Composed: A Memoir (Rosanne Cash)

A musician's life story, learning to accept herself for what she is, instead of living in the shadow of her famous Dad. Very honest and heartfelt.

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Quotes:

For my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me.

I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water.

I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are a part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them I’ve often found meaning, and relief, while at other times I’ve failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured the experience.

I have always wanted to live as a beginner

what I understand more clearly now, is that it’s not just the singing you bring home with you. It’s the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter, and the daily handling of your instrument if you are a musician, and the humming and scratching and pushing and testing of the voice, the reveling in the melodies if you are a singer. More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace.

Someone once told me to perform to the six percent of the audience who are poets.

The idea of performing, of going on endless tours and living the draining, peripatetic life my dad was leading, was not appealing.

But I did want the songs. I wanted to write them and I even wanted to sing them. I wanted to collaborate with other musicians, and construct arrangements and sonic textures and poetry, and get inside a rhythm and a beat, and go into the studio like a painter and create something from nothing. In the end, I wanted to do that so badly that I concluded that the benefits outweighed the attending risks,

But through all of it, I worked hard, I paid attention, I sang to the six percent even if only two percent showed up on a given night, I sang to become better, I sang for the band if no one else was listening, I just kept doing it until it felt like home. I worked out a lifetime of self-doubt and musical and emotional vulnerabilities under the spotlight.

desire can become commitment, and commitment can make the forces of the universe work to your advantage.

repertoire is destiny.

I would think of her—proud but not egotistical (a feat in itself), delicate and strong—and of how the world would never again be innocent enough to produce another Tammy Wynette.

During those long, frightening days of near-muteness, I vowed that if my voice ever returned, I would give up the internal monologue of self-criticism about it. I promised myself that I would enjoy it, for a change. And I did. I saw my voice in a whole new way once I really did get it back. It was so much stronger than I had believed, so much more lithe and nuanced.

I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about parenting after twenty-plus years of motherhood, but what I knew about was mothering girls.

Having realized that I had been operating on a false premise for over thirty years, I now felt a palpable sense of relief. Maybe some of the other burdens I had carried from the past into my adult life had also been based on equally false assumptions, and maybe I could review some of them now, find a fatal flaw in my logic, revise my prospects for the future, make my way through my personal mazes, and put away some of my regrets and obsessions. It was never too late to undo who you had become.

That was June. In her eyes, there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know and loved. She looked for the best in everyone; it was a way of life for her.

She was like a spiritual detective: She saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and your possible future, and the gifts you didn’t even know you possessed, and she “lifted them up” for you to see.

The best thing I could wish for him now is that all his beliefs are coming true.

There is not meaning in everything, but one can ascribe meaning to anything. Therein is the beauty.

If I had wings I’d cut them down And live without these dreams so I could learn to love the ground.

“God Is in the Roses”

“The World Unseen,” the opening line of which was a reference to Psalm 102,

With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant. Or maybe poignancy isn’t the conclusion to grief. Maybe there is something beyond poignant that I haven’t experienced yet.

film Walk the Line, which had recently been previewed for me, and which I found to be an egregious oversimplification of our family’s private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style;

I ended the album with a track that was seventy-one seconds of silence. To me, it was the only direct tribute track to my mother and my father, both of whom had died at the age of seventy-one.

In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you—or shrinks you, as the case may be—according to your own nature.

You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence.

Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.

We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching eye.

For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

Sometimes songs are indeed postcards from the future, and are not written out of prescience as much as time travel.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks)

Written by Mel Brooks' son. Hopefully there will be a movie version. On one hand, this is genius. It takes George Romero's living dead to their logical conclusion: an epidemic of zombies would certainly take over the world, until the world made dire changes in order to fight back. On the other hand, there is a lot of it, and in the end it gets tiring. It does drive the point home very well... i sincerely hope we never have to go through a zombie crisis in our world.

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Quotes:

It goes by many names: “The Crisis,” “The Dark Years,” “The Walking Plague,” as well as newer and more “hip” titles such as “World War Z” or “Z War One.” I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable “Z War Two.” For me, it will always be “The Zombie War,” and while many may protest the scientific accuracy of the word zombie, they will be hard-pressed to discover a more globally accepted term for the creatures that almost caused our extinction.

I saw them: ten or fifteen, silhouetted against the fires of the burning shanties. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could hear them moaning. They were slouching steadily toward me with their arms raised.

The sky was red that day. All the smoke, the crap that’d been filling the air all summer. It put everything in an amber red light, like looking at the world through hell-colored glasses.

Rainbow Fist: South Africa at War.

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.

Two hundred million zombies. Who can even visualize that type of number, let alone combat it?

