Infinity

A catchy song only matters the second time you hear it. Is that true? The first listening lays the groundwork, but the power of a catchy song is in its after-effects, the extent to which it lodges in your brain, consciously or not, so that in the second, and subsequent, listenings, the primary pleasure is in the flush of recognition. It’s in the itch you did or didn’t know needed scratching. Certainly, catchy songs are also often something other than catchy, and there are plenty of immediate pleasures to be found in hearing many songs for the first time. But last night I went to see Superchunk, and they are a band whose primary asset is catchiness. It’s their hooks and, yes, choruses. I don’t know a single song past 1994’s Foolish, and the vast majority of the set came from their last couple records (which, to be honest, I didn’t even know they’d released). Though it was great to see Mac hopping and flailing around the stage, and a despite-herself pogo or two from Laura, I was pretty bored. It was thwarted nostalgia, too, of course—I wanted the songs that reminded me of something, that reminded me of myself a decade-and-a-half ago. I wanted the songs that would let me dip into my 17-year-old self, then immediately transcend it, with the viscerality and difference of the current moment. I know it’s not Superchunk’s job to do that. Was I talking about catchiness?

Anyway, I’m trying to start writing a new novel. I don’t know what it’s about. Actually, the problem is that, variously, I’ve thought it might be about any of the following: teenagers, New Jersey, Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead, queerness, Israel/Palestine—but I don’t know what it’s about in a more adverbial sense, as in, I don’t know what it’s up to, I don’t know how to make it up to something. I don’t have a character, voice, style, or structure. In her essay “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” I’ve got statements out the arsehole, but no story. I know that the best stories find their statements, not the other way around (which is, in part, why Ayn Rand was not very good at writing stories). Over the last couple months, I’ve generated pages of attempts. One piece uses a Superchunk show as the setting for a transformative teenage moment. At times the piece feels about to veer into story, but what’s driving it is statement. An idea of what this show did or could mean, to me, to the character who is much closer to me than I would prefer.

I’m not sure, right now, if catchiness is statement or story. I’m leaning toward the former. Statements are important, we need statements, and we need statements to arise from art, and with artfulness. It’s possible that the best statements are stories in their own right. They imply dimension and action, though their outward manifestation may be simple and concise. Statements gain depth not through expansion, but through repetition. How many of us have cut off a catchy song before it’s finished, because we just can’t wait to start it over and hear it again? When reading a novel I love, on the other hand, I try to slow down the reading process as long as possible, in order to let the story creep and linger. Whether it’s a page or 1000 pages long, I think a story should feel infinite when you’re writing it. To find infinity requires patience. And oh, how hard it can be, to hold on to that patience through the lure of statements, to wait out that unscratchable itch.

She's Real

Kicking Giant’s “She’s Real” is the theme song of a New York City heat wave. I knew this in 1996, the first summer I lived in NYC, and I remembered it today. I love Alien i.D., the album it’s on. It came out in 1994 on K Records. The whole album is a crucible of croon and churn, of stinging melodies and dry-mouth beats. “She’s Real” is the last and crooniest song on the record, it’s about walking the streets of NYC, pining for an unreachable lover, on a night that’s “much too hot to sleep,” and the whole thing is simultaneously tension and release. Part of that is accomplished by the dueting of Tae Won Yu, whose always-impassioned-but-a-little-whiny vocals could fall flat on a belter like this, with guest vocalist Joanna Bronstein, whose voice is clear and cooling. Another big part of the genius of the song is Rachel’s drumming; even in the fast parts, each hit is always separate, drawing attention to itself while simultaneously propelling the song-as-a-whole forward. Those drumbeats are exactly how it feels to walk in oppressive humidity—you notice every step while you’re taking it but forget it immediately after. Did I describe the arc of the song? It’s hot, it’s hard to remember. The song starts with just Tae singing and guitar, then Joanna starts singing, then the drums come in, then the song starts moving, then we get the first breakdown, and in it there are two layered guitar lines, sharp noise and gurgling melody. Rachel’s drums come back in, and it’s a dirge, resigned. “I was sleepless, Second Avenue.” That specificity is another reason the song sticks: “Now I am walking down the river to the East River Park.” It reminds me of the way Bolaño is constantly naming streets, subtly impressing (as in “impressing upon”) you with his geography. Of course, for it to really stick, you have to want it: when I was a teenager and first heard this song, what was more romantic than the idea of walking the streets of the city, “85 at half past 2,” searching for a way out of heartbreak? The harmony on the “She’s real” refrain is pure insistence and delusion. And then the tambourine kicks in and the walking continues despite its impossibility, “Be my baby,” there’s no fucking way, this is late night delusioning, this is teenage desire, this is the heat-inspiration, because doesn’t the awesomeness of its intensity make you feel that everything is possible, only that you’ll get it to it a little later? The end is a fucking Neil Young guitar solo, like the one where he guests on Elyse’s “Houses,” the notes are few but they burn. And then what? Shaky tambourine, straying feedback. The song goes out like headlights in the distance, like lights in the windows when it’s finally cool enough to get to sleep.

