April 2022 Vinyl Spin Challenge - Intertextuality and You

Hemotep

Hemotep

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Intertextuality is the implicit or explicit, whether understood by all or argued by some, presence of one text within another text. Think, for instance, of what Karl Mannheim wrote: “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to say that [they] participate in thinking further what others have thought before [them].” The short story writer Tobias Wolff compared this to a chain, in his short story of that name, in which we only receive one link in the story but we know that there are links that go beyond the text, forward and backward in our thoughts, and in that way the story keeps being told in our minds even when it is no longer on the page. Every piece of culture that is produced is influenced by the chain of history. The chain may rest heavily on the link that precedes or follows it or it may not touch those links at all; regardless they remain linked. The albums we listen to are also texts that are bound by this process of social thought.

The sociologist Max Weber developed a sociological practice based on what he called, in the German, Verstehen. This practice involves the attempt to understand, interpret, and make meaning out of our world and those people and things with whom we share it. This month’s challenge has a variety of themes, but all will rely on your discernment—the understanding and meaning you make out of the prompts—with the goal of putting the album you select into conversation with the prompt. Does the prompt speak to the album, or does the album speak to the prompt? The directionality is up to you. Although it is not required, I most enjoy reading why you selected the albums to play that you did.

TL;DR: Read the quote from the short story (the whole story is linked). What does it mean to you? How do you understand it removed from context? Does it remind you of any songs/albums/bands? If you were to imagine what comes before and after the quote and an album were part of it, what album would it be? Or is there a word, a phrase, an image in the quote that makes you think of an album? Play that :cool:

April 1 – Samuel R. Delany, Aye, and Gomorrah…
  • “"Yes." She looked down. I glanced to see the expression she was hiding. It was a smile. "You have your glorious, soaring life—and you have us." Her face came up. She glowed. "You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . ." She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. "We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!" She looked back at me. "Perverted, yes? In love with a bunch of corpses in free fall!" Suddenly she hunched her shoulders. "I don't like having a free-fall-sexual-displacement complex."”
April 2 – Don DeLillo, Human Moments in World War III
  • “It is not too early in the war to discern nostalgic references to earlier wars. All wars refer back. Ships, planes, entire operations are named after ancient battles, simpler weapons, what we perceive as conflicts of nobler intent. This recon-interceptor is called Tomahawk II. When I sit at the firing panel I look at a photograph of Vollmer’s granddad when he was a young man in sagging khakis and a shallow helmet, standing in a bare field, a rifle strapped to his shoulder. This is a human moment, and it reminds me that war, among other things, is a form of longing.”
April 3 – Carmen Maria Machado, The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror
  • “Maxa’s vanity was cluttered with what she needed and more: bulbed bottles of scent with sleek lines, a small pair of scissors, mascaras and powders the color of chalk, lipstick and a metal tracer, kohl for her eyes, a hot curler, rouge, a fat brush tipped in pink dust, pencils, old scripts, a pair of bone-colored dice. It seemed like a place where spells were cast; that by scooping up a resident mouse and opening its throat into her wine glass, Maxa might be able to curse whomever she pleased. But there was no need for animal blood; powdered carmine arrived in small sacks – which Sabine told me was created by boiling insects – and I spent my waking hours mixing and reheating the concoction like a vampiress.”
April 4 – William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic
  • "Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be. The pirate broadcaster's front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoarm cup of water on the ledge beside Molly's shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their DayGlo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language."
April 5: Amy Hempel, In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried
  • “On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried, I enrolled in a "Fear of Flying" class. "What is your worst fear?" the instructor asked, and I answered, "That I will finish this course and still be afraid."”
April 6: Octavia Butler, The Book of Martha
  • “She stepped away from God, and already God seemed to be fading, becoming translucent, transparent, gone.
  • “I want to forget,” Martha said, and she stood alone in her living room, looking blankly past the open drapes of her front window at the surface of Lake Washington and the mist that hung above it. She wondered at the words she had just spoken, wondered what it was she wanted so badly to forget.”
April 7: Richard Selzer, The Knife
  • “One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip--by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power--cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a human being.”
April 8: Kanai Mieko, Rabbits
  • “Every day since then I am haunted by the ghosts of the dead rabbits and have behaved like a large, one-eyed rabbit. In short, I have clearly confirmed that I can never again return to the world of human beings. Looking back on it, I see that I had lived like a normal human being until the fourteenth of that month several years back. Up to that time, I had been like any normal schoolgirl and had kept hidden from my classmates everything about my father’s strange tastes—that he killed rabbits and cooked them. And I cannot say that I did not feel somewhat guilty about eating the cooked rabbits. If they had known that I had calmly eaten the rabbits I myself raised, my classmates would have surely nicknamed me Tiger Lily.”
April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
  • “On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”
April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited
  • “He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”
 
