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Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]

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It was Margo Jefferson, the great cultural critic, who first put my name in the New York Times. In a review of another's book, in a closing paragraph, she made mention of something I'd penned in solitude and put forward with innocence and didn't even understand as well as she seemed to.

She looked up and saw me, and I, discovering her snatch of words quite by accident, never felt such gratitude.

When I read earlier this year that Margo had written a memoir called Negroland, I wanted it at once, bought it when I could, and put it on the top of a pile called (in my mind), "the books you'll be allowed to read once you have completed your tour of duty with all known responsibilities."

Yesterday I was done with all known (until next week) responsibilities. I picked up Negroland. I read.

And oh my, oh now: this. Like H is for Hawk, like M Train, like My Life as a Foreign Country, Negroland is the kind of book that elevates not just its readers but the capital M Memoir itself. It's personal—and otherwise. It's I, You, We. It's inquiry, declaration, admission, confusion—the story of the impossible ideals, hurtful expectations, pleasant privileges, and chaotic undertows that have been all bound up with being a member of the black elite. It's a book by an esteemed critic who was "taught to distinguish (her)self through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off" and who then (but always judiciously, always for a higher purpose) allows us in.

In a book of anecdote, history, cultural expose, and yearning, we encounter, on almost every page paragraphs as searing as this:

Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren't looking.

 And this:

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.

This year, when my beautiful son goes into bookstores he goes straight (his mother's child) to the memoir shelves. He, like me, views memoir as one of the best chances we have of broadening our vision, breaking down our walls, stepping out of our recklessly limited world view.

I have been taught by Margo Jefferson with her gorgeous Negroland. I have seen a little further. I have hurt a little more. I have been made grateful for both the seeing and the hurting.

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The organizers have announced the nominees for the 58th annual Grammy Awards.

Five audiobooks have been honored in the Best Spoken Word Album Category.

Follow the links below to listen to free audiobook samples of all the nominated titles below.

Free Samples of the Best Spoken Word Album Nominees

Blood On Snow written by Jo Nesbø and narrated by Patti Smith

Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, And Assorted Hijinks written and narrated by Dick Cavett

A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety written and narrated by Jimmy Carter

Patience And Sarah written by Isabel Miller and narrated by Janis Ian and Jean Smart

Yes Please written and narrated by Amy Poehler (& Various Artists)

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Patti Smith is on the cover of the current issue of Arrive magazine (the Amtrak magazine). That's really enough, by any measure. She's gorgeously photographed—silvers and blues.

Tucked inside that edition is an interview with me about Love and about memoir. Greg Weber and I had the nicest conversation many weeks ago. Reading these words today brings all of that back to me.

I'm grateful. I'm so grateful that I think I'll ride Amtrak every day now, for months.

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Yesterday, on Huffington Post, I wrote about the importance of structure in memoir. How, indeed, considered structure makes memoir memoir. If we don't care about how the true story gets told, if we don't think broadly, innovatively, wisely about structure, we're only writing autobiography. Telling our story because it's interesting to us, because we feel like talking.

Patti Smith understands structure.

Indeed: How much did I love Patti Smith's utterly humble and humbling new memoir, M Train?

TOOMUCHTOSAYTOOMUCHTOWRITETOOMUCHTOOMUCHTHATMUCH.

This is a star who moves quietly through this world, sitting at coffee shops, remembering and thinking. Never drops a name. Never boasts a moment. She is, and she takes us with her.

My thoughts on M Train, in New York Journal of Books, here.

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I am in the midst of a most emotional summer, and I'm just letting that be. Not building walls around my feelings. Not afraid to sit and reel.

This afternoon I've been reading Patti Smith's new memoir, M Train, due out in a few months. I will tell you right now that this book is fierce beauty if ever there was fierce beauty. This book is cloud sweep, glistened web, vast and aching, a room in which to cry. I can't say more than that for awhile now. Just. Oh, my goodness. This book.

I stopped in the midst of my reading to return to an interview Smith did with Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, a few short years after Smith's beloved husband, Fred, passed away from heart failure. The interviewer has been speaking of how Smith "literally disappeared during the 1980s." Smith has talked about the greatness of that period, how the couple traveled America, lived in cheap hotels, loved. He would study flying. She would write poems and stories the world wouldn't see for years.

