Today is EOU Commencement. So I took a little two-block walk, under intermittent light rain, to check it out. A range of facial and other expressions were noted, plus dronage.
The commencement speaker was our own Gov. Kate Brown. Whether you love or hate or don’t care about her politics and policies, I have to say that she is one uninspiring, extraordinarily ordinary public speaker (judge for yourself at
http://livestream.com/eou/events/4124537). On that subject, just for contrast, here is one noteworthy commencement speech, delivered to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College by the writer David Foster Wallace (deceased).
One of my favorite reads of the past several years has been punk rock goddess/poetess Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her 2012 National Book Award winner chronicling her 1960s-1970s affair with taboo-shattering photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her leap from obscurity to celebrity.
Recently retrieving Smith’s 2015 M Train from the local library afforded another chance — following our last success with Joseph Mitchell‘s wonderful Up In The Old Hotel — to entertain ourselves with a book that I could read aloud at bedtime. But I was well into two or three chapters Thursday night before I realized that Kim had fallen asleep. The hour was sufficiently late that I forcibly put the book aside, waiting until the next morning to find out where Kim had taken leave of it, so she could catch up on her own — or I was even willing to reread the missed portion. But as it turned out, Kim signaled me to read on, as her intention is now to read the thing in her own time. After all, she had a couple of books in process on her own anyway, and the book was soon due back to the library. So yesterday, a fairly undemanding, quiet, rainy day — I read on. (Completing the book well before midnight, I was still not sleepy and had to take in a couple of episodes of Peaky Blinders on Netflix before retiring.)
Smith writes about coffee, travel, her cats, her parents, her now-adult kids, her deceased husband, TV crime dramas, dreams, writers and writing, conversations, time, memories and the realities and tragedy and humor and minutiae of her life as she is approaching seventy. The book is liberally sprinkled with her trademark photographs, taken with her ancient and rather idiosyncratic Polaroid instant film cameras, appearing as usual and at first glance as crude documents but always becoming arresting and moving for me, as I have watched this aspect of her work over the years. And for me the entire book became an utterly beautiful instance of prose that made its way to my brain as poetry. Patti Smith has always been beautifully human to me and even more so, now.
If you want to get a taste of the Patti Smith I first got to know back in the day, some forty years ago, try this, from her classic 1975 album, “Horses”:
