October 10, 2009
Shorties (The Great American Rock Band, A.S. Byatt, and more)
A.V. Club writers each choose the "great American rock band."
A.S. Byatt talks to the New York Times about her latest novel, The Children's Book.
The idea for the novel came to her, Ms. Byatt said, because she had been thinking about how child rearing changed in the late-Victorian era. “People began talking to their children as people,” she said. “They even took tea with them. That’s a change — you wouldn’t find it in Dickens or Jane Austen. And this also coincides with Freud’s deciding that everything comes from childhood and discovering all sorts of little dark things there, even if they weren’t true.”
Tran Anh Hung, director of the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, discusses the movie with the Associated Press.
The Financial Times offers musical travelogues of two Georgia towns, Macon and Athens.
David Small talks to Short Stack about his graphic memoir, Stitches.
The power of "Stitches" lies in how strikingly straightforward you are in portraying your tale.
I tried to be completely candid, but without the complaining quality or, for that matter, the philosophizing that makes so many memoirs unreadable for me. I took my tone from the memoirs I've been moved by, most of which were from the events in Europe during World War II. In these brief, usually harrowing memoirs, there is a remarkable lack of adjectives because the facts stand alone. If you get caught up in, as it were, "customizing" your story (the way they customize, or tart up cars), it detracts from the verisimilitude, which should be the goal of any memoir.
NPR's Weekend Edition examines songs written about Mexico's drug war.
The Globe and Mail examines interactive books, or "digi-novels."
14 Mojo Nixon albums (& 147 songs) still FREE at Amazon MP3.
At the Guardian, Simon Reynolds examines the effect of the synthesizer on popular music.
Billboard interviews Glen Hansard of the Swell Season and the Frames.
Billboard: The Swell Season won an Oscar for the song "Falling Slowly" -- and has been immortalized in an episode of "The Simpsons." Which was more surprising?
Hansard: "The Simpsons," of course. "The Simpsons" is the one thing that binds the world together in a way. People don't watch the Oscars necessarily in India, but they watch "The Simpsons." What really struck me was that they were doing a little bit of a joke on "Once," but "Once" was a tiny film in the world. It did OK in America, but in the world of cinema, it hardly got recognized. I said this to the people at "The Simpsons" and they said, "We don't care. If we like something, we'll parody it. It's up to the rest of the world to figure out what we're parodying." When you've been on "The Simpsons," you know something has shifted.
Jacket Copy interviews author Margaret Atwood.
JC: Has the Internet created a different level of engagement with readers than previous book tours?
MA: It puts you in the position of a journalist, in a way. You become the journalist of yourself. Which is really weird. But you also become the journalist of your own tour. For the blog, I've been taking pictures of the events we've been doing…. Sometimes they come out, and sometimes they don't.
In the Guardian, author Nicholson baker reviews the Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader.
A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reduction. The Kindle DX ($489) doesn't save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them – it kills their joy.
As voted by its readers, the Times Online lists the best 60 books of the past 60 years.
Flavorwire lists the 8 most surprising music collaborations of 2009.
Current contest at Largehearted Boy:
Win one of two copies of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben H. White.
Follow me on Twitter for links that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
daily mp3 downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
tags: music books popculture indie
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October 10, 2009
Daily Downloads (Ryan Adams, Billy Corgan, and more)
Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:
Billy Corgan: 2009-08-29, Pioneertown [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Femme Fatale (Velvet Underground cover)" [mp3]
other Billy Corgan posts at Largehearted Boy
Fruit Bats: 2009-09-20, Chicago [mp3,ogg,flac]
"My Unusual Friend" [mp3]
other Fruit Bats posts at Largehearted Boy
Grace Potter: 2009-07-26, Bridgeport [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Come into My Kitchen" [mp3]
other Grace Potter posts at Largehearted Boy
Mike Doughty: 2002-11-15, Cleveland [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Madeleine and Nine" [mp3]
other Mike Doughty posts at Largehearted Boy
Mission of Burma: 2009-10-04, Cambridge [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Peking Spring" [mp3]
other Mission of Burma posts at Largehearted Boy
Ryan Adams: 2009-02-04, Auckland [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Wonderwall (Oasis cover)" [mp3]
other Ryan Adams posts at Largehearted Boy
Superdrag: 2009-08-25, Chicago [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Destination Ursa Major" [mp3]
Superdrag: 2000-07-07, Johnson City [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Motor Away (Guided By Voices cover)" [mp3]
Superdrag: 1999-10-02, Nashville [mp3,ogg,flac]
"Pine Away" [mp3]
other Superdrag posts at Largehearted Boy
Victor Krummenacher: 2009-09-24, San Francisco [mp3,ogg,flac]
"The Gulf Road" [mp3]
other Victor Krummenacher posts at Largehearted Boy
Free and legal mp3s of live performances at other websites:
The Tallest Man on Earth: Daytrotter session [mp3]
other Tallest Man on Earth posts at Largehearted Boy
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous free and legal mp3 daily downloads
2009 Bonnaroo downloads
2008 Lollapalooza downloads
other music festival downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and album streams from weekly CD releases)
weekly CD release lists
tags: music download indie mp3
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
October 9, 2009
Book Notes - Bill Cotter ("Fever Chart")
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Fever Chart is one of the year's most wonderfully dark and entertaining novels, and its protagonist Jerome Coe an unforgettable literary character. Coe's narration is filtered through his mental illness as he weaves through the book's tightly woven plot and the menagerie of interconnected characters that populate this wonderful book. Read this excerpt from the beginning of the novel, I'm sure it will entrance you as well.
HTMLGIANT wrote of the book:
"It’s a dark book. Funny, sure—Jerome has episodes where he hallucinates thought balloons filled with Scrabble tiles telling him what to do—but dark. It’s been compared to A Confederacy of Dunces (even by the publisher), but beyond the setting, I’m not precisely sure it’s a apt comparison. Jerome is surrounded by large characters, but he himself is small, pushed to action and reaction by those around him. Ignatius Reilly pushed his rotundity around, bumping into the world, forcing himself on others. Coe runs from the world, runs from doctors, sleeps under his bed, falls in love with women he will never actually speak to.
Fever Chart is an excellent piece of writing, solid sentence to sentence. I’m enjoying it quite a bit."
In his own words, here is Bill Cotter's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel, Fever Chart:
In the mid-1990s, when working on the earliest version of Fever Chart, I acquired a late-1970s Pontiac Bonneville equipped with an 8-track player. Even when the automobile was new, 8-tracks had already been hurtling towards obsolescence for some time and, by 1995, when the car became my only transportation around my then-home of western Massachusetts (the top storey of Hell, not incidentally), thrift shops and garage sales were pretty much the only places 8-tracks could be found. And since the magnetic tape inside 8-tracks putresced so quickly, finding working specimens was not easy. Among the operational ones I remember piling up in the passenger's leg-room area of the Bonneville were Al Green's Greatest Hits, Band of Gypsys, Jaco Pastorius, the Annie soundtrack, and a swingy, jazzy thing whose label had blanched to illegibility.
There were others. One day, while idling at a stoplight in the dank city of Pittsfield, Mass., I noticed in the rearview a Cadillac approaching at an imprudent speed. The crash awakened the Cadillac driver, a 90-year-old fellow who should not have been sleeping. His car got totaled. A car between us got totaled. Incredibly, my Pontiac, even with its trunk hopelessly accordioned, worked just fine afterwards.
Except for the stereo. The Dire Straits album that had been parked in the 8-track player at the time was now jammed in there permanently. It still played though, so that's what I listened to. Over and over, scores of times. It was what was always playing in the following months, during which a number of unpleasant things occurred, mostly related to unrequitedness, snow, and soured love.
At an especially bleak moment (also at a stoplight), when I realized I had not the timber for carrying on and decided that cashing in my chips was the most sensible route for all concerned, the Dire Straits song in progress was "Down by the Waterline." It was some moments later, parked in a desolate church parking lot, ready for action, when I remembered that the vacuum-cleaner hose and duct tape that I, as a rule, kept in the trunk of my car for just this kind of emergency despair, was not available because the lid to the trunk had been sealed forever shut by Cadillac Granddad.
Though most of Fever Chart takes place in New Orleans, one or two details of the above recounting found their way into the first chapter.
Here are a few songs attached to the novel in one way or another:
1. Marc Ribot, "St. James Infirmary" (Saints)
I think I discovered this version of the old standard the day I submitted the final draft (of six) of my novel to the editor. For this reason I cannot think of a song I have more positive feelings towards. Similarly, I am moved to syrupy optimism whenever I listen to
2. Bob Log III, "Log Bomb" (Log Bomb),
which was the song playing when UPS came by in the middle of thunderstorm and dropped off two boxes of author's copies of the novel. It was the first time I'd seen the actual book. That was a pretty darn good day.
3. Percy Mayfield, "Louisiana" (A-side of Specialty 432; May, 1952)
I heard this in New Orleans around 1996, on WWOZ 90.7, while showering without soap. (I was out.) It was such a hypnotic, davening kind of song that I didn't realize I'd clenched up my whole body---as if moving would ruin the spell---and didn't relax until the deejay (who I recall sounded like an Irish-Channel Yul Brynner) came on and IDed the song. My muscles ached for days and I ate lot of Doan's pills. It was several years hunting until I found a copy of the single. To this day a loud playing of it makes me feel wet and unclean. In the best possible way.
4. Three Blue Teardrops, "Wished Upon a Star" (Heads Up for 53!)
It's one of those songs that's so right you figure it must be a cover of some classic; something all the best have interpreted at one time or another. But no, it's a completely original rockabilly expression. I can't believe it isn't famous and included on compilations and the like. Hell, maybe it is. I heard it first at the one and only Three Blue Teardrops show I ever went to, in New Orleans, at some now-vanished beer joint under the Pontchartrain Expressway. The place sold icy cans of Pabst at 50 cents apiece, and you were allowed to fall asleep at the bar if there was room. This beer joint---I wish I could remember what it was called!---in conflation with several others, formed the mental model for the novel's fictional barroom, the MoneyMaker, in which some of more adults-only scenes play out.
5. Magic Sam, "21 Days in Jail" (B-side of Cobra 5028; 1958)
A lot of real fear in this song. I can hear it in my head right now, and it makes me want to be good. Law-abiding. Not ever in jail. I recall upon first hearing it thinking this is the best song I've ever experienced, and feeling like the only sufficiently respectful response to its call was to drown myself in the tub. What the song has to do with Fever Chart I can't quite specify, but in my head they are forever snugly collocated.
6. David Isaacs, "Who to Tell" (Collected on Lee Perry's The Upsetter Shop, Volume 2)
A favorite during a creative draught halfway through the first draft of the novel where all I could do was play uncomplicated music, spy on a neighbor I was quite certain was a serial killer, and riot away my writing hours playing internet chess against anonymous French sadists and vicious, cheeky Kazakhs who made sport of my pawn formations. Another good song on the same collection is "Caught You Red-handed" (Take 1) by Eric Donaldson and the West Indians.
7. Sexy Death Soda, "When the Money Falls" (California Police State)
One of the best songs on the only album of a band that an ex-girlfriend turned me onto (an act which has proved her very greatest gift to me). An element of the song was the inspiration for a chapter of the novel in which a seven-year-old New Orleanian art prodigy who paints photorealistic portraits with nail polish sees a Vons on a trip to LA and realizes he'd been kidnapped from a grocery-store shopping cart as a toddler. The editor, during the novel's second revision, had me cut the chapter and cauterize all the remaining flyaway plot threads. I put the chapter aside, with plans to later manhandle it into a short story that could be submitted to a journal or something, but an otherwise charming cat named Henry anointed, with hot tinkle, the travel drive on which the chapter lay fallow.
8. Cake "Friend is a Four-Letter Word" (Fashion Nugget)
The breakup song of the list. Often playing when a woman I was especially preoccupied with during the New Orleans years (references to whom cause Annie, my girlfriend of ten years, to puff up like a nettled moggie) began making it clear without ever really being clear that our thing was over, that the thrill was gone, that a just-friends phase was nigh, and not a moment too soon. It hurt, though I don't blame her a bit---I was a gloomy, zestless, long-distance boyfriend who gambled instead of going to work. Soon after, I piled up everything I owned, except for a frypan, a change of clothes, and a shelf-yard of books, into a big, melodramatic heap out on the corner of Sixth and Baronne, and then sat back and watched the thrift-buzzards skeletonize it. Then I took a one-way nonrefundable to Vegas and lived there for a year. Though neither the woman nor the breakup feature in the novel, the themes of romance frustrated by friendship, and friendship murdered by romance, are central.
And, finally,
9. Guitar Wolf, "Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic" (Missile Me!)
When the novel's main character and narrator, Jerome Coe, first arrives in New Orleans, he (like lots of first-time visitors) is wholly seduced by the city and its whispered promises of sanctuary and bacchanal, sex and contentment, Catholic-style sin and instant absolution, liberty, rest, absurdity, additional sex, mutiny, and laffs; and if his seduction could be aligned with any one occurrence in the real world, it would likely be the sweaty, groupie-crammed, gin-wet Guitar Wolf show (at yet another bar whose name I've forgotten and which is probably gone now) where Seiji, Guitar Wolf himself, an individual so sexy his mere presence could make even the straightest of you boys out there mighty uncomfortable deep down in your pants, beetled far over the lusty crowd and snarled, causing a mostly naked Veronica Lake look-alike to swoon. Swoon.
