Sound problems

essay collection as mixtape; Norman, Oklahoma, is full of ghosts

Lately, I’ve been going for long drives to nowhere. I am trying to fix the book by fixing the soundtrack for the book. Some days are better than others. It’s like this: my brother was once a musician, and music feels central to the book. Add that to the fact that my brain is wired for sound (like most of us with nonverbal learning disability), and it’s very loud in there. I don’t know what I’m trying to solve by driving, exactly, but a lot of book problems get fixed this way. I am casting loops around Oklahoma and Logan counties, dipping into Payne or Cleveland in places. I have made this imaginary deadline for myself, sparked by my real deadline, and I need to finish this book. So I drive and write in my head, and listen to music the entire way, because I’m chasing a feeling. Cost of Living had a kind of soundtrack, too, and I’d hoped to write a Largehearted Boy playlist when the book came out, but I had Covid instead and could barely string two or three thoughts together when it was due, so I didn’t. Maybe I will get lucky and be able to do this next time instead, when the new book comes out.

At one point, many years ago, when Ori and I were not speaking, I briefly dated a guy I met at community college, in English class. He was a number of years older than me, had a collection of velvet Elvis paintings he’d found at thrift stores, printed curtains from the TV show Alf he’d sewn himself. He looked a bit like Burt Lancaster and lived in a singlewide down by the river, in Iowa City. He had recently gotten his license back, after blowing up his life when the man he cared for, in a group home, had suddenly passed away. The man was Deafblind from birth and the guy I was dating had made a series of blocks to communicate with his charge and would give him different blocks to indicate days of the week, activities, and other information. The blocks had been responsible for a communication breakthrough, a way of speaking, order and meaning. Then the man died, suddenly, and the guy I was dating got his license suspended from a small collection of DUIs. We broke up because of irreconcilable differences. Notably: I realized I could not sleep with this man, because I was still in love with Ori, and getting drunk to sleep with sober guy felt out of the question. Perhaps more notably: our tastes in music would never work together.

I say this because I think about how I listen to nearly anything, but this guy felt like a step too far. I can’t even remember the bands that he liked, now, but it felt like monomania, just one or two that were important to him in every way imaginable. He had all the records, the albums, the special pressings, a full collection of artifacts; all the songs sounded like the background music of commercials. These were the bands that made sense to him. One of the bands was an offshoot or reincarnation of the original band (and no, it wasn’t Joy Division). It felt unbearable, this tiny life. Also, I was more of a bitch then. And, impracticably, still in love with Ori, though it would take years for us to get back together. So I broke up with sober Burt Lancaster.

Cost of Living was my MFA thesis, a book that seemed to take forever to come together, until suddenly, more or less, it did. My friends made suggestions, had ideas. And Ori edited everything. But in the early stages, when it was still my thesis, my advisor, Peter Trachtenberg, told me to think of an essay collection as a kind of mixtape. To modulate the experience of the listener, the emotional register, you had to organize the songs, or the essays, in a particular way. This felt like something I could do. Now, looking at the new book, it’s less of a mixtape and more of an album, all the songs by the same artist, telling some larger story, I hope. That monomania coming back. One album, on repeat.

So I’m at it, driving long and not-so-long distances through the countryside until the sun sets, hoping something comes of this.

A couple killer music novels I read recently:

• Welcome to Medicine Park, Constance Squires (also check out her latest, Low April Sun, a novel in the shadow of the Oklahoma City bombing, featuring deeply dysfunctional characters with magical thinking in two timelines, also cults?!)

• Boy From the North Country, Sam Sussman (is he Bob Dylan’s kid? Mayyybe?)

PS, do you ever feel a place is haunted? I maybe realized this last week, when we visited Norman, Oklahoma, to see if Ori might want to go to grad school there, in counseling. The campus is beautiful; the library is gorgeous, Gothic Revival (or Cherokee Gothic if you prefer) and full of cozy spaces to escape to and read. The bustling downtown with its many independent businesses. But it makes my heart beat out of my chest, feels dark and dangerous, reminds me of Iowa City in a way that makes me think I could run off the rails there, destroy my life and everything in it. I just don’t trust Norman. I probably sound insane, but I can’t move to Norman for the same reason I can’t visit Iowa City for more than a day at a time. It’s like a timer for a bomb, an unraveling, some big countdown clock in my brain. I know this is stupid. That I have never really spent time at OU, or in Norman, and so how could it be like Iowa City, really? But I can’t shake it. Sorry to all our friends in Iowa City. This is why we never visit.

Ori is reading tomorrow night, before the sports ball, with Robyn Schiff and Martha Rhodes. It’s virtual and free. Register here.