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April 29, 2020
Jennifer Calkins' Playlist for Her Novel "Fugitive Assemblage"
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 Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jennifer Calkins' powerful novel Fugitive Assemblage captures the Southern California of the early 1980s lyrically and poignantly.
Amina Cain wrote of the book:
"Fugitive Assemblage is mysterious, restless, searching, flat out beautiful, and finally, heartbreaking. I don’t think I’ve ever read grief in a way that feels so true. And then there is just this absolute pleasure in the language, the atmosphere, the constant move forward through the Southern California landscape and through history. Joan Didion meets Bhanu Kapil meets the films of Kelly Reichardt. It’s like a long, hot day that turns into a harrowing night, and yet at the end, somehow, there is a sense of peace."
In her own words, here is Jennifer Calkins' Book Notes music playlist for her novel Fugitive Assemblage:
When I thought of a playlist, I first thought of time. The narrative of Fugitive Assemblage takes place along two clearly distinct timelines. The events occur in 1983. But the narrator recalls these events at some later, undisclosed, date. At first, I thought I’d focus on including the music of the era of the events—of the early '80s—and would certainly include the music the narrator drove during her flight. But here’s something strange. She listens to little music—only Elvis Presley’s antiseptic “Hound Dog” (because Big Mama Thornton did it so much better) and the sound of static.
On top of the complications of the relative audio sterility of the narrative is the problem of all of the other timelines crisscrossing the storyline deriving from the narrator’s own family history, from the history of California, from modern human history, from the geological origins of the cliffs, the mountains, the sand and soil of that state. And then there is the feverish heartbroken state I was in when I wrote the book. A different timeline from everything else.
So, rather than picking songs the narrator could have heard during her drive, I picked songs that were in and around me during that decade, such as Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark’s “If You Leave,” Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Nocturnal Me,” and REM’s “The One I Love,” and I picked songs that were necessary for my heartbroken state and that I listened to as a wrote the thing, including Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” and Shearwater’s “Hail Mary.” I picked Big Mama Thornton’s most definitely not antiseptic “Hound Dog.” I picked one song, in particular, that was the book in a way, P.J. Harvey’s “Down by the Water,” And finally, the ending, an opening, and the totality and interconnectedness of everything, Thor & Friends’ “As Above so Below,” and Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything.” My list started out longer and included Leonard Cohen, Bill Callahan, Sinead O’Connor, and Sharon Van Etten.
But I left them off and paired the list down to something more accurate for the book, which of course is not a biography or even a memoir. It is a work of fiction. And it is a love story. So these are love songs.
Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Nocturnal Me” was in and around me near the time the book takes place. Not the same year, so my narrator would not have heard it but it draws from the same space, reaching back in time before the book to a necessary night, a crucible. It reaches towards the initial propulsive moment, towards something that is heatswamp, that is California night, that is moon sinking low over the sea, that is an incorporation in that way sex can be fundamentally an attempt to incorporate, imbibe, take inside. That is the ancient art of engulfing. That is what Robert Burton found so troubling about love, so risky, so likely to trigger melancholy. As Emil Cioran, that horrifyingly fascist thinker wrote, Do not forget you are a fugitive assemblage. Whatever burns, burns eternally.
Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark’s “If You Leave” is another song that was in and around me at the time the book takes place. Here it represents a pivot point, a moment of fear that takes place seconds before a relationship breaks—a desperation. The narrator walks into a bathroom and knows she is walking into a memory instead of that moment. OMD, like Echo & the Bunnymen and REM were staples to me during the eighties, when I was a decade younger than my narrator but still inhabiting California in a sort of fever dream. As the narrator, motelbound, said, He’d washed his hands of me long ago. Don’t leave now.
REM’s “The One I Love” is the moment the narrator pulls the IV out of her arm, in the dead of night, the witching hour. The song is disjunct in time, but not in experience. A cynicism of love, overlying something held in, a deeper incapacity to reconcile the heart. For the narrator, it is the moment after that one particular night and after the attempt to hold the thing together that cannot be held together. Fire. Burn it all. Her hospital gown flapping open in the back, the thing in the trunk. The door slams on her Datsun and she is on her way. Fire, the heat of her tires, the heat of the peak moments of decay. And the cold hard metal taste of whatever she thought was love but has become different. There was that moment when she knew, even as it happened, that his resting beautiful body, my skin moving through the air, was already over.
