Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth

Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth

Edited by Peter Wild

There is a scene from Woody Allen's 1997 film Deconstructing Harry where an out-of-focus Robin Williams visits his doctor because he is... well... out-of-focus. Nothing metaphorical. his body is literally fuzzy. The doctor assures him there is nothing physically wrong with him but he makes his family nauseous and loses his work as a film actor and in classic Woody Allen (and Kurt Vonnegut) style, the idea is never resolved. It's not a long segment, only three or four minutes in the film, but it's one of those quirky scenes that sticks with you forever.

It's odd because when I think about Sonic Youth, I often think about that scene. Sonic Youth is the sort of band that remains eternally peripheral no matter how hard you try to focus on them. To me, they are the sort of band that fills the miniscule gaps in pop music without ever falling into a particular category. Born of the punk rock/new wave scene in New York City in the early eighties, they were never a punk or a new wave band, and although they are often called the grandfathers of the grunge/alternative scene on the 1990s, they don't fallen easily into either of those categories either. As you can see, just like the scene in Woody Allen's movie, Sonic Youth is unresolved.

I was an ambitious music listener when I was younger. I was listening to Johnny Cash in kindergarten, Motley Crue as a 7 year-old, Metallica at the age of 12 (before Enter Sandman, mind you) and I still bought my first Sonic Youth album far, far too early. I bought Daydream Nation in the wake of the Nirvana/Pearl Jam fiasco of 1992 expecting to get a variation on a theme. What I got was nothing like I had ever heard before. It was nihilistic and dangerous and painful and off-putting and all sorts of things a 14 year old isn't really ready to handle. Well, at least not me. It was like a Nora Jones fan picking up mid-career Tom Waits and expecting them to make that leap. I was simply baffled. Sonic Youth is opaque.

I put the album away for a couple of years until I inadvertently discovered Dirty in my first year of university. By then I was listening to a wider array of music and was susceptible to the more unsettling sounds of Thurston Moore's eccentric guitar work and Kim Gordon's flat, monotonously sexy vocals. Over the years I have grown to like Sonic Youth. Not love, mind you... but like. But it's a very strong like and Daydream Nation is now one of my favorite all-time albums. Sonic Youth is a mushroom on the brain.

When I saw them live in the late 90s, it was (and still is) one of the best shows I ever saw. The way they would tear a song apart like a predator slashing into its prey, both vicious and tender. Then, just when the song has been stripped down to nothing more than a wall of sheer feedback, distortion and noise to the point where you don't think you can stand it anymore, they slowly stitch the song back together like a musical Frankenstein. It was like waves of pleasure and pain, an oscillating cacophony of sound. It was, simply put, the first and only time I have experienced noise art. It was mesmerizing. Sonic Youth is idiosyncratic.

Try as I might, I could never really place them. Many bands defy categorization. That's the mark of any good band. But Sonic Youth defies the existence of categories or boundaries themselves. Just when you think you may have them all figured out, they come at you with something so outlandishly different you can only stand and marvel at the audacity of it all. Sonic Youth is not my favorite band. I doubt they are anyone's favorite band. It would be a difficult, moody relationship. High maintenance. Prone to vase-shattering arguments, long, painful silences and violent, knee-shuddering make-up sex. In a lot of ways, Sonic Youth is the musical equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome.

So I was excited to get my hands on Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. A literary collection I hadn't even heard of until it fell in my hands. The premise of the collection is quite interesting. A series of writers were given a title of a Sonic Youth song and were asked to write a short story inspired by the song. Song titles include some of Sonic Youth's most accessible songs: Kissability, Kool Thing (Or How I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst) and Bull in the Heather as well as some of their more obscure titles. I hadn't heard of any of the writers in the book except for Katherine Dunn (which gives me the opportunity to plug her wonderfully weird novel Geek Love) but I will be seeking out a few in the near future.

