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There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Poet
LA
California
Happen
Else
Happens
Certain
Things
Anywhere
York

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I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California [status] isn't something I think about that much.
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I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.
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There are always so many things happening [to us] at one time. We read Isherwood's A Single Man in class, and we had to ask: How is he talking about all this stuff: teaching, being lonely, all his memories, all at the same time? He's telling us: This is where my head is at, let me be straightforward. And of course, try be artful about it.
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I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .
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People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
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Sometimes I highjack memories. Sometimes I switch them around. Sometimes they're just in the background, like some little bass note. Those things have carried me through, especially when I first started writing. They're still there, but more in the distance these days.
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I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true. He's not saying, I'm trying to lie to you. But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.
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There's this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I'm just trying to have fun with that stuff.
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I've also never written anything really in LA.
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Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about process all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative wor
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I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.
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The anger and fear are so global. And of course, we live where we live and there's a hierarchy to who is worth what. It's been going on for a long, long time.
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Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.
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My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, Contradiction is how we operate.
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It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.
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I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.
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We don't act the same in every situation. Things bleed into all kinds of other things, from behavior to identity.
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It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.
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I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.
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My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about.
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