Since I’ve retired from compiling a best-of-the-year music list, I only have one area of cultural ephemera left to quantify, and that’s books. And I’m doing a pretty lousy job at that, to be honest. I was so embarrassed by the garbage I read in 2012 (both of Michael Caine’s autobiographies? Really?), I didn’t bother to post a list.
2013 was a little better. I finally warmed up to the concept of the Kindle, after eyeing it suspiciously from across the room for several months. I’m no Luddite technophobe, but not turning paper pages felt like I was somehow betraying the bibliophile oath. The feeling died as I realized my shoulder bag did not have to make me list to the side like a tugboat taking on seawater due to the weight of several books anymore if I just used the Kindle. (My vaguely tugboat-ish shape is another issue entirely). Speeding that feeling to its grave was the acquisition of an iPad this past fall, which makes Kindle reading feel a little more book-like due to its larger size. Now I’m riding the narcotic rush of clicking one button on Amazon and having a new book materialize instantly. It doesn’t even feel like I’m spending money…
My cripplingly expensive clicking has at least resulted in a Books of the Year list that consists entirely of books published this year, without being padded out by books that came out earlier (often years earlier) and only recently stumbled upon.
Let’s begin…
Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn
What struck me most forcefully about the new Cash biography is that it exposed the terrific Walk The Line film as almost complete fiction. Of course, it is naive to believe that biopics are a straight re-telling of facts, but Cash’s story related on film has only a nodding acquaintance with the reality as detailed by Hilburn. The circumstances surrounding Cash’s discovery by Sam Phillips, his meeting June Carter, their courtship, and his much-ballyhooed 1968 “clean-up” were not only fictionalized, but just a biscuit away from pure fantasy.
Almost no great artist can stand the biographer’s scrutiny with their halo intact. People who create at high levels tend to be addiction-prone, incredibly selfish, lacking impulse-control skills, and make life difficult if not downright hellish for those around them. The Cash myth is that he went through his pill-popping “wild years,” then cleaned up and became the avuncular St. Johnny, pals with Billy Graham, and ingester of nothing stronger than black coffee. The reality is that he remained incorrigible and unpredictable, and his continued substance abuse led to the health problems that plagued his final decade and hastened his demise at the not-too-old age of 71.
Johnny Cash: The Life is no hatchet job or expose. It is a scholarly examination of a very complex individual. The negative aspects of a personality are magnified when there is no self-awareness (in other words, assholes who don’t know they’re assholes are the worst kind). Cash was painfully aware of his shortcomings, and I feel that his positive inclinations won out by the end of his story, as we hope they do for all of us. This victory was made possible, in his view, by his religion and treating his life as a spiritual journey. As cloying and hokey as that sounds (I cringed writing it), there’s no other way to put it, and there’s no separating the man from his faith. To his eternal credit, he practiced religion the way it should be practiced — without judging others (he knew better than that), with a sense of humor, humility, and a fierce intelligence. Most importantly, he subjected his faith to constant, rigorous questioning and probing. (He even wrote a work of religious scholarship — a fictionalized biography of the apostle Paul titled Man In White.)
Oh, and he did some pretty good songs, too. Continue reading
Holy Bee of Ephesus 