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November 22, 2022
A. J. Bermudez's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Stories No One Hopes Are about Them"
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.
Awarded the Iowa Short Fiction Award, A. J. Bermudez's collection Stories No One Hopes Are about Them is filled with short stories that absurdly ponder identity to haunting results.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"In Bermudez’s captivating and mischievous debut collection, protagonists search for meaning and deal with other people’s entitlement. Bermudez eloquently and powerfully writes of objectification and exploitation. This is a must-read."
In her own words, here is A. J. Bermudez's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Stories No One Hopes Are about Them:
Stories No One Hopes Are About Them offers, essentially, exactly what the title suggests. Characters range from patricidal twins and jaded bottle girls to minimum-wage theme park princesses and mortally wounded surgeons. In one story, the protagonists are a school of fish. Such characters are hardly the stuff of aspiration.
But they are pretty fun. More than fun, they’re like us: real beings, often splitting the difference between endearing and atrocious, divine and banal. Powerful and unpowerful. I’m especially delighted to be doing a piece for Largehearted Boy because, when I began this project, I’d initially set out to create a music album––Songs No One Hopes Are About Them––a collection of songs opposed to the notion of muses. To treat a person as a muse, as an extension of one’s creative reality, or as a player in one’s own paradigm of brilliance, is reductive at best and violent at worst. Stories No One Hopes Are About Them is at times indecisively serious and outlandish, but it is decisively muse-free. The book, and the songs below (many of which were on my original Stories writing playlist), capture this sense of unease with privilege and paradigm.
This is going to get playfully weird. Thanks for reading (and listening). xx
“Get Your Shit Together” by Pillowfight
The folks who populate Stories No One Hopes Are About Them are, for the most part, a fucking disaster. They’re gorgeous and sloppy and lovable and cringeworthy and, like many of us, need to get their shit together. Tonally, this song is ideal for the book: a collision of levity, intimacy, and sheer bombast. The song opens with the lyrics “Have you ever really, really, really wanted anything?”. In a way, I suspect, really really really wanting something is how many of our stories start.
“Sacrilege” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
This song is a fucking bop. Part pop, part gospel, part six other things, it’s nothing if not blissfully genre-agnostic. Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, likewise, has little respect for genre delineations. Both are, to a degree, about sexuality and subversion. Although honestly, I love this song so much that even if those things weren’t true, I’d probably find a way to shoehorn it into this list anyway.
“Your Best American Girl” by Mitski
I’ve listened to this song about a thousand times, and I don’t think I’ve ever not cried. This is one of the ways in which fiction might envy music: Mitski conveys, in three and half minutes flat, an authentic experience of real love, privilege, and a reconception of identity. It’s big and small at once. One aspires.
“Perfect Day” by Lou Reed
I read someplace that Lou Reed referred to this as just a lovely, straightforward song about a nice day, although if someone told me “You’re gonna reap just what you sow” at the end of a date, I’d have some questions. A heretical approach to “perfect days” is a recurring element of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them. The perfect days of “Obscure Trivia of the Antarctic” are overshadowed by a criminal (and ideological) conviction; the hosts of “Octopus,” “Bottle Girl,” and “The Train Speaks” have been hired to manufacture idealized experiences for others. In “The Lady Will Pay for Everything,” a privileged family’s perfect vacation is subsumed by the perfection of the natural world. And in “Year of the Snake”––which, like Lou Reed’s song, features a zoo––the story begins with one person’s perfect day and ends with another’s.
“Shangri-La” by The Kinks
Paradise-as-trap is a killer theme. Songs like “The Village Green Preservation Society,” “Picture Book,” and others are still, decades after the fact, disconcertingly apropos. There are shades of paradise-as-trap in “The Real India,” and a bit more meanly/politically in “Retrospect,” but again, music has an edge on literature. And it’s not technically on this list, but Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes” feels like this song’s godmother.
“Nobody Speak” by DJ Shadow feat. Run the Jewels
Characters in Stories No One Hopes Are About Them are constantly calling into question the boundary between the personal and the political (supposing there is one). The lyrics are so casually and creatively violent––and mostly hot nonsense––punctuated by a simple decree: “You wanna hear a good joke? Nobody speak, nobody get choked.” The song doesn’t choose between being scurrilous and hilarious, and puts me in mind of “Cain vs. Cain,” in which rival brothers engage in “a cavalcade of escalating transgressions, each more Andronican than the last.” Incidentally, this music video––shot in Kiev––is one of the best of all time.
“Estas Botas Son Para Caminar” by Hilda Aguirre
Far be it from me to challenge a classic, but I prefer this Spanish cover of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” to the original. The characters in Stories are often finding their feet (so to speak), transitioning from players in others’ stories to agents of their own. The best thing about this song is that the boots are “para caminar,” but the singer doesn’t choose to walk away; rather, the song hinges on a threat of violence, to walk all over someone. As power trips go, it’s pretty fucking fantastic.