We lost a hell of a lot more than just people when we abandoned them to the dead. That’s all I’m going to say.

You wanna know who lost World War Z? Whales.

The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

Wow...

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Quotes:

The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’a.

Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues.

laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate—sadly, almost a national affliction;

Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered. "Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft."

Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.

Ali shut the gates behind us. I heard him mutter a prayer under his breath—he always said a prayer when his son left the house.

The immensely popular Ahmad Zahir had revolutionized Afghan music and outraged the purists by adding electric guitars, drums, and horns to the traditional tabla and harmonium; on stage or at parties, he shirked the austere and nearly morose stance of older singers and actually smiled when he sang—sometimes even at women.

I finally had what I’d wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, I felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

We dined the traditional way, sitting on cushions around the room, tablecloth spread on the floor, eating with our hands in groups of four or five from common platters.

I’ll tell you this, Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.”

Rahim Khan barked a bitter laughter. “It was Homaira and me against the world. And I’ll tell you this, Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.”

Baba loved the idea of America. It was living in America that gave him an ulcer.

Up to that point, our encounter could have been interpreted as a respectful inquiry, one man asking for the whereabouts of another man. But I’d asked her a question and if she answered, we’d be…well, we’d be chatting.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.

“What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”

Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that.”

Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought. A way to be good again.

As an Afghan, I knew it was better to be miserable than rude.

“Beard Patrol”

He leaned toward me, like a man about to share a great secret. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘liberating’ until you’ve done that, stood in a roomful of targets, let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, knowing you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you’re doing God’s work. It’s breathtaking.”

What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace.

And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Till Death Do Us Bark (43 Old Cemetery Road) (Kate and M. Sarah Klise)

A great third installment of the series, about the value of making changes, even if small, in our lives. Now it's the waiting for the next volume, due out in May.

Over My Dead Body (43 Old Cemetery Road) (Kate and M. Sarah Klise)

The second in the series, as good as the first one.

Dying to Meet You (43 Old Cemetery Road) (Kate and M. Sarah Klise)

What a funny book! Full of self-referential humor, a story about a ghost writer, told in letters and pictures. Looks like it's one of a series, so i need to read the others too.

The Dirty Parts of the Bible -- A Novel (Sam Torode)

A rollicking yarn that reminds me of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

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Quotes:

This novel is a retelling of the ancient Jewish tale of Tobias and Sarah (as found in the Book of Tobit), set in the world of my grandparents, who met and married in Texas during the Great Depression.

My father, the Reverend Malachi Henry, was a fierce opponent of liquor, dancing, gambling, whoring, and all other forms of worldly enjoyment.

Texas’s main exports are cotton, oil, and preachers.

Heaven, Father said, was one long church service where the saints sang through the Baptist Hymnal again and again, into infinity.

For the first time, I realized that Father had once been a lot like me.

That was the third or fourth time I got saved. Whenever I feared I was in imminent danger of death, I’d call on Jesus and beg for salvation. The rest of the time, I didn’t give him any thought. Jesus was like an insurance policy against eternal fire.

The idea that we evolved from monkeys was tough to swallow. But what was the alternative? Flaming swords, fornicating angels, faked dinosaurs, and Philistine foreskins?

If sex was just about power—the weak over the strong, the rich over the poor—I didn’t want it.

I didn’t have sex with the girl, but I sure got screwed.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a face creased and oily like worn leather. Between his white whiskers and lively eyes, he looked both ancient and ageless—a look I’ve only seen in black men.

“Well,” Craw said, “I was going to compose a ballad in memorium of your demise, but I couldn’t decide whether it should be called ‘The Remus Kid’s Last Ride’ or ‘The Remus Kid’s First Ride’—so I gave up and rescued you instead.”

“Aw, don’t you mind us,” Chester said. “I done got religion myself once. Just can’t remember where I put it. And Craw, here—why, he knows the Good Book better’n any minister. He can recite all Ten Commandments by heart. Course, that’s cause he’s done broke ’em so many times.” “You’ve got to sin before you can be redeemed,” Craw said. “A man might as well enjoy it.”

“Fill up,” Craw told me. “This might be our last grub for a while. Food on the road is as scarce as preachers in heaven—if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Well, imagine a movie—a vast production with kings, fools, knights, ladies, peasants, preachers, prostitutes—every sort of person you find in the world. When the actors take off their costumes, they’re all equal. So it is with life. When death strips us of our roles, we’re all equals in the grave.”

“Remember this, my boy. The two greatest men who ever lived—Jesus and Socrates—were both hoboes.”

“This world is full of wonders,” he said, hoisting his treasure. “You just need the eyes to see them.”

Texas. Craw might as well have told me that we’d just entered the Land of Oz. It was a mythical place for me—the land of cactuses and cowboys, the land of my ancestors. I couldn’t believe I was really there.

