In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The stories in Emily Mitchell’s collection The Church of Divine Electricity are brilliantly inventive and and marvelously dark.
Dan Chaon wrote of the book:
“These eerie fables of societies gone amok are almost too realistic to bear. Mitchell has written a fitting epitaph for our species: a darkly glittering gem of a book.”
In her own words, here is Emily Mitchell’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection The Church of Divine Electricity:
My second story collection The Church of Divine Electricity begins with an epigraph from the poem “[American Journal]” by Robert Hayden. “[American Journal]” is a wonderful, strange dramatic monologue spoken in the voice of an alien ambassador who has come to earth to learn about these bizarre people who call themselves Americans. He says:
like us they have a veritable populace
of machines that serve and soothe and pamper
and entertain we have seen their flags and
footprints on the moon also the intricate
rubbish left behind a wastefully ingenious
people many it appears worship the Unknowable
Essence the same for them as for us
but are more faithful to their machine made gods
technologists their shamans
The poem was the title work of Hayden’s 1978 collection. But when I encountered it in the 2010s, it seemed as if it had been written about our own era, including our besotted, mystified relationship to technology, which is perennially fascinating to me and which I’ve been writing about for a long time. The poem is about a lot more than this, of course, and Hayden as an African American writer has a particular, skeptical, distanced view of US culture and its noisy self-certainty. But the stanza which I chose for the epigraph forms, I think, a useful touchstone for my book, connecting directly with the book’s title. Basically, the imaginary Church of Divine Electricity, with its worship of technological progress, is the church we all belong to by virtue of living in our time and place, whether we like it not, and whether we admit to it or not. Although they range around among genres from magical realism, to surrealism, to horror to speculative fiction, this is what the stories in my book are fundamentally about: our uncanny present and its haunted/haunting machines.
For my playlist, I went in order through the stories as they appear in the collection, picking a song to represent each one. In a couple of places, I’ve cheated and chosen more than one song. Like my stories, the songs are pulled from a lot of different genres and time periods. But I think (I hope) they work together to make something weird and pleasing, rather the way I think (I hope!) my collection ultimately does.
“Mothers”: “Hark to the Music” by Ezra Furman and “Running the World” by Jarvis Cocker
Mothers tells the story of a woman, Ana, who works as a cleaner for a company that manufactures and sells giant therapy robots for the very rich. These enormous faceless automata are great at making their users feel peaceful and safe and good about themselves by picking them up and rocking them like babies. The only problem is they’re so expensive, only those who are already extremely privileged can possibly afford to use one. Even people who work for the company aren’t granted access. But Ana’ s beloved son Gus is suffering from a terrible depression, and he could really use the help…
This story came pretty directly out of my reading of essayist Mark Fisher’s writings, especially Capitalist Realism, which for me was like having someone turn a light on in my head that had always been there but for which I’d never found the switch before. Fisher describes, in a way accessible to a general reader, how the end of communism and the so-called triumph of western liberalism were, in one sense, massive disappointments of expectations. In the 20th century, people dreamed and worked ambitiously to change society for the better. Sometimes this led to great things and sometimes it led to disaster. But either way, by the 1980s and 90s, the consensus was that such radical change was no longer possible or desirable. Liberal capitalist government was the best we could ever hope for. It was time to grow up and be sensible. The free market was human nature and history was over.
Yeah, right. As a socialist and a deep dreamer about human possibility, Fisher could see clearly what a total fucking bummer this was. He realized that people deprived of a framework within which to imagine profound change towards greater justice, equality and flourishing would become depressed and this depression would express itself in different ways. But the longing for something better would also remain and in my story, the characters are just starting to wake up to that. And what better serenade for them in this than Ezra Furman’s wild plea to find some way, any way, to break out of your damn shell? And then of course, I couldn’t resist adding in Jarvis Cocker’s lovely anti-neoliberal rant with its triumphantly profane refrain about who is still in charge.
