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by Peter Wild, January 16, 2009 9:14 AM
Some things I'd like potential reviewers of Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth to knowSometimes I don't think press releases quite do the job. Tends to be, you see, when a book is sent out for review, it comes accompanied by a press release and, nine times out of ten (or maybe even more than that, maybe something like nine-and-three-quarter times out of ten) you get a sort of plot synopsis and some author information and one or two pre-release review snippets (or reviews of previous books to give you a kind of 'from the people who brought you...' sense of anticipation). I'm reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666 at the moment and the press release that came with that — whilst fulfilling what you'd expect from a press release — was woefully inadequate in terms of giving the reader a way into the book. (I'm reading 2666 and careering wildly between thinking, 'Egads, this is the greatest book I've ever read, I'd like to simultaneously read everything this man wrote before he popped off this mortal coil!' and, 'Arrrghghgghggggghhhh, why I am reading this book? What is the point? What does it all mean? Why I am reading about what Mexican writers are like/deranged geometry being taught a lesson by hanging on a clothesline/a former Black Panther giving recipes in church as a kind of sermon?') Ideally the press release of 2666 should have been two words in 76 sized point: PREPARE YOURSELF That would've helped me somewhat. But thinking this way (and you can blame Roberto Bolaños for this) got me thinking about Noise: Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth. You see, the two 'Fiction inspired by...' books published to date have both come in for a certain amount of stick in some quarters ('stick' being a slangy English word for critical brickbats) sheerly because — and I kid you not — short stories are not songs. Moreover, short stories by a host of different people — anthologies, if you will — are not a smooth and easy read, they are in fact somewhat 'disjointed' — which is, for me, part of their charm but is (for other people) something surprising. I say 'something surprising' and it sounds okay, doesn't it? But it's not. I've had reviews where reviewers say things like, 'Reading this collection of stories by different people is not good because the reading experience is all disjointed.' Which makes me think, would you really expect a bunch of stories by different people to all be the same? But, what's worse is, certain reviewers have then criticised the disjointedness of the anthology by comparing it to Sonic Youth — 'How could this disjointed anthology of discordant stories ever pretend to have a relationship with Sonic Youth?' Part of me wants to say to these people: listen to yourself! It's all discord, baby. But there's a larger point to be made. It kind of comes back to what I was saying about press releases. It seems to me that the 'fiction inspired by' series really needs a guidance note cum erratum slip inserted into all review copies. The guidance note cum erratum slip will say: 1. You hold in your hands an anthology of short stories inspired by [insert band name here]. This is an anthology of short stories. Not a new album by [insert band name here]. Don't blame the book for not being an album. And don't blame the short stories for not being songs. They're completely different things. 2. As is clearly indicated on the front of the book, this is fiction INSPIRED BY [insert band name here]. Not fiction ABOUT [insert band name here]. If you are buying this book because you would like to read about [insert band name here], you might be disappointed. Unless you're a fan of short stories, in which case you might get a kick out of it. 3. Even if you are a fan of short stories — if, for example, you bought and purchased the very excellent short story collection by Miranda July called No One Belongs Here More Than You or the (equally excellent) short story collection by Simon Van Booy called The Secret Lives of People in Love — you may still find reading this anthology of fiction inspired by [insert band name here] somewhat disorientating, because these are short stories written by different people — each of whom have individual writing styles, thoughts, heads, hair styles and human hearts. Part of us wishes to apologise (to you, the potential reader, and to each of the contributors who gave up their time to contribute to the book) because — and I'm sorry but it's true — IT'S MORE THAN LIKELY YOU WON'T LIKE EVERY STORY IN THE BOOK. Just as, if you went down to your local record store today and treated yourself to a compilation — maybe one of those nice Nugget compilations you've always wanted to pick up — YOU STILL WON'T LIKE EVERYTHING. But you might like something and it will be something rare and true and different and individual and maybe it will turn you on to a new writer you will like (or, if you picked up the Nuggets compilation, a new band you can go find everything else by). 