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April 9, 2021

Brian Phillip Whalen's Playlist for His Story Collection "Semiotic Love [Stories]"

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.

The stories in Brian Phillip Whalen's debut collection Semiotic Love [Stories] are smart and surprising in the best of ways.

Matt Bell wrote of the book:

"Brian Phillip Whalen has an incredible ear for dialogue, an eye for precise details, and a knack for delivering surprise after surprise, skills he deploys well through this excellent collection. The energy is relentless, each story a fresh burst of deep emotion and deeper wonder: once you start reading, you won't want to stop."

In his words, here is Brian Phillip Whalen's Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Semiotic Love [Stories]:

A baker’s dozen songs to accompany my debut collection, Semiotic Love [Stories]. I chose thirteen songs because that was my number in little league, the single season that I played. I was a good hitter in practice, and in my imagination, but in real games I couldn’t connect. Not too different from, for most of us, how love works. That summer ended with lots of bumps and bruises, from misfielded pop-ups and grounders. Yeah, like love.

“This”
Brian Eno

David Sedaris, when asked how “true” his essays are, famously replied, “True enough.” Why doesn’t a fiction writer have to answer: “How untrue are your stories?” I think about the power of specificity in true or untrue writing: Eno’s iteration of the word “this.” In my story “The Father Bell,” it’s this hammock, this river, this father, this book (what the son is reading in the story: Turgenev, who wrote Fathers and Sons). Idiosyncrasy matters. What the father says at the end of the story is what my real father said one day while swinging on his hammock. My real father was grieving for my sister, who was alive but in the throes of a heroin addiction. In “The Father Bell,” the father is grieving over a dead wife. Why did I turn this true story into an untrue story? One answer: I think more people understand the grieving that comes after death than grief that accompanies a loved one’s addiction. But the real answer is that I gave the father in my story a grief he could handle, a hurt he could make sense of, so by the end of the story, the fictional father finds peace. Sometimes we write stories in order to live, sometimes to save. In real life, when I wrote the story, my father hadn’t found peace—how could any father?—and I couldn’t help him. How could any son?

“Two-Headed Boy, Part II”
Neutral Milk Hotel

I first heard this song on a mix CD given to me by a girl I loved, but who didn’t love me. I don’t think I could accurately describe the song’s musical quality; it’s akin to a rusty saw being forced into melodic submission, or if a broke-down pick-up truck from the '80s came to life and sang a dirge. The song is beautiful and broken, sonorous and ugly. Leonard Cohen said, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I think the feeling at the end of this song, the gravelly but soaring delivery of the final line—“God is a place where you’ll wait for the rest of your life”—is what the child in my story “Missing” is feeling in church, when he cries out in a song; he becomes part of an emotional symphony, the shared human history of brutal beauty that arises out of intense suffering, and loss. Hemingway said we don’t get fixed once we’re broken, we just get stronger in the broken places. A religious man might say there’s grace in a moment of surrender, in grief, that a giving over to God eases our burden, allowing us peace. I’m not a religious man.

“Somebody that I Used To Know"
Elliott Smith

I remember visiting a friend from college who was studying in Bath, England. It was late fall. He was a senior; I’d graduated the previous spring, and had nothing better to do (I was living with my parents). My friend had just met a girl. He spent every moment with her, and I spent most of my vacation walking around Bath in the rain, in the cold, buying warm beer cans in convenience stores, and listening to Elliott Smith on my Discman. Anyone who’s walked around a foreign city in the rain in the cold, alone, while their friends are busy falling in love, knows why Elliott Smith is a perfect accompaniment. I spent one night sleeping in a stairwell outside my friend’s bedroom while he was inside with his girlfriend. The story “No Tengo” in my book is set in Paris, inspired by a different overseas trip, when I was a freshman in college—but “Somebody That I Used to Know” is a good fit for the story, about another rainy walk abroad.

