i’ve been meaning to write a post for a while now about the secondhand books one finds in a shop. the guardian had a nice piece over the summer that i hoped to replicate on bark, and thus learn all about your favorite discoveries, dear reader(s). then i had to go and fucking ruin it by not writing that post. not to mention that jonathan and cathie wrote such lovely posts about used books that my original idea just seems stupid by comparison. so now i’m gonna do something totally, totally different. i’m gonna write about used cds instead.
In January, Sam posted some words about Patti Smith and her memoir, Just Kids. I finished the book last night and will say that it belongs among the top five or ten most important books of my life to date.
I was as the Port Townsend Writers Conference a couple of years ago, and because there wasn’t a hot tub, and because I was eating meals with people I didn’t know, I started asking asinine questions at dinner, making conversation, etc, and somehow the question, “Who’s the coolest person in the world?” came up, as it so frequently does. Being literary types, we kicked this around a little, established some parameters–Could it be anyone from all time? we wondered. Yes, we decided. What did we mean by cool? We weren’t going to answer that question. It was uncool even to ask it. And then we started throwing names around. Lou Reed came up. Dylan. Someone mentioned the Dalai Lama, but I said, while I thought he was great and everything, I wasn’t sure he was “cool,” necessarily, even if cool people tended to attach themselves to him. The conversation continued the next night at dinner, with a slightly different configuration of people. Again, there was no hot tub. Stephen Malkmus was mentioned. Dennis Cooper. De Niro. Someone wondered if Jesus was cool. I wondered about a new bracelet campaign: What Would Jesus Do, if He Were Cool? Denis Johnson was mentioned. So was Beckett. I realized we had no women on the cool list. I pointed this out and then asked if, all things being equal, men were cooler than women. It was a disastrous question, of course, and had the same effect farting at the table would have had. Look, I said, I’m not saying men are cooler than women, but when considering the coolest person in the world, we’re only naming men. Then somebody said, Patti Smith.
Right. Yes. Possibly the coolest person in the world.
Ms. Smith has a memoir out called Just Kids, reviewed in this week’s NYTBR. While the review isn’t very interesting, the book looks like it probably is. And coming from the coolest person in the world, I’m guessing it will probably be, well, cool.
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