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Biography & Autobiography. Literary Criticism. Nonfiction. HTML:NATIONAL BESTSELLER â?ą From the National Book Awardâ??winning author of Just Kids: a â??sublime collection of true stories â?Š and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith isâ? (Vanity Fair), told through the cafĂ©s and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work â??a roadmap to my life.â? M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafĂ© where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahloâ??s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New Yorkâ??s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writerâ??s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smithâ??s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. Featuring a postscript with… (more)
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CafĂ©s, or at least regular doses of strong coffee, clearly play a huge part in Patti Smithâs life, and form the unifying theme of this volume of memoirs. Indeed, T. S. Eliotâs line, âI have measured out my life with coffee spoonsâ might have proved a worthy epigraph. She describes her travels around the world, both with her late husband, Fred âSonicâ Smith (who died in 1994), and later on her own, and wherever she goes, she finds a cafĂ© to use as a refuge. Her displeasure when someone else âstealsâ her customary seat at one of her regular haunts is something that many of us can recognise and empathise with.
Her prose style is frequently beautiful and moving â somehow rather at odds with the ferocity of her early stage persona. I remember being both exhilarated but also almost frightened while watching her performances from the 1970s, when she would shout and rage at the audience. While the strength of character and self-assurance (I know, I know, a dirty word!) that underpinned those performances clearly remains, age appears to have mellowed her, and there is a contemplative tranquillity about many of these pieces.
M Train is a journey into the head of Patti Smith -- her memories, her obsessions, her present as a poet/artist in her late 60s. The picture on the cover of the book was taken by a casual acquaintance, passer-by, with Smith at her corner table of the Cafe 'Ino, on the day the cafe was closing. It is iconic of the voice of the book -- the watch-cap, the cup of black coffee, the Polaroid camera, the deeply ruminative gaze.
She invites us on her trip to Devil's Island to gather stones for Genet, to Reykjavik for a meeting of the exclusive Continental Drift Club honoring Alfred Wegener, on her drives through Detroit with her husband Fred, to the Dorotheenstadt Cemetary where Brecht is buried, to her cottage in Far Rockaway dubbed "My Alamo" which survived Hurricane Sandy.
She pushes her way through a persistent malaise with work, black coffee, beloved detective shows, and travel. Always in the background is an apparition of a philosophic cowpoke prodding her thoughts. The book is dedicated "for Sam." One cannot help but reference her onetime lover and collaborator, Sam Shepard.
M Train is the memoir of a purposeful, persistent wanderer through life. I admire both the writing and the writer.
Be prepared for an intense read. I listened to this audio in its entirety, but I must admit, I wanted to quit many times. The author narrates her own book, and her style is a monotone that drones on and on, without any modulation. It feels sad from
In spite of the solemnity of the memoir and lamenting nature of the narration, the straightforward, conversational nature of the reading made me stay on long after I thought I would. I simply felt that the author was speaking directly to me, confiding in me, unleashing her tormented soul, relieving her emotional angst upon my shoulders, so how could I abandon her? I felt like I had been invited to read her diary. Obviously, somehow, in spite of her lack of emotion in the reading, she filled her story with it in the telling, and I connected completely with her, in the end.
It felt almost like a lamentation about the losses she experienced in her life, many of which seemed untimely and unfair. She had a house in New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy hit, a house that by all rights should have been destroyed but stood alone among her neighbors intact, still however, in need of its original list of necessary repairs. The coffee shop she invested in and loved died a premature death. Two loves of her life, her husband and her brother, left her in the prime of their lives. When she visited the home of Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the trip was marred by her severe migraine. The organization she gave speeches for in Iceland that concerned itself with Arctic expeditions, closed its doors.
All of the mundane happenings of life somehow took on a larger than life meaning for her. She agonized over the ways that travel changed, down to resenting the seat belt requirements on airlines or kiosks used for boarding passes. She traveled to Vera Cruz hoping to get a superb cup of coffee, a drink she adored. She collected odd little pieces of memorabilia that meant so much to her, and yet she often lost the things that meant most to her. She had a compulsion to make lists to keep organized and functioning, but somehow, she was forgetful too and was always leaving something important behind and wondering if it was a message or sign of some kind. She missed her mother and her father. She reminisced about the time she played chess with Bobby Fischer.
So you see, while it was intensely interesting because of the subjects she introduced, it was rambling and somber as well. Most of the time, she seemed to be looking backward, morosely, at the lost loves of her life, without the opposite effort of looking forward, somewhat with joy. She is, and was obviously, a free spirit who missed her husband her other family members. She dwelled upon the illnesses that afflicted them, and even memorialized her own serious childhood illness. At the end, there was the barest hint that she would continue to investigate and participate in new projects, in spite of the heavy cloak of grief that seemed to travel along with her.
So, what is the M train? Is it a train with no fixed destination, traveling down the road of life showing us all the random events we will all someday face, sooner or later? Is it the embodiment of the capriciousness of life? Somehow, in spite of the monotone, in spite of the sorrow and solemnity inhabiting the pages of her memoir, it grabbed my heartstrings and made me think about my own life and lost loves.