Now the interviewer asks Smith about the transition from that period of rock and roll stardom to "almost complete anonymity." Smith's response, in part:

Because people don't see you or see what you're doing doesn't mean you don't exist. When Robert [Mapplethorpe] and I spent the end of the '60s in Brooklyn [NY] working on our art and poetry, no one knew who we were. Nobody knew our names. But we worked like demons. And no one really cared about Fred and I during the '80s. But our self-concept had to come from the work we were doing, from our communication, not from outside sources.

Necessary words for those of us who are still waiting for that big (or small) break, for those of us whose time seems to have come and gone, for those of us deliberately stepping off the trammeled path to think for a bit, to reconceive.

Necessary words.

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Rock guitarist Lenny Kaye has landed a deal with the HarperCollins imprint, Ecco. He is best known for his work with the of the Patti Smith Group.

According to the press release, Kaye plans to write a book called Lightning Striking. He will detail the career path he has followed “across five decades and a dozen cities where rock and roll exploded onto a national stage.”

Publisher Daniel Halpern acquired the manuscript and secured both North American and translation rights. The Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency represented Kaye on this deal.

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HarperCollins has established a new partnership with JetBlue. Henceforth, the content platform on JetBlue’s Fly-Fi (a special inflight Wi-Fi program) will feature content from HarperCollins books.

For this month, passengers will be able to read excerpts from Patricia Cornwell’s thriller novel Flesh and Blood, Amy Poehler’s memoir Yes Please, and James Dean’s children’s book Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses. Readers will have also have the option to purchase any of the available titles from a plethora of booksellers.

Here’s more from the press release: “At launch, JetBlue customers will be able to choose from excerpts of books by Daniel Silva, Martin Short, Anthony Bourdain, Patti Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Carine McCandless, Paulo Coelho, Patricia Cornwell, Dorothea Benton Frank, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Dick Couch, Amy Poehler, James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton, Peter Lerangis, Herman Parish, James Dean, Nate Ball, Dan Gutman, Lauren Oliver, and Erin Hunter. Titles will change monthly. Books from these HarperCollins authors will be available to customers as e-samplers via JetBlue’s Fly-Fi Hub, which is currently accessible on 35% of their fleet.”

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61 authors and 14 artists have made annotations to some of their most beloved works for the First Editions/Second Thoughts (FEST) auction. The funds from this venture will benefit the PEN American Center.

The writers added in features to first edition copies of their books such as notes, essays, sketches, photos, and letters to the reader. The artists had a choice of re-making either a monograph or an important art piece.

All of the artwork and annotated books will be put on public display at Christie’s New York starting November 17th. The auction itself will take place on December 2nd.

The New York Times has an exclucisve video starring Robert A. Caro, Paul Auster, and Jane Smiley who talk about the experience of re-reading their own books (embedded above). Click here to watch another video for more details about the auction event.

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By Matthew Hough

There are many cases of musicians with homonymic names, including jazz performers Bill Evans (pianist, 1929-1980) and Bill Evans (saxophonist, 1958-), and composers John Adams and John Luther Adams. In the following paragraphs, I discuss musical examples by artists comprising three such pairs.

Nancy Wilson and Nancy Wilson

Nancy Wilson – “Guess Who I Saw Today” (1960)

The arrangement here works for me: no real solos and clearly defined instrumental roles, including the absence of the piano during the bridge (1:56-2:29). Wilson’s performance, particularly the memorable way she sings the cascading titular line at 1:01 and 2:31, is stunning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Heart – “Stranded” (1990)

Nancy Wilson sings a powerful lead vocal on this track from Heart’s Brigade album (produced by Richie Zito, who also produced Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” and Bad English’s “When I See You Smile”). The chorus features one of the great uses of the I-V-ii-IV pattern, evoking the chorus of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” (with which “Stranded” shares the key of G major following the half step “pump-up” modulation at 2:55).