Bill Cotter and Fever Chart links:
HTMLGIANT review
Texas Monthly review
The Blacklist interview with the author
McSweeney's essays by the author on being a rare books dealer
Ron Rege, Jr. on his cover art for the book
Six Sentences guest post by the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks
tags: books music literature fiction
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Book Notes - Colin Dickey ("Cranioklepty")
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Colin Dickey's new book, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, is a fascinating history of the stealing of skulls. Well-researched and thoughtfully illustrated, these tales of grave robbing (and often the medical and pseudo-medical reasons behind the crimes) are easy to read, yet hard to forget.
The Brooklyn Rail wrote of the book:
“Dickey spins these stories with a storyteller’s grace and a historian’s exactitude. Cranioklepty will join those books for popular audiences that delve into the origins of eccentric intellectual lore, whether madness and lexicography (see: The Professor and the Madman) or inventions and visions by depressives, maniacs, and malcontents. So be it: volumes dedicated to unearthing the historically obscure and perversely attractive have a place on my shelf near where my souvenir skull should be."
In his own words, here is Colin Dickey's Book Notes music playlist for his book, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius:
I broke this list into two halves. Since many of the more famous skulls that were stolen were in fact musicians, I built a playlist around the key pieces of music that appear in the book. But also, in keeping with the somewhat gothic theme of the book, it seemed important to include the type of songs one might listen to while digging up skulls.
Here's the first half, of some of the more notable pieces of music that get featured in the book:
Haydn, The Creation
Based on the Book of Genesis, The Creation was a hallmark of the Romantic notion of the sublime—as Gustav Schilling would write thirty-five years after its premiere, "there is still no music of greater sublimity than the passage ‘And There Was Light' which follows ‘and God said' in Haydn's Creation." This became, in some ways, the central piece of music for the book, since it was the sublime—that mixture of both ecstasy and of terror—that seemed to me motivating this very odd form of thievery that I was exploring.
Mozart, Requiem
Performed during Haydn's funeral mass, while the entire city of Vienna was occupied by Napoleon's army. This one already has its own gothic aura attached to it, and while this solemn, if sparsely attended ceremony was taking place, some members of the audience that day were already planning how to remove the great composer's head from his body, a theft which would take place only a few days later.
Gluck, Orpheus
Haydn had himself composed an unfinished opera on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice, entitled The Soul of the Poet, which retells the famous story of the world's greatest musician venturing to the underworld to win back his dead love Eurydice from Hades. But since Haydn's opera was never finished or staged, most music-lovers at the time would have known Gluck's piece above all others, and it was perhaps this piece of music that was on the minds of those who ventured once more into the world of the dead—Gumpendorf cemetery—to retrieve the head of Haydn.
Mozart, The Magic Flute
The Queen of the Night's part is often recognized as an incredibly difficult role, and in the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of the few sopranos well known for this role was Therese Gassman, whose husband would later go on to be directly involved in the theft of Haydn's skull. While she herself was generally horrified by his macabre pursuits, Therese (who had known Haydn in life) would ultimately have her own ghoulish part to play in the theft.
Handel, "For Unto Us a Child Is Born"
Handel's Messiah was Beethoven's favorite piece of music, and this oratorio was his most beloved. When he knew he was dying in 1827, it was this piece he quoted to his doctor, when he said, "My work is done; if any doctor could still help, his name shall be called Wonderful!" He died only a few days later, but that phrase would in time come to have some odd, iconic resonances.
And a short collection of music that one might listen to while stealing skulls….
Band of Skulls, Baby Darling Doll Face Honey
Boy, I didn't think I'd like this band, but it turns out to be great to dig skulls with—if by skulls you mean the Damien-Hirst-encrusted-in-diamonds kind.
Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
If you already know about this band's bizarre saga, you might understand why they're on this list. I'm certainly not going to go into it here.
Burzum, Aske
Deeply problematic individual, not to mention a confessed murderer (see #2 above), and certainly someone I hesitate to endorse, though a friend assures me that, on a playlist of songs to dig up skulls to, this one's a "no-brainer."
Grateful Dead, Skull and Roses
Grew up on this. It seemed like the right thing to follow Norwegian death metal.
Sonic Youth, "Screaming Skull" (from Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star)
Because why wouldn't Sonic Youth be on this list?
Colin Dickey and Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius links:
the book's website
the book's blog
the author on Twitter
Win a copy of the book from the publisher
A.V. Club review
Author Exposure review
Bookmarks review
The Brooklyn Rail review
Denver Post review
Macleans.ca review
Mile High News review
Publishers Weekly review
The Second Pass review
Boston Globe interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks
tags: books music literature non-fiction
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Shorties (Barack Obama, Tom Waits, and more)
Congratulations to Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama. I recommend his books, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father.
Tom Waits talks to the Guardian about playing the devil in Terry Gilliam's film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Built to Spill's Doug Martsch talks to the Boston Herald.
In the Times Online, Antonia Senior lists historical fiction worth reading.
"Jesus Christ." (The Indie Band) is a new band featuring Hipster Runoff's Carles and author Tao Lin.
Tor's blog offers a steampunk primer.
The Denver Post interviews James McNew of Yo La Tengo.
Time and Goodreads interview Audrey Niffenegger about her new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry.
The Phoenix New Times interviews singer-songwriter-cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis.
NPR is streaming last night's performances by Lou Barlow and Dinosaur Jr.
NPR's All Things Considered examines William S. Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch 50 years after its initial publication.
io9 reviews Bill Willingham's Peter & Max: A Fables Novel.
Funny, smart and full of old-fashioned thrills and spills, Peter & Max: A Fables Novel brings Bill Willingham's long-running comic series to the world of prose in a way that's sure to please old fans and make some new ones.
Newsarama wraps up its interview with Willingham.
At eMusic, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats discusses religious records that have inspired him.
Tiny Mix Tapes also interviews Darnielle.
Tiny Mix Tapes, the Harvard Crimson, and the Daily Cardinal review the new Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come.
Current contests at Largehearted Boy:
Win a copy of Nick Hornby's new novel, Juliet, Naked
Win one of two copies of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben H. White.
Follow me on Twitter for links that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
daily mp3 downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
tags: music books popculture indie
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
Daily Downloads (Say Hi, Fela Kuti, and more)
Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:
Alex Cuba: "Si Pero No" [mp3] from Agua Del Pozo
other Alex Cuba posts at Largehearted Boy
Fela Kuti: "Zombie" [mp3] from The Best Of The Black President (out October 27th)
other Fela Kuti posts at Largehearted Boy
Girls in Trouble: "Secrets / You're Always Watching" [mp3] from Girls in Trouble (out November 3rd)
other Girls in Trouble posts at Largehearted Boy
I Was Totally Destroying It: "Come Out, Come Out" [mp3] from Horror Vacui (out October 13th)
I Was Totally Destroying It: "A Reason To" [mp3] from Horror Vacui (out October 13th)
other I Was Totally Destroying It posts at Largehearted Boy
On Fillmore: "Master Moon" [mp3] from Extended Vacation (out November 3rd)
other On Fillmore posts at Largehearted Boy
Peephole: free and legal Cold Dime EP [mp3]*
other Peephole posts at Largehearted Boy
The Rest: "With Every Heartbeat (Robyn cover)" [mp3] from Everyone All At Once (out October 12th)
other Rest posts at Largehearted Boy
Say Hi: "November Was White, December was Grey (demo version)" [mp3]
other Say Hi posts at Largehearted Boy
Tyondai Braxton: "Ulfie's Woodshop" [mp3] from Central Market
other Tyondai Braxton posts at Largehearted Boy
*registration required
Free and legal mp3s of live performances at other websites:
Decemberists: 2009-09-19, New York [mp3]
other Decemberists posts at Largehearted Boy
Odawas: Daytrotter session [mp3]
other Odawas posts at Largehearted Boy
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous free and legal mp3 daily downloads
2009 Bonnaroo downloads
2008 Lollapalooza downloads
other music festival downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and album streams from weekly CD releases)
weekly CD release lists
tags: music download indie mp3
Posted by david | Permalink | Comments (View)
October 8, 2009
Book Notes - Sara Zarr ("Once Was Lost")
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Once Was Lost focuses on Samara, whose crisis of faith is enhanced by her alcoholic mother, aloof pastor father and the disappearance of another local teenage girl. Sara Zarr has a gift for building tension through her narrative, and this talent shines though in Once Was Lost.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Beyond delivering a gripping story, Zarr has a knack for exposing human weakness in the ordinary."
In her own words, here is Sara Zarr's Book Notes music playlist for her novel, Once Was Lost:
I started writing Once Was Lost back in 2002, when a teen named Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped, more or less from my neighborhood. (I'm sure most adults will remember this story, which is in the news again lately as the kidnapper's trial drags on.) At first, it was an adult book written from multiple points of view, kind of a Tom Perrotta-life-in-the-neighborhood plus a crime novel. All of the narrators had some connection, direct or peripheral, to a missing girl. When my career writing young adult fiction took off, I knew I'd be reshaping what I had into that format and went to a single narrator---Samara, the daughter of the pastor of the church that the missing girl's family attends. (By the way, later, Stuart O'Nan did a fine job with exactly the kind of book I initially wanted to write--Songs for the Missing. Another favorite adult novel with a missing child as part of the backdrop is Frederick Busch's Girls.)
Some people hear the title Once Was Lost and immediately make the connection to the Christian hymn "Amazing Grace," from which that line is taken. Others don't have any background in church and therefore may worry that this book isn't for them. I'll just say that though the particular details involve church and religious faith, that crisis-of-faith aspect could just as easily be (and is, really) a crisis of faith in family, self, and basic beliefs about the safety of the world and essential goodness of people. YA fiction is so much about firsts--first car, first crush, first love, first loss. This is about one girl's first dark night of the soul.
And so, selections from the writing/reading playlist for Once Was Lost:
Hurry Home Dark Cloud - Pinetop Seven
I listened to a lot of Pinetop Seven last summer while trying to get together a draft I could turn in to my editor. Their style is distinctly haunting, and there's a kind of big-sky largeness to the music that seemed right for the setting of the book---a fictional, rural western town. This one was always the first song on the playlist when I'd sit down to write. I was in Santa Fe at the time, while my husband worked on his graduate degree. Hearing this song now brings back all those days at the St. John's College library where I'd work while he was in class.
I Know There's a Word - Aimee Mann
Aimee Mann makes great music for depressives. For me, this is ultimate anthem of malaise, if that's not a contradiction in terms. I can imagine both Sam and her mom laying in separate rooms, as this plays in the foreground a la that scene in the movie Magnolia when the characters sing Mann's "Wise Up" in tandem.
Oh God, Where Are You Now? - Sufjan Stevens
A beautiful, sad song of lament that goes on for nine minutes. This could be the title of the book, too, as it's the essential question for Sam.
Imperfect World - Peter Himmelman
A friend, another writer, sent me this CD about a year ago and this, the title track, immediately broke my heart. It's just a gorgeous piece about the beauty and order of the created world alongside the disorder, the things that are broken. "Imperfect world / with every stone in its place." After falling in love with this album, I ran out and bought pretty much the rest of Himmelman's catalog, which is absolutely rich with that tension I try to capture in my book--the coexistence of affliction and hope.
Faith Enough - Jars of Clay
For the longest time, I tried to get a book title out of this song. We tried Home Enough, from the lyric, "I'm home enough to know I'm lost," a line I adore, but couldn't make it work. The song is about contradictions, kind of a litany of things that don't make sense: "The ice is thin enough for walking / the rope is worn enough to climb...the bridge is weak enough to cross / I'm home enough to know I'm lost." Faith, by its nature, doesn't make sense, yet somehow thrives or survives in a sea of contradictions. Musically, I like the steady bass and drumbeat of this one.
I Need Love - Sam Phillips
Oh, Sam Phillips. She's someone who has struggled with religion, embraced doubt, and invited the world into that experience through her songs. It's hard to pick just one ("Five Colors" would also go here). The line in this one, "Peace comes to my rescue / I don't know what it means" touches right on something mysterious Samara experiences in the midst of her doubt.
Long Lost Brother / Idea #21 (Not Too Late) - Over the Rhine
So many of Over the Rhine's songs are the musical version of the themes and questions of this novel. Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler have a knack for writing about how we fumble around for faith, misunderstand God and each other, and go looking for love in all the wrong places. Here are a couple of the songs I think specifically belong on the book's soundtrack:
Long Lost Brother: The book has an epigraph taken from this song: "Trouble is I'm so exhausted, the plot, you see, I think I've lost it. I need the grace to find what can't be found." I just love that line. I think we all feel like we lose the plot now and then, and Sam is in that place of exhaustion already when the book begins, even before the girl in her church is kidnapped.
Idea #21 (Not Too Late): I just love, love, love this song. It's got a classic gospel feel and the lyrics are so goose-bumpy for me, completely articulating "I'm tired of this shit" along with "There just might be hope yet." It goes, also, with a little Lazarus/resurrection thread running through the story and questions Sam asks herself---When do you decide to stop having hope for a particular situation/relationship/longing? Can you ever really say, "Well, that's that"? I'll end the playlist with this lyric: "How does it end? How does it end? We're all riding on the last train trying to find our way home again."
Sara Zarr and Once Was Lost links:
the author's website
the author's book tour video diary
the author's Wikipedia entry
the book's video trailer
AyeCaptain review
Bloody Bookaholic review
The Book Reader review
BookEnvy review
BookPage review
The Compulsive Reader review
Dog Ear review
Everyday I Write the Book review
Everyday Reading review
Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf review
Literary Girls Writing Group review
A Patchwork of Books review
Penultimate Page review
Publishers Weekly review
Read Into This! review
Sarah's Random Musings review
Simply Books review
Steph Sue Reads review
Zoe's Book Reviews review
Arts & Faith essay by the author about the book
Bitch Magazine interview with the author
BlogTalkRadio interview with the author
Every Girl Blog interview with the author
Front Pages interview with the author
Hunger Mountain essay by the author about writing the book
Life, Words, & Rock 'n' Roll interview with the author
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for her novel, Sweethearts
readergirlz essay by the author about the book's cover
Teenreads.com guest essay by the author
Wrapped Up in Books interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks
tags: books music literature fiction
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Book Notes - Marc Estrin ("The Good Doctor Guillotin")
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Marc Estrin's The Good Doctor Guillotin examines the lives and times of the five men who invented the guillotine, and finely blends history, fiction, and political commentary.
Foreword wrote of the book:
"The story of these five men is accompanied by facts about French society during the Age of Enlightenment, including a discussion of the rampant taphophie--or fear of graves and being buried alive--and an account of the first hot air balloon flights. Readers with an interest in history and politics will find the story especially fascinating."
In his own words, here is Marc Estrin's Book Notes music playlist for his book, The Good Doctor Guillotin:
Being a musician, I think in musical terms and often structure my work guided by musical forms. As a teenager, I was completely bowled over by Thomas Mann's chapter on Beethoven's last piano sonata, op. 111, early in his Doctor Faustus. "I'd love to be able to write something like that," I thought. Fifty years later, I gave it a try with my chapter on a fictive Charles Ives sonata in my debut novel, Insect Dreams.
Since then, my every novel has some composer or some piece of music as part of its story or structure. In various books, I have engaged Ives' Fourth Symphony, Handel's Messiah, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Zelenka's Lamentations of Jeremiah, Mahler's Second Symphony, Gilbert & Sullivan's Yeoman of the Guard, Scarlatti's piano sonatas, Messian's L'Ascencion, Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, and Beethoven's Grosse Fugue. I have planned books to be in sonata form, in rondo form, and as themes and variations.
The Good Doctor Guillotin was structured and driven by the songs of the French Revolution: The main sections are Ça Ira -- a revolutionary song meaning it will happen, it will work out fine; Allons enfants de la patrie -- the beginning of the Marseillaise -- let's go!; and La jour de gloire est arrivé -- the glorious day has come. Unfortunately, the glory turned out to be the Terror.
Realizing that a young composer who lived and died during the Revolution's genesis and birth -- Mozart -- had to be part of the picture, one of the first scenes I conceived of was that of the good doctor Guillotin, progressive, humanist member of the National Assembly, playing a Mozart sonata with Tobias Schmidt, the German piano maker who built the early beheading machines. "Why are you crying?" Schmidt was to ask. "Why are you crying?" was to be the answer. While both characters were real, it was I who made them both musicians. The discussion that followed would concern not only the music, but the revolution occurring around them.
Not being a violinist, and not well-acquainted with the violin literature, I emailed my many musicians friends -- folks I play chamber music and in orchestras with. "If you were going to cry over a moment in a Mozart violin sonata, what would it be?" I received a variety of answers, but the one that came up most commonly was the E major trio in the minuet of the E minor sonata. I listened to all suggestions, and decided that not only was that most popular suggestion eminently cryable-to, but that it would give me the most thematic connection with the social complexities of the revolution. It is now the context of the chapter "Tempo di Menuetto".
So, anyway -- to my "playlist".
First, the French revolutionary songs:
The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.
Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.
La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.
Next, Mozart:
Of primary use was the E minor sonata mentioned above. But equally important thematically is a piano piece played by beginners, a little set of variations on the French folk song, Ah, vous dirai-je Maman. We know the tune as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". In French, there are bawdy lyrics (probably more to Mozart's liking) about what a young daughter would like to, but can't tell her mother about her new lover, but the original may have been a simple children's song, which I find thematically more interesting:
Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman
Ce qui cause mon tourment ?
Papa veut que je raisonne
Comme une grande personne
Moi je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.
Mama, should I tell you what is tormenting me? Papa wants me to reason like an adult, but I think bonbons are worth more than reason.
There, in a nutshell, the fate of the Enlightenment Project, and our own predicament.
Musically, what is of musical/thematic interest here is that in the midst of the upbeat, tongue-in-cheek compositional facility of the twelve variations, plunked down in the middle, is one of the darkest moments in Mozart. Perhaps this crucified minute is no "worse" than some of the tortured moments in the late symphonies, but here, in the midst of a nursery rhyme tune, it is particularly devastating. The darkness concealed in the light. Both Guillotin and Schmidt would have noticed that. And they do.
Two other Mozart pieces make their appearance, both in the context of the contemporary fad for Mesmer, his healing clinic, and his animal magnetism. (Though he was run out of Paris by the good doctors of the Sorbonne, he was one of the earliest practitioners of the "energy medicine" now widely practiced in its eastern and western forms.) There was a lot of "new age, woo-woo" music played in his clinic during the healing sessions, and Ben Franklin's design for the "glass harmonica" was the Wurlitzer in the theater. Mozart wrote an Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica, which was very likely part of the mix. Woo-woo.
The inveterate Wolfgang clown wrote a send-up of Mesmer himself in Così fan Tutte, where, at the end of Act One, fake Albanians are killed by fake poison, and are revived by a fake doctor, using a giant, all-healing magnet.
Bach
Hard to escape him. As Bach developed his keyboard works, it became obvious to many -- including the old man -- that the clavichord and harpsichord could no longer contain or express the range of emotion and intensity of passion he and his works had grown capable of. Music history was screaming for a pianoforte, and organ builders and harpsichord makers put their minds and tools to it. For purposes of the story, I made Schmidt one of them, a child so inspired by his own understanding of the Kantor's needs as to make a life project of piano building. Too bad that during the Revolution, aristocrats weren't buying pianos anymore, and of course the poor never could. Find a hole and fill it. Beheading machines. That's the ticket! Makes for a sardonic consciousness.
Schmidt was not the only character involved with Bach. Sanson, the executioner of Paris, was the historical figure with the most written about him. It turned out that he (like me) was a bad cellist, but bad enough -- that, mixed with his profession -- no one (I thought) would play with him. What do cellists do when they have to play alone? They play the Bach cello suites. Today, any cellist anywhere can go to the nearest music store and buy any of many editions. But then? Would Sanson have been able to get his hands on them? Yes, they were written by then. And there were musical manuscripts flowing, largely through Strasbourg, between Germany and France. And any suite would be easy enough to copy in the pre-xerox age. So -- it's possible that Sanson, a self-styled noble, and member of the court, might have been able to get hold of some of them. That's the best I could come up with from my musicological friends -- "It's possible". Time for my author's rights: I gave him a copy to nurse his cellistic wounds with. I imagine him loving the Saraband from the D minor suite.