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April 11: Vladimir Nabokov, Details of a Sunset
  • “That evening there had been beer and songs with friends in honor of Mark and russet-haired, pale Klara, and in a week they would be married; then there would be a lifetime of bliss and peace, and of nights with her, the red blaze of her hair spreading all over the pillow, and, in the morning, again her quiet laughter, the green dress, the coolness of her bare arms.”
April 12: Huzama Habayeb, A (Somewhat) Realistic Dream
  • “How I hate these early mornings! Cursed are those who indulge in idealizing the moment when the sun lights up the horizon! They give it the exaggerated burden of grandeur, majesty, and fancy. This was a scathing birth for which I wouldn’t wait, and which compelled me to await an even more biting day. And although I give myself a reason to hope the sun might withdraw its decision to rise, for just one morning, by an hour or even a few minutes, it rises in spite of me every morning. Now, the rumbling echo of rusty water pipes was dimmed by frosty dew, and I got a poor thread of cold water to wash my face.”
April 13: Chinua Achebe, The Sacrificial Egg
  • “Julius was worried because it was almost a week since he had seen Janet, the girl he was going to marry. Ma had explained to him very gently that he should no longer come to see them "until this thing is over by the power of Jehovah." Ma was a very devout Christian, and one reason why she approved of Julius for her only daughter was that he sang in the church choir.”
April 14: Nicola Barker, G-String
  • Jeanie picked up something that resembled an obscenely elongated garter and proffered it to Gillian. Gillian took hold of the scrap.
  • What’s this?’
  • ‘G-string.’
  • ‘My God, girls wear these in Dave Lee Roth videos.’
  • ‘Who’s that?’ Jeanie asked, sucking in her cheeks, insouciant.
  • ‘They aren’t practical,’ Gillian said.
  • Jeanie’s eyes narrowed. ‘These are truly modern knickers,’ she said. ‘These are what everyone wears now. And I’ll tell you for why. No visible pantie line!’
  • Gillian didn’t dare inform her that material was the whole point of a pantie. Wasn’t it?
  • Oh hell, Gillian thought, shifting on Mr Kip’s Aston Martin’s leather seats, ‘maybe I should’ve worn it in for a few days first.’ It felt like her G-string was making headway from between her buttocks up into her throat. She felt like a leg of lamb, trussed up with cheese wire. Now she knew how a horse felt when offered a new bit and bridle for the first time.
April 15: William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
  • “"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.”
April 16: Horacio Castellanos Moya, Hypertension
  • “I went back to the stationary bicycle. I bought a Walkman. I thought that a little bit of music could help me. I chose my favorite cassettes. But the situation barely improved. While my eyes were closed, I forgot that I was pedaling like a lunatic on that tiny patio, I enjoyed my favorite songs, and I even sang along; but if I opened my eyes for any reason, and came back to myself, I was immediately attacked by an anxious desire to climb off the bicycle.”
April 17: Nnedi Okorafor, Mother of Invention
  • “Anwuli closed her eyes and listened to her house sing for a bit, and soon she calmed and felt better. “Music is all we’ve got,” she sang back to Obi 3. And the sound of her own voice pushed away the fact that she and her baby would probably be dead by morning, and it would be all her fault. Pushed it away some.
  • Music and Obi 3. Those were all she and her unborn baby had had for nine months. Since she’d learned she was pregnant and stupidly told her fiancé, who a minute later blurted to her that he was married with two children and couldn’t be a father to her child, too.”
 