Teenage Seagulls

Earlier, I remembered when I was in high school and went to see the movie Higher Learning (I keep slipping up and thinking High Art). I remember not very much about the movie, except it was the early 90s and the movie was meant to be a very consciously multicultural snapshot of a first year at college. You had the naïve white female student, and the black male ambiguously “angry” student, and white artist dude, and so on. Somewhere in there was a lesbian subplot, which I think I somehow knew about before, though maybe all I knew was that Liz Phair had a song on the soundtrack, and it was a time when I was very, very much a fan. I saw the movie at the Tenplex in Paramus, I think with Kristen, and when I think about it this seems strange to me, as I don’t remember that we were close enough friends that we would go to movies just the two of us. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Part way through the movie the lesbo kiss happened and of course this moment was going to be so important to me, so privately so, not just the moment but the lead-up to it, and then in the lead-up, or maybe it was in the moment of, this group of kids sitting behind me got rowdy (I didn’t know them), yelled “Oooh, gross, nasty,” predictable and relatively mild epithets. I was enraged. I turned around and said something. What did I say to them? Did I actually turn around and say something?

I wrote an editorial in my school paper. What was it about? I started writing this to tell this story and now I realize that the specifics have all emptied out. I hadn’t written for the school paper before. Had I? The editorial was about outrage, it was about injustice. It questioned why homophobia was publicly acceptable. The article was not about me. I wasn’t out at all in high school, and, in my mind, writing this article did nothing to implicate me, personally, in what had happened or my feelings about it. The article was about an issue, one that had made me angry, as I felt it should make other people angry. It was not about me.

I think about this incident and my memory fails me. It fails because there was already an act of willful forgetting involved in it, a denial of myself, as if my action of writing about my outrage at the other teenagers’ homophobia could, in the act of being public, be made separate from me, my physical self that I carried through the halls every day, of a school small enough that I was known by most people, and where no one said the word “gay” unless derisively, or else hesitantly, about someone somewhere else. The article was a refusal to acknowledge the real source of my reaction in the theater. I was not outraged, but ashamed—of my body that had sat in that movie theater so privately eager and then made to feel shame for wanting it so much.

