When Chauncey Gardener in "Being There" says "I don't read," all the party guests agree that no one reads, no one has the time. And the audience laughs. Of course Chauncey means he simply doesn't know how to read. So that's his excuse.
My excuse used to be that I couldn't afford it. Time was money and since I poured over every word as if it were poetry, even the novels, I simply couldn't take the time to do it. Something had to be work-related in order for me to allow myself to do it. But my entire approach to work and writing changed when I met Nik Venet, as my album producer and mentor. I won't go so far as to say I read merely for pleasure, now, because I'm still too work-motivated to simply engage in something as frivolous as pleasure on a regular basis. But I will say I am armed with all the reasons necessary for me to allow myself to read regularly, and I thought you might need some and, therefore, benefit from hearing some of mine.
"How can you write if you don't read?" asks Nik Venet at the beginning of his ongoing Songwriting/Performance seminar series. Everyone is handed a reading list when they first arrive. The writers listed are all amazing novelists and poets whom Venet has discovered around two to fifteen years before the world at large does. Both Toni Morrison and Rita Dove won prestigious new writer awards two years after their names appeared on the Venet reading list. So it's like being the first on your block to discover these exquisite writers in many cases. And since I co-ordinate and host the seminar, I can't be the only one not reading these writers, so that's one work-related rationale for having to do something so pleasurable. I eased into it with Toni Morrison's "Jazz" on tape read by the author. It was totally enthralling, and her control over the language so masterful and inspiring, I found myself traveling long distances at the slightest provocation, just to be in the car where I could put the tape in my stereo. Since, that way, I was doing two things at once, I could easily justify spending the time on it.
I can't remember the exact order of discovery, but all of the authors offered a different type of treasury. Bukowski's world might seem on the surface like it had nothing in common with the likes of me, a Dallas-born Doctor's daughter. And yet the irony with which he draws characters and writes about relationships hits a common chord with anyone who's ever really lived, whatever the neighborhood they may have lived in. Lyle Lovett has a wonderful command of that kind of irony in a songwriting genre. Whether he ever read Bukowski, I don't know. But what I like in one, I also appreciate in the other. Raymond Carver's Short Cuts was on the list two years before Robert Altman attempted to turn it into a film. It took me until the fourth story to stop waiting "for something to happen" and start grasping the power in his detailed reality.
Some people read to get ideas for songs. That's not how it works for me. There's so much more depth an author can provide in the long form of a novel, that the fleshed out real people characters and the intricacies of the plots involve us in a way that seems to give texture to our own writing of songs. It's a little like "back story" in screen writing--the rest of the story of the characters that is not shown on the screen, but which fills out the characters somehow just because the screenwriter knows it. Singer/songwriter Corwyn Travers explains it like this, "Literature is a compatible art form, not a competitive one, so it's easier to learn from it. Furthermore, a book is limitless in what it can give... including putting a visual to our own feelings." I happen to know Corwyn was reading Dorothy Allison's "Bastard Out of Carolina," one of my personal favorites from the list, while she was writing a particular song as a seminar assignment. She was inspired to write the last line of the following, autobiographical verse by her intense experience of reading the book: "Father spent his days behind the wheel/Told me I would never miss a meal/But hunger was a part of me/And it rocked me every night to sleep."
Monique Dayan loved Joan Didion's use of language in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album." And in reading "Jazz," Monique said she would spend ten minutes on one paragraph just to get the depth of what Toni Morrison was saying. I did the same thing, but with my rewind button in the car. I remember when I first started reading "Cowboys Are My Weakness," a group of stories by Pam Houston, I kept wondering if she was a songwriter as well. Every other line sounded like a lyric, packed with rich analogies and imagery.
The L.A. Times in an article March 7, quotes Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (Viking Penguin, 1986) "By not reading," the article says, "we lose 'a sort of psychic habit, a logic, a sense of complexity, an ability to spot contradictions and even falsity.'" The book deals with the wide ramifications of reading's decline on a society. And in a culture where sound bites provide the news and people's attention span can only last four minutes when MTV is flashing simultaneous non-sequitur images on the screen, it's no wonder that beginning songwriters have so much trouble writing a clear, meaningful, logical lyric. How can someone develop the foresight for chess when they've been raised exclusively on Pac-Man?
Well, I just finished "Waiting To Exhale" last night. And Terry McMillan took me on an engrossing journey into the lives of four fascinating women. (It was on the Venet list a year before it was publicized that there will be a Whitney Houston movie of it.) The characters each had a uniquely different voice and viewpoint and McMillan remained true to each one throughout. Little clues planted in the beginning blossomed later and even though some reviewers will probably think it was tied up with a bow at the end, I liked that facet of it.
So now I'm reading for pleasure, for inspiration, for the vicarious thrill of all those other lives, for the texture it gives my own life and, therefore my work. And I'm also enjoying being in a community of other songwriters who are reading the same novels and poems. Of course, a reader could get whip lash jumping from Raymond Chandler to Terry McMillan in the same night. But while we're recuperating, we could curl up with a really good book.
© 1995 Harriet Schock
Webmaster: Jeff Mallett (jeffm@lyricist.com)