I take it as my loss that my whole life Patti Smith has remained off my radar. I knew her as a one-hit wonder with "Because the Night" co-written (but primarily written by) with Bruce Springsteen. But she's released a starving baking student's dozen of albums and has enjoyed a long career as a highly respected artist, musician and writer.

When I was plumbing local public libraries for rock biographies, I did see her Just Kids (2010) and picked it up, but put it back down despite seeing it was highly lauded. It just didn't read like the usual rock biography. Recently I saw her M Train (2015) in the library for the first time and judging it by its cover decided to give it a spin. I was transfixed. Something about her writing style sucked me in and tainted the way I moved about the rest of my day, like every little thing was just hoping to become memory. Kindred mentions of Wings of Desire (one of my favorite movies from college) and The Master and Margarita (one of my favorite books from high school) tugged; although I should mention that I didn't get the vast majority of allusions and references she dropped from her copious knowledge of arts and culture.

M Train put me in meditative, hyper-observant moods that had me thinking and seeing in her voice. Mind you, that happened with Catch-22, too, and after reading that I'd go about making quirky observations and absurd interpretations of things around me. M Train also had me go back to Just Kids (at another library) and I ended up loving that, too. The tone of the two works are quite different despite being published only five years apart. Both can be considered memoirs. Just Kids is about her early life and relationship with artist/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose name was familiar to me since his death from AIDS in the late 80s was well-reported in the news because of the "controversial" nature of his work. I didn't know there was a connection between them. She wrote the book to fulfill a promise she made to him when he was dying to tell their story.

M Train covers personal aspects of her adult life apart from Mapplethorpe, and is a bit cagey about her music career which was a little off-putting at first but I came to understand. Like she never mentions "Because the Night", but instead says that she "came across a bit of money". She also casually mentions touring to earn enough money to buy or invest in something that was important to her, but touring is a big thing! It means she's a big deal in some way; she has backing, an audience and a way to pay musicians. But that's not the emphasis of the book, so she rightfully downplays it. M Train is in a completely different mental state from Just Kids. The important men in her life have all gone and I got the sense of her moving on with her life in a certain amount of personal isolation and grief. Batty, even. Mental. But artistic, because she's an artist.

I don't know if I would have been a fan of her music if I had been exposed to her long ago (like I would have with Sonic Youth), but unfortunately I only heard that one radio hit and no one I knew had any of her albums or didn't push them on me. She's also a photographer, and it may have been her pictures that prompted me to wonder about my iPhone as a camera and dig up what cameras I had left.

Speaking of reads, I also recently read a book about "The Simpsons" called Springfield Confidential by Mike Reiss, which is a no-brainer, (library) must-read for anyone even vaguely entertained by the show. The thing is a lot of what he writes are actually jokes rather than anecdotes. But it's a simple formula to figure out what is which: if it has a punchline, it's a joke. And a lot of his "anecdotes" have punchlines. He does write about the internationalization of "The Simpsons" and how there are fans all over the world who take sudden interest in him once he tells them his job. What I don't know if he knows is that in the Taiwan market, (I'm told) the show isn't directly or loosely translated but has a completely re-written script in Chinese to something that still matches the visuals but has nothing to do with the original plot in English! That's some mind-blowing, extra-level creativity going on there!