Patti Smith and Why Books Matter

I was very happy this week to learn that the National Book Award for Non-Fiction went to the “Godmother of Punk,” Patti Smith, for her memoir, Just Kids. 
 
I found this very good news for several reasons. I was a big fan of Patti Smith in the 1970s when her first album, “Horses,” was released like a bombshell, followed by other classic rock masterpieces such as “Radio Ethiopia” and “Easter.” 
 
But more important, I was happy because I read Just Kids earlier this year and had, in fact, heard Smith reading from her book at the Hammer Museum at UCLA in January. It is a highly entertaining, emotional, and ultimately heartbreaking book. On one level it is the portrait of an artist in her formative years which happened to occur in New York in the late 1960s and early 70s with cameos by dozens of interesting figures from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to Allen Ginsberg and Salvador Dali. But it is also the heartbreaking story of her lifelong love for the artist and photographer Robert Mappelthorpe, Smith’s soulmate with whom she was in a physical relationship until he discovered his true sexuality and, thereafter, remained artistically and spiritually bound until Mappelthorpe died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 43.
 
Just Kids becomes a tribute to the life of the mind, of life lived in the pursuit of the things that matter most: art, music, literature. Smith turns out to be a person who is much more sensitive, more thoughtful, more introspective, and, in important ways, more tied to traditional values of art and literature than we ever expected. Which brings us her acceptance speech this week upon receiving the National Book Award. Smith recalled how she worked at Scribner’s book store on Fifth Avenue in New York. She commented that she always wondered how it would feel to write a book that won a literary award. 
 
Then she made the following comment: 
 
"Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."
 
I say amen to this sentiment about the book as the foundation of our intellectual, artistic, and cultural lives. And to Patti Smith: Congratulations on winning the National Book Award and for staying true to the things that matter.