Link Post - The Soundtrack of My Bookshelves

When you read, do you ever tap your foot? Does music ever spark an idea in your head? Can you come up with a song or an artist that blends music and literature? Joyce Carol Oates wrote one of her most enduring works of short fiction after hearing Bob Dylan on the radio. 

Below, I go to my bookshelves - I choose artists and writers that bring music to my ears.  For each selection, I found an interesting quote.  Underneath each paragraph, I share a video.   

Here is my TOP FIVE cuts for The Soundtrack of My Bookshelves:

1. Lewis Carroll - I know him as the author of Alice in Wonderland. Did you know this book came from stories he invented to entertain a 10-year old girl?  Alice was her name, and she urged Lewis to write it all down.  The rest is literary history!   Maybe you've seen Johnny Depp in "Alice Through the Looking Glass."  Think psychedelic music: check out "White Rabbit" by the Jefferson Airplane.  Lewis Carroll rocks!

2. Frida Kahlo -  If there is one book on my shelves I read over and over, it has to be The Diary of Frida Kahlo.  It's an illustrated journal that Frida kept the last ten years of her life.  The publishers were able to reproduce her thoughts, poems, dreams, and plenty of her artwork.  For everything she writes in Spanish, there are pages of English translation.  You can read about the tremendous pain she endured through her life.  She has said in her life she has experienced two great tragedies: One was horrible trolley accident that crushed her spine; and the other was her husband and lover Diego Rivera who broke her heart.  Despite it all, she lived a life of love and magic.  She once said, "“Feet, what do I need them for If I have wings to fly.” Here is a little bit of passion from Salma Hayak's biopic Frida. The song is called "Alcoba Azul." 

3. Edward Hopper - I learned about Edward Hopper's most famous work Nighthawks in English class.  The painting expresses the anxiety and lonliness of drinking coffee in an all-night diner.  The customers look like they are trapped in a fishbowl.  Over the years, Hopper's work has captured the imagination of a wide array of artists, musicians, and writers. I am now into the Poetry of Solitude. This is a collection of poems that pay tribute to Edward Hopper.  Click on the following link to watch the mad poet himself, Tom Waits, play to the artistry of Edward Hopper: "Closing Time."

4.  Sylvia Plath -  When Sylvia was only eight years old, her first poem was published in the Boston Sunday Herald.  Before she even graduated from high school, her work appeared in Seventeen magazine.  At age 32 she joined a long line of suicidal poets - she tenderly tucked her two young children into bed and then went downstairs to the kitchen where she sealed off the doors with wet towels and stuck her head inside a gas oven.  She was found two hours later dead on the floor.  I've read of her mental illness from various biographies and her the novel The Bell Jar.  In English 009, I found out Sylvia was committed to the same mental hospital we read about in Girl, Interrupted.  She suffered from life-long bipolar disorder.  Country singer Ryan Adams wrote a tribute song to the famous poet's spirit: "Sylvia Plath."

5.  Ernest Hemingway -  At the beginning of  his writing career, Ernest was asked to choose between a secure, well-paid position on the Toronto Star; or the tenuous, uncertain dream of becoming a fiction writer.  He chose d-a-n-g-e-r. At age 19, he left his job as a newspaper reporter to volunteer as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in the Spanish Civil War.  For Hemingway, chasing death was the best training ground for a writer.    James Hetfield of Metallica agrees.  His song "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was inspired by a Hemingway novel of the same name.