Nashville Scene
August 6, 2015 at 10:33am
Patti Smith to Read and Discuss Memoir Nov. 13 at OZ Arts
POSTED BY LAURA HUTSON
In between voting and dodging the rain, here’s some news that will make your heart beat faster: Patti Smith will be in Nashville on Friday, Nov. 13, for a reading and conversation about her new memoir M Train. The event will take place at OZ Arts in conjunction with Salon@615. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, Aug. 11, and a free copy of M Train is included with the purchase.
Here’s what people are saying about M Train, which comes out Oct. 6 through Knopf.
Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith articulates the pensive rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels. In a Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in journals, and ‘plotting my next move,’ the author reflects on the places she’s visited, and the impact each played on her past and present selves. She describes a chance meeting with guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of travelling with Fred, armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid, to French Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, and to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach and purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy—though she vowed to rebuild. The author synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art, and life with Fred . . . No matter the distance life may take her, Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simple pleasures of a deli coffee on her stoop, her mind constantly buoyed by humanity, art, and memory . . . An atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir, to be savored and pondered. — Kirkus
M Train’s narrative will begin at the Greenwich Village café where Smith used to drink black coffee every morning and “ruminate on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook,” as her publisher puts it. The book’s cover shows her at the now-closed Café ‘Ino. … Smith told Rolling Stone last year that she had submitted the book to her publisher last October; she first announced she’d begun work on it in 2011. At the time, she described it as being “sort of in present tense.” “I wanted to write a contemporary book or just write whatever I felt like writing about, and it’s things going from literature to coffee to memories of Fred in Michigan,” she says. “It’s whatever I felt. I hopped on a train and kept going.” — Rolling Stone