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

Self-help as oxymoron

Matt Haig, Reasons To Stay Alive

After I wrote a long post about self-help, I listened to an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I had completely forgotten the beginning of that book:

LOOK, UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING ONE, A SELF-HELP book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. […] None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

In the interview, Hamid talks more about what he learned from writing in the self-help format:

…what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself. You know, I sit by myself in a room for several years, which isn’t a normal thing to do, and out of it comes a novel. So there is some degree of self-help just in writing a novel. But also when I read a novel, I feel like there is a kind of self-help going on there too, that I’m going beyond myself, transcending myself, I’m encountering another consciousness, I’m leaving the place where I am.

To repeat Josh Shenk, writing is self-help, because “we’re writing to help ourselves.”

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