5. The Empty Page

First published in Plan B #35

The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (edited by Peter Wild, Serpent’s Tail, 2008)

The video for Sonic Youth’s ‘Teenage Riot’ not only marks out, through its collaged footage, an alternative canon, but insists on an intellectual, extra-musical, element: Bill Burroughs and Harvey Pekar appear alongside Patti Smith, The Stooges and Sun Ra. Literature and theory have always informed SY’s output, from Thurston’s love for the Beats and Kim’s absorption of feminist theory to Lee’s parallel career as poet and diarist. This intellectual fertility, echoing the band’s stylistic breadth, perhaps explains the fascination they exercise for writers, musical and otherwise: they provide a limitless number of jumping-off points, which the authors in this anthology, each taking an SY title for their own, use.

The results, perhaps predictably, are varied. Even by the standards of middlebrow publishing, many of the authors here are less-well-known, which results both in some pleasant surprises and some duds. The majority of the stories seem to be ‘inspired’ by the more exoteric elements of SY, particularly during the Goo/Dirty period: pop-culture refs, nihilistic blankness, psychosexual menace. Some, such as Tom McCarthy’s incendiary fantasy about Marxist icon Patty Hearst, or Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘Snare, Girl’, which perfectly captures the suffocating mental claustrophobia of adolescence, work very successfully; others, including Scott Mebus’ ‘Bull In The Heather’, which grafts an embarrassing pun onto a mundane story, or Kevin Sampsell’s ‘Swimsuit Issue’, where a potentially fascinating theme is ruined by an empty prose style, are less so. A number, such as Katherine Dunn’s ‘That’s All I Know (Right Now)’, wherein a severed hand temporarily fascinates a gentrified community, are amusing in their deadpan oddity, but nothing more.

The best stories seem to follow the melancholy traces in SY’s post-Washing Machine work, peeking at the desolation beneath the poise. The autobiographical, starkly poetic ‘Little Trouble Girl’, by SY’s peer Emily Carter Roiphe, ends with the discovery of a child – the return of rock’s repressed responsibility – reminding us that, for those excluded from the inner sanctum of bohemia, the world still turns. Meanwhile, Jess Walter’s moving ‘Rain On Tin’, ironically commenting on the preceding stories, quietly reveals a despair at its heart to equal that of Murray Street’s ‘Karen Revisited’.

If the fascinating stories here don’t outweigh the number of ones that left me indifferent, that’s not necessarily the writers’ fault: ‘my’ SY and the band many in this anthology seem inspired by seem to be two different outfits. Such are the perils of fandom. There is, however, definitely a lost opportunity here: SY’s greatest legacy was re-introducing the Modernist project to rock music – the formal possibilities opened up by Daydream Nation, where they caused the time and space of rock form to buckle, should serve as more of a lesson to writers than their thematic gewgaws.