In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Morgan Day’s The Oldest Bitch Alive is a powerful and cleverly written novel, one of the year’s strongest debuts.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“This is an ambitious, freewheeling novel that plays with a great deal of philosophical material, but the painstaking specificity in which Day packages these musings, along with the visceral suffering and ecstasy of the book’s tragic heroine, protect it from opacity. An uncommonly commanding debut.”
In her own words, here is Morgan Day’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Oldest Bitch Alive:
The Oldest Bitch Alive aims to level out the narrative plane by exploring the perspective of things and beings much smaller than us humans. Writing the book required pushing aside many barriers of thought. These songs were routes to the elemental, helping me get down to different scales of existence and see through the lens of a French Bulldog, the parasitic worms inside of her, as well as things like foam and glass