Life/Story: “The Sun Always Shines on TV” by A-ha and “Arcadia” by Apparat
I’m dating myself with this first choice but that’s okay. Who doesn’t like A-ha? And I’m making up for it by adding Apparat’s ghostly ode to the best laid plans gone awry. Life/Story, the second piece in my collection, is a novella about an ordinary husband and father who is offered the chance to participate in a TV reality show called Life Stories. He stands to win an amount of money that will change his life. All he has to do is come up with a project or plan that’s exciting and suspenseful enough that other people will want to watch it unfold on screen – his “Story”. To record this, he’ll be followed around by a cloud of tiny drones that will video everything he does all day and night for a full year. Sounds simple. But once he agrees to it, he can’t think of anything to do that’s interesting enough for the show. He’s paralyzed with indecision. As this drags on, the life he loves begins to fall apart – all because he cannot figure out how to turn himself into the star/hero/protagonist that he’s supposed to be – until he finally reaches the point of desperation where he’s willing to try anything to save his marriage and get his family back.
“Forgotten Pastimes of the Victorians”: “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” by Tom Lehrer
I love stories that take the form of lists, stories that dispense with conventional plot and character and just describe. This third story is a putatively scholarly account, complete with citations from learned works, of all the bizarre things that our forebears from 200 years ago might have done to keep themselves amused. These include: endurance sneezing contests; beard collecting; bonnet fighting; and a dance called “the galvanic” where the participants pretend they’ve been electrocuted. Of course, all historical fiction is really about the present, and so the end of the story curves around to include some activities that resonate more directly with our own time. I didn’t include Tom Lehrer’s favorite hobby of pigeon poisoning on my list, but I think it would fit in there very nicely.
“Her Face I Cannot See”: “Suspiria” by Goblin
Horror is having quite a moment. Maybe it’s the only genre capable of capturing the profound distress and anxiety of our time. For this story, I set out to deliberately work with the conventions of horror, the way that the presence of something dreadful and otherworldly is only gradually revealed the characters and their audience. I was inspired by the writings of Thomas de Quincey’s and by discovering that large sections of his last book of essays, Suspiria de Profundis, are lost. All that remains of those missing essays are their titles, one of which is: “Who is this Woman that for some Months has followed me up and down? Her face I cannot see for she keeps ever behind me”. This seemed like one of the most terrifying things I could imagine: being followed around by someone of whom you could never get a good, clear view. In my story, the protagonist Simon starts seeing a woman when he goes out in in city where he’s moved, New York, to escape from some bad experiences he had at home in England. At first, he is curious about her. He thinks she might be a romantic prospect. Soon, however, he comes to believe there is something sinister about her and he wants to be rid of her, which turns out to be easier said than done.
Of course, I’m hardly the first creator to be inspired by de Quincey. There have now been two movies based on Suspiria de Profundis. While both are good, I’ll admit to preferring the Dario Argento Suspiria from the 1970s. Even the wallpaper in that film is terrifying. Even the hairstyles! And then there’s the amazing fever-dream of a score by Goblin. Has there ever been a more frightful piece of music than the theme they created with its creepy glockenspiel and its taunting, whispering voices almost too quiet to hear? If so, I do not ever, ever want to hear it.
“The Church of Divine Electricity”: “International Dateline” by Ladytron
I could have picked any number of Ladytron tracks to accompany this story because more than anyone else I think they capture in their music the way technology is simultaneously ominous and alluring. We’re drawn to it even as we’re afraid of it. In this story, the father of a troubled daughter is initially delighted when she turns her life around, then dismayed to discover it’s because she’s joined a new, transhumanist religion in which some adherents undergo surgery to alter their bodies in experimental ways. The protagonist, Henry, can’t figure out whether this religion is the force for good his daughter Rebecca claims or the sinister thing his wife Carol believes. But he loves his child and just wants her to flourish, and this leads him ultimately to embark on a course of action he could never have predicted or foreseen.