April 18: Angela Carter, Wolf-Alice
  • “She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all and her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talking beasts and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lion’s mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again?”
April 19: Jeanette Winterson, The Agony of Intimacy
  • “‘It’s funny.’ She said, a short Scotch cupped in her long fingers, ‘how we live in no-fault culture that is also a blame culture. My experience is that the no-fault applies to the men, and the blame applies to the women. But you can’t say that post-feminism. And maybe I am just bitter.’”
April 20: Thomas Pynchon, Entropy
  • “Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking* party was moving into its 40th hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean* and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine* pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev*. They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa*. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambú and had to their credit one 10" LP entitled Songs of Outer Space*.”
April 21: Denis Johnson, Strangler Bob
  • “Donald Dundun showed me how to roll a cigarette. Dundun came from the trailer courts, and I was middle class gone crazy, but we passed the time together freely because we both had long hair and chased after any kind of intoxicating substance. Dundun, only nineteen, already displayed up and down both his arms the tattooed veins of a hope-to-die heroin addict. The same went for B.D., a boy who arrived the week before Christmas. We knew him only as B.D. “My name cannot be pronounced, it can only be spelled.” That was his dodge. I, on the other hand, didn’t know the meaning of my own handle, Dink. Some grouchy, puffy-eyed prisoner would walk by, look at me, and say, “Dink.””
April 22: Franz Kafka, Josephine the Songstress
  • “In private conversations amongst trusted friends we admit this quite openly, that Josephine's songs aren't, as songs go, anything all that out of the ordinary, there's nothing essentially miraculous about them. And, is it even song at all? Despite our fundamental lack in things musical we do have a substantial history that has come down to us about singing; in earlier times our forefathers were musical-there are legends that inform us about all of this and, indeed, even still we have some of these songs though, to be sure, nobody has any idea as to how they're to be sung. I don't know why it is that in the course of centuries we became so thoroughly disinterested in any sort of music, that, indeed, we became fundamentally hostile toward it, perhaps this is due to our particular destiny, that somehow we were chosen for this: that we worship stillness, stepping back within ourselves and not really being committed and, so, in all actuality we don't have much choice in this. But however all of this may be, we still do have some premonition of what song is and our premonition, to be perfectly honest, goes against her artistry, what Josephine actually does when she's singing.”
April 23: Donald Barthelme, The Rise of Capitalism
  • “The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -- melancholy sadness -- toward it. This attitude is not correct. Fortunately your letter came, at that instant. "Dear Rupert, I love you every day. You are the world, which is life. I love you I adore you I am crazy about you. Love, Marta." Reading between the lines, I understood your critique of my attitude toward capitalism. Always mindful that the critic must "studiare da un punto di vista formalistico e semiologico il rapporto fra lingua di un testo e codificazione di un -- " But here a big thumb smudges the text -- the thumb of capitalism, which we are all under. Darkness falls. My neighbor continues to commit suicide, once a fortnight. I have this suicides geared into my schedule because my role is to save him; once I was late and he spent two days unconscious on the floor. But now that I have understood that I have not understood capitalism, perhaps a less equivocal position toward it can be "hammered out." My daughter demands more Mr. Bubble for her bath. The shrimp boats lower their nets. A book called Humorists of the 18th Century is published.”
April 24: Jeff Noon, The Blind Spot
  • “The noise of a boom-box, bass coiled with blood-pulse music. A desperate man hiding away as police cars pass by along the seafront, sirens rising and falling in waves. A pair of teenage girls on the run, thinking themselves film stars. Escapees from boredom. Both of them dying of thirst for love, trapped in life, pain held in their joined palms like a bird’s egg lined with cracks.
  • The sun rises, melting the sky. Now the city moves closer. A new camera is set up across the road, the lens glistening black and hostile, zooming in. Until the blind spot stands revealed: a few feet of grimy pavement, a few yards of wall, a grim corner. Dog shit, tarmac, litter, brickwork, plaster. Graffiti, names and dates, all fading now.”
 
