A. Kendra Greene‘s collection No Less Strange or Wonderful is filled with magnificent essays that examine the world in all its fascinating facets large and small.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Greene brings ebullient inquisitiveness to 26 illustrated essays on matters human and animal, mundane and metaphysical. . . . With deftness and grace, she draws connections and meaning from her fresh take on a vibrant universe. A delightful collection.”
In her own words, here is A. Kendra Greene‘s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection No Less Strange or Wonderful:
Cabinet of Curiosity: A Bestiary of a Playlist
It just makes sense to me that a book written while obsessed with bestiaries—those medieval marvels of text and image, of etymology and travel writing and moral philosophy and natural history, of understanding the things we can’t see through the things we can—should inspire as wild, as motley, as unbelievable a playlist as possible. I started such a playlist two and a half years ago when I was figuring out what this book was. The playlist was more literal then, full of animals to start, then love and the devil and the universe, but the book leaned ever harder into curiosity as it came into being, and the playlist embraced wonder and credulity, too.
I’ve thought a lot lately about how this book gathers up innumerable gifts, just scads and scads of phrases and facts and ideas gleaned from everywhere but especially the people who, in any number of ways, bring meaning to my life. That’s the whole beating heart of it, the core of how I think and make and move in the world. So here we are, the book and the playlist: a cabinet of curiosity, a mix tape of mix tapes, all of it pieced together from things I was shown and occasionally discovered on my own, but either way things which are in some way so stunning I just have to share, can’t keep them to myself.
“Twelve Days of Christmas” John Denver & the Muppets
I know exactly where I was—next to my best friend Nicki in the back of her mother’s car going down Foothill—when I first heard this. As Christmas music goes, I find “Carol of the Bells” pretty unbeatable, but the genius of Beaker singing the ninth day as “Meep, meep meep MEEP meep”—so recognizable and yet so transformed! so unexpected and so exactly how it must be!—just undoes me.
“Snowflake Music (from Bottlerocket)” Mark Mothersbaugh
My college sweetheart, the only person to make me an actual mix tape, had a show at the college radio station and would bring back CDs for me to listen to. Some were and some weren’t the kind of things my English major listened to, and I always thought that was lovely, that it wasn’t just sharing but exploring, that the impulse was to imagine what might resonate with me.
“Salaam-E-Ishq” Sonu Nigam, Shreya Ghoshal, Kunal Ganjawala, Sadhana Sargam, Harshdeep Kaur, Shanker Mahadevan
This book has made me think a lot about curiosity, and specifically how curiosity might well be a form of love. It has all the hallmarks of it: such care and attention and openness. And for all the song lyrics referenced in an essay about love embodied—and the insistence of my painter friend, who travels with a bag of harmonicas, and says there’s a whole generation that’s not going to get a J. Geils Band reference if I don’t tell them that’s what it is—it’s this sweeping, cinematic dance number that I’ve returned to as the best of love songs, ever since my darling friend invited me to a screening of the Bollywood spectacular and then burned this jubilation as part of a CD titled in reference to a study we once read about chaffinches, back in an unforgettable seminar on The Psychology of Language.
“Friday I’m in Love” The Cure
My students in Korea made a study of my K-pop education, and in noraebang after noraebang I tried to deduce what karaoke I was actually suited to, started with the old crooners and hovered in the fast-talking talk-singing that demanded little range, came to understand I was best in duet. But the sound of Korea is maybe still what was on the Walkman when I walked to Tae Kwon Do, late, because if you are going to take up the national sport you’ll be a beginner running laps with six year olds unless you enroll in the last class of the night, spar in padding like Twister mats come to life with a nine year old and a high schooler and a college student and a professor and a woman who works at the television station, knows what you mean when you string together just enough words to communicate: “The danger is here.”
“Freedom” Erasure
The year I lived in a living room, not even couch surfing but sleeping on three floor cushions that drifted apart in the night, the weight of my hips and shoulders and feet like pivot points articulating the disjointed minimalist sofa, there was a day downtown when a sudden downpour caught me sheltering under the awning of the movie theater. My roommate and I had just run into an old friend, decided we could all afford to wait out the rain with a matinee. I went to the movies with the old friend a lot that year, learned the term “corporate goth,” and chewed our way through the gummy penguins and Swedish fish and britecrawlers circle of life watching March of the Penguins. When the corporate goth came to pick me up, there was always Erasure on the tape deck, as loud as we could stand, and “Punch it, Chewey!” shouted over it with something like abandon, a benediction to make the tricky left turn out of the apartment’s circular drive and across two lanes of lakeside traffic en route to the theater’s dark.
“Sons & Daughters” The Decemberists
In the book I mention a bike mechanic wooing me with seashells and itineraries and flowers and the vase to put them in, but it also included Arcade Fire and The Crane Wife, the latter with a note that the band’s song writer was also a short story writer, that you could tell once you knew, that I might like to know all the things writers do with their writing, all the things they do extended and beyond it.
“One Day Like This” Elbow
I was listening to The Seldom Seen Kid on repeat driving from Chicago to Iowa City to move the backseat worth of things I owned into my new friend Nancy’s spare room. A neurosurgeon I never saw again had just taken me to their concert, the frontman orchestrating a remarkable contract with the audience where the band would only come back to do an encore if we collectively sang a song to them. We did. And I kept this anthem of possibility, of how just a glimpse of revelation can stain you, on repeat as the fields unfolded and I learned that one of the things I would love about Iowa was the great murmurations of little black birds shaping the open sky.
