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M Train
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Memoir & Autobiography (2015)M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café 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 Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York'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 writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith'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.
Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith'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.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2015
About the author
Patti Smith
141 books11.6k followersPATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone.
Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.
In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Smith married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.
Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award in 2010, Wītt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.
In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor given to an artist by the French Republic. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Smith married the musician Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,593 reviews
October 10, 2015
I can't believe Patti Smith wrote a book about drinking black coffee and watching serial crime dramas and it's the best thing I've ever read.
January 5, 2016
"Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all."
- Patti Smith, M Train
My second Patti Smith memoir. This one was more experimental and nonlinear than Just Kids (which still wasn't exactly linear). It was filled with dreams, detective shows, talismans, cats, constant travels, coffee, more coffee, missing things, memories, loose threads, graveyards, hotels, photographs, and miles and miles of beautiful, lyrical Patti Smith prose. In the end, Patti Smith made me cry. She took these dreams and random memories, periods of loneliness and melancholia, artists and lost things and brought them together into a coherent love note to life, art, and love. She stitched together ideas and travel and talismans of her life into a coherent and moving exploration of things, belief, and creativity. God it was beautiful. I want to be Patti Smith when I grow up.
- Patti Smith, M Train
My second Patti Smith memoir. This one was more experimental and nonlinear than Just Kids (which still wasn't exactly linear). It was filled with dreams, detective shows, talismans, cats, constant travels, coffee, more coffee, missing things, memories, loose threads, graveyards, hotels, photographs, and miles and miles of beautiful, lyrical Patti Smith prose. In the end, Patti Smith made me cry. She took these dreams and random memories, periods of loneliness and melancholia, artists and lost things and brought them together into a coherent love note to life, art, and love. She stitched together ideas and travel and talismans of her life into a coherent and moving exploration of things, belief, and creativity. God it was beautiful. I want to be Patti Smith when I grow up.
December 9, 2015
I listen to Patti Smith's audible. The very first thing I notice was her
voice. Her raspy eastern accent was mesmerizing.
As I was walking, I could picture Patti in the cafe she sat drinking coffee.
She says..."It's not so easy writing about nothing".
Easy or not ...I had a warm smile on my face listening to everything she had to say - at times aching -and soooo loving this woman.
There is a mystery about Patti Smith... which adds to her beauty.
Her mind is fascinating. A coffee drinker, loner, a thinker, a dreamer, a writer, ...
musician, a poet, a gorgeous suburban artist.
There were so many 'tender-smilie-feeling-things', Patti roll off her tongue - plus sadness I felt deep in my belly.
I'd like to own the physical book.....
Take a copy of her book - sit in a cafe myself 'drinking' in her words...reading her
lovely prose myself 'while' still hearing the sound of her voice in my ears.
Kinda really love this woman! Her speaking voice really 'is' intoxicating!
voice. Her raspy eastern accent was mesmerizing.
As I was walking, I could picture Patti in the cafe she sat drinking coffee.
She says..."It's not so easy writing about nothing".
Easy or not ...I had a warm smile on my face listening to everything she had to say - at times aching -and soooo loving this woman.
There is a mystery about Patti Smith... which adds to her beauty.
Her mind is fascinating. A coffee drinker, loner, a thinker, a dreamer, a writer, ...
musician, a poet, a gorgeous suburban artist.
There were so many 'tender-smilie-feeling-things', Patti roll off her tongue - plus sadness I felt deep in my belly.
I'd like to own the physical book.....
Take a copy of her book - sit in a cafe myself 'drinking' in her words...reading her
lovely prose myself 'while' still hearing the sound of her voice in my ears.
Kinda really love this woman! Her speaking voice really 'is' intoxicating!
November 17, 2015
Sometimes the right book finds us at the right time. For me this was the book. No linear, no plot to speak of, just musings and meanderings of a creative woman. Search for the perfect coffee, cafés, Hurricane Sandy, her obsession with detective shows and the way she enters into the lives of authors and novels. At times her writing is poetic, at others very poignant, especially when thinking or remembering her husband, Fred and her children when they were young. Her photography, travels, conferences and visits to author's graves, her likes and frustrations.
Not sure what others will think of this book, but for some reason it spoke to me.
Not sure what others will think of this book, but for some reason it spoke to me.
April 23, 2017
What's the point of reading books? Do they really help? Sometimes – compulsively turning pages to lift your mood – you have to wonder. I think often of a line I read once in an Orhan Pamuk novel: ‘Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.’ That hurts so much that you feel there must be something to it.
It's been quite some time now since the fascination and joy I get from books could be ascribed to youthful enthusiasm, but I still worry that I'll reach some older, wiser state from where I'll look back with a sense that I should have been doing something else with my free time. It's a relief and a joy, then, to follow the wide-eyed, childlike wonder that Patti Smith, in her late sixties, still has for reading, in this melancholy, peripatetic masterpiece about creativity and loss. I finished M Train and immediately stuck Patti Smith's picture up over my desk, among a small number of other heroes of creative inspiration. She is magnificent.
At the beginning and end of this work, she says (somewhat disingenuously) that it's an attempt to write about nothing, and indeed a lot of what's in here has the meandering immediacy of the journal entries on which it's clearly based. What took me by surprise when I started it was just the modernity of its setting – although it ranges through the past and around the world, it is anchored in her daily life in cafés and hotel rooms of the contemporary world. After reading Just Kids, which is infused with the atmosphere of 60s New York, and full of stories about watching Janis Joplin get high and write songs, it was pretty bizarre to open this one up and read about Patti Smith's obsession with bingeing on
Of all the things I expected Patti Smith to be talking about, an ITV3 Cracker marathon comes pretty low on the list. But what's so clever about M Train is that these passages of amiable banality shade, almost imperceptibly, into deep, moody reflections on the cities she travels through, the writers associated with them, and the cafés where she spends her time reflecting on it all in her Moleskine. Themes, like patterns in iron filings, emerge as her magnetic prose style passes over them: from writers we move, usually, to writers' deaths – she visits the graves of Rimbaud in France, Jean Genet in Morocco, Sylvia Plath in Yorkshire and Yukio Mishimo in Japan – while her own memories increasingly circle around her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who died in 1994 when he was only 45.
The way she talks about reading is wonderful – completely open, completely uncynical, admiring the positive qualities in everything but somehow without any sense of being undiscriminating. She'd be great on Goodreads, although she'd probably be one of those annoying people who just five-stars everything they read. It will be a strong reader indeed who can walk away from this one without a list of further books to track down, and if you've ever wondered fleetingly whether some kind of real book could ever be made of your own scattered book reviews, travel diaries and journal entries, then this book shows that it can indeed be done, and succeed triumphantly.
More to the point, she shows you how reading and writing works, as a form of mental wellbeing, of self-healing, of keeping an even keel in the world. She shows not only how loss can sometimes spark creativity, but how creative urges can, in turn, help you deal with loss and respond to it imaginatively. She's a model of what wisdom without cynicism sounds like. Yeah, this is a beautiful work, and I admire it enormously.
It's been quite some time now since the fascination and joy I get from books could be ascribed to youthful enthusiasm, but I still worry that I'll reach some older, wiser state from where I'll look back with a sense that I should have been doing something else with my free time. It's a relief and a joy, then, to follow the wide-eyed, childlike wonder that Patti Smith, in her late sixties, still has for reading, in this melancholy, peripatetic masterpiece about creativity and loss. I finished M Train and immediately stuck Patti Smith's picture up over my desk, among a small number of other heroes of creative inspiration. She is magnificent.
At the beginning and end of this work, she says (somewhat disingenuously) that it's an attempt to write about nothing, and indeed a lot of what's in here has the meandering immediacy of the journal entries on which it's clearly based. What took me by surprise when I started it was just the modernity of its setting – although it ranges through the past and around the world, it is anchored in her daily life in cafés and hotel rooms of the contemporary world. After reading Just Kids, which is infused with the atmosphere of 60s New York, and full of stories about watching Janis Joplin get high and write songs, it was pretty bizarre to open this one up and read about Patti Smith's obsession with bingeing on
ITV3 mystery dramas, late into the night…. I settled in, giving myself over to the likes of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Wycliffe, and Whitechapel—detective inspectors whose moodiness and obsessive natures mirrored my own…. In between shows were upcoming scenes from the highly anticipated Cracker marathon, to be aired on ITV3 the following Tuesday. Though Cracker wasn't the standard detective show it stands among my favorites…
Of all the things I expected Patti Smith to be talking about, an ITV3 Cracker marathon comes pretty low on the list. But what's so clever about M Train is that these passages of amiable banality shade, almost imperceptibly, into deep, moody reflections on the cities she travels through, the writers associated with them, and the cafés where she spends her time reflecting on it all in her Moleskine. Themes, like patterns in iron filings, emerge as her magnetic prose style passes over them: from writers we move, usually, to writers' deaths – she visits the graves of Rimbaud in France, Jean Genet in Morocco, Sylvia Plath in Yorkshire and Yukio Mishimo in Japan – while her own memories increasingly circle around her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, who died in 1994 when he was only 45.
The way she talks about reading is wonderful – completely open, completely uncynical, admiring the positive qualities in everything but somehow without any sense of being undiscriminating. She'd be great on Goodreads, although she'd probably be one of those annoying people who just five-stars everything they read. It will be a strong reader indeed who can walk away from this one without a list of further books to track down, and if you've ever wondered fleetingly whether some kind of real book could ever be made of your own scattered book reviews, travel diaries and journal entries, then this book shows that it can indeed be done, and succeed triumphantly.
More to the point, she shows you how reading and writing works, as a form of mental wellbeing, of self-healing, of keeping an even keel in the world. She shows not only how loss can sometimes spark creativity, but how creative urges can, in turn, help you deal with loss and respond to it imaginatively. She's a model of what wisdom without cynicism sounds like. Yeah, this is a beautiful work, and I admire it enormously.