“What Makes a Good Man?” by The Heavy
Like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs––and not just insofar as Karen O and Kelvin Swaby both get down with gospel choirs––The Heavy isn’t shy around the notion of “blasphemy.” The song doesn’t even attempt to answer the titular question––neither does Stories No One Hopes Are About Them––but can’t help asking it.
“Have You Been Good to Yourself?” by Johnny Frierson
Wondering what makes a good man? Johnny Frierson has some ideas. These ideas are predominantly framed as questions, starting with: “Have you been good to yourself?” Sub-questions include whether you’ve been getting at least eight hours of sleep, eating the right kind of food, and getting enough exercise, but most importantly whether you’ve been living a righteous life. “A lot of people,” Johnny Frierson notes, “depend on drugs,” “go too far,” and are “not eating right.” A lot of these people are in Stories No One Hopes Are About Them.
“Man of War” by Radiohead
The book spends some time with aquacultural organisms, and, occasionally, with weaponry. Radiohead’s “Man of War” hits both marks. When I was young––too young, like eight––I used my scant allowance to buy a stack of original Ian Fleming Bond novels, which the bookstore had clearly misjudged as garage sale relics rather than antiques and mispriced at a dollar each. I was delighted to learn, years later, that “Man of War” was envisioned by Thom Yorke as a Bond theme. It has exactly the kind of build I can’t resist, and melds playfulness with darkness in a way I love. As a bit of personal trivia, “Man of War” has been my morning alarm song for a long time, which is probably not healthy.
“Le Temps de l’Amour” by Francoise Hardy
There’s a sense of anachronism that moves throughout the book, and I love this out-of-time classic. Tonally, the song is both flippant and serious. It’s sincerely bittersweet, douce-amère. Lyrics include what translates roughly to “we don't worry about anything despite our wounds.”
“Ballade de Hollis Brown” by Hughes Aufray
Not one but two retro French bangers in a row? I agree, this playlist is too good to be true. Bob Dylan’s original is iconic, Nina Simone’s cover is infallible, and Rise Against’s iteration is great/loud fun, but for Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, I like Hughes Aufray’s “Ballade.” It’s simple and tragic, and deviates from the classic––as all translations do––in some interesting ways. For example, Hollis Brown has an additional kid in the “Ballade” version––most likely because of the rhymability of huit vs. sept, but also, I hope, because Hughes is playing a weird transatlantic game of one-upmanship. Like this song, the stories in the book are are really about who survives (or not). ”Orphan Type,” “Totenhaus,” and “The Body Electric” come to mind, but also, more quietly, “Eating the Leaves.”
“Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds
You know what, fuck it, I changed my mind. “Little Boxes” is on the list. Shout out to Malvina Reynolds for her incisive takedown of post-war suburbanization. For extra credit––while beyond the scope of this list––enjoy Victor Jara’s brilliant adaptation, “Las Casitas del Barrio Alto,” which introduces the added layer of colonization.
“Tobacco Road” by The Nashville Teens
I lived in a lot of nowhere places when I was young. That may sound harsh, but some places choose to be nowhere places. Some places specialize in erasing identities, character, opportunity. There are nods to these places in stories like “Mnemophobe,” “Lacquer,” and “All the Places You Will Never Be Again.” Sometimes places are redeemable, worth revisiting with an eye toward investment and repair. And sometimes, as proposed by the Nashville Teens, the most generous thing you can do is burn a place to the ground.
“Humiliation” by The National
In my experience, no song more perfectly captures the feeling of living in LA than this song. The opening lyrics, “I survived the dinner,” could be the title of my time there. I remember pulling out of the private lot of this recording studio once, really early in the morning, and scraping the side of my car against the ivy-covered brick wall alongside the lot. This song came on, right away, like a joke, as I drove down Fairfax and the sun started to come up. “The Train Speaks” and “The Real India” are set partially in Los Angeles, and both––like my experience in the city––involve a fair amount of humiliation.
“An Angry Young Man” by Strawberry Alarm Clock
While fewer than 25% of the characters in Stories are male-identifying (and of those, even fewer are straight), many would identify with the designation “angry young man.” From the album The World in a Seashell, this dark yet weirdly hopeful little number is suspiciously redemptive. Wish I could tell my dad how right he was about the merits of Strawberry Alarm Clock.
“Las Casitas del Barrio Alto” by Victor Jara
Nope, fuck it, “Las Casitas” is on the list too.
“This Year” by The Mountain Goats
In “Year of the Snake,” the final story of the collection, the protagonist transitions from object to subject, weaving between incidents of fetishization, evolution, and heroism, always against the backdrop of celebration. I believe her when she suggests that it will be a very good year. I also aim to live by the Mountain Goats’ theme: “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”
A. J. Bermudez is an award-winning writer and director. She is artistic director of the American Playbook, and coeditor of Maine Review. Bermudez divides her time between Los Angeles and New York City.
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