On Nadia Sirota’s First Things First (New Amsterdam Records, 2009)

j/j:I want to start by saying that I do not have the album on or with me to turn on right now so much of this articulated feeling is coming from memory. Memory is a place of cellular retentions so the articulation is no less true than would be if the music were playing right now, but know I do plan to get to those live time specifics later on in this conversation.

For me there are qualities of fairy tale, deep mythology and different stories in the sounds of this album. An example of this is in the way that you get the ability to hear (as a type of seeing) texture regarding the particular quality of the movement of the bow on the strings. The sound as wooden strands of hair on a non-gendered person who is running through a scape. Not trying to escape, but running nonetheless. These sounds are so compelling to me. As a string instrument player myself I am always interested the variations in qualities of tone. Col Legno for example (Witch’s Dance) – that subtle but simultaneously abrupt hint.

In the rhythm and timing shifts in many of Sirota’s pieces, I hear the building up of sensations of surrounding/environment. This is what makes story possible (in reception) I think – the sound’s refusal to engage solely lyrical quality in a single time signature (“this is obviously in 4/4”)…

Benjamin: Thank you for starting this conversation off for us, j/j. As the musician among us, I felt it was important for you to get the first crack at describing this album. I agree wholeheartedly that articulated feeling, whether regarding a person or an artwork, is based in memory, and that nothing is lost in not hearing the notes as we type these letters. In fact, something may be gained, as we access long-term memory, and its associative qualities. But, of course, that’s a subject we can discuss another time.

I decided that I would put us on an even playing field. Even though my the cord of my headphones is coiled around my feet, my stereo within arm’s reach, I have elected not to play Nadia Sirota’s First Things First while typing my initial response. It feels more organic, this way.

Let’s return to your idea of stories being enveloped in the individual sounds and textures of the compositions on this album. For me, Nico Muhly’s in particular stand out. It is not just that I have a huge artistic-crush on the composer (and found him to be extremely affable when I met him a couple of years ago), but that most of his pieces seem to be narrative, oftentimes even explicitly so. I am thinking here of the first track on the album, “Duet No. 1, Chorale Pointing Downwards”, in which Sirota’s plaintive, keening viola runs maddening phrases up and down, down and up, sometimes plucking individual notes that resound through the silence, only to be answered by the low, dismissive hum of Clarice Jensen’s cello. To me, it sounds as if we are listening in on a domestic spat, our neighbor’s flat suddenly turned into a pitched battle. Like any lovers’ argument, there are moments of extreme viciousness (We know just how to hurt the one’s we care about the most.) tempered by soft, bright passages of tenderness. That Muhly’s composition never fully resolves itself, simply fading away in media res to a pleasant drone, only adds to my feeling of a half-heard conversation.

I must admit, I had never thought of this particular piece on the album quite so much, but in context it makes rather a lot of sense. Just listen to “The Only Tune” on his albumMothertongue or observe his recent turn to opera. Narrative.

Is there a track that holds special resonance for you, j/j? Lead me down the path, and I will gladly follow!

j/j: Interesting what you state here, when regarding memory, things not being lost by our not being in geographical proximity to the audibility of a ‘composition’…

It’s important to note that in psychoacoustic studies it is proven that there are at least three neuro-physical healing processes that are ignited by music. Because music is nonverbal it moves through the brain and directly to the limbic system. This system is related to basic metabolics (body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate). Music also activates neuro-pathways of stored memory and “imagined material across the corpus collosum” (the bridge between left and right hemispheres of brain). Music has also been known to excite peptides in the brain. When stimulated, peptides can be responsible for the feeling of euphoria in the body. These notes relate to the basal fact that music and memory can be inherently, experientially enjoined. (Even if not intentionally or linearly provoked as such, by us) I think that this fact has to do with why we feel a direct connection to our own reverberative composition (“I feel a story in these sounds”) when we listen to albums like Sirota’s (which are so full of differentiating stimulus regarding sound/music). We are dragged into _______ because our cells are literally being stimulated. See Marie Menut’s Vibrational Healing.

It is so striking to me that you hear a sort of dueling (“domestic spat”) in the piece we are describing. So, you hear some anxiety in the composition too? Also interesting is this note of the non-completion of the gesture within the gesture. That that itself leaves someone experiencing the loop, left in the loop.