“What Do I Do Now?”
Sleeper

A strange thing just happened. I was trying to remember the name of the band who wrote this song (the way I first came to the song was a cover by Elvis Costello) and I typed the memorable lyrics, from the chorus, into Google: “Oh I’ll miss you for the rest of your life.” The first hit on Google was for a Pinterest page about the grief of a parent. I don’t want to think about dead children, but I was thinking about dead dogs when I decided to look up the song. The Google description for the Pinterest page says: “Dog Heaven quotes.” But when you click on the link itself, there’s no mention of dogs. I can chalk this up to Google knowing more about me than I want Google to know about me. But I think of the dog in the story “Dog”—the dog of “Dog”—who is based on a real dog, a dog who is now dead. Thinking about that dog, and my Google search, makes me think about the story “Dog Heaven” by Stephanie Vaughn, and its opening line: “Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.” Maybe Google knows who controls our dreaming. Probably. But I’m afraid to ask.

“Postmodern Dilemma”
F’loom

I failed out of my first PhD program. I failed hard. I was 21 years old, on a prestigious fellowship to earn my PhD in American Studies at a major midwestern university (the year following my lonely trip to Bath). Half way through my second semester in the program, I packed my belongings in a U-Haul (I sold what wouldn’t fit) and hightailed it to Buffalo, NY, where I moved in with a girl I knew from college who I didn’t love—but I tried to love. The story “Typical” is loosely based on that year in Buffalo. I remember a class in my PhD program, before I quit, on postmodernist theory. I was lost in the conversation, clueless. Everyone spoke in code. For a very long time I felt ashamed of failing out of that program, even when, 15 years later, I graduated from a different PhD program. By then I’d learned the code that in Kansas was a foreign language to me, and I came to realize that I didn’t care for the code at all. Life, and writing, is hard enough without the distraction of theory (all that thinking about thinking). Love, of course, is a kind of code. I’m 40 years old and I believe I’m getting the hang of it. But it’s hard to crack the code when you’re in your twenties, and cracked yourself.

“House on Pooh Corner”
Loggins and Messina

The Tim character in the story “Hindsight” is based on a real Tim, my best friend since 2nd grade. The Loggins and Messina album in the story is the album I’d listen to on car rides or field trips when I was a kid. I remember one van ride when we were twelve, in summer camp, returning from an ice cream outing. I was listening to “House on Pooh Corner” (yes, Winnie the Pooh) on my headphones, when I looked over at Tim’s Walkman, across the aisle. It was a sunny, lovely day outside. Tim was listening to Rage Against the Machine.

“Cello Song”
Nick Drake

This song reminds me of my grandfather. I listened to the song a lot my first semester in college, the year my grandfather died. The pattern of the guitar’s open-tuning sounds a little like something in flight. (“If one day you should see me in the crowd / lend a hand and lift me / to your place in the cloud.”) My parents are now grandparents, and I think a lot about a life without them (perhaps that’s why there are so many stories about dead parents in my book). I wonder how my daughter will remember them, in what words or books, objects or songs, their memories will be returned to her. There’s a painting in my story “Palimpsest,” based on a real painting: the image of a butterfly, painted by my mother, that hangs above my writing desk. Perhaps when my mother dies, I’ll give the painting to my daughter, an object to remember her nana by. What I remember most about my grandfather is that he liked to read, play Trivial Pursuit, and watch hummingbirds gather around my mother’s feeders. I’d like to believe he’s a hummingbird now.

“Analyze”
The Cranberries

I imagine Max in the story “Semiotic Love” hearing this song on Chicago’s red line on his way to work and dreaming of a better life, and a less complicated love. God bless him if he thinks such love exists.

“The Book of Love”
Peter Gabriel

The only mention of daughters in the book is in the story “Saudade.” Twenty years ago, my college a cappella group sang “In Your Eyes,” and I never listened to anything else by Peter Gabriel. (I remember there was no room in the chapel the night of our first concert, and the president of the college sat on the floor in the aisle between the pews. He was the former ambassador to NATO under the Clinton administration, and there he was sitting on his butt on a dirty carpet in Geneva, NY, watching my scruffy face belt out the lead on Men at Work’s “Down Under,” about a country I’d never been to.) Twenty years later I heard “The Book of Love” in my car, while driving my daughter through campus on our way home from daycare. I’m a total girl-dad (R.I.P. Gianna Bryant) and I burst into tears. I can’t get enough of the song’s chorus, how perfectly it captures the feeling of adoration. I usually turn the song off before the third verse, which is about wedding rings—maybe because my love as a parent supersedes the feelings of any romantic love I’ve ever had. But probably it’s just because I don’t want to think about my daughter growing up, falling in love (“wedding rings”), leaving the house, etc. I want her always to be this perfect little five year old, who would spend eternity just reading in bed with her dad, or singing lullabies. Gabriel sings, “I love it when you read to me.” In the second verse, it’s “sing to me.” Loving my daughter makes me want to stop time forever; being loved by my daughter makes me wish I could travel back in time, before she was born, to honor her by loving other people better, everyone I hurt along the way.

