Just Kids

I'm reading Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids." I really wish I had it as an audiobook read aloud by Smith because I just love the sound of her voice.

At first I found it a little tedious. I was getting tired of reading about being hungry and living in grungy places. I'm also reading it on a Kindle and so far I worry that I am rushing through Kindle books (maybe because I rush through everything else I read on a screen?). So I tried to slow down and then I got to the part where she moved into the Chelsea Hotel. That's when I really started to enjoy myself.

Patti Smith is about 15 years older than me. It's startling to reflect on the fact that when I was in high school, trudging back and forth from Union Square to my school on 15th Street, it seems likely that I may have brushed past Patti Smith at some point. And just as her head was full of ideas of how to be an artist and find her way in the world, mine was too. I was walking along toting a dance bag and some volume of 19th century fiction and I was hungry not because I didn't have money but because I was intentionally not eating to try to fit in just a little bit more invisibly at American Ballet Theatre School.

In some ways I'm still walking along everyday wondering about how to be an artist. This past week I've been chewing on how to keep up with a writing practice. It seems like a burden right now. I want to wallow in words but I don't want to write a scene or tie up the loose ends of a character.

At breakfast yesterday as I read about Patti and Robert stringing up beads in their studio and about Patti hiring a guitar player to accompany her at her first big poetry reading, I realized I am looking at my own art from a narrow, prescribed point of view. It's important for me to have a "deliverable" to point to -- mostly for other people. "Oh, look, here is a set of short stories I've written," "Here is the first half of a novel I'm working on." Why should I care about that?

If I don't want to finish a scene, why should I? Isn't it enough to just play with words and colors and patterns for a while and see where it leads?

Blessing and Curse

I recently had lunch with a friend who is in the middle of writing her second novel. I don't know much about it other than it has given her a reason to learn a lot about the Warsaw ghetto during World War II and also the tapestries of Bayeux. (Sounds like my kind of project.) I asked how the book was going.

"It's fine. I expect it to have the same commercial success as the first." She laughed out loud. Because, of course, her first novel has not yet found a home in the publishing world.

She continued, "Aren't we lucky that we like the process so much?"

I nodded and smiled and hoped that she was right. I've always thought of myself as a happy "process writer" -- someone who gets enjoyment from the act of putting pen to paper even if it never leads to a published work I can hold in my hand and give to someone. But of late it's seemed more of a burden.

I've been having such a hard time writing. I'm preoccupied with my new office and my creative energy is being heavily used in things like logo design, decisions on websites, etc. But if I don't manage to sit down and write a bit, even if just a few times a week, I feel pretty uneven and eventually unhappy.

So -- for how long can I get away with just doing free-writing and, if I'm lucky, odd character sketches and potential background scenes for longer projects I am working on?

A wise friend has suggested that I try to shake myself up and do some drawing every time I sit down to write. I have never thought of myself as much of a visual artist - not in the "Oh, my God, I can't even draw a circle" way but more in the shruggy "it's just not something I've ever been attracted to" variety. I went ahead and bought a bunch of colored markers, which was great fun, and I have gone ahead and done a few odd little drawings that did lead to some free writing. But I'm not at all sure about any of this.

Not a Townie

I just finished reading my first book on a Kindle. I selected "Townie" by Andre Dubus III. I had heard a lot about the book when it came out a few months ago and it was on my list of books to get from the library. I thought this was a good choice for a Kindle book because I thought my husband and son would also be interested in reading it.

Well, I don't think I'll be recommending the book to anyone. Dubus certainly has a wonderful ability to create a scene and give the reader a sense of place. But I had no idea I was signing up for hours and hours of descriptions of fist fights, of long, hopeless hours in bars. The book had just one theme -- barely controlled and barely disguised anger. Frankly, it became pretty boring and I started to skim whenever he stepped into a bar and saw a well-muscled young man.

I felt like I lived in an entirely different world than the author. About 50 pages in I found myself looking up his picture because I just needed to have a face in mind as I read about these endless fights. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen anyone in a fight (including junior high) and I can't remember ever observing the things that seemed to happen to Dubus every week -- coming across a couple who were on the verge of physical violence and needing to make the decision of whether to step in and protect the woman. Have I just not noticed? It's not like I've spent my entire life in a rarified, protected suburb. My first 18 years on Staten Island and my several years living on the edge of Koreatown in Los Angeles allowed me to see a pretty broad cross-section of humanity. But I guess those places are a lot safer than the Boston suburbs where Dubus grew up.

One of the weirdest things about the book is that Dubus is the son of a well-regarded writer who was a working writer and teacher when the author was a child. And yet the son had never traveled out of Boston and lived in near poverty conditions with his mother and siblings. It left me really wondering about Dubus pere.

One of the only poignant things I discovered in the book was the description of the father's writing schedule. Apparently he wrote every morning, had lunch, and then went for a run. He kept careful track of how much he was writing and kept a log where he noted down his word count for every day and wrote "thank you" below it. I like that. A daily recognition that artists are just a vessel for a gift, a thing, that we only barely understand.

But I would have been happy reading that in an article. I didn't need to read the whole book.