First the delight as the familiar skyline comes into view. even in the days when a trip back to new york meant plunging back into childhood fear & unhappiness, I always had that jolt of joy at my firat glimpse of thew jagged skyline against a scrim of clouds or etched into fog. Today as the bus pulled in I felt myself hunching into myself as I always do when I first arrive. Its as if I am turtling iin so all you see is the tough New Yorker, nevermind the rolling suitcase or the pause as I stop to remembere if I turn right or left toward Broadway. I am here to spend time with a friend I first met in Boston. I come back at Christmas to see my aunts and our cousins who shook off Queens long ago in favor of Long Island. But the weekends spent walking from one end of Manhattan to another, finally visiting John Derian’s shop or stalking the jen bekman gallery for the umpteenth time or chatting up the vendors if I cross the bridge and head to the Brooklyn Flea, those are the New York memories I have now thanks to my Boston friend and other friends I met somewhere else back when I didn’t yet know how to wear my growing up years lightly. Its thhese friends who have helped me shake off most of that dust and given this wild beautiful noisy crowded exhilirating place back to me.

p,s,  I apologize for the typos. who knew it was this hard to blog by phone?

Still Life with Street Art, New York City, September 2011

Yesterday Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist arrived in the mail. He’s probably most famous for his “black-out” poems, which he wrote by taking a black marker to newspaper articles (mostly the NY Times, I think, but don’t quote me). The poems are epigrammatic, spare, and function as much as visual art (which is why moi discovered them courtesy of 20×200.com) as literary texts. Kleon’s also a big brain and Steal Like an Artist is sort of his creativity for dummies, except beautifully designed with sentences that read like lines of poetry or koans.

One of his premiere tenets, which I alluded to in yesterday’s post, is that there’s no such thing as originality. If you’re truly doing the work right, you’re always borrowing/stealing/reimagining/being influenced by/quoting. (The mark of the immature poet—which I certainly was in my time—is the statement, “Oh, I don’t read other people’s work. I don’t want to be influenced.”)

As Kleon writes, “You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, ‘We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.’”

Here’s a  list of those who have influenced me, and who I’ve stolen from—whether it’s actual lines, or ideas about living as an artist, or concepts. (It’s by no means exhaustive, it’d be pages and pages long, I’m sure, if I went through my accumulated body of poems one by one.)

Maureen Seaton * Denise Duhamel * Joy Harjo * Billie Holiday * the Bible * Danna Ephland * Mary Oliver * the Mighty Blue Kings * Frida Kahlo * Toni Morrison * May Sarton * Little Walter * William Eggleston * photography and sculpture, in general * Walt Whitman * Langston Hughes * Stephen Elliott * Virginia Woolf * August Wilson * Sylvia Plath * Federico Garcia Lorca * Rob Nadeau *  the Catholic Mass * Lucille Clifton * the blues and hymns * a medieval altarpiece that depicted the three stages of the  life of whichever saint it was

Who (or what) have you pickpocketed for art’s sake?

Owen Wilson likes art. I know this because he wrote this article.

“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original….Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer Andre Gide put it, ‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.’” — Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Don’t buy Steal Like an Artist here or from your local bookseller unless you want a big wallop of inspiration and good talk right upside your head.

Don’t buy any of Austin Kleon’s prints from 20×200.com if you hate art.

And yeah, I don’t know why I’m feeling so contrary either.

Rocky Carroll Pictures

I met Rocky Carroll when I was 18 years old. I worked at the Huntington Theatre Company, and he was playing “Lyman” in their production of August Wilson’s Piano Lesson. My favorite scene was when he kissed “Bernice” on the neck; I wanted to be her each and every night. I walked home with him (and others of the cast) most every night I worked. I confess that more than two decades later, I’m still swooning.

1. IMHO the perfect state for an ice cube is when it’s half firm, half slush so it’s enough crunch when you bite into it to be satisfying, but not so crunchy that your dentist yells at you when you go see her or you become too scared to go to said dentist because you know she’s going to yell at you when you see her even though you’ve spent all of your life having perfect teeth.