February 6, 2019
In my life I have had various musical periods where I would want to listen to one artist exclusively for a period of time, exhausting myself on listening over and over again to all the media I could get. There was a long Led Zeppelin period back in HS, also a Doors period and The Police. In college I had a REM period and U2. At other times, sporadically over the years I have experienced this binge listening and I always enjoy the time, its like meeting a new friend and wanting to spend all of your extra time, and making more time, to spend with that person. I have also done this with writers, spending weeks and even months, reading every book or story from them I could get my hands on.
At some point I was in the middle of a long The Clash marathon and I would listen to London Calling or Combat Rock over and over, sometimes rewinding and listening to the same song over and over. Following this period was a shorter Bruce Springsteen period. But for a brief time, maybe only a few weeks, like a torrid and clandestine affair, I was introduced to Patti Smith and I was enraptured.
What struck me most, and I can still see the sunlight flashing past as I listened to her music in my car, or the night sky outside my room, was the vibrancy of her music. Although she could sing about troubling subjects, she never seemed outright angry, only alive and resplendent in her stridency. Songs like “Dancing Barefoot” and “Free Money” demonstrate her edgy but ultimately human, and vulnerable, worldview – a perspective that is more often than not personal and immediate.
Of course her 1975 album Horses was a lovely gem; she was a tough skinny girl who could belt out lyrics and be artsy, but it was also entertaining. I could imagine her dancing on stage and moving with the rhythms. I always thought of The Doors 1971 album LA Woman when I listened to Horses, and I guess the most direct connection is the poetry. But whereas Morrison came across as bluesy and world-weary, Smith was on the attack. She was anarchic and spirited but not as Sex Pistols nihilism but rather in a practiced emotionalism that wanted to send a message but also wanted to dance and have fun.
Patti Smith would have been a great girlfriend.
Her 2015 book of musings and curious observations M Train reveals that the 69 year old may have slowed down some, but her inquisitive and energetic mind is as effervescent as ever.
Sometimes pensive, frequently introspective as she looks back over a long and colorful life, she is always energetically questioning her surroundings, looking for answers and more questions to ask, easily able to be caught up in a book or idea, and with the freedom and ability to pick up and travel and see some part of the world, or visit the grave of a lost artist. The ubiquitous black coffee and black bread with a dish of olive oil in cafés all over the world was a familiar and intimate detail.
Throughout the book I found myself smiling at something she had written or a way in which she had expressed a thought. Her poetry was never far from the surface and this fluency of artistic demonstration coupled with her ever present practicality and immediacy (so much like her music) was pleasing.
Another element of this book that was especially enjoyable was her frequent and list worthy referencing of artists and works, from books to films to music. This reminded me of Jo Walton’s 2011 fantasy work Among Others. I saw another reviewer had listed all of the artists in a comment following his review and I want to copy this down and use as a part of my own “to-be-read” library list.
Whether you are a Patti Smith fan or not, this is a very well written and very enjoyable book. If you are unfamiliar with her or her work, this would make for an excellent introduction to this extremely talented and multi-dimensional artist.
At some point I was in the middle of a long The Clash marathon and I would listen to London Calling or Combat Rock over and over, sometimes rewinding and listening to the same song over and over. Following this period was a shorter Bruce Springsteen period. But for a brief time, maybe only a few weeks, like a torrid and clandestine affair, I was introduced to Patti Smith and I was enraptured.
What struck me most, and I can still see the sunlight flashing past as I listened to her music in my car, or the night sky outside my room, was the vibrancy of her music. Although she could sing about troubling subjects, she never seemed outright angry, only alive and resplendent in her stridency. Songs like “Dancing Barefoot” and “Free Money” demonstrate her edgy but ultimately human, and vulnerable, worldview – a perspective that is more often than not personal and immediate.
Of course her 1975 album Horses was a lovely gem; she was a tough skinny girl who could belt out lyrics and be artsy, but it was also entertaining. I could imagine her dancing on stage and moving with the rhythms. I always thought of The Doors 1971 album LA Woman when I listened to Horses, and I guess the most direct connection is the poetry. But whereas Morrison came across as bluesy and world-weary, Smith was on the attack. She was anarchic and spirited but not as Sex Pistols nihilism but rather in a practiced emotionalism that wanted to send a message but also wanted to dance and have fun.
Patti Smith would have been a great girlfriend.
Her 2015 book of musings and curious observations M Train reveals that the 69 year old may have slowed down some, but her inquisitive and energetic mind is as effervescent as ever.
Sometimes pensive, frequently introspective as she looks back over a long and colorful life, she is always energetically questioning her surroundings, looking for answers and more questions to ask, easily able to be caught up in a book or idea, and with the freedom and ability to pick up and travel and see some part of the world, or visit the grave of a lost artist. The ubiquitous black coffee and black bread with a dish of olive oil in cafés all over the world was a familiar and intimate detail.
Throughout the book I found myself smiling at something she had written or a way in which she had expressed a thought. Her poetry was never far from the surface and this fluency of artistic demonstration coupled with her ever present practicality and immediacy (so much like her music) was pleasing.
Another element of this book that was especially enjoyable was her frequent and list worthy referencing of artists and works, from books to films to music. This reminded me of Jo Walton’s 2011 fantasy work Among Others. I saw another reviewer had listed all of the artists in a comment following his review and I want to copy this down and use as a part of my own “to-be-read” library list.
Whether you are a Patti Smith fan or not, this is a very well written and very enjoyable book. If you are unfamiliar with her or her work, this would make for an excellent introduction to this extremely talented and multi-dimensional artist.
January 31, 2016
Reading the lovely Proustian interlude that is M Train, I felt like a shadow-angel trailing Patti Smith, from Café 'Ino down the block from her New York apartment to the far-flung places in her past and present that twirl like ribbons in her poetry, her songs, her art. M Train is a meditation on this artist's life, more kaleidoscope than memoir, a shifting wonder that spills pieces of colored glass memories.
The clarity of Patti Smith's language, the fragility of her voice, made me want to wrap my arms around her words to keep them safe, an odd and vaguely patronizing thing to say about an artist who has never been anything but her raw, true self in a business that forces creativity through the meat grinder of glossy image and correction of imperfection. But Patti's solitude and her bittersweet longing for her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, are so achingly present here it's impossible not to feel connected and protective to the Woman, even as you hold the Artist in reverence.
An elegiac tone is set by the revisiting, either literal or in the mind, of the graves or homes of now-deceased artists who influenced Smith's own work. And by the poignant recounting of her life with Fred, whom she mourns like a songbird, sweet and gentle.
This is a restful book—not a book about nothing as Smith suggests in its opening line—but a book about everything that makes a life: dishes, coats, cats, coffee, books, music, poetry, friendship, travel, love, loss.
Thanks for letting us sit with you awhile, Patti Smith. Next time, the coffee is on me.
The clarity of Patti Smith's language, the fragility of her voice, made me want to wrap my arms around her words to keep them safe, an odd and vaguely patronizing thing to say about an artist who has never been anything but her raw, true self in a business that forces creativity through the meat grinder of glossy image and correction of imperfection. But Patti's solitude and her bittersweet longing for her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, are so achingly present here it's impossible not to feel connected and protective to the Woman, even as you hold the Artist in reverence.
An elegiac tone is set by the revisiting, either literal or in the mind, of the graves or homes of now-deceased artists who influenced Smith's own work. And by the poignant recounting of her life with Fred, whom she mourns like a songbird, sweet and gentle.
This is a restful book—not a book about nothing as Smith suggests in its opening line—but a book about everything that makes a life: dishes, coats, cats, coffee, books, music, poetry, friendship, travel, love, loss.
Thanks for letting us sit with you awhile, Patti Smith. Next time, the coffee is on me.
December 1, 2015
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch once said in an interview that if all culture breaks down, he's following Patti Smith. Much of the pleasure of reading Smith's nostalgic M Train is that it offers fascinating insights into her interior life, her dreams, her quixotic travel adventures, her literary obsessions (listed in my Comment below), and her minimalist, bohemian tastes for such things as black coffee, brown bread with olive oil, Polaroids, word games, moleskines, detective stories, and her favorite black coat (lost). (“I don’t like anything superfluous," she writes.) Smith's memoir will appeal to anyone with an appreciation for her rare personal aesthetics.
January 5, 2023
two things patti smith and i have in common:
1. she and i cannot live without coffee
2. she and i cannot live without books
1. she and i cannot live without coffee
2. she and i cannot live without books
June 30, 2021
It’s not so easy writing about nothing. Words caught from a voice-over in a dream more compelling than life. I scratch them over and over onto a white wall with their chunk of red chalk. I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing if only I had nothing to say.
This is Patti Smith’s peripatetic memoir, an account of her life’s journeys, written 5 years after her first, widely successful attempt at autobiography with Just Kids. By the time she writes it in 2015 she’s 66, she’s had her fair share of gain and loss, she has put together the pieces of her personal mythology. Sitting in her favorite coffee shop near her house in Greenwich Village, Café 'Ino, she turns the place into the mental and physical starting point of her quests. In this idiosyncratic travel account she pays homage to all the things she holds dear, like coffee, detective shows, the writing process, her late husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the legends and heroes of said mythology.
Those include artists such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Roberto Bolano, Mikhail Bulgakov, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima, Sylvia Plath, Haruki Murakami, Akira Kurosawa and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among many others. She especially moved me when she talked of the latter’s 1969 film ‘Medea’ with Maria Callas in the title role, a film that has almost vanished into oblivion by now but remains one of the most powerful adaptations of the story and, in any case, part of my own mythology.
