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Tag: Austin Kleon
How many things that blossom and bear fruit in one year were planted as seeds years before…
Austin, your discussion of seeds reminds me of something Tom Waits said on the Take 5 podcast I was listening to:
That’s really what we hope for … plant a few seeds and then we go. We are all just drawing in the dirt with a stick.
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
Austin, I love the way you tie all your posts and newsletters together in this collection.
Liberty Hyde Bailey’s thoughts on gardening and how they relate to creative work.
I love this quote Austin.
I know poets who do not write poetry, artists who do not paint, architects who do not build. I know gardeners who do not garden.
It makes me wonder about teachers who do not teach and the importance of first and foremost caring.
Shall I repeat myself? Yes:
Problems of output are problems of input.
No input, no output.
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
Becoming a parent is an opportunity to think about who you’ve become, who you wanted to be, and, if you need to, course-correct. This is what’s so fucking hard about it: You not only have to take a cold look at yourself in the mirror and become the kind of person you want your kids to be, if you have biological children, you spend all day around little people who are living mirrors. And they don’t necessarily reflect back at you the parts of you want to see! (There have been several nights where I’ve turned to my wife and said, “Do you ever feel like they got our worst parts?”) Lou Reed’s song could be about a child instead of a lover: “I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you / in case you don’t know.”
I always enjoy your reflections on parenting Austin. Whether right or wrong, I feel that I have learnt so much about myself through the reflections provide by my children.
In this week’s newsletter: art, secrets, uncertainty, neurodiversity, and more…
I really enjoyed the Glass piece, especially the point:
You don’t defeat your enemies, you just wait until they die.
Your son certainly has impeccable taste for someone so young. Aphex Twin. Kraftwerk. Carly Rae Jepsen.
Ear candy: I’ve mainly just been listening to New Order’s “Your Silent Face” and my New Division Joy Order playlist on repeat. Very autumnal.
Not sure if you have already stumbled upon it, but I recommend Peter Hook’s conversation with Zan Rowe on the Take5 podcast
Misheard lyrics, by the way, have a name: Mondegreens. Here’s Maria Konnikova on the science behind them in The New Yorker:
“Mondegreen” means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect… Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That’s a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn’t interpret it the same way.
I love the Tom Waits strategy of intentionally mishearing. This reminds me Harold Bloom’s notion of a ‘map of misreading’:
With the publication of Yeats (1970), Bloom began to extend his critical theory, and in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), he systematized one of his most original theories: that poetry results from poets deliberately misreading the works that influence them. Figures of Capable Imagination (1976) and several other works of the next decade develop and illustrate this theme.(source)
This is such an important message Fiona. It reminds me of Austin Kleon’s message from Steal Like an Artist:
What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
We however forget about stealing from our past selves.
This is what I like about Song Exploder, where artists break down the birth of an idea.
To be honest, I had a pre-canned newsletter of book recommendations ready for y’all because I’m in the middle of moving studios again, but in this death-filled week, I felt like I wanted to sit down, check in with death, and check in with you
What if you stopped thinking about your ideas as things you need to let out of you, but things you need to let in to you? Things you need to be ready to receive?
Austin Kleon reflects on how Tom Waits and Nick Cave get ideas when writing songs. The focus is not about getting ideas out, but rather letting them in from the outside. This had me thinking about why blog. In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson talks about the way the same ideas have occurred to different people at the same time:
The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand.
“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…
Take a (whispered) tour of the most incredible architectural reading spaces across Australia.
On holding onto your curiosity as you age.
I love the term ‘curious elder’:
John Waters is what I call a Curious Elder — someone who manages to retain their curiosity as they age and stays interested in what young people are up to. The curious elder isn’t interested in judging youth, they’re interested in learning from them.
As a parent and an educator, I think that there is a danger of understanding, rather than “revelling in the mystification”.
I remember when I taught music I would start each weekly lesson with a listening diary where we would reflect upon a different piece of music chosen by a student. It was a fascinating opportunity.
Austin Kleon doesn’t glamorize creative work. It’s hard. (Hence, the “work.”) But the bestselling author has found ways to stay the course in the face of burnout, self-doubt, and yes, even raising children. He shares his wisdom in his new book Keep Going, which comes out tomorrow. Today, he talks to us about how he parents.
I always like following Kleon’s tips and reflections associated with parenting. I was just wondering about the place of Kleon’s wife in all of this. It reminded me of Douglas Rushkoff’s argument that being human is a team sport, I think the same could be said about parenting.
This week: tour dates, reading recommendations, and more…
OK, friends. Thanks for reading. Next week I go into full Book Promotion Mode with the new one. If you like this newsletter and want it to keep going, pre-order Keep Going online or at your favorite indie bookstore, and save your receipt because we’re announcing an awesome pre-order gift next week. (The reviews on Goodreads so far are better than good and my 6-year-old was quite pleased by the nice comments about his book trailer.)
Not sure I completely get how the book industry works, but have pre-ordered Keep Going in the belief that this makes a difference to production numbers.
Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!
Want your kids to read more? Let them see you reading every day.
Want your kids to practice an instrument? Let them see you practicing an instrument.
Want your kids to spend more time outside? Let them see you without your phone.
There’s no guarantee that your kids will copy your modeling, but they’ll get a glimpse of an engaged human.