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August 10, 2020
Joni Murphy's Playlist for Her Novel "Talking Animals"
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.
Joni Murphy's Talking Animals is one of the year's best books, hilarious, profound, and one of the finest NYC novels I have ever read.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A 21st-century combination of Animal Farm and Aesop's Fables . . . Murphy packs a lot of issues―class, climate change immigration, vegetarianism, and more―into a familiar plot about malfeasance. She balances her poetic ruminations and dogmatic lecturing with a goofy relish for puns . . . Weird yet engrossing and hard to forget."
In her own words, here is Joni Murphy's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Talking Animals:
Fog on the Hudson—Moondog
Fog on the Hudson sets up a cityscape that’s overgrown and metallic, unkept and echoing, traversable yet overstuffed, futuristic rustic. It makes the city a ship.
Moondog’s work was necessary for mine. He, “is a potent symbol of Old New York, both as a collective fantasy and as a real and absent place.”1
He composed another song, not this one, that served as my in-process manifesto.
“Enough about Human Rights” goes the title and first line. After comes a litany the other rights we might consider instead. What about whale rights, and Ox rights, and Loon rights? What about them, indeed.
Iron Galaxy- Cannibal Ox
As Moondog is to real and absent 1970s, Cannibal Ox is to our turn-of-the-century.
Released in 2001, this is a capsule, a compressed pill made of '90s grit. It arrived at eras end, but also anticipates a future, maybe the one we’re shambling into now. Sometimes a door is twenty years wide.
Iron Galaxy has the precision of miniature communicated with the force of an epic. The five minutes and forty-seven seconds contain a trilogy of films, a science fiction tragedy on par with Jodorowsky’s Dune. An apocalyptic wind swirls through Union Station. The worst has already occurred.
This album shoulda-woulda-coulda been an arrival. These guys were young and full of momentum. But the album was not followed up until 2012 and by that time so much had shifted. Drugs, the need to make money or the desire for a lot of it, or something more every day, day jobs, family, arguments with collaborators.
Modern pressures exist everywhere, but in New York there’s so little room to slip. This is part of what makes some of its art so good, but also destroys so much in the process. New York too often destroys it’s young or at least silences them before they’ve said everything they need to say.
Erase You- Puppy to You- E.S.G
I wasn’t a teenager who dreamed of moving to New York. I didn’t think I cared.
But then I visited and I was smitten. When I did finally fall for the city, I realized how much of its charm I’d absorbed unconsciously. Mythic crowds passed into me through MTV, VHS, NBC and all the other initials. Style arising from anxiety was dramatized in All the Jazz, Fame, Ghostbusters, Klute. My parents watched Midnight Cowboy in the living room. I watched Kids at the single screen art house theater in Mesilla, New Mexico. The synesthetic Metropolitan collage I got was E.S.G. I didn’t know, but I knew. You know?
E.S.G sounds how New York is supposed to be: savvy hard earned; hyper vigilance with a thrilling bassline.
How unjust, yet on the nose, that you could belong to the coolest, most sampled, girl group in the world and still end up driving a city bus?
In my mind I hear Erase You echoing out in a dark converted garage dance club with white cinderblock walls, empty save for some potted palms and spinning blue and pink lights.
Informal Economy Man – Body Improvement Calendar
This one goes out to all the lonely office workers out there.
Thank you for what you’ve done during this unprecedented period.
You’ve been phenomenal, really above and beyond.
Kudos.
Unjustified Murder- Dropdead
The two central characters in Talking Animals are an alpaca and llama who’ve been friends since junior high. They were hardcore fans and spent a lot of their teen years haunting record stores or the corners of dingy venues, listening to sweaty creatures shriek about veganism for short bursts of song.
Alfonzo knows that Dropdead is perhaps not the most important herbivore power violence band, especially in relation to say, Siege or Infest—obviously that’s a complicated conversation for another time—but he still has a soft spot for their level of DIY commitment. He still has one of their tee-shirts but it’s too holey and too confrontational to wear in adult circles.
