Tag: austin kleon

Keeping Notebooks: Artifacts of the Mind

Kleon’s Notebooks

Austin Kleon shared his year in notebooks, and I find myself inspired yet again.

I’m not as systematic as Kleon. I don’t create daily pages, I don’t have a notebook “system,” but I do have a couple of staples and go-to practices. I have a notebook I began “building” years ago with quotes, ideas, images, drawings, scratching, and lists. I glue in pictures and trinkets and fortune cookies and scraps. I put a lot of stickers on the cover, stuff I’ve collected from places through the years.

And I keep a journal. I’ve started to be a little bit more disciplined in this practice recently. My goal is to make journaling a daily habit. I use my journal primarily to process my emotions, to get what I’m feeling out there. If there is one area of my self that I sometimes keep hidden, it is my emotional life. I’m not always real clear on what I’m feeling, and journaling helps me work through that aspect of my experience.

I tote around a couple of pocket sized notebooks so that I can record ideas and passing thoughts, bit of conversation and quotes, stuff I need to take on later. I also like having my small notebooks handy so that I have something to hand my kids when they say they are bored. “Make me something,” I tell them.

Søren Kierkegaard‘s “authorship,” as he called it, was undertaken with the understanding that his writings would be read by the public, not only his books, sermons, and manuscripts, but even his journals. Portions of his journals were excised and burned in the fire. He discarded portions that were not for public consumption, that were not intended to be read as part of his corpus. His writing, even his journal, was part of his grand vision.

I’m not quite there yet. I don’t think I’ll ever go that far. But I am writing and creating while conscious that family and friends may one day read what I’ve written or look upon what I’ve made, doodles and drawings and sayings, the occasional aphorism, the more-than-occasional rant.

Postman’s Advice on Living

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Neil Postman is one of my favorite thinkers, changing much about the way I think about media and modern society, with varied applications to the church, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. His “Advice for Living the Rest of Your Life,” a lecture delivered by Postman, is something I stumbled upon via Austin Kleon (his books!).

The complete lecture can be found here (delivered initially in 1989, and again with revisions in 1993). Kleon cited his favorite bits. I went back to the full manuscript, and decided to quote Postman’s list in its entirety. If you want Postman’s commentary, you’ll have to go to his text.

  1. Do not go to live in California.
  2. Do not watch TV news shows or read any tabloid newspapers.
  3. Do not read any books by people who think of themselves as “futurists,”such as Alvin Toffler.
  4. Do not become a jogger. If you are one, stop immediately.
  5. If you are married, stay married.
  6. If you are a man, get married as soon as possible. If you are a woman,you need not be in a hurry.
  7. Establish as many regular routines as possible.
  8. Avoid multiple and simultaneous changes in your personal life.
  9. Remember: It is more likely than not that as you get older you will get dumber.
  10. Keep your opinions to a minimum.
  11. Carefully limit the information input you will allow.
  12. Seek significance in your work, friends, and family, where potency and output are still possible.
  13. Read’s Law: Do not trust any group larger than a squad, that is, about a dozen.
  14. With exceptions to be noted further ahead, avoid whenever possible reading anything written after 1900.
  15. Confine yourself, wherever possible, to music written prior to 1850.
  16. Weingartner’s Law: 95% of everything is nonsense.
  17. Truman’s Law: Under no circumstances ever vote for a Republican.
  18. Take religion more seriously than you have.
  19. Divest yourself of your belief in the magical powers of numbers.
  20. Once a year, read a book by authors like George Orwell, E.B. White, or Bertrand Russell.

I plan to heed numbers 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, and 19. Number 6 does not apply. I’ll consider numbers 3, 13, 16, and 20. I have no intention of applying 4, 14, 15, 17, and 20.