My soulmind is so often filled with Bach that the moment I sat down to write the Acknowledgements, I translated "I acknowledge" into Confiteor -- which, in spite of the many settings of the latin Credo, first and formost means the enormous fugue/plainsong "Confiteor" movement of the B minor mass. So I wound up dividing my acknowledgements into Bach's components -- the marching continuo, the fugue and the chant -- and the form served me well to acknowledge the many aspects of the novel that needed acknowledging.
Minor characters
Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill's opera masterpiece, Mahagonny, was bound to show up in any work of mine about the Enlightenment. After all, it concerns a planned city -- planned by criminals, of course -- which, like the French Revolution -- was to be devoted to human happiness -- happiness in this case consisting of eating, drinking, whoring and boxing. It ends with the electric chair. Sound familiar? Early on, Jimmy Mahoney, like my Schmidt, senses the limitation of the project. He and his friends get together and sing a barbershop quartet (barbering, anyone?) about how wonderful, noble and beautiful their new world is. "But," Jimmy continues to observe, "Something is missing." The moment sang itself right into my text.
As did Richard Peaslee's "Fifteen Glorious Years" from Peter Brooks's astonishing Royal Shakespeare Company production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. Many of the elements of this remarkable play prompted moments and larger musings in my text. Peaslee's music has that kind of memorable rightness which will forever prevent me from thinking of any other settings -- much like Tenniel's drawings for Alice, or Cruikshank's for Dickens.
As did two epigraph references from The Mikado -- inevitable in a book about beheading as punishment. "Now though you'd have said that head was dead" speaks directly to the fierce eighteenth century debate about whether the guillotine was kinder than the gallows. We are currently in the midst of an equally barbarous debate concerning our procedures for lethal injection. And we, unlike other advanced democracies, are also still debating whether the punishment fitting the crime must necessarily involve state murder to convince the public that murder is a bad thing to do.
There is a piece of music which did not, and could not, get into The Good Doctor Guillotin, but which I would also recommend to the interested reader/listener: the final scene from Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, in which a convent of Carmelite nuns, condemned for resisting the Revolution's disenfranchisement of the Church, are led serially to their deaths, singing a prayer to the Virgin while the mob screams and denounces, and the guillotine cuts, and cuts, and cuts through their serenity.
My wife and I stayed with an orchestral conductor in Paris one of whose proudest plumbing creations was his invention of how to do the guillotine sound.
Marc Estrin and The Good Doctor Guillotin links:
the author's website
the book's website
ForeWord review
Publishers Weekly review
Dissident Voice interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks
tags: books music literature fiction
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Shorties (Lucinda Williams, Herta Muller, and more)
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams discusses her music career with Greg Kot at Turn It Up.
“There was no money in my family,” Williams says. “My dad was supportive of me creatively, but he had so much trouble as a poet making a living, he wanted me to have something to fall back on. And he was right, because I didn’t have a damn thing to fall back on. So I had to do this, because I didn’t have any other skills. I gave college a try, at the University of Arkansas, studying cultural anthropology of all things. In the summer of ‘72, I went to visit my mother in New Orleans and got offered this four-nights-a-week gig playing for tips in the middle of all the strip joints on Bourbon Street. I called my dad and said I wanted to stay there and play instead of going back to school. And to my surprise and eternal gratitude he said, ‘OK.’ That was the biggest turning point of my entire career. If I had come back to school, who knows what would’ve happened?”
Romanian-born German writer Herta Muller has won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Urban Outfitters is offering a free 25-track iTunes music sampler (to U.S. residents only), featuring tracks by The XX, Vivian Girls, Islands, and much more.
The Provincetown Banner profiles Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection, Olive Kitteridge.
In today’s world of fast and big and lots of it, Strout’s stories are a world of small pleasures and dissatisfactions. In Crosby, people can be counted on; they stick around, they do the right thing. Except, of course, when they don’t, like in real life. They have dreams but they are not so big, and neither do they expect their sorrows to be as large as they sometimes are.
The San Jose Mercury News profiles singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco.
The Telegraph interviews Lorrie Moore about her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs.
The Georgia Strait profiles Passion Pit.
While they await Passion Pit's inevitable back-to-roots phase, fans can make do with the fivesome's charged-up debut album, Manners, which marries fluorescent machine-made melodies to Angelakos's wildly expressive falsetto. “Sleepyhead” is the band's signature song, its corkscrewing synth blasts and grainy vocal samples establishing an atmosphere of competing emotions; on the dance floor, the track is an ecstasy bomb, but heard through headphones, it seems designed to push you to tears.
NHPR's Word of Mouth and The Stranger interview Tao Lin about his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel.
Absolutely Kosher is clearing out its warehouse and offering great deals on the indie label's CDs (1 for $5, 3 for $10, 5 for $15, 8 for $20, 13 for $30, 26 for $50, or 78 for $350).
Cartoonist Emily Flake is covering Small Press Expo for Print.
The Village Voice goes behind the scenes at the Mountain Goats' Colbert Report appearance.
Goodreads interviews Nick Hornby about his new novel, Juliet, Naked.
Goodreads: Juliet, Naked is receiving a lot of comparisons to High Fidelity. However, your characters have turned a corner into the problems of middle age. How is this new book different?
Nick Hornby: There were a couple of things that came together. I wanted to write about the way our consumption of music has changed over the last ten years or so, because since High Fidelity was published, everything has changed. I wanted to write about an artist's relationship with his own work, and how that work means different things to different people. And I wanted to write about how everyone seems to have the feeling in middle age that they have wasted their life, no matter how much they have apparently achieved.
PopMatters reviews the book.
Jacket Whys is a blog devoted to children's and YA book covers.
True/Slant critiques Pitchfork's top 200 albums of the 2000s list.
Drowned in Sound interviews Randy Randall of No Age.
DiS: How do you feel about noise pop and lo-fi music at the moment? It seems to be everywhere you look.
RR: I don’t really read a lot of blogs or websites so a lot of it passes me by but the thing with No Age and the music we make is that it was never something we set out to so. The reason our early recordings sound the way they did is that we had to use equipment that was free because we had practically no money at all so we had a certain lo-fidelity for that reason. As time's gone on though we’ve got a little more money and have been able to get in a studio and enjoy both sides of it. I’m a big fan of the shoe-gaze element of the lo-fi music that’s around at the moment though, there’s something about the whole bedroom recordings that’s dreamy and I really like that. When people say 'lo-fi' they tend to mean you’re not trying. We like to make records sound as good as they possibly can and as noisy too.
WHYY's Fresh Air interviews Michael Chabon about his new essay collection, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son.
Read an excerpt from the book (and hear Chabon reading an excerpt as well).
CBS News also interviews Chabon about the book.
NPR is streaming last night's show by Gossip.
Cartoonist Peter Bagge is teaching a class on how to write graphic novels.
