May 23, 2013
Book Notes - Christopher Hacker "The Morels"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Christopher Hacker's smart and compelling debut novel The Morels asks big questions about art, imagination, and life, and is as entertaining as it is thought provoking.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Hacker earns all the stereotypical accolades of a debut novel—promising, ambitious, sincere—but his execution is far more original, and the result is an odd alloy of kitchen-sink family drama and metafictional inquest."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In his own words, here is Christopher Hacker's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel, The Morels:
Music has always been a big part of my life. I studied piano and cello as a child and went to a music conservatory every Saturday, where, in addition to private lessons, I took ear training and music theory. I performed in the orchestra, in monthly group recitals, and prepared a yearly solo recital. When I went off to college, I majored in music composition. Since the mid nineties, however--the year I graduated--I drifted from the world of string quartets and tone poems as my creative interests shifted to literature, and I lost contact with most of my fellow musicians. What remains is a wall of meticulously curated Deutche Grammaphone recordings and an abiding love of the Twentieth Century repertoire. It's music that still has the power to make me faint from pleasure--or shock me awake. To bring me back to the humid wood air of the practice room, the cool brass knob of the backstage door. This is the music that inspired my forthcoming novel.
What follows is an annotated discography. A-Side: Music to Swoon to. B-Side: Music to Wake You the Fuck Up.
A-Side: These recordings brought me to the table of classical music. Each piece is pure bliss, suffused with imagery and emotion, music that, because of its lushness, is easy to fall in love with:
Debussy, Nocturnes for Orchestra
The three nocturnes are inspired by a series of paintings by Whistler of the same name. I'll tell you the truth: I've never been able to see the pictures Debussy was supposedly illustrating with his music. In fact, I find the notion of musical "impressionism" kind of nonsensical: painting is painting, music is music. Oh, but what music! In the first movement, the reed section meanders over a lush cloud of chords. In the second, the orchestra comes alive in a nighttime fete. But the reason to stick around is the third movement, which introduces a woman's choir. The ethereal beauty of these sirens has kept me enthralled since I first discovered the piece, 25 years ago.
Stravinsky: L'oiseau de Feu
This was the piece that made young Stravinsky's career, a huge hit at the time. It has all the romantic high drama of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky's mentor. The slow sections are lovely, tremolo violins supporting a plaintive oboe. There is a bright, brassy theme that ends the piece grandly and recalls the "Ode to Joy" sections of Beethoven's Ninth. But the real greatness here is the driving percussive sections in the middle that presages the insanity of the ballet he would introduce three years later, cementing his reputation as the enfant terrible of modern music: Le Sacre du Printempts.
Mahler, Symphony No. 10 [fragment]
In school, I developed a soft spot for Mahler, a man who—while others of his generation were forsaking grace for the grotesque, giving up on the old forms and dismantling the very foundations—was still writing beautiful symphonies. It was a music that palpably ached, that longed for—phrases dissolving one into the next, never resolving, wandering like a Melville sentence for hours at sea, in pursuit of some impossible desire.
Vaughn Williams, The Lark Ascending
Not knowing much about this piece other than my absolute love affair with it when I was a teenager, I read the Wikipedia entry now and see that I am not alone in my adoration: This fantasia for violin and orchestra was voted number one for five years in a row by Classical FM, and chosen in a public radio poll by many New Yorkers as the piece to commemorate the September eleventh attacks. The freewheeling cadenzas do suggest birdlike movements, sometimes flitting from phrase to phrase, other times soaring octaves above the rest of the orchestra.
Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand
Commissioned in 1929 by a pianist who lost his right arm in the Great War, this piece rumbles forth with a vengeful, hurricane like force. The three major sections run together into a single long movement lasting roughly 19 minutes. Part of the magic here lies in the sheer virtuosity required of the pianist. One listens, incredulous at just how much music five fingers are capable of making, a testament to the human will behind it, determined to overcome every adversity.
Barber, Adagio for Strings
I won't lie: I first heard this piece in 1986, along with millions of others, paired to the bloody climatic firefight in Oliver Stone's Platoon. This was before it was commonplace to lyricize violence with elegiac music, and, I'm ashamed to say, the scene and the music had a profound effect on me. But hey, I was fourteen! The best versions are the epically slow ones--like Neville Mariner's St Martin in the Fields recording--each note spun out to its absolute breaking point.
Strauss, Metamorphosen
Scored for the oddly specific 23 solo strings (ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses) this symphonic elegy was supposedly written after Strauss visited the remains of Munich at the end of the Second World War. The halting, lilting main theme is passed from violins to violas to cellos and back again as it swells and breaks and swells again, one iteration cascading into the next, endlessly, spiraling into the void. This is what pure grief sounds like.
Gorecki, Symphony No. 3
This symphonic lament, subtitled "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" is comprised of three slow movements, scored for orchestra and solo soprano. It has a pure liturgical beauty that is every bit as cleansing as a good cry. The first movement is a canon, rumbling first through the double basses, picked up by the cellos, passed on to the violas and then up to the violins, an epic crescendo that culminates in the soprano's entrance, Mary lamenting the death of her son. When she is done, the canon is taken up again, but in reverse, descending from the violins, back down to the violas, the cellos, and ending where we began, barely audible grumbling through the stage's floorboards.
B-Side: These are recordings I discovered in college through mentors and fellow students, which took time for me to open up to. Each is delightfully crazy, the product of a generation of composers tearing down the very foundations of tonality, erecting in its stead a strange and, at times, terrifying place.
Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printempts
This ballet caused a riot when it was first premiered in 1913. From the plaintive opening oboe call, one wouldn't know why, but as the second movement rolls in with its relentless percussive note-clusters, it becomes clear enough what the fuss was all about. But for all its bombast, the intervening century has softened its edges somewhat. The piece is thoroughly enjoyable to listen to, even at its most dissonant: You find yourself absently tapping your foot and moving your head to the beat, and in the slow movements you can clearly hear the lyricism of L'Oiseau.
