In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Mike Barnes’s book Sleep is Now a Foreign Country is lyrically and brilliantly inventive.
Quill & Quire wrote of the book:
“At times memoir, at times dissociative fable, at times personal essay … the writing maintains breath-close nearness to the perceptions of the narrator … akin to being in a diving bell with the storyteller, extremely intimate and viscerally suffocating … culminat[ing] in a feeling of waking from a vivid dream not quite remembered.”
I don’t recall what music I might have been listening to while writing this book, which was first drafted fourteen years ago, and only one song is mentioned in it: “Spanish Bombs” by The Clash. So I need to come up with another way to pick tracks for a playlist. There might be many such ways. I have chosen to make two mini-playlists based on the book’s structure.
Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country (subtitled Encounters with the Uncanny) tells its story in two interweaving timelines.
In the first, spanning 1963-1977, a young person undergoes a kind of initiation into the uncanny. During his formative years (ages 8-22), a boy (a version of myself) is increasingly drawn to uncanny states and events. This part of the narration is like a dark fairy tale, in which a naïve protagonist is lured deeper and deeper into a dark forest where something sinister awaits. When it is finally encountered in its full powers, the result is predictably devastating.
But that is not the whole story. In the present timeline, thirty years later, the narrator again copes with the influx of the uncanny (as has clearly happened many times), using tools and techniques gained through long experience. The coping isn’t easy, or entirely successful—but it enables a very different relationship with what, to a younger self, was simply overwhelming.
The uncanny is now a door through which healing as well as harm can pass.
That can inform a life as well as deform it.
That is not just destructive, but constructive—as the small tangible artifact of the book in hand attests.
Mini-Playlist 1 (past as dream)
Growing up, and then living in rented rooms in my teens and twenties, I did not own a record player. But there was always a radio, at first just a small transistor, usually perched in the corner of the kitchen counter. The station playlists were amazingly eclectic—with older artists like Nat King Cole sitting easily beside early rock and novelty songs and Brill Building tunes. As time went on, the audio spigot narrowed into thinner streams, or niches, without much overlap.
My first three songs are chosen for the years in which they were playing on the radio, years which brought significant change to my narrator.
“It’s My Party” (1963), sung by Lesley Gore. Written by Gluck, Gold and Weiner; produced by Quincy Jones. I’ve always been a sucker for catchy pop melodies; one listen to this song and the tune is in your head forever. I love the twist of paradox it puts on teen heartache, with the birthday girl insisting on her right to cry at her own party. It jibes with my narrator’s dawning sense that in a world exactly opposite to what it’s said to be, the only appropriate responses might be reversals: It’s my party, so I’ll cry if I want to.
“Come And Get It” (1970), sung by Badfinger. Written by Paul McCartney in 1969 for the film The Magic Christian, with the Badfinger version released in North America early the next year. My narrator thinks of 1970 as the last year he felt like a normal, healthy, clean-cut kid—exactly the target audience for this MOR rocker—before sliding into an endangered sort of life ripe for trafficking with dark forces and entities. He has the sense, in retrospect, of a door quickly closing: If you want it, here it is, come and get it/But you’d better hurry ‘cause it’s goin’ fast.
“Alison” (1977), written and sung by Elvis Costello. Something about this song has always sounded haunted to me. The spare and liquid guitar, the clear and plaintive address. There is something sweetly broken about the melody. The song’s sense of a doomed reunion fits the sense in Sleep of a woman once known in dream re-encountered under fantastic circumstances: Oh, it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl. I won’t say more. The song bespeaks a trauma to which the only possible response is a repeated declaration of faith: Alison, I know this world is killing you./Oh, Alison, my aim is true./My aim is true.
Mini-Playlist 2 (dream as lucid)
Some sorceries can’t be ducked or beaten, or fought to better than a draw. But if you survive the first rounds, and are granted time enough, you can learn to parley with them, turning a nightmare that must be passively endured to something more like a lucid dream that can be shaped and shared. That could be a definition of all art.
“Here But I’m Gone, Part II,” written and sung by Curtis Mayfield. I don’t know where Part I is, or if there is one, but it doesn’t matter. The song’s from 1999, but that doesn’t matter either, because now I’m not bound by the radio’s offerings and can get a song anytime. Nor is it keyed to a particular scene in the book, other than the narrator’s sense, on the first page, of the realm of the uncanny tapping him again on the shoulder to say, Hello, it’s your old friend, and it’s time to come with me for a while, with all the eerie lost-ness and dark magic that will likely involve, evoked perfectly by Mayfield’s space-thinned voice in the refrain: If I took the time to replace/What my mind erased/I still feel as if I’m here, but I’m gone. There’s no lucid dreaming without first surrendering to the dream.
“dlp 2.2,” from “Disintegration Loops” by William Basinski. This work has a legendary connection with the attacks of 9/11, since Basinski completed the four-album project on that morning and dedicated it to the victims. But I didn’t know of that connection when I first heard it. How he created the work is legendary, too. Trying to transfer some of his early recordings to a digital format, Basinski found that the tapes were literally decaying, with increasing gaps and static. Instead of cursing his fate, he went with it, playing extended versions of the deterioration and even enhancing it with reverb effects. The results are haunting, meditative, elegiacally beautiful. Listening to it, you enter another realm and understand loss from the shards and spaces within it. “dlp 2.2” is my favourite. It is a model for honouring fragments and letting them speak in their own fractured tongue.
Run Time: The three songs of the first playlist clock in at only a little over 8 minutes. The two of the second run to over 38, with “dlp 2.2” being 32-plus minutes. The contrast is accidental, but it rings true. Re-processing something takes at least five times as long as living it.
Mike Barnes is the author of twelve books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. He has won the Danuta Gleed Award and a National Magazine Award Silver Medal for his short fiction, and the Edna Staebler Award for his photo-and-text essay “Asylum Walk.” His most recent book of nonfiction, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award and has been praised by Margaret Atwood as “Timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.” He lives in Toronto.