La Paloma Ingrata— Violeta Parra
The song smuggles a sad tale of betrayal, love lost, and murder into something that sounds almost frivolous because the characters are doves.
Violeta Parra sang lightly because she knew heaviness. She experienced poverty, celebrity, obscurity, intimate flashes, and grand desires for political justice.
Doves, who are really pretty pigeons, live in brutish conditions. Once my friend Aaron Peck pointed out a pigeon with a mangled foot and lopsided hobble. He said he’d never thought about them feeling sick before.
Since then, while sitting in parks or lingering on corners, my eyes have strayed to passing pigeon’s feet. So many limp along wounded and falling apart. They can’t go on. They go on.
I read about Parra’s legacy on the website Chile Today. Above the essay about her life a looping red ticker tape of the latest Covid death toll numbers scrolled. I look at Chile, the United States, and the world, from my little perch in New York.
At the age of forty-seven, Parra’s great love disappeared to Bolivia, she went searching and found him married to another. At the age of forty-nine, she committed suicide. “The last song she wrote, hours before killing herself, is named Gracias a la Vida, and it is her most memorable and famous song. It speaks about the gifts life gave her, such as her sight and hearing, but highlights the love for her lover.”2
They Cannot Be Replaced— Not Waving (188)
Alessio Natalizia derives his musical name from Stevie Smith's poem 'Not Waving But Drowning'. The title gives everything, the whole simple image.
My father was a scientist and an engineer who was always deeply skeptical of religion. In the last few years of his life however, while dying of cancer, these anti-religious feelings took on a fervor which mirrored the religiosity that was his target. “After death there is nothing,” he said. As he got sicker he became angrier and more fearful. “The people who believe in an afterlife are deluding themselves,” he said.
Whole species are not waving but drowning around the world. Drowning in heat, in felled forests, and in oily water. Yet if we speak too directly about fear, about collapsing ecosystems we risk being dismissed as militant, lecturing, or cliché. At least these are the internal shame struggles I have. “Be reasonable,” my dad would have said, “make your argument without exaggeration”.
The arctic ice melt rate has doubled since 2010. Four hundred and sixty-seven species have gone officially extinct in that same period. Sometimes I think we’re all going about our business, waving politely so as not to make one another uncomfortable about the fact we’re all drowning.
La Danza Del Petrolero— Los Wembler’s de Iquitos (185)
Iquitos is a Peruvian city beside the Amazon that can only be reached by air or boat. The nearest road is six days away. The area the city belongs to is home to many kinds of birds and oil workers, monkeys and travel agents, mototaxi drivers and pink river dolphins. It is also home to the famous psychedelic cumbia band Los Wemblers.
In this short documentary about this history of Peruvian cumbia guitarist Joaquín Mariátegui, says of a cumbia rediscovery, “we brought an almost political message to the people, not with the words but with sensations.”3
While writing, I thought about all kinds of second and third generation beings who do not live in their homelands and do not have the means to reconnect. These other places can be like phantoms even though they exist.
One cheap way to connect to the far away place is with music. Songs are little phantom vessels and La Danza Del Petrolero is a great one. It’s one freighted with the poisonous black gold of oil, but also singers and workers, animals, and amazonian air. Political not so much in message but in sensation.
Remember (Walking In The Sand) — The Shangri-Las (112)
This is a song for when my mother was a teenager and went to the shore; A song for the shores of timeless space; for timeless space crystalized in outer borough nostalgia; for linguini and clams. This is a song for sensible clothes on tough girls who are forced to share the same few names. They gather around in refashioning worn out Mary, Elizabeth, and the like into names that might fit their lustmorde pangs.
This is a hit song for “Shadow” Morton at Red Bird Records; a swan song for the tiny crystals we inelegantly call sand. This is a song for cheeks wet with salt spray. And it is a song of infinite longing and loss without an object that calls out “remember” to the gulls who in turn call out their aching into the night.
Poor Fisherman— Yusef Lateef (15)
I cannot write anything about this exquisite composition other than to say I am lucky to share such a thing.
