Austin Kleon

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Book walkthroughs

If you make the kind of visual books I do, they really have to be seen to be understood. I came across these “art book walkthroughs” by Graeme Franks a few days ago. Simple, perfect online advertisements for my kind of books. Here’s the one for Steal Like An Artist and here’s the one for Show Your Work!

I had my six-year-old do (a more hurried & shaky) one in the trailer for Keep Going:

And way back in 2010, I did one for the Newspaper Blackout trailer. I think I used some sort of HD camcorder, but now, of course, you can just use an off-the-shelf iPhone. (And get better quality, too!)

UPDATE: Graeme made one for Keep Going, too!

Rats

Rats from the end of Herzog’s Nosferatu

“Recently, I phoned Levitin. He told me he suspects that humans during the Trump era are unwittingly re-enacting the rat experiments that James Olds and Peter Milner did in the 1950s, wherein the creatures repeatedly pressed a lever to feel an electric jolt to their reward centers. The poor subjects became such hostages to gratification that they stopped eating, drinking, even having sex. Eventually, they died of exhaustion.”
—Jennifer Senior, “Our Brains Aren’t Designed to Handle the Trump Era”

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those lab rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
—Tricia Lockwood, “The Communal Mind”

Why wasn’t I consulted?

Every single time some stranger online says something dumb or rude or completely beside the point to me, I think of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?”:

“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

I’ve taken it to appending the phrase (and acronym: WWIC) to all random tweets and Instagram comments and it instantly turns them comedic. “You suck,” becomes, “WHY WASN’T I CONSULTED? You suck.” See how much easier that is to deal with? WWIC highlights that here is a lonely soul lost in the cosmos, shouting into the void, reaching out for any kind of contact, or sign that they exist.

Scroll down, swipe left, “thank u, next.”

Surf’s up

The waves of Lake Erie

“You just have to know where to go when.”
—William Finnegan, Barbarian Days

In 1992, a librarian named Jean Armour Polly was asked to write about the internet for the Wilson Library Bulletin.

In casting about for a title for the article, I weighed many possible metaphors. I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the Internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well. I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger. I wanted something fishy, net-like, nautical. At that time I was using a mouse pad from the Apple Library in Cupertino, California, famous for inventing pithy sayings and printing them on sportswear and mouse pads (e.g., ‘A month in the Lab can save you an hour in the Library’). The one I had pictured a surfer on a big wave. ‘Information Surfer’ it said. ‘Eureka,’ I said, and had my metaphor.”

She named the article “Surfing The Internet,” and the rest is history. (What’s interesting to me, re-reading the article, is that it also contains another metaphor: mining. “Tunneling through the network matrix in search of gems and ore is not far from fact. Sometimes it is hard work, and a lot of it is working in the dark.”)

I thought a lot about the surfing metaphor last year when I read William Finnegan’s surf memoir, Barbarian Days. I was completely new to surfing when I picked up that book, and I quickly learned how the sport isn’t really about “going with the flow,” it’s about finding waves. You catch waves when you surf, but you don’t take just any garbage water that splashes up on the shore. You seek out just the right one to ride. 

How much better off we’d be online, I thought, if we went back to truly emulating surfers: leaving the crowded beaches, seeking waves in obscure locations, etc. Social media has “streams” (you can’t surf a stream) or worse, “feeds” (like pigs at a trough). I want the sea, man. I want to surf again!

Open tabs are a time machine

GIF by Jennifer Daniel | via GIPHY

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet, he writes that “Our Browser History Is the New Memoir”:

If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

I have a laptop that I use sporadically, so every time I open it, the tabs in my internet browser show me who I was 24, 48, or even 168 hours ago. It’s a tiny form of (unexpected) time travel. (When you dip into an old diary, you’re expecting to take a little time trip…)

Years ago, I figured out a way to help my future self:

1. Put a Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard in the freezer
2. Forget that it’s there.
3. Open the freezer.

How funny that forgetting — something we mostly see as a bad thing — sets the stage for later surprise and delight…

Unread and irrelevant

I posted one of my favorite Ron Padgett poems on Twitter a few days ago and a man I don’t follow went out of his way to tell me that I was “unread” and “obviously haven’t read much poetry” because “Padgett is irrelevant.” He then tweeted me a half dozen long, presumably more important poems, most of them from poets I’d heard of, but none that I bothered to read.

Several times a day I want to put a pixelated arm around a digital stranger and say, “My god, who did this to you? Who gave you these bad ideas? You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right? This way you’re thinking… it’s not really real. Come over here and take a seat. Here is the land where we read whatever we want and we like what we like and we don’t tweet nastiness to strangers. Have some punch and a cookie. Do you feel better?”

You don’t have to live in public

anyone could speak / and they did

My book Show Your Work! was an attempt to answer questions my readers had asked me about self-promotion: “How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience?” It is, as it says on the cover, a book about how to get discovered.

