Bookin' It in 2019

For a number of reasons, I only finished reading an embarrassing total of four books in 2019.  They are as follows.

1. Whose Boat Is This Boat?: Comments That Don’t Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane by Donald J. Trump (as collected by the staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert)
2. The Scrap Sculptures of Stuart B. Padnos: Book 2
3. Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon
4. Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot by Vivien Goldman

Quote of the Day

Whenever life gets overwhelming, go back to chapter one of this book and think about your days.  Try your best to fill them in ways that get you a little closer to where you want to be.  Go easy on yourself and take your time.  Worry less about getting things done.  Worry more about things worth doing.  Worry less about being a great artist.  Worry more about being a good human being who makes art.  Worry less about making a mark.  Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 201

Quote of the Day

You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output and learn to be patient in the off-seasons.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 187

Quote of the Day

When we're glued to our screens, the world looks unreal.  Terrible.  Not worth saving or even spending time with.  Everyone on earth seems like a troll or a maniac or worse.  But you get outside and you start walking and you come to your senses.  Yeah, there are a few maniacs and some ugliness, but there are also people smiling, birds chirping, clouds flying overhead...all that stuff.  There's possibility.  Walking is a way to find possibility in your life when there doesn't seem to be any left.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 176 & 178

Quote of the Day

Things are already a mess out there.  We've made enough of a mark on this planet.  What we need are fewer vandals and more cleanup crews.  We need art that tidies.  Art that mends.  Art that repairs.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 167

Quote of the Day

Art is not only made from things that "spark joy."  Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us.  Part of the artist's job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can't see it.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 166

Quote of the Day

New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 149

Quote of the Day

It's amazing how little human life changes.  When I read Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, I marvel at how every ancient poem is basically a withering commentary on our contemporary politicians.  A dip into Henry David Thoreau's journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parents -- he sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 143 & 145

Quote of the Day

Interacting with people who don't share our perspective forces us to rethink our ideas, strengthen our ideas, or trade our ideas for better ones.  When you're only interacting with like-minded people all the time, there's less and less opportunity to be changed.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 140

Quote of the Day

[C]ertainty, in art and in life, is not only completely overrated, it is also a roadblock to discovery.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 132

Quote of the Day

"Attention is the most basic form of love," wrote John Tarrant.  When you pay attention to your life, it not only provides you with the material for your art, it also helps you fall in love with your life.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 118

Quote of the Day

When you have a system for going back through your work, you can better see the bigger picture of what you've been up to, and what you should do next.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 118

Quote of the Day

The pencil's best feature is that it has no way of interrupting you with texts or notifications.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 112

Quote of the Day

The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it ... It's impossible to pay proper attention to your life if you are hurtling along at lightning speed.  When your job is to see things other people don't, you have to slow down enough that you can actually look.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 105 & 107

Quote of the Day

This is exactly what an artist does: By paying extra attention to their world, they teach us to pay more attention to ours.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 105

Quote of the Day

I noticed a long time ago that there's actually very little correlation between what I love to make and share and the numbers of likes, favorites, and retweets it gets.  I'll often post something I loved making that took me forever and crickets chirp.  I'll post something else I think is sort of lame that took me no effort and it will go viral.  If I let those metrics run my personal practice, I don't think my heart could take it very long.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 89

Quote of the Day

An Amazon rank doesn't tell you whether someone read your book twice and loved it so much she passed it on to a friend.  Instagram likes don't tell you whether an image you made stuck with someone for a month.  A stream count doesn't equal an actual human being showing up to your live show and dancing.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 87 & 89

Quote of the Day

It's easy to become as obsessed with online metrics as money.  It can then be tempting to use those metrics to decide what to work on next, without taking into account how shallow those metrics really are.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 87

Quote of the Day

Saying "no" to the world can be really hard, but sometimes it's the only way to say "yes" to your art and your sanity.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 61

Quote of the Day

What's clear is that it's healthiest if we make a daily appointment to disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves.  Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time.

-- Austin Kleon, Keep Going, p. 43