Liner Notes #11: Bibliographies

Image description: the Liner Notes no. 11 header; the background is a picture of card catalogs, with one card catalog drawer open, "no, 11" pasted on the label. Above is "Liner Notes" written in Courier.

Hello and welcome back to yet another issue of Liner Notes, which will easily be the nerdiest issue I've dropped to date. This time, instead of a writing sample, I'll include a bibliography, as full as possible, for Key & Vale.

I keep talking about Key & Vale because it's a project I wanted to succeed, though it's quite possible it'll die on sub and I'll be left with 117,000 or so words that won't see the inside of a bookstore. If K&V does indeed die on sub, I'll try to get it out elsewhere, but for right now, it's a bit of an extended mourning process as, little by little, I put away the things I collected to make this manuscript. The playlist has been phased out of use; the tabs, all closed; I don't even check the social media accounts of the editors who have this book much anymore. I've gotten the figurative shovel out and have picked out a burial plot, and all that's left over is taking care of the paperwork.

I always like citing my sources, and I know there are other nerds out there who are curious about what goes into a book. In this case, it was a lot of imagination and inspiration, propelled first by my friend Beth's inability to get Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" out of her head, followed by an image of a young Black girl in a future overgrown upstate New York, forging through the underbrush before stumbling upon long-abandoned Belmont Park. I tried for a while to make that image work, but Key had to be older, and I could not import the real world into this book. Not with all the history of America, and not when I knew the premise of the book was about reaching back into our broken generational lines to sit with our ancestors for a few moments.

I also knew this book would be about museums. Back when I was a regular at the Atlanta Botanical Garden library, the orchid collection, to be precise, we'd get new books in all the time, which had to be accessioned and cataloged and shelved, etc. One book was Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief; another was Eric Hansen's Orchid Fever; yet another was Eugenia Bone's Mycophilia; another, Caz Hildebrand's Herbarium, and finally, Kew Gardens' The Plant Hunters, repackaged in a beautiful, fresh edition.

I ate these books. Devoured them. I love nonfiction, you see. And these books, combined with the begonia journals we got in, and the monthly orchid journals with all the gorgeous, fascinating spider orchids and leafless orchids, got me started on thinking about what world Key and Vale would live in. And then, as these ideas were percolating in the back of my head, Merlin Sheldrake released Entangled Life.

As I'm writing this, I realize that my bibliography isn't as complete as I'd like it. Not only are some of the books above not listed, but there are a number of academic websites that I swear I bookmarked but can't find in my list. This is quite irritating, as I used these websites and PDFs--which were listings and guides and papers on leafless orchids of North America and their mycorrhizal relationships--extensively while getting the fake scientific names for C. diabolum and A. caliceum down. I'll find them again, I hope, and if K&V ever makes it to the big leagues, I'll include them in the bibliography in the back (not to be confused with the fake bibliography I wrote for the book). There's also a reprint of the 1868 train North American train schedules that I have to figure out how to cite.

I hadn't anticipated this book to have so many things in it that fascinated me. My agent sometimes refers to this as the book of my heart, which I can't get behind because I'm not sentimental about my work that way. Maybe it is the book of my heart, though. It's got libraries and museums and diaspora woes and ethnomusicology and fake culty ritualistic folk religion all baked into it. I put in mushrooms and orchids and things that terrify me, and then I put in my princess and her feral weasel of a knight and pressed "blend."

Extended mourning period, indeed. We'll see what happens.

We do have to talk about music in the mailing letter; it's in my contract (it's not in my contract, but I can't not talk about music in a mailing letter entitled Liner Notes). It's been a month of concerts for me, plus books to edit and home drama to handle. Anyway, I got to see Hozier twice in a week, which was really a wonderful experience, and just a couple of days ago, a friend and I went to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Amjad Ali Khan's Samaagam. Amjad Ali Khan is the world's foremost sarod player, and he was joined by his two sons, also formidable sarod players, to play a medley of ragas arranged for sarod, percussion, and symphony orchestra. Needless to say, stuff like that is a hundred percent my jam--back in April, when I went to DC for Awesomecon, I arrived on the same night that Anoushka Shenkar was playing at the Kennedy Center, and it hurt me that I couldn't go because I was fresh off a ten-hour drive and needed to rest--and I really enjoyed myself. Here's a review: 

https://www.earrelevant.net/2023/10/atlanta-symphony-orchestra-entices-with-east-west-fusion-musical-flavors-of-india/

Samaagam is available on streaming services, so you should be able to listen to it.

I've also been mildly obsessed with Hermanos Gutiérrez, a pair of Ecuadorian-Swiss brothers whose guitar-driven, low tempo music is perfect for letting your imagination drift free. Their Tiny Desk Concert was a delight. Here's a link: https://youtu.be/wTqCthvtL8k?si=VHZEamr7mtnviIsq. I've gone and nabbed tickets for their performance in Atlanta next March. Can't wait to sit and vibe with everyone in the crowd.

Tinyletter says I'm at a thousand words, and I still haven't dropped the bibliography, so real fast-like, I've gotten all the Hozier vinyls in, as well as the Joe Hisaishi symphonic arrangements of his Studio Ghibli scores. My next score is probably going to be the Polyrhythmics' new album, Filter System. I need to grab it before it's gone; Caldera was such a fucking awesome album, but the vinyl run is all sold and now you gotta pay good money for it.

The bibliography, by no means complete, is below. It's got books, articles, Youtube links, and an essay in it. Enjoy, if you like that sort of thing; I do, and I take pride in the fact that, while sitting in front of a pile of these books at the library, I wrote a good chunk of this bibliography out by hand. In Chicago style, of course.

See you on the B-side.