XVII - On Writing a Novel / Soulless

So I’m apparently in the middle of writing a novel, which is exciting. And, though I am writing, and writing quite a bit, I don’t feel comfortable putting up even intermittent snippets—for me, getting critiques about the writing as I’m putting something together end up killing the process for me, as I discovered on my old blog. I’ve lost whole short stories (like my shotgun coffee shop/live painting story in 2009) because I just put stuff up before I’d gotten through a whole draft.

That said, I can share some other things. I find that, as a writer, I respond especially to music as I compose stories. The music affects a wide range of things—most noticeably my mood, and the overall emotional timbre of the piece. I’ve had short stories spun out of lyrics or concept albums—like my seven dreams piece, which was really rooted in Shearwater’s Palo Santo. For Americano—which I’d sum up succinctly as Faust in a coffee shop, replete with train stations through hell, strange guardian angels burrowing through basement walls, and a lot of tempo changes—I turned to both Amanda Palmer (specifically her persona, drunk in an empty auditorium singing radiohead covers) and other strong female singers, as well as Nick Drake, Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, Blonde Redhead’s spare euro-pop album Penny Sparkle, Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, and, earlier in the process, Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”. Near the end of the process, and the novella, I found a tone in Boards of Canada’s album “The Campfire Headphase”, which sounds like you’re sixty years old on a salt-sanded beach.

Overall, after I’d smoothed out the kinks with the voice, I was left with a second draft that was, largely, controlled and sad and, for the most part, distant. I’d told a story that spun Eurydice on her head, made her a sex-crazed emotionally torn Faust, and left her, at the end, more or less in hell. It wasn’t an easy thing to write, and though I found a lot more hope in it than others, my impression from readers was that it was more or less depressing, and in their eyes, hopeless. This was not my intent, but the music sang, and the prose spoke, and the character ended where she would.

It’s my hope, as I move forward with this novel, that I find a different emotional core, a different voice. If Americano was Eurydice, then this one’s Orpheus. Doesn’t mean it’ll end happy, but I think it’ll end differently, if nothing else. It’s turning deeply personal, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. At the time of this writing, it’s at 26 pages and counting.

I’ve compiled a playlist for this album, too. It’s massive, and I’ve tried to keep it alternating between two extremes—every other song. What’s on it? I started with Patty Griffin and Over the Rhine, the National, M. Ward and Joni Mitchell—warm, soulful voices—and then I heaped artists like Aphex Twin, Radiohead (Kid A & King of Limbs style), Flying Lotus, the Knife, and Boards of Canada—distant beats, cold, quick sounds. Among others. Sigur Ros’s Untitled album looks to be a fair influence too, for different parts. It’s my hope, through my voice, if nothing else, that I can produce something warmer, though just as trying and emotionally resonant as Americano.

I’d like to close with a short letter one of my close friends sent me—some harsh criticism that I really took to heart. Posted without his permission, of course, as is my wont.

I did read your book, and I found it to be further proof of your excellence as a writer. Indeed, Joe, you've quite surpassed the rest of us in that regard. I liked the hell scene and I thought your unctuous Mephistopheles -- Mr. Bean -- was the perfect tempter. I was not convinced, however, by the logic of the Faustian bargain. In order to sell her soul, Mary had to have one in the first place, and I found little evidence of that. She seemed too cool, detached, cynical. The sex she engaged in was horrible in its passionlessness -- it reminded of the encounter between the secretary and the "young man carbuncular" in the Wasteland. But maybe that was your point -- to show the blending of earth and hell, to rewrite the Faustian bargain as something easy and unconscious, rather than momentous and signed in blood. But this brings me to my primary concern: why is it, my dear Joe, that you refuse to allow your main characters souls? Real, living, human souls? The ghost, the little mermaid, the necrophile, now Mary -- I feel like it's becoming a problem. Really, I'm curious. Your newsletters are so full of color and life -- but your fiction is always gray and, well, dead-feeling. Beautiful, too, don't get me wrong. Dead things often have a kind of ethereal loveliness (and when you aren't being intentionally ugly -- with the vomit, urine, mechanical sex -- this story has it too). But seriously, what's the deal with that? Why do you think this has become your aesthetic?

