Hooves
Patti Smith has been in the media a lot these days, which makes the pleasure of my meeting her last fall even greater. She’s going to be a speaker at Pratt’s graduation this year, along with Johnathan Letham, so it’s writers for the win.
The other day, a friend of a friend of mine tossed out this Flaubert quote over pints (for the boys, that is… a Bordeaux for me) at the extraordinarily warm-lit Brooklyn Public House: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
[Side bar: Relating to today's earlier post on math, Flaubert also said, "All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."]
But getting on back to Patti Smith, she told this to Interview Magazine:
If you attach anything harmful to the creative process, you have to do that. If you learn nothing else from me, this is a really important lesson. I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they attach a substance to their creative process. A lot of it is purely habitual. They don’t need it, but they think they do, so it becomes entrenched. Like, I can’t go without my coffee. I can go without drinking it, but I can’t go without it nearby. It’s the feeling of how cool I feel with my coffee. Because I don’t feel cool with this tea. [Bollen laughs] You know, there are pictures of me with cigarettes in the ’70s, and everybody thought I smoked. I can’t smoke because I had TB when I was a kid. But I loved the look of smoking—like Bette Davis and Jeanne Moreau. So I would have cigarettes and just light ’em and take a couple puffs, but mostly hold them. Some people said that was hypocritical. But in my world, it wasn’t hypocritical at all. I wasn’t interested in actually smoking them. I just liked holding them to look cool. All right, was it a bad image to show people? I’m happy to let people know I wasn’t really smoking.
There it is, kiddos, badassery is in the eye of the beholder. We don’t have to self-mutilate, cutting the beauty out of ourselves to insert into our art. You can be healthy and creative all at the same time–and probably have a better career for it.
Don’t die the poet’s death.
You drink Bordeaux? Once, I wandered around denver with a liter of Bordeaux in my bag. It got easier to carry as the night went on.
! jonathan lethem is speaking at your graduation? jealous. also bummed that he is coming HERE to pasadena as i am moving back to brooklyn.
i tend to agree with the first flaubert quote, though what is ‘regular’ and ‘orderly’ are always subjective.