Patti Smith in Los Angeles

In his book “A Bright and Guilty Place” Richard Rayner writes that “cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you….”   This phrase came to mind when I went to hear Patti Smith speak and sing at USC.  I associate her with certain places and times— New York City, the Chelsea Hotel, the punk scene….but then, too, with Detroit, where she raised her children.

Josh Kun asked Patti Smith what place Los Angeles occupied in her imagination.   She said that she first saw it through the eyes of her mother, who loved Hollywood. She also mentioned the influence of hard-boiled Los Angeles writers—from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler onward. She mentioned that she loves the nicotine-gum chewing detective from “The Killing” so much that Sarah Linden is the screensaver on her computer.  When I told my friend Dawn Prestich, who is an Executive Producer on “The Killing,” she was thrilled—she texted me that “Patti Smith is now our screen-saver!”

Los Angeles figures as a place in the imagination through a blend and a whirr of associations.  Geography, immigration, inheritance and new technologies were the perfect mulch-bed for Hollywood. There is also Noir—that distinctly Los Angeles sub-genre.   Rayner describes noir as “on the one hand, a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when a European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom.”  He goes on to say that it is also a “counter-tradition, the dark lens through which history came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times…”

Patti Smith went on to talk about her love of the materiality of books: “the feel, the tissue, the paper, the frontispice”—I am reminded of a short essay that she wrote for the New York about shop-lifting a book from a New Jersey supermarket.

She also talked about what Josh Kun called her references, but what I understood to mean her influences:  “I mix freely,” she said.  “I take what I like from different worlds and try to make my own world. I look to work that makes me want to work—work that agitates me.”

She said that as an artist she feels “sort of dogged…I can’t relax. I always want to photograph– I always want to translate–” I always travel with a small notebook, and as she spoke I was trying to keep up with her, trying to write down the sense and gist of her phrases. We weren’t allowed to record or photograph that night, so this is written from those notes and those impressions—of course I did see many people in the audience covertly taking photos or recording on their little easily hidden devices.

Patti Smith spoke about loss and love—and how emotions and experiences get transformed into art.  She spoke of losing her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, and her mother and her dog—“they’re all gone.  I’ve lost them all.  But as I lost people I thought I can still talk to them. Because they’re still here—a host of happy, scolding spirits.”

As she played “Because the Night” she invited the audience to join in.  She said that she’d always hated it when she was at a concert and the singer cajoled the audience. “Now I’m doing it,” she said.  She also said how she still felt the love and tenderness and lust she’d felt for her husband when she sang “Because the Night.”

After she sang, after she spoke, after the event ended I was walking my dog Violet across campus.  We crossed paths with Patti Smith.  When I introduced Violet to Patti Smith, she kissed Violet on the head and said “Beautiful name.”  Yes.  Then she asked me “Do you want a pick?”  YES, I did, and she handed me a guitar pick. Here it is, and here is Violet:

“I don’t like meeting my heroes,” MG Lord said to me when I told her this story. I didn’t really meet her, I said, Violet met her. I just happened to be there when it happened.

What we feel most…

On the big bulletin board to the left of my desk:

Assorted postcards (most strikingly featured: a manatee, a hummingbird, a fishing spot on the Cape Cod Bay)
A list of 50 literary magazines that pay
Another of phone numbers for my office-mates
A luggage tag from American Airlines
A couple of yellowing cartoons from The New Yorker
An ancient photo of my niece and nephew
A Groupon for a month of unlimited classes from a local Yoga Studio
Several quotes, lifted from periodicals and programs, to comfort and inspire (Emerson, Thoreau, Helen Frankenthaler, Whitney Balliet, and Margo Jefferson)

And poems—
poems peeking out from behind poems—
poems I had to have in my sightlines because they got to the bottom of how I think and feel; because they expressed exactly-but-exactly what I hadn’t known I thought or felt, better than I’d ever be able to say it myself—

poems from Yeats, Ponsot, Ryan, Rector, Haas, Gerstler, and Laux, to name only a few—

poems about living, and poems about writing—

“Memoir” by Vijay Seshadri—
And “The New Song,” by W. S. Merwin—
and “The Problem of Sentences,” by Linda Gregg—

and here’s Czeslaw Milosz, the last stanza of “Ars Poetica”:

What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
Under unbearable duress and only with the hope
That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

And from Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy #9:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
Bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most, column tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing…

And today I’m adding a poem to the board (thanks to Dinty Moore, who posted it online this morning). I’m typing it out to feel the words in my fingers, pinning it smack in the middle of everything, to remind me how important it is to get it right, and how impossible, and how that’s the reason we keep trying, isn’t it?