VIII: The Golden Archipelago (Or, a herald for more pretentious music snob nonsense in the future)

(Stolen from an older post for another blog I used to write for. I may have to post some more stuff there. Keep your eye on it here).

Shearwater is my favourite band out there right now. I love every inch of their arty pretentious emotionally-fueled rock, and they've rewarded us with their latest album, The Golden Archipelago.

2006’s Palo Santo was a raw affair, a concept album conceived by the band as they struggled to find their footing after Will Sheff’s exodus. While it featured what I believe to be the band’s strongest and most consistent lyrics, the sonic texture of the album was extremely uneven between the ambitious arrangements of the five standout tracks (1, 2, 5, 8, 10) and the slower songs like Failed Queen and Nobody. This disparity was made more acute with the release of the deluxe edition in 2007, which featured vastly improved recordings of the five standout tracks.

I’ll stand by Palo Santo; it’s still my favourite, though it’s a flawed record. When I write stories I find they typically reflect the sentiments and emotional timbre of the music I’m most attached to at the moment. I wrote a series of short fictional “dreams” based on seven different faces of the Tarot, though as the writing progressed it became increasingly clear that Shearwater provided most of the inspiration for the work.

I came to Shearwater through their 2008 release Rook. Where Palo Santo was rough and course, Rook was as smooth as glass. I can’t name a single weak song on the album: each one is well-constructed and minutely refined, like a delicate piece of stained glass or an ice sculpture. The whole album swoops, flutters, dives, much like its namesake.

And while I found Rook to be technically satisfying, breathtaking, I couldn’t help but find the textured sound of Palo Santo more compelling. I’ll freely admit that Rook is the “better” album, but Palo Santo got under my skin in a thousand different ways, and each time I listened through I found something new, some lyrical hook or link I hadn’t found before.

So far I don’t know what to make of The Golden Archipelago. I do know that, from listening through it dozens of times, the album manages to hone the band’s sound. The raw energy of Palo Santo meets the careful construction of Rook. The sonic landscape of the album is entirely new as well. Palo Santo sounded like an undercover transmission from across enemy lines in some war-torn wasteland, replete with an unsettling feedback interference that pervaded every track. The album is uncomfortable in every respect. Rook took me north to a landscape of craggy glaciers and moonlit wastes. The waterphone “South Col” impresses the image of a graveyard of wrecked ships captured in the ice, the wind scratching across their hollow shells. Take a look at Kahn & Selesnick’s most recent project, Eisbergfriestadt (from which the cover image was taken) and you’ll get a clearer sense of the sonic landscape Shearwater are building.

The Golden Archipelago journeys south to the Pacific. The album hits you like the swelling of some huge wave: the sea, the storms and the tide create the heartbeat of the album, which is warm where Rook was cold, welcoming where Palo Santo was alienating. Like Rook, The Golden Archipelago is all about the narrative and emotion, less about the strength of the individual songs, though each song possesses a singular and unique effect as each one did in Palo Santo. I can’t pick a single song I don’t like. That said, I’ve yet to be impacted by the lyrical content.

Having grown up in Nabire, a small town on the beaches of Western New Guinea, I find the album’s approach to be quite powerful. The Papuans, descendents of the Aborigines, have found their freedom hounded away by the constant press of the Indonesian military. As a people their very identities are being auctioned off to machine gun carbines and motorcycle smoke. Songs like “Uniforms” and “Runners of the Sun” embody the steady attrition of this people’s way of life. It’s an album of unimaginable scope and scale—encompassing every facet of the landscape I grew to love, from the slow moving glaciers up in the mountains to the humid chokehold of sea level. And always the sensation of wind and rain, the images of the sea woven throughout, the devastation of the tidal wave and the fury of a volcanic eruption.

Yeah, I’m all about the hyperbole. Shearwater invites these images, though. I remember when I first introduced my friend Josh to the band on the floor of my parents’ basement in Colorado (“La Dame et Licorne” from Palo Santo) he got this far away look in his eyes and told me this was the band he’d been looking for. Fire and water and earth and wind: it had them all. Shearwater gives voice to the unspoken fury and serenity of the natural world, a rage in the face of all we’ve taken for granted in the day-to-day ho hum of concrete suburban/urban life. Take this band up the mountainside or into the blanketing quiet of your bedroom and you’ll find yourself transported to a world with its own mythology and a pulse all its own.

--Duke