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November 14, 2022
Cat Fitzpatrick's Playlist for Her Novel "The Call-Out"
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.
Cat Fitzpatrick's debut novel The Call-Out is an incisive 21st century comedy of manners. Very queer, very Brooklyn, very entertaining, and very necessary.
Jeanne Thornton wrote of the book:
"How does Fitzpatrick do it? How does she see it all so clearly–the grace of trans women who play Zelda in gross apartments, the social maneuver behind the moral absolute, the loopy mores of the picnic, the queer lit reading, the library date? She’s the heiress to Thackeray and Rochester, and we’re so lucky to have this gossipy, glamorous, and vital novel: one all about justice and the messy queers who have to build it."
In her own words, here is Cat Fitzpatrick's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Call-Out:
My book, The Call Out, is a comic novel-in rhyme about (mostly) transsexuals in Brooklyn making terrible life choices. It’s written in a stanza form borrowed from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (by way of Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate). As I wrote it I mainly listened to Baroque and Renaissance Choral Music.
Clément Janequin - Voulez Ouyr Les Cris de Paris
A lot of choral music is sacred, but I also love secular polyphony. This is a brilliant example: Janequin starts out with the choir singing market cries but is soon throwing in salacious snippets of overheard gossip too. It really captures the chaotic bustle of the city, but also orders it into beauty. That was what I wanted to do in this book- there is a narrator, but she’s constantly being forced out by dialogue and things she overhears, and she doesn’t get the last word either, but it all happens in this strict verse structure. If it has a fraction of the energy Janequin gets into this song, I’ll be well satisfied.
John Dunstable – Veni Sancte Spiritus / Veni Creator
My friend Jeanne Thornton says she doesn’t think trans people can be materialists, but I am! Despite which most music I listened to while writing The Call-Out was religious, like this transcendent motet. Many verse narratives contemporary to Dunstable, like Pearl or Troilus and Criseyde, have hidden formal features, only identified by scholars centuries later. Supposedly such structures were ‘for god’. There are also features of The Call-Out which may not be apparent, which I took pains to work in. As I did so, I told myself they were “for god”. Given I don’t believe in god, I’m not sure what I mean. Maybe that, even if the world doesn’t possess wholeness or transcendence, we can try and make our art have these qualities, as Dunstable’s does.
John Dowland – Go Cristall Tears
I don’t want to give the impression I only like choral works. One of my most durable obsessions is with John Dowland, and this is my favourite song about being sad in love. Sad in love was Dowland’s brand (he has a pavan called Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens). If you listen to him you understand that bad love is where the secular and the sacred come together. Or, in the case of my book, where earnest queers making thoughtful attempts to work for justice and dumbass trannies getting fucked up and shagging each other collide. In a small community, bad love always becomes everyone else’s problem too.
Amazing Blondel - To Ye
I also, as I was writing this book, listened to a lot of Amazing Blondel, which is a lot baser than Janequin, Dunstable or Dowland. Amazing Blondel try to combine the 20th-Century pop/folk song with the kind of song Dowland wrote. I think they fail: really they just write structurally modern pop songs with Elizabethan instruments and aesthetics. In that sense they ought to be a cautionary tale for me – I was trying to do the opposite, to take the structural principles of Eugene Onegin or Troilus and Criseyde and give them a contemporary aesthetic- to learn from the things I love in the past without indulging in what Shola Von Reinhold calls necrophilia. And yet: I Iove Amazing Blondel. Maybe I am more of a necrophiliac than I want to admit. Or maybe they just rule.
Johann Sebastian Bach- De Profundis, fifth movement (BWV 131)
Towards the beginning of the book, the narrator (who’s not me, at ALL, but who shares some of my tastes) is going through her solitary morning routine, feeling jealous of all the other characters who got laid the night before. She drinks green tea and listens to Bach’s setting of Luther’s translation of the 130th Psalm. I fudged things slightly, because Bach uses Luther’s prose translation, but in the book I quoted from his metrical translation, since it’s, well, metrical, and doesn’t mess up the rhythm. The line is ‘Ob bei uns ist der sunden viel”, which means ‘although amongst us the sins are many.’ Very appropriate in a book about wrongdoing, justice and, perhaps, redemption in a small, tight-knit community.
Anonymous - Propiñan de Melyor
I wrote one Onegin stanza a day, five days a week, over 14 months. Onegin stanzas involve a lot of double rhymes: you can’t just find ‘walk’ and ‘talk’, you have to find, ‘ardor’ and ‘harder’ or ‘lubricious’ and ‘injudicious’ or ‘pentacle’ and ‘tentacle’. This gives the verse a gay, carefree air, but it’s painstaking work. Sometimes I’d be stuck on a single rhyme for an hour or more. In a situation like this a motet isn’t going to cut it, so I’d put on baroque dance music. This anonymous Spanish piece from the early 16th century is a TOTAL BANGER and would always drag me out of a rut.
Henry Purcell - Scene of the Drunken Poet
The characters in my book drink a lot. Champagne. Manhattans with Makers and Cocchi. Bad warm white wine at literary readings. Several bottles of gin during a snowstorm after a break-up. Straw-ber-itas. Campari with a little squeeze of orange. Bourbon Fro-Yos. Whisky Slaps. Everyone is constantly wasted which is part of why they make such poor choices. I don’t drink when I’m writing, so the period of this book’s composition became one of the most sober of my adult life. If I finished a stanza early, though, or was particularly pleased with one, I’d reward myself with a bottle of wine, and probably listen to this song from Purcell’s Fairy Queen. In it, a bunch of fairies assault a drunken poet, singing:
Pinch him, pinch him for his crimes
His nonsense and his doggerel rhymes
It’s no less than I, or any poet, deserves.
Natalie Braginsky - The Harvest is Past, The Summer is Ended
As well as a comic novel and a set of arguments about justice, this book is a sort of shepherd’s calendar for urban queers- it lasts exactly a year, and most chapters begin and end with reports on the seasons noting the disappearance of air conditioners from windows, or the turning off of the heat by landlords to drive out rent-stabilised tenants. Natalie is one of my favourite contemporary musicians. She mostly makes Noise with a capital N, but occasionally does something more lyrical, like this mesmerising piece based on Anatoly Alexandrov’s Prelude No.3 Op.1. I had this playing when I was writing the end of the final summer chapter- it has that feeling of tipping over. Something is ending.
Billy Idol - Dancing with Myself
And one thing that is ending is this playlist. With, finally, a pop song! The Call-Out includes an avant-garde drag show, with a lot of songs in politically relevant costumes, including a version of this dressed as a murderous incel. If I were a drag queen I would take the name Gloria Mundy. However I’m not, I’m a poet, which is also a kind of performer. Verse novels are different from prose ones because the sound is already encoded on the page: in some sense the words, even when read silently, are being spoken aloud. So as well as publishing this book, I am going to tour the fuck out of it. The northeast this fall, the West in Spring, and probably Europe next summer. Maybe I’ll see you on the road. Deets at littlepuss.net/tour.
Cat Fitzpatrick is the first trans woman to serve as Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark, and the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. She is the author of a collection of poems, Glamourpuss (Topside Press) and co-edited the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Award for Literature. The Call-Out is her first novel.
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