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| Patti photographed by Robert Maplethorpe for the cover of her first album, Horses |
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Anyway Just Kids. Patti Smith is born in Chicago and grows up in New Jersey. The family are blue collar Catholics and Patti is one of those skinny dreamy kids who runs wild outdoors and invents games and imaginary playmates. She's intensely creative and seems to inhabit her own world. Her primary interest is art and poetry. She gets pregnant as a teen and lives at home and then when the neighbours begin to talk moves in with her aunt. She carries the baby to term, has it adopted and moves to New York.
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She lives in squalor for many years and falls in love with another young misfit called Robert Maplethorpe who also dreams of becoming an artist. They move in together in Brooklyn and talk about getting married. She has a succession of low paying jobs to support his endeavours in painting and as time progresses they gradually drift apart. He flees to San Francisco and comes back announcing that he is gay. She accepts this and they decide to remain friends. She gets a job in a bookstore and starts going to poetry readings. They live together in the Chelsea Hotel and gradually get absorbed into Andy Warhol's scene at the Factory. She meets Alan Ginsberg and has an affair with Sam Shephard who initially conceals the fact that he's a famous playwright and married. Eventually of course she becomes a singer and a punk rock icon and he becomes a photographer and artist.
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Patti Smith has two huge things going for her in this book: she has a way with a words and she has an interesting story to tell. Her prose is spare, economical, beautiful and her narrative is full of compassion, wonderful details and humour. This was one of my favourite reads of 2010 and it holds up very well on a second go round. Highly recommended.
17 comments:
This one is flying out the door in paperback and people seem to love it. I am not particularly drawn to it, but then, memoir isn't something that often calls to me, I don't know why. If it's an interview or travel writing, it's a completely different story.
Seana
I'm not a big memoir reader either. Crime fiction, history, travel writing, science writing, literary fiction & biography are more my bag. But Smith does have an interesting story and she tells it really well.
I found it a bit name-droppy.
I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had been biography.
Talking of name-droppers, the new Hitch Article is heart-breaking
Rob
Well it doesnt really get name droppy until the second half when she's beginning to move in trendy circles. I liked the fact that Alan Ginsberg bought her a sandwich because he thought she was a beautiful boy and then was slightly aghast to discover she wasnt.
Its a great Hitch piece.
I was a bit saddened by his new piece in Slate - its depressing that he feels the need to spend his last weeks on planet Earth battling with buffoons like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky
Rob
A nice line from the Vanity Fair piece:
"When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen."
It was the Edna St. Vincent Millay line from his first VF cancer piece that broke my heart:
"In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason."
Thanks for the heads up on the Vanity Fair article, Rob. I look forward to reading it.
As to spending his last days battling Chomsky and Moore, don't you expect that is enlivening and hopeful to him? Although I don't take the same line on either of them that you do, Adrian, I am sure Hitchens enjoys batting at them. Give 'em a good swipe before he goes.
Your friend Girish has a good piece on Yahoo India on Osama's religious affiliation and inner contradictions, in case you hadn't seen it.
Seana
I had read it and enjoyed. Pretty smart is old Girish. I suppose I should go over there and comment. I loved the history lesson in this bit and the logic at the end.
In the 18th century a theologian named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged in what is now Saudi Arabia, and formed a close bond with a local ruler, Sheikh al Saud. When the clan of al Saud became a dominant force across the entirety of the Muslim Holy Land, Wahhabism was made the official belief system of the realm. Wahhabi ideology closely resembles Puritanism in notable ways. Like Puritans, Wahhabis reject any form of intercession by priests and saints, encouraging instead a direct relationship between the individual and God based on a reading of canonical scripture. This sounds rather rational and modern but, as demonstrated by the history of Protestant iconoclasm, it has a dark side. There weren't many pagan icons left to destroy in West Asia by the time the Wahhabis gained power, just as Europe's pre-Christian heritage had been erased by the time of the Reformation. So, as the Puritans had done, Wahhabis focused their vandalism on their own culture. Down the centuries, opulent tombs had been built at the burial spots of important Islamic figures. Dargahs of pirs and saints dotted every land where Muslims lived, attracting devotees and pilgrims. Condemning any attachment to human remains as a distraction from the message of God, Wahhabis launched campaigns of destruction wherever they grabbed power. In the early nineteenth century, they razed the tombs of the two central figures of Shia devotion, Muhammad's son-in-law Ali and his grandson Husayn, in Najaf and Karbala. Soon after, they took control of Mecca and Medina and demolished shrines built over the resting place of the Prophet's daughter Fatima, his first wife Khadija, and a number of his relatives and followers. The Wahhabis' iconoclastic zeal has remained undimmed two centuries later, as demonstrated by the leveling of the tomb of Muhammad's mother Amina in 1998.
Considering this history, it might have been peculiarly appropriate for the US administration to have placed Osama bin Laden's body in a marked grave instead of dumping it in the sea. President Obama and his advisors expressed concern that any spot where Osama's body was buried could become a site of pilgrimage. Had that happened, it would have been another marvelously ironic stage in the iconification of the iconoclast, a man who parlayed his self-image to attract devotees to his cause, in hypocritical disregard of the tenets of the very faith in whose name he issued calls to violent action.
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It was an excellent concise history lesson, and really pointed out the contradictions within bin Ladin's beliefs.
Seana
Girish was an English major at Oxford but I think he's dabbled in lots of different fields since then.
It makes for a lively blog. I don't always get the references in all of them, but it's definitely a blog I check in on from time to time.
I suppose it would be nice of us to post a link for anyone following along right now, so here is Girish's Shoot First, Mumble Later.
Seana
Thanks for that and I'm sure Girish will appreciate it.
How's the project that you were procrastinating about going?
Seana
Another very successful day of procrastinating today.
Love it.
After procrastinating for months, I finally took two buses across town to go to the DMV to replace my lost/stolen driver's license. I don't have a car, so it's not really a problem, but my passport expired today and I finally convinced myself that it might be wise to have some proof of my legitimate existence. I dragged myself kicking and screaming all the way.
Inwardly, of course.
I agree with Seana's sentiments about Hitchens arguing with Moore and Chomsky.
Although I don't see them in with a critical eye, re, I do think that Hitchens is arguing with them because that's what makes him feel alive, that he's still thinking and arguing. That is much of his raison d'etre -- to argue it out to his last breath. He's thinking and doing mental jousting, point for point, argument for argument. Not boring, it's life!
And for anyone who grew up in a dual Eastern European-Jewish and Irish household,as I did, you know the argument's the thing! So I wholly get it. It's life!
He's alive as long as he can think, argue, refute and assert.
His mind, his words and writing are still intact.
Kathy, Seana
Its a fair point. Fighting the good fight to his very last breath probably helps. Its certainly not how I would want to spend my last days (maybe I just dont care enough?) but if helps him, fine.
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