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April 25: Sherman Alexie, Indian Education
  • Tenth Grade I passed the written test easily and nearly flunked the driving, but still 60 received my Washington State driver's license on the same day that Wally Jim killed himself by driving his car into a pine tree. No traces of alcohol in his blood, good job, wife and two kids. 61 "Why'd he do it?" asked a white Washington State trooper. 62 All the Indians shrugged their shoulders, looked down at the ground. 63 "Don't know," we all said, but when we look in the mirror, see the history 64 of our tribe in our eyes, taste failure in the tap water, and shake with old tears, we understand completely. Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough.
April 26: Louise Edrich, Satan: Hijacker of a Planet
  • Stan Anderson looked intently, quietly, evenly, at each person in the crowd and spoke to each one, proving things about the future that seemed complicated, like the way the Mideast had shaped up as such a trouble zone. How the Chinese armies were predicted in Tibet and that came true, and how they'll keep marching, moving, until they reach the Fertile Crescent. Stan Anderson told about the number. He slammed his forehead with his open hand and left a red mark. There, he yelled, gutshot, there it will be scorched. He was talking about the number of the beast, and said that they would take it from your Visa card, your Mastercard, your household insurance. That already, through these numbers, you are under the control of last things and you don't know it.
  • The Antichrist is among us.
  • He is the plastic in our wallets.
  • You want credit? Credit?
  • Then you'll burn for it, and you will starve. You'll eat sticks, you'll eat black bits of paper, your bills, and all the while you'll be screaming from the dark place, Why the hell didn't I just pay cash?
  • Because the number of the beast is a computerized number, and the computer is the bones, it is the guts, of the Antichrist, who is Lucifer, who is pure brain.
April 27: Will Christopher Baer, Suffer the Fool
  • There is a calendar on the back of the door, stuck on the wrong month. The picture is taken from an old Dick Tracy comic. I flip the months past Little Nemo, The Phantom, Betty Boop. I grind my teeth and shiver. Betty Boop disturbs me. Her eyes are too big for her head and she has no actual mouth. Her figure is freakish. The shrunken waist and big curvy breasts, the thighs of a dwarf. I turn to look in the medicine cabinet. The usual female gear, mysterious and oddly threatening. I swallow several prescription diet pills and hope my world will accelerate. Through the closed door I can hear Emma and Michelle, hissing at each other.
April 28: Donald Ray Pollock, Pills
  • Wanda tended bar at Hap's and sold the black beauties on the side. The hilljacks loved them because a three-dollar capsule made it possible to drink four times as much and still miss the telephone poles on the way home. She had a whole posse of big girls that she carted around southern Ohio to the fat doctors. To get a prescription of black beauties, all they had to do was stand on the scales and let the nurse take their blood pressure. Wanda bribed the women with cheap tennis shoes from the Woolworth's and Rax Roast Beef sandwiches and Dairy Queen milk shakes. My older sister, Jeanette, was one of her regulars. The only time I ever saw her happy was after one of those trips with Wanda to cop a 'script. She always came back with mustard stains on her good blouse and something sweet for her two illegits.
April 29: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Island of the Immortals
  • We are a carbon-based life form, as the scientists say, but how a human body could turn to diamond I do not know, unless through some spiritual factor, perhaps the result of genuinely endless suffering.
  • Perhaps “diamond” is only a name the Yendians give these lumps of ruin, a kind of euphemism.
  • I am still not certain what the woman in the village meant when she said, “There’s only one.” She was not referring to the immortals. She was explaining why she didn’t protect herself or her children from the flies, why she found the risk not worth the bother. It is possible that she meant that among the swarms of flies in the island marshes there is only one fly, one immortal fly, whose bite infects its victim with eternal life.
April 30: David Markson, This is Not a Novel
  • Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.
  • Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
  • As a sort of mantra, Kant would sometimes recite a list of people who had lived long lives, hoping to match them. He reached eighty.
  • Gluck’s face was pitted from smallpox.
  • Haydn’s face was pitted from smallpox.
  • Mozart’s face was pitted from smallpox.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer.
  • My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury. Wrote Liszt at twenty.
  • Obviously Writer exists.
  • Not being a character but the author, here.
  • Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake.
  • Landscape of the Urinating Multitudes, Lorca called one of his New York poems.
  • Unmarried women should not bathe, said St. Jerome. Ever. And should embrace the most deliberate squalor. The less to breed temptation in the world.
  • Sappho was small and dark. Though is made blond and fleshy by Raphael in his Parnassus at the Vatican.
  • Horace was short and fat. Admitting this himself in the Satires.
  • On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.
  • Paul Celan’s body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau. Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.
  • Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theater.
  • Rossini, on the Symphony Fantastique: What a good thing it isn’t music.
 
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