Sometime after I saw the movie I got the soundtrack and listened to “Don’t Have Time,” the Liz Phair song, over and over. The lyrics are vivid and obtuse, and the sound is pure ambivalence. The song starts out ambling, deceptively carefree—“There’s a little bridge now”—a possible escape, an opening, but she’s singing in a key too low for her, as she often did, so the last words in the lines get swallowed. She’s cynical, and self-consciously so: “If I could solve your problems/ what do you think I would be/ one stupid seagull picking Styrofoam up out of the sea.” The song pauses, then comes back in with more drums, a quicker tempo. She’s repeating the first verse and it could sound celebratory, but the celebration rings false, she’s rushing the words now and puts even less feeling behind them. The guitars shimmer in the refrain (I don’t think it’s a chorus) but her voice is pissed-off, boredly, “Don’t have time” for your problems. Why do I feel as if she’s talking not only to the “you,” but also to herself ? The verse-melody returns and now the bass plays high up on the neck, buzzing, and there’s a flip-off in the bounce of that bass, we’re in a boat bouncing on a tiny lake, nauseous with waves. “Don’t remember feeling older any worse than feeling wooden and alone.” Syntactically, the line makes little sense, but I knew what she meant with that line, trapped there in the small, shitty boat of the song. You thought you would feel better when you got older, and now look at you, older, wooden and alone. The song ends with nearly a minute of layered sound: crooned, dreamy melody low in the mix, guitar chord continually resolving and unresolving itself, shards of distortion that begin as an accent but sharpen, come forward. There’s a vision of something easier and an impatient itching to get there. By the end of the song the static has shaped itself into the cry of seagulls, taunting the people stuck on the ground, and taunting themselves for needing them.

Synesthetic Anesthetic

from James Purdy's The Nephew:
"As they talked to one another in the dark, it even seemed to them that they were living their entire lives all at once, and were in command of their total personalities. Friends and relatives long dead entered into their conversation, and the hard implacable void of contemporaneity was dissipated. One could, so to speak, see land, breathe air. The night had lifted from night."

Sincerest form etc.

I’ve been thinking about the question of influence and imitation, in writing and in other forms of art-making as well, about what it means to be conscious of your influences, to at times consciously attempt to replicate aspects of work by those you admire. I’ve been thinking about the line between interesting and clunky (purely derivative) imitation, about the ways that influence bleeds in even when you don’t mean it to. Sometimes, I think, the bits in our work that feel most “stolen” from another source are totally not identifiable as such by the average listener/reader/viewer—I always felt like I was throwing other bands’ riffs into Erase Errata songs, but in the midst of everything else that was going on in the song, and due to my admitted lack of actual technical virtuosity, I have a feeling these stolen riffs entered the world much transposed. In writing, you may not have bandmates’ cacophony to hide behind, but you still have the cacophony of your own brain-processes, your own contexts. Jason was recently telling me how transparently he felt that he’d ripped off a Sebald scene and thrown it in his novel, but the way he told it to me it seemed a) more a tribute than a theft and b) like probably no one would be able to tell. I think too about an anecdote I heard years ago about Stereolab, how they listed their songs on their set-list after the titles of songs they felt they’d ripped off to create them (“Percolator” = “Take Five”, etc.). Sure it makes sense when you think about it, but, usually, only then. When we feel the shine of influence so strongly, we think it must be blinding for everyone else.

But I’m also wondering about more insidious, less conscious forms of influence. What about when you love, say, an author’s work, but your work is kind of nothing like theirs? Does that influence still show up without your realizing it? For example, I am such a huge fan of Jane Bowles—recently re-obsessed via this amazing volume that Four Corners Press put out, featuring two stories each by Bowles and Denton Welch, another of my faves, with beautiful drawings by Colter Jacobsen. What I love about Bowles’s writing is the matter-of-factness with which her characters inhabit contradictions, the characters’ simultaneous absolute sense of self-awareness and absolute inability (or lack of desire) to adapt that sense of self in order to fit into regularly functioning human society. In Bowles’s work, indecision is everywhere, but ambivalence is nowhere. My writing, on the other hand, is often fueled by a sense of ambivalence. Where Bowles’s fiction is quick and amazingly on-the-surface, mine is frequently slow, lyrical, and very focused on the interior. So does my work still bare the mark of her influence? Is it there, in however transposed a fashion, in the way that all our experiences and contexts somehow come across as a trace (in the literal or Derridian sense) on the page? Should we deliberately push our art to echo the art we admire? For those of us who get obsessed with the art we love, I think we often want to join it, to get close to it, by paying testament somehow. But is it better if we don’t attempt to get close to all of our heroes, but leave some out that we can continue to admire, appreciate, from a fan’s safe distance?