Benjamin: I’m not sure that I precisely follow, having not read Menut’s Vibrational Healing. However, I am aware that the nonverbal aspects of music stimulate the limbic system directly, or something to that effect. Perhaps this is why I described this piece as being like a “domestic spat” or an argument; the notes simply raised my blood pressure, my heart rate, and left me feeling discomfited.

As for why I should feel “a story in these sounds” and a pang of anxiety whenever I listen to this composition, well, I’m stumped. Perhaps the analyst’s couch is the proper forum to explore this further. You do touch on a most interesting point, though, in your final paragraph: Experiencing the loop, being in the loop, yet being simultaneously aware of its intrinsic non-completion. That, in and of itself, is a disquieting feeling, one that I feel Sirota exploits to full effect in this composition.

On Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party (Caketrain, 2011)

Benjamin: So, I’m working way my way back through Tongue Party for a second time, and I’m struck by the way in which Sarah Rose Etter takes what feels like familiar literary milieus and radically subverts them. Often, she takes what could be considered a typically masculine trope and inverts it, telling the story from a decidedly feminine point of view. Remind me, what wave of feminism are we on, again? Whichever it is, her work is post-that-wave, in it’s ability to reach all audiences, to create clearly female characters and to tell the, for lack of a better term, “feminine experience”, without in the least self-segregating.

I’m thinking in particular here of the opening story in the collection, “Koala Tide”. There are clear echoes, at least to me, of Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, complete with the young girl, the older, drunken man, the interplay of innocence and violence. Yet, here, rather than tell it from the man’s perspective, we have a young girl as our protagonist, innocent enough to want to take home a koala as a pet, her illusions shattered, much like the veteran who commits suicide in Salinger’s tale, by the gore she witnesses. In some ways, our narrator even feels implicated in the violence, by wading out into the tide, despite warnings from well-meaning adults in her life.

j/j: Benjamin, I love how you move through the beginnings of this discussion regarding Etter’s Tongue Party with reference to feminism and what of Etter’s text might exist post it. Of course, I can’t go deeply into the discussion without our clarifying further what, specifically, you mean when you speak about subversion of the “masculine trope” for a telling of a “decidedly feminine point of view”. What do these binary-based nomenclatures connote, really? I am not trying to give you shit here, my friend. I just need to have a more fleshed-out conversation with you about what specifically we are meaning when we are talking about subversion of the “masculine” for the “feminine”. Are we talking about what you perceive as more general storylines that perhaps begin in patriarchal society (as you referred to regarding Salinger) being subverted for the brash violences that existed, for example, in “Koala Tide”? And if that is the relation that you are referring to, do you see those brash violences as a sort of post-feminist gesture?

I ask this because I feel that while Etter did do some shocking actions in this book, it was not my feeling that the book was so candidly feminist or even post-feminist. In fact the lack of refusal of binary paradigms (that often relate to and uphold the subversion of female bodies, as was the case in many stories in this book) makes me desire to name the book anarchic or graphic before naming it at all a part of feminist work.

I guess really what I am saying is, what is a “feminine” story? Or is there a femininity that is not intrinsically linked to and thereby relegated to masculinity as its counterpart? I am suggesting that what I really loved in Etter’s book was certainly not based in its performance as _____.

I am thinking about how at the end of “Koala Tide” after Cassie has gotten up from falling asleep to her own crying, her mother is still telling her to shut up. “Cassie, control yourself at the dinner table.” Cassie continues to “sob quietly” and cannot say what she is trying to say regarding the koalas or her grief, because of the overpowering presence of the mother in the scene. I mean, I guess we could posit the fact that the mother has a lot of power in Cassie’s family, as a turning toward a feminism, but I did not feel the father as any less powerful than the mother there. In fact, the way that the mother was portrayed in “Koala Tide” felt pretty typical to me.