Smith embarks on a pilgrimage to the places these people lived and died, turning the locales into her shrines and turning us, her readers, into her travel companions. She gives us the chance to pay our own respects to those who may have been our heroes too at some point in our lives. For her part, she reveals, adds and discards chunks of herself in the process.
Her dreamlike, yet edgy voice and poetic narration was my companion for the better part of a recent car trip. Although a bit too romantic for my taste nowadays, I know it would have made for a ‘sacred’ read had it existed in my 20s. Apparently Smith has kept in touch with her younger self more than I have… It was the perfect soundtrack for the open road, nevertheless.
I closed my notebook and sat in the café thinking about real time. Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Or are thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by a mass of posters with repeating images, catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reason, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the Perpetual Present that contains the Trinity of Memory.
This is Patti Smith’s peripatetic memoir, an account of her life’s journeys, written 5 years after her first, widely successful attempt at autobiography with Just Kids. By the time she writes it in 2015 she’s 66, she’s had her fair share of gain and loss, she has put together the pieces of her personal mythology. Sitting in her favorite coffee shop near her house in Greenwich Village, Café 'Ino, she turns the place into the mental and physical starting point of her quests. In this idiosyncratic travel account she pays homage to all the things she holds dear, like coffee, detective shows, the writing process, her late husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the legends and heroes of said mythology.
Those include artists such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Roberto Bolano, Mikhail Bulgakov, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima, Sylvia Plath, Haruki Murakami, Akira Kurosawa and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among many others. She especially moved me when she talked of the latter’s 1969 film ‘Medea’ with Maria Callas in the title role, a film that has almost vanished into oblivion by now but remains one of the most powerful adaptations of the story and, in any case, part of my own mythology.
Smith embarks on a pilgrimage to the places these people lived and died, turning the locales into her shrines and turning us, her readers, into her travel companions. She gives us the chance to pay our own respects to those who may have been our heroes too at some point in our lives. For her part, she reveals, adds and discards chunks of herself in the process.
Her dreamlike, yet edgy voice and poetic narration was my companion for the better part of a recent car trip. Although a bit too romantic for my taste nowadays, I know it would have made for a ‘sacred’ read had it existed in my 20s. Apparently Smith has kept in touch with her younger self more than I have… It was the perfect soundtrack for the open road, nevertheless.
I closed my notebook and sat in the café thinking about real time. Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Or are thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by a mass of posters with repeating images, catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reason, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the Perpetual Present that contains the Trinity of Memory.
June 8, 2019
I can't believe how much more I enjoyed this upon re-reading it. The years grow on you and Patti Smith's writing grew on me too; I admire her so much and this book, though a bit listless, is so beautifully written. Her sentiments are profound and admirable, and though I could never truly take a look insider her head this feels, for only an instant, that I can. 4.5 stars
---
Original review:
In M Train, Patti Smith creates something deeply personal and lyrically beautiful, but not something that will necessarily resonate with a wide audience.
Not quite a follow-up to her 2010 National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids, M Train is Smith's ode to coffee, art, travel, Haruki Murakami, her late husband, growing old, Rockaway Beach, The Killing and other surprisingly disjointed facets of her life. Her fascinations are endless, and she lives quite like you'd expect an artist to live; authentically, minimally, spontaneously, passionately. And while these stories of her life are unique, intriguing and well written, they are quite scattered.
As a fan of Patti Smith, especially after having read Just Kids I found myself enjoying this book immensely. But if someone were unfamiliar with her or her previous works, I can't imagine this would be a satisfying read. I truly think of her as a kindred spirit--what with her fear of immersion in water, her general perception of the world, love of reading, and desire to document things in photograph. But people who may not feel the same way would perhaps find this book, well, pointless.
While I didn't adore it as much as I was hoping, I still greatly appreciate how Patti Smith pushes me to see beauty in the world, record my experiences, lose things and let them go, and live artfully. She is an inspiration. And this book was just a brief glimpse into her struggles, her travels, her life, leaving maybe a bit too much to the imagination. Or perhaps, that's exactly what she wants for the reader. Either way, I was left wanting more, but still appreciative of the moments I had while reading this book. 3/5 stars
---
Original review:
In M Train, Patti Smith creates something deeply personal and lyrically beautiful, but not something that will necessarily resonate with a wide audience.
Not quite a follow-up to her 2010 National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids, M Train is Smith's ode to coffee, art, travel, Haruki Murakami, her late husband, growing old, Rockaway Beach, The Killing and other surprisingly disjointed facets of her life. Her fascinations are endless, and she lives quite like you'd expect an artist to live; authentically, minimally, spontaneously, passionately. And while these stories of her life are unique, intriguing and well written, they are quite scattered.
As a fan of Patti Smith, especially after having read Just Kids I found myself enjoying this book immensely. But if someone were unfamiliar with her or her previous works, I can't imagine this would be a satisfying read. I truly think of her as a kindred spirit--what with her fear of immersion in water, her general perception of the world, love of reading, and desire to document things in photograph. But people who may not feel the same way would perhaps find this book, well, pointless.
While I didn't adore it as much as I was hoping, I still greatly appreciate how Patti Smith pushes me to see beauty in the world, record my experiences, lose things and let them go, and live artfully. She is an inspiration. And this book was just a brief glimpse into her struggles, her travels, her life, leaving maybe a bit too much to the imagination. Or perhaps, that's exactly what she wants for the reader. Either way, I was left wanting more, but still appreciative of the moments I had while reading this book. 3/5 stars
December 5, 2016
A very quiet, elegiac book, memories linked one to the next--that's the train, the M train. In tone it reminded me more of the works of W.G. Sebald than of her earlier book Just Kids. It has none of the exuberance of that memoir of youth--in which she recaptured the tone, the feeling, of youth. This is the voice, the mind, of an older person looking back through a tangible scrim of loss. And yet, her memories are very much a child showing you the contents of his pockets, his array of child-treasures. It's an image that recurs in various ways throughout the book, from "what she carried" in her own lightly packed bags on journeys from Tangier to Japan to London… contents of pockets, of drawers, tiny bits of sacredness.
In my favorite section of the book, she and her then-new husband Fred Sonic Smith voyage to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana, once the jumping off place to Devil's island, closed in 1930 as inhumane. It was crazy yet thoughtful pilgrimage in honor of Jean Genet, the criminal turned writer and a hero of Patti's--who always wanted to be imprisoned there, the very pinnacle of a French criminal career. He never succeeded, but she went to find a stone to bring back for Genet, who was still alive at the time.
Though she never completed that circuit--until late in the book, when she took the stone to Genet's grave in France--this early episode has many of the earmarks of the entire book: a peek into the life she shared with a man who fully embraced who she was, and possessed many of the eccentricities and enthusiasms she did. Who understood that we live on the symbolic as well as on the real level (as Tennessee Williams says in Night of the Iguana, the realistic and the fantastic.). It is a pilgrimage, and Patti is nothing if not a literary and artistic pilgrim, doing much to revisit the sacred spots of an artist's legacy. I adored this aspect of the book, as a great lover of such pilgrimages--maybe it's part of being a writer, which is about preservation of human memory.
So many pockets with so many treasures--stones, pens, leaves, tickets, a lost toy Fred Smith always liked to keep with him, a shred of one or another true cross. Her apartment full of such treasures, autographs, memorabilia--bits of the Real, imbued with the symbolic. Photographs of her travels, odd and full of secret meaning-- including the mysterious Sebald-like photographs in the book, all shot with a square Polaroid camera. Of course she would photograph with a Polaroid--it is unique, in that there's only one image-- there's no negative, only an original. So a Polaroid itself becomes a sacred and irreplaceable artifact.
Patti Smith has a very strong relationship with physical objects which she handles, owns, wears. When she loses her faithful coat, she mourns it as if it was a child or a friend. Naturally, a person like this always wears the same things, eats the same things, sits in the same place in her favorite cafes--a certain self-monasticizing which isn't so much about spartan-ness as the necessity for a deep emotional investment in the ritual object.
Pilgrimage and treasure, ritual objects, lost worlds and people form the fabric of this intensely moving and yes, sad book. The feel of it haunts you long after you finish reading it. I didn't get so much of a "jump up and make everybody read this" reaction to the book that I had with Just Kids, its more a difficulty shaking it off, like a dream that speaks to you so deeply, you can't just run around doing your thing the next day, you carry it around with you, turn it over in your palm at odd moments. It's a pocketful of treasures, of things and times lost, that you want to handle and dream about.
In my favorite section of the book, she and her then-new husband Fred Sonic Smith voyage to the prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana, once the jumping off place to Devil's island, closed in 1930 as inhumane. It was crazy yet thoughtful pilgrimage in honor of Jean Genet, the criminal turned writer and a hero of Patti's--who always wanted to be imprisoned there, the very pinnacle of a French criminal career. He never succeeded, but she went to find a stone to bring back for Genet, who was still alive at the time.
Though she never completed that circuit--until late in the book, when she took the stone to Genet's grave in France--this early episode has many of the earmarks of the entire book: a peek into the life she shared with a man who fully embraced who she was, and possessed many of the eccentricities and enthusiasms she did. Who understood that we live on the symbolic as well as on the real level (as Tennessee Williams says in Night of the Iguana, the realistic and the fantastic.). It is a pilgrimage, and Patti is nothing if not a literary and artistic pilgrim, doing much to revisit the sacred spots of an artist's legacy. I adored this aspect of the book, as a great lover of such pilgrimages--maybe it's part of being a writer, which is about preservation of human memory.
So many pockets with so many treasures--stones, pens, leaves, tickets, a lost toy Fred Smith always liked to keep with him, a shred of one or another true cross. Her apartment full of such treasures, autographs, memorabilia--bits of the Real, imbued with the symbolic. Photographs of her travels, odd and full of secret meaning-- including the mysterious Sebald-like photographs in the book, all shot with a square Polaroid camera. Of course she would photograph with a Polaroid--it is unique, in that there's only one image-- there's no negative, only an original. So a Polaroid itself becomes a sacred and irreplaceable artifact.