Webern, Bagatelles
It's amazing to think that Webern wrote this only three years after the premiere of Mahler's Ninth. It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of a Mahler symphony: tentative, affectless, sparsely scored, as much silence as music. In this piece, no phrase lasts more than a few notes, and a leisurely performance of it clocks in a just over three minutes. Although it sounds upon first hearing like the accidental plucks and chirps of four musicians setting up their instruments, repeated listening reveals this short masterwork to be the carefully wrought miniature that it is, a perfect jewel-like distillation of music's very essence.
Cage, 4'33"
This is perhaps the most misunderstood piece of music ever written. Instruments and number of players are unspecified. There are three movements. For each of them, the performer is instructed not to play. The nothingness of it often provokes a kind of incredulity, a feeling that one is being duped, one's time wasted. But this entirely misses the point. There is music to be heard here, only it's not the composer or the performer who is making it. Live, one might hear on a given night the quiet music of coughing, sighing, the rustling of programs and clothing, and the squeaking of seats. Listening to it at home, one might hear a different sort of music in the privacy of one's apartment. It's a study in negative space. Cage turns the tables--a characteristic move from a composer with a lifelong interest in Buddhism and the chance games of the I Ching.
Xenakis, Metastaseis
This post-war Greek composer was trained as an architect and mathematician before coming to music and the pitch systems he employs are informed by this expertise. This piece is inspired specifically by the spatial-temporal theories of Le Corbusier and Einstein. Each of the 61 players is playing 61 separate parts (as opposed to most ensembles, arranged in sections--thirty violins, for instance, playing the same part) and the sound masses that ensue are as impressive and impenetrable as any that Le Corbusier ever built. His scores are impossibly complex, a kind of theoretical music that seems only playable by a nitrogen cooled supercomputer, but the Luxembourg Philharmonic does an amazing job of it in this recording from 2008.
Penderecki, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
Listen to this piece along side Strauss's Metamorphosen for a lesson in how the expanded language of the Post War era was able to capture the inexpressible nature of horror and sorrow. The high register sound clusters and exaggerated slow vibratos feel very much like the full-on alarm of new grief, the thumping on the backs of instruments and the clacking of the wrong side of the bow against the strings a fitting analogue to breast-beating and teeth-gnashing.
Berio, Sinfonia
This musical collage, scored for orchestra and eight voices draws on texts from Samuel Beckett and the music of Mahler, Ravel and Brahms, among others. The third movement is the main event, a chaotic vortex of sound, scraps of Debussy and Strauss floating by as voices shout and sing out from the center of the chaos, occasionally commenting, it seems, on the music itself. Although cacophonous, it manages also to be graceful and humorous and, at times, downright beautiful. An exciting, theatrical piece.
Crumb, Black Angels
This is no ordinary string quartet. In addition to their instruments, the four members of the quartet make use of maracas, crystal glasses and their own voices to evoke an epic battle between good and evil. The extended techniques the performers employ here run the gamut, from bowing across the fingerboard to clicking along the strings with thimbles and fingerpicks. The reference recording is, as with most avant garde string quartets, the masterful Kronos Quartet album from 1990.
Lerdahl, Waves
Lerdahl and other composers of his generation have been attempting to bring Post War modernism in line with a more lyrical expression. As a theorist, Lerdahl makes use of cognitive psychology and has developed a musical "grammar" that informs his own pieces. Waves is like a magic trick, moving back and forth, almost imperceptibly, from a clear, tonal Mendelssohnesque theme to a dense, thorny Stockhausen-like wilderness.
Christopher Hacker and The Morels links:
A.V. Club review
Cleveland Plain Dealer review
Kirkus Reviews review
Open Letters Monthly review
Publishers Weekly review
also at Largehearted Boy:
Book Notes (2012 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
May 23, 2013
Book Notes - Elizabeth Huergo "The Death of Fidel Perez"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Elizabeth Huergo's novel The Death of Fidel Perez is a clever, lyrical debut, political satire that brings to life Cuba and its history.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Havana-born first-time novelist Huergo's clever political satire uses an intriguing premise to depict what could happen to her native country if Fidel and Raul Castro suddenly died."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In her own words, here is Elizabeth Huergo's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel, The Death of Fidel Perez:
The Rhythms of Home and Exile
Mi Buenos Aires querido: Tangos among Friends (Barenboim, Mederos, Console)
Carlos Gardell, "El dia que me quieras" and "Mi Buenos Aires querido"
Horacio Salgán, "Don Agustín Bardi"
Soul of the Tango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla (Yo Yo Ma)
Astor Piazzolla, "Milonga del angel," "Regreso al amor," and "Café 1930"
For a long time, the working title of my first novel was actually Song without Landscape. Nobody got it, so I went literal, The Death of Fidel Pérez, referring to the event that catalyzes the plot. For years, though, the phrase "song without landscape" haunted me. It evoked Federico García Lorca's notion of duende and came to represent a tango between the cerebral and the primal, between two Muses--one of a fire that destroys, the other of a fire that purifies. And I don't mean those silly tangos on "Dancing with the Stars" in which the dancers sport calculated grimaces as they count their steps across the floor. I mean the tango: the physical expression of that line between life and death we all tread so precariously and the emotions that enthrall the human heart—jealousy, lust, fear. So I listened to Carlos Gardell ("El dia que me quieras" and "Mi Buenos Aires querido") and Horacio Salgán ("Don Agustín Bardi"). And I listened especially to Yo Yo Ma play the music of Astor Piazzolla ("Milonga del ángel," "Regreso al amor," and "Café 1930")—all the while burning with fear and a longing to depict something I could barely see or name.
García Lorca was drawn to, obsessed by cante jondo, the "deep song" of Andalusian folk tradition, a tradition that bridged for him the looming span that arced between Romanticism and Modernity. He liked to quote an old guitar master who had told him that "‘The duende is not in the throat [of the singer]; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.'" While all art forms are capable of duende, for García Lorca its greatest expression occurred "in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." But my throat felt closed, blocked. So I listened to Cecilia Bartoli ("Chant D'Amour") and imagined being a mezzo-soprano who channeled her exquisite voice onto the page. Time passed. I gave up and turned to Howard Alden and George Van Epps ("Thirteen Strings") and to John Williams ("The Guitarist").