Here, from Jack Gilbert, who died yesterday, who left us his poems, this one among them:

THE FORGOTTEN DIALECT OF THE HEART

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go…

Last week there was a piece in the Guardian: The Ten Best First Lines in Fiction, and boy, it got a rise out of readers, since it left out Dickens, Nabokov, and Woolf to name only a few—183 comments (protests) posted so far, and one, I happened to notice, is a link to another list, on the American Book Review site—100 best first lines from novels (now that’s more like it)—which happens to include three of my favorites: “Call me Ishmael” and “Happy families are all alike…” and “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” none of which made the Guardian actually, but all of which, plus the opening of Lolita, turn up in the ABR top 20, whew.

Not that I took exception when I read the Guardian’s list, not at all. I was delighted, in fact; pleased to be provoked to think about first lines, and how good ones abound; why, you could make a hundred lists of the ten best lines and never run out of material, right? Which got me curious and looking around the room where I’ve been working lately—my daughter’s—my papers and books strewn among hers for the next few weeks, until she comes home for the summer; good fun, consequently, to take a random sampling. Herewith, ten openings for your consideration, fiction and non:

On the bed:

1. “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome, taken in 1852.” Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida.

From the bottom shelf to my left:

2. “Kath. Kath steps from the landing cupboard, where she should not be.” The Photograph, by Penelope Lively.

3. “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.” Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley.

4. “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” Chandler. Farewell, My Lovely (a brittle little Vintage paperback that must have belonged to my father-in-law).

From the bench on the opposite wall:

5. “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.” 1Q84. Haruki Murakami.

In the middle of the shelf over the desk, wedged between The Bell Jar and a French dictionary, #6: Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, which begins: “A Nurse held the door open for them.”

And further down that same shelf, #7. “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” Orwell. 1984.

From the shelf just above, # 8 (This one kills me): “Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.” Baldwin. The Fire Next Time.

Back to the bed:

9. “The man was stubborn.” Calvin Trillin—Messages from My Father.

10. “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” From Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, Jr.

And, in deference to Eliza (my daughter), let’s make it 11; because how to leave out J. K. Rowling, who, in this room, has almost a whole shelf all to herself. From her first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

Ta da. But what does this selection tell us? For one thing, apart from the Harry Potter parade, we need a better system around here: I’ve been looking for the Lively for weeks, and also Eudora; and the rest of our Baldwins, fiction and nonfiction, are downstairs, I believe, so what’s this one doing up here?

But about these opening sentences: Tell me they aren’t mysterious and enticing—and I’m thinking it’s because every one of these books appears to start in the middle, as if to assume that the reader is in the know, which, of course, she isn’t; but she’s flattered all the same, to be trusted and invited; to have the author’s confidence, as if he or she were telling the story for her and her alone.

And how is that achieved? How has each author managed to enlist us in this way? With the Barthes, it’s the phrase, “I happened on,” which implies, doesn’t it, that he was doing something else at the time. That “Kath steps from the landing cupboard,” without introduction—well, obviously we’ve got catching up to do. In How Green was My Valley, something has compelled the narrator to pack all his things; but he’s going ‘from’ not ‘to’ which ups the ante considerably. With the Murakami, we’re actually in transit, on the road, music blaring. And how about Chandler: “It was one of those blocks”: So cavalier, right? —“it” with no antecedent?—as if to imply that we should know why he’s going on about that particular block in the first place. Now, Welty’s nurse—wherever, whoever they are, when she opens the door to let them in, we can’t help but be worried for them, right? Whereas Baldwin is honestly and totally overwrought, and we have to know why. And if Trillin’s state of mind feels, in comparison, resigned (amused), it too was arrived at before the book begins. Same thing with poor India, so ill at ease in the world from the outset—which doesn’t bode well.

As for #11: What does “thank you very much” tell us about the Dursleys? Why, they’ve got something to prove—an axe to grind, a grievance to air—and we’ve only just met them, too.

And, as I say, this was a random sampling; if I started all over again, I’m betting the outcome would be much the same. So why do so many authors choose to start their stories mid-stream? What’s the reason and the effect?

To seduce, right? At the very least, to immediately engage the reader, who, as noted, is not just eager to get up to speed, but delighted to be on such intimate terms with the author from the start. Moreover, the strategy requires specificity from the get-go—the writer is obliged from the very first moment to come up with just the right details of place, person, and thing, to insure our investment, to give us our coordinates, so that we can find our way forward and back. And that specificity makes for good prose, establishes authorial voice and control right off the bat.

Easier said than done? Sometimes, and sometimes not. When we’re lucky, our first lines simply arrive: They’re delivered to us when we’re walking or driving or watering the plants or washing the dishes, or in the middle of the night, or on line at the ATM machine, or during somebody else’s book-signing even. Other times, often in fact, we have to write our way to them, which is why, even when we think we’ve nailed a good beginning, it’s best not to get too attached—we might wind up shuffling things around, even cutting whole first paragraphs which turn out to have been throat-clearing, at least in my case.

The point is, in order to actually get to the beginning, you have to begin. Somewhere, anywhere—anything that gets you started is good—but a prompt is one thing, and a strong first sentence is something else. Therefore it isn’t good enough to get started, no. You have to keep going…