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March 29, 2012
Book Notes - Peter Markus - "We Make Mud"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, David Peace, Myla Goldberg, and many others.
Peter Markus's We Make Mud is an innovative and absorbing novel in stories, told mostly in the first person plural.
Norman Lock wrote of the book:
"In the slow accrual of his two narrators’ discoveries (mundane and earth-shattering, related by a twin, scarcely divisible intelligence), Markus builds a kind of novel from the humblest of materials-–transfiguring them to make us a gift, again, of how it was to have been a child: a life newly formed and breathless with the rapture of being."
Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.
In his own words, here is Peter Markus's Book Notes music playlist for his story collection, We Make Mud:
I don't usually listen to music when I write, and never did when I was spending time—over a decade of my life, roughly the years 1998 to 2008—living with and writing about the brothers who live in and occupy the pages of We Make Mud. The brothers, I hope, bring with them a way of speech and a musicality of their own that occupied my ears every time I picked up a pen to scribble some note or sentence or catch-phrase that I heard them say to me during those years. That said, music occupies its own large space in the heart of the boy-man that I am and aim to be, and there are songs, and singers, whose songs I believe occupy a space that is a kindred space that the brothers live in: music that, to my ears, is lyrical but muddy, simple and blunt and beautiful and strange, everything that I look for when I look for something to hold onto me in this world. These are some of the songs that I think of when I think of the brothers who love and live in the dirty river that runs through this dirty river of a book, and through these songs, I realize, the world that all of us live in is made into a more livable place.
Smog's "Drinking by the Dam" and "Stick in the Mud"
The voice of Bill Callahan is the voice inside my own head. I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me to say that when they read and hear my stories they think of Smog. If I'm going to be accused of being derivative, there's no other writer/singer whose shadow I'd rather stand beside.
Neutral Milk Hotel "Two-Headed Boy"
Jeff Magnum is the boy born without a tongue in his own mouth. Where most of us have a tongue, Magnum has a fish in his mouth that knows what it means to sing.
Nick Cave "The Hammer Song"
Because the hammer comes down hard in Cave's hand and I am held.
Chris Moore
Because Moore is a brother. If I had to picture the brothers grown up Chris Moore is who I would want them to be. He is the voice inside my own head.
Elliott Smith
I could build a backyard totem pole studded with the heads of fish in his memory and honor.
Spahn Ranch: "Echoes of the Day"
"I gave words and you gave words/ Sounds like a fair trade." In memory of Bob.
Neil Young "Down by the River" and Springsteen's "The River"
Because both Neil and Bruce know the power of the river, and that when you go down there there's always something about to go down.
Cat Power's "Bathysphere"
I love this Bill Callahan song and love even more, I think, the version sung by Chan Marshall. I think the brothers create their own sort of bathysphere out of fish and river and mud.
The Decemberists' "Down by the Water"
I can see the brothers bobbing their boy heads and tapping their muddy boots to this tune.
Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"
If the brothers sang a song about Girl this just might be what they'd say.
Peter Markus and We Make Mud links:
The Life and Opinions of J. Rathke review
The Lit Pub review
The Story Prize guest post by the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlists
List of Online "Best Books of 2011" Lists
List of 2011 Year-End Online Music Lists
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists
