15 Jul // lonely little love dog
15 Jul 2023
weather: humid but at least it isn't raining
mood: properly caffeinated
music: TV on the Radio, "Red Dress"
Well hi.
There's a new venue open in Woodstock. It's an unassuming little spot, a true community gathering-space: mismatched chairs, kids toys scattered in the corner, a bunch of lamps and assorted oddities for lighting and decor.
Last night, I was there for a double bill of Holly Miranda (who happens to be one of the space's organizers) and Kyp Malone (of TV on the Radio). Holly's set was vibrant and glorious; I hadn't seen her play live since she played a mini-set in 2014 at an FSG Originals event (spot me in the video lol) although I've seen her supporting other acts or playing a song here and there over the last few years here upstate.
But when Kyp started his set, something happened to me. I've never seen him (let alone TVOTR) live before and when his voice -- that voice, that absolutely inimitable, acrobatic, achingly emotive voice -- leapt out of his mouth, I was thrown back in time. I knew I was sitting on a wicker chair next to my wife in the town where we live in the year 2023; I was also in Boston in 2008, a junior in college, celebrating Obama's election, making stupid decisions and playing Claudio in Much Ado.
But I was also somehow outside of both of those times. I don't entirely know how to explain it, and I should jump in here and say that I was on no drugs! I was stone-cold sober! This, then, is the power of music, is it not? The novel I've been (primarily but also fitfully, verrrrry fitfully) working on over the last two years takes as one of its main interests the power of music to transport, to change, to uplift or cast down -- and it always throws me for a loop when this thing happens to me, when a song (particularly live) upends my sense of time and space and being.
Kyp's set was challenging, in a lot of ways. He was a little harried, having arrived late and not having played out much in recent years. His idiosyncratic phrasing almost requires multiple listens to parse what he's saying; he manages to do that thing that Justin Vernon does, of making it about the sound of the phrase in order to convey the desired emotion except that he also doesn't need to make up gibberish for it, he just warps his very elegant lyrics through that voice of his and so you get both at once. There were songs that I knew (hello "Stork and Owl", melt my heart, I will remember that performance forever) and plenty that I didn't, plenty that seemed to be coming out of him live on the spot.
But sitting there, in this cute little room where passionate people have decided to carve out some space for each other and for us, hearing this voice that defines a moment in my life but also a feeling I cannot describe, seeing both the human before me and experiencing the transcendent more-than-human thing that a unique voice (or performance, or persona) can bring forth... Well, I suppose what I mean to say is: anybody who tells you time travel isn't real is lying, to themselves and to you.
Heck, I already know when I get to experience this sort of thing again, too: I'm seeing The Hives in October, for the first time since 2007. We are all so much older! Pelle Almqvist is like 45! And I still bet that my friend Kenard and I, who were at that little show at the Middle East in Cambridge and who will be together again at Brooklyn Steel, will jump around like we're teenagers again and in that moment we will be time travelers, alive in both the present and the past.
A moment of proper self-promotion / an announcement: my podcast Voyage into Genre (presented with the fine folks at Tor Books and my audio home Literary Hub) has been renewed for a third season! It'll start airing in August, and as a result I have been on a deep dive into the current Tor catalogue. Friends, it is going to be a very, very good season of the show.
Homework reading can be tricky, even when it is self-assigned -- Christopher and I used to talk about this (sometimes on the air, much more frequently off-air) re: SMDB and the balance of 'needing' to read something and 'wanting' to read something. When all things align, those two are indistinguishable; sometimes, they do not align. Think: every year in high school English, there was almost certainly at least one book that made you go 'ugh.' Among mine: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Never mind that two of those books, upon re-reading, catapulted to the heights of some of my favorite books of all time (also never mind that I still haven't read any further Kingsolver; I do know I need to rectify that, it's not her fault I was a 13-yr-old boy when I was forced to read that book) -- the feeling at the time was BAD.
And so I'm happy to report that there is no feet-dragging happening so far with the Tor season. I can't give away all of the authors who I'll be talking to, partly because we haven't confirmed all of them yet -- but I can tell you that this year has great books coming / already out from Emily Tesh, Chuck Tingle, Vajra Chandrasekera, S.L. Coney, J.R. Dawson, S.L. Huang, V.E. Schwab... yeah, it's a good year for genre.