I think in “Koala Tide” of the sort of seemingly off-kilter. I am thinking of James Tate’s poems now. Or, perhaps, some of CD Wright’s stuff where the poems themselves exist as snippets/snapshots of subversive material. “Subversive” why? Because in the information being articulated, so many status quo norms and/or traditional realities are broken. It is this act of breaking in Sarah’s work that feels most radical to me. “I knew I shouldn’t be listening but I was.” (Cassie begins by saying or thinking this.) What in these stories are we seeing or hearing or feeling that we shouldn’t be? Because my (By the way, a lot of the vividity of the gores in this book strike me as current theorizing regarding the salacious or violent images in porn, being what makes the particular form of images addicting.) favorite parts of Etter’s book were the parts that felt like some sort of sordid inside view of the moment of that fracture. Obviously in “Koala Tide” the parts that most do this are in this type of tone: “The screams came out of my throat before I knew what was happening, before I realized that here was the koala bear’s face, eyes plucked out and blood clinging to the fur, veins hanging out of the holes and dangling down cheeks,” and “I looked down and all around me were rolling piles of eye-less, dead koalas. All of their faces had the two deep holes, the veins slapping against the sand as their heads hit the beach.”

In “Womb Peck”, though this story is shorter and a bit less blatant regarding the moments of fracture I am referring to, I think that “[Y]ou are always scared of your own womb, aren’t you?” and “[Y]ou spend days praying for black birds to come and peck at your midsection, to remove with their beaks what does not belong,” are certainly brazen reinventions of the mythologies that feel albeit a bit familiar to us, but in their articulation by Etter, strike us anew…

Benjamin: You raise some really excellent points, here, j/j. I am so glad that we can have these discussions about Tongue Party, and even get a little contentious now and again.

I will confess that I may have been plucking at some low-hanging fruit in my initial response. I wouldn’t say that I did not think through what I said, but that I perhaps reached a facile, limp conclusion. I’m glad you called me out on it. Really, I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book, by labeling anything that is not immediately, virulently “masculine” as “feminine”. It’s a false dichotomy, as we both know quite well.

In answer to your question about what a “masculine” storyline is or may be, I referred to that specific Salinger story because of its origin in patriarchal society, and because of Salinger’s status in the literary canon. Granted, I may be missing something. I haven’t touched Nine Stories in ages. I ought to go back and read that one.

I see both sides of this issue in Etter’s reinforcing of binary paradigms, as you eloquently put it. We can look at “Womb Peck”, and it’s obvious reliance on a secondary male character with shoulders to climb upon to fulfill the narrator’s ultimate goal. Yet, a story like “Men Under Glass” does feel like a powerful assertion of feminine power, subverting conventions of what, were it more graphic, could easily be construed as “torture porn”. (I appreciate how you brought this topic up. It’s definitely relevant, and I will touch on it in a later paragraph.) Much like the replaceable, generic females in those works, we have replaceable, generic males, a litany of “Tim Brad Tom Sean Mike”. However, Jessica/Cassie still seems to seek a form of male approval, as when describing her heart: “I feel it will never stop expanding until it grows out of my chest and rises up above and beyond the glass, and would who not love me then?” All of this said, any attempt to read this work purely from a feminist perspective is shortchanging both the author and the reader.

So, as for any charge of sensationalism, shock value or brazen gore, I am prepared to defend the necessity of it in these stories. In works this short, something drastic almost must occur to retain the reader’s attention. Does it have to be as violent as it is? No, of course not. Raymond Carver made a career from the small story where “nothing” happens. But I will readily admit to finding some of his work boring, even while it may be a technical masterpiece. Here, in this work, while there are certainly flaws that we have been discussing, I was rapt. I have read through Tongue Party twice now, and read the stories we have been discussing additional times, and I feel like it is one of the more exciting reads I have had in a long time. There may be something prurient in my interest, but it seems to satisfy a primal urge. Hearing Etter read these, as I have had the privilege of doing, living in her hometown of Philadelphia, has only heightened that feeling for me.

Again, I agree with you that, if we were to label this book, graphic and anarchic are the best terms. Would you be able to speak a little more about the moments of “fracture” that you found so compelling? Would you be able to flesh-out your thoughts regarding Sarah Rose Etter’s reinvention of mythologies?

j/j: Good to be getting back into this conversation again, Benjamin! Thank you for the clarification about your inclusion of Salinger because of his relation to patriarchal culture. I would still find it valuable for us to differentiate between patriarchal culture/norms and embodied masculinity, but I feel that the conversation is more grounded now – good.