2. I am one of those people whose pee smells when I eat asparagus. (Is that the kind of thing you should announce on a first date or a second, or maybe you just gently work it into the conversation after he’s popped the question and you’re sure you really like your ring…)

3. Today I was able to spend a half-hour being delighted by the antics of my friend M’s smart, rambunctious, absolutely gorgeous boys (almost 3 and almost 5.) Somehow this made me write a poem on the way home that contains the lines: “I will never have children. I will never learn the grief & guilt of them. I will never forget their names, or lose them in the murk and muck of my mother’s love for them.”

4. No, really, i have a serious ice cube problem.

5. Even with my glasses on, I can rarely actually see anything. It’s a problem of focus, mostly physical—I have deformed corneas—but sometimes I’m sure it’s mental too.

6. I have given up using any type of styling product except for a few blasts of L’Oreal Elnett hairspray for which I pay $12/can because it was once only available in Paris. I also wear mascara most every day, and black eyeliner most days, and I’m starting this new thing involving red lipstick except on Tuesdays cause that’s when I weigh-in at Weight Watchers and I don’t want to stain my shirts as I strip down to the bare minimum before I step on the scale.

7. I hated being 40. And 41. What I said: “Well, it’s just disorienting coming face-to-face with the disparity between what the 40-year-old me looked at from the vantage point of 18, and what the reality is, but I do love my life.”  What I meant: “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I wasn’t supposed to be the one who ended up without a husband, without kids. I wasn’t supposed to still be recovering from childhood. I wasn’t supposed to still tear up—in joy, but also in sorrow—at every engagement and pregnancy announcement, and wonder why not me?”

8. I love being 42. What I say now: “It’s okay to be sad when someone else gets married or engaged. It’s okay to grieve what you may not have. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a good life. That doesn’t mean you don’t know from the bottom of your heart you have a good life. That doesn’t mean that you hate your friends. It just means that grief can be unreasonable and inarticulate. It just means you’re human.”

9. I just realized last week that honey isn’t vegan. I haven’t had any honey because it doesn’t sit well in my stomach, so it’s not really something I needed to know. But still, shouldn’t I have put two and two together?

10. I worry that I talk about the white men I find attractive too much. I worry that you think I’m one of “those” black women who only likes white guys. I don’t think there’s any (legal) way to show you all the beautiful black men I see on the Metro, or walking down the street, or in Barnes and Noble who make me yearn. They’re just not usually on the TV shows I watch all the time, or they’re not in the bands I listen to. But in case you’re keeping track: Common and Hill Harper and John Legend and Rocky Carroll and Shemar Moore and the guy who played the sheriff in Why Did I Get Married? and the guy who played the bad husband in that, too, who I loved in Judging Amy and Sarah Connor: The Terminator Chronicles, and Don Cheadle, and Keman, who’s the kid I grew up next to who was way too young for me, and Peter from down the block, but that’s another category entirely…

Carnival Ride by Paulette Beete

It’s about perspective. Sitting here on the blue and white sofa, I can see the lighthouse PBN I thrifted during a wonderfully warm afternoon tooling around Bennington with Ann and Robin, the Holstee Manifesto poster that I bought for both Debbie and me for Christmas, the (still-not-steam-cleaned) tailored blue chair I garbage picked a few months ago, my collection of books by Colette and May Sarton, the photographs that the other Kimberly took of us all wearing her clothes when we were fellows at the Fine Art Works Center. I think what I’m getting at is that when I sit here, listening to a “mixed tape” I borrowed from my friend David, it’s pretty clear that I have a good life. I don’t have a perfect life, but I am sheltered, I am clothed, I am fed, and most important of all I am loved.

I was thinking today about how it’s easier to focus on the #fail, the lack. But I’m not actually motivated by failure. I’m too much of a closet perfectionist for that. If I look at the fact that I only exercised twice not three times last week—no matter the extenuating circumstances of feeling unwell—I think, “Oh, I’ll just never get it right. I’ll never be able to keep this up.” But when I celebrate and applaud each and every day I do get out of bed on time and I do sweat my way through a 45-minute tape, I am much more excited about doing it again.