“All The Old Showstoppers” – The New Pornographers
I met the album Challengers amid galley racks and cabinets of lead sorts in the Center for the Book’s Type Kitchen—and subsequently played it so many times letterpress printing my first chapbook that I mailed the band one of the edition as a thank you for all the joy I’d spent with them. There’s a phenomenon printing where every time you pull the paper from the press, see what has just imprinted on it, there’s a thrill that you would think would diminish because the last pull did just the same thing, but it gets me every time, and this album was kind of like that. The chapbook was my first attempt at text and image, and it changed my life. It is the seed essay of what eventually, a long time later, became this book.
“Perpetuum Mobile” Penguin Cafe Orchestra
I fell for Preludes, Airs and Yodels in a radio essay class. It is so good, so companionable. I listen to it as the sole object of my attention or I put it on as background when I need to focus, sometimes catch samples of it as interstitials on public radio and discover I have the sort of friends who hear in it a wedding march. The quirk and catch and beauty of, all the pieces of it building and searching and sometimes giddy, sometimes yearning—so resonant—sweeps me up ever and again.
“High Hopes” Panic! At the Disco
This was on the radio driving from San Antonio to Dallas, the last trip before lockdown, and I listened to it a lot thereafter on my night walks during pandemic. That same season I noticed memories flashing, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, that invariably warmed or cheered or soothed me, made me think “I’m so glad we did that,” and began to seem like my brain throwing out lifelines, trying to save me, tethering me as best it could to times and people and moments that mattered. I was grounded from travel, from the site-specific research I had lined up, and this is where my mind went instead—this book is in part what came from following where it lead. The song was part of a playlist that sometimes made me dance during those late walks, right down the sidewalk, an act that felt essential and experimental and tapped into something I should heed. I learned the lyrics about long shots and “museum victories” and very specifically “The weird and the novelties don’t ever change” well enough to sing along, feeling they were uncannily, almost personally, addressed to me.
“The Sloth” – The Brothers Four
My family shows up in this book. Indeed, seeking mentions of themselves, my nieces have been asking for the essays as bedtime stories these last few years, and that ritual of reading to them, watching in real time what they connected to, made me think about how I wanted to write the essays that followed. At their age, I would have been listening to the record collection of my parents, all folk and comedy. I am definitely the child of someone moved to sing along, to this day, with the lyrics, “The bradypus, or sloth, am I…”
“Share It Maybe” Cookie Monster
The copy editor flagged the six line excerpt of a parody ode I wrote for my niece to make sure it wasn’t too close to Carly Rae Jepsen’s original lyrics. Honestly, if I’m ever going to have my day in court, it would be worth it to introduce a hand puppet Giraffe belting “Giraffone Maybe” into evidence. When I recorded the same passage for the audiobook, the engineer stopped me because the melody has its own protections. “You can read them monotone or you can sing them badly,” he said. I asked if spoof lyrics sung in the high pitched voice of an imaginary giraffe for the benefit of an eight year old could possibly count as singing it well. “It’s not bad enough,” he said. Giraffe attempted the monotone.
“Bears” Lyle Lovett
I don’t actually know why this song was in my library in the first place, seemed to turn up when I was making that initial attempt at a playlist, and I was properly charmed by the playfulness and shapeliness of its language, know it was in the bright studio with me the late August days I was working out how to write about a chipmunk with human fingers, how to draw Korea as a bunny/tiger but also as a Rorschach Test of an ink blot, a torn hole in the page.
“Indiana Jones Theme” John Williams
I found myself whistling this not infrequently as I walked between my studio and the library this fall, in those six weeks when I was writing the acknowledgments and honing the dedication and fact checking the final questions of the proofreader and drawing a final surge of illuminations. There’s a reference maybe midway through the book about the iconic bag of sand / golden idol scene, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. The tune came unbidden, I suspect had more to do with that sense of adventuring into the unknown, of generally putting to bed what has been the most intense incubation, most daringly creative, most seat-of-the-pants evolution of discovering, at speed, just what this book really is and needs to be.
“C’est Magnifique”
I did the absolute last pass of this book in the midst of chasing giraffes and l’enfer at The American Library in Paris. I am, inexplicably, just terrified when I leave for these things. It started with my Iceland work a decade ago, and for whatever reason remains with me. It’s not the flying, but the leaving maybe, the risking of precious resources, the vulnerability of what if it doesn’t pan out, of stepping into who knows what? A composer sent me this tune as a bon voyage. I listened to it in the jet bridge, and it steadied me. I returned to it for weeks, on the flight and the Metro and as I crossed over the Seine. It is now woven into what I discovered with it, has the special ability to transport me even now that I am home. This composer sometimes cautions me not to read into lyrics, that you could miss what matters in the song, indeed sent this recording with no voice beyond the piano itself. I take the liberty of thinking the title at least can be taken at face value, is undeniably right—not just about setting out or the unknown or discovery or Paris, not just about the note in the bottle by which we every so often manage to collide, but about all of it—about everything.
A. Kendra Greene is the author most recently of No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays (Tin House).