Bewilderment and illumination

Embrace bewilderment

Thursday, June 9, 2022

Here is a sign I saw on yesterday’s ride through the Johnson Creek Trail here in Austin.

I thought of the poet Rumi, who wrote: “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

@austinkleon

A message from my favorite sign

? original sound – Austin Kleon

My riding partner is traveling, so I’ve been taking slow, solo rides.

Wandering the streets (and trails) with a wandering mind.

Getting somewhere I didn’t know I was going — that’s the goal, in rides like these, and in making art.

Here is another sign I saw on my way home:

Filed under: signs

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art

Friday, February 26, 2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at 101. I can’t remember when I picked up my copy of Poetry as Insurgent Art. The latest copyright in the back is 2007, so that rules out college.

I was ready to claim the title page as an inspiration for the look of Steal Like An Artist, but if I didn’t get the book until my first trip to City Lights in San Francisco, that was in 2012 on the Steal book tour.

(I do think sometimes that artists tend to claim influence apocryphally — you put your work in the world and then you find all the stuff you should’ve looked at before you made the work.)

The thing I remember most about my first visit to City Lights in North Beach — other than the wonderful poetry room with the big dictionary in the corner — was all the hand-painted Ferlinghetti signs everywhere. I think I liked looking at those as much as I liked browsing the books.

One thing to know about Ferlinghetti is that while best known as a poet and a publisher, what he really wanted to be was a painter. He wrote about it in “More Light”:

I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment. I wanted to be a painter but from the age of ten onward these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.

There’s a great story on the City Lights website about how he discovered the basement and the signs you see behind him in the photos above:

Ferlinghetti also discovered signs painted on the walls by a Christian sect that had used the basement for prayer meetings, and on the walls today you can still fragments of them: “Remember Lot’s Wife,” “Born in Sin and Shapen in Niquity,” “I and My Father Are One,” and “I Am the Door.” Ferlinghetti made a deal with the landlord, put in a staircase, persuaded the Chinese Dragon to leave, and expanded the store into the basement.

Surely, those signs must’ve inspired him to make his own.

* * *

Every Friday I pull one of my favorite books off the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

What you think is boring now may be interesting in the future

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Looking at the glorious grocery store advertisements in this photo of John Cage from the poster for Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage, I remembered something my friend the photographer Clayton Cubitt once tweeted:

I think about this all the time, now. (I wrote more about it in a previous post on pack rats and collecting.) What you try to crop out and hide now might eventually be what people will want to see.

The trouble is that it’s hard to predict what will be interesting, and a lot of what will eventually be interesting will be saved on accident, because somebody didn’t bother to throw something out, or it got lost, or it was buried somewhere. (Archeologists love uncovering garbage dumps, for example.)

Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark

“Look at this,” says the villain Belloq to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.”

Not everything will be okay (but some things will)

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

An image by Ryan Thacker at the end of Maira Kalman’s Creative Mornings talk

“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided

You know you’re in a bad spot when passing sidewalk chalk platitudes on your daily walk makes you murderous.

For me, yesterday, the breaking point was a hand-painted sign that read “EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.”

What fucking planet are these people living on?

“No, I don’t feel alright! None of us feel alright!! Can't you see what's going on?!?!?”

(This is perfect thank you @sonia__harris) pic.twitter.com/jcE2odJCgB

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) May 5, 2020

My favorite cinematic misanthropes started conversing with each other.

“Where do they teach you how to talk like this?” Melvin Udall asked.

“What absolute twaddle,” Withnail agreed.

Every time somebody asks if I’m alright I think of this scene from GROSSE POINTE BLANK

“No! I’m not alright! I’m hurt, I’m pissed, and I gotta find a new job.”https://t.co/ABt5ovFY9l pic.twitter.com/TlWCspwDFB

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) May 5, 2020

I was reminded of the story of G.K. Chesterton’s book, Platitudes Undone:

In 1911, author Holbrook Jackson published a small book of aphorisms under the (mildly pretentious) title Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk and gave a copy to his friend G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, it seems, sat down with the book – and a green pencil – and wrote a response to each saying in the book. Presumably he then set the book down, and somehow, someway, it turned up in a San Francisco book shop in 1955, where it was purchased by a certain Dr. Alfred Kessler, an admirer of Chesterton. Every book collector dreams of such a find. Rather than keep the book to himself, however, Dr. Kessler and Ignatius Press have produced a facsimile edition. Remove the dust jacket, and you have a reproduction, in every particular, of that 1911 volume, together with all of Chesterton’s remarks. It’s a remarkable project, and a real treat for readers of Chesterton.