Dinner Music #138: The weekly lineup
with special guest Catherine Lacey
This week we’re talking to and taking recommendations from author
. The way her work intersects with music was on my mind after I read her novel, Biography of X, which felt like a deep excavation of the fault lines between reality and unreality and the feelings that writhe between the two (“But I know now a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drops at the edges, then rushes out completely. People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.”). One of the characters in the book is Connie Converse (Dinner Music 131), mythic in reality, a bit more human in Lacey’s re-telling. I could write a lot more about the way her work sounds, the words and sentences themselves (she has so many good ones, like this favorite of mine: “I was young and therefore insane.”) and her depiction of sound, music and otherwise. An image from Biography of X that I think of often is someone sleeping underneath a piano. There’s an East Village punk bar. David Bowie makes an appearance.A little while back, I reached out to Lacey after she posted a link to a playlist for her upcoming novel, The Möbius Book, from her Substack, Untitled Thought Project. And now, we’re here and I feel very lucky to have her be a part of this project. She’s chosen some great albums and I’m recycling her excellent playlist for the Dinner Music weekly.
Her book, The Möbius Book, comes out tomorrow. Buy it. Buy all of her others, while you’re at it.