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January 19, 2021
Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq's Playlist for Their Collection "Speculate"
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.
Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq's inventive collection Speculate is filled with short pieces that blur the line between flash fiction and prose poetry, but always impress with sharp language and intense insights.
Pamela Jeffs wrote of then book:
"Rich and entrancing. This collection is not only a conversation between two literary impressionists-it is a narrative of art. With their words, Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq paint landscapes, both inner and outer, and all in stunning detail. In this book I delighted in finding messages and warnings relevant to the questions of today. Earth in existential crisis. Reefs formed within a human body. A Martian's dialogue reflected in its public art. Eugen & Dominique riff delightfully off each other as they offer up a speculative fiction smorgasbord of thoughtful insight-small dishes served with literary flavour. This is a highly recommended read for those who love language and find delight in morsel-sized fiction and prose poetry"
In their words, here is Eugen Bacon & Dominique Hecq's Book Notes music playlist for their book Speculate:
Think of music as intercourse, head fog, holy grail or belch.
Intercourse is bird song: impassioned and pure. A fragrant blossom: velvet-centred tulips in a lover’s heart.
Head-fog is plucked from cosmic ripples, vivid colours in the head. It’s loud, surreal. Vigorous.
Holy grail is elegant and balanced. Paired in flutes, violins, clarinets, oboes, bassoons and mood contrasts. It’s timeless. A tapestry of genius.
Belch is a one-time hit best watched on a spastic disco floor. Onlookers—wondering how anyone with an active soul might choose that burp and yowl—can only survive the moment.
Yet melody is equivocal. Take for instance Boppity, most likely a hybrid—it melts your bones, and your body becomes fluid. When it morphs into Boppity-Lark, the succulence and bop is a lullaby of angels and demons.
Sometimes there’s the anomalous emperor’s new coat: everyone’s raving about it but nothing’s there. Or it’s caged.
All that, but there’s one universal etiquette: never jest another’s taste. Because music tells you of a person’s clan. If you don’t get it, go find yours. Feel free to roam.
And then… there are those in identity crisis. Active in discovering themselves. They flitter from intercourse to belch, holy grail to head-fog, even the emperor’s new coat. It may be a whatcha-ma-call-it crisis. Give them time to figure it out.
So here we are: Speculate. Mischievous, novel, unrestrained. What beats—intercourse, head-fog, holy grail or belch—match this literary experiment? Never the emperor’s new coat.
Eugen:
I’m thinking fresh, alternative, hip-hop, R&B/Soul… Boppity-Lark mutants? Drizzled with acoustics, sizzler beats and best served with vintage wine or straight-barrel whiskey.
Love Not War / Jason Derulo & Nuka
This wooing pop is perfect for lovers in a provocation game, pulling and teasing, as the bass, piano, cymbals and acoustics accompany their pulse of playfulness and jouissance.
Ablaze / Alanis Morissette
Morissette’s alternative music from her Such Pretty Forks in the Road album is a reaching ballad, vulnerable and sedate. There’s an apple and a snake. A lyrical road less travelled—it invites you to steal at dawn into the gleam of an eye’s blaze.
The Sound of Silence / Disturbed
This hard rock, so tender, is deep with distortion. Just right for liberating text that’s unprecedented yet nothing new in its nonrule of feeling language without speaking.
Sweet but Psycho / Ava Max
An opening shriek from a lookout in this disturbing pop urges you to run, not walk away, from this poisoned daisy that’s a prose poem—might infect you with the rapture of writing it.
All of Me / John Legend
Put your head under water with the vibrations, strings and voice of an angel in this R&B / Soul. Love your edges, your perfect imperfections. It’s a magical ride that says you’re out of your mind… So dizzy, you don’t know what hit you—just prose poetry that’s both an ending and a beginning.
Coming Home / Tribute to Diddy-Dirty Money & Skylar Grey Tribute Band
Synthesizer. Drum machine. Another night, another dawn. This hip-hop/rap is about coming home. A chant with beatboxing to the prose poem, encouraging its belief. It’s coming home where it belongs. Despite what poetry cousins Taneka and Teresa have to say.
T.I.N.A. (feat. Angel) / Fuse ODG
Hip-swinging beats in this dance number about a diva—she takes you head over head—swirl with Afro-Caribbean merriment. It’s a promise that no rain, no storm could stop this loving, coz Tina gonna come and save you. She’ll tell you old stories like Nelson Mandela and the truth behind… Tripoli?
Crash / Usher
This R&B/Soul serenade with words from Usher has lyrics the prose poem wants you to put in its Christmas stocking:
“Would you mind if I still loved you?...
Up all night, can't let go...
You’re the only one who takes me there…”
Dominique:
I’m thinking dance, not words; mood, not text; cadence and feeling. It’s jumbled in timespace. It’s only new as Max Richter’s Vivaldi’s can be.
Autumn / Vivaldi: The Four Seasons (Fear Of Tigers Remix)—Recomposed by Max Richter
In particular the third concerto, Autumn, featuring Max Richter & Daniel Hope & Raphael Alpermann & Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin & André de Ridder, the hint of fall in this classic composed in Venice is a timeless reference piece for Speculate.
Lay Me Low / Nick Cave
When I’m gone’, they’say ‘bring a big old gong’, and ‘the motorcode, will be 10 miles long’. It’s not so much about the lyrics but the exercise in parody in both voice and guitar that stand out in this insanely delightful yet funereal song. It inspired ‘A Short History of Books’.
The Rite of Spring, Part 1, No 1: The Kiss of the Earth / Igor Stravinsly
I listened to how hotly before its notorious Paris ballet premiere in 1913 The Rite of Spring first saw the light of day: Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin recapture the heady, visceral thrill which must have been in the air when Stravinsky sat at the piano with Debussy to create this landmark of modernism. I’d seen it danced in the early 80s in Brussels in a choreography of Maurice Béjart starring Jorg Donn.
Le Boléro / Maurice Ravel
This is a one-movement orchestral piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Originally composed as a ballet commissioned by Russian actress and dancer Ida Rubinstein, the piece, which premiered in 1928, is Ravel’s most famous musical composition. Jorg Donn is the obvious link here, but my interest in the art of the fugue and how it can be applied to prose poetry cements the connection.
Blue Heaven / Hektor
Ah, dear reader, surprise. This is electronica by an Australian. It transports me into alternate worlds, which is exactly what you look for in speculative fiction. Get a taste from Patrick Grigg’s Electronica website.
A Morning in the Woods / Leo Ornstein
You’d think this composition would bring me down to earth, but it doesn’t. Well, it does as it’s at hand, so to speak: played in vivo as I make breakfast for the pianist. We talk about tempering with tempo over steaming coffee with magpies eeing and aaing.
Crawl / Kings of Leon
A felicitous accident: now that most children have left, I’m clearing space. I’m astounded at what I see crawling under their beds. Astounded at what I didn’t know I’d studded fictions with in a process of rhythmic transcodification.
Le voyage dans la lune (Voyage into the moon) / Air
French electronic duo Air is the next big retro thing. Le voyage dans la lune, the band's sixth studio album, was released in February 2012. Whether intended or not, it has echoes of their debut album, Moon Safari (1998). For sure, some of these echoes crept in Speculate.
Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She's the author of Claiming T-Mo (Meerkat Press) and Writing Speculative Fiction (Macmillan). Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans. Eugen is a recipient of the Katharine Susannah Prichard (KSP) Emerging Writer-in-Residence 2021. Her creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, Aurealis, Bards and Sages, Meniscus, TEXT Journal, Unsung Stories, British Science Fiction Association's Vector Magazine and through Routledge in New Writing. In 2020 she released The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories (Meerkat Press), Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction (Luna Press Publishing), Ivory's Story (NewCon Press) and Black Moon (IFWG).
Dominique Hecq, MA, Dip Ed, PhD, worked as Research Leader in her capacity as Associate Professor in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology after teaching at a number of universities in Australia and overseas. She has a background in Literature as well as French and Germanic languages, with qualifications in translating. Hecq writes across disciplines, and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works comprise one novel, three collections of short stories, ten books of poetry and two one-act plays. She co-edited Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies (1998; 2015) and Creative Writing with Critical Theory: Inhabitation (2018), edited The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century (2013) and wrote the widely acclaimed Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing (2015). Kaosmos (2020) and Tracks (2020) are her most recent publications in English. Among her multiple awards for fiction, poetry and translation, Hecq is a recipient of the 2018 International Best Poets Prize administered by the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters.
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