TELLS US NOTHING: A Quick Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli

by Weston Cutter

This has happened before, but every time it happens I still love it: someone I’ve never read writes and asks if I’d be willing to take a look at some recently published thing, and I almost always say yes, and then sometimes, if I’m very lucky, the thing I’m looking at ends up being one of the more interesting and lovely books of the year—in this case, Jeff Alessandrelli’s Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound, a book about which I’ve been struggling for a few days thinking how to talk about. The book is beautifully lyric and is—in ways I don’t think I’ll be much good trying to articulate—a quiet book. I read it off and on three times in a bit over a week and I don’t think I once played music while listening to it. The weirdness of this fact has to do of course with the fact that Erik Satie was a musician, and there are poems in this book which are on the page as musical scores. But stick with it: ultimately the book doesn’t urge one toward some (boring, or at least foregone) appreciation for the music of poetry or some such; what the book does, I think, and very very well, is it ends up proposing questions about limits and silence and music and self. That’s a fairly vague and broad way to talk about this book, but it holds, for me: the (according to Alessandrelli) little book packs quite a punch in terms of ideas. It’s just a fantastic thing—you should get and read this book as soon as possible. For real. Here are five questions with JA re his book:

In however you can address this, how did this book come together? It’s got a cohesive elegance that doesn’t at all feel forced–doesn’t feel like it was engineered or anything, yet clearly it’s been put together with care. However you want to address this, go for it. Also: extra points for how the f you found your way to watusies, which is maybe the perfect whimsy word for the whole endeavor.

Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound had a fairly long gestation. In brief, though, I started listening to Satie in the winter of 2006 when I lived in Portland, Oregon at a 2 story house that had no heat; when I woke up one morning I could see my breath. Every day before I went to work I put on a Satie mix cd that my friend Dylan had made me, one that had on it Satie’s “hits,” as it were—the “Gymnopédies” and “Gnossienne” pieces, as well as a four minute version of his 18 hour long “Vexations.” At the time I didn’t know anything about Satie’s life and simply liked the music because I didn’t have to listen to it; it was soothing background music, music that asked absolutely nothing out of me as its listener. For about 8 months I listened to that Satie mix cd nearly every morning. Then I lost it, forgot about it and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska in August of 2008. No Satie at all for a year. But in Lincoln I began reading (sometimes rereading) a lot of serial/ longer poems–John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Homage To Mistress Bradstreet, Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn,” Anne Carson’s Short Talks, a hefty amount of Jack Spicer’s work, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Louis Zukosky’s All: The Collected Short Poems,1923-1958, Mathias Svalina’s serial-poem-chapbook Creation Myth–and also began listening to a lot of instrumental/ vaguely electronic music, particularly Boards of Canada, Tortoise, Brian Eno and John Cage’s “Ryoanji.” One day—it’s a bit murky, as these things often are—I thought of Satie again and on a whim bought a box Satie set (6 cds) online for something like $25. It came in the mail, I listened to it a lot and one day I Googled Erik Satie and found out how much of a weirdo he was; I had not known this before.

Flash Reviews + Other Updates

by Weston Cutter

Some from-wherever stuff:

1. Still going strong @ the Kenyon Review blog: interviews with the fantastic Roxane Gay and Richard Buckner, and some mild ramblings about one of the year’s absolute best books: Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I wanted to write more about the thing, but nothing I could write would be as interesting as what Kahneman already has. Get and read that book pronto.

2. Not only do I have new work in Nashville Review (which is totally, totally badass: check their archives for some serious mind-blowing), but see that image to the left? That’s the cover art for the new issue. I’ve been waiting years to have my name noticeably on the cover of something. That may make me sound preeny and whatever, but I don’t care: it’s a thrill.

