In a 1976 interview with New York’s then-FM radio station WNEW, Patti Smith said, when asked whether or not the lyrics of her song “Redondo Beach” were autobiographical: “That song is based on an old poem of mine; it’s kind of like my version of ‘Endless Sleep’ — having nothing to do with anything but fantasy.” Smith’s attitude seems like the best one to take when talking about whether or not writing is “autobiographical”; not that every work isn’t at some level involved with that creator’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, perceptions, experiences, etc., but the art itself has to do with the craft, or the transformation of those “things” into a product that is then set forth, both within history and within a traditional (art) form. The worn-out, dumbed-down notion that “art” and “biography” are interchangeable can lead a lesser man to believe that, say, Woody Allen is actually the nebishy intellectual character who populates so many of his films. Such a confusion can make even a regular artist person reticent to discuss anything in “life” that might be connected to work, above, beyond, or below the nuanced knowledges and technical juxtapositions of literally everything involved with creation itself. Is the idiocy of this weirdly stupid “auto-detailizing” phenomenon related to our current, annoying, twittering pop trend toward the fetishization of the banally personal, and, in the worst cases of the “famous,” to all of those not-solely American obsessions with the “lives of ” (or lies about, told by, etc.) “those” people, none of whom (or which) has anything to do with anybody’s art?! (Pause…) The life is not the work, period, is my new(er) answer toward, the auto/bio/graph/i/cal: No matter how artful (or how boring!) someone’s life, or someone’s autobiography, is, no one with any smarts, or with any real substance, will be “reading” it, meaning/full/y, as art, in the future, when, as Heiner Muller put it, we’ll be lucky, with our oily-ass selves, to be “living” on Mars.
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