Patti Smith has a very strong relationship with physical objects which she handles, owns, wears. When she loses her faithful coat, she mourns it as if it was a child or a friend. Naturally, a person like this always wears the same things, eats the same things, sits in the same place in her favorite cafes--a certain self-monasticizing which isn't so much about spartan-ness as the necessity for a deep emotional investment in the ritual object.
Pilgrimage and treasure, ritual objects, lost worlds and people form the fabric of this intensely moving and yes, sad book. The feel of it haunts you long after you finish reading it. I didn't get so much of a "jump up and make everybody read this" reaction to the book that I had with Just Kids, its more a difficulty shaking it off, like a dream that speaks to you so deeply, you can't just run around doing your thing the next day, you carry it around with you, turn it over in your palm at odd moments. It's a pocketful of treasures, of things and times lost, that you want to handle and dream about.
June 12, 2020
Oh Patti! you didn't half give me the munchies whilst reading this. Lost count of the amount of times brown toast dipped in olive oil was mentioned. That happens to be one of my favourite snacks! And what about the craving for coffee. A girl after my own heart is she! Bucket loads of coffee! Apart from a cup of sake, there wasn't much mention of alcoholic. Which for me was a good thing, as I didn't have any in at the time and the last thing I wanted was to read this licking my lips at the mention of a nice cold beer, a glass of wine, a shot of tequila, or, even worst, a cocktail. Man, how I've missed cocktails. Its not the same at home. It's been driving me up the wall! Anyhow, with normality creeping its way back in I feel like becoming the worlds greatest barfly at the next opportunity.
As much as I liked Just Kids, which had a tighter, more focused narrative, I found M Train to be the superior book. And there was just so much to love about it.
Patti spends a lot of time pondering and reflecting on her life sitting at a corner table at Café 'Ino (which closed its doors later on in the book) sipping coffee, jotting down notes in her journal, and plotting her next move. She writes wholeheartedly in a sometimes moody, sometimes bittersweet way, about the places she’s visited, the personal experiences she gathered, and the impact each moment whether big or small impacted her past and present self. we get her trekking off to interview Paul Bowles in Tangiers, visiting the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa among others. She describes one pivotal moment in her life in 1978 when she wanted to open her very own cafe, but her plans were kicked into touch following a chance encounter with guitarist Fred Sonic Smith from Detroit rock band MC5. He stole her heart, and they seeemed a match made in heaven. Marriage, children, happiness, until he sadly passed away in 1994. She vividly recalls her travels with Fred, armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana, as well as a number of solitary journeys including trips to Mexico to the house of Frida Kahlo, and to Spain to the town where Roberto Bolaño spent his last days. With so many references throughout to writers and books it doesn't take a genius to figure out she is a big book lover. Reading all sorts of writers, some of which did surprise me. Another thing that surprised me somewhat was her love for spending a lot of time lethargy binge-watching crime dramas on TV. She purchased a ramshackle bungalow after being seduced by it in Rockaway Beach, Queens, which was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy as it tore through the east coast, but she vowed to rebuild, and their was the sad moment when she went for coffee as normal at the 'Ino only to discover it had shut up shop. She did get to go in though, for that one last cup, and as a nice touch, was aloud to keep her favourite table and chair. One thing that became apparent is that no matter the distances Smith traveled, I got the sense there was simply nowhere else on earth that could replace the feeling of being at home in New York, just doing the little everyday things that bought great pleasure, like simply sitting with a coffee for example, with all her treasured memories. Will certainly read more of her work.
January 24, 2016
I thrived on this one as she shared how she was influenced by certain books that I favor and suceeded in engaging me on surprising adventures and missions, even ones I would I never consider for myself. She believes in details of writings and specific places as portals that allow one to channel people one cares about. That was a thrill when it came to elements of books I loved like Bolano’s “2666” and Murakami’s “Windup Bird Chronicle” and appetizing for others not yet read, like Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.” Her many travel missions to far flung places up the ante on this channeling of lost heroes. She does homage at their graves or visits their homes and meditates on them through key artefacts like a favored chair or hat, capturing the experience with Polaroids that she sometimes will "spread out like tarots or baseball cards of an imagined celestial team". This approach to life not really my cup of tea. But I grant that writers have a right to their muses and I empathize in my heart with her overall endeavor to master the art of conjuring up lost things and people, among them her dead father and brother and writers who feel like kin to her (e.g. Genet, Mishima, Plath).
Having savored her award-winning memoir “Just Kids” about her youth in New York in the 60’s with her artist friend Mapplethorpe, I had already erased my sense of Patti Smith’s identity being that of a poetic pop singer. With this as the seventh volume of memoir and personal essays, she has clearly earned a primary identification as “writer”. I just happen to love her voice and the way her mind works. Not stream-of-consciousness, with its intent to emulate the mind’s workings, but a record of the journey of her mind, which is guided both by the serendipitous connections of dreams and memory and by concrete adventures in action and intersections with people. I also like her coy humility and her generosity in sharing some of the workings of her craft of writing. Here are slivers illustrating each of these elements:
I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.
Phrases swoop in on me as if skywritten by tiny biplanes.
Many readers could be frustrated by Smith’s constant pinballing among allusions to writings or art they are unfamiliar with. At one point she apologizes for so many allusions bit then turns the tables:
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? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions.
She has dreams about and daytime internal dialogues with an alterego character she calls the cowpoke. One lonely Valentine’s Day she imagines him telling her: “If you don’t have one, then everyone is your valentine.” Often he ignores her, and once gets obstreperous, much like a Calvino character, and answers her assertion that “It’s my dream” with “Nope, it’s mine”. Later I smile as the cowpoke drawls: “The writer is a conductor.”
It’s essentially a cliché to say that writers’ words are a reach for something more permanent than their lives, but I love the way she expresses this thought in reference to a friemd's poem of called “New Foal”:
The foal lands, teeters, is smoothed by God and man to become horse. The poet who wrote it is one with the dust, but the new foal he created is lively, continually born and reborn.
I got eerie sensations whenever she dwelled on connections I have also experienced. Such as a dream she had slowly leading her through cues in a cup of chamomille to a mental image of the plethora of dead soldiers in a peach orchard covered in fallen flowers after the Civil War battle of Shiloh. The irony and pathos of men in the flower of youth covred with the blossoms of Spring moved me too as I came across it in books by Shelby Foote and Michael Shaara.
I was happy when she pinned down so well the power of certain books and authors, especially the masterpieces that “sung, wrung, and hung her out to dry.” She misses her friend William Burroughs and his ability “to decipher the language of her despair.” I appreciated her pithiness in how Plath’s “Ariel” revealed her to have the “incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart”. Of Max Sebald, whom I’ve not read, she distills a potent in response to his “Austerlitz”: “He recognized voices within silence, history within negative space”. She comes down to a common plane when she identifies with certain avatars from TV. Similar for me and many others growing up in the 50’s, Fess Parker as Daniel Boone became her and her brother’s hero, despite her father's judgememt that he never would amount to “a hill of beans”:
“Be sure you are right, then go ahead” was his maxim that soon became ours. … We walked with him as I walk with Detective Linden.
And just who is Detective Linden? Throughout the book she is touching base with a number of TV detective series. For her, “yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives”. Even though that feels true for me (along with certain singers), I got a little wary over this elevation of pop culture. It seemed a bit flakey for her to admit: “I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends, whether in real time or rerun.”
A key target for her portal and channeling proclivites is the female detective of the series “The Killing”, whom she finds “commingles with our own sense of self” and spurs her to gush that “the rain falls from the blue-eyed skies of Sarah Linden.” She is a “Flemish Madonna with the eyes of a woman from the backwoods who has slept with the devil”. It’s a noir series transplanted from a Danish novel and TV production to an American setting in rainy Seattle. Toward the end of Smith’s book her chapters get shorter and more distilled. In among some personal segments about trying and not succeeding in conjuring her husband Fred Sonic Smith, her father, or the innocence of her children she slips in a chapter “How Linden Kills the Thing She Loves.” My doubts were quickly erased, not about the issue of treating the series as high artistry, but about her artistry in showing how we can harness TV as well as written fictional figures for mining our lives.
I have to admit that this review ( and others for recent reads) were seriously delayed due to channeling Patti Smith on her TV habits. My curiosity me on a binge of watching “The Killing”, four seasons of emotionally gripping entertainment consumed in about 10 days. I don’t know about the sanctity of such compulsive pleasure. Still, the sense of walking in Smith’s shoes a bit in this and other ways was fun and doesn't really turn me into some dorky fan. Likely I will follow her footsteps further and read some of the authors she likes and maybe pursue her book-length poem in response to Bolano, Hecatomb.
Having savored her award-winning memoir “Just Kids” about her youth in New York in the 60’s with her artist friend Mapplethorpe, I had already erased my sense of Patti Smith’s identity being that of a poetic pop singer. With this as the seventh volume of memoir and personal essays, she has clearly earned a primary identification as “writer”. I just happen to love her voice and the way her mind works. Not stream-of-consciousness, with its intent to emulate the mind’s workings, but a record of the journey of her mind, which is guided both by the serendipitous connections of dreams and memory and by concrete adventures in action and intersections with people. I also like her coy humility and her generosity in sharing some of the workings of her craft of writing. Here are slivers illustrating each of these elements:
I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.
Phrases swoop in on me as if skywritten by tiny biplanes.
Many readers could be frustrated by Smith’s constant pinballing among allusions to writings or art they are unfamiliar with. At one point she apologizes for so many allusions bit then turns the tables:
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? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions.
