Sonic Youth's inspirational noise

Where and how do music and literature intersect? That's something we wonder about here at Jacket Copy, and we're not alone. Peter Wild asked authors to write something for the anthology "Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth," out Tuesday from Harper Perennial. The contributors are a stellar bunch -- Mary Gaitskill, Tom McCarthy, Shelley Jackson -- all complicated enough to tackle the layers and contradictions of Sonic Youth's music.

For the L.A. Times, August Brown looks at the book:

The origins of the severed hand in the park were uncertain. Some were convinced it was fake, an especially convincing rubber facsimile with elaborately painted muscles and tendons. ... Still more blamed an eager Labrador retriever or seagull for dropping a find on the lawn, and one particularly morbid theory suggested a homeless man cut it off after his buddy's gangrene infection drove him to madness.

That mutilated limb in Katherine Dunn's short story "That's All I Know (Right Now)" doesn't appear in the Sonic Youth song that inspired (and shares a title with) her work. But those familiar with the famed noise-rock band's two-decade-plus career might nod in recognition at some of what the image conjures up: intrigue, antagonism, violence and the accidental poetry of the inscrutable.

Wild has done this before, with "Perverted by Language: Fiction Inspired by The Fall," another sonically adventurous underground band. And he'll do it again -- "Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction Inspired by The Smiths" is scheduled for release in the United Kingdom later this year. An author himself, he uses music as a writing tool: "When I can't figure out how to get from point A to point B, I always play music," he tells Brown. "Sonic Youth is like a puzzle that offers many different routes for an author to travel."

I'm excited by this new kind of music-fiction mashup. But maybe that's because I like short stories -- and The Fall and Sonic Youth and The Smiths. What do you think? Is this combination appealing, like getting music's chocolate in fiction's peanut butter? Or should the two break it up and go back to their own corners?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Comments

[Spyro Verrtun]

The next one should be based on the Smashing Pumpkins. I know some of their work was a lot more mainstream than Sonic Youth or the Smiths, it was awesomely layered, evocative, and perfect for interpretation to new media.