Deep Voices #103

Provoke, sublimate, amplify, etc.

Deep Voices #103 on Spotify
Deep Voices #103 on Apple Music

---

Deep Voices shirts have arrived! Or at least they will in a few hours, according to my UPS tracking number. They feature the Deep Voices logo printed on a pocket tee and a fun play on the Nurse With Wound list, both designed by Michael Schmelling. Photos and a link to buy coming soon! Paid subscribers to Deep Voices will receive a 15% off code for shirts! I’ll send that out as soon as the shirts are on sale but you can sign up for a subscription anytime. Paying subscribers also get 12 exclusive Deep Voices newsletters a year. If you get a modicum of happiness from Deep Voices, consider a paid subscription. Thank you!

---

Usually, I read one book at a time. I’m easily influenced by the point of view of whatever book I have in front of me—if I’m reading a book about, say, the Supreme Court, for example, I will be consumed for weeks by thoughts of black robes and lawyers. By the nature of reading a book being slow-moving, that period of obsession can stretch out to weeks or months. If the book is good enough, the absorption can be so total it can sometimes feel like I’ve never read anything else at all. 

Music is different. Streaming audio has been somewhat responsible for this change, the ability to jump around thoughtlessly from song to song. It is not often that I am as narrowly focused on an album as I am on a novel. But that singularity in reading is starting to erode and I think my listening habits, not just the desire but ability to digest such a vast spread of musical stimuli, has a lot to blame for it.

Three or four months ago I started reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead. It’s beautifully written but, for the most part, a huge downer. A modern take on David Copperfield, it's a story about Demon, an orphan with great talent and charm but very bad luck. After a while of picking it up before bed and being so bummed out by the next terrible thing that happened to this kid, I needed a break. So I quickly read Vivian Gornick’s book about writing, The Situation and the Story, which felt like taking a class with a beloved professor. Two friends recommended John Cheever’s novel Bullet Park, so I started that and found its sentences to be so masterful it was almost annoying. I’m not finished yet. After hearing about it at a child’s birthday party, I got an advance copy and read Emily Witt’s upcoming memoir, Health and Safety and found the increasingly out of control relationship at the book’s heart to be so upsetting that I felt crushed for several days after. Only after that feeling eroded, was I able to go back and reread certain passages and realize what an accomplishment of craft it is. Now I’m about halfway done with Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted, which makes the modern struggles of the working class into a breezy drama. I’m not yet sure how I feel about it, but it reads easy. In between all of this, I’ve been picking up Demon Copperhead. With Demon’s luck improved, it’s been easier to push ahead. 

In the memoir I’m writing now, I spend a chapter cataloging the art I consumed in the summer after my son died. Books, music, paintings, photographs. At the time, I hadn’t meant to make it a season of cultural immersion, but upon reflection I guess I needed to try to feel a little bit of everything to figure out how to feel anything at all again. 

This week’s mix is something like that, a bit of dress up, a journey through an array of genres and styles and the emotions they provoke, sublimate, amplify, etc. We contain multitudes, as does Spotify. Perhaps these songs can help you puzzle out how you feel. Or make you feel something you’ve not before. I know how serious that sounds, how high stakes I can often make the mechanics of being a music fan seem, but I don’t mean to. The second song on this mix is called “Clown Confusion” and it sounds pretty much like you’d imagine a song called “Clown Confusion” would sound. I’ve listened to it endlessly the past week, and I still can’t decide if it’s terrible or incredible. I have been impressed that it could very plausibly be both.