I am not sure that I think that there is even an issue or problem with Etter’s reinforcement of binary paradigms in the stories in Tongue Party. For me, though this is an element of the action of the book that cannot be overlooked, so thanks for going further into it here. I agree with the examples you have provided to articulate that much of the work that is being done in the book is work that does reinforce binary thinking, even if in that reinforcement necessary fractures of some binary norms take place. I agree with you that there is a non-typical assertion of female power in the story “Men Under Glass” (which makes that portion of the story at least, appear to be feminist) and you are also right by my read, that we end that story (even if we had felt momentarily empowered by that self-differentiation of Jessica/Cassie from the norm of “generic females”) located again in the reliance of female to male. Woman to man. And not just the reliance, but the relation as dependence, “and who would not love me then”.

I think that the brazen and shock-value gore in these stories is one of the aspects of them that makes them the most strong and compelling. In my opinion it is as we are moved by Etter from traditional tones of storytelling into sudden and brash vibrancies within those same stories (much like the feeling of rapid feminist emancipations, only to then feel them dissipate as we are again located in the norm of binary relation) that we feel a sort of vertigo (a general violence in itself) which keeps us on the edge (reeling) and committed to continue reading (driven).

The last story in this book, felt to me like an entire performance of gore (as did the story “Cake”). Gore without even needing anything brazen or gory in language, to make it shock anymore. I think that there is certainly some sensitive genius involved in composing a book like this. Going from (in the first few stories) a sort of slipping in of brutal gores, to the entire story itself being a brutal enactment of gore (that does not even need to appear gory anymore)—does this make sense?

In the “Cures” section of the book we are encouraged to “ruin the best things”—I think that Etter is doing this very thing in this book. Ruining relations and typicalities. Ruining ease.

I want to clarify that reinforcement of binary paradigms is not necessarily a “flaw” in my opinion. There are many differing projects out there, and I think that for some bodies working through their images and sensations and desires and wounds, there is a constant and necessary relation to binary-based-other. That is just not the case for me in my writing. I am saying that yes, of course Etter’s book is a great read, is exciting and “satisfies a primal urge.” When we talk about this I think of some of the necessary rituals in indigenous cultures. The stretching of a lip. Hanging from hooks. Walking alone across an entire desert with no shoes in order to complete and contact ones rite…“stretch out the red under skin.”

Benjamin: Oh, I hear you. Thanks for clarifying your thoughts on binary-based relations. Likewise, I don’t see it as a flaw, and I don’t see its not being there as a flaw. How could I, when both my writing and yours stubbornly rejects it?

Anyway, I’m at the café down the street and don’t have my copy of the book with me, so I’ll try to keep this brief. But someone just ordered a scone and took it back with them, which got me thinking about “Cake” again, and what you said. How the story, in itself, is gory, is brazen, is shocking, without ever being explicit. It encourages us to “ruin the best things”, and ruin the kind of ease, the kind of lull that can slip over us when reading without ever going so far as to slip a knife between our ribs, like the first stories in this collection do. Yes, what you said makes a lot of sense, I sometimes just have to put it into my own language for it to do so.

On Micah Robbins’ Crass Songs of Sand & Brine (Habenicht Press, 2010)

Benjamin: So, now that we’ve both gotten a chance to read and digest Sand & Brine, would you like to kick off the conversation?

j/j: Well, my general feeling about the book is that there is a slow stability about it and it very much feels like the glittering sands of the sea. That the book is enacting its subject matter by way of its rhythms and textual textures. That is all I can say about it now without having it here to quote to you from. I hope this works as a beginning.

Benjamin: Oh, certainly I concur about the sands and the sea. I was immediately struck by the cover, even: A letterpressed compass rose overlaid with what appears to a crowded beachfront, as viewed from a distance. The back has a small image of a Ferris Wheel and a midway, reinforcing this Coney Island or Steel Pier aesthetic. I immediately felt at home in the book, as it conjured up memories of summers spent in Atlantic City.

 And, of course, once I opened it and began to read, it was like an immediate immersion into the more tawdry aspects of my teenage years: References to Steel Reserve malt liquor, “PA girls”, “out-of-state-plates” along the shore, and Mac & Manco’s pizza shop are liberally sprinkled throughout the text. For one who was raised in southern New Jersey, like I was, the text initially produces an eerie feeling, like staring in the mirror too long, until your own reflection is no longer recognizable.

I’d like to speak, briefly, before I turn it back to you about the violence, both explicit and implied in the text. The call of seagulls is rendered as “Kill! Kill! Kill!”, the speaker mentions torn-down houses, and begs, in what I thought was one of the more moving stanzas, for someone to “please / persuade me not / to slap the fool / who scratched / Orange Julius / from the two-for-one / mid-week spread”. There was even a bit of an archetypal Cain and Abel undercurrent, with the constant interjections and interdictions of the speaker to his brother.

But these are just some preliminary thoughts. I’d like to hear what you’re thinking.

j/j: Thank you for your paragraphs here! What strikes me in what you articulate is how the book sort of poised you to bring out your own narratives in a deeper way. I would attribute this to the tone and the layout of the book. I think it creates a sort of tendency in the reader to open up. Like a daybed in the house of someone you trust. This, because the text and the framing of the book are very accessible.

This fact makes me think of aesthetics and the way that images and certain types of language in compositional spaces conjure up our own deep images. That perhaps this is one of the intents of the book. To open those possibilities. 

I certainly felt invited into the languages and images of my own livelihood when I read it. But, interestingly enough, I have no “history” relating me to the vivid events or relations of the book. “PA girls”, “out-of-state-plates”, even the call of the seagulls as violent. What this meant for me as I read was that I stopped reading the book for narrative relation to my own life. In this way it felt like the book got a bit mythological to me. Like, in reading it as beautiful, but as distant from me, I could imagine another kind of life, while also being invited to stay in my own. I am saying that it did not feel like I was demanded into the world of that text. Instead, as I mentioned before—it felt like the slow wisp of golden dust.

I must also say that I still cannot find the book physically even though it is so here in my body – heavy like an anvil covered in honey. I am saying it would have done me good, to etch the short book’s texts into the trench where I go to meditate and pray, so that I could quote from it for you – quote from the strikes of Micah’s narrative, in the mud. 

Speaking of which, maybe the trench is where I left it? If so, it is drenched and quite possibly embedded in the thick, as the last few days have pelted us with rain. This possibility gives me so much pleasure. Like Sand & Brine (Micah’s images) becomes Rocky Mountain silt (someone else’s images including my own).

Benjamin: I find that very beautiful that you have actually lost, or at least misplaced, the book-object. There is something immensely touching about the book degenerating back into the soil, the loamy earth of your trench, Micah’s words returning to the sand and brine from which they came. It’s always more important that one carries the words within oneself, and speaks volumes to how the poems have touched you. I could not tell you how many chapbooks of contemporary poetry that, while I found them “interesting” or “worthwhile”, fail to leave a lasting impression in my head like Sand & Brine has for you.

Since last writing, I have also been carrying Micah’s words around. I sat in the park this morning before work, and let certain lines wash over me like tides. You’re right that the framing of the book is very open, very accessible, and provides a “safe space” for the reader to reflect on their own narrative, if they so choose. We need more of this in our prosody. More open-endedness, more space for the reader to explore personal histories. I think we both attempt this in our own work, which is why we are so drawn to this volume.

You mentioned that the book became “mythological” for you in your reading. I suppose this was what I alluded to when I mentioned the Cain and Abel parallels, the barely suppressed physicality of the injunctions to the brother. While this is a slim selection of verse, the repetition of that motif imbues nearly every page with a veiled threat, to me. It felt very mythological, very Biblical. In other words, I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying, j/j. It is just that, for me, it was difficult to divorce my own history from the textual narrative, at least upon my first few readings.

j/j: Thanks Benjamin! I agree about the image of enjoining that is made in Micah’s book being literally embedded. Also, I want to point out here how interesting it is, the way that other people’s words stick to our bodies. They, too, become embedded in our cells.  

Regarding mythological-ness. Yes. I think what you bring to light regarding the Cain and Abel piece has a strong ring. I also really enjoy your use of this phrase “the barely suppressed physicality”—I appreciate that because if there is anything to say about Micah’s book to increase press regarding it, with honesty, I think it is that phrase or one like it. You also refer to a “veiled threat”—which I want to know more about. It is true that I do not often read into texts for narrative relation, so I am curious what you saw in there, in that regard. Please say more …

Benjamin: I am trying to think of how best to explain what I mean by a “veiled threat” in Micah’s text. I suppose it felt, to me, like there was a premonition of violence imbuing the whole book with an, at times, uncomfortable strain. I mentioned the call of the gulls, the slaps, and the torn-down houses. I will try to say more, when, and if, I can.