Yo La Tengo visits The Current studio for an interview and live performance.
Current contests at Largehearted Boy:
Win a copy of Nick Hornby's new novel, Juliet, Naked
Win one of two copies of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben H. White.
Follow me on Twitter for links that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.
also at Largehearted Boy:
daily mp3 downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
tags: music books popculture indie
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Daily Downloads (Built to Spill, The Spinto Band, and more)
Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:
Built to Spill: "Hindsight" [mp3] from There Is No Enemy
other Built to Spill posts at Largehearted Boy
Computer Perfection: "Silence Is a Shadow's Dream" [mp3] from We Wish You Well On Your Way To Hell
other Computer Perfection posts at Largehearted Boy
Jon Black: free and legal Goodbye Golden Age album [mp3]*
Jon Black: free and legal The October Sky album [mp3]*
other Jon Black posts at Largehearted Boy
Gogol Bordello: "Wanderlust King (BBC session)" [mp3] from Live from Axis Mundi
Gogol Bordello: "Troubled Friends (Gypsy sessions)" [mp3] from Live from Axis Mundi
other Gogol Bordello posts at Largehearted Boy
MV & EE: "Summer Magic" [mp3] from Barn Nova (out October 13th)
other MV & EE posts at Largehearted Boy
One Eskimo: "Kandi" [mp3] from One Eskimo
other One Eskimo posts at Largehearted Boy
Spinto Band: "Jackhammer (Slim Version)" [mp3] from Slim & Slender
other Spinto Band posts at Largehearted Boy
Wallpaper: "Doodoo Face" [mp3] from Doodoo Face
other Wallpaper posts at Largehearted Boy
*registration required
Free and legal mp3s of live performances at other websites:
Holly Miranda: 2009-10-03, Hoboken [mp3]
other Holly Miranda posts at Largehearted Boy
Je Suis France: 2009-09-17, Athens [mp3]
other Je Suis France posts at Largehearted Boy
The Phenomenal Handclap Band: Luxury Wafers session [mp3]
other Phenomenal Handclap Band posts at Largehearted Boy
Woods: Daytrotter session [mp3]
other Woods posts at Largehearted Boy
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous free and legal mp3 daily downloads
2009 Bonnaroo downloads
2008 Lollapalooza downloads
other music festival downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and album streams from weekly CD releases)
weekly CD release lists
tags: music download indie mp3
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October 7, 2009
Contest - Win Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
This week a review copy of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters landed on my doorstep, and I giggled and laughed my way through the book in one evening. Ben H. Winters has added a heaping serving of sea monsters to the Austen classic novel, and has created a perfect Halloween season read. I am giving away two copies of the book to lucky winners this week.
Of course, reading about sea monsters made me think about my Halloween costume this year, and, as usual, I will probably wait until the last minute to throw something together. I am hoping you can give me some ideas...
To enter the contest, leave a comment in this post with your Halloween costume plans. If you don't plan to wear a costume this year, just name the costume you would wear if you were headed out to a costume party.
Two will receive the following prizes:
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen & Ben H. Winters
an assortment of books & CDs
The winners will be chosen randomly at midnight CT Tuesday evening (October 14th).
also at Largehearted Boy:
previous and ongoing contests at Largehearted Boy
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks (2009 Edition)
tags: books music giveaway contest
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Book Notes - Libba Bray ("Going Bovine")
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Libba Bray's novel Going Bovine, a modern day Don Quixote tale, hurtles through time and space with self-effacing humor. Mad cow disease, string theory, punk fairies, and animated lawn gnomes, combine with Bray's storytelling genius to produce one of the year's funniest and most surprisingly moving books.
Catch Libba Bray reading (with Lev Grossman) at the first edition of the Largehearted Lit reading series on November 8th at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn.
In her own words, here is Libba Bray's Book Notes music playlist for her novel, Going Bovine:
Going Bovine is loosely based on Don Quixote, if Don Quixote were a misanthropic, stoner sixteen-year-old from Texas who’s just been diagnosed with mad cow disease. In the hospital, Cameron is visited by Dulcie, a punker angel/possible hallucination with dubiously spray-painted wings (she’s not a great speller, for one), who tells him that there is a cure for his disease if he’s willing to go in search of it. And also, he’s needed to save the universe from a band of dark energy that just hitched a ride into our world from the Higgs Field. No pressure.
Together with his new friend, Gonzo, a profane, video-gaming, hypochondriac dwarf, and an enchanted yard gnome who claims to be the Norse god, Balder, Cameron sets off on a quest through a twisted America of happiness cults, reality TV, mystical jazz musicians, bizarre physicists, roadside diners, snow globe vigilantes, Disney World, and some other stuff, tilting at windmills the whole way in his search to find what matters most.
I make an iPod playlist for everything I write. It helps me get into the right mood. Plus, it’s great to be able to claim that as work. For Going Bovine, I wanted something that captured the way midnight movies make you feel when you are seventeen, when the night and freedom collide to put you in a strange space where you are open wide and everything is possible. But, you know, all of that with a beat you could dance to.
"Add It Up" The Violent Femmes
This seemed like the perfect pre-mad cow disease-road trip song for Cameron. Adolescent angst and frustration coupled with an amphetamine beat and Gordon Gano’s bursting-at-the-seams yelp. Why can’t I get just one kiss? Word.
"Pompeii AM Gotterdammerung" The Flaming Lips
I listened to a lot of Flaming Lips while writing. Maybe it’s that we’re from roughly the same geographic region (Their Oklahoma City to my North Texas), but hearing this song is like driving solitary stretches of I-35 late at night, the street lamps strobing over your face, the lonely night lights of the anonymous motels and truck stops the only witnesses to your existence. I also like the relentless space-age drive of this track, like Pink Floyd at 850-horsepower.
"Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)" Gnarls Barkley
Cameron begins to see freaky, terrifying visions of Fire Giants and destruction and a shadowy guy in a space helmet who is known only as The Wizard of Reckoning. He’s starting to figure out that something is very, very wrong—whether that something wrong is within him or the universe is the question. Ceelo and Danger Mouse know exactly how he feels. Yes, they do.
"Roadrunner" The Modern Lovers
This was the first song I picked for the GB playlist, actually. Cameron is obsessed with a cartoon, which is clearly a stand-in for Wile E Coyote/Roadrunner. But it’s Jonathan Richman singing about driving past the Stop & Shop, the radio keeping him from being lonely late at night, and the “suburban trees, suburban speed/And it smells like heaven” that really capture the spirit of the journey for me.
"Trouble" Ray LaMontagne
One of my favorite movies is Harold & Maude, and certainly Cameron and Harold could be in the same Outsiders’ Club. (Can you have an Outsiders’ Club? Or does that automatically make you Insiders? Just wondering. Anyway…) Cat Stevens’ soundtrack really augmented that movie in just the right, wistful way. Ray LaMontagne was my stand-in for Cat Stevens here, though certainly, he is no stand-in for anyone, really. The song is achingly romantic. His voice is raw and gorgeous. The rhythmic strumming reminds me of bus wheels on rain-slicked highway. And who doesn’t need a little saving sometimes?
