Patti Smith won the National Book Award for her beautiful new book on her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. I first encountered Mapplethorpe’s work as a thirteen year old at Barnes and Noble – quite innocently and it was and remains incredibly shocking! I didn’t encounter Patti Smith’s work until recently and now she seems to be everywhere at once! Last week she appeared over and over in a new but forgettable documentary of William Burroughs and now she writes this moving, inspiring and elegiac book. She tells, romantically, of a very different New York City than what I know  and it’s particularly interesting because I work in the East Village and Lower East Side where Patti, Robert and Burroughs all lived in the 60′s and 70′s.

I love a couple of lines:

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos– the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I crave honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination

And:

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

I’m not sure artists today have the same bold visions or maybe they just aren’t happening in New York.

After months of procrastination, I began composing String Quartet No.3. I’ve never had trouble starting works since my process relies on intuition, situation and subjectivity so intensely.

One’s third quartet has to be good and I’m freaking myself out just a little. Wolfgang Rihm, one of my great heros wrote his third quartet at the age of 27 and it is one of his finest works. Brahms, my childhood hero stopped at his third quartet. For the first time in my life I have let the blank page spook me. My solution: write String Quartet No.4 concurrently to simply remind myself that String Quartet No.3 isn’t the last word.

I played a similar trick on myself when writing Sibyl Tones, my first quartet – I said that it wasn’t really my “first quartet;” it was only a sketch. When writing my second quartet, I thought it would turn my Sibyl Tones into my first quartet by being a latter movement. By then (even months later), I realized that the situation (and thus my intuition) had changed significantly and that String Quartet No.2 (2005)  really stood on its own.

I believe they are my finest works and suddenly, surprisingly I find myself standing in their shadow as though they were written by someone else and I doubt if I can replicate the feat, let alone exceed it.