Austin Kleon

The Momus Questionnaire was created by musician Nick Currie, and is designed to identify the aspects of the subject’s personality which give them a posiive self-image, or ‘subcultural capital’.

1. Have you rebelled against someone else’s dreary expectations of your life, and become something more unexpected?
2. What in your life can you point to and say, like Frankie, ‘I Did It My Way’?
3. What creative achievements are you most proud of?
4. If there was one event in your life which really shaped you, made you the person you are today, what would it be?
5. If you had to make a song or rap boasting about your irresistible charm and sexiness, how would you describe yourself?
6. Have you ever made material sacrifices because of your integrity?
7. Describe a public personality who exemplifies everything you’d like to be yourself, then another public personality who incarnates everything you’d least like to be.
8. If you were an Egyptian pharaoh and had to be buried with a few key objects to take to the next world, what would they be?
9. Do you have a favourite joke, quotation or proverb?
10. What’s your favourite portrait (it can be a song, a painting, a film, anything)?

You can read some of the answers here.

In the shack with Robert Caro

He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Caro first composes in longhand, then types up everything triple-spaced, with a carbon copy, in the old newspaper manner. He insists on cotton rather than synthetic typewriter ribbons, because the letters come out inkier and darker, but they’re no longer in regular production. “Ina found somebody out in either Pittsburgh or Cleveland who said that he’d make the cotton ribbons for me if I ordered, I think, a dozen gross, which — I have enough typewriter ribbons to support the entire …” He laughs, breaking off the thought.

That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) 

In Working, Caro writes:

I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.

See also: Robert Caro’s corkboard

The dying singer who cured himself with music

Tapedeck.org

a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There’s an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60’s functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70’s audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80’s and 90’s. We hope you enjoy these tapes as much as we do!

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.”

Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes (via)

From her essay, “Autumn”:

There is no such thing as time going straight on to new things. This is an illusion. Okay? And clinging to this illusion makes it difficult to understand oneself and one’s life and what is happening to one. Time is repetition, a circle. This is obvious. Day and night, the seasons, tell us this. Even so, we don’t believe it. Time is not a circle, we think. Spring screams the opposite to us, of course, and summer seduces us into believing that we’re all going to live forever. Winter couldn’t care less what we think about time. But fall cares. Instructive, tactful, subtle, fall is a philosophy all its own. Occult, secretive, taking pleasure in sleep, in rest. Fall’s comfortless, honest rot. In the beginning in most places it’s showy, the better to mask its melancholy: raging
leaves and spanking breezes, edgy with the real cold. And that special, solemn light. For fall is for melan- cholics and those in love. The torchy sort of love. Forget spring. Spring is nothing but promise, a reproach to melancholics. Spring makes us forget the deal, whereas fall is the deal. The unutterable, unalterable deal.

Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s re signed, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory. We’re transient, we’re temporary, we’re all only sometime. We will pass and someone else will take our place. Our pursuit of living founders each time we remember this. Fall is the darkening window, the one Hart Crane had in mind in his poem “Fear,” the window on which likes the night.

Found in Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals.

Paintings by Will Berger

(he’s part of a show at Yard Dog right now)