"People Who Died" Jim Carroll
Cameron and Gonzo have an encounter with a mystical jazz musician, Junior Webster, in a New Orleans nightclub. My friend Laurie and I once took a legendary trip from Austin to New Orleans (just how legendary shall remain a closely guarded secret). We both have a primal fear of bridges over water, which became a bit of a problem when we hit the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. “Uh, tell me we’re not going over that,” Laurie said. “Okay, we’re not going over that,” I said, choking back manic laughter. And then there were twenty-five miles of screaming. This song was playing at nosebleed level. I can’t think of New Orleans without it. Consider it a raised middle finger to fear.
"Keep the Car Running" Arcade Fire
A paranoiac’s anthem. Cameron, Gonzo, and Balder are trying to keep one step ahead of the Fire Giants and the Wizard of Reckoning as well as Cameron’s disease. I really like Win Butler’s voice on this, the way he manages to mix anxiety with longing in a primal howl. I just know that when this song comes on, I have the urge to grab my keys and run.
"Kick the Stones" Chris Whitley
My older brother, Stuart, was a huge musical influence on me. I can remember driving with him out country roads in Texas, a real Ry Cooder landscape, while listening to this song, talking about music and life. There’s something haunting about the tune for me, like Robert Johnson heading toward the apocryphal crossroads. That Whitley died between the first and second drafts of the book intensified the feeling of time bearing down on the characters, with an otherworldly presence nipping at their heels.
"Mama Told Me Not to Come" Three Dog Night
I think Quentin Tarantino directed this song in another life. It’s the perfect song for finding yourself in a bizarre situation where things promise only to get weirder from there. So you might as well surrender and take the ride. Mama may have told you not to come, but hey, Mama’s not here.
"God Only Knows" The Beach Boys
When you’re writing about mysterious, vanishing Inuit rock bands, you need a starting point. (C’est vrai. C’est vrai. Look, I can type French.) In the book, there’s a band called the Copenhagen Interpretation who may or may not have existed, who may have been sucked into a parallel world or who might have eaten each other in a drug-fueled frenzy. Maybe it was growing up in a music town. (Denton, TX—home of UNT.) But I got so sick of hearing about how influential Pet Sounds was that for years I just refused to listen to it out of spite. Because I’m stupid like that. And then one day, I listened to Pet Sounds and went, holy cow, this Brian Wilson fellow is a stone-cold genius! Turns out I was a little late to that party.
"It’s All Too Much" The Beatles
A joyful, psychedelic aural assault to go with the characters’ wild experiences and newfound freedoms. It is physically impossible for me not to smile when I hear George Harrison singing about “the love that’s shining all around you.” This is the song I want played at my funeral, by the way. Not that I’m hoping to shuffle off this mortal coil anytime soon. But if, by chance, I meet up with the wrong end of a city bus next week, and my iPod is found, please let them know to play this and not, say, “Xanadu.”
"Stuck in the Middle with You" Stealers Wheel
Cameron, Gonzo, and Balder are forced to pick up some frat boy hitchhikers at one point. Hijinks ensue. “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right/Here I am—stuck in the middle with you.” Plus, you gotta figure they can only pick up crappy AM in that busted Caddy.
"She’s a Mystery to Me" Roy Orbison
Cameron is obsessed with a Portuguese novelty singer named The Great Tremelo, who plays songs of love on the recorder and sings falsetto. My inspiration, strangely enough, was Roy Orbison. In my ignorant youth, my thought about Orbison was that he was no Robert Plant. It should be noted that I also thought home perms and mullets were a good idea. It took me a few years to be haunted by the beauty and passion of that voice. When I got it, I really got it. Just like Cameron finally comes to understand the Great Tremelo.
"Guiding Light" Television
This is my favorite Television song: the slow ache, the existential musings, the hypnotic guitar riff. In the book, Dulcie talks about embracing life’s mystery; here, Tom Verlaine sings, “All intent/remains unknown.” There’s nothing more to say.
"Light & Day" "Reach for the Sun" Polyphonic Spree
The trio is sidetracked by a visit to Putopia, the Parallel Universe Travel Office…pia. (The physicists at Putopia who are working on parallel universe travel haven’t figured out the acronym completely, but they wanted to make sure to secure the domain name.) I thought about using Fountain of Wayne’s “Supercollider” for Cameron’s little ride in the atom-rearranging InfinityCollider™, but something about this song suggested being hurtled through time and space to me, a wave-particle experiment in sound.
"The Cold Song" (from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur) Klaus Nomi
If you haven’t seen The Nomi Song, the excellent documentary on singer/performance artist Klaus Nomi, I highly recommend it. I also recommend you go to YouTube and watch this performance, one of his last before succumbing to AIDS the year after. Anyway, I listened to it a lot while writing the climactic scene.
"Joy" Apollo 100
This is an absolute musical McCheeseburger with an XL side of cheese sauce, but I love it. Bach goes disco! It’s the "Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring" you can dance to! There’s just such an exuberant, “aw, what the hell” goofiness to this that it seemed the perfect endnote to Cameron’s weird little journey. Part smirk. Part grin. And 100% joy.
Other songs on the Going Bovine soundtrack:
"Heart to Hang Onto & Keep Me Turning" Pete Townshend & Ronnie Laine
"Pink Moon" Nick Drake
"One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces" Ben Folds Five
"Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans" Louis Armstrong
"New Slang" The Shins
"Solsbury Hill" Peter Gabriel
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, “Choral”: IV/Ludwig Van Beethoven—Chicago Symphony Chorus, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
"Company in My Back" Wilco
"This Time Tomorrow" The Kinks
"Who Knows Where the Time Goes" Fairport Convention
Libba Bray and Going Bovine links:
the author's website
the author's blog
the author's Wikipedia entry
the book's video trailer
Blogging for a Good Book review
BookEnvy review
Bookish Blather review
BookPage review
A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy review
Common Sense review
A Confederacy of Books review
Em's Bookshelf review
In Between the Pages review
Martha Flynn review
Mrs. Magoo Reads review
nineseveneight review
Publishers Weekly review
readergirlz review
Reading Rants review
Teenreads.com review
Through a Glass, Darkly review
3 Evil Cousins interview with the author
Alien Onion interview with the author
All Things Girl interview with the author
Book Chic interview with the author
BookPage interview with the author
Cynsations interview with the author
The First Novels Club guest post by the author
Teenreads.com guest post by the author
Write for a Reader guest essay by the author
Young Adult (& Kids) Books Central Blog interview with the author
Ypulse interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks
tags: books music literature fiction
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