Ways to Be Pretentious
Ian Penman, 5 May 2016
Collected Lyrics 1970-2015
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015,978 1 4088 6300 8 Show More
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015,
“... It was only when I got to the chapter featuring two people whose work I happen to know and love, Paul Bowles and Jean Genet, that the spell was broken. All of a sudden, this oddfellow’s odyssey didn’t feel quite so whimsical – it felt borderline exploitative, as though she was using these people, or their memory, to make herself look good. ... ”