More importantly, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything while I read for the show. Yes, I'm maybe not getting to galleys in time to submit Indie Next nominations or to dive into the possibility of essays/coverage for other forthcoming books. Yes, I occasionally feel the urge to read some non-fiction (see below) or take a break with a short piece of litfic (see below also), but I'm excited to pick back up on the Tor reading, and isn't that just the best feeling? If you've got a similar feeling about something literary right now, let me know.
(PS if you leave a review of the show on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, I would be so so so appreciative -- a single review can make a several-hundred-listener difference, on the back-end. You don't even have to listen, although... listening would be rad as well. Thank you!)
PSA: David Graeber & David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything is absolutely as revelatory as the hype would lead you to believe. I'm working my way through it rather slowly, mostly because I cannot sustain the mind-expanding theories they're putting forward too often or my head starts to hurt. To my mind, it's the perfect book to read a few pages of here and there, to put down for a week or two or three and then pick back up again.
The thesis of the book is, essentially, that the story of human history that we have been taught/sold -- which falls into some combination / somewhere on the continuum of Hobbes (life is nasty, brutish, short) and Rousseau (things were so groovy in a state of nature until we invented private property and corrupted ourselves) -- is fundamentally flawed, based as it is on Western thought and essentially designed to justify a post-Enlightenment status quo that maintained strong drivers of inequality as though there were literally no other way of existing. The Davids take all of the other popular modern philosophers / anthropologists to task -- Yuval Harari, Steven Pinker, David Brooks; all of them and more get their flawed arguments handed back to them in style. And obviously I love watching "centrist" asshats getting thoroughly pilloried, but the book is more than that, much much much more. I would go so far as to suggest that it might be, some ways down the line, one of those seminal texts that helps redefine the course of human history. Yes, that big of a deal.
The thing about it is not the actual content of the book -- although that is terrific, well-researched, and joyfully (even at times angrily) written -- but rather the way that it provokes thought in the reader. Hearing about the ways in which the Enlightenment was rooted in a thought exchange between European philosophers and, surprise, Native American ones blew my mind -- and started to open my thinking about historical civilizations in ways similar to how Ed Yong's An Immense World did for thinking about animals. So much of what I've been taught, in school and in culture, tells a very narrow story that even in its kindest and most progressive iterations is fundamentally flawed, utterly skewed by the history that has come before and the narratives that we have so thoroughly enshrined whether we wanted to or not.
It all makes me think about Ursula K. Le Guin's line: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."
Re-examining our history (we didn't really know about the dinosaurs until about 170 years ago, and didn't really start to learn about pre-history until the last century!! Isn't that wild?!) is one way of doing this. It might even be the best way, because we all need some re-education.
Speaking of thinking about other ways of telling stories/understanding the world: Henry Hoke's Open Throat. Holy shit.
The elevator pitch of the book is that it is from the point of view of a mountain lion in Los Angeles. It is so much more than that, of course -- it is an examination of queerness, of consumerism, of climate change. It is a story about domestication and rebellion, a story about family and friendship, a story about what it means to repress our urges until they burst.
It is a short book, readable in an afternoon (and perhaps best read in that short a span; you won't want to put it down). Hoke's prose is magical, somehow beautifully concise and yet utterly expansive. Entire cosmologies are born out of single phrases, and then they collapse again into black holes a paragraph break later. The mountain lion's narration is obviously somewhat anthropomorphic and yet it is also manifestly inhuman throughout. You never doubt that this is a creature and not a human, something I can only think of happening a few other times in my reading life.
The book functions as a tremendous piece of literature, on just a reading-enjoyment level, but it also does that thing of forcing you to see your world differently. How a person could read this book and not experience a tremendous burst of love and sorrow for how badly humanity has fucked this planet... well, I suppose some people don't have souls, or have sold their souls to the company store (hello Monopoly River man, hello bad Internet Man, may your dick-spaceships always explode and your actual dicks never rise to the occasion), but if you have an ounce of goodness in you, I wager you will look at the natural world differently upon finishing Open Throat. Just go read it, and tell me what you think.
Okay, this was fun, but now I have to go move a bunch of firewood that is sitting in my driveway. Yes, firewood; turns out the time to prepare for the autumn is during the summer (if not even earlier). More lessons we have unlearned through our enforced get-it-now modern culture! Let's go back, babes -- let's take our time, let's understand the movement of time. Let's travel, together, up and down the time-stream. Who knows what we might discover along the way?
xo
D