“The Woman Who Loved a Tree”: “Suspended in Gaffa” by Kate Bush
I was beside myself with delight when Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill” was popular for 15 minutes in 2022 because it featured in Stranger Things. I kept picturing all these genZ listeners newly discovering her incredible catalog, all the wonderful albums she’s made over the decades, each one a totally unique gem. No other songwriter I can think of explores female sensuality, in all its unruly peculiarity, as brilliantly as she does. So I knew I’d look for one of her songs to go with this story about a woman who is led by the power of her senses out of her comfortable, settled existence into a world she could never have previously conceived. I finally chose “Suspended in Gaffa” because it combines desire and awe that resonate in exactly the way I hope my story does. What if it turned out your one true love was a vast, beautiful beech tree that lived in a park near your home? Then what would you do?
“The Assistant”: “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” by Tubeway Army
This story is a dramatic monologue spoken in the voice of an AI, specifically an Ameliorex Daemon 3000 “fully integrated subcutaneous assistant” that has just been installed in its new user and is very excited to demonstrate all its wonderful capabilities, all the ways it’s going to make that person’s life better and more efficient. The user is still groggy from the anesthetic they were given to allow for the assistant’s installation. But, to the assistant’s great surprise, they don’t seem nearly as delighted or enthusiastic as the assistant expects. In fact, they seem to be growing gradually more and more upset. What on earth, the assistant wonders, could be going on?
One thing that always interests me is the mismatch between the romantic vision of how technology will improve everything and the reality that both humans and our creations break, malfunction and lead to unintended consequences. Even though it’s from an earlier era, Tubeway Army’s song about an artificial companion that goes wrong seems to capture something of this: the idea that human beings will still be sad and flawed and prone to loneliness even amid all our gleaming automation.
“In Which I Try to Save the World from Total Destruction Through the Power of Art”: “Five Years” by David Bowie and “Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois” by Sufjan Stevens
This story is about an alien who comes to earth to check out humanity and decide if there is any good reason why his people, who desperately need a new home planet for themselves, shouldn’t wipe us out and replace us. If he finds something unique and worth preserving that we’ve done or made, he can call of the invasion. If no, curtains for us. His next-door neighbor, a disaffected single mom, discovers what he’s up to and tries to help him since it’s the only way she can save herself and those she loves. She thinks initially this will be easy, since obviously humanity has created so many wonderful things. Her efforts, however, don’t quite work as planned.
My favorite songs about people from space are (of course!) from Parliament’s album The Mothership Connection. But the joyful interstellar fabulosity of George Clinton and Bootsy Collins didn’t seem quite right for my absurdist, melancholy little story, so instead I went with David Bowie, the other great space alien to walk among us, and “Five Years” with its ominous account of world whose time is up. And then Sufjan Stevens lovely, lilting song “Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois”, which treats the alien as something holy, comes closest to capturing the sweet, sad tone I was attempting of someone looking around at the world and really seeing its beauty for the first time just at the moment when it might be lost.
“Becoming a Cat”: “The Lovecats” by The Cure and “Black Cat Hoot Owl Blues” by Ma Rainey
This very last story in the book is a set of instruction for turning yourself into a cat. If you are really fed up with being a human being, with our awkward upright posture, our need to acquire so many pointless material possessions and our terrible self-consciousness, this story is here to tell you there is help. There is a way out. Through the process of felinization.
There are a lot of bad songs about cats in the world. One friend suggested “Eye of the Tiger” for this entry, and I thought about that seriously for at least five minutes. Finally, though, I settled on The Cure’s inimitable anthem to gothy otherness and Ma Rainey’s gorgeous lament about the kind of bad luck that just won’t go away.
Emily Mitchell, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of a collection of short stories, Viral, and a novel, The Last Summer of the World. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere; her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Guernica. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review.