Austin Kleon

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Handmind is heartwork

I made a recent batch of lifted type collages that were inspired by my friend Alan Jacobs. During the early days of the pandemic, Alan wrote a piece called “Handmind in Covidtude” that quoted a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:

It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.

You can read more and see the other pieces in the newsletter.

Making things with your own hands

Two Fridays ago my friend Steven visited the studio and I showed him how to make zines from a single sheet of paper. We spent a half hour or so catching up and folding, creasing, and tearing paper. At the end I said, “I haven’t made anything with my hands in a while… that’s probably why I’m sad!” (I wrote more about it and linked to a bunch of zines in the newsletter.)

I found myself stuck at a band function with my kiddo for several hours and never was I more happy to carry a pen and a notebook. I think I filled a dozen pages or so of scribbles and drawings.

I’ve been using my notebook a lot lately, not as much as a place to keep things I’ll need later (that’s what I use Apple Notes for these days) as much as a place to doodle and draw and write and work things out.  

Inspired by reading Marc Masters’ High Bias: A Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I’ve been buying sealed, pre-recorded cassettes for cheap at the record store, taping over the protection tabs, taping over the music (using the runtime as a constraint for the mix), then taping over the artwork. January’s mix featured a lot of music that isn’t streaming, but for February’s mix, I was able to duplicate the playlist on Spotify: “Music in the Key of Love.” 

As the late David Carr put it, there’s just something about making things “with your own dirty little hands…”

Professional human loser

While reading Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, I came across this bit from Jeopardy! whiz Ken Jennings’ essay, “My Puny Human Brain,” about getting beat by a supercomputer:

To my surprise, losing to an evil quiz show–playing computer turned out to be a canny career move. Everyone wanted to know What It All Meant, and Watson was a terrible interview, so suddenly I was the one writing think pieces and giving TED Talks. Brad and I can both be found in standard college cognitive-science textbooks now, standing behind blue lecterns looking annoyed. Last year, Watson and I even reunited for a TV commercial. (He was professional as always, but you could cut the on-set tension with a knife.) Like Kasparov before me, I now make a reasonable living as a professional human loser. Have rueful sense of own inevitable obsolescence, will travel.

Emphasis mine.

Paulus Berensohn once said, “There’s something that we lose with contemporary technology. I would like to be the monk that raises his hand and says, ‘Remember. Remember the hand.’”

I’m no monk, but I believe deeply in the head, the heart, and the hands. In a human intelligence rooted in our bodies.

If AI really does “take over,” I would very happy to spend my days as a Professional Human Loser…

The cube (in praise of solvable problems)

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs to replace the old doorknobs in the old house we were living in. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

My son got a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. Something compelled me this weekend to sit down and try to figure it out. I missed the whole craze in the 80s, so I was completely new to it. After watching an online tutorial, I discovered that there are step-by-step systems you can apply to solving it. You can actually attack it like a programmer with code: You basically look at the cube and run if/then statements in your head to find the right algorithm to apply. After the first dozen solves, I felt like I was replacing doorknobs again, except there were as many doorknobs as I wanted!

There’s something about keeping your hands busy when your brain feels broken. I have friends with depression who build elaborate LEGO sets. I’ve read about veterans with PTSD who put together gigantic jigsaw puzzles.

We’re wired to want to turn chaos into order. Randomness into meaning.

It’s why hobbies are so important…

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