I discovered yesterday, to my delight and chagrin, that I like the Ken Ken puzzles that appear next to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times: in a Ken Ken puzzle, you have a four or six frame grid which, when filled in, have the numbers 1-4, or 1-6 in each horizontal and vertical row; the grid itself is broken up into smaller sections, and in each section you are to enter the number that will yield a given number after performing the indicated mathematical function - adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying. Thus if you have a three panel section on a six frame grid that carries the notation "20x" it means that the section should be filled out with the numbers 1, 4, and 5 but that to figure out where to put them, you have to see how the numbers work in the horizontal and vertical arrays.
Get it? If not, no worries; you will not have to stress out about the hours that will be sucked up by this particular past time, though I'm told that such logic games stave off dementia in the long haul. This is just a way of introducing the fact that rather than pick up today's paper with a whole fresh set of puzzles that would delete an hour or so from other productive forms of activity, I contented myself with reading yesterday's news, which in the Times includes the weekly science section. Nicholas Wade's article on genetic variation (and the lack thereof) in grapes contains the great lines: "The purpose of sex, though this is perhaps not widely appreciated, is recombination,...the new combinations of genes provide variation for evolution to work on, and in particular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey upon them."
While one might argue that we should in fact be seeing microbes as co-conspirators in the ongoing acts of creation, this kind of insight is well worth the two bucks that a New York Times will set you back if you pick it up in your local Acme in suburban Philadelphia, but the article that is staying with me is one by Ben Daitz, a doctor reporting on the ways in which health care workers affiliated with the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital open up conversations with Navajo families about end-of-life directives, a tricky negotiation in a cultural context in which it is understood that to speak of death is to invite it.
The staff ended up composing a poem:
"When that time comes, when my last breath leaves me, I choose to die in peace to meet Shi-dy-in."
Here, I'm thinking of the wisdom of these folks in understanding that some things have to be approached in lyric time; keeping this in mind in the wake of a year in which I was repeatedly reminded of all the different ways in which our expected narratives of our lives get interrupted and transformed and thinking of the poets -- Lucille Clifton, John Rybicki, Joy Harjo, Barbara Ras -- who helped to show the way through.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Just Kids
I have to admit that when I started Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, I wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about; her recollections of her childhood in a working-to-middle class neighborhood outside of Philly straightforwardly conveys her camaraderie with her siblings, the specter of childhood diseases that confined her to bed for weeks on end, the horror of the social stigma of getting pregnant at 19 while working her way through Glassboro State College for a teaching certificate, falling from grace in her neighbors' eyes from the smart eldest daughter who was going to make something of herself to something lower than everyday trash.
Knowing something of the kind of life-changing effect her work has had on friends just a half-generation older than my own, I was thinking that this was clearly a situation in which the good folks who were on the award committee were themselves so smitten with Ms. Smith that whatever she made of her coming of age as an artist alongside Robert Mapplethorpe was going to be taken as holy writ from on high. As someone who probably heard her first as that other singer on Bruce Springsteen's "Because the night" and who first listened to Horses in its entirety within the last year (the kind of admission of pop cultural ignorance that, in my household, leads to someone standing at the dinner table, pointing to the kitchen door, and saying with 90% humorous intent "Out! Get OUT!") I could completely understand that I'm basically so behind the curve on her entire career that all that she has done that has been revolutionary, I've gotten via other artists in their various takes on and homages to her work, so when I finally get to the source I can't fully appreciate what she was doing in bridging beat poetry and rock n' roll.
So while my Bronx-born and Ardmore-reared kin cut their wisdom teeth on Smith's music, I was steeping in the music of Lynryd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, thanks to the programming selections of radio stations in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the era that Patti Smith was galvanizing audiences in New York City and in other places where folks were willing to lend an ear to the heresy that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" -- which Smith breaks down as an assertion of her decision as an artist to take responsibility for her actions, in a radical Christ-like way.
The point at which the memoir really began to draw me in is as Smith narrates her early days with Mapplethorpe, whom she first encounters while trying to crash with friends from home who have enrolled at Pratt, next as a customer at Brentano's who purchases -- at the astronomical price of $18.00, a Persian necklace that functions as a talisman for Smith, and then in Washington Square Park where Smith is trying to duck out of a date that is taking a turn she doesn't want to follow. As they scrape together a household - trashpicking a mattress and religious icons for their $80/month apartment, debating over whether to spend the extra dime for the chocolate milk Robert craves from the automat -- they spend free days riding the F train out to Coney Island or taking in the scene in Washington Square Park. Smith writes that one day "We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us...'Oh take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'"
Of course, the joke that we're all in on is that they are just kids - doing things like shoplifting copies of Rimbaud from second hand bookstores because they don't have the 99 cents to buy the copy, only being able to buy one hot dog on their trips out to Coney Island, with Robert eating the lion's share of the sausage while Patti eats most of the saurkraut - but they are also going to become Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Smith's point of view, what we see as inevitable is shown to be a sort of miracle -- the only way she is able to cover the bus fare to New York is because she finds a pocketbook with $18.00; when she returns from a trip to Paris she finds Robert in the grip of a potentially life-threatening illness, in an apartment where a murder takes place on the front steps her first night back - only the advice of a transvestite junkie at the fleabag motel to which they have fled convinces Patti to take Robert to the Chelsea Hotel, where she talks their way into a room by brandishing their portfolios (which, of course, would in fact now be worth far more than their weight in gold) and spinning tales of getting an advance from her job (which she is in fact able to do); in pursuing an interview with a drummer who has introduced himself to her as Slim, she ends up in a relationship with Sam Shepard in which she begins to make a name for herself as a poet, and starts to find her home in rock 'n roll.
There are also moment at which her straightforward prose gives way to the kind of lyricism that animates her songs: in writing of her friendship with the musician Matthew Reich, she notes that "I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe." When I read lines like that, I begin to get her shamanistic way with words and understand how she's worked her magic on so many lives.
Knowing something of the kind of life-changing effect her work has had on friends just a half-generation older than my own, I was thinking that this was clearly a situation in which the good folks who were on the award committee were themselves so smitten with Ms. Smith that whatever she made of her coming of age as an artist alongside Robert Mapplethorpe was going to be taken as holy writ from on high. As someone who probably heard her first as that other singer on Bruce Springsteen's "Because the night" and who first listened to Horses in its entirety within the last year (the kind of admission of pop cultural ignorance that, in my household, leads to someone standing at the dinner table, pointing to the kitchen door, and saying with 90% humorous intent "Out! Get OUT!") I could completely understand that I'm basically so behind the curve on her entire career that all that she has done that has been revolutionary, I've gotten via other artists in their various takes on and homages to her work, so when I finally get to the source I can't fully appreciate what she was doing in bridging beat poetry and rock n' roll.
So while my Bronx-born and Ardmore-reared kin cut their wisdom teeth on Smith's music, I was steeping in the music of Lynryd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, thanks to the programming selections of radio stations in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the era that Patti Smith was galvanizing audiences in New York City and in other places where folks were willing to lend an ear to the heresy that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" -- which Smith breaks down as an assertion of her decision as an artist to take responsibility for her actions, in a radical Christ-like way.
The point at which the memoir really began to draw me in is as Smith narrates her early days with Mapplethorpe, whom she first encounters while trying to crash with friends from home who have enrolled at Pratt, next as a customer at Brentano's who purchases -- at the astronomical price of $18.00, a Persian necklace that functions as a talisman for Smith, and then in Washington Square Park where Smith is trying to duck out of a date that is taking a turn she doesn't want to follow. As they scrape together a household - trashpicking a mattress and religious icons for their $80/month apartment, debating over whether to spend the extra dime for the chocolate milk Robert craves from the automat -- they spend free days riding the F train out to Coney Island or taking in the scene in Washington Square Park. Smith writes that one day "We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us...'Oh take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'"
Of course, the joke that we're all in on is that they are just kids - doing things like shoplifting copies of Rimbaud from second hand bookstores because they don't have the 99 cents to buy the copy, only being able to buy one hot dog on their trips out to Coney Island, with Robert eating the lion's share of the sausage while Patti eats most of the saurkraut - but they are also going to become Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Smith's point of view, what we see as inevitable is shown to be a sort of miracle -- the only way she is able to cover the bus fare to New York is because she finds a pocketbook with $18.00; when she returns from a trip to Paris she finds Robert in the grip of a potentially life-threatening illness, in an apartment where a murder takes place on the front steps her first night back - only the advice of a transvestite junkie at the fleabag motel to which they have fled convinces Patti to take Robert to the Chelsea Hotel, where she talks their way into a room by brandishing their portfolios (which, of course, would in fact now be worth far more than their weight in gold) and spinning tales of getting an advance from her job (which she is in fact able to do); in pursuing an interview with a drummer who has introduced himself to her as Slim, she ends up in a relationship with Sam Shepard in which she begins to make a name for herself as a poet, and starts to find her home in rock 'n roll.
There are also moment at which her straightforward prose gives way to the kind of lyricism that animates her songs: in writing of her friendship with the musician Matthew Reich, she notes that "I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe." When I read lines like that, I begin to get her shamanistic way with words and understand how she's worked her magic on so many lives.
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