Chant D'Amour, Cecilia Bartoli (Myung-Whun Chung, piano)
Bizet's "Chant d'amour," Delibes's "Les Filles de Cadix," and Viardot's "Havanaise"
Thirteen Strings, Howard Alden and George Van Epps
"I Hadn't Anyone Till You," "The Touch of Your Lips," and "Embraceable You"
The Guitarist, John Williams
Satie's "Gymnopédie no. 3" and Williams's "Aeolian Suite for Guitar and Small Orchestra"
When he arrived in the United States, García Lorca was just in time to witness the material and psychological devastation of the stock market crash. Writing home, he gave testimony to what he saw as the central contradiction of this Protestant culture which, in its worship of money, had stripped religious ritual of all its mystery, rendering Christ's transubstantiation, the holiest moment of the mass, one marked abstractly by the sound of a ringing bell, into a transaction devoid of duende. It wasn't until he got to Cuba, on the next leg of his tour through the Americas, that he felt at home. "Si me pierdo que me busquen en Cuba o en Andalucia," he wrote home. ("If I am lost, look for me in Cuba or in Andalucia.") His words darkly foreshadowed his fate at the hands of the Spanish Nationalists who, six years later, in 1936, would execute him and throw his body into an anonymous grave. He was 38. Here was duende—now in the form of a trickster, of an irony as unbearable as the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, of any war.
In silence, I began to translate García Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, the posthumous collection of poems he had written at points along his transit from Spain to New York and Havana. He and I shared those three geographical points, my great-grandparents having emigrated from Spain to Cuba in the nineteenth-century. He and I had known New York and Havana, my parents and I having lived in both cities. Though it was not apparent then, I was trying to understand my loss of homeland in an egregiously dishonest way: through the prism of García Lorca's words, searching for the source of his courage, his ability to see and evoke the invisible, instead of trusting myself to feel the magnitude of my sorrow. Hiding behind the act of translation, willing only to engage in what amounted to an act of mimicry, I was too scared to be possessed, to let the duende climb up from the soles of my feet.
The Ultimate Collection: Lecuona by Lecuona
Ernesto Lecuona, "Siempre en mi Corazon," "La Comparsa" and "Malagueña"
It was the Cuban composer and musician, Ernesto Lecuona, who nudged me out of that fearful silence, conjuring once again that notion of a song that attached itself, belonged to the landscape of my imagination. I could agree with him that Cuba was "Siempre en mi corazon" ("always in my heart"). Lecuona's "La Comparsa" gave me a sense of Havana's rhythm, and helped me imagine the characters who would populate my novel. "La Comparsa" evoked, too, the brutality of slavery, the Congolese who were brought to the island in chains by good Christians. His "Malagueña" connected me to Cuba's colonial past and the history of Moorish Spain. And it was Lecuona's piano that let me sense the contours of the historical cusp García Lorca lived, the era the Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz explores in "Anna in the Tropics," between the Romantic and the Modern.
The Buena Vista Social Club: Ibrahim Ferrer
Ibrahim Ferrer, "Bruca Maniguá," "Marieta," "Qué Bueno Baila Usted," "Como Fue" and "Herido de Sombras"
The Buena Vista Social Club, however, catalyzed for me the emotion I had avoided for the lost landscape of my imagination, an island in my soul the size of a continent. Ibrahim Ferrer's "Bruca Maniguá" was a rhythm I had never and always heard. And "Marieta," a bawdy responsorial between male and female vocalists, elicited that sense of Cuban humor and love of puns, turning the Argentine tango's anguish of love betrayed on its head: "¡Ay, Dios! A mi me gusta que baile Marieta" (Oh, Lord! I like it when Marieta dances."). Ferrer singing Benny Moré's "Qué bueno baila usted" gave testimony to an era that had existed only in my parents' stories. Ferrer's voice prodded and goaded me to meet the duende.
I listened to Ferrer crooning "Como fue," "how it was" that he came to fall so desperately in love. He offers no explanation, only a repeated insistence that he doesn't know. I listened to "Herido de sombras," "injured by shadows," in which the singer can only invoke the penumbra of the love that once was. And I thought about García Lorca's observation that duende is best expressed through aesthetic forms that "require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." There was nothing to understand, really, just a terrible chasm of loss and sorrow, of a longing for language and culture and place that has no resolution, only the experience of having sounded and felt its depths. Writing is a mystical embrace, the push and pull of a tango, of a finite human life against the unforgiving contours of time. I finished my novel, dear reader. I let go of that love affair--and started another.
Elizabeth Huergo and The Death of Fidel Perez links:
the author's website
the author's blog
the author's writing blog
Cleveland Plain Dealer review
The Hispanic Reader review
Kirkus Reviews review
Publishers Weekly review
Shelf Awareness review
4 and 20 interview with the author
Fiction Writers Review interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
Book Notes (2012 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Shorties (The Literary References This Season in Mad Men, A Definitive Oral History of '80s Metal, and more)
Word and Film lists the literary references in Mad Men's current season.
Salon shares a "definitive oral history of '80s metal."
Reuters interviews James Salter about his writing process and new novel, All That Is.
Music Mix interviews the National's frontman, Matt Berninger about the band's new album, Trouble Will Find Me.
CBC Radio profiles the owner of Manhattan's McNally Jackson Books, Sarah McNally.
The Rumpus interviews singer-songwriter Julianna Barwick.
The Paris Review excerpts from the newly published Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985.
SPIN shares an oral history of Daft Punk's first American show.
Fresh Air interviews Jennifer Gilmore about her latest novel, The Mothers.
The Quietus interviews former Girls frontman Christopher Owens about the inspirations behind his solo debut, Lysandre.
What esoteric types of music inspired the songs?
CO: One very specific album was Nico's Chelsea Girl which had flute and classical guitar, and also some Donovan songs. The 'New York City' track was very much influenced by Lou Reed. The last song, the epilogue, was written a year later and is almost a 70s folk rock song, like Glen Campbell's 'Gentle On My Mind' or Harry Nilsson's 'Everybody's Talkin''.
Flavorwire recommends seafaring books for summer reading.
The Current streams a live concert by Rufus Wainwright.
The 2013 Man Booker International Prize has been awarded to Lydia Davis.
Pitchfork lists 20 worthwhile music documentaries streaming online.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh discusses his favorite short story at Flavorwire.
The Awl interviews Thalia Zedek about the reissue of Come's 11:11 album.
USA Today lists the top 10 young adult books for summer.
Rocks Off lists the five "most insane" bands to see live right now.
Win Michael Moss's new book Salt Sugar Fat and a $100 Threadless gift certificate in this week's contest at Largehearted Boy.
Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for $5 each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for $3.99.
Amazon MP3
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for $1.78.
Amazon MP3
Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week's best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week's best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Daily Downloads (Rose Windows, David Ramirez, and more)
Every day, Daily Downloads offers 10 free and legal mp3 downloads, plus free and legal live sets from around the internet.
Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:
BrotherJT: "Celebrate Your Face" [mp3] from The Svelteness of Boogietude
City Light: "Sweet Death" [mp3] from Memory Guide
David Ramirez: free and legal NoiseTrade Sampler EP [mp3]
Glenn Jones: "Bergen County Farewell" [mp3] from My Garden State
Max Garcia Conover: free and legal Burrow EP [mp3]
Miesha and the Spanks: "Please, Don't Blow" [mp3] from Girls, Like Wolves (out August 20th)
Paper Lions: "Philadelphia" [mp3] from My Friends (out August 20th)
Peals: "Blue Elvis" [mp3] from Walking Field
People of the North: "Drama Class" from Sub Contra (out June 11th)
Rose Windows: "Wartime Lovers" [mp3] from The Sun Dogs (out June 25th)
Free and legal live performances at other websites:
Doe Paoro: 2013-05-14, Brooklyn [mp3]
search for more free and legal music downloads at Largehearted Boy
also at Largehearted Boy:
other daily free and legal mp3 downloads
covers collections
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, books, and pop culture news and links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtrack)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
May 22, 2013
Book Notes - Sarah Gerkensmeyer "What You Are Now Enjoying"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Sarah Gerkensmeyer's story collection What You Are Now Enjoying is dark and surreal but suffused with humor, a promising debut that showcases her unique voice.
Stewart O'Nan wrote of the book:
"The smart, funky, well-turned stories in What You Are Now Enjoying keep the reader not just guessing and leaning forward but in a perpetual state of wonder. Sarah Gerkensmeyer is an original, a sneaky sorceress of a storyteller."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In her own words, here is Sarah Gerkensmeyer's Book Notes music playlist for her short story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying:
I've always had trouble with song lyrics. I'm not a good listener. When I was a kid, I loved the song "Careless Whisper" by George Michael. I didn't know all the words, but I didn't care. When I belted out the refrain, I sang: "I'm never gonna dance again. Alvin, Simon, Theodooore!" I'm jealous of writers who listen to music while they work. But I need quiet. I'd get too distracted by the music and my messed up attempts to make sense of the lyrics.
Music didn't become a big part of my life as an adult until after my first son was born five years ago. Simon fell in love with Vampire Weekend before he turned one. My husband and I discovered Pandora and suddenly our house was filled with a collage of music that all of us loved. We have two sons now, and amid the chaos of parenting (and writing and teaching and everything else) we've got music playing all the time. Simon's favorite band is still Vampire Weekend. His younger brother Charlie, who is louder and wilder, is in love with The Fratellis.
Somehow, my writing life has started to solidify and take off in exciting directions amid the wonderful disorder and commotion of raising young kids. I think my appreciation for music has also grown. I still don't have enough focus—amid the wrestling matches of diaper changes and the execution of tickle fights—to pay close attention to the lyrics. But our family time is infused with a soundtrack. And I like to think that the songs that we love together somehow linger in my writing, too. Who cares if I don't know all the words.
I've included a video of my son Simon when he was a baby listening to a Vampire Weekend song that is still one of his all-time favorites—"A-Punk." And so that's the song for my entire story collection. I like to think that I get as sucked into and carried away by my stories as this little guy dancing here.
Below are the stories from my collection, paired with some of the songs we listen to at my house. And a huge thank you to my husband Andy for making a couple cocktails after the boys were in bed and sitting down with me to listen to good music and talk about weird stories.
"What You Are Now Enjoying": "Heart It Races," Dr. Dog
This song throws the listener directly into the strange. And I like to think that the first story in my collection does this, as well. The lyrics are crazy weird—"legs like little splinters" and "legs like little spiders." But the sound is wonderful. It pushes us forward.
"Dear John": "Back in Your Head," Tegan and Sara
Here's a story where a husband begins to gradually disappear. He becomes both a new person and a ghost of his former self. To me, this is a story about longing. And in this song, the plaintive punch of the piano as well as the wailing of the refrain echo a similar longing to return to a place and a person and a time that has become unreachable.
"Careless Daughters": "Hard to Love," The Drums
Like so many of the other pieces in my book, this story has characters who are forced into an odd and stiff kind of intimacy (in this case, a guy places ads on the internet for women interested in secular polygamy). This song seems to encompass the strange sense of strained yet dynamic intimacy that some of us discover ourselves wrapped up in from time to time.
"Produce": "Trust," The Generationals
I think the funky beat of this song matches the sense of obsession and fetish in my story. We see a character who finds herself attracted to a stranger's outward display of mysterious grief. And I love the huge question in the lyrics: "Carry the weight, carry the wound / Is it everything you want and more?"
"My Husband's House": "In the Big Rock Candy Mountain," Harry McClintock
I'm not sure how this song ended up on one of our Pandora radio stations, but my sons and I love it. There is such a poignant mix of sweetness and eeriness and sadness in this song when you start to tap into the sense of yearning for an escape that seems impossible. The husband in my story also yearns for an escape that feels impossible and magical and wondrous and sad.
