Read and Appreciated in 2004
A Year’s Best List
I had the good luck to discover Monkeybrain Books this year, a little publisher of SF-related nonfiction. First, I read Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy—a lively monologue from an important writer—and then Jeff VanderMeer’s Why Should I Cut Your Throat: Excursions Into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. The latter collects articles, essays, and reviews VanderMeer has written over the past twelve years, and so it is sometimes repetitive, sometimes obsessed with minutia or information that seems less important now than five or ten years ago, but the collection on the whole is fascinating, because it offers a parallel history of the sf world in the 1990s and early 21st century than the history anyone not involved in the day-to-day grime and greatness of it all might know. It is a portrait of the artist as an ambitious young man struggling against the petrified mucas of preconceptions and prejudices, against the tide of the publishing world’s endless ocean of commodification, against the limits and wonders of technology, against friends, enemies, and even himself. If you want to know what it means to be a writer who values originality in a world saturated with cloned entertainments and entertainment for clones, this is the book to read.
Toward the very last days of the year, Alan M. Clark sent me a retrospective collection of his artwork, The Paint in My Blood, and though I have only had a few days to look at it, I can see it will be a book I return to with some frequency. Clark mixes the darkest of dark fantasy with surrealistic flourishes, as if Max Ernst had boarded for a night at Arkham House.
Things that are not books
Once upon a time, there was an irascible literary critic named Marvin Mudrick who published a book of essays called Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is?, and it is a title I like to fall back on, not because it is true, but because it sounds like it should be. We can pretend for the moment that books are the house of life, but the basement and attic of life are music and movies. (That’s enough for me, at least. I’m not responsible for your architecture.)
So, from the tapes in the basement: I was busy this year, and didn’t challenge my musical tastes too much. I listened to things I’ve known for years, though sometimes in new forms. For instance, there was The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, which only made its way to CD this year, just as my old tape of it was beginning to wear out.
Another band that, like Talking Heads, became well known in the 1980s was The Cure, and Join the Dots, a four-CD collection of B-sides from throughout their career, lived in my CD player for two months. I’ve never gone out of my way to hear The Cure (though I have not disliked what I’ve heard), but a Village Voice review of the B-sides intrigued me, and I was hungry for something new and different to listen to. New, different, and full of various pleasures it turned out to be.
I also heard for the first time Pablo Casals’s recordings of Bach’s six cello suites, which I had previously only known on Yo-Yo Ma’s two recordings (from the early ’80s and late ’90s). Casals is the first person to have made the cello suites famous in the 20th century, and his playing is vastly different from Ma’s—not better or worse, to my ears, but certainly different. The recording I have contains lots of scratches and swishes and clicks from the originals, which Casals made in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the imperfections let me love the sound even more, because somehow the imperfections heighten the sense of intimacy and the range of emotions.
A range of emotions appear on PJ Harvey’s Uh Huh Her, my favorite album original to 2004. I am a bit of an anomalie among PJ Harvey listeners, in that I like her most recent three CDs best among her work, although there are certain songs from her earlier albums that grab my attention as much as anything else.
Tom Waits released a new album, which is always, for me, a reason to run to the record store, because the combination of his inventive lyrics, beautiful melodies, odd choice of instruments, and dust-encrusted voice is irresistible. Real Gone is not his best album, and it takes some getting used to, but it’s original and surprising, and a couple of the songs are as astonishing as anything he’s done.
They Might Be Giants released an album of rarities, oddities, and spare parts called They Got Lost via their website. There’s not much of interest on it, but the song “All Alone” is brilliant: the story of a single germ on the moon.
I spent a tremendous amount of time listening to John Prine’s first, self-titled album, even though it’s not his best (that would probably be John Prine Live). “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” amused me endlessly, particularly as the U.S. election season drew to a close and legions of bigots mobilized their brethren to fire on the last vestiges of the Age of Reason.
