Started reading Tori Amos’s book Resistance. It seems to be a book about how her music has been influenced by politics. She relates the story of being a fourteen year old girl and playing in a gay bar in Washington. The customers are mostly politicians who educate her about politics. I can see it’s gonna be a pretty quirky journey, and I’m here for it.
I finished reading the Tori Amos book Resistance. After a slow start where I didn’t really get into it, it came very good for the last half. The change happened because Tori stopped writing about political issues and got more personal. She especially detailed her mother’s declining health in a way that was quite affecting. After her death she imagines her mother communing with her (accompanied by a raven, a personal symbol of her mother) and taking her back to various key moments in her life. There’s also a nice side-story about her husband Mark’s father’s death which gave a good insight into his family and Tori’s role in it. The last section contained some brilliant writing about creativity and the role of the artist. I really like her line ‘the real estate of the universal creative spirit is infinite’. So inspiring and positive. So, a good book for fans and maybe even non-fans.
After I read the book I looked over my Tori Amos cds to check that they all contained lyric sheets, and they do. I’d never really paid much attention to her lyrics, finding them sort of impenetrable, containing her private mythology. But the book made it clear to me that her lyrics are decipherable, if you have the code (as in, if you have an idea what they’re supposed to be about – it’s not always obvious). I looked again at my copy of her best of album, Tales of a Librarian. A cute concept, with Tori looking librarian-ish. I guess I hadn’t noticed before, because I bought the album well before I became a library worker myself, but the album artwork really runs with the library theme, right down to including a list of the major Classes of the Dewey Decimal system we still use. And the lyric booklet has each song assigned to whatever Class its subject refers to. Thus, for example, Cornflake Girls resides at 170 for Ethics and 177 for Ethics of Social Relations (Betrayal). The 100s Class covers Philosophy and Psychology. I love this idea!