In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Joanna Howard’s Book Notes novel Porthole shares fascinating takes on themes of art and authenticity.
Alta Magazine wrote of the book:
“Howard’s latest work cuts close to the bone on questions of art and sacrifice, hedonism and power, performance and authenticity, using a high dose of absurdity to highlight uncomfortable truths.”
In her own words, here is Joanna Howard’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Porthole:
Bonnie and Clyde, Serge Gainsboug and Brigitte Bardot
This bizarro global hit, made extra sultry by the addition of Bardot, absolutely captures the vibe of Helena: arty, moody, a bit Eurotrash but with a love of the old school heists and crime sagas. Her vagabond upbringing and restless film location globetrotting collides with the pulpy, macho accoutrements of gangsters, grifters, and safe crackers: Borsalinos, trench coats, and tommy guns litter monasteries, chateaus, and Proustian seaside resorts. When working on the novel, the weird Nouvel Vague noirs of Jean Pierre Melville were central to my mind when scripting the plots of her successes and her failures.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Ella Fitzgerald
Helena’s insomnia shapes her entire experience of the world—hallucinatory, unreliable and unrelenting, the haunting nature of her not-sleep allows her to conjure her past misalliances. Whether it is longing or guilt which troubles her sleep, her perpetual waking fixes each moment on her former lovers—and by this I mean her films more than the actors she slept with. Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the Rogers and Hart standard remains the finest.
What Goes On, Velvet Underground
Avant-garde and dissonant, this song captures the discord that is running through Helena’s brain on repeat play. While her sangfroid has worked in her favor for most of her successful film career, after the death of one of her actors on set she experiences what the doctor calls psychic exhaustion. Not only is her reality upside down, too much of it is all there her mind. This book was an opportunity to celebrate an interiority deep dive, and Helena, who is a bit unhinged, and a bit blaring, allows for that hi/lo clash that I think of as signature Velvet Underground.
Train in Vain, The Clash
This jaunty punk anthem of the wounded dude has always felt like a celebration of feminine independence. For Helena, all of her relationships with actors have blurred sexual conquest with artistic creation. David, the longest on-again off-again actor-lover, and her only remaining soundboard, provides comic relief in the novel with his tantrums, and moaning about the way she has exploited her boys. But sometimes it lands a little too close to the bone. She ricochets from controlling her actors lives in every detail to dropping them without warning, and when they no longer serve her artistic vision, they are dead to her. When this becomes literal, the reckoning she must face is the damage she left in her wake.
Modern Love, David Bowie
More than just a mad-scientist Pepsi commercial, this ’80s Bowie classic was also used in the Leos Carax’s film Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) a subtly sci-fi art flick about an STD wherein sex without love will kill you. Starring Juliet Binoche as the ingenue moll of a pair of aged criminals, and Denis Levant, as her hopelessly devoted young thief whose slight of hand will help the trio heist the antidote to the epidemic. Lavant, whose acrobatic dance to Modern Love is perhaps the most memorable scene, was the source for the character of Emile in Porthole.
Prioritise Pleasure, Self Esteem
Sex power but with a self-deprecating edge. Helena’s way of carving out her freedom seems to be filled with contradictions, threats, and self doubt. When she has to confront her past relationships, it becomes clear that her preferred mode of avoidance is sexual escapade—which neither improves or clarifies much. Self Esteem’s wry wit elevates raw sensuality, while it gives a wink to the Freudian pleasure principal, and the dangers of misdirection it offers.
I get along without you very well, Chet Baker
This Hoagy Carmichael classic was at its best in the sweet, high voice of jazz great Chet Baker. In thinking about the edge between making art and making art available (to audiences, to viewers, to readers) is a painful wearing of the heart on the sleeve. Much of Helena, and a part of myself as a writer, will always prefer to protest too much: I get along without you very well. For the characters in Porthole, the collaborative nature of film making often clashes with the solitary and singular vision.
So Tired of Being Alone, Al Green
When the film studio attempts to recuperate Helena, and bring her back into the industry, she finds herself at Jaquith House, a fantasia of psychoanalytic possibility, made possible only by the blythe eccentricity of its figurehead Dr. Duvaux. While Helena herself is a confirmed loner, the jovial constraint of the compound is engagement and shared community. There’s a tongue in cheek element to me with this song, which both represents her condition—as an insomniac separatist—and the gentle and sweet understanding of the way she comes to enjoy being part of a community again.
Marquee Moon, Television
What better way to conclude than under a Marquee Moon? Darkness doubles, lightning strikes itself, self-referential and self-destroying, it is one of my all time favorite songs, and one I listened too perpetually when I was finishing my revisions. This is a song rich in paradoxes, and as Helena in her Bernhardian oscillations is always on the one hand and then on the other, seducing paradoxes summarize her vision and her desire: to make films that speak without dialog, that give voice to silence, image in afterimage, not the touch but where the touch has been.
Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Verse, McSweeney’s, BOMB, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir Rerun Era; the novel Foreign Correspondent; the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round; and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She taught in the Literary Arts program at Brown University for 15 years before moving to University of Denver’s PhD program in Literary Arts, where she teaches prose writing and prose and poetry hybrids, narrative theory, and contemporary literature.