She has dreams about and daytime internal dialogues with an alterego character she calls the cowpoke. One lonely Valentine’s Day she imagines him telling her: “If you don’t have one, then everyone is your valentine.” Often he ignores her, and once gets obstreperous, much like a Calvino character, and answers her assertion that “It’s my dream” with “Nope, it’s mine”. Later I smile as the cowpoke drawls: “The writer is a conductor.”
It’s essentially a cliché to say that writers’ words are a reach for something more permanent than their lives, but I love the way she expresses this thought in reference to a friemd's poem of called “New Foal”:
The foal lands, teeters, is smoothed by God and man to become horse. The poet who wrote it is one with the dust, but the new foal he created is lively, continually born and reborn.
I got eerie sensations whenever she dwelled on connections I have also experienced. Such as a dream she had slowly leading her through cues in a cup of chamomille to a mental image of the plethora of dead soldiers in a peach orchard covered in fallen flowers after the Civil War battle of Shiloh. The irony and pathos of men in the flower of youth covred with the blossoms of Spring moved me too as I came across it in books by Shelby Foote and Michael Shaara.
I was happy when she pinned down so well the power of certain books and authors, especially the masterpieces that “sung, wrung, and hung her out to dry.” She misses her friend William Burroughs and his ability “to decipher the language of her despair.” I appreciated her pithiness in how Plath’s “Ariel” revealed her to have the “incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart”. Of Max Sebald, whom I’ve not read, she distills a potent in response to his “Austerlitz”: “He recognized voices within silence, history within negative space”. She comes down to a common plane when she identifies with certain avatars from TV. Similar for me and many others growing up in the 50’s, Fess Parker as Daniel Boone became her and her brother’s hero, despite her father's judgememt that he never would amount to “a hill of beans”:
“Be sure you are right, then go ahead” was his maxim that soon became ours. … We walked with him as I walk with Detective Linden.
And just who is Detective Linden? Throughout the book she is touching base with a number of TV detective series. For her, “yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives”. Even though that feels true for me (along with certain singers), I got a little wary over this elevation of pop culture. It seemed a bit flakey for her to admit: “I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends, whether in real time or rerun.”
A key target for her portal and channeling proclivites is the female detective of the series “The Killing”, whom she finds “commingles with our own sense of self” and spurs her to gush that “the rain falls from the blue-eyed skies of Sarah Linden.” She is a “Flemish Madonna with the eyes of a woman from the backwoods who has slept with the devil”. It’s a noir series transplanted from a Danish novel and TV production to an American setting in rainy Seattle. Toward the end of Smith’s book her chapters get shorter and more distilled. In among some personal segments about trying and not succeeding in conjuring her husband Fred Sonic Smith, her father, or the innocence of her children she slips in a chapter “How Linden Kills the Thing She Loves.” My doubts were quickly erased, not about the issue of treating the series as high artistry, but about her artistry in showing how we can harness TV as well as written fictional figures for mining our lives.
I have to admit that this review ( and others for recent reads) were seriously delayed due to channeling Patti Smith on her TV habits. My curiosity me on a binge of watching “The Killing”, four seasons of emotionally gripping entertainment consumed in about 10 days. I don’t know about the sanctity of such compulsive pleasure. Still, the sense of walking in Smith’s shoes a bit in this and other ways was fun and doesn't really turn me into some dorky fan. Likely I will follow her footsteps further and read some of the authors she likes and maybe pursue her book-length poem in response to Bolano, Hecatomb.
November 1, 2018
My 2nd audiobook and it was Patti Smith again... I just love listening to her.
We are taken around the globe 🌎 in her memories and reflections of the past and I especially enjoyed the memories of her husband Fred Sonic Smith and her life here in Michigan.
We are taken around the globe 🌎 in her memories and reflections of the past and I especially enjoyed the memories of her husband Fred Sonic Smith and her life here in Michigan.
August 15, 2020
I saw Patti Smith speak about this book on her book tour. At the event, I got a copy of the book. In fact, some how I ended up with two copies. And then, I carried that book with me everywhere. I traveled a lot for work, always taking this book, starting it, getting distracted, and then it sat there. I hesitated on the audio book since I have the print. But honestly, there is no better way to 'read' a Patti Smith book that to have her narrate it to you. So I finally caved, audio it was, and it was great! Guess I knew I was meant to listen to this one in the end.
Patti Smith talks about many things in this one, often times almost stream of consciousness. She talks of her love (more like obsession) of coffee, drinking it, finding a good cup, books, travel, travels with her husband, stories of her husband/children/their life, her new home, hurricane Sandy, visiting various cafes in NYC and along her travels, and her love of detective stories. She's quite interesting and the stories she tells just draw you in. I enjoyed hearing stories of her telling about her travels to Japan (reminding me of my trips and the places I visited), Europe, and a number of other places. But her details of the show The Killing made me laugh. She talked about this during her book tour and me not much of a TV watcher had no idea what this was. I've since watched the entire series and enjoyed it. Also, Patti ended up have a small bit role in the show.
Anyway, a book I enjoyed, loved the audio as always. She has a very casual narration in her books where it seems like someone you know just telling you their story. I did go back and forth on the print as in the print there are various photos of her travels which I also enjoyed. I'm so glad to finally have listened to this one. My only problem with Patti Smith books is she always helps me add to my mountainous TBR pile (yup, I've finally decided to give Murakami a try). Ha! But now I'll be patiently waiting for the next book/audio narration by Patti Smith.
Patti Smith talks about many things in this one, often times almost stream of consciousness. She talks of her love (more like obsession) of coffee, drinking it, finding a good cup, books, travel, travels with her husband, stories of her husband/children/their life, her new home, hurricane Sandy, visiting various cafes in NYC and along her travels, and her love of detective stories. She's quite interesting and the stories she tells just draw you in. I enjoyed hearing stories of her telling about her travels to Japan (reminding me of my trips and the places I visited), Europe, and a number of other places. But her details of the show The Killing made me laugh. She talked about this during her book tour and me not much of a TV watcher had no idea what this was. I've since watched the entire series and enjoyed it. Also, Patti ended up have a small bit role in the show.
Anyway, a book I enjoyed, loved the audio as always. She has a very casual narration in her books where it seems like someone you know just telling you their story. I did go back and forth on the print as in the print there are various photos of her travels which I also enjoyed. I'm so glad to finally have listened to this one. My only problem with Patti Smith books is she always helps me add to my mountainous TBR pile (yup, I've finally decided to give Murakami a try). Ha! But now I'll be patiently waiting for the next book/audio narration by Patti Smith.
September 8, 2022
Poetic, Meandering Meditation on Loneliness, Love, and Loss
Patti Smith's latest memoir, M Train, is more rambling and poetic, less coherent and focused than "Just Kids". Yet, I found it almost as moving, but in an entirely different way. "Just Kids" was an emotional tribute to a beautiful connection between two twin souls, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. "M Train" covers wider ground.
The M train actually exists in the NY City subway. I'd forgotten it. I may have ridden it once (if ever). It connects parts of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. It might be the least known subway line in New York City. When I was reading the book, I didn't remember that the M was an actual subway line. It's been that long since I'd ridden it or heard of it.
The book apparently connects eighteen "stations" (corresponding to chapters, I think). I didn't realize this while I was reading it either.
What I did get from this book was a dreamlike meditation following an introverted and solipsistic Patti on her travels around the world. In nearly every city she visits, she finds a cafe, where she imbibes her favorite drink, coffee, and sits and writes. Patti lives simply, favoring foods like lentil soup and brown bread with olive oil.
She reflects on loss and pain. I could readily identify with her when she tells us she's lost the joy in her life since the death of her husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith in 1994. That's awhile ago, yet even now, in 2015, she apparently still misses him a lot. Shortly after Fred's death, Patti also lost her brother, Todd. She found these back-to-back losses nearly unbearable.
Perhaps as a result, Patti seems to have a lot of compassion for the suffering of others.
Her empathy, unpretentiousness, inner reflectiveness and tendency to live simply are rare among celebrities. She isn't the usual narcissistic, shallow famous person. It's easy to like her and to identify with her.
The eighteen stations range over a wide area. Patti visits the remains of the penal colony in which Jean Genet (one of Patti's favorite writers) imagines himself imprisoned. (He was in fact, impriosned, but not in this particular prison, which is in Northwest French Guiana (French Guiana is on the Northeast coast of South America, north of Brazil). Patti is obsessed with Genet, and Fred accompanies her on this journey. Patti and Fred run into big trouble on the trip there. They pay a driver to take them there and this is what happens:
"Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.
They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French."
Fred wins the respect of the police commander and persuades him that he and Patti had nothing to do with this situation and that they should go free, but it's touch-and-go for awhile.
The writing, like Patti, is unpretentious and straightforward. However, she also describes many dream sequences.
A key character who ties her dreams together is the "cowpoke" who visits her in many dreams. Who is he? Patti asks. I wondered if he was Fred "Sonic" Smith, but it's unclear. In any case, he warns and advises her. In the beginning of the book he mentions that "it's not so easy writing about nothing".
Another "station" in the book is Casa Azul ("Blue House"), now a museum in Mexico City. It was once the abode of artist Frida Kahlo and her husband, artist Diego Rivera. Patti goes there to give a talk and take photos. She gets sick (Montezuma's revenge?) and the museum staff tenderly care for her, letting her rest in the bed which was once Diego's.
Other venues in the book are Detroit, Berlin, Morocco, and Iceland (for a meeting of the mysterious and defunct "Continental Drift Club", to whom Patti gives a disastrous and poorly received lecture).
Still other settings include Rockaway Beach, where Patti buys a tiny and rather rickety (but much loved ) house that amazingly survives Hurricane Sandy, damaged but still standing; and Greenwich Village, where Patti hangs out in the Eno Cafe.