4. Don't get too hung up on the 'Fiction inspired by' thing. If you are a fan of [insert band name here], then imagine you're reading a collection of stories written by people who are, hey, more or less like you. They've been into [insert band name here] for as long as you have. Or maybe not as long as you have but, you know, for a while. Or longer. Maybe longer in some cases. Some of these people are hardcore, brah. Just remember. These people haven't contributed stories to a book in order to antagonise you. Nobody wants to trick you. They like you. They think you're great. You, particularly. (Not those other people, we're singling you out right now. You know who we mean, don't you?) 5. If you feel yourself getting worked up — if you feel, as some reviewers in the past have felt, that the very idea of asking writers to be inspired by a band's musical output is an atrocity on a par with thinking, on a Sunday afternoon, 'Do you know what? I might invade
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Guests
by Peter Wild, January 15, 2009 10:04 AM
We were talking, the other day, about the ways in which various lovely writer types were inspired by the songs of Sonic Youth in order to fashion stories for Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. One of the great things about putting the book together was the fact that the band members themselves were so supportive (a far cry from my experience with Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by the Fall — Mark E. Smith hates me, tore the book up live onstage a number of times). Kim Gordon suggested a handful of contributors (Rebecca Godfrey and Mary Gaitskill, to name but two). Lee Ranaldo offered great advice throughout. Steve Shelley put in the odd kind word at the start. (I didn't hear from Thurston, but... there's still time! Thurston! Hey, fella!) I like to think that part of the reason Sonic Youth were so good about the book derives from the fact that books play a big part in what they themselves do. Reader — these guys are readers! (Lee is obviously a writer, too — and if you haven't checked out any of Lee Ranaldo's books, you should. Hello from the American Desert, his most recent, is a book of poetry inspired by SPAM — see how all of these artist-types so frequently bounce off of other media…) Not only are they readers, what they read sometimes inspires what they write: William Gibson's influence can be felt on "Pattern Recognition" and "The Sprawl" (which also features stray bits of Denis Johnson's sublime The Stars at Noon); "Schizophrenia" was allegedly inspired by Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; more recently Thurston's "Fri/End" (from the Trees Outside the Academy album) was inspired by Portland's own Jonathan Raymond's The Half-Life... And so it goes. But what this demonstrates, I think, is that — although there are countless examples of writers who would, if they could, have preferred to be rock'n'rollers (Stephen King went the whole hog, forming a band with other writers, I seem to remember, some years back) — there are also rock'n'rollers who wish to be deemed literate. The writers want to be rock'n'rollers for a variety of reasons (the adulation, the groupies, the desire to distill some three-minute wisdom in a catchy chorus the youngsters'll sing along to). The rock'n'rollers, though... Do they want to be literate because music, especially pop or rock music, is felt to be disposable? Do books allow musicians to be, you know, "taken seriously"? I read an interview with Lemonhead Evan Dando fairly recently where he admitted writing short stories in his spare time. Sufjan Stevens turned to music after failing at a novel, apparently. Laura Viers writes short stories. Then, of course, you have all those who straddle both fields — your Nick Caves, your Willy Vlautins, your Joe Pernices, etc. What am I trying to say? Nothing more than this: there is a kinship, I think, between writers and musicians, a kinship that you don't tend to see so much in other disciplines (there aren't that many footballers inspired by sculptors / models inspired by playwrights / actors inspired by DJs, etc). In spite of this kinship, though, books and music are separated by a bit of a gulf (nobody has ever strapped on a Corolla like a Fender Stratocaster) — but it's a gulf that, Evel Knieval-like, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth tries to bridge. If you buy a copy, I want you to imagine each story as gas in that bike's engine, the ground disappearing from beneath your feet, the great chasm opening up beneath you, prose left behind on one side, ear-splitting rock'n roll some ways ahead. Did we make it? Reader — only you can answer that question!