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

Patti Smith and Patty Smyth

Patti Smith – “Free Money” (1975)

From her first album Horses (produced by John Cale of the original Velvet Undergound), this track features Smith’s distinctive mix of song and spoken word. I enjoy Smith’s vocalizations as well as the arrangement, which features a somewhat gradual buildup of instrumental forces. The accompaniment begins with piano; the bass and drums enter at 0:30 and rhythm guitars at 0:48. A double time feel begins at 1:01, followed by an uneasy, repeating eighth note gesture in the drums beginning at 1:33. Additional vocal tracks enter at 2:24 and a lead guitar comes in at 3:08.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scandal – “Goodbye To You” (1982)

Featuring lead vocals by Patty Smyth, this song preceded Scandal’s bigger 1984 hit “The Warrior.” (Both became karaoke staples long ago.) The background vocals on this track are nicely placed in 1:18-1:31 and 2:48-2:56. The decision to elide Smyth’s voice with the synth lead beginning at 1:48 provides a smooth transition into the solo section, which ends with what are possibly my favorite two seconds of the song, from 2:19-2:21.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

“Papa” Jo Jones and “Philly” Joe Jones

Jo Jones Trio – “When Your Lover Has Gone” (1958)

Also featuring Ray Bryant (piano) and Tommy Bryant (bass), this track features Jones’ uniquely colorful cymbal playing. I especially enjoy Jones’ contribution during the last chorus, beginning at 2:32.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sonny Clark Trio – “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” (1957)

With “Philly” Joe Jones (drums) and Paul Chambers (bass). Jones is in top form here with pianist Sonny Clark and frequent rhythm section mate Paul Chambers. The group’s interplay during Chambers’ solo (2:31-3:21) is particularly engaging, as Jones and Clark create a subtle interplay within the accompaniment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have you ever confused musicians or artists with similar names? Tell us about it in the comments below!

A version of this article originally appeared on Music! Musical Musings from Matthew Hough.

Matthew Hough is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His music can be heard on Original Abstractions and is published by Hough House. He is also a Grove Music Online contributor. You can follow him on Twitter at @houghmatthew. He is a contributor to Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The post Musicians with homonymic names appeared first on OUPblog.

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St. Mark’s Bookshop, a New York City-based independent bookstore, plans to move to a new location within the East Village neighborhood.

To help generate the money for a financial push, the owners have turned to the crowd-funding site indiegogo. According to the indiegogo page, the funds will be used to “build out the space and pay for moving costs, as well as maintaining its inventory for the remaining months at 31 Third Avenue.”

Some of the rewards that are up for grabs include signed first edition books by Junot Diaz, Patti Smith, and Paul Auster. The campaign will run until April 26, 2014.

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The full track listing for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack has been released.

The CD includes songs by Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Patti Smith, according to Yahoo! Music.

The video embedded above contains a 90-second snippet from Christina Aguilera’s song, “We Remain.” The announcement on the Grammy Award-winning diva’s facebook page has already drawn almost 24,000 “likes.”

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In an age when everyone and their niece has written a tell-all book, when even fictional characters like Ron Burgundy are penning the stories of their lives, how does a memoir stand out among its peers? What qualities make it like nothing we've seen before? Sometimes truly extraordinary experiences can launch a memoir into uncharted [...]

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Your childhood wasn't based in "facts," was it? A timeline, something dry and tidy and biographical like that? Nah. You probably remember childhood as a series of vignettes informing you of what it felt like to be alive in a fresh new world. Patti Smith gets that, and she presents her childhood here as a [...]

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The great author Virginia Woolf drowned 72 years ago today. To remember her literary legacy, we’ve rounded up four free Woolf books for your Kindle, iPad or other eReader–follow the links below to download. You can find the rest of her books at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has collected condolence letters from other authors and linked to Patti Smith‘s tribute to Woolf. Here’s an excerpt from the letters post:

On March 28, 1941, at the gruesome onset of WWII, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with rocks, treaded into the River Ouse behind the house in East Sussex where she lived with her husband Leonard, and drowned herself. She had succumbed to a relapse of the all-consuming depression she had narrowly escaped in her youth. Once news of her death broke, an outpour of condolence letters captured the enormous collective grief, mourning at once the deeply personal emptiness left behind by a remarkable woman and a loyal friend, and the severe cultural loss of a brilliant mind and a transcendent artist.

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Last evening, at Bryn Mawr College, the multi-media legend Patti Smith was given the 2013 Katharine Hepburn Medal at an absolutely beautifully orchestrated event.

