Johnny Cash - The Life by Roger Hilburn

There was much more to the man in black than his stage persona revealed. This well-written and thoroughly-researched biography by LA Times journalist Robert Hilburn traces Cash's development from youth to old age and ill health with remarkable sensitivity and warmth.

The central focus is the evolution of Cash as a musician. From a boy who loved to sing gospel songs with his mum - to a man strumming his guitar with air force pals - on to starting a garage band and eventually after thousands of miles touring across America, a spell of super-stardom before the inevitable fall.

Hilburn goes into detail about most of the songs ever written by Cash and quotes many of the lyrics at length. This really brings his subject to life and it's a joy to read song texts penned by Cash. If you know the songs you will certainly hear his voice and music in your head as you read. Seeing the lyrics on paper it's clear that Cash is a storyteller and poet of great style and wit.

Here are the top 5 new things I learnt about Cash reading this book:

1. His Christian faith played a huge part in his life. He regularly read the Bible and even wrote a book about St John. Despite this he almost never went to church.

2. He wrote Walk the Line for his first wife Vivian. He tried to remain faithful to her and was terrified of separating from her. In the end, it was she who filed for divorce.

3. His return to the music charts with the album American Recordings in 1994 owed a great deal to the inspirational work of music producer Rick Rubin who reinvented Cash at the height of the grunge movement.

4. He was in an incredible amount of pain and on a cocktail of about 40 pills a day as he recorded his last albums with Rubin. Sometimes he was so out of breath that his voice was reduced to a whisper. Engineers had to piece his last songs together from hundreds of takes.

5. Cash was a terrible driver and was in many car accidents. Once he crashed a camper van in the middle of a national park. He ended up by causing a wildfire in which scores of endangered eagles were killed. He got off with a hefty fine.

Of course the book also covers the drug addiction and the famous prison concerts with panache, but there is so much more to Cash and therefore the book than that. An added richness is the cultural context which Hilburn lucidly paints from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century.  This book sits not only within biography but within the historiography of 20th century music - doing Cash justice as one of America's biggest musical icons of the last century.

Drive On from the album 'American Recordings' (1994) is one of the lesser known songs by Cash that I discovered whilst reading the book. He was a prolific artist.

Paint It Black

Dark Romanticism - From Goya to Max Ernst

The Städel Museum, Frankfurt Main:  until 20 January 2013
Musée d’Orsay, Paris:  04 March until 09 June 2013

The exhibition 'Dark Romanticism' is a treasure trove of ghoulish art which is sure to leave even the most well-heeled gallery goer slightly unhinged.

If you are familiar with Gothic literature, such as Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ or the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, then you will be in a good position to appreciate the major themes of the exhibition: the supernatural, death and horror.

As scientific and social progress faltered with the descent of the French Revolution into unadulterated violence, artists began exploring irrational elements of human nature. Therefore the major part of the exhibition is rooted in 19th century European art.

It begins with Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ (1802). A woman is hounded by a demon and a vacant-eyed horse in her sleep. This evolves into Franz Stuck’s ‘The Sin’ (1893). A dark-haired nude stares from the picture, as an evil green viper hisses at us from her shoulder.

Spanish artist Goya features strongly. Despite sketches of dismemberment and rape, there remains a dreamlike quality in all his work which renders it immediately accessible and intriguing. Another highlight is the set of little black pen-and-ink wash pieces by none other than French writer Victor Hugo. His impressionistic doodles are a delight to behold and it is amazing that he considered his artwork to be a mere hobby.

Clips from early black and white horror films embellish the overall gothic mood. Nosferatu, Frankenstein and Dracula are all there along with some more esoteric footage. Not to be missed.

Arguably the curators have tried too hard to extrapolate dark romanticism into the later 20th century. Instead of showing Dali and Hitchcock, a room exploring the massive influence of gothic literature would have added an important dimension to the otherwise comprehensive show.

'The Nightmare' (1802)

Book review: The Fat Years

Shanghai-born author, Chan Koonchung

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

First published in Chinese in 2009 by OUP, Hong Kong as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013

English translation by Michael S. Duke, 2011

318 pages, £6.50 on amazon.co.uk

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung has been billed by some as the Chinese Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the novel has been banned in China, it is far less radical than George Orwell's masterpiece that was first published in 1949.