"Monster Drinks Chocolate Milk": "Creep," Radiohead
In this story, the monster who has been haunting the narrator's nightmares since childhood wants to hang out in the narrator's kitchen in the middle of the night and drink chocolate milk and discuss his anxiety and depression and lack of direction. So I most definitely have to go with "Creep."
"Vanishing Point": "Sleeping In," The Postal Service
"Slightly bored and severely confused." This lyric perfectly describes the people in this story who attend a remote, falling apart, overpriced camp in the Minnesota Boundary Waters Wilderness in order to reconnect with the twins they think they might have lost while in their mothers' wombs. And: "Last week I had the strangest dream"—apply this to any story I have ever written (or even thought about writing).
"The Shopkeeper's Tale": "When They Fight They Fight," The Generationals
In this story, a bunch of babies and toddlers gather outside a tiny baby boutique in a Brooklyn neighborhood and start banging on the windows and the locked door, because they know that the shop owner secretly hates babies. They are there for a good, old fashioned brawl.
"Hank": "We're Going to Be Friends," The White Stripes
In this sweet song, the singer declares friendship, inviting us into the simple wonder of playtime and bugs. Hank is a three-month-old who begins talking to his nanny, pointing out the simple wonder of plants growing on the windowsill as well as the heavy-hearted weight of his parents' failing marriage. He claims a friendship with his nanny, because he desperately needs it.
"The Rockport Falls Retirement Village Rescuers": "First Day of My Life," Bright Eyes
This song is beautiful. There's such a hopeful sense that our lives can begin any day—that any day can be the first one. That's the kind of hope I tried to discover in a story about a retirement village where everyone is reaching the end. I wanted there to be a sense of beginning, too.
"Wonder Woman Grew Up In Nebraska": "5 Years Time," Noah and the Whale
Welcome to a story in which the cartoon-colored, comic book version of Wonder Woman is an angsty teenager growing up in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, killing time with her girlfriends each weekend at a dingy airport bar. These young women don't know, yet, the bite of nostalgia. They don't know how much they will miss each other and how much they will miss the yawning stretch of boredom that they share, in five years time.
"Edith and the Ocean Dome": "Where is My Mind," The Pixies
This song is about disorientation. And Edith may be one of my most disorientated characters. She distances herself from both her personal life and her professional work. The people and things that attract her also repulse her. She's an oceanographer, and the sea opens up before her as both a comforting and a frightening presence. And so I have to love the lyrics, "I was swimmin' in the Caribbean / Animals were hiding behind the rocks."
"The Cellar": "The Pact (I'll Be Your Fever)," The Villagers
This song pushes us into our past and into our future all at once. And so my husband and I can't help but be blown away by it each time it plays—and especially now, sitting together on the couch with our boys asleep just upstairs. We know it's cheesy, but we don't care. I wanted to end my collection full-circle. With "The Cellar," I wanted to show how to be lost and how to be found, how to try to make sense of it all—that roving stretch of our lives. And when I listen to music and dance with my family, these are always the things that I search for in the melody and the beat and the rhythm and the refrain and the words that I sometimes don't know—something to push us forward and pull us back all at once, beautifully.
Sarah Gerkensmeyer and What You Are Now Enjoying links:
the author's website
excerpt from the book ("Dear John" at Guernica)
Center for Literary Publishing review
The Coffin Factory review
Hayden's Ferry review review
Midwestern Gothic review
Fiction Writers Review interview with the author
The Observer profile of the author
The Quivering Pen guest post by the author
TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog review
Writer Unboxed guest post by the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
Book Notes (2012 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Largehearted WORD Books of the Week - May 22, 2013
In the Largehearted Word series, the staff of Brooklyn's WORD bookstore highlights several new books released this week.
WORD is an independent neighborhood bookstore in Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn, that recently celebrated its sixth anniversary. Our primary goal is to be whatever our community needs us to be, which currently means carrying a lot of paperback fiction (especially classics), cookbooks, board books, and absurdly cute cards and stationery. In addition, we're fiends for a good event, from the classic author reading and Q&A to potlucks and a basketball league (and anything set in a bar). We're a small operation, just 1000 square feet and four people, but we read too much, so it all works out. If a weekly dose of WORD here isn't enough for you, follow us on Twitter: @wordbrooklyn.
WORD also hosts the monthly Largehearted Lit reading series, featuring authors who participated in this blog's Book Notes series and musical guests.
The Black Count
by Tom Reiss
We are suckers for unexpected histories, and this one is a doozy: Alexandre Dumas's grandfather was a black slave? Say what now?! Fascinating.
Red Handed
by Matt Kindt
Emily loves Revolver, Jenn loves Super Spy; stands to reason we cannot leave this one alone.
Capital
by John Lanchester
Jenn fell hard for this book when it first came out last year, and now that it's in paperback she is proselytizing even more loudly. "The best novel about the financial crash I can imagine reading; Lanchester does a brilliant job weaving storylines from different classes, different expectations, different viewpoints."
The Pink Hotel
by Anna Stothard
This debut novel - -- about a nameless young woman in search of her dead mother's secrets -- was longlisted for the Orange Prize and comes highly praised by Tupelo Hassman, which is a magical equation that makes Molly really excited about it.
WORD Brooklyn links:
WORD website
WORD Tumblr
WORD on Twitter
WORD's Facebook page
WORD's Flickr photos
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Largehearted Word Books of the Week (weekly new book highlights)
Online "Best Books of 2012" Lists
52 Books, 52 Weeks (my yearly reading project)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics & graphic novel highlights)
Book Notes (authors create music playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Atomic Books Comics Preview - May 22, 2013
In the weekly Atomic Books Comics Preview, Benn Ray highlights notable new comics and graphic novels.
Benn Ray is the owner of Atomic Books, an independent bookstore in Baltimore. The Mobtown Shank is his blog, and his comic Said What? is syndicated weekly in the Baltimore Sun's B-Paper.
Atomic Books has been named one of Bizarre Magazine's 51 geekiest places on the planet, as well as one of Flavorwire's 10 greatest comic and graphic novel stores in America.
