Reading Diary
A while back I was in a book store looking for something to start reading, and this recently published Merle Haggard biography caught my eye. I'd never written a Marc Eliot book but he's written biographies of a lot of major musicians and actors, in the photos section there's a picture of Eliot and Haggard together in the '90s, so they knew each other. It seems like Eliot didn't work on the book until after Haggard's death in 2016, so there's not a lot of firsthand quotes from Haggard, although he occasionally quotes Haggard's memoirs or even debunks or questions Haggard's recollections, it's a really dense and well-researched book. Haggard's quite a character, just about the only "outlaw" country star who actually had a lengthy criminal record and was actually in San Quentin for two and a half years when Johnny Cash performed there. Eliot doesn't shy away from the sordid complexity of Haggard's life (he married 5 times, and two of his wives were named Leona -- Haggard joked that he didn't have to change his tattoo). Eliot also does a great job of breaking down Haggard's musical evolution, revealed interesting stories behind my favorite Haggard records and made me curious to check out some more.
Richard Chisolm is a Baltimore-based cinematographer I've known from doing a lot of video work in the area over the last several years, a very intelligent guy with some good stories. So when he mentioned that he had a book coming out, I asked him to send me a copy and I'd pitch some Baltimore publications on covering it. I didn't really have any luck with that but I'm glad I got a chance to read it, it's interesting to get a sort of academic perspective on making documentaries, the ethics and economics and visual language of fact-based filmmaking. Right now, anybody can make a "documentary" for YouTube or a streaming service, which is good in some ways but comes with a lot of pitfalls, and I feel like this would make a good handbook for a first time documentarian to honor some basic principles of journalism and cinema that might be getting eroded a little bit these days.
This big, dense volume features Paul McCartney reflecting on the lyrics of over 150 songs from across his career. Of all of the songwriting giants who could do something like this, McCartney is the one who's probably got the most goofy simplistic lyrics in even some of his greatest songs, so sometimes it's funny to see a page of silly little rhymes on one page and his memories of writing them on the next page. And even when his lyrics are brilliant, he's usually pretty humble about it and just explains why a particular word occurred to him or whatever. But McCartney is always a good hang and this book is enjoyable much in the same way as the "McCartney 3, 2, 1" docuseries where Rick Rubin plays his old tracks and they talk about them, and it's kind of remarkable just hearing all these moments from his life and how they influenced his art at different points and what his songwriting routines are.
In middle school and high school I just devoured Kurt Vonnegut books, most of his novels as well as some of the collections like Welcome To The Monkey House. This is a more comprehensive volume of all of his short fiction, some of which I'd read before, some I hadn't, some great stories I'd totally forgotten about and got to experience all over again. Short stories published in magazines and newspapers were a thriving business and one of the most popular forms of American entertainment in the years before there was a television in every home. And some of the essays in the front of the book almost make it sound like Vonnegut was just cranking these things out for a living before he really found his voice as a novelist, but to me it's remarkable just how much his particular way of looking at the world and his distinctive phrasings and rhythms are there from the very beginning in his early '50s stories.
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