Alfonsina Y El Mar— Mercedes Sosa (260)
In 2002 I watched Talk to Her at Sunshine Cinema by myself. I walked out after into the night of Houston Street so happy because of art.
I imagine I’ll be trying to conjure or imitate Almodovar indirectly for the rest of my life. He embedded so many other works of art within the story of his film. There was Pina Bauch’s dances and Caitano Veloso’s music. Or rather the director did not just use the song but showed us the singer singing, as well as the actors watching and crying because of the way Veloso sang.
I had a similar experience of joy after watching Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were the most beautiful and tragic couple. They were too much even though, or perhaps because they could not stay together. The opening of that film also uses Veloso’s song. But it is not fair to say ‘uses’ when what both directors really do is honor the song like the spiritual object it is. They both surround it with cinematic space so that we, the audience can be contained. This song deserves a waterfall and a patio. It deserves snakes and tears, black and white and technicolor, tossed around dancers in florals and more tears. Endless, simple tears.
But here I am again writing about a song I haven’t chosen. Each time I slip it's because I am too moved.
Mercedes Sosa sang in Lincoln center and the Colosseum and in the Sistine Chapel. She sang Violetta Parra’s songs and also this one about Argentine feminist poet Alfonsina Storni. Sosa is Veloso, and they are both somehow Josephine who belongs to Kafka and also the troubled and vast mice peoples of the world.
Sunshine Theater— which had flickered in and out of theatrical, cinematic life since 1917—was demolished last year. It is supposed to be replaced by a nine story office building.
What If Birds Aren’t Singing— Aldous Harding
I sat in a straight-backed wooden pew close to Chloë Sevigny—though I didn’t know until after— at an Aldous Harding show in a local church. Harding wore white and glowed on the stage which was also the pulpit I guess? The lights made pink and blue triangles across the rose window when she sang this song. The audience was very solemn and the drinks clandestine.
Qasida Nightmare— Fatima Al Qadiri
Cities are characters and cities are plots. Cities are the fortresses of capital which no longer requires material to flow. We live, if we can, beneath this phantasmal blanket of capital which has no qualities except for insatiable destructive energy and endless malleability. Beings work and beings disappear without their bodies ever turning up. Disappearance is perhaps harder than death because we are material girls who still believe we live in a material world.
Industrial capitalism makes corpses while financial capitalism makes ghosts.
If you haven’t already, watch Mati Diop’s film Atlantics, which says this all and more much better than I.
Is the Sky the Limit?— Grant Hart
To end, I return again to epic and miniature. In 2013 my husband—who was not my husband then—invited me to see Grant Hart play at Cake Shop on Ludlow. We can’t stay the same. I remember the ceilings feeling particularly low but there being room to shift around the bar, which is to say it wasn’t so crowded. Hart seemed very close at hand. It was September.
He performed for a long time, as if he wanted to fit everything in, a whole album or lifetime of thought on Williams Burroughs and Milton, angels, God, and Lucifer.
“Awake, arise or be forever fallen!” A revolutionary call if ever there was one.
The sound is so vast yet lasting only three and a half minutes.
It’s always been something I’ve loved about the city, how whole epochs, entire reference libraries, and lineages of art and politics get stuffed into these boxes called apartments, or shops, or venues. Things last as long as they can.
Cake Shop made it to New Years 2016, Hart to September 2017.
For some reason the recurring line from Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind. So I’ll write it here. So it goes.
1Amanda Petrusich, “How Moondog Captured the Sounds of New York” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-moondog-captured-the-sounds-of-new-york#:~:text=Moondog%20is%20a%20potent%20symbol,of%20street%20life%20into%20song
2Paz Rodriguez Zaninovic, “Violeta Parra: Voice of the poor, sound of a country” https://chiletoday.cl/site/violeta-parra-voice-of-the-poor-sound-of-a-country/
3“A Brief History of Peruvian Cumbia” https://remezcla.com/music/a-brief-history-of-peruvian-cumbia-video/
Joni Murphy is a writer from New Mexico who lives in New York. Her debut novel Double Teenage was published in 2016. It was named one of The Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2016.
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