Book Love. 💙💘
I adore books! For me they have been the windows to many parts of my life. There have been types, styles, and recordings of certain musicians that I would have never gotten to experience if it were not for a book the I read that opened my eyes to its exsistance.A very good case in point is Ray Manzarek's Light My Fire. I had listened to the Doors but I'd never taken in an entire album of their work. It was not until I had read his autobiography that I was opened up to his amazing life. It was knowing that he took many of his phrasings and melodic ideas from songs he learned taking piano lessons as a child that encouraged me to listen to these great works and virtuosic playing skills of the band. Also his words told me of a band called the Grateful Dead.
He hated this other great band of the late 60's. He called them self-indulgent, over intoxicated, out of tune, and sloppy when he wasn't speaking of how selfish their Keyboard player was. Thus turning me off from listening to the group for years and years. But one day I was on an extended road trip and stopped at a gas station to get some tunes for the tape deck to keep me awake.
I saw a tape of the Grateful Dead's American Beauty on sale and I grabbed it up. I had read they were hard rock for their time and wanted stay awake for the rest of the drive. What a mislabeling for my ears. I though I'd hear something like Steppin Wolfe or something that would evolve into Stone Temple Pilots, instead I hear beautiful hippie jams of rebellion and intoxication. Though beautiful, it wasn't the brutality I expected when I got into extreme metal like Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth years later.
After falling head-first in love with this mellow group of recreational drug users I started reading the vast library of work on this group. I found out they are the most written about music group in history and I fell in love with Jerry Garia's oral biography of his life Dark Star.
This book captures his life in the exact words of those who were around him. His family, friends, most of his co-workers, and partners would tell of this man's life as they were around the man living it. Every detail from how he lost the finger on his right hand from a childhood game to his battles with cigarettes, heroine, and diabetes to how these effected the life of those around him and his art.
Finding that the cigarettes did more damage to his body than all the hard drugs he used encouraged me to give up smoking and watch what I ate and try to stay away from the extreme amounts of candy I would eat. No matter how much I respected his ability to play the guitar and preform music; what I took from that book was to not live a life of pure indulgence to the point of shortening the life I do posses.
I still love and adore biographies and autobiographies to this day, but I have expanded my readings to religious books of all religious beliefs, formal philosophy, and science fiction past the types that were made into bock-buster movies. I have learned so much reading how others succeeded or failed in their existences, or how their world view shaped who they were and the world it created for them. Being able to see their pit falls helped me watch for them or attempt to avoid them.
None were more so than Voltaire. The man wrote and spoke his mind just to be persecuted for it. He spend most of his life on house arrest. But the joke was on his captures. Voltaire lived in a beautiful castle and his lover was a gorgeous and brilliant woman that came to him. He spent his many hours drunk, fucking, and writing works that we still love and learn from today. He also avoided the plagues being locked in his own home and lived to be an ancient old man of the late 1700's. His persecutions caused him to live a life we can be enriched by all while we have enjoyed the good fortune of knowing he was happy and blessed unlike Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky on the other hand angered those whom forced him into military service, torture, and starvation. He turned to gambling and booze to try to calm himself and the world of torment he was forced to live. When these did not work he turned to religion and writing. His craft became some of the greatest novels ever written in any language. We also know he died starving and alone.
Voltaire was a giant influence upon the structures and beginnings of the United Sates. Ben Franklin met with Voltaire during the Revolutionary War for ideas while he and John Adams tried to get monetary funding from France.
I also can't help to think for all the influence that great French thinkers had for our country I see us heading the same direction as Russia of the late 1800's. Any differing views or beliefs are silenced by prison, forced labor, military service, falsified criminal charges, or a silencing of their communication abilities by censorship of all mediums they can use. I don't think it is coincidence the Salinger had most of his life's work under lock and key till many years after his physical body's death.
