The folks at City Lights recorded my recent interview with Peter Turchi and posted it to YouTube. I enjoyed it very much. (The last time we spoke was 2015!) | Continue reading
Listening to an interview with artist William Kentridge, he explained the origins of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an “interdisciplinary incubator space” he started in Johannesburg. The name comes from a Twsana proverb: “When the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less goo … | Continue reading
On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, comedian Simon Feilder became fascinated by how many bootleg copies of famous books were for sale in stalls around the city. So he bought a copy of a book he already owned to compare: Steal Like an Artist. He made this video about it: Feilder as … | Continue reading
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do. “We tend to think of a thesa … | Continue reading
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you. “Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but […] | Continue reading
Here are some blind contour drawings of the two owls that are living in the box in the backyard. A while back, I bought a cheap Gosky spotting scope with a smartphone adapter that let me take photos with my old iPhone SE. I keep it on the desk in my studio pointed at the box, but … | Continue reading
Today’s newsletter is about the shortest month and what to do with it. | Continue reading
Adam Sternbergh has started a newsletter, and his first dispatches concern his “Year of Reading Recklessly,” brought about by a sense of dissatisfaction looking at his year-end list. “My reading life had become a grim slog,” he writes. “My TBR pile — ever higher, ever teetering, … | Continue reading
Here is a slide from my friend Bill Keaggy’s TEDx talk, “How to Find Attention, Mindfulness, and Creativity in the Ordinary.” After going through some of his own creative work — I highly recommend his books 50 Sad Chairs and Milk, Eggs, Vodka — and the work of others, Bill sugges … | Continue reading
Here’s one of my favorite pages from Steal Like an Artist: I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you’ve left. […] | Continue reading
One purpose of good writing is to make you not take the things in your life for granted. Two of my favorite writers have recently wrote about fireplaces. Elisa Gabbert wrote an essay about wanting a house with a fireplace, a longing she says is “a form of homesickness.” I love lo … | Continue reading
NYTimes writer Shannon Hall on “How to Watch the ‘Green Comet’ in Night Skies”: Comets are clumps of dust and frozen gases, sometimes described by astronomers as “dirty snowballs.” Most are believed to originate from the distant, icy reaches of the solar system where gravitationa … | Continue reading
When you’re biking you have to look out for a thing called “target fixation”: Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of … | Continue reading
Sometimes when I’m reading I’ll make a cluster map in the endpapers. This is my map in the back of John Hendrickson’s memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With A Stutter. It’s not necessarily a map of the book, but a map of the relation of the book to my own interests. John’s on t … | Continue reading
A last-minute souvenir: On her way out of town, my mom sent me this photo of my interview in Austin Monthly from the Bookpeople newsstand at the Austin Airport. | Continue reading
The title of this post was stolen from John Warner, whose book Why They Can’t Write was recommended to me by a friend. He tweeted a really excellent thread about how AI’s “correct-seeming” prose is an opportunity to rethink and improve how we teach students writing. I highly reco … | Continue reading
A page from How To Make an Earthquake, by Ruth Krauss. (Drawings by her husband, Crockett Johnson.) Published in 1954. | Continue reading
A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.” I am loathe to muddy it any further with […] | Continue reading
I was touched by these bits from an interview with Iggy Pop. As @jhiggy suggested, they lend new depth to the lyrics of “No Fun”: Maybe go out Maybe stay home Maybe call mom on the telephone Iggy has spoken elsewhere about the love of his parents: My parents had been shocked and … | Continue reading
The poet Charles Simic died. Here is the author portrait on the back of his book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks, drawn by Saul Steinberg in 1993. Simic said walking around New York with Steinberg was as delightful as looking at one of his drawings. They became friend … | Continue reading
Always inspired by Munari’s Roses in the Salad, I stole some bok choy remnants off the chopping block on the kitchen counter and made some prints to use later in collages. (See also: onions and peppers.) | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I shared a bunch of prompts for reflecting on the last year and priming yourself for the new one. (These two are from The Steal Like an Artist Journal. There’s also a free download of the 30-day challenge.) | Continue reading
For closure, my first collage of the year was an ode to my kidney stone. I made this second one in portrait, but I think I like it better landscape. Here’s what they look like side-by-side in my diary: It’s a beautiful day today. I’ve got the screen door open while I scan… (Here … | Continue reading
Guess I know what I’m doing this year… | Continue reading
Disneyland with the family. Dole Whip. Hotel room lightsaber battles. Best vacation ever. Getting my studio built. Graffiting the inside of the walls with the boys before they blew in insulation. The deadbolt lock on the studio bathroom door. Panicking about ever being able to ac … | Continue reading
Was going through old photos from the year and came across these funny signs at various nurseries I went to with my wife. Gardening remains so rich in metaphor… | Continue reading
