Sonic Youth as muse
Authors crank the New York band and let the words flow. The result is an anthology of new fiction.
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. Another thought it was evidence of a prank gone wrong at a nearby medical school, where corpses, students and alcohol might have added up to a grisly practical joke. Still more blamed an eager Labrador retriever or sea gull 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.
"Noise," an anthology of new fiction inspired by the New York band's catalog due for release Tuesday, has many such uncomfortably commanding moments, but the collection also captures a particular cultural cross-pollination. Writers like Jonathan Lethem, Lavinia Greenlaw and even Stephen King seem ever more fascinated with pop music, and many ambitious songwriters are packing high-minded allusions and images into their songs (or, like Ryan Adams and John Darnielle, crafting books of poetry and novellas about Black Sabbath).
"You have this idea of the writer in their Parisian garret, but so many of them need something to stir them," said Peter Wild, the editor of "Noise." "When I can't figure out how to get from point A to point B, I always play music, and Sonic Youth is like a puzzle that offers many different routes for an author to travel."
"Noise" is Wild's third anthology of stories inspired by bands after similar collections based around cantankerous U.K. post-punks the Fall and swoony romantics the Smiths. What could have amounted to a very nerdy love letter to a group with a labyrinthine catalog is given extra literary weight by notable figures from the flintier ends of contemporary fiction like Dunn, Mary Gaitskill and Shelley Jackson. True to the joke that all writers are failed rockers, it's never been hard for Wild to solicit contributions to his series.