3. Also new work in Devil’s Lake, a badass mag I’ve been excited about for a long while.

It occurs to me there’s been this stack of books I’ve had next to me for a bit, books I’ve wanted to write long things about but which, given the year’s coming end and that I’d rather these things at least just get mentioned, I’m gonna flash review here, for now:

Damascus by Joshua Mohr. Roxane Gay interviewed Mohr @ HTML, which you should absolutely read. I’ve liked Mohr’s stuff before (Some Things that Meant the World still floors), but I wasn’t wilded by this one. It’s good, yes but didn’t knock me sideways—it’s a lot kinder book than his previous burners, but also the language feels less leper-y, less fall-apart-at-the-touch, and also moderately less torqued. It’s still—that said—10x the book most other books are—a 2 Dollar Radio/Mohr book’s head/shoulders above the bulk of what passes for bookery otherwise.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion. You’ve seen this one written about elsewhere, over and over. Fine. And of course you’re a fool to miss anything Didion, and of course you know the tragic awfulness of things, how, immediately following publication of her Year of Magical Thinking her daughter died and so she lost *all* family at age like 77 all in the span of like 3 years. She looked like a wizardy gnomic seen-too-much being when I saw her read in NYC in 2005. And so now Blue Nights, about the loss of her daughter, and here’s the thing: Didion’s been writing of world-ending issues forever, or _______-ending issues forever (lest you believe this is the second big thing she’s written after the death of someone close to her, recall After Henry, about her editor), and so the shock of this thing’s not the circumstances or specifics of the loss, and it’s not even Didion’s style, or whatever’s left of it after she’s had so many aspects of her life shocked into unrecognizable new twists—it’s that she still fights her way into dashing to and for and around meaning. This book’s a pricey miracle.

Pulp and Paper by Josh Rolnick. Great stories expertly done. I don’t know that much necessarily to say about a book like this—years back when Thisbe Nissen’s Out of the Girl’s Room and Into the Night hit, I thought I’d never read anything like it again, but then, of course, one does—one reads, again and again, well-crafted, gorgeous books in which characters take center stage and you close the thing feeling as if you’ve fully entered, smelled, touched certain lives other than your own. It’s a book you close feeling full, larger than when you’d begun.

 

 

 

A Plague of Prisons by Ernest Drucker. If you’re at all interested in social justice, and if you’re looking for the scariest but maybe most necessary companion read to the all-time great social-problem-non-fiction books (Random Family, of course, but also last year’s crazy excellent Just Like Us plus also maybe that great old Fist Stick Knife Gun), Plague of Prisons is what you’ve got to get to next. It’s of course terrifying: Drucker’s looking at prisons themselves as a social sickness, instead of just focusing on the crime and violence we believe leads to prisons. It seems to this reader not remotely coincidental that Sheriff Joe, in Maricopa County, has just been called out for being the racist f*ck he is: his ability to get away with what he’s for years gotten away with would, Drucker’d argue, be almost predictable: given the sickness of overprisoning in this country, Sheriff Joe’s an almost automatic result. The book’s scary and genius like that, and it came out in September and I should’ve mentioned it a long long while ago. Read the thing.

Going All the Way with John Jeremiah Sullivan: An Interview

by Weston Cutter

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s got a modest, measured voice, a thing that I can’t help but thinking of as having sounded sturdy. His voice sort of reminds me of someone’s, though I can’t think of who that person is.

In my eight or so years of interviewing people I’ve yet to comment on anyone’s voice though Sullivan seems worthy to be the exception—his voice, on the page, has been among the most fantastic and gorgeous of the last decade or so. Tempted though I am, I will not here mention at length how Sullivan’s voice is among the very best going in contemporary nonfiction, and I will absolutely not go to lengths about how, for those of us who will never be able to get enough Wallace, Sullivan is who we should now be tracking (reasons for not going to lengths on that: seemingly everyone everywhere puts Sullivan and Wallace together).

What I will say is that Pulphead is among the year’s best books, and any time Sullivan’s got new work in any magazine anywhere is reason for celebration, and also this: there is a difference between Sullivan and Wallace, a significant and real difference. Though both writers will, if you’re reading them correctly, make you a better person, and will make you see the world bigger and with more color and strangeness and also more love, Sullivan’s work ultimately seems to be asking for or providing something different from Wallace’s, a less whiz-bangy burst of stuff and more a deep thrum—ultimately the feel is a matter of connection in Sullivan, whereas for Wallace it felt more about recognition. At the end of Sullivan’s best stuff (the piece about his brother’s near death is up there), the reader feels less like something’s been revealed but that something’s been awakened, some deep part of himself made aware.

Sullivan awesomely spent almost an hour on the phone answering these questions on a Wednesday and Friday morning. There were tributaries that’ve been compressed or cut for clarity, but this is fairly accurate.