And oh, did she make us cry. From her heart, without prepared words, she spoke directly to us from the stage above about Little Women, Jo March, and a certain season when Patti was twenty-two years old and Katharine Hepburn herself came shopping at Scribner's, where Patti was working. Ms. Hepburn had tied an overlarge man's hat to her head with a green ribbon. She asked for help in locating books. While Patti escorted her down the aisles, Ms. Hepburn would note that Spencer (Tracy) would have loved this book or that, giving Patti (she said, so eloquently, so flawlessly) permission years later to shop for her own husband, even after he had passed on.

Sometimes people really are who they are on the page, and I have never doubted that Patti Smith is the Patti Smith of Just Kids, a book I loved so much (for its integrity, its soulfulness, its ungreen love, its sentences) that I forfeited meetings with writers at a certain Orlando, FL, event so that I could stay in my hotel room and read it. Woolgathering, too, reveals the Patti Smith we met last night.

Patti Smith has, she herself has said, always sought to lessen the distance between herself and her audience. She does. She did. Taking on the obvious questions from passersby during the cocktail and dessert hours, allowing us to exclaim over her, noticing us.

"I like your dress," she said, as I stood near, photographing my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, second photo down, above.

I very rarely like my own clothes. I will always love this dress.

Oh, and in case you are wondering? That bit of graffiti up there does in fact belong to me. I try to stay in the background, whenever I can. But sometimes you just have to tell someone how much you love them.

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What are we to make of Woolgathering, this hand-sized book by the legend Patti Smith? First published in 1992 as a Hanuman Book and described by its author (years later, upon its re-release) as absolutely true. The book, legendary singer/writer tells us, was such that in its writing Smith was drawn from her "strange torpor." Here she is, looking back:

In 1991 I lived on the outskirts of Detroit with my husband and two children in an old stone house set by a canal that emptied into Lake Saint Clair. Ivy and morning glory climbed the deteriorating walls. A profusion of grapevines and wild roses draped the balcony, where doves nested in their tangles.... I truly loved my family and our home, yet that spring I experienced a terrible and inexpressible melancholy. I would sit for hours, when my chores were done and the children at school, beneath the willows, lost in thought. That was the atmosphere of my life as I began to compose Woolgathering.

There are photographs in this slight book—many of clouds, many of childhood places. There are concentrated memories, phantoms, distillations intensely personal and inescapably vivid. Some of the passages begin like the beginnings of psalms, or songs, while others break toward a private vocabulary.

Here is a line:

Exclamation! Questions of origin, scope.

Here is a scene, a codex, a rebus:

How happy we are as children. How the light is dimmed by the voice of reason. We wander through life—a setting without a stone. Until one day we take a turn and there it lies on the ground before us, a drop of faceted blood, more real than a ghost, glowing. If we stir it may disappear. If we fail to act nothing will be reclaimed. There is a way in this little riddle. To utter one's own prayer. In what manner it doesn't matter. For when it is over that person shall possess the only jewel worth keeping. The only grain worth giving away.

Woolgathering is a book of parts. It is a prayer set into motion. It is a return to child awe, a vindication of at least some part of adult responsibilities to make sense of things, to cohere. What do our minds do when we let them roam and wonder? Something perhaps, like this. Let Patti Smith lead the way.

Thanks to my friend Elizabeth Mosier, I will be seeing Patti Smith this coming Thursday evening at Bryn Mawr College. Elizabeth knows what a huge Patti Smith fan I am (I could not stop raving about Just Kids, for example (a book featured prominently in my forthcoming Handling the Truth), or about Smith's interview with Johnny Depp in the pages of Vanity Fair). She knows how proud I was of her piece about Smith in her alum magazine, here. And she knows that, even if I cannot find just the right cocktail dress to wear (because I end up looking so lousy in all of them), I will stand proudly at her side on Thursday, when the Main Line welcomes Patti to town.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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I stopped at The Strand while making my way to a client the other day.  It was a long walk and bitter cold.  I wanted warmth.  I needed books. 

Patti Smith's Woolgathering was on a front table, signed.  It was mine in an instant, and today, while on the train to Penn, I read.  Patti gave the class its first exercise of the day, which began with her words below: 

Blowing upon it, candles, a star ... What does one desire.  A partner.  A freewheeling moon.  Or perhaps to hear again as one heard as a child.  A music—curious, optimistic, as plain and elusive as the call of the reel permeating a summer night.  Expanding squares of laughter and delight.  Everyone dancing, just dancing.  

