In 2007, while in Iceland to give a talk at a meeting of the Continental Drift Club, the musician and writer Patti Smith also monitored a junior chess tournament in return for being allowed to photograph the table that had been used for the 1972 chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. The next day Fischer sent Smith a note asking her to meet him at midnight in the dining room of her hotel where they sat at a corner table, and after a short stream of rants from Bobby—to which Smith did not react—they spent the next two hours singing rock ’n‘ roll songs. This is just one of the stories in Smith’s book M Train (Knopf Canada), which she describes as “a roadmap to my life.” The world of Smith’s imagination and the world that she walks around in seem to be separated by the thinnest of veils; her ideas and musings often turn into actions. In “Wheel of Fortune,” Smith travels to Veracruz, Mexico, because William Burroughs advised her that she would find the best coffee in the world there. She booked into a modest hotel and spent the next few days sitting at a table in a room filled with sacks of coffee beans, observing men sniffing beans and sipping coffee, and writing in her notebook. Smith writes that she and the proprietor “shared not a word, but the coffee kept coming.” In “Clock with No Hands,” Smith ponders the nature of real time and remembers that, when they were young and living at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel in Detroit, she and her husband slept, ate and wandered around town at any time of the day or night, dreamed up a TV talk show, and realized that not all dreams need to be realized. Such is the magic of Smith’s writing that when I got to the end of the book and flipped it over to the back cover, the phrase “NEW MATERIAL WITHIN” jumped out at me, and for a moment I imagined that if I reopened the book, it would have filled itself with new stories. When this didn’t happen, I consoled myself with reading Smith’s other memoir Just Kids (Ecco), a collection of stories about living in New York in the 1960s with her lover and then friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, amidst a steady stream of famous or soon-to-be-famous artists and musicians.

—Patty Osborne

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