This is a short but evocative read. As before, I enjoy listening to Patti read her own work. She feels like someone I could befriend.
Patti Smith's latest memoir, M Train, is more rambling and poetic, less coherent and focused than "Just Kids". Yet, I found it almost as moving, but in an entirely different way. "Just Kids" was an emotional tribute to a beautiful connection between two twin souls, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. "M Train" covers wider ground.
The M train actually exists in the NY City subway. I'd forgotten it. I may have ridden it once (if ever). It connects parts of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. It might be the least known subway line in New York City. When I was reading the book, I didn't remember that the M was an actual subway line. It's been that long since I'd ridden it or heard of it.
The book apparently connects eighteen "stations" (corresponding to chapters, I think). I didn't realize this while I was reading it either.
What I did get from this book was a dreamlike meditation following an introverted and solipsistic Patti on her travels around the world. In nearly every city she visits, she finds a cafe, where she imbibes her favorite drink, coffee, and sits and writes. Patti lives simply, favoring foods like lentil soup and brown bread with olive oil.
She reflects on loss and pain. I could readily identify with her when she tells us she's lost the joy in her life since the death of her husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith in 1994. That's awhile ago, yet even now, in 2015, she apparently still misses him a lot. Shortly after Fred's death, Patti also lost her brother, Todd. She found these back-to-back losses nearly unbearable.
Perhaps as a result, Patti seems to have a lot of compassion for the suffering of others.
Her empathy, unpretentiousness, inner reflectiveness and tendency to live simply are rare among celebrities. She isn't the usual narcissistic, shallow famous person. It's easy to like her and to identify with her.
The eighteen stations range over a wide area. Patti visits the remains of the penal colony in which Jean Genet (one of Patti's favorite writers) imagines himself imprisoned. (He was in fact, impriosned, but not in this particular prison, which is in Northwest French Guiana (French Guiana is on the Northeast coast of South America, north of Brazil). Patti is obsessed with Genet, and Fred accompanies her on this journey. Patti and Fred run into big trouble on the trip there. They pay a driver to take them there and this is what happens:
"Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.
They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French."
Fred wins the respect of the police commander and persuades him that he and Patti had nothing to do with this situation and that they should go free, but it's touch-and-go for awhile.
The writing, like Patti, is unpretentious and straightforward. However, she also describes many dream sequences.
A key character who ties her dreams together is the "cowpoke" who visits her in many dreams. Who is he? Patti asks. I wondered if he was Fred "Sonic" Smith, but it's unclear. In any case, he warns and advises her. In the beginning of the book he mentions that "it's not so easy writing about nothing".
Another "station" in the book is Casa Azul ("Blue House"), now a museum in Mexico City. It was once the abode of artist Frida Kahlo and her husband, artist Diego Rivera. Patti goes there to give a talk and take photos. She gets sick (Montezuma's revenge?) and the museum staff tenderly care for her, letting her rest in the bed which was once Diego's.
Other venues in the book are Detroit, Berlin, Morocco, and Iceland (for a meeting of the mysterious and defunct "Continental Drift Club", to whom Patti gives a disastrous and poorly received lecture).
Still other settings include Rockaway Beach, where Patti buys a tiny and rather rickety (but much loved ) house that amazingly survives Hurricane Sandy, damaged but still standing; and Greenwich Village, where Patti hangs out in the Eno Cafe.
This is a short but evocative read. As before, I enjoy listening to Patti read her own work. She feels like someone I could befriend.
November 19, 2015
‘I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.’
Patti Smith carries us through her esoteric stories of the past and present in this short story/essay collection. M Train reads like an internal journey, a solo exploration. She recalls cafes visited all around the world, writing or simply sitting and reminiscing while drinking an insane amount of coffee that makes my own addiction to caffeine seem laughable. While Smith seems completely content with her own company and the adventures she undertakes alone, there’s still an underlying sadness when recollecting the loved ones she’s lost and the memories that still haunt her.
-What are you writing?
I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.
Ultimately, this accurately sums up this non-linear story collection. Random, non-cohesive thoughts that bounce around her lifetime from past to present with no indication of time. It is possible for randomness to possess interest and there is no doubt that Patti Smith has led a most interesting life, such as the descriptions of her trip to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana to visit the remains of a French penal colony where criminals were kept. Of all the places in the world to visit though, only Patti Smith would decide to visit an old abandoned prison at the end of the world. Nevertheless, it was interesting, but while it was all very informative and her writing is forever fluid, none of it ever felt as if it had much substance. Her descriptions of her trip to Germany to attend a conference with the Continental Drift Club, of which she is a member strangely enough, were fascinating but then she goes on to describe how on her return trip home she decided to stay in London to binge-watch some crime shows on the BBC. Fascinating and then… not.
Just Kids was stunning and poignant and her writing transported the reader back to a long past period of time. While her writing is still top-notch and her talent is undeniable, M Train was simply too meandering and tangential for my liking. The triviality of these stories are clearly meaningful to her since our experiences in life are what make us who we are today, but the importance is easily lost when not experienced firsthand but only recapped from memory.
‘I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realize, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology.’
I received this book free from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Patti Smith carries us through her esoteric stories of the past and present in this short story/essay collection. M Train reads like an internal journey, a solo exploration. She recalls cafes visited all around the world, writing or simply sitting and reminiscing while drinking an insane amount of coffee that makes my own addiction to caffeine seem laughable. While Smith seems completely content with her own company and the adventures she undertakes alone, there’s still an underlying sadness when recollecting the loved ones she’s lost and the memories that still haunt her.
-What are you writing?
I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.
Ultimately, this accurately sums up this non-linear story collection. Random, non-cohesive thoughts that bounce around her lifetime from past to present with no indication of time. It is possible for randomness to possess interest and there is no doubt that Patti Smith has led a most interesting life, such as the descriptions of her trip to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana to visit the remains of a French penal colony where criminals were kept. Of all the places in the world to visit though, only Patti Smith would decide to visit an old abandoned prison at the end of the world. Nevertheless, it was interesting, but while it was all very informative and her writing is forever fluid, none of it ever felt as if it had much substance. Her descriptions of her trip to Germany to attend a conference with the Continental Drift Club, of which she is a member strangely enough, were fascinating but then she goes on to describe how on her return trip home she decided to stay in London to binge-watch some crime shows on the BBC. Fascinating and then… not.
Just Kids was stunning and poignant and her writing transported the reader back to a long past period of time. While her writing is still top-notch and her talent is undeniable, M Train was simply too meandering and tangential for my liking. The triviality of these stories are clearly meaningful to her since our experiences in life are what make us who we are today, but the importance is easily lost when not experienced firsthand but only recapped from memory.
‘I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realize, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology.’
I received this book free from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
March 21, 2016
I remember this tv commercial where a guy comes down the stairs, he is dressed and has his luggage in hand. He stops in the foyer, picks up a dart and throws it at a map of the world on the wall. The idea being that he has the time and resources to travel anywhere at any time. Well, that's Patti Smith, but instead of darts she uses random thoughts, or passages from books, or memories. She is always on the move, both physically and spiritually, seemingly trying to soothe her battered and tortured soul. I traveled with her in this book and loved every minute. She is a rock star icon, an accomplished artist, and a very talented writer, and writer is what she considers herself first and foremost. Her writing mojo seems to match my reading mojo, so now I am really looking forward to reading her National Book Award winning "Just Kids".
October 10, 2015
"M Train" is perhaps one of the most romantic books of being a writer, and those who likes to read. What can be better than reading and writing in a small hip cafe, and watching the world go by. And on top of that, visit every cool writer's grave site - from Europe to Japan. Patti Smith is not a hard person to figure out. She conveys the spirit of being a book nerd as well as a rock n' roll lunatic. In many ways, it's a very simple image of a writer/artist. Yet it is the simple aspect of it that many are driven towards that world. Millions feel like Patti, but she has the ability to write in a very clear manner her love for icons such as the Beats, Genet, Rimbaud - and to my utter delight - Osamu Dazai. And speaking of Japan, I'm happy that she gives a call-out to my favorite cafe - "The Lion" in Shibuya, Tokyo.
For those who fell in love with Patti Smith due to her previous book "Just Kids," will not find the same type of narrative. This is very much a writer's book, about writing and thinking. Also it's a book about nothing, which for many of us (including me) is very much an aesthetic that one follows. In other words, this is a book that is hard to dislike, and one can only dislike this book, if you don't have the romantic impulse of reading and worshiping your favorite artists. For me, I don't see art or artists in that light. They are not gods, but humans, and that is what strikes my fancy regarding the artist and their role in our world.
If I were you (readers), I would treat "M Train" as a classic. I would recommend this book to romantic girls and boys, as well as a bit of social history through the eyes of Patti Smith. May you sit in that cafe, for a long time.
For those who fell in love with Patti Smith due to her previous book "Just Kids," will not find the same type of narrative. This is very much a writer's book, about writing and thinking. Also it's a book about nothing, which for many of us (including me) is very much an aesthetic that one follows. In other words, this is a book that is hard to dislike, and one can only dislike this book, if you don't have the romantic impulse of reading and worshiping your favorite artists. For me, I don't see art or artists in that light. They are not gods, but humans, and that is what strikes my fancy regarding the artist and their role in our world.
If I were you (readers), I would treat "M Train" as a classic. I would recommend this book to romantic girls and boys, as well as a bit of social history through the eyes of Patti Smith. May you sit in that cafe, for a long time.