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by Peter Wild, January 14, 2009 4:14 PM
[Editor's note: The following post is from Kevin Sampsell, a contributor to Peter Wild's Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth.] I've found myself wondering lately: Can the popular video game Guitar Hero actually help you learn guitar? If not, wouldn't all that time playing the game — if turned into real guitar practice — make you an actual guitar hero? And I know people play this junk for hours. I can hear my downstairs neighbors playing it late into the night. (The guitar "playing" is silent, but the simulated drumming goes tap tap tap on the computerized drum pad until I eventually hit dreamland.) I tried learning guitar when I was in 8th grade. I recall my after-school teacher letting me pick one song as a goal to master and I picked The Joker by Steve Miller Band. I figured that it was a sexy enough song to impress potential girlfriends. I could picture myself in the future coolly plucking and strumming an array of hits at a party somewhere, pretty girls nodding along and glowing with a newfound knowledge that I was a cool dude. Admit it — if you ever learned (or tried to learn) how to play guitar, those were approximately the same little dreams in your head, too. Sadly, I gave up on the guitar after a month. I learned a couple of chords (G, D, A, A7) and some repetitive plucky song that sounds like a sad Mexican death march. My son Zach has been taking guitar lessons for a couple of years now, and he's getting pretty good. Just a few short years ago he didn't seem very interested in music, but once he got into middle school he learned how to use iTunes and started downloading all sorts of crazy stuff. His musical taste is refreshingly unpretentious — his iPod contains Michael Jackson, Tegan & Sara, various death metal, Journey, INXS, Against Me!, and Midnight Star. One time, after watching Footloose, he downloaded the song that Kevin Bacon does his angry dance scene to. His guitar teacher is a friendly young man who plays around town, usually in jazz combos. I often listen in from another room as Zach improvises solos over his teacher's strumming. Then they usually practice a song of Zach's choosing. "Ace of Spades" by Motörhead was one of them. AC/DC and Nirvana songs were among others. There have been a couple of occasions where Zach's teacher brings over an electric guitar and amp. It's a break from the acoustic routine and serves as a reminder to Zach: Once you get solid on the unplugged setup, then you can start shredding! I wonder if Thurston Moore had lessons when he was a kid or if he just taught himself. I'll guess that he taught himself, as I can't imagine a teacher saying, "Now stick this drum stick between your strings, take your E string and loosen it up so it sounds like a sleepy ghost, and run this beer bottle up and down the neck... Good! Now kneel in front of your amp, turn this dial up, and make it sound like a whale screwing a seagull... Good!" Of course, there's more deliberate artistry involved in Thurston's guitar mayhem. You can hear it on every Sonic Youth album, from their earliest (1983's Confusion is Sex) to their latest (2006's Rather Ripped). And even though you can't exactly copy it, that SY guitar scree has influenced other awesome guitarists such as Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), and Randy Randall (No Age). If I was an 8th grader again, but taking guitar lessons in 2009, I'd probably forget about Steve Miller Band and learn something off of the Dirty album instead. Or just settle for Kool Thing on Guitar Hero. Either way, I'm kneeling to the stack-of-amps altar of Sonic Youth. ÷ ÷ ÷ Kevin Sampsell has worked at Powell's City of Books for 10 years and has been the publisher of Future Tense Books since 1990. His fiction has been published widely in literary journals and on popular websites like McSweeney's and Nerve. His books include A Common Pornography, Beautiful Blemish, and The Insomniac Reader (as editor). His most recent book is Creamy Bullets, from Chiasmus Press. He lives in Portland,
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Guests
by Peter Wild, January 13, 2009 9:15 AM
So, I'm blogging on Powell's this week, ostensibly to publicise Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, which is published roundabout now by those lovely people over at Harper Perennial. You might ask, what the Billy-o is fiction inspired by Sonic Youth (or, indeed, fiction inspired by any band)? After all, words on a page and squawling feedback hewed from a vomit-spew of guitars, cables, amps, and electricity are unlikely bedfellows. I'll tell you what I tell prospective contributors. For me, fiction can be inspired by music in a variety of ways: you can take the title of the song and run with it (the same way we did years ago in school when the teacher asked us to write "What I Did Over the Summer" at the head of the page — only, instead of "What I Did over the Summer," you're writing "Teen Age Riot" or "The Diamond Sea" or, as I did, "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style"); you can tweak some hidden meaning out of the lyrics; you can use the pictures stirred up in your head by the music; or you can play the song over and over and over and over again (and then over and over and over again) until the furious juxtaposition of lyrics and vocals and music sends you spinning off in some direction you want to pursue. Some contributors to the book wanted to try and react to the band themselves, wanted to try and sum up everything they felt about Sonic Youth, what Sonic Youth meant to them, all of that. Catherine O'Flynn, for example (whose debut novel What Was Lost is really well worth checking out if you haven't already), wrote a story about a girl who finds herself trapped in the back of her teacher's car. The title — 'Snare, Girl' — is perfect. You'll understand why when you've read the story. (One clue, though — the comma could be a colon.) But it was just one title drawn from a list of six or seven other possible songs (each of which drew out a different element of what she was trying to accomplish with the story). For Catherine, it was Sonic Youth — the essence of Sonic Youth — she was trying to distill. Of course, Catherine O'Flynn's perspective on Sonic Youth is different from J. Robert Lennon's and Steve Sherrill's and Mary Gaitskill's and Kevin Sampsell's (who you'll be hearing from tomorrow) and all of the other contributors. Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth is, in a way, a bit like that story of the six men of Indostan and the elephant. You've heard it, right? "It was six men of Indostan / To learning much inclined / Who went to see the Elephant / (Though all of them were blind)..." Each of the men grab a different part of the elephant and think they're holding a radically different thing (one confuses the elephant with a wall, another with a spear, a third with a snake, a fourth with a tree, a fifth with a rope, and the sixth with a fan, of all things). Taken together, though, the findings of the six blind men add up — via some deranged, otherworldly mathematical system — to one elephant. Now, I'm not saying that the contributors of Noise are in any way akin to the six blind men of Indostan (although I'm sure there are reviewers hastily drawing up scathing comments along those lines as I type this); but a whole host of different perspectives on one single thing can (IMHO) offer you a bird's eye view of what it might otherwise be impossible to try to understand. (Which, in this case, is the route chosen by 21 writers to fashion fiction inspired by that greatest of all rock'n'roll bands, Sonic Youth...
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by Peter Wild, January 12, 2009 9:41 AM
Shakespeare was quite possibly not the first to admit that there is "nothing new under the sun." It's one of those particular nuggets of wisdom it does us good to be reminded of from time to time. (In fact, it wouldn't hurt if we occasionally dispensed with our more familiar greetings — "Hey, how are you doing?"; "Great, thanks for asking, how's you?" — in favour of, "Hey buddy, there's nothing new under the sun!"; "You sure got that right!") Certainly, four or five years ago, when I was first struck with the idea of a series of fiction anthologies inspired by the songs of particular bands, congratulating myself on what I thought was a shiny bright new thing right there, it wouldn't have hurt me too much to have a restraining hand placed upon my shoulder and a gentle "nothing new under the sun" whispered in my shell-like ears. Fiction! Inspired by a band! Well, that's just genius in a can, right? How could the world have turned so many times without somebody making the connection previously?! Just to cement what a blinkered cloth-head I really am, it wasn't until Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by the Fall (The Fall in question being a perverse group of musical types led by one Mark E. Smith hailing from Manchester, England, and not the egregious booting of one Adam and Eve from Eden) was published that someone brought to my attention an earlier anthology called Lit Riffs, in which a motley assemblage of the great and the good took songs by all manner of people and... you know... "riffed" on them in short story form. Matthew Miele, the editor of the anthology, even went so far as to talk of the authors "covering" the songs in short story form (yet one more bright and shiny new thing I'd been congratulating myself about, fool that I am). Lit Riffs put short shrift to any vainglorious ideas of my own brilliance, including as it did a short story by Lester Bangs inspired by Maggie May. Not only had I not come up with the idea first — Lester beat me to it way back in 1981. It got worse before it got better. Lit Riffs wasn't alone, you see? Just as various graphic novel types have put their heads together to flesh out the mythos of Heroes and The Matrix and all manner of other pop-phenomena, so various graphic novel types also beat me to the punch on the whole "fiction inspired by bands" thing. Put the Book Back on the Shelf is a sort of portmanteau graphic anthology in which a whole host of the aforementioned graphic novel types take songs by Scottish indie pop legends Belle & Sebastian in order to fashion lovely pictorial short stories that riff on titles and lyrics and various bits of wonderment conjured up by the songs of Stuart Murdoch and his buddies. And, of course, there is the legendary 33 1/3 series kickstarted by David Barker over at Continuum Books. Yes, yes, yes, I know — a great many books in the 33 1/3 series (in which various bright sparks engage with a particular album by a particular band) are, in fact, rock journalism of one stripe or another. But within that hardy canon of tomes there exists a growing vein of fiction inspired by music. Joe Pernice (himself no slouch in the great album stakes) started the ball rolling with his Meat Is Murder novella. Since then, there have been a half a dozen others, ranging from Kate Schatz's lesbicious take on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me to Mountain Goat John Darnielle's labour of love inspired by Black Sabbath. And did I mention that The Fall — the English noise-niks who inaugurated this series of mine — had previously inspired a novel? Pan, by the wonderfully named Camden Joy and her sidekick Colin B. Morton (a title that brings to mind Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen being a writer whose influence The Fall's frontman Mark E. Smith has long celebrated). Nothing new under the sun? You got that right, Shakes. (And, incidentally, if there are any novels, anthologies, graphic novels or what-have-you inspired by musicians I've not mentioned, let me know...) But I did say it got better, didn't I? I'll tell you why. Soon as I heard about all these other books, I wanted to read all these other books. Soon as I got over the fact that I wasn't the big brain on bran I thought I was, I started to get a bit of a kick out of being part of such great company. If Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by The Fall and Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth are ever talked of in the same breath as these other books, then that's all right with me (and I say this in full appreciation of the irony/fact that I have just mentioned all of these books in the same breath... Ahem...
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