 
Koonchung's story is set in the China of 2013. Whilst the rest of the world languishes in economic depression, China has forged ahead to a 'Golden Age of Properity'. As Old Chen sips his Lychee Black Dragon Latte in the local Starbucks, it barely crosses his mind to question his own feeling of contentment or that of anybody else around him. On the surface, everybody is happy.

It takes several encounters with old friends before he seriously starts to suspect that something is wrong with reality. First, the spiritual traveller, Fang Caodi, insists that a whole month has been wiped from people's memories. Second, Chen's ex-girlfriend Little Xi is constantly shadowed by undercover agents because of her internet activism.

The story follow's Chen's somewhat rambling path to unveiling the truth. Along the way there are plenty of essayistic style dialogues with wizened Party official, He Dongsheng. Although these offer interesting perspectives on Chinese history and politics, they clog up the action.

In the end, the book is more philosophical treatise, than straight thriller. Is it better to live a lie and be happy or live in truth and be unhappy?

Who owns Franz Kafka?

Israel is laying claim to a stash of unpublished mouldy Kafka works.  Why?

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  He was a member of the German speaking community and also happened to be Jewish.  He died in 1924, a mere five years after the state of Czechoslovakia was founded.  So, given this multi-cultural history any number of modern day nation states could argue for Kafka's legacy.  Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Germany even Switzerland as a german-speaking country might stake a claim.

So why Israel, a state that did not exist when Kafka died?  Well, Kafka's friend Max Brod was a Zionist and emigrated there.  When Brod died, he left a pile of Kafka's writings with his secretary in a cat-infested Tel Aviv flat.  Some connection!

Now the Israel National Library has gone to court for the papers.  They're outraged that the daughters of the deceased secretary want to sell the papers to Germany's Marbach Archive.  The sisters argue that Germany will be a safer place for the papers.

Germany makes sense.  More people are likely to benefit from having the papers in the middle of Europe, instead of tucked away in Israel in some vault between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

But the real question is, how can a nation-state truly own Kafka?  It is the individual reader of say, Metamorphosis or Amerika who is enthralled by the ingenious tangle of events the author relates.  In many ways Kafka owns his readers as much as they own him. Literature is the most democratic artform of all and it is only the illiterate who are truly unable to own it.

A final thought - those mouldy notes may amount to nothing more than a pile of Kafka's old shopping lists and doodlings.  It's the same as people forever trying to discover some new Jimi Hendrix recordings.  The best stuff was published years ago.  When will we realise that even genii have their off days?

Source:

The Independent, 20 July 2010, The Bitter Legacy of Franz Kafka

Awesome Writer Dies

J G Ballard has died aged 78.

If there is one book you should read before you die, it is his autobiographical novel 'Empire of the Sun'.

It is a fictionalized account of his internment, at the age of 12, inside a Japanese prison camp in China during WWII. Surrounded by violence, starvation and death, Jim's spirits never fall and neither does his iron determination to cling onto life.

Self-pity is not in Jim's repertoire. Flies clog his sick gums and pus oozes from the sores that cover his body, but his black humour and ability to barter favours sees him live off a single mouldy sweet potato a day.

The Collins English dicitionary may define 'Ballardian' as 'dystopian modernity', but Ballard's writing in 'Empire' thrives on the man-made catastrophe of war.

Prostate cancer may have taken him, but I look foward to exploring his 15 novels and many short stories further.

• 'Empire of the Sun' was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1987
• 'Crash' was made into a film by David Cronenberg in 1996 and tells of a group of people who take sexual pleasure from car accidents
  

Kundera's integrity under threat

Dissident Czech author Milan Kundera was yesterday accused of denouncing a Western spy in the 1950s.

Kundera who is famous for satirizing the Czechoslovak Communist regime in novels such as 'The Joke' vehemently denied the accusation. Now aged 79, he has lived in France since 1975.

The institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes which collects and publishes Communist secret police files, claimed that it had found documents which proved that Kundera had informed on a fellow student. Part of the Czech state, the institute is widely regarded as credible.

One speculates whether the Communist secret police named Kundera in the document as a way to smear him at a later date. If you were found out as an informer you became a social outcast. In any case, more research will be needed to judge the authenticity of the accusation.

One thinks back to the revelation that Gunter Grass was a member of the Wehrmacht during World War Two and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's latter-day support for Russian President Putin. Author's hailed for their work in defending human liberties are often found out to have a dark past.

Read more here: The Independent