“Keep Me in Your Heart”
Warren Zevon

I’m thinking about my story “The Mother Cup” and the verse in Zevon’s song that goes: “Maybe when you’re doing simple things around the house / you’ll think of me and smile. / I’m tied to you like the buttons on your blouse.” (I wonder, when I die, if my wife will even come to miss the crumbs I leave on the counter, or the water pooled on the edges of the sink after I do the dishes.) The mug in the story, a version of it, is real, and the teacher’s gambit at the end, how he draws his students’ attention to the mug, is something I once did in a class to teach my creative writing students about tension. The real mug—the one my mother gave me—broke one day in class, when I accidentally knocked it, like a klutz, off my desk. It wasn’t tied to a lesson that time, it was simply an accident. One of my students said, “Oh that’s so sad,” and in one of my rare Zen-like moments, I said, “Don’t worry. The mug was always already broken.” (I like to think I’ll say something cool or comforting on my deathbed, but I’m sure the last thing I’ll say is, “One more slice of pizza can’t hurt me.”)

“I Don’t Care”
Ricky Skaggs

This song is a one-to-one relationship with the book. It’s the song the homeless man sings in “Broadcast.” The homeless man in that story is real, or was real—he’s based on a real person, I mean, and that person sang this song outside my apartment in Albany, NY, just like in the story. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to decipher what is not true in the story. You could call the story “autofiction.” This is the second iteration—of four iterations—of the “sister” character in the book. My sister, like the homeless man, was also a real person. Until she died.

“Funky Town"
Lipps, Inc.

Another one-to-one relationship, this time with the story “Brothers.” The set-up for brothers is based in fact, a trip I took to Prague with a friend I’ve known since childhood. “Funky Town” was playing in a bar, and the two bartenders had a back-and-forth about the volume of their stereo. Unlike “Broadcast,” the only truths in “Brothers” are the barmen, the song, and the fried cheese sandwiches in Wenceslas Square.

“Waiting for My Real Life to Begin"
Colin Hay

I thought really hard about what song could accompany “Una Vida Mejor,” the final story in my book. I don’t remember many songs or artists my sister liked to listen to. I remember Weezer, but that’s about it. She and I had vastly different tastes in music, and film, and I never took an interest in her interests. Now that she’s dead, I’m curious, of course, and wish I’d taken the time to know her better, even though we never had a lot in common, and we never got along that well. I spent most of my adult life wrapped up in myself like an orange peel, thinking “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” was my theme song, like it was written for me. But my sister’s real life, truly, never began, even though she lived for 38 years. Addiction and severe psychiatric problems can do that to a person. I have a box of letters she wrote back and forth to her boyfriend Zeb, who the boyfriend in my story is based on, and in several letters (I’ve only read a few), he talks about the dreams they shared: a house with dogs, steady jobs, a quite, boring life—but theirs. It was a life cut short by addiction, then suicide (his), and my sister spent the rest of her life waiting, essentially, for her unreal life—a life without love—to end, which it did, ten years later, when she overdosed, alone on a couch in a stranger’s apartment. My sister was trapped inexorably in the waiting room of a life that never got off the tarmac. If the Buddhism she once believed in is true, perhaps her real life will begin in the next life. I hope she returns as a butterfly.

Brian lives in Tuscaloosa where he teaches creative and first-year writing at The University of Alabama. He has a PhD from SUNY-Albany and an MFA from Iowa State University. He has served as Special Features Editor for Quarterly West, has taught creative writing workshops in public libraries, and has been awarded a residency at Vermont Studio Center (for 2021).

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