March 24, 2019
Patti Smith is precious. She is not a writer - but she's also a writer. She's a rock star but of an unusual kind. She's a poet but also a photographer and visual artist. She's that person that elides all these categories revealing possibilities that eschew the usual "she's this or that". Patti Smith is this and that, and many other things besides. More importantly, she's this and that (girl but also tomboy, woman but also an androgynous person) without being someome out there that has nothing to do with us. Patti Smith is all those possibilities within us (although she's her own person out there as well). For all that she is I celebrate and love her. The book was a bit stream of consciousness and flowy, so you'll like it if you'te in that sort of thing.
August 15, 2018
I’ve been staring at a blank review box for like ten minutes, trying to figure out how to summarize Patti Smith’s M Train, and I still have no idea what to say. For one thing, there’s not really a plot. It’s just Patti Smith, talking about authors who have influenced her and describing the trips she took to visit their past homes, or their workspaces, but most often their graves. She also tells you about coffee shops she’s visited and worked in. Also she buys a house on Rockaway Beach that’s destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. She does not talk about her music, and barely discusses her writing or her poetry. It’s a hard sell, is what I’m saying, especially because it seems to be the embodiment of the advice that, “Nobody wants to hear about your vacation.”
Are you intrigued by Patti Smith’s stories about the two times she visited Sylvia Plath’s grave? If not, this isn’t the book for you. But if there’s something about that idea that appeals to you, this might be worth your time. It was certainly worth mine, even though I can’t articulate why.
It’s a comforting book, in a way – like you’re in a mostly-empty coffee shop, sitting across from Patti Smith at a tiny table while you wait out the rainstorm, looking at her snapshots of Mexico and Japan and Russia, listening to her stories. The fact that there’s no real purpose or resolution to the stories doesn’t really matter – it’s enough just to listen to Smith tell them.
Honestly, the best I can do is give you an overly-long excerpt and let you decide from there:
“I had a black coat. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his – an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garcons overcoat that I secretly coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me.
-I don’t need a gift, I said.
-But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for.
-Then I would like your black coat, I said.
And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I pulled it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café. I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this relatively short span it disappeared.
My black coat gone, vanished like the precious league ring that disappeared from the finger of the faulty believer in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light. Then, ashamedly, within my childish mourning, I think of Bruno Schulz, trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland, furtively handing over the one precious thing he had left to give to mankind: the manuscript of The Messiah. The last work of Bruno Schulz drawn into the swill of World War II, beyond all grasp. Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble into helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat."
Are you intrigued by Patti Smith’s stories about the two times she visited Sylvia Plath’s grave? If not, this isn’t the book for you. But if there’s something about that idea that appeals to you, this might be worth your time. It was certainly worth mine, even though I can’t articulate why.
It’s a comforting book, in a way – like you’re in a mostly-empty coffee shop, sitting across from Patti Smith at a tiny table while you wait out the rainstorm, looking at her snapshots of Mexico and Japan and Russia, listening to her stories. The fact that there’s no real purpose or resolution to the stories doesn’t really matter – it’s enough just to listen to Smith tell them.
Honestly, the best I can do is give you an overly-long excerpt and let you decide from there:
“I had a black coat. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his – an ill-fitting, unlined Comme des Garcons overcoat that I secretly coveted. On the morning of my birthday he told me he had no gift for me.
-I don’t need a gift, I said.
-But I want to give you something, whatever you wish for.
-Then I would like your black coat, I said.
And he smiled and gave it to me without hesitation or regret. Every time I pulled it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had come unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves. Every morning I got up, put on my coat and watch cap, grabbed my pen and notebook, and headed across Sixth Avenue to my café. I loved my coat and the café and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity. But in this current run of harsh weather, I favored another coat to keep me warm and protect me from the wind. My black coat, more suitable for spring and fall, fell from my consciousness, and in this relatively short span it disappeared.
My black coat gone, vanished like the precious league ring that disappeared from the finger of the faulty believer in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light. Then, ashamedly, within my childish mourning, I think of Bruno Schulz, trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland, furtively handing over the one precious thing he had left to give to mankind: the manuscript of The Messiah. The last work of Bruno Schulz drawn into the swill of World War II, beyond all grasp. Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble into helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat."
November 25, 2019
Patti Smith could write about anything and make it sound like poetry. After completing this book I immediately felt the need to luxuriate in her words again. It reads like a sublime dream. Haunting and reflective. Such is her gift of writing and embodying emotions of wonder for the everyday ordinary as well as the extraordinary. God I love her.
August 20, 2023
Hiçbir şey hakkında yazmak kolay değildir.
Böyle başlıyor söze bu kez Patti Smith.
Hiçbir şey; gittiği cafeler, ziyaret ettiği mezarlar, gördüğü rüyalar, hayalleri, polaroid makinasıyla çektiği siyah beyaz fotoğraflar.. Şairlerle gezginlerin bir tımarhanenin sadeliğini bulabileceği ufak bir sığınak.
Çoluk Çocuk'tan farklı bir kitap bu, ama onun kadar lirik, iç acıtan bir anlatımı var. Farkına varmadan hafif ama daimi bir keyifsizliğin içine sürükleniyorum. Depresyon değil bu, daha çok melankoliye duyulan bir ilgi diyor o içsel haline. Geçmiş ve bugün arasında gidip geliyor, şimdiki zaman içinde yaşarken geçmiş hakkında yazarsam hala gerçek zamanda mıyımdır? diye soruyor hem kendine hem bize. Kitapta bunun gibi pek çok can alıcı soru var.
Kaybettiğimiz eşyalar bizim yasımızı tutar mı? ... Nasıl oluyor da birine duyduğumuz sevgiyi onu ebediyen kaybedinceye değin bir türlü bütünüyle anlayamıyoruz?
Patti Smith kitabında cansız nesnelerle ve ölülerle konuşuyor. Kapanan cafelerin, kaybolan eşyalarının yasını tutuyor. Ölüler konuşurlar. Biz onları nasıl dinleyeceğimizi unuttuk. Sevdiği yazarların mezarlarını ziyaret etmek için inanılmaz mesafeler kat ediyor. Boyuna yazıyor, boyuna kahve içiyor. 21. yüzyılın çılgınlığına direnen bir çiçek çocuk, bilge ruh. Çılgının teki işte, bence müthiş bir hayat yaşıyor!
Böyle başlıyor söze bu kez Patti Smith.
Hiçbir şey; gittiği cafeler, ziyaret ettiği mezarlar, gördüğü rüyalar, hayalleri, polaroid makinasıyla çektiği siyah beyaz fotoğraflar.. Şairlerle gezginlerin bir tımarhanenin sadeliğini bulabileceği ufak bir sığınak.
Çoluk Çocuk'tan farklı bir kitap bu, ama onun kadar lirik, iç acıtan bir anlatımı var. Farkına varmadan hafif ama daimi bir keyifsizliğin içine sürükleniyorum. Depresyon değil bu, daha çok melankoliye duyulan bir ilgi diyor o içsel haline. Geçmiş ve bugün arasında gidip geliyor, şimdiki zaman içinde yaşarken geçmiş hakkında yazarsam hala gerçek zamanda mıyımdır? diye soruyor hem kendine hem bize. Kitapta bunun gibi pek çok can alıcı soru var.
Kaybettiğimiz eşyalar bizim yasımızı tutar mı? ... Nasıl oluyor da birine duyduğumuz sevgiyi onu ebediyen kaybedinceye değin bir türlü bütünüyle anlayamıyoruz?
Patti Smith kitabında cansız nesnelerle ve ölülerle konuşuyor. Kapanan cafelerin, kaybolan eşyalarının yasını tutuyor. Ölüler konuşurlar. Biz onları nasıl dinleyeceğimizi unuttuk. Sevdiği yazarların mezarlarını ziyaret etmek için inanılmaz mesafeler kat ediyor. Boyuna yazıyor, boyuna kahve içiyor. 21. yüzyılın çılgınlığına direnen bir çiçek çocuk, bilge ruh. Çılgının teki işte, bence müthiş bir hayat yaşıyor!
December 10, 2022
“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.”
Patti Smith and I have many of the same notions and ideas. We both like to ponder the writings of Plath, the philosophies of Nietzsche, and the enigmas of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Her illustrations are a trove of Polaroid treasures: like Frida Kahlo’s bed and Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Virginia Woolf’s walking stick. All relics of souls now lost, captured in Smith’s nostalgic photographic style - softly focused and unfiltered.
“One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live...”
M Train is part memoir, part autobiography, and part journal. Fragments of an interesting life; successes and setbacks; adventures and misadventures; all softly focused and unfiltered.
Patti Smith and I have many of the same notions and ideas. We both like to ponder the writings of Plath, the philosophies of Nietzsche, and the enigmas of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Her illustrations are a trove of Polaroid treasures: like Frida Kahlo’s bed and Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Virginia Woolf’s walking stick. All relics of souls now lost, captured in Smith’s nostalgic photographic style - softly focused and unfiltered.
“One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life. Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. This is how I live...”
M Train is part memoir, part autobiography, and part journal. Fragments of an interesting life; successes and setbacks; adventures and misadventures; all softly focused and unfiltered.
April 25, 2021
I enjoyed this book so much! Loved learning of her travels, her favorite coffee shop, her husband and their relationship, etc. I looked up many people and places. How interesting and enjoyable it would be to sit, drink coffee (or a shot of tequila) and have a conversation with her.
I listened to this one and now I might have to “reread” Just Kids on audio to have Patti tell me the story in her voice instead of my own.
PS - Her singing voice is one of my favorites! 🙂🎤
I listened to this one and now I might have to “reread” Just Kids on audio to have Patti tell me the story in her voice instead of my own.