In the most recent newsletter, I wrote about how I’m spending “dead week” — the no man’s land on the calendar between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. | Continue reading
I read a terrific batch of novels this year. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow surprised and delighted me up until the very end, and I think that book deserves any acclaim that comes its way. Don Delillo’s White Noise was spectacular and also had an extra lay … | Continue reading
We’ve had this wonderful drawing by Jules up on our fridge for the past week or so. On Christmas Day in 1858, Thoreau wrote: I hear an owl hoot. How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age. I did not hear any hooting this morning, only the […] | Continue reading
The Public Domain Review has a great collection of Christmas-related material. Yesterday I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Christmas Sermon,” which was “written while he convalesced from a lung ailment at Lake Sarnac in the winter of 1887.” (I, too, am doing a little convalescin … | Continue reading
I get much less reading done in the fall compared to the summer. Summer here is fairly easygoing: the kids are home, everyone’s on vacation so they don’t expect much from me, and it’s so hot outside that floating in the pool with a book seems a perfectly reasonable way to spend t … | Continue reading
At the very end of this video (excerpted here), the director Francis Ford Coppola explains how he chooses a single word for each of films to keep him on track as he makes decision after decision: Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of … | Continue reading
Here is the back of a vintage mid-60s sweatshirt (Schroeder’s on the front) recently shared on the @schulzmuseum Instagram, along with this quote from Charles Schulz: Music is what keeps us sane. Music would be equivalent to a sense of humor. Music is one of the things, like the … | Continue reading
A thought from my friend Mark Larson: Advice on leaving (your place of birth, social media platforms, etc.): Make sure you’re running toward something, and not just away from something! Made me think of Sly and The Family Stone’s “Running Away”: Running away to get away Ha-ha, ha … | Continue reading
Sometimes I think they call them “idioms” because when you discover their origin you often feel like an idiot. For years, I thought “bum steer” must refer to a cow that’s lazy or no good or couldn’t procreate or something. (The latter doesn’t even make sense because a steer is a … | Continue reading
That we would train machines to be like us is not surprising. The real scandal is how much we’ve trained ourselves to be like machines. We’ve trained ourselves to be so machine-like that the machines don’t have to make that much of a leap to emulate us. Resistance is celebrating … | Continue reading
It’s the rare book I hear about in the morning that I’m reading by the afternoon, but that’s exactly what happened when I caught wind of Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas’ This is What It Sounds Like. Rogers was Prince’s engineer starting in 1983 and ending around 1988 — arguably the pea … | Continue reading
Here is my lunch (leftover enchiladas with a fried egg on top) and Amanda Petrusich’s 9,000-word profile of Metallica in The New Yorker. Petrusich is in a handful of writers I love whose work I honor by saving it to read in print, with a pen. This practice has become harder and h … | Continue reading
I came up the hill at Walnut Creek this morning and saw this hawk, perfectly indifferent to humans, dogs, and bicycles alike. | Continue reading
Once upon a time in Austin, Texas, you could walk around in the evening and see people tinkering in their garages, working with the garage door open. Robin Sloan says that’s how we all should be working: This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to to … | Continue reading
Keeping in mind Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap,” every time I pass the local community garden, I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the book-writing process. | Continue reading
At this risk of this blog just being a back-and-forth with Alan: I love his “twoquotes” tag on his blog, where he simply juxtaposes one quote with another. I’m coming up on the second anniversary of keeping my commonplace diary, and he whole year has been the art of juxtaposition … | Continue reading
Here is a lifted type collage, inspired by this Alan Jacobs post, a sermon I desperately needed (which he told me he wrote, like almost all sermons, for himself) about outsourcing research, letting AI do your writing, watching YouTube videos at 2x speed, etc. My question about al … | Continue reading
In today’s newsletter, I wrote about building my dream studio. The post Building my dream studio first appeared on Austin Kleon. | Continue reading
Heads up that tomorrow, Dec. 7th is the last day to order signed and personalized copies of my books from Bookpeople. I’ll be signing all the orders this weekend and I’ll sign as many as you buy! Get a whole set for the office, if you want. (Please be sure to follow their instruc … | Continue reading
Literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home, on The Ezra Klein Show describing her “bookends” routine of beginning and ending the day with books: I begin my day with meditation. And then reading at least 20 minutes a philosophical or theological or spiritual or so … | Continue reading
I was inspired to draw out this matrix after stumbling upon a website for a show called “Less Than Perfect” that ran at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology in 2016. The exhibition was organized around three themes: Failed Perfection presents objects that failed in production and expl … | Continue reading
In the latest newsletter I wrote about how I made these collages, weaving personal meaning into your art, and what Hershey’s calls the paper flags in the Kisses. Read it here. The post Kisses first appeared on Austin Kleon. | Continue reading