The semester break is when I like to catch up on my reading and my listening, and usually I combine these activities. So, for this week I’ve put together a summary of my winter reading list and some of the music that has accompanied it.
TiO (Zayn) & A selection of poems in The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology (Robert Peters)
Peters’ poetry reads like the most intimate of caresses, he throws words together, toying with enjambment and biting, visceral bodily imagery that makes it hard to breathe as you read. His poetry, like Zayn’s song, comfortably vacillates between tension and release and there is a palpable physical connection between the speaker and addressee. Peters’ work is an exploration of intimacy, working to dismantle barriers between lovers, sexual and domestic. “Hubris” tackles intense, carnal desire that cannot be separated from the urge for tenderness, the poet explaining his need to “leap past gestures/ we know/ to savor cin-/namon, eat crushed thyme/ and fall/ locked with you/ through to that kingdom/ of exhaustion, wet/ breathing nerve-and-sinew/ wisdom, / burning the gods.” Zayn is fully embracing his sexuality, imploring the subject of his song to “take it off” and desperately admitting “I just can’t wait to see it all”. It might seem strange to peer Zayn’s “TiO” with poetry like Peters’, but there’s something in this song that is tender yet propulsive, like these poems it is pulsing and erotic, an honest exploration of bodies, sexuality and intimacy.
Tweez (Slint) & Ryder (Djuna Barnes)
I couldn’t pick only one song for Ryder, maybe because it is a whole novel and not only a handful of poems or a single short story, or maybe because it is so varied. Barnes’s first novel is a terrifying jaunt through turn of the century American gothic, and so it absolutely makes sense to listen to Slint while reading this book. I picked Tweez as my soundtrack rather mostly because the song titles being names of people in the band members’ lives (“Darlene”, “Warren”) reminded me of chapter titles in Ryder (“Sophia and the Five Fine Chamber- Pots”, “Wendell Is Born”) and seemed to resonate with the autobiographical nature of Barnes’s novel. Slint’s music shifts between fragmentary statements and narratives, driving riffs and smashing, sudden percussion. Slint provoke in me a deep sense of malaise. Their music mirrors Barnes’s writing in that it feels like a slow, often draining, trek through sonic and conceptual sludge. It feels totally appropriate to listen to a bunch of Kentucky teens bashing out creepy bog music while reading Barnes’s dread inducing phantasmagoric portrayal of her bigamous, bestial father, and isolating rural upbringing.
Speedy Ortiz (Death Note) & Mathilde in Delta of Venus (Anaïs Nin)
I want to start by saying that I don’t want to compare this song to this story, which, while Nin’s prose is brisk, light and delightful, ends up being beyond horrible. But I felt some kind of connection, be it emotive, situational, or just a result of over thinking my reading and listening processes. “Mathilde” is an erotic short story, and “Death Note” is a bass heavy, wailing poetic ramble. Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis drags us into the song, murmuring “be kind to your bad self because sooner or later you’ll come out good”. She alters the line in the second verse, adding “be kind to your bad self because sooner or later someone else grabs the whip”. Nin’s story features a hat maker named Mathilde who leaves France, tired of men crudely objectifying her, picking up on her sensuality and physical attributes and seeking to take them without reciprocity. Dupuis sings about writing love letters to herself, and Mathilde eventually learns to pleasure herself and to be pleasured as she wants, I suppose in a sense shedding a negative experience of sexuality. Dupuis’s song is a song nurturing the negatives in your life, and to a point so is Nin’s story.