Dinner Music #185: The weekly lineup
with novelist and critic Lucy Ives
This week we’re listening to music selected by novelist and critic Lucy Ives. Lucy and I have been in conversation about music since late January, when I asked her about contributing to this project after The Paris Review shared some excerpts from her then-upcoming book, three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing). Distraction Diary is the name of the one of the prompts:
If you work at a computer, keep a running account of what you are thinking at moments when, instead of continuing a task, you have a tendency to turn to “frivolous” or “unnecessary” pursuits, such as digging through social media, stalking esoteric DJs, or trawling eBay. Note your thoughts and impulses at these moments. Consider allowing the note-taking to replace the activity you had thought to turn toward. Remain aimless, if possible. Observe, describe; write things you didn’t mean to write and think things you didn’t mean to think.
“Stalking esoteric DJs” is my primary distraction and I figured if Lucy included this in her prompt that she probably had great taste in music (I was right). The book was published by Siglio last week and you can (and should!) buy a copy.
In mid-April, Lucy was announced a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction. Her most recent books are Life Is Everywhere: A Novel and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays, the winner of the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. My introduction to her work was through her collection of short stories, Cosmogony, which I bought immediately after reading the opening paragraph of the title story: “A few years ago a friend of mine married a demon. There was a liberal in the White House then and everyone was feeling pretty sanguine.” When I read An Image of My Name Enters America, a scene from “The End” haunted me for its familiarity:
On my way, I stop in with some friends who are squatting in dilapidated buildings in Austin, Texas. I stay with them for late spring and part of the summer of 2001. We don’t need much money. We cook communally and go to shows. I am very high one afternoon and we jump off what seems like an enormous quarry cliff into beautiful water. There are people drinking beers in a pontoon boat below and they clap for me as I come up, nose burning, crying, relieved not to have broken my neck, wishing I lived my life in a social world that would allow me to do things like this every day.
The familiarity haunted me, because Austin is still like this, but also it isn’t. I was also reminded of Richard Linklater’s first short film, Woodshock, though I highly doubt it was the same cliff. There are a lot more cliffs to jump off of in Austin, Texas than people not from Austin, Texas would expect. In college, friends and I jumped off the cliff at Pace Bend Park and I also remember feeling glad I didn’t break my neck. I would never do that kind of thing now, as my dare-deviling is long behind me. Maybe I like Lucy’s writing, and now her music taste, so much because we share this small kinship: a wish, however occasional, to be drinking beers on a pontoon boat while you, or someone near you, performs feats that place you so directly and violently inside of the world that you can’t help but come up for air dazed and alive and transformed.
Enjoy.