Soft Skull News

Much as we'd like to like Booknotes just on its own merits (though we do, we do, and you should too), we're liking it right now especially because of the profusion of Soft Skullers that have popped up there recently.

Those merits, not-so-incidentally, are that Mr. Large-Hearted Boy invites writers to talk about the music that inspired them, or that accompanied them as they wrote, or that might serve as a soundtrack for the reader...

So herewith four Soft Skuller's responses (And make sure you scroll down, cause there's a bonus prize from Mark Swartz at the end...)

There's CAConrad, of Deviant Propulsion (of which Sam Delaney says: "[B]brilliantly tough, now jaw-droppingly romantic, witty, outraged, yearning, and often unabashedly lovely. With a clarity of language that makes the bones sing, they sneak past our defenses and do things, directly, surprisingly, irreparably, to us...")

There was this crazy fag I met when I was 19 and he LOVED the band X, and soon enough I too was a crazy fag, LOVING the sound of that wicked bitch EXCENE CERVENKA! Excene drag is the BEST drag to do man! Curdled punk swaggering out, "A THOUSAND KIDS BURY THEIR PARENTS!" All my writing has come ashore on white caps and pounding curls of song. Continues...

Lynne Tillman on American Genius

Glenn Gould playing Beethoven Sonatas equaled: we’re in this game of imagining together. You can hear him humming happily sometimes beneath the music, and it’s reassuring. He goes in and out of range nicely, the way my protagonist does. Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations: concentration aid, since Bach’s logic and reason are merciless, and this novel reckons with reason and unreason all the time. Bach kept me in line.

But then there’s the irrational, which is as much what the novel’s about, and which is always compelling, so let’s say it’d be Miles Davis’s “You’re Under Arrest” : a wake up call and a reminder of how bad things really are. There’s an insanity – or unreasonableness-- I need when writing anything, and Miles supplies it, except when he plays ballads, and then he stops everything and holds it in place. Sometimes Hole’s first CD worked for adolescent angst, which never goes away completely, when nothing can ever be right. Courtney Love sounded like an aggression I needed to usurp for the novel at times.Continues...

And the ravishing Michelle Embree of Manstealing for Fat Girls...

CRAZY TRAIN — Ozzy Osborne: I still get pretty riled up when I hear this song. In the eighties, I would go insane. Ozzy was something punks and the burn outs had in common; Ozzy, weed, beer (though not necessarily in that order). The name OZZY next to a big pot leaf was spray painted on pretty much every available surface. And I don’t think it was really a tagging thing, I think that is just what stoned working-class-suburbia, white-dudes painted on a wall whenever they got the chance. Continues...

And, as promised, a bonus from Mark Swartz, of H20:

Call it Water Music. This isn’t the soundtrack to the nonexistent movie of my eco-noir novel H2O, but to one proposed way of reading the book. The first three people who write me at swartzmark [at] yahoo (friends and family excluded) win a CD-R of the mix.

Chapter 14.

TEXT: We settled in a far corner, out of earshot, but neither of us said a word as the room filled. She took me by the hand, but I didn’t know whether it was a true gesture or part of the act.

AUDIO: Marianne Faithfull, “Don’t Forget Me,” from 20th-Century Blues. It’s about a breakup, but for a long time I thought it was about dying. I’ve never heard the Harry Nilsson original. Continues...

And, if you've not yet checked it out, the Flash trailer for the book!