Shearwater’s “Hail Mary” was a background to my writing, with Meiberg’s lyrics and vocals and Thor Harris’ grounding percussion. Nico died in 1988, but she was entirely alive at the moment the narrator noses her Datsun onto the road. Cigarettes and heroin. Or cigarettes and the pierced vein of a Demerol drip. A lack of time, the narrator’s otherness, Nico as a space apart, the narrator’s experience of being outside of the moment, the flight from nothing, the flight in the dark, the flight at the edge of the lit match, the flight to a motel bathroom, the flight into the Twilight Zone, a wilderness of the heart. Glass ashtray, two hits on a cigarette. I was done. God saved his hardest face for you and all of your kind.
Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” My own heart was broken and a bit battered when I wrote Fugitive Assemblage. So the writing was an expression of that pain, to some extent.
And during this time, I listened to “Song for Zula” over and over again. It utterly inhabits the text. As in “Song for Zula,” in Fugitive Assemblage, love is disfiguring, traumatic, it is the constant bleeding and vomiting, it is the grief, the source of grief behind, in time and space. As Sue Grafton asked, If it is love that injures us, how can we heal? My narrator left the love in the dark. I was simultaneously hungry and riven. And she found herself undone. Matthew Houck’s album Muchacho grew out of his own heartbreak and ripples with something true about how love breaks you, and is threaded with Mexico, an entire country, expatriated for his healing. A country the narrator turns away from, but, let’s but honest, one that tugs on her and that perhaps becomes her home in some not so distant future.
Big Mama Thornton’s “ Hound Dog” splits the soundtrack and stands outside of it for what the text is missing. On the road, in Fugitive Assemblage, is Elvis Presley’s version of “Hound Dog.” As it was on the radio in America 1980s, nostalgia for what was white appropriation and barrenness. Big Mama Thornton reaches right into your gut, reaches down to your cunt, if you are lucky enough to have one. Do you feel the narrator’s need and lack? Do you feel how Big Mama Thornton brings you the fuck back in? I ain’t gonna feed you no more. As a friend of mine said, Fugitive Assemblage should be core to a Department of Whiteness Studies curriculum. Such a very white experience of the narrator, dragging clanking ghosts of the trauma of a white experience imposing and erasing everything as it goes, crushing that experience under its tires, watching Twilight Zone and eating pies and vomiting and bleeding. Bow wow to all of ‘em.
PJ Harvey’s “Down by the Water” is the story. Not because the narrative is right on. Indeed, the most surface-level narratives of the song and the text are quite different. But listen underneath, drowning, water, the bridge, the children. Generations talk about death by drowning. I wrapped her entirely. The narrator does not lose her daughter to the water but throughout the text the water as a place to drown, one’s own body and the bodies of children. The bridge to Big Sur, beneath the bridge, as the Datsun drives over it, the ghosts of California below the car, above the car and in all of the seats of the car. Holding hands with someone with the child her great great grandmother was, with the child she might have had with that lost love, with the child her grandfather was, cloaked in rage. PJ Harvey sings of taking her daughter home and sings of the fish who have that child. There is always that possibility.
Thor & Friends with Jenn Wasner and Soriah’s “As Above so Below” is the opening back up of the text in the wide space of California’s central valley, under that sort of sky. I stared into nothing. At some point the road, the sea, the California hills, the cypresses crack the narrator open. I wish your body I wish her bones. A resting place in the wind and dust swept land just adjacent to a highway gas station. Where I imagine the narrator feels something like what this song does to my body. Thor & Friends make music that is both delicate and grounding, unworldly, otherworldly. And in those final moments, her blood mixing with the dust, the man smoking nearby but not too close, the narrator starts to inhabit this other world. And it allows her to leave that patch of earth behind.
Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything,” What is before you is what is. What is above you and in you. Hill, in her own traumatic awakening, created this piece, a spiritual and political song, but also deeply personal. It is music entirely open to brokenness and the emergency. Everything in the book is everything, the history, the geology, the geography, the melancholia, the dark black cliffs and the Taco Bell parking lot. The bridge from here to there. Abiding, emerging, eventuality. The narrator walks off into something else, and we don’t follow her, it is possibility at the end of nothing, nothing left. I walked away. To be inside.
Jennifer Calkins is a writer, attorney and evolutionary biologist. Her academic credentials include a PhD in biological science, an MFA in creative writing and a JD in law. Between 2010 and 2015 she produced The Quail Diaries, an interdisciplinary project melding science and lyric essay. Her most recent creative works are published in The Fanzine, Entropy, Queen Mob's Teahouse and Quarterly West. Her peer reviewed humanities and scientific works are published in Configurations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and Animal Behaviour, among other journals. Her natural history writing has appeared online at the The New York Times, National Geographic, and Voices for Biodiversity. She is the author of the book A Story of Witchery (Les Figues Press) and the chapbook Devil Card (Beard of Bees Press). She lives in Seattle with creatures including teenagers.
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