Alan Michael Parker Bingo, Bango, Boingo is a moving and insightful collection of flash fiction.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“These stories are pithy, whimsical, ironic, and poignant by turn… a pleasant, chatty overlay of language that sometimes parts to reveal a startling moment of insight.”
In his own words, here is Alan Michael Parker‘s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Bingo, Bango, Boingo:
Bingo Bango Boingo was my hardest favorite book to write. A collection of thirty-one flash fictions and forty Bingo card stories—more about that adapted form shortly—the book began in Covid and ended in a whole new way of thinking about what making art means to me.
Like a number of other artists I know, the events of 2020 and 2021 made me reconsider my studio practice, and what my writing might actually be for—that is, how to sit and type while so many people (including my dad) were dying. I felt small, and my work felt smaller. Which isn’t to speak ill of books I have written, but I had to pause, and give thought to what should/could I do next, and after that, what next next? So I began experimenting: I worked to excavate drafts of unsuccessful poems (since making new sentences wasn’t happening) and also, to play. And because very short stories seemed to hold the most dramatic promise in that historical moment, that’s what I made.
A Bingo card is a narrative form, albeit in its least interesting and most orthodox iteration, only a fancy checklist. I wondered about how to change that, as I played: what if the various boxes on the card produced lines of Bingo! that could be read as plots, or sub-plots, or near-plots in a single story? That led to the work I did for this book—Bingo cards that might be poems (encapsulating a moment, or as Wordsworth says, “Spots of time”) or stories (including discursive elements and a use of time consistent with sequential narration). What are they? Some editors have thought of the results as poems, some as stories. In Bingo Bango Boingo, the forty cards are being called stories, and I don’t think that’s more right or wrong.
In terms of music, yes, please. I love a lot of music that tends to be all over the place, the world, the genres, the years, and not really an aesthetic so much as a taste. I like the human voice especially, and rhythm: I love bongos (natch) and a capella and Juju and gypsy punk. While many of the stories in Bingo Bango Boingo include songs that the characters consider anthemic, a few of which I’ll talk about below, mostly the music that I’ll list here is music I listen to, especially when revising.
- Alicia Keys, “If I Ain’t Got You”
A song that’s been with me since 2003, when Keys dropped her great second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, this soaring ballad puts a little spin on Can’t-Buy-Me-Love, inverting the trope ever so much. What I like, too, are the lyrics’ critique of the acquisitive, of wanting things. I think that because art-making, to me, seems so unrelated to getting stuff, and worldliness, this track became one of my go-to songs as I wrote BBB. Also, I love love songs, and there are a lot of “love song stories” in this book.
- Anakronic Electro Orkestra, “Free Klarinet Screamin’ in My Brain”
I can’t always write to music that has words. So instrumentals regularly fill my studio, the jolly discordance of bands such as AEO both entering into my consciousness and also remaining just outside where the words live in my head. As my characters in BBB often struggle to find ways to articulate themselves—and even more often, are trying to make the kind of Big Life Decisions I’ve recently made, which includes trying to write their Big Life Decisions in my stories—instrumentals can seem just right.
And for you, dear reader: “Free Klarinet Screamin’ in My Brain” may be lined up with the Bingo card story, “A September Wedding, Not Hers” on page 75, a story that also includes a reference to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it).”
- Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Take Five”
Another instrumental, the most listened-to jazz song of all time was an anomaly in 1958, and a surprise hit. Written in 5/4 time at the request of drummer Joe Morello, the song has a number of great fade-ins and moments of raised volume, including especially Morello’s drum work beginning at the 2:15 mark that cranks up as we approach the 3:00 mark, until the piano kicks back in around 3:15 while Morello continues his joint. What I love: the sneakiness of the solo, and how you think you’ve got the melody and then bopbopbopbopbopbeedeebop you’re in a drum solo. What I hope: that one of the apparently less important boxes in a Bingo card rises to the surface like that, just as you think the story’s about something else, and you’re happy to be surprised.
- Chet Faker, “No Diggity”
The 1999 Blackstreet Number 1 single—co-written by seven people, including credit given to Bill Withers, for the R&B sample from a track of his, “Grandma’s Hands”—is covered here by Chet Faker. Originally, one of the songs in the battle between Dr. Dre and Tupac, “No Diggity” made the Rolling Stone “Top 100 Pop Songs” at #32.
It’s a song I have listened to a lot, coming to the track as a Bill Withers fan. Sampling is an idea that I’ve thought about a lot too, in terms of literary history and cultural production—and I’m quoting freely in this book of stories, in a way that I’ve learned to trust. Plus, “I like the way you work it, / no diggity, / I got to bag it up.”
- The Cure, “The Lovecats”
Oh, Robert Smith. I so want to get over my crush on you. In 1984, a year after this song came out, I had copied your hair and your wardrobe. And I still blame you for that.
In Bingo Bango Boingo, perhaps the most autobiographical story is “Unemployment Benefits,” which features many jobs from which I was actually fired in the eighties, during my Robert Smith phase.
- Adele, “Hello”
The young mother who’s the protagonist of the Bingo card story, “All the Cell Phones Ring at Once,” has Adele on shuffle. Although the song the protagonist quotes here is more of a lovelorn ballad, the idea that her phone is being rung—along with everyone else’s phone, all at once—and that there’s someone doing so… well, that’s the story’s “what if,” as the O.G. writers say.
I like too that Adele’s music video for “Hello” is in black-and-white, which would be how I’d film this Bingo card.
- Miriam Makeba, “Pata Pata”
Here’s another song that I like to listen to when revising—because revising’s hard, and I need to get up and move and let my body shake out its preconceptions.
The fabulously talented Makeba released this song worldwide as a single in 1967—adding English descriptions to the Xhosa language instructions—and it remains her best-known hit.
Sadly, on the 9th of November, 2008, Miriam Makeba sang “Pata Pata” during a concert in Italy, and then collapsed and died on stage of a heart attack.
- Django Rheinhardt, “Brazil”
The great, mad Django has a bio that can’t be beat. Unable to read music, a deeply original guitar, bass, and strings genius, he invented a couple of genres, including “Hot Club Jazz.” Apocryphally, the provenance of his innovation is too often attributed to the results of a fire in his touring caravan that left him unable to use the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand.
Rheinhardt also had the honor of playing with a musician I know nothing about, but whose name I wish I had invented, Peanuts Hucko.
There’s a lot of invention in Bingo Bango Boingo. That’s always been the challenge at the heart of this project—what to invent? I don’t think you’d believe a character named Peanuts Hucko.
- Nina Simone, “I Shall Be Released”
Another cover, this time of a Bob Dylan song—written as half-homage half-riff on the prison songs of Johnny Cash, among others—the track has a naturally plaintive, quasi-religious sensibility. And Nina Simone’s cover is my favorite, from probably a list of thirty or so artists who have sung it over the years. (And Dylan himself, according to www.bobdylan.com, performed the song 491 times between 1975 and 2008).
Given this little book of mine’s origins in Covid, and the preponderance of characters changing their lives, and being changed, “I Shall Be Released” may in fact be one of the better anthems for BBB.
- The Grief Knuckles, in an untitled track from their 2017 “crossover deathcore” album, You’re Dead. What an annoying song–I love it. In my story, “The Lumber Mill at Night,” the guitars and the thrashing reverb blast away in the BOSE headphones of the fifteen-year-old son of our protagonist. He’s got the volume cranked to 11, and mom’s ready to graffiti his face with a Sharpie. That’s what crossover deathcore does to families.
- Bingo Bango Boingo, the title track.
I’d like to make up a song for this collection of stories, something with a sampling of early ‘60s bongo music, a peppy soprano, and a wicked guitar solo. It would be danceable, shoulder shimmying, jam-able live, and Number 17 with a bullet. I wish I could write music—but all I’ve got are these words, which I’ve tried to make sing.
Alan Michael Parker is the author or editor of nineteen books, including the novels Christmas in July and The Committee on Town Happiness, both with Dzanc Books. He holds the Houchens Chair at Davidson College, where he chairs the Department of English. His awards include the NC Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Poetry selections, and the Fineline Prize. A book reviewer for The New Yorker for nine years, he has judged the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction, as well the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction.