Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for zines

Incineration intervention

Stacy Schiff tells us this story about the first time the manuscript for Lolita was saved from incineration in her biography of Véra Nabokov:

She stepped outside to find her husband had set a fire in the galvanized can next to the back steps and was beginning to feed his papers to it. Appalled, she fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. ‘Get away from there!’ Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. “We are keeping this,” she announced.

Her husband tried to burn his manuscript several other times and was thwarted only by her interventions. Schiff continues:

Plenty of manuscripts have burned, among them early drafts of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dead Souls. A three-person brigade intervened to save A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the flames; in Pale Fire, Kinbote looks on as John Shade indulges in a little backyard auto-da-fé. That Lolita did not meet with the same fate, in the context and climate in which Nabokov was composing in the early 1950s, is testimony to Véra’s ability to—as her husband had it—keep grim common sense from the door, shoot it dead when it approached. She feared that the memory of the unfinished work would haunt him forever.

“Without my wife,” her husband said, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”

Survive the savage sea

cover of the zine

“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

fish poppet

The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian word quarantina, meaning “forty days.” Why did Venetians keep the boats at bay for 40 days? Who knows. Maybe it’s the Bible. Before Noah’s Flood, it rains for 40 days and nights. Moses goes up on Mount Sinah for 40 days. Jesus spends 40 days in the desert.

We’re coming up on 40 days in this house. I keep thinking of Dougal Robertson and his castaway memoir, Survive the Savage Sea. He and his family got picked up on their 38th day at sea. By the time they were rescued, they had hit a kind of groove: they had meat and water stored, and they’d seemed to have moved beyond survival mode.

Our 38th day was yesterday. We’ve hit a kind of groove, too. (“We no longer thought of rescue as one of the main objectives of our existence; we were no longer subject to the daily disappointment of a lonely vigil, to the idea that help might be at hand or was necessary.”)

your spine needs no special magic  

Not that we don’t have our doubts. (“‘Of course, we’ll make it!’ The answer came from my heart but my head was telling me a different story.”)

breathing becomes bewildering

“If any single civilized factor in a castaway’s character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous,” Robertson writes. “It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.”

take lessons from a beginner

I read that book last January. My family and I had moved ourselves somewhere we didn’t belong, and we were waiting for the time when we’d journey back to where we belonged. I thought I was reading it to have some help surviving that moment in time.

in this world its the first time

As it turns out, the book speaks even more to me now.

back cover

Note: This zine was made from a single page of an old National Geographic book about fish, after watching this video about how to make a 14-page zine. Here’s a video of me making it:

The Man With No Advice

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant…”
— Emily Dickinson

I thought I was done making zines, but I can’t seem to stop! Here is one I made yesterday, with the first line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” (Here’s Dennis Hopper reciting it on The Johnny Cash Show.)

It feels like it should be a time in which people need advice more than ever, but I’m not so sure. (And though I could be seen as a professional propagator of advice, on the whole, I am skeptical of giving it.) I think, in all times, but especially in these, if you sit quietly for long enough, you can hear that voice inside you that tells you exactly what you need to do.

“Advice, wrote David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, “even wise advice — actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.” (I got that from Tim Kreider, who is “Against Advice.”)

Besides, as Steinbeck said, “No one wants advice — only corroboration.” I think my advice books mainly give voice to what the reader already thought but couldn’t put into words. The books are permission slips, in a sense. “Go make some art!”

Then again, some advice is good. I know I always sought it when I was starting out. A reader on Twitter a few days ago told me, “Thanks to your advice I’ve stopped being an artist and I’m making art again.” That was my message perfectly distilled and it made my whole day.

Anyways, this zine is not actually about advice at all. It’s about the power of staying quiet when people ask you how you’re doing what you’re doing. Refusing to answer, Bartleby style. (“I prefer not to!”) Because the thing you’re doing is still very close to you, and it’s still very much alive, and like a wild horse that’s somehow letting you take a ride, you don’t want to spook it. Or it’s a gift being given to you and you don’t want to cheapen it. Whatever metaphor you want to use, it’s something precious to you right now, and you don’t want it out in the air. You want to keep it close and see where it goes. And besides, those who really look close, they’ll get what they’re looking for.

But it’s also about how much easier it is to say these things with art. And how freaking good it feels not to talk, but to make.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.