Aesthetics: A Memoir
by Ivan Brunetti
Ivan Brunetti, of Schizo fame, presents this comics memoir- from the doodles of youth to a modern master. Brunetti provides more than just a collection of work here, he reveals his creative process and outlines his aesthetic (something far too many creatives fail to hone) as well.
My Dirty Dumb Eyes
by Lisa Hanawalt
Hanawalt is easily one of the funniest, more original cartoonists working today. But more than that, she's also an excellent illustrator. This collects a number of her short works - and I promise you, you will laugh.
Occupy Comics #1
by Alan Moore / various
Like the phrase "Arab Spring," the word "Occupy" is fading from our collective memory (at least within a social movement context). With these comics, a number of cartoonists like Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Ronald Wimberly, Molly Crabapple, David Lloyd give a comic book treatment to the ideals and goals of the Occupy movement while raising funds for it.
Sunny Volume 1
by Taiyo Matsumoto
If you like your manga smart and of the alternative variety, check out this new work from Tekkonkinkreet's Matsumoto.
Questions, concerns, comments or gripes – e-mail benn@atomicbooks.com. If there’s a comic I should know about, send it my way at Atomic, c/o Atomic Books 3620 Falls Rd., Baltimore, MD 21211.
Atomic Books & Benn Ray links:
Atomic Books website
Atomic Books on Twitter
Atomic Books on Facebook
Benn Ray's blog (The Mobtown Shank)
Benn Ray's comic, Said What?
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Atomic Books Comics Preview lists (weekly new comics & graphic novel highlights)
52 Books, 52 Weeks
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Book Notes (authors create music playlists for their book)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Shorties (An Excerpt from Lionel Shriver's New Novel, Albums as Book Collection Prints, and more)
NPR excerpts from Lionel Shriver's new novel Big Brother.
Standard Designs offers prints of several Cure, Smiths, and Radiohead albums as book collections.
Guernica interviews Claire Messud about her new novel, The Woman Upstairs.
SPIN investigates how music is purchased and consumed in the American prison system.
Michelle Tea lists her five favorite books about teen girls in trouble at Flavorwire.
R.I.P., Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.
A judge for the Man Booker Prize discusses the experience at the Independent.
The new Imaginary Cities album, Fall of Romance, is streaming at Paste.
Ramona Ausubel discusses her favorite short story at Flavorwire.
BuzzFeed lists 10 Daft Punk samples you may have missed.
The Millions interviews Ru Freeman about her new novel On Sal Mal Lane.
Win Michael Moss's new book Salt Sugar Fat and a $100 Threadless gift certificate in this week's contest at Largehearted Boy.
Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for $5 each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for $3.99.
Amazon MP3
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for $1.78.
Amazon MP3
Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week's best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week's best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Daily Downloads (Pillars and Tongues, Bestial Mouths, and more)
Every day, Daily Downloads offers 10 free and legal mp3 downloads, plus free and legal live sets from around the internet.
Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:
Amanda Jo Williams: "Holster, The Gun It Hangs In There" [mp3] from You're the Father of My Songs
Bestial Mouths: "Earth" [mp3] from Bestial Mouths
CoastWest Unrest: free and legal CoastWest Unrest EP [mp3]
HalfNoise: free and legal HalfNoise album [mp3]
Her Royal Harness: "Blood and Fire" [mp3] from The Hunting Room (out June 24th)
House of Hats: free and legal Sewing Machine EP [mp3]
Jay Arner: "Midnight on South Granville" [mp3] from Jay Arner (out June 25th)
Quickbeam: "Grace" [mp3] from Quickbeam (out June 3rd)
Young Readers: "Boxcar" [mp3] from Family Trees
Young Readers: "Homesick" [mp3] from Family Trees
Free and legal live performances at other websites:
Pillars and Tongues: Epitonic Saki session [mp3]
search for more free and legal music downloads at Largehearted Boy
also at Largehearted Boy:
other daily free and legal mp3 downloads
covers collections
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, books, and pop culture news and links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtrack)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
May 21, 2013
Book Notes - Charles Newman and Ben Ryder Howe "In Partial Disgrace"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Charles Newman's last novel, In Partial Disgrace is an ambitious and devastatingly original rollercoaster of a book, finely written and equal parts satire, comedy, and philosophy.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn wrote of the book:
"Newman's novel, then, occupies a thematic space blending the comic with the philosophical, with a baroque sensibility rounding it off. As a reader new to Newman's body of work, In Partial Disgrace struck as a bridge between the comic terror found in Flann O'Brien and the intellectual comedy of Robertson Davies."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In the words of his editor and nephew, here is Ben Ryder Howe's Book Notes music playlist for Charles Newman's novel In Partial Disgrace:
Charles Newman (1938-2006) was known as the founder of the literary magazine TriQuarterly and an author of darkly funny, cerebral novels akin to the work of David Foster Wallace. His last book, In Partial Disgrace, which he spent more than twenty years writing, is published this spring by Dalkey Archive Press. The Chicago Tribune calls it "a torrent of ideas and stories."
My uncle's book is essentially a simple story: a man wants to buy a dog, but the man he wants he wants to buy the dog from won't let him. Why? Did something happen between them? Is it something the man said or did, or is it simply who he is (an intellectual, a Jew, a person who wants a dog for the wrong reason, namely to serve as a pet)? Somehow nothing less than the origin of civilization and the lurking tug of barbarism are involved, and music naturally plays an important part. Charles Newman was a classical music junkie, the sort of fan who would sit in the front row at Alice Tully five nights in a row when the Borodin Quartet came to town. All his fiction features music to some degree – it's right there in the title with works like White Jazz and The Five Thousandth Baritone – but in this novel it is a frightening and terrible force, deforming both the musician and the audience it is played against. This was nothing less than Charlie's goal as a writer: he wanted you to feel the dehumanizing power of art, or as he himself describes Gubik, the malevolent piano-playing prodigy who is one of the novel's side characters, "Warm hands, cold heart." Rapturous writing, spiritual abyss.
The following is from an as-yet unpublished section of the novel describing its fantastical setting, the Mitteleuropean country of Cannonia, a landlocked nation that is "effectively all border" and usually covered on maps by the compass sign or coat-of-arms.
