[Moshe]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/01/sonic-youth-as.html


Sonic Youth as muse

03:41 PM PT, Jan 2 2009

 

Authors crank the New York band and let the words flow. The result is an anthology of new fiction.

The origins of the severed hand in the park were uncertain. Some were convinced it was fake, an especially convincing rubber facsimile with elaborately painted muscles and tendons. Another thought it was evidence of a prank gone wrong at a nearby medical school, where corpses, students and alcohol might have added up to a grisly practical joke. Still more blamed an eager Labrador retriever or sea gull for dropping a find on the lawn, and one particularly morbid theory suggested a homeless man cut it off after his buddy's gangrene infection drove him to madness.

That mutilated limb in Katherine Dunn's short story "That's All I Know (Right Now)" doesn't appear in the Sonic Youth song that inspired (and shares a title with) her work. But those familiar with the famed noise-rock band's two-decade-plus career might nod in recognition at some of what the image conjures up: intrigue, antagonism, violence and the accidental poetry of the inscrutable.
"Noise," an anthology of new fiction inspired by the New York band's catalog due for release Tuesday, has many such uncomfortably commanding moments, but the collection also captures a particular cultural cross-pollination. Writers like Jonathan Lethem, Lavinia Greenlaw and even Stephen King seem ever more fascinated with pop music, and many ambitious songwriters are packing high-minded allusions and images into their songs (or, like Ryan Adams and John Darnielle, crafting books of poetry and novellas about Black Sabbath).
"You have this idea of the writer in their Parisian garret, but so many of them need something to stir them," said Peter Wild, the editor of "Noise." "When I can't figure out how to get from point A to point B, I always play music, and Sonic Youth is like a puzzle that offers many different routes for an author to travel."
"Noise" is Wild's third anthology of stories inspired by bands after similar collections based around cantankerous U.K. post-punks the Fall and swoony romantics the Smiths. What could have amounted to a very nerdy love letter to a group with a labyrinthine catalog is given extra literary weight by notable figures from the flintier ends of contemporary fiction like Dunn, Mary Gaitskill and Shelley Jackson. True to the joke that all writers are failed rockers, it's never been hard for Wild to solicit contributions to his series.

"These things almost commission themselves," Wild said. "[Band members] Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo [who wrote the introduction to 'Noise'] are both enthusiastic and massive readers and made a lot of introductions. Some of the writers have been into Sonic Youth for decades, and then there are some like Emily Roiphe, who used to live across from Sonic Youth's practice space and they would drive her crazy."
The task of capturing in fiction Sonic Youth's obliqueness leaves lots of room for obtuse experiments. The Fall and the Smiths offer plenty of easy entry points for writers as both of those bands have notoriously high per-song word counts and conversational syntax, but Sonic Youth's feedback calisthenics and tossed-off teenage cynicism is less readily evoked on the page.
The best pieces in "Noise" are the ones that mine Sonic Youth's tension between pop and chaos more than the actual source material. Dunn's story precisely captures the kind of disruption of expectation that makes the band so innovative. Scott Mebus' "Bull in the Heather" involves a bleakly funny trip to a sex-toy store in which a lesbian wrestles with the implications of her lover's request for a more phallic device, an aid called "The Bull," a tweak on the song's title. It's a story about negotiating between love and debasement, a classic Sonic Youth-y gesture.
Some took the job of evoking the band's sound more literally -- Jackson's "My Friend Goo" is littered with raw, Joyce-ian peals of repeating sounds.
"I saw an analogy between the way Sonic Youth pushes music toward sheer sound and my interest in how tongue twisters, foreign languages and speech impediments emphasize the 'stuff' of language -- whistles, clicks, the tongue thrashing behind the teeth -- over against its meaning," Jackson wrote in an e-mail. "Noise prose, you could call it."
The diversity of approaches is half the fun of "Noise." The band can move between Glenn Branca's sheets of white noise, Suicide's nihilist bomp and the dinosaur-rock leanings of its grunge-era peers, so it's no surprise that writers try wildly different tactics while staying true to the group's ethos.
"There's a real center around the band around which so much seems to move," Wild said. "Noise" also might answer one of fiction's most intractable questions: How does one write convincingly about something so defiantly anti-lingual as music? Plenty of otherwise able writers, such as Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, have whiffed at attempts to capture the physicality and ecstasy of performing or listening to music. "Noise" suggests that the best way to write fiction that feels like music is to write about something else entirely.
"[Sonic Youth's] music showed that you could combine intensity with ambiguity -- that you could stir an audience on a visceral level without pandering for easy answers," Jackson wrote. "And they proved that it was possible to combine avant-garde tastes with street cred. So I pierced my nose, got a tattoo and started writing experimental fiction -- my own way of making a weird noise on the fringe of culture."
By giving so little direction to fans, the band offers listeners the opportunity to wander into bigger ideas and for a writer to find a striking turn of phrase or grimy groove that makes emotions smolder.
"I want Sonic Youth fans to think, 'Ah, I should read more short stores,' " Wild said. "And then I want Mary Gaitskill fans to say, 'I didn't know this about Sonic Youth.' "
-August Brown
EXUBERANT: Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth’s lyrics offer writers a lot of entry points. Credit: Getty Images.

[stu666]

i don't get it, this book Noise Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth is exactly the same as The Empty Page Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth?

[pbradley]

I don't want to read this because I'm afraid Thurston and Lee will end up making out.

[Derek]

Originally Posted by stu666

i don't get it, this book Noise Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth is exactly the same as The Empty Page Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth?

Yeah... that's the one I have.

[RanaldoNecro]

Has anyone read either book?

I am curious...I read like three SY books last year

[stu666]

i've got both books which is why i know they're identical, there are about 20 strange short stories inspired by SY song titles.

i don't read many books but i found this quite interesting and funny in places.

[RanaldoNecro]

Why the misleading covers?

[Moshe]

http://www.powells.com:80/blog/?p=4430

 

Writers and Rockers

var addthis_pub = "powellsblog"; : Guests.

 

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 </B>themselves do.

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 </B>other disciplines

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!!

÷ ÷ ÷

Peter Wild is the editor of a series of fiction anthologies based on the songs of rock and pop bands. His articles and fiction have appeared in The Independent (London), The Guardian (London), The Big Issue, Word Riot, NOÖ Journal, and 3: AM magazine