How’s it going? (ed note: Sullivan had to call back like a quarter hour after the first call, saying there was a plumber situation going on). What’s this plumber thing?

There’s this candlelight tour through historic homes in our area, and we’ve used the opportunity to attend to some home maintenance we’d been meaning to get to. I’ve also been reading ships logs from 1722. I’ve been working on this book for many years set in the first half of the 18th century, and the plan was to have a chapter about that done and excerpted in the Paris Review by the end of the year, but the plan is shrinking.

Best of ’11: Sarah Jaffe

by Weston Cutter

Sarah Jaffe’s The Way Sound Leaves a Room is, hands down, among the very best recorded things released this year. Maybe it’s a function of aging, but the idea of besting certain things, ranking absolutely #1 on down, seems silly. There have been a handful of necessary things to listen to this year, and Jaffe’s ep is among them. Decide for yourself what sort of rank you’d like to give it.

To prime the Jaffe pump, here’s a video:

What’s remarkable about that is how seemingly simple the whole thing is. Watch Jaffe open her mouth and just pour gorgeousness as if it was as simple as throwing the wash into the dryer. Notice how absolutely controlled the thing feels and seems—the song seems perfectly boundaried, something with real edges but flexible as well (all that background sound, all the tiny pieces coming together like elements suddenly perfectly aligning over and over).

You think it’s a rarity somehow? That she doesn’t do that every damn time? Here’s more:

I was lucky enough to see Jaffe with friends in Omaha and we were among maybe 30 people in the audience, and Jaffe herself was incredibly cool and kind and drinking whiskey or bourbon, I can’t remember which, and the reason she’s worth talking about as among the very most exciting musicians at present is how shockingly quickly she’s growing. Before talking at any length about The Way Sound Leaves a Room, let’s revisit Suburban Nature, her 2010 debut. It’s a gorgeous, compelling disc, and it was among my favorite records of last year, but it was also, indisputably, younger, less sure of itself. For the audacious confidence of tracks like “Perfect Plan” or “Before You Go,” there were shakier, less certain tracks like “LUV.” Weirdly, the song that at the time seemed to me the absolutely most compelling thing imaginable—”Clementine”—still holds up to a degree, but its murmury hesitance is striking now, in the context of Jaffe’s latest.

The Way Sound Leaves a Room is an audacious and confident collection of 8 tracks that I think offers pretty inarguable proof that Jaffe’s the most exciting thing going. Evidence? Fucking ep starts off with a cover of Drake’s “Shut it Down,” the song stripped down and given harmonies and pianos and a tiny sandpapery casiotone drum beat in the track’s back, and if you hear Jaffe’s version before hearing Drake’s, you’ll never hear the original again—Jaffe owns the thing, absolutely. The ep would be fantastic enough just for that cover (which for the record is, in my mind, among the best covers of the year, a category which’d have to include the two amazing covers Bon Iver dropped this year [Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and his cover of Bjork's "Who Is It" at his DC show]), but of course there’s more.

There is a piano version of “Clementine,” which to me feels weaker than the original, but even that’s not a mis-step or anything, just a track that doesn’t quite hang as awesomely as the rest. For my money, the second half of the ep, from the title track to the haunting, almost Imogen-Heap-ish “All that Time,” is why this thing stands so tall and powerfully. What the listener gets in these four tracks is a level of confident messiness that was developing in parts in Suburban Nature but is hugely, awesomely more pronounced now. There’s also just more noise: electronics in “When You Rest,” and, in the ep’s single, “A Sucker For Your Marketing,” a hard bass line couples menacingly with the lyrics (“Whatever you put out, I’m gonna buy it / so what’s your latest, I wanna try it / are you still in love, are you over it again / when the damn thing grew with no intent,”) to make one of the most aggressive I-want-you songs I’ve ever heard.

Jaffe’s been at the top of my list of holy-shit-she-can-do-anything artists for awhile, and this new ep bodes exceptionally well for her. It’s past time to consider what she might do next, how she might do it: look what she’s doing. No one is doing anything close to what she’s doing; no one’s taking such big, masterful steps. Listen now, if only so you can brag later, when she’s got all the attention she already deserves.

(If yr interested, here’s a brief interview I did with her last year)