I think that’s a true thing about life in general. It’s much harder to press forward if we only ever focus on the lack, if we’re constantly trying to plug a hole in our lives. Isn’t it much easier to build on what’s already there? And if we only focus on what we don’t have—no husband, no kids, no savings account to speak of—don’t we miss the wonderful friend who applauds on Facebook everytime you exercise (thanks Leah!) and the sister who introduced you to the Brit chick-lit author Jill Mansell and will spend an entire hour in the Life is Good store with you debating over which sweatshirt to buy (thanks Debbie!), and all of the many kindnesses and chuckles that make life worth living and give you traction when you need to pull yourself through a hard time? If I were going for the t-shirt or bumper sticker version of what I’m saying, I guess I’d say—if you don’t like the view from where you’re sitting, maybe you just need to change your perspective.

I thought this was a really wonderful personal essay on speculative fiction

Lolah has a new blog post. Yay!

Are you on Facebook? Then you should prolly like “Paulette Beete, Writer.” And then answer the question I put up today.

Go here and listen to #s 2, 8, 10 , and 11

Matt Dillon. Photo courtesy of Guadalajara Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons

Some days the problem isn’t that I can’t think of anything to write but that I can think of too many things to write. I just wrote out a whole list of my thoughts but then I deleted them. It was a boring list. Well, it was a list that meant nothing to anyone but me. Even though my brain is full, nothing seems to be catching fire. There’s lots I want to think about, but nothing I want to write about. Some days I guess you just have to say, well, today’s a day I’m just going to be happy I showed up even if nothing happened. More tomorrow?

Interesting interview with Cindy Sherman here

Matt Dillon’s Wikipedia page here

“Language is an act of faith.” — from The Language Archive by Julia Cho

Support local theater: go see Forum Theatre’s production of The Language Archive!

1. Everyone keeps saying that Whitney Houston’s voice was  ravaged by drugs, but I don’t think that’s 100% true. Part of it was age; even the most well-trained opera singers retire or completely change the roles they sing in their 40s because the soprano register gets harder and harder to access. I wonder if that was part of her troubles, watching her gift seemingly slip away even when she was clean, unable to make peace with all she could still accomplish with a diminished vocal range, even with an unfathomable range of hard-won experience to draw on to power her performances.

2. I am reading Catching Fire, the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy. It’s difficult to read because it all seems so possible to me as the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen and “the Capital”—our politicians, our bankers—seems not to care. And given that for so many of our poverty-stricken young  people, irrespective of race, their only way out is to join the military, don’t we already have our own version of tesserae, of the Hunger Games?

3. I should be used to my body’s betrayals by now—the petulant lungs, the uterine fibroids gorging themselves on my blood as if the uterus decided to get me pregnant on its own. But still, it surprises me when this body breaks down, takes me a beat too long to accept an afternoon on the couch while I wait for this too to pass.

4. What struck me most when I heard the news of Whitney’s death was that she was only six years older than I am. I’ve lost two friends from high school in the last two years, and I nearly died myself six years ago, but still, in the first few seconds of hearing about a death, it seems unreal that people my age die.

5. God’s timing is the best timing, even in innocuous ways like making you catch the elevator to go home sick from work a half-hour later than you thought you would because there’s someone on that elevator that needs to connect with you around facing the same health issues.

6. Sometimes I think, “Oh, next year, I’ll finally be able to decide to let go of having natural children. At 43, it just won’t be that difficult to close that door, especially if I’m still unmarried.”

7. It’s amazing to me how much we have to lie to ourselves sometimes just to get to the next moment.

8. I wrote a lot of angry poems last year, so-called political poems. (I say so-called because I do believe every poem is political simply because of the act of choosing to speak out loud, but people usually  mean “concerned with politics”when they say “political,” don’t they?) It was soul-wearying to be that angry and that creative at the same time.

9. That’s no excuse to stop being angry. Or creative.

10. Sometimes I get very very scared to speak out loud.