PS - Her singing voice is one of my favorites! 🙂🎤
August 1, 2019
I know we’re both a bit old for this, but I want Patti Smith to adopt me. If I ever meet her, I will just have to ask her if she’d be my grandma. They just don’t make them like her anymore…
Some people say “M Train” is a book about nothing, and that might not be inaccurate. It’s certainly not a story like “Just Kids” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which was about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, nor a collection of poems tied together by a theme. It’s a collage/memoir of cafés, travels, books, cemeteries, art and the enormous love Patti has for all these things. Also, she apparently loves to binge-watching detective shows (whaaaat?!)! It’s meandering and intimate and it made me smile and get glassy-eyed; her songs have often had that effect on me as well.
My husband and I listened to the audiobook on the Rochester-Montreal drive, and narrated by Patti herself, it was wonderful. Her voice is incredibly strong, sometimes raspy with a tinge of Jersey accent that made me smile. But mostly, I found her delivery soothing and enveloping. I have a paperback copy, but I would recommend the audiobook enthusiastically (even if the paperback includes some of the pictures she refers to in the text).
Her prose is like her music: wild but economical, whimsical yet incantatory, erudite and romantic. The way she talks about her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and how much she loved him made me feel like bursting. When she writes about her love of books, and the authors she admires and who have inspired her, my heart feels so full. Did I mention I want her to adopt me? We could drink coffee, read quietly and have a bunch of cats hanging around. I could probably help her not lose stuff everywhere, the way she seems inclined to do.
This shouldn’t be your introduction to Patti Smith, however. Listen to “Horses”, read “Just Kids”, watch a few interviews and live performances on YouTube.
Some people say “M Train” is a book about nothing, and that might not be inaccurate. It’s certainly not a story like “Just Kids” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which was about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, nor a collection of poems tied together by a theme. It’s a collage/memoir of cafés, travels, books, cemeteries, art and the enormous love Patti has for all these things. Also, she apparently loves to binge-watching detective shows (whaaaat?!)! It’s meandering and intimate and it made me smile and get glassy-eyed; her songs have often had that effect on me as well.
My husband and I listened to the audiobook on the Rochester-Montreal drive, and narrated by Patti herself, it was wonderful. Her voice is incredibly strong, sometimes raspy with a tinge of Jersey accent that made me smile. But mostly, I found her delivery soothing and enveloping. I have a paperback copy, but I would recommend the audiobook enthusiastically (even if the paperback includes some of the pictures she refers to in the text).
Her prose is like her music: wild but economical, whimsical yet incantatory, erudite and romantic. The way she talks about her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and how much she loved him made me feel like bursting. When she writes about her love of books, and the authors she admires and who have inspired her, my heart feels so full. Did I mention I want her to adopt me? We could drink coffee, read quietly and have a bunch of cats hanging around. I could probably help her not lose stuff everywhere, the way she seems inclined to do.
This shouldn’t be your introduction to Patti Smith, however. Listen to “Horses”, read “Just Kids”, watch a few interviews and live performances on YouTube.
July 11, 2018
Slightly more than one year ago, the beginning of June, I read Patti Smith’s
Just Kids
and I fell in love with the writing, the story of her early years with Robert Mapplethorpe and then later on her music career, and her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith.
”It’s not so easy writing about nothing.
“That’s what a cowpoke was saying as I entered the frame of a dream. Vaguely handsome, intensely laconic, he was balancing on a folding chair, leaning backwards, his Stetson brushing the edge of the dun-colored exterior of a lone café. I say lone, as there appeared to be nothing else around except an antiquated gas pump and a rusting trough ornamented with a necklace of horseflies slung above the last dregs of its stagnant water.“
And so it begins.
Entering the mind of Patti Smith, her dreams, her thoughts, her outlook on life, on art and other artists, the art of living a true life, a good life, is what had me reading this first as a book, and then listening to the Audible version of what I’d just read just so I could have the pleasure of hearing it with her inflections, her pauses, her voice.
”Words that lingered then fell away as I boarded a train of my own that dropped me off fully clothed in my rumpled bed.
“Opening my eyes, I rose, staggered into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face in one swift motion. I slid on my boots, fed the cats, grabbed my watch cap and old black coat and headed out toward the road many times taken, across the wide avenue to Bedford Street and a small Greenwich Village café.”
This does wander back and forth through time, for me it almost felt as though time is a river to transport you from place to place and time, a memory to be brought forth to enhance another time, another place, an idea. I loved this, so it wasn’t disorienting to me, but others might prefer to note where and when they are as this memoir progresses.
”When my children were young I contrived such vessels. I set them to sail, though I didn’t board them. I rarely left the perimeter of our home. I said my prayers in the night by the canal draped by ancient longhaired willows. The things I touched were living. My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to frame these moments. They passed without souvenir.”
Highly Recommended
”It’s not so easy writing about nothing.
“That’s what a cowpoke was saying as I entered the frame of a dream. Vaguely handsome, intensely laconic, he was balancing on a folding chair, leaning backwards, his Stetson brushing the edge of the dun-colored exterior of a lone café. I say lone, as there appeared to be nothing else around except an antiquated gas pump and a rusting trough ornamented with a necklace of horseflies slung above the last dregs of its stagnant water.“
And so it begins.
Entering the mind of Patti Smith, her dreams, her thoughts, her outlook on life, on art and other artists, the art of living a true life, a good life, is what had me reading this first as a book, and then listening to the Audible version of what I’d just read just so I could have the pleasure of hearing it with her inflections, her pauses, her voice.
”Words that lingered then fell away as I boarded a train of my own that dropped me off fully clothed in my rumpled bed.
“Opening my eyes, I rose, staggered into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face in one swift motion. I slid on my boots, fed the cats, grabbed my watch cap and old black coat and headed out toward the road many times taken, across the wide avenue to Bedford Street and a small Greenwich Village café.”
This does wander back and forth through time, for me it almost felt as though time is a river to transport you from place to place and time, a memory to be brought forth to enhance another time, another place, an idea. I loved this, so it wasn’t disorienting to me, but others might prefer to note where and when they are as this memoir progresses.
”When my children were young I contrived such vessels. I set them to sail, though I didn’t board them. I rarely left the perimeter of our home. I said my prayers in the night by the canal draped by ancient longhaired willows. The things I touched were living. My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to frame these moments. They passed without souvenir.”
Highly Recommended
June 18, 2020
Not as good as Just Kids, but still enjoyable overall, though the essay quality is uneven. What works best is Smith's voice, which I made note of when reading the previous book. That and her unapologetic Romanticism. I like it! And I like it when she writes paragraphs like this:
"We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow."
Now she's speaking my language!
At other times, though, the writing grows a bit too self-indulgent. There must be 154 references to drinking coffee with brown bread with olive oil. OK. Got it. No need to say it again and again (and again for good measure).
At one point she talked about the people she loved that had died, especially her husband Fred Sonic Smith. But there was nary a word of the prime character in Just Kids, Robert Mapplethorpe. It seemed very strange.
Best for readers is Smith's love of mentioning book titles and authors. It gives you something to explore. Some I noted were The Beach Cafe (Muhammad Market), The Thief's Journal (Jean Genet), Amulet (Roberto Bolano), An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (César Aira), The Confusions of Young Törless (Robert Musil), and No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai). Also mentioned were authors Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Wittgenstein, Rene Daumal, Paul Verlaine, and Isabelle Eberhardt. Oh. And The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , which she loved.
Oh, wait a minute. I forgot Goodreads' LIST feature. Someone surely has made a list of every book Patti touts in this book. Someone has!.
This is a good 3-star review, by the way. You realize 3's are poker-faced Tricksters like Loki. This one's leaning more four than two, more positive than negative, but I wanted to differentiate it from the 4-star glow I gave to Just Kids.
Glad that's cleared up.
"We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow."
Now she's speaking my language!
At other times, though, the writing grows a bit too self-indulgent. There must be 154 references to drinking coffee with brown bread with olive oil. OK. Got it. No need to say it again and again (and again for good measure).
At one point she talked about the people she loved that had died, especially her husband Fred Sonic Smith. But there was nary a word of the prime character in Just Kids, Robert Mapplethorpe. It seemed very strange.
Best for readers is Smith's love of mentioning book titles and authors. It gives you something to explore. Some I noted were The Beach Cafe (Muhammad Market), The Thief's Journal (Jean Genet), Amulet (Roberto Bolano), An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (César Aira), The Confusions of Young Törless (Robert Musil), and No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai). Also mentioned were authors Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Wittgenstein, Rene Daumal, Paul Verlaine, and Isabelle Eberhardt. Oh. And The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , which she loved.
Oh, wait a minute. I forgot Goodreads' LIST feature. Someone surely has made a list of every book Patti touts in this book. Someone has!.
This is a good 3-star review, by the way. You realize 3's are poker-faced Tricksters like Loki. This one's leaning more four than two, more positive than negative, but I wanted to differentiate it from the 4-star glow I gave to Just Kids.
Glad that's cleared up.
February 9, 2017
Writing this review is difficult because it's hard to explain in words the effect Patti Smith has on me. She is one of the few artists who never let me down. She has this incredible way of turning even the most unpoetic things in life into beautiful prose. In this book of shorts she shares with us memories from her travels, her family and what inspires her creativity.
Her stories and stunning prose would be enough to make this a fantastic read for me, but her words always go well beyond that. Every time I listen to her music, read her books, or see her in person she never fails to fill me with pure inspiration. She brings things out in me that I've forgotten exist. She makes me want to sit down and write and express myself. Somehow, her words, her courage and honesty spills off the page and pours itself into me.
While I cannot guarantee she will have the same effect on others, I can guarantee this is a worth a read.
Her stories and stunning prose would be enough to make this a fantastic read for me, but her words always go well beyond that. Every time I listen to her music, read her books, or see her in person she never fails to fill me with pure inspiration. She brings things out in me that I've forgotten exist. She makes me want to sit down and write and express myself. Somehow, her words, her courage and honesty spills off the page and pours itself into me.
While I cannot guarantee she will have the same effect on others, I can guarantee this is a worth a read.
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