Vivaldi: Serenata a Tre
In 1728, on Ascension Day, Antonio Vivaldi was summoned to meet Charles VI at Ottemenarche, where he was presented with a gold medal and had a long talk about music. The emperor's ministers noted that Charles spoke more to the composer in two days than he had to them in fifteen years. Vivaldi presented the king with a serenata which would not be performed for more than two centuries. Meanwhile, some thirteen years after his meeting with the emperor, as a broken old man of sixty-two, Vivaldi would take his leave from Venice in search of patronage, but passing once again through Ottemenarche, the scene of his greatest pecuniary triumph, was told by a pretty nun in a white habit with a spray of pomegranate leaves behind her ear, that the king had just perished from a plate of poisonous mushrooms. Ignoring her entreaties to remain and conduct in Cannonia, and selling his scores for nineteen Cannonian imperials, he proceeded to a tense dark Vienna, and busied himself with an invention which he hoped would make his fortune: a three-dimensional score, through which ritornelli and repeats inscribed on cubes could be drawn through or dropped out with a string like a dumbwaiter. When he showed it to a famous music critic, the fellow hawked ein entsetzliches maud ("a disgusting gob") upon it. A month later the composer died in disordered prodigality as the pauper's bells pealed.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major ("Eroica")
Mozart: Serenade No. 10 In B-flat Major
When Mozart first crossed the foggy border four years before his death and two before the French Revolution, his entourage was visaed under the precocious boy's invented names: "I am Punkitititi . . . my wife is Schabla Pumfa, Joseph my servant is Runzifunzi, and Goukerl, my dog, is Schomanntzky." Coming upon the woods owned by the Stradivari family which supplied their cello veneers, and noting that several of the larger trees had keyboards built into them, he reappelated this section of the Marches as "Klavierland," which remains its modern name. It was here that little Wolfgang played upon his first real piano, rather than a souped-up harpsichord of shallow touch and damping — an instrument of local manufacture, labile planks of Cannonian fir and curly maple structured upon an iron frame, which even in its most problematic tuning produced a full, round tone. "The sonority of the future, no doubt," the little genius wrote to his father, though he found the action sluggish in this sluggish land . . . But the composer would write nothing for this instrument; he knew it could only finally serve a more tormented spirit, and that once its dynamics were released from suavity and elegance, only a kind of madness would satisfy. Indeed, the behemoth would not be mastered until a suicidal Beethoven gave a concert wearing dogskin gloves and reduced the instrument to a heap of wire. Wham, wham, two raving chords from the Eroica, and the classical order was thrust aside.
Beethoven claimed to work well in Cannonia, and wrote to the Cannonian girl he should have married of "that certain mood — I hesitate to call it ‘romantic' — the feeling of having no relatives at all, while at the same time feeling related to everybody." In his last shattered years, it was only in Cannonia that he was still permitted to conduct. He stood in the midst of the musicians, confusion written on his face, deaf to all tone, at the pianos creeping under the conductor's desk, and at the fortes leaping high into the air, then looking around himself in affright. Yet despite the fact that he was often a dozen bars ahead or behind the orchestra, there was no laughter in the audience, for Cannonians could recognize a masterpiece even under the most uncertain and grotesque direction. "In Cannonia," he wrote, "nothing but art held my hand."
Chopin: Nocturnes, Op. 48
Liszt: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in A major
Clara Schuman: Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17
Robert Schumann: Liederkreis, Op. 39
Brahms: Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38
Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor ("Tragic")
Chopin was astonished at how sound carried across the countryside, protected and concealed by mists. "Music somehow sounds better here. The crescendo is a cataract, the diminuendo a crystal stream, the pianissimo a vernal breath." Liszt invented a portable piano which could be broken into thirds and transported by donkeys, and on which he could play his transcribed Beethoven symphonies for those who would never hear an orchestra. Schubert spent a summer near Bomipid, where he wrote his first poignant song, "No One Wants to Sleep with a Fat Little Lark," and after giving the only public concert of his life on the town bandstand, resolved never again to teach, whatever his circumstances. Rob and Clara Schumann loved to hike in Cannonia and once met Metternich stalking a chamois. "She walks behind me," Robert wrote of his beloved wife, "and gently tugs my coattail each time we approach a rock." Pianoed-out on that trip, the composer foreswore the instrument for a lieder eruption: 140 songs in eight months. Brahms gave his last concert performance in that desperate but not serious city Ottemenarche, and during a walk by the Hron, complained acidly to a twenty-eight-year-old Mahler that the end of classical music was fast approaching. "Look," Gustav said, pointing gaily out on the greenish-grey river, "there goes the last wave."
Charles Newman and In Partial Disgrace links:
the author's Wikipedia entry
the book's website
Chicago Tribune review
Publishers Weekly review
The Rumpus review
Vol. 1 Brooklyn review
The Millions profile of the author
Publishers Weekly feature by the editor
Times Literary Supplement profile of the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
Book Notes (2012 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Book Notes - Drew Magary "Someone Could Get Hurt"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Myla Goldberg, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Drew Magary's new memoir Someone Could Get Hurt is a laugh out loud funny yet brutally honest account of modern parenthood.
Kirkus Reviews wrote of the book:
"Laugh-out-loud funny . . . An outspoken dad's brassy, wise and painfully honest view from the top of the family tree."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In his own words, here is Drew Magary's Book Notes music playlist for his memoir, Someone Could Get Hurt:
Okay, so this book was written using two different playlists. There was the music I was listening to as I wrote the book, the kind of "I'm so fucking inspired!" music that people get all weepy and annoying about. And then there are the songs that actually spring up within the stories, songs that just happened to be playing whenever shit was going down. So I'll start with the first playlist of inspirational RAWK:
FIRST PLAYLIST:
Celebration Rock by Japandroids
Silver Age by Bob Mould
I listened to nothing but these two albums for ten straight months because they're awesome and other music is dogshit by comparison. In my authorial wet dreams, "Someone Could Get Hurt" becomes a TV show, and the network thinks so highly of me ("You have such a unique voice, Drew!") that they cede full creative control of the series to me and pay me a billion dollars per episode to make it. It wins many Emmys and when the show ends, people beg for a cast reunion and I tell them to piss off. I'm also in charge of all the show's music, which means a title sequence that has "Nights of Wine & Roses" by Japandroids blasting loud as fuck as we show quick shots of a house RUINED by children leaving all their shit all over the place. And for the touching montages where we show my character (played by a winning Chris Pratt) lovingly feeding a baby, we use "First Time Joy" by Mould to really get the tears jerkin'.