For me it was the image of a train of memories and the memoir as striking as Charles Demuthâs painting âI Saw the Figure 5 in Gold,â itself based on William Carlos Williamsâs poem "The Great Figure." A work of imaginative writing reflecting on the world around the author which she turns into art and all encompassing; it contains her world awaking and dreaming, full of other people and their productions: art, coffee, conversation, science, and memories.
Patti's existence casually careens between the magical and the mundane and through it all she is completely calm. She is overcome by stomach flu and ends up sleeping it off in Frida Kahlo's bed. She creates a memorial tribute to Rimbaud, lays it at his grave, and returns to her room to watch her beloved reruns of Law & Order SVU. (She really likes television crime dramas a lot, and they are discussed at length, and it is not at all boring somehow.)
I guess the point is that she is who she is. She talks about Genet, and Kurosawa in the same way she talks about Law & Order and Prime Suspect. She talks about her telepathic emotional connection to a 16th century Japanese writer the same way she talks about her connection to Lenny Kaye. She eats happily at a noted Japanese restaurant, and just as happily she munches brown toast and olive oil just about everywhere. She loves peanut butter, sardines, and fine sake and great coffee. She is not name-dropping to impress anyone. She loves what she loves, she doesn't question why or worry about what anyone else might think about her choices. She is just utterly unselfconscious. And utterly amazing. And, perhaps most importantly, she writes as if touched by the divine. I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to read this book.
"They float through these pages often without explanation. Writers and their process. Writers and their books. I cannot assume the reader will be familiar with them all, but in the end is the reader familiar with me? Does the reader wish to be so? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions."
One thing that I never doubted: this is an authentic voice of a deeply felt existence; an honest to goodness struggle with loss and memory and loneliness and love. Thanks for the map, Patti.
I admit to knowing hardly anything about Patti Smith. She has always been a fascinating figure to me, so when I saw this audio book available at my local library, I put a hold on it, because I wanted to learn more about her and her
I discovered her love for her husband, Fred, and that she lost him while he was still relatively young. I learned that she has two children. I also learned that she is incredibly well read and has traveled all over the world. She loves coffee, cafes and the ocean. There, everything I learned is right here in these few sentences-but I wanted MORE.
This was well written and I did enjoy Patti reading it to me herself. However, I'm disappointed that I didn't learn more about her musical career, her writing or much of anything else. For this reason, I rated this audio 3 stars.
I will most likely try something else, probably Just Kids, and see what I can learn from that.
Recommended for readers that already know and like Patti Smith. Not so much for people that do not.
I also read this as an audiobook, and I think because of the kind of meditative and diary sensibility it would have been better as a paper book.
~ Patti Smith
Thereâs a cowpoke haunting both her sleep and daydreams. Antagonizing her creative flow, egging her on. He meanders throughout the book, just inside wakefulness.
With husband Fred Smith, she tours the places written of by her literary heroes,
These are the snippets, journal entries brought forth with black coffee, brown bread & olive oil in Cafe âIno and the numerous cafes of her travels. Dreams and travels. Observations and ruminations.
Holed up in hotels as she is called upon to do readings, talks, she caters to her fixation with detective shows, pantomiming along with them. âWhen they had a chop, I ordered same from room service. If they had a drink, I consulted the mini bar.â
Memories of times with Fred are entwined. (Would have enjoyed the tv show she & Fred conceived âDrunk in the Afternoonâ had it ever came to be. He gabfesting with fellow drinkers, she expounding on literary prisoners while drinking coffee.)
Her search for the purported perfect cup of coffee trained her to Mexico, sidelined with a visit to Frida Kahloâs Casa Azul. A nod to William Burroughs, who tipped her the brew, reminded me of d.a. levyâs own search for such the elixir. I, too, have searched. Paying 20+ a pound, gifted more, to enjoy the perfect balance. Remembering the Jamaican Blue Mountain I drank every morning in Ocho Rios and never since, no matter how badly claimed the beans were. Alas. That was my epitome, my Holy Grail of coffee.
A brilliant, often woeful look into the daily life of one of my heroes. I feel like, were I to happen upon her somewhere, we could share a hot, black cup of coffee and need not say a word.
âI didnât seek to frame these moments. They passed without souvenir,â ... âWhat I have lost and cannot find I remember."
~ Patti Smith
Smith invites the reader into her world in a way that is intimate,
(Thank you to my sister who surprised me with this book in the mail.)
I came to this less than neutral as I have seen her perform and have heard her albums many, many times but none of it ever moved me, ever. So I did not hold out much hope that Iâd enjoy or appreciate it.
I listened to it. Patti reading her own words in her own accent is perfect. Then, I bought a hard copy because it just isn't a book to listen to. It must be wandered through,
Smith recounts a meeting of the Continental Drift Club (now disbanded), dedicated to the memory of Alfred Wegener, who hypothesised about continental drift in the
She also recounts how she stops off in a London hotel after her connecting flight is delayed and watches repeats of British detective dramas on ITV3, sees trailers for Cracker which is being repeated the following week, and then briefly meets Robbie Coltrane (the eponymous Cracker) whilst waiting for the elevator in the hotel reception.
She tells of reading Haruki Murakamiâs The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, with the text of her book then taking on a more dreamlike quality, before finding a bungalow for sale out at Rockaway Beach, which is easily reached by train.
There are memories of the Beat generation, reading Jean Genet and Sylvia Plath.
Unexpected and delightful.
Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.