(Nowhere in the text do I address the question of why anyone should want to get discovered. There’s a little bit of that in the new book and chapter 6 of Steal Like An Artist: “Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.”)

It isn’t a book about living in public, it’s a book about working in public. It is, I think, about sharing your work with intention, and using the technology available to you to connect directly with the audience you seek.

I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media. (Website, blog, mailing list, etc.)

I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

It seems ridiculous to say, but 2013, the year I wrote the book, was a simpler time. Social media seemed much more benign to me. Back then, the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.

I’ve just got finished reading Jaron Lanier’s 10 Reasons for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It’s not a particularly well-written book (Franklin Foer’s review is worth reading — he calls it “less polished” than Lanier’s other books and, even, “hokey”) but it has an important message. And I can’t say I disagree with any of the points, especially the last one, in which Lanier argues that the social media machine “hates your soul.” Here’s Foer, summarizing:

He worries that our reliance on big tech companies is ruining our capacity for spirituality, by turning us into robotic extensions of their machines. The companies, he argues, have no appreciation for the “mystical spark inside you.” They don’t understand the magic of human consciousness and, therefore, will recklessly destroy it.

This was a point, I think, made much better in his earlier book, You Are Not A Gadget, which contained a list of things “you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others”:

  • Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
  • If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
  • Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
  • Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
  • Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
  • If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

It’s about pushing against these mediums and using them in a way counter to the way they’d like you to use them.

Another book I might recommend to writers and artists worried about their social media usage is Cal Newport’s Deep Work. (Especially the second half.) Newport also wrote a popular NYTimes Op-ed, “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It” and has given a TEDx talk called, “Why You Should Quit Social Media.”

Two caveats before you read Deep Work:

1) I’m not sure about the terms “deep” and “shallow”. Often in my work, what might seem “shallow” is often what leads to what is “deep”

2) Newport is an academic — he makes his primary living teaching computer science at a university, so he already has a built-in network and a self-contained world with clear moves towards achievement. People doing creative work have neither of those things. (For that matter, Jaron Lanier is already famous and well-respected and has a good gig at Microsoft.) One must always be beware of the advice-giver’s context.

I was struck, in Warren Ellis’s last email newsletter, how much he emphasized solitude, and carving out disconnected time for working:

The trick, for me, is carving out time for things and trying to do them with some wit…. I am not ready for the world until I’ve had my 45 minutes with four espressos in the back garden with earbuds in…. I spend a lot of time on my own, and mostly in my office. You can emulate these obvious role-model traits by excavating yourself a cave in your back garden or taking over a room in your apartment, fitting it with uncomfortably bright lights and way too many screens, filling all the spaces with books and skulls, playing nothing but music that sounds like it’s emanating from a dead moon, and waiting for everyone to leave you alone forever, and then dying in seclusion and being eaten by cats.

And this terrific advice he gave to people worrying about living online:

You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to.  Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me.  I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time – but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done.  You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you. These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.

I still find value in being on Twitter (just yesterday I learned about a new-to-me artist from a follower) but it is increasingly hard to justify much time spent there and on other social media sites, like Instagram. (I have not deleted my Facebook account, but I rarely sign in there.) That’s why I continue to write here every day and keep up my weekly newsletter, both of which produce better thinking and better work from me and give me a stronger, more deeper connection to my audience.

I’ll be writing more about the need to disconnect in my next book, so stay tuned…

Fancy zines


I think of all my books as fancy zines.

Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? I’ll let Wikipedia handle this:

A zine (/zi?n/ZEEN; short for magazine or fanzine) is most commonly a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Usually zines are the product of a person, or of a very small group.

When I’m working on a book, sure, I flip through my bookshelves, looking for stuff to steal, but what I really love to do is head over to my zine drawer (see above) and flip through zines.

Even though my books are printed in mass quantities overseas and are shipped all over the world, I want my books to feel handmade, like they’ve just come off the photocopier.

Back in December, I wondered in my diary if I should just go ahead and do a real zine, and work my way up to a book:

Maybe next time. Or maybe the country will collapse and this tweet will come true:

There’s something really special about zines. “Zines Had It Right All Along.” “The Internet Didn’t Kill Zines.” Even though “The Blissfully Slow World of Newsletters” can feel close to the spirit of zine culture, nothing digital seems to fully replace them. “A blog is not a zine.”

Whenever I do a workshop with students, zines are the perfect thing to make together: We make a bunch of blackout poems, each choose our favorites, and then we sequence them, everybody getting their own page. Then we run them on the photocopier, fold ’em, staple ’em, and everybody gets to take one home:

If you want to learn more about zines, check out this book and hit up your public library — several libraries actually have zine collections now! The new Austin Public Library has a whole section next to the comics:

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