In three to four sentences only, write what you desire, I said. 

Oh, how they broke my heart.  Oh, how I wanted to be their age again.  So many years of doing still laid out before them.

I have a wonderful class.

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It's been a while since I've had the pleasure — or the time — to write for the Powell's blog, so I thought I'd dip my toe into something I really love: a roundup of a few of the best poetry books I've read in the last year. This list, of course, is by no [...]

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Here are some literary events to jump-start your week. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Author Charity Shumway will be celebrating her debut novel, Ten Girls to Watch, at the powerHouse Arena. Join her on Tuesday, July 31st from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Brooklyn, NY)

Author Karen Thompson Walker and writer Hannah Trini will headline a discussion event. See them on Wednesday, August 1st at the powerHouse Arena from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Brooklyn, NY)

Meet one of the creators behind The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, William Joyce, at a Books of Wonder event. Check it out on Saturday, August 4th from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. (New York, NY)

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Rock star and memoirist Patti Smith will host a lunchtime interview Neil Young at BookExpo America on June 6th.

Here’s more about the event, to be held in the Special Events Hall at the Javits Center: “Ms. Smith’s discussion with Mr. Young will focus on his upcoming memoir, Waging Heavy Peace to be published in North America by Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), in fall of 2012.”

Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids. She is working on a film adaptation of the book with Tony Award winning playwright. If you want to prepare, check out this 10-hour long Spotify playlist linking to the music mentioned in Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir.

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David Bowman has an interesting and timely back-page essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend.  It's called "Read It Again, Sam," and it celebrates books fine enough to be read again.  Patti Smith reports on her plan to read again An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.  Stephen King professes to having read Lord of the Flies eight or nine times.  Bharati Mukherjee reveals that she re-read all of Louise May Alcott at least a half-dozen times at the tender age of 9.

And you?

Earlier this week, while on a plane home from London, I reached for Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), a book I'd read at once upon its release in 2009.  It's just the right size for an eight-hour flight (with a nap tucked somewhere in between), and I'd wanted to re-read it because I craved the surreal mood it had engendered within me—the fog, the mist, the strange; I craved the Berlin at the book's heart.  How had Aridjis achieved her effects?  I would examine this.  I would study it.

I had remembered Clouds as a lyric of a book, and indeed extraordinarily beautiful images float throughout. But what was also fascinating to me, upon my second review, is that Aridjis is not tricking her reader with language here; she is never overreaching.  Indeed, some of her oddest moments and most surreal, memorable constructions are rendered with thoroughly uncluttered, even straightforward prose—a glorious effect that I had not deconstructed my first time through.  So caught up was I in the mood of her Berlin—in the underground worlds, in the residues of a sinister past—that I failed to see that passages like this one, describing an abandoned bowling alley beneath the streets, had been meticulously and not (until the very end) metaphorically put forth.  Aridjis gives us the facts.  She lets us do with them what we will. 

After traversing several dark, damp rooms, plowing ever deeper into the labyrinth, though it was hard to tell how many doorways we'd actually crossed, we arrived at the so-called Gestapo bowling alley, a rectangular room, somewhat larger than the others as far as I could tell.  Our guide asked us to fan out so that everyone could see and directed his flashlight at different spots.  I stepped out from behind a girl with pigtails and began to look around.  It was a pretty chilling sight.  Everything, it seemed, was just the way it had been left decades ago.  At the center of the room lay a metal contraption, about eight feet long, an obsolete machine once used for spitting out wooden bowling balls, and with its rusty corners and thin bars, it looked, at least from afar, like a medieval instrument of torture, like those racks to which victims were bound by their hands and feet and then stretched.

I would not have known this about Clouds had I not read the book a second time.  I would have carried with me a false idea about Aridjis method—a first-blush idea, not a studied one.  I loved the book even more the second time I read it through.  I loved it, though, for somewhat different reasons.

Always, in perpetuity, Clouds will be a signifier for me—a book that in large part sent me to Berlin this past summer, a trip that subsequently led to my own work on a new (and very different) book set i 6 Comments on On Berlin, Re-reading, and Book of Clouds, last added: 12/10/2011