In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Zoe Dubno’s novel Happiness and Love is a stunning debut that exposes the dark side of the art world and privilege.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Dubno updates Bernhard’s drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary… Readers will devour this in one gulp.”
In her own words, here is Zoe Dubno’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Happiness and Love:
Mozart Clarinet Concerto
Something happens to me when I hear the opening notes of the clarinet concerto. It’s like mind control, Pavlovian. Time for work. Yes Mozart wrote an opera about a magical mind-control flute, and yet it’s his clarinet that’s got me under his spell. Maybe it is because I played the clarinet as a kid (terribly, squeakily, lazily) that the clarinet concerto has such a hold on me. Like, I’ll never be good enough at clarinet to play like these professionals, not even close, but if I start writing, if I try my best, maybe I can make a piece of art that is 1/100th as beautiful as the dancing clarinet.
Eternal Blue Aurora halal/Wata Igarashi mix
More mind control music, but this time Japanese techno by way of Brooklyn. I dare you to stop dancing (typing) while this is playing.
Under My Thumb – Rolling Stones
If I’ve done a good job writing for the day I feel like Mick Jagger at his sexiest and meanest, as captured in this song.
Ashtangi/shanti -Madonna
In the acknowledgments of The Dud Avocado Elaine Dundy thanks a masseuse for her daily massage because writing is painful on the body. I personally don’t have the funds to get a daily massage but I do suffer from intense writing related back, neck, and hand pain, so I started doing ashtanga yoga. It helped so much. I’d do it every morning before writing and then go to the library where I’d do a mid-day headstand in the stacks as a kind of as a re-up once my neck started to hurt. Works like a charm. Anyway, Madonna used to be big into Ashtanga in her “Ray of Light” era and recorded the opening Sanskrit Ashtanga mantra, which you chant in class. Basically you are bowing to the “jungle doctor” who is “able to remove the poison of the ignorance of conditioned existence.” Pretty good. Some ashtanga people were apparently mad at Madonna for taking liberties and repeating lines out of order but those are the people who get mad if you skip a pose because it hurts so I don’t know. I’ve not been practicing for a while and my whole body is in pain again. Time to get the Madonna back out.
Bob Dylan – Not Dark Yet
I was in London almost three years ago, making some final edits to my book before it went out to publishers for consideration. Time Out of Mind, one of my favorite albums, was playing, and as I sent the final document to my agent “Not Dark Yet” came on. My book is about escaping my hometown of New York and all of these vapid, transactional and vicious art world people I used to know, only to return to the city for one last soul crushing dinner with them. I was sitting on the bathroom floor having a glass of scotch in solo-celebration, getting ready to meet a friend, and I started singing along to the song.
Well, I’ve been to London and I been to gay Paris
I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea
I’ve been down on the bottom of the world full of lies
I ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there
I was born here, and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m movin’, but I’m standin’ still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
That was it. That’s the book. I typed up the line “I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will” and sent it to my agent. “This is the epigraph.” Worth the $250 I had to pay Universal Music Group.
K-Hand’s Boiler Room set from 2015
Picture this- you’re in the library, you’re two coffees and three teas deep, you feel lasers coming out of your eyes, you’re listening to some of the best Detroit techno ever, you’re typing at speeds no one has ever seen, mavis beacon would kill for these speeds. You’ve written TWICE your daily word quota of the day because the music is lifting you so much you just can’t stop writing. Shoutout to Leon Vynehall Butterflies. This is how you write a book, in my opinion. RIP Kelli Hand.
What It’s Like – Arthur Russell
In Iowa, in the tall grass, there’s a couple…
The Whole of the Law – The Only Ones/Yo La Tengo
If I’m not choosing my own music, I listen to the radio station WFMU most of the day, after listening to Democracy Now! on WBAI and then Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I’ve loved the Yo La Tengo version of Whole of The Law from since I heard it on WFMU as a teenager since YLT is like their radio station home band. Only while writing this book did I become addicted to the original version of this beautiful love song. I recommend both.
Here’s to Cheshire Here’s to Cheese – Pete Seeger
This song has been stuck in my head for the last 15-30 years. Don’t know what to do about it. I recommend listening to it and then singing it to yourself with the wrong words all day for the rest of your life. Here’s to the lovely strawberries.
Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and Muumuu House and NY Tyrant, her nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, BOMB,and elsewhere. She lives in New York and London. Happiness and Love is her first novel.