Books & Music, Vol. 1

The importance of play, Okkervil River, & Tatyana Tolstaya

I’m not sure when exactly it happened—maybe Malcolm Gladwell knows—but somewhere along the way we stopped trusting artists to tell us how to live and started trusting scientists. I suppose it makes sense. Half our brains reside in the little boxes we stuff in our pockets. Groupthink blows us around like plastic bags. Gifs, emojis, reels, clips, the same images and messages repeated and regurgitated. It’s harder and harder to think for oneself. It’s harder and harder to feel your soul go slack and receptive. We’ve hardened ourselves—another disaster flickers on the endless scroll (fight/flight/freeze)—so we look to hardness, crunched numbers, proof, proofs, profs. No shade to science. I find the studies and data just as fascinating as everyone else’s genetically-modified Dalmatian, but I do think it’s time to let the artists reclaim their stake on our souls—and our nerves.

Take play. A quick google yields articles citing scientific data supporting the importance of play, from the New York Times to PsychCentral to the National Institute of Health. There’s even a TED talk. (Of course there’s a TED talk.) But let’s be clear about one thing before we start asking Jeeves for advice about “how to inject more play into our daily lives”: artists have always known how to play. The only way into the act of the creation of a story or poem or painting or song is play.

Guns N Roses guitarist Slash cooked up the main riff for “Sweet Child O Mine” by noodling with a string-skipping exercise. Sculptor Ernesto Neto, who has been called “One of the most influential artists of his generation,” roots his work in play. Anne Lamott exhorts young writers to embark upon “shitty first drafts.”

Make mud pies, splat around, slap the dash, paint the poodle.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct,” Carl Jung wrote in Psychological Types.

Not far from my writing desk is a stack of books by William H. Gass, who is sadly mostly known to writers— a “writer’s writer,” what a dreadful, doom-laden phrase—or as I affectionately refer to the big muscly bros of writing: Metafictional Meatheads. You know the type: they like heavy books, cerebral books, the power lifting equivalent of literary-ness (William Gaddis, Robert Coover, John Barth, etc.). Anyway, I like power-lifting sometimes, too, so I keep Gass close—and emit gas frequently—because his work is full of playful sentences like this: “His lightest touch leaves a bruise, but not one a bully’s blow leaves, one the doctor’s inoculation causes.” He’s referring to Italo Svevo here. Do we need to expound? Not really. The musicality is enough. I’ll leave the heavy lifting of “what does it all mean” to the Meatheads.

All art is a Matryoshka doll, but only to the extent that you want it to be. Open the largest doll? That’s up to you. I personally like a wide range of art — from the fluffy to the obtuse and everything in between—but if I can’t first enjoy the art on a surface level, then I tend to eschew any deeper-understanding digging. I need the charm—or I need something about the work to charm. If I can’t first and foremost enjoy the doll in its largest, most obvious, biggest pronouncement, then why un-nest at all?

So, let’s leave the largest doll up on the pedestal and delight in the very surface of things today: playfulness.

Hence: one album, one story.

Okkervil River, a band that might inspire many un-nestings, has left me gasping and giggling for almost twenty years. My still-favorite, I think, is The Stage Names, which is at once ruminative/dark and peppy/playful. In a 2007 interview with NPR, Will Sheff, bandleader and main songwriter, said this:

"There's a prejudice these days where people think that in order to be serious, you have to be all dark and brooding and heavy, and I was thinking, 'That's not true; you can be serious and be playful and fun,'" Sheff says. "And joy is as much of an important emotion as pain and sorrow, and far more desirable."

Phrases and lines that have brought me garbled mouthfuls of volume-up-windows-down-on-the-highway joy:

“What gives this mess some grace unless it’s fiction—unless it’s licks, man, unless it’s lies or it’s love?”

and:

“the cyringest eyes”

and:

“No one wants a tune about the 100^th luftballoon that was seen shooting from the window of your room…”

and:

“Gassed and trashed and smashed young cads roasting away…”

and:

“…as you roam on silk ripped tippy-toe alone through Silverlake—splayed astride a snow-white mare…”

The final track of The Stage Names, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” miraculously turns the poet John Berryman’s suicide into a playful song. To me, this one has it all, and it’s tempting to go off here and indulge in more than play¹, but I’m being mindful of space (and your attention).

The opening lines of the suicide ballad:

“I’d like to start this off by saying, ‘Live and love!’”

And then there’s this:

“…broke my bones and skull and it was memorable.” You have to laugh a little here—if you can. (Laugh, laugh in the face of darkness.)

“Okkervil River,” the short story by Tatyana Tolstaya, delights in similar play, and when I first made the connection some years ago, I couldn’t help but think that Sheff had been mining more than just a band name from the Gorbachev-era Russian chronicler. Tolstaya delights in maximalist wordplay, and her impressionistic, dreamy portraits are often seen as acerbic social commentary. A little Chekhov meets Nabokov, I suppose

The story follows Simeonov, a middle-aged bureaucrat who “translated boring books” and likes processed cheese (this detail always makes me giggle) and becomes obsessed with Vera Vasilevna, an obscure vocalist. Simeonov fantasizes about her, listening to her records over and over, and eventually goes in search of her after finding out she lives by the Okkervil River in St. Petersburg, which he also romanticizes.

Much like phrases and lines from The Stage Names, I find myself, every time I re-read this story, goofily smiling, almost willing to stand up in my neighborhood café to read the unusual, funny, or pleasurable-sounding phrases and sentences aloud for all to hear.

We’ve got:

“slow green sun murkily floating”

and:

“apple-round heels”

and the:

“festooned orchid of her voice, divine, low, dark, lacy, and dusty at first and then throbbing with underwater pressure…”

and:

“the revenge of the huge, bug-eyed, big-mouthed, and toothy carpenter-tsar, ship’s axe in his upraised hand, chasing and gaining on his weak and terrified subjects in their nightmares.”

Sheff and Tolstaya share an affinity for splashing around in language— associative leaps, the momentum of lyricism, double and triple meanings. Why spoil it all with critique? Why un-nest at all when there’s so much to admire on the surface? Sometimes you just need to leave it alone and revel in the surface delights, the sound over sense, the pure play.

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Please spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. You can find out more about Okkervil River here. Thanks, as always, for reading.

1. Like how John Berryman’s Dream Songs reverts to crude racial stereotypes as his main character Henry occasionally performs in blackface; Kevin Young’s great rebuttal/critique of this; how Berryman committed suicide by jumping off the Washington bridge — which is, coincidentally, about five miles from my house—how the song ends with the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.” medley, which itself can be traced back to 1930’s folk songs in the Bahamas…on and on the nesting dolls un-nest. (Also, fun fact for all you Succession freaks out there. Every season’s finale episode borrows its title from Berryman’s “Dream Song 29”.)