selfishbookclub

Just Kids and M Train by Patti Smith

It has been over a year since I last wrote a blog entry for the Selfish Book Club, which could almost be renamed the Lonely Book Club. I have so few friends anymore who want to discuss books other than the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Also, my intermittent brain fog has had me googling “long Covid symptoms,” although as soon as I’m convinced I have a disease of some sort I go out to my home gym and perform a strength workout I could have barely completed in high school followed by bursts of creativity at a store where I art direct the Instagram fashion shoots and put together window displays with consigned art and furniture. The naps and drag-ass that plague my mid-afternoons is probably just un petit peu d’ennui. After all, another Biden-Trump election on the horizon is making everyone sick in one way or another.

In one of my recents energetic moments I recommitted to learning from my own library and pulled a few books to review and keep or toss. Out went a book on screen writing. Who am I kidding? I also thought I might let go Patti Smith’s M Train.

The last time I read M Train was immediately upon its release in 2015. I had read Just Kids and loved it intensely–it seemed to me a recipe for how to live life to the fullest. I read it in paperback, then bought it in hardback and read it again. When I went to Costa Rica for a yoga retreat, I downloaded it to my iPad. We were in a remote area on the edge of the jungle on the southwest coast, accessible only by small plane and then small boat.

The “resort” was poorly designed and the menu of exclusively beans and rice exacerbated my usual travel constipation as did the unappetizing proximity of the two toilets (for 30 people) to the dining room. The location of the privies was hardly private, and as any chronically constipated person knows, privacy is everything. Smoke from the cooking fire the clueless host lit during our open-air yoga sessions gave me the worst case of asthma I have had since my 20s and I spent most of the retreat struggling for breath in my tent. Reading Just Kids got me through the horrible vacation. The memoir was just as engrossing the third time and I was so grateful I had it.

I don’t need to reread Just Kids for this blog–some of the images from it are so familiar they feel like my own memories. Making necklaces on leather thongs and selling them to make money, peeing in a coffee can, Robert and Patti taking Polaroids of each other. I see it all in black and white: not a silver, perfect Mapplethorpe image, but a more grainy, surreal Patti Smith image, artistic yet amateur and bohemian. In Costa Rica to avoid the bathrooms I would climb down from my tree-house tent and squat in the open outdoor shower in the dark to pee. I felt rebellious like Patti Smith.

M Train, when I read it the first time, was much too sad and romantic for me and it didn’t have the youthful, creative energy of Just Kids. The way Patti Smith imbued objects with feelings and personalities bugged me. I’m not that much older now than when I initially read it at age 52 (I am now 60) but I have recently began to look at the objects that have settled into grooves in my own life and I have been writing down some of their histories. Realizing that it won’t be that long before I leave all of these objects behind has made me want to make sense of them for whoever has the privilege of finding them and sending them on to new homes. I’m trying to let go of things that have any remnant of a negative memory or association and just keep the things that will tell a meaningful, hopefully rich, story.

One of the categories I find hardest to let go is rocks. I have a rock or two from each of the powerful places and experiences in my life, collected since my early 20s and starting with a piece of serpentine from what a Buddhist monk called the Driver’s Seat of Mt. Tamalpais. After that, I started saving small stones from important vineyards I visited in Napa Valley and France, from Macchu Picchu, from the peaks of difficult hikes, from beaches I enjoyed with my boyfriend, and other places.

Patti gathers stones in French Guyana and puts them in a Gitaines matchbox. Later she buries them at Jean Genet’s grave in France. I did a similar pilgrimage in 1993, to Balzac’s grave in Paris, and I saw little rocks visitors had placed on his headstone but didn’t bring anything to leave myself.

Patti describes a second hand Commes de Garcons coat she had practically become one with but somehow lost. A warm, reliable yet fashionable coat is hard to beat. Many of my favorite articles of clothing and furniture are second hand. I’m careful never to buy something from a negative person. No matter how cool the item might be I always see a dark haze of negativity around it. But stuff from optimistic, positive people shines with an inner light.

M Train is very dreamy and Patti has enough age and success to get away with a lot of almost dream-like selfish and odd behaviors, for example, insisting on having the same table and chair at her favorite cafe. Sometimes she would hide out in the bathroom until another customer had vacated the table. She sort of lives as if New York is her personal domaine and so it is.

I know that feeling of arranging your schedule and surroundings so that a routine is unimpeded and selfish or eccentric activities are allowed. I’ve always chosen jobs and relationships for the flexibility and freedom they offer. When I’m in a crowded city–Rome for example–I get up at dawn to walk and I have the entire city to myself. At 6am there is practically no one on the Spanish Steps, no one at the Trevi Fountain.

In New York I have been first in line at the Metropolitan Museum of Art several times and have had the joy of being the only person (for a few seconds at least) walking up grand staircase to the second floor galleries or can even find myself one of two or three people in the Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian galleries. It is my favorite way to spoil myself. I hate visiting places with people who aren’t early risers and want me to have a leisurely Spanish breakfast or whatever when we could be standing alone in front of Guernica (for a few seconds).

Patti Smith gives me ideas. Patti Smith give me permission.

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I’ve read this book a bunch of times and my paperback is full of underlining, margin notes and little stars, but when I try to recall the main points of Gretchn Rubin’s the Happiness Project, I come up somewhat empty. It’s a book written in the “one year spent doing x” format, which I happen to like. Rubin and I have similar personalities–we are sticklers for rules, self-monitoring maniacs, lovers of gold stars and atta-girls. A lot of the stuff about her that bugs me is the same stuff that bugs me about myself.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex is a tough act to follow, and Jeffrey Eugenides third novel, The Marriage Plot, seems thin and humorless in comparison. It has been in a resell bag in my car and was not going to earn a blog post, but I brought it back into the house and placed it back on the shelf next to Middlesex based more on Middlesex’s merit than it’s own.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

When an author becomes really famous they earn the right for first editions of their subsequent books to be more opulent than their earlier efforts. and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things (TSOAT) is gorgeous. Since the book is set in the 18th and 19th centuries, the look of it is antique, with unevenly cut, thick ivory pages and a dust jacket printed to look like aged parchment. There are dreamy colored illustrations of orchids on the end papers and the hardbound cover is a soothing green-tinged ivory with an olive colored spine, the author’s initials stamped in gold on the front. The feathery edges of the pages are soft and the book is very sensual, befitting some of the subject matter. My copy is even signed!

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

The winter solstice is still ahead of me but it has been freezing and I am dreading the next four months of short, cold days and long, cold nights. I have a buffalo hide on my bed that makes me feel like a pioneer and I snuggle under it to read the winter away. I love the book The Snow Leopard, but I wish I’d chosen a book about the Tropics. Author Peter Matthiessen’s melancholy account of his trek through the Himalaya with his leaky tent and snow-sodden sneakers only makes me feel colder, and also unadventurous and guilty.

In Our Time, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Byline by Ernest Hemingway

I’m writing the week after the 2022 mid-term elections when the expected Republican “red tsunami” never materialized and hope for civility and moderation returned to many places in the USA. The insensible, egomaniacal rantings of Le Grand Orange and his minions aren’t as omnipresent and I’m reading and listening to some politicians who actually can string a few sentences together intelligently and who don’t resort to schoolyard name-calling. Reading a lot of Hemingway during this time has helped tune my ear back to the recognition of strong, clear, sensible American English.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I’ve been through peaks and valleys with my admiration for Hemingway. Fact is, when I read about him I like him less but when I read his actual writing, I admire him enormously again. He left all these astonishing books–so what if he, like his compatriot Picasso, wasn’t faithful. To take a Tom Robbins quote about the rich and apply it to geniuses: “A lot of geniuses are assholes, but a lot of idiots are assholes too and at least a genius can contribute something great to the world.”

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

From Gravity’s Rainbow to elevated chick lit! It’s astounding how enjoyable the ride of a good, straightforward novel can be after a Pynchian or Joycean brain wreck. It’s like going from a groaning board of beautifully prepared pigs feet and sweet breads served with absinthe and laudanum in a darkened hall to a simple morning repast of a scone and coffee in the sunlit corner of a cozy kitchen. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is smart historical fiction about one of the historical figures I’m most fascinated by, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.

Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

Go into any person’s house who has a liberal education and you will probably find a copy of Jung’s Man and His Symbols. I found my nice, hardbound edition in a used bookstore in San Francisco; I think it was in the Mission district, or the Castro, on the way home from an Ntozake Shange reading (I also found a book of hers there). I have flipped through MAHS many times but never read it. As I am working on a book that has to do with Jungian psychology, I am finally cracking it for real–for the words, not just the pictures.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

In 1991 I was hanging out occasionally with a wine magazine editor who lived in New York and would visit San Francisco once a month to make forays into wine country for tastings and interviews with winemakers. He had graduated from Princeton and was a real east coast snob, but when I was young many of my self-improvement activities were attempts to win the approval of various snobs and iconoclasts, or at least get them to have sex with me. The editor had written his thesis on Pynchon, so in order to prove to him that I was not the California air head I thought he thought I was, I devoured Pynchon’s V, then slogged through Gravity’s Rainbow.