SECOND PLAYLIST:
"Stronger," by Kelly Clarkson
Every time I drove to the hospital to see my son and the other kids were in the car, my daughter would demand that I change the channel to whatever station was playing this song (which was easy, since in the spring of 2012 EVERY station was playing this song). So while little girls listen to this song and are like, "I'm finally gonna dump Jayden!", I think about my son getting a feeding tube rammed up his nose. I'd rather not hear it again.
"Boogie In Your Butt," by Eddie Murphy
I don't wanna post book spoilers or anything. All I can say is that it's a fine song to teach to your children when you desperately want them to like you.
"This Lullaby" by Queens of the Stone Age
I sang this song to my kid when he was in the NICU. And in the initial draft of Someone Could Get Hurt, I actually printed out one verse of it in the final chapter. And then my editor looked at the manuscript and was like, "Uhhh... Drew. You need permission from the artists to use these lyrics." And I was like, "Seriously?" And she was like, "Yeah, it's a whole horrible process and they never say yes." So I was given the option of replacing it with a song in the public domain or simply alluding to the song without directly quoting it.
And that's all well and good. I get why artists are protective of their material, especially in an age where everyone steals music. I don't think the book is any worse off without the lyrics. But it's not like I named the book SONGS FOR THE DEAF. We're talking about just a couplet here and there. How the fuck does a rock critic write a book without being able to quote song lyrics? I swear I've seen song lyrics in books before. I want to sneak the lyrics back into the book without a lawyer or Josh Homme noticing.
"Try To Sleep" by Low
Another song I would sing to my kid to get it to stop screaming. I did not succeed.
"Gold on the Ceiling" by the Black Keys
I spent a lot of time trying to wean my kids off of listening to either terrible children's music or terrible Top 40 music. Thankfully, the Keys were just mainstream enough for me to transition my two older kids into listening to actual, good rock and roll. God bless the Black Keys. Now the kids even listen to Japandroids without bitching (NOTE: They still bitch on occasion, but then I turn it up and drown them out). "Midnight City" by M83 and "Everybody's on the Run" by Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds were also big helps in this department.
"Ricochet" by Faith No More
I had the lyric "It's always funny until someone gets hurt and then it's just hilarious" as the epigram for this book. But again, permission and shit. So out it went. But the sentiment remains. Kids hurt themselves so often and so mildly that it almost becomes a recurring sight gag in the life of a parent.
"Suicide & Redemption" by Metallica
I was listening to this when I took my kid for a power walk in the book. I was faster than her. EAT IT, KID.
And here are a few more that either inspired the book or played a role in the stories:
"I Love NYE," by Badly Drawn Boy
"All Over the Road," by Rival Sons
"Your Love (Outfield cover)" by Bon Iver
"Sweet Freedom" by Michael McDonald (good for singing while drunk)
"Chips Ahoy!" by the Hold Steady
"Some Day My Prince Will Come," Snow White soundtrack
"Art of Almost," by Wilco
"Take a Walk," by Passion Pit
"Acquiesce," by Oasis
"Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet (I don't actually like this song, but it plays a role)
Pretty much every Katy Perry song (ditto)
Drew Magary and Someone Could Get Hurt links:
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for The Postmortal
Reddit interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
Book Notes (2012 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Shorties (The Best Books About Haiti, The Greatest Alternative Music Drummers, and more)
Ben Fountain lists the top 10 books about Haiti at the Guardian.
SPIN lists the 100 greatest drummers of alternative music.
Morning Edition interviews basketball coach Phil Jackson about his new book, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success.
Music Ruined My Life shares several covers of Bob Dylan's song "Wagon Wheel."
New Yorker writer George Packer talks to Weekend Edition about his new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
Drowned in Sound interviews Public Image Ltd frontman John Lydon.
Boing Boing shares an excerpt from Jeffrey Brown's new book, Vader's Little Princess.
Flavorwire lists the 50 albums from the past 50 years everyone should own.
Page-Turner interviews author Claire Vaye Watkins.
Realistic fiction about the West tends to get called "gritty," whereas, say, in the South it’s "gothic" or "grotesque." How different are those regional labels, really?
It’s like what Flannery O'Connor said: what Northerners call grotesque, the Southerner will call realistic. I certainly never set out to be gritty or inflict on my reader a harrowing, difficult experience. I actually think of the stories as really funny and really pretty but my big fear for them is that they're nostalgic, that they're too affectionate, that they're too safe. So to hear them described to me as gritty is really bizarre. But the other element of it is sometimes I do get, Oh this very dainty girl has written a very gritty book, and that’s probably my least favorite response to it; sometimes people have very strange responses to my age and gender and my photo— "You seem so nice in your picture, but then you're writing about sex." I want to say, "Hey, nice girls get there, too!"
The band Foals visits The Current studio for an interview and live performance.
The Paris Review blog profiles Icelandic author Sjón and his unlikely collaborations with Bjork.
Stream a documentary about the Boston band, The Stairs.
Author Manuel Gonzales discusses his favorite short story at Flavorwire.
Rookie Magazine premiered a new song by Eleanor Friedberger and interviewed the singer-songwriter about her forthcoming album.
Win Michael Moss's new book Salt Sugar Fat and a $100 Threadless gift certificate in this week's contest at Largehearted Boy.
Amazon MP3 offers 100 albums on sale for $5 each.
Amazon MP3 offers over 1,400 albums on sale for $3.99.
Amazon MP3
Amazon MP3 offers over 400 jazz albums on sale for $1.78.
Amazon MP3
Follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week's best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week's best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
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