Like Sonic Youth themselves, I wanted desperately to love this book unequivocally, but like my relationship with the band, this work is uneven and difficult. The good is really, really good. Catherine O'Flynn's interpretation of Snare, Girl is especially good in the way that she traps the reader along with a girl in the trunk of the car only to manipulate the reader through an emotional and psychological tug-of-war. Christopher Coake's variation of Unmade Bed captures the sharp reality of getting your ass kicked for absolutely no good reason and Brother James by Emily MaGuire is a smart, snarky and satirical look at the life of Jesus as seen through the eyes of his brother.... um... James. These stories alone are worth the price of admission.

But like a mediocre Sonic Youth offering, the bad is really, really bad. Call me a literary troglodyte if you must, but I simply hate avant-garde fiction. While I understand what is represents from an Ornette Colman/Free Jazz sort of perspective, the idea of reading 15 pages of sentences that don't really add up to a coherent story seems like a waste of time. Listening to My Friend Goo, the song, is a far cry from reading it as a stream of consciousness mess (Sorry Shelley Jackson). I've read a bit of avant-garde fiction over the years and it has literary value, I'm sure. It's just not my thing and I found that it really disjointed the collection. Made it uneven and quirky. But I guess I should have expected this sort of dichotomy given that Sonic Youth has played the same game with me for over 20 years.

Regardless, fans of Sonic Youth are going to find something in this collection to enjoy. I did. I droves. As for everyone else? I'm not sure. If you go into this collection blind (as in having never heard Sonic Youth) I would suggest a primer. You could download all the tracks used in the book. That would be the logical introduction given that you are about to read the book. But I'd do what I did. Go get Daydream Nation. Sit at home... alone... in the dark, glass of wine in hand and take it in. Do this repeatedly over a few weeks. If that album hasn't seeped into the pores of your very being, then give this book a pass. Sonic Youth is not for everybody.

6 x H

6 x H

By Robert A. Heinlein

I think I know who Robert A. Heinlein is. I'm onto him. He wasn't who he said he was. Oh, I'm sure he believed he was who he said he was, but I think he was something a little more. Something a little more culturally relevant. Something more literary that he ever acheived during his own life. Something intangible. More on this in a few paragraphs.

Originally published under the name The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, 6 x H is a little book of six short stories by legendary science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (a man best known nowadays for having written Starship Troopers but back in the day he was considered to be one of the three best sci-fi writers in the world along with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury although that meant virtually nothing outside the realm of sci-fi, of course). The centerpiece of the book is a novella also named The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag which was originally published in Unknown Worlds Magazine in October 1942 under the pen name of John Riverside (don't ever accuse me of not bringing the facts!). The other five stories are considerably shorter and, on the whole, great deal better.

The stories in this collection are an eclectic mix. They run from abysmal (Our Fair City and They) to excellent (-And He Built a Crooked House- and The Man Who Traveled in Elephants) to the absolutely sublime (-All You Zombies-). -All You Zombies- is one of those rare sci-fi stories that has you guessing right until the end and even when the story is revealed you feel the need to go back and read it again to make sure all the pieces are in place (they are). It will find a place among my favorite short stories of all time.

But don't assume I'm an expert on this subject.

It has only been in recent years that I have discovered old science fiction as a genre. It probably started a few years back when I finally discovered Kurt Vonnegut (my introduction was via Breakfast of Champions and I have subsequently read everything he has ever written except God Bless You Mr. Rosewater) I then revisited Ray Bradbury's excellent collection of short stories The Illustrated Man, a book I was forced to read in high school English and enjoyed a lot more as an adult. This lead me to Fahrenheit 451 and then a glut of Asimov, Jeff Noon, Arthur C. Clarke, as well as Ken Grimwood (Replay is still my favorite sci-fi book of all time).

I can't profess that I am a sci-fi aficionado, but I suppose I have read more than your average reader. I read Heinlein's short novel Methuselah's Children last year and while it didn't blow me away, it was good enough to merit a second book. Heinlein is a master of hanging on, in my opinion. while 6 x H wasn't the best thing I will read this year, it was certainly good enough for me to read one more. But something about the stories really rubbed me the wrong way.

The problem I have with old science fiction stems from my first reading of Breakfast of Champions and Vonnegut's recurring character of Kilgore Trout. Trout is a widely published writer of science fiction but he is only published in pornographic magazines. Trout himself doesn't even know how many stories he has written, and yet there are readers who obsess over his writing.