We both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white!

“Doesn’t believe in stories? The Bible isn’t a damn book of facts, it’s a collection of stories. And Jesus wasn’t a scientist or a mathematician—he was a storyteller.” Craw threw up his hands. “Why, all of life is a story!”

“I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but I doubt if it’s even possible for you white folks to understand the Jews.”

Good thing I was laying flat, or she would have seen me already.

“Well, Brother McGraw, you ought to be a preacher. Cause the way you talk about Jesus, he sounds like somebody I’d like to have a drink with.”

AFTER Sarah left, I licked the blood from my lip and thought about how attraction is like a rose. It springs up from fertile, manure-rich soil; it blooms for a day, giving off an intoxicating scent; and then it wilts, rots, and festers on the shit pile of life. As my father might have said, all things come from shit; all things return to shit—except he would have used the word “dust.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Would you stay for five hundred dollars?” Craw stopped, scratched his chin, then waved his hand. “I’m a hobo, son. If I had that kind of money, I’d lose my position in life.”

If all that exists is only what you can see, you live in a pretty small universe.”

Only a speck of reality comes to us through our eyes. Shit—things we can’t see are the only things that make life worth living.”

“Tobias my boy, they’re all haunted. There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t have a demon of one sort or another.”

For love is stronger than death.

James Madison (Richard Brookhiser)

An unexpectedly good read. Short and to the point, dynamic, even exciting biography of the "Father of the Constitution" and founder of the Democratic (then called Republican, i kid you not) Party. Good introduction to the first four American presidents and their times. The politics is surprisingly "modern" in the bad sense. At least he was able to use his genius for niceness and not for evil.

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Quotes:

Scottish teachers were popular in mid-eighteenth-century America because they were sparks from a furnace of intellectual life. Scotland was a poor, small country, but it was unusually literate,

Madison hardly ever wrote or spoke of his beliefs, then or later. Did he have faith? Had he lost it? The most he ever said, in a wintry letter at the end of his life, was that “the mind prefers” the idea of an infinitely good, if invisible, God.

Eighteenth-century letter writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic began to fear that their letters were lost only after seven or eight months had passed. They lacked the blessings of Twitter and Skype; what they got in return was leisure to think.

Jefferson’s letter implied two far more radical ideas. Property is only a secondary right, since society allows it “for the encouragement of industry,” and the right to earn a living—“to labor the earth”—precedes it.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Three months after Washington’s inauguration, the Bastille fell. Louis XVI’s ministers had been trying to reform France’s finances (which had been strained, in part, by its support of the American Revolution). Now reform had provoked a new revolution.

Hamilton’s reaction showed the weakness of his strength. He published a ninety-five-page pamphlet of his own, denying that he was corrupt by admitting that he was an adulterer; he printed both his mistress’s love letters and her husband’s blackmail notes.

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home” occurs under the threat of “danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

The Alien Act allowed the president to deport any noncitizen foreigner he thought “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the country, without hearing or trial. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to say or publish anything “false, scandalous and malicious” about the federal government, or Congress.

the “right of freely examining public characters and measures” was “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

“Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence.... In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Freedom of the press was not a privilege accorded journalists; it was another name for citizen responsibility. “It is the duty as well as right of intelligent and faithful citizens to discuss” the errors of their representatives, both “to control them by the censorship of the public opinion” and “to promote a remedy according to the rules of the constitution”—that is, to elect new representatives at the next election.

Madison and Jefferson shared two goals, and two prejudices, which would guide their foreign policy for the next eight years and beyond. The goals were peace and expansion; the prejudices were a disposition to trust France and to distrust Britain. [...]
Jefferson’s and Madison’s agreement on their two goals and their two prejudices gave their actions consistency and, in many cases, force. But it could also blind them to difficulties and failure. [...]
Their peace policy was not a passive one, however. American commerce, they believed, was so valuable to the world that it could be used as a weapon instead of armies and frigates.

Republican presidents could act swiftly, decisively, and even extralegally when their foreign policy interests were clear.

Madison biographers who want their hero to be consistent in all things will not be pleased with this analysis; political philosophers who value intellectual elegance and constitutional lawyers, who seek guidance from the Father of the Constitution, will be even less so. But we have to remember Madison’s job: politics.

It should be enough for us that a great mind gave it his best thoughts for as long as Madison did.

Madison was the last framer standing. Loneliness increased his eminence, like a hill on a plain.

Making book lists was an old pastime of theirs; it was a form of vicarious shopping, vicarious reading, almost vicarious thinking.

On the question of slavery, all Madison’s intelligence and political skills amounted to nothing. His statesmanship failed, and in failing he typified the founding generation, instead of leading it.