Science Nonfiction
Charles Yu, Gauche, and Adrianne Lenker
Happy December, y’all. If you need me I’ll be obsessing over my Spotify wrapped and budgeting for the therapy I clearly need:
Here’s some stuff I’ve been into.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Often while reading an adventure story, I look for ways in which the author defies the hero’s journey, a monomyth pattern popularized by Joseph Campbell. Of course, the hero thing as Campbell describes it is a pretty Western way to shape a story; The Tale of Genji, for example, lives beyond the confines of the pattern. But I’ve found that, once you start to look for it, the hero’s journey is everywhere. Part of what I liked so much about Charles Yu’s novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is the way Yu sidesteps the pattern.
From the publisher:
Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves….Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.
If you’re going to write a story with time travel, use it — don’t write something that could easily happen linearly, and don’t write just another paradox conundrum story. Yu not only writes a time travel adventure story, he experiments with the form. He makes metaphors literal, he creates a world with bureaucracy and infrastructure and limits. The result is a meta meditation on human relationships and what it means to be a person, molded into a fun science-fiction adventure. Yu examines the human condition as a researcher might, engaging with mathematic formulas and semiotics. This makes the work sound dry, but it’s not at all. It’s funny and bold and just the right amount of sentimental.
A People’s History of Gauche - Gauche
Katie Alice Greer’s (of Priests) voice is enough to make me like an album. It’s husky but at the same time it has a kind of silly putty quality, bending, sliding, sticking in ways that shouldn’t be attractive but are. On A People’s History of Gauche, her voice is part of a new wave ensemble with decidedly punk lyrics, like Le Tigre had a baby with the B-52s. On “Pay Day” she sings “Always think about payday/Always waiting on wages/Always think about systems.” The album blends a jazzy sax over indie pop beats and political commentary about structural inequity that you might expect to find in a poli-sci debate, as opposed to a punk record. At times the songs feel manic — a little too much going on, a little too fast. The bass lines on this album are so consistently fantastic, and I wish they could have had a chance to shine. But part of me thinks that’s the point — the world is moving so fast, and we’re thinking so fast, and nothing is quite as clear as we want it to be.
instrumentals by Adrianne Lenker
One of the most distinctive attributes of Big Thief’s music is Adrianne Lenker’s striking vocals — childlike and reedy, unaffected yet full, her voice sounds almost like it’s coming through a gramophone, no matter how one listens to it. So I was intrigued to hear her most recent work instrumentals, the second half of a double release (the first half is called songs). Lenker’s songs here are made up of acoustic guitar, windchimes, the sounds of leaves crunching underfoot. The result is interesting, though I don’t know that I’d call it gripping. instrumentals feels like the result of relaxed strumming guitar back and forth with a friend on a porch or in a bedroom — nice in the moment, nice to create, but not necessarily something you want to put out into the world in its entirety. Toward the end of the first track, Lenker says — the only vocals on the album— “I’m starting over.” It’s a peek into Lenker’s songwriting process, and there are moments that I can envision being expanded and incorporated into other works. But her songwriting and musical style is ordinarily so imbued with vulnerability that it’s hard to know what is supposed to make this markedly different or worth hearing. Coupled with songs, it serves as a sort-of ellipses to the end of the album. As a standalone, though — as it was released and billed — it seems like something made specifically to illustrate love scenes in a indie movie without drawing attention away from directorial choices — that is, generic.
What should I check out next? And, as always, let me know how I can do better. Thanks for reading! See you later.
P.S. I made a playlist of sad but dance-able songs this week. It’s good for angsting and grooving in your sock feet when it gets dark at 4 p.m.