I got a Kilgore Trout vibe while reading Heinlein's stories and it occurred to me that Kurt Vonnegut may have modeled the eponymous Kilgore Trout after Heinlein. Heinlein was nothing if he was not prolific. Certainly, Heinlein's stories have an absurd quality that matches Trout's. And clearly Heinlein's stories were published in some fairly dubious publications. Heinlein was writing at least a full decade before Vonnegut put pen to paper and while I don't dismiss that idea that Kilgore Trout is a composite of all science fiction writers of the era if you follow Heinlein and Trout's career trajectory from Breakfast of Champions through Timequake you find that while never cracking the mainstream literary world, Heinlein, like Trout, gained a modicum of respect at the end of his career.

Which then begs the question: Is Robert A. Heinlein the real Kilgore Trout? If so, how much of Kurt Vonnegut's career is owed to the career of Robert A. Heinlein? It's an idea that niggled its way into my head while reading but hasn't had time enough to ferment. More on this as I continue to read.

Blue World

Blue World

by Robert McCammon

The short story is the red-headed stepchild of literature. Science Fiction is the geeky teenage tenant than lives in the basement. Together, they amount to vitually zero.

In the introduction to Stephen King's collection of short stories Everything's Eventual, he laments the slow demise of the short story, especially within the genres of horror and science fiction (well, of course he would... I doubt Stephen King would lament the demise of romance novels). I couldn't agree more. Oh sure, you can find all sorts of short fiction in things like Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, but that a whole different ballgame and usually concerns some writer recalling some isolated moment from their childhood in an oh so whimsical fashion. There's not a single alien or swamp creature to be found in THOSE pages. Gone are the glory days of short story magazines such as The Twilight Zone and Terror Tales. Not that I was a subscriber to these publications as a kid. I would have, though, if I wasn't so busy collecting baseball cards.

But I do have a special relationship with the short story (and Stephen King for that matter). Allow me to flashback...

My first exposure to short stories and Stephen King was Skeleton Crew. For whatever reason, the hardcover edition of this monster was sitting around my house for a dog's age around the time I turned 13. I'm going to assume that my mother, who is an avowed Stephen King fanatic had just finished reading it, or was about to read it. I say assume because I have never known my mother to buy or even be in possession of a hardcover before or since, so it was a very slight mystery.

I remember that the dust-jacket was a picture one of those mechanical monkeys with the hat and cymbals and it coincided with a third rate horror movie release called Monkey Shines. (Is there anything written by Stephen King that wasn't made into a movie?) By 13 I was already a card-carrying fan of horror movies. Sure they still gave me nightmares, but it was like a rite of passage to sit through them. Every one more of them you watched was a feather in your cap. I still hadn't discovered taste, however, and didn't see the difference between Night of the Living Dead and Sleepaway Camp III.

At 13 I wasn't the reader I am today. I was often scared off by the volume of books because I was 13 and I wanted instant gratification. If I couldn't finish it in a sitting, I wasn't interested. And 500 page books were not nearly as interesting as the TV. But, when it occured to me that this massive tome with the creepy cover sitting on the bookshelf was a book of short stories (and possibly scary at that) I slipped it in my backpack the day before I went on a camping trip with my best friend where there would be no TV.

Without even referring to Wikipedia I can still recall some of those stories: "The Mist," "Gramma" and (of course) "The Monkey."

But the one that always torments me in my weaker moments was a little science fiction number called "The Jaunt." It's essentially a retelling of the history of matter transference as told by a father to his curious son. The majority of the story is interesting enough, but not in the least bit scary, but the payoff (while I will not recap) left me sleepless in a tent for nights on that camping trip and is one of the books (stories) that I credit when anyone cares to ask how I developed my love for reading.

Blue World by Robert McCammon had some really interesting moments, some of which reminded me of that camping trip (I read this while lounging on the beach on Bohol Island in the Philippines). More science fiction (yay!) and less horror (aww...) but, because they are short stories, the plots move nice and quick for those in need of instant gratification (I'm still 13 on the inside).

So here's to red-headed step-children and geeks in the basement. And here's to sleepless nights while on vacation.