Danielle Dutton’s collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is modern creative nonfiction at its best, a collection of original and inventive pieces that defy literary categorization.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A shimmering and perplexing work that challenges the constraints of traditional prose… Highbrow while remaining mischievously playful, reminiscent of the form-smashing thrills of writers like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.”
In her own words, here is Danielle Dutton’s Book Notes music playlist for her collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other:
I live with two musicians, and they each seem to play the piano, which is downstairs, right under my desk, for 100 hours a day. When they’re not making sounds on the piano (or cello, guitar, kalimba), one is playing music through a bluetooth speaker in the dining room (often punk or jazz) and the other is playing records on a turntable upstairs (Radiohead, Elliot Smith). I play no instruments myself, and I almost never turn on music in the house. I do, sometimes, when I’m out on a walk by myself. When I’m sitting down at my desk to write I need it to be quiet, though it’s nice if I can write with the window open and half-listen to the noises of the neighborhood. This morning: birds, traffic, dogs, wind chimes (no shouting, no leaf blowers).
Because I don’t listen to music when I write, it’s hard to think of a playlist of songs that might make sense with this book. Instead I offer an assortment of sound pieces that seem to me to be thinking about spaces and their noises the way I was sometimes thinking about the spaces in/of this book . . .
The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause
In an interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1SnSv0OQdY), Krause, a bioacoustician, says he creates “performances of wonder” via field recordings of animals from all around the world. “Each habitat,” he says, “has its own story to tell.” I feel like I’ve been asking the inverse, sort of wondering if each story might have its own habitat to tell. Anyway, I initially thought of the story “Installation,” in the Prairie section of the book, as a kind of field recording of a specific spot on a river in Missouri, though it grew from there in unexpected ways.
Back in 2004 or 2005 I got to see Vicuña perform. I think it was billed as a poetry reading, and I remember we were all sitting in our rows of chairs waiting for something to happen at the front of the room. But then she emerged from the back, and, while singing/chanting, walked between the chairs and people, unspooling red yarn that eventually wove us all together. It was incredibly moving. It was like the whole space had become this living sculpture-performance-poem-song. Of Kunter Ko, Vicuña says: “In this set of songs/poems I enter the space of the death of the glaciers, the slow disappearance of ‘agua dulce,’ sweet water in the Andes and the world.”
Some of my proceeds from the sale of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other will go to the Missouri Prairie Foundation, which works to preserve remaining prairies and native grasslands. On this page of their website, you can listen to various sounds of the prairie, including the northern cricket frog, the eastern meadowlark, and the greater prairie chicken. I have never been in a prairie that was as noisy as parts of this recording, but I like how the recording gets at the quieter sonic space of the prairie too, which is always full of a particular open, buzzing, blowing landscape of sound.
Out There – A Field Recording Program at dublab
Speaking of landscapes of sound: I’ve been a fan of dublab for years but only recently listened to this. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but I think it involves the LA River, and I’m obsessed. Actually, this episode reminded me of a performance I saw in St. Louis a few years back by the composer Ellen Fullman; Fullman builds room-sized stringed instruments—she basically turns rooms into instruments—that she then plays by walking inside them. https://vimeo.com/14863993
Vessel Orchestra by Oliver Beer
Okay, and speaking of turning rooms into instruments: in the essay “A Picture Held Us Captive,” which makes up the Art section of this book, I write about how exciting I find it when a writer lets an art object speak through and warp their prose. I call it “letting the vase sing.” So I was pretty excited to internet-stumble across this piece by British artist Beer in which the vases are the singers of their own strange song.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Danielle Dutton’s playlist for her novel Margaret the First