Balance in Asymmetry

George Nakashima, Bench With Back, 1976

All Hook, No Chorus

I was driving through sunny Brooklyn the other day, listening to the Beach Boys. Though I’ve had my moments with all of Smiley Smile or Pet Sounds, I tend to return to particular songs: “Heroes and Villains,” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” and, especially, most recently, “That’s Not Me.” Definitely, these songs are all catchy as fuck—they move, with the kind of buoyancy unique to great pop songs; a few chords, a melody, and you’re granted easy entry to the bubble of the song, you float along with it. What surprised me to realize, contrary to my unexamined expectations about what comprises a great pop song, is that none of these songs have choruses. Refrains, definitely; hooks, abundantly. But if a chorus is a sort of destination, a moment of unloading where the listener decides whether or not to get on board for the next verse, then these songs are stationless, ever-traveling. That’s what makes you want to go back to the beginning and start again.

**

In her essay “Telling Tales,” Lynne Tillman writes, “As a writer, I question the need for goals or directions, for specific outcomes based on specific actions or events.” Tillman is not arguing that writing should do away with narrative, with narrative structure, altogether—she is suggesting that plot, in the conventional sense of the term, can be “a way of setting limits,” of “control[ing] the meaning of a story.” Sticking to a conventional plot structure—rising action, climax, denouement—can overdetermine the cause-and-effect in a story, can imply, too simply, that x event leads to y outcome. The lopsided-mountain-of-a-plot-curve we’re so used to seeing on high school English blackboards can streamline all the messiness out of x, erasing the z and w and perhaps latent aspect of y itself that causes the narrative to end up at whatever outcome it does.

Considering plot in this less limiting manner means opening up what counts as “action” in a story. Again, from “Telling Tales”: “I think, thinking is an activity. An emotion may produce an action, be an action or a reaction.” Narrative moves forward by accumulation, by action at the level of consciousness. Take this scene from Tillman’s Haunted Houses, in which Jane, a young woman, is sexually assaulted by a male intruder. The scene begins: “Jane fell asleep with the radio on next to her head. Rock and roll, the background to her dreams. The music was her first thought when she woke with a man lying on her back.” We begin the scene internally, in music, in thought, a dream-haze scrimming the physical action. When Jane becomes aware of the intruder, she doesn’t scream or cry out, but comprehends, thinks: “Jane understood that the longer the man didn’t get hard, the more desperate he would grow…She thought about screaming.” Still embedded in the same paragraph, in the same even, inevitable tone, they struggle, the man gives up, leaves, Jane “hear[s] the radio again,” calls her sister, a friend, and the cops come. In the midst of a traumatic scene, perceptions and physical action mutually constitute the event. It is only in retrospect that the physical—the bold line of the plot curve, soaring towards climax— moves to the foreground.

**

I hope, by way of my Beach Boys example, that you realize I’m not slamming on pop music. I hope, too, to make clear that Tillman’s point about plot, and my support of it, is not a call to do away with all signposts of conventional fiction. Characterization, narrative, setting, conflict—these are all elements that I deeply believe in. In fact, one of the things that I love most about Tillman’s fiction is that, by letting go of some conventions of plot, those other elements of fiction become even more potent. ALL HOOK, NO CHORUS: Narrative that values the grain of narrative—language, character, small moments of perception and observation—and finds surprise and richness there. Songs that delight in the material of the verse—the riff, the lyric (repeated, inverted)—rather than the chorus it leads to. Trying to disrupt the idea that for a piece of music or narrative prose to matter, it needs to go somewhere. If you’re with it, it’s already there.

(You can find “Telling Tales” in Tillman's essay collection The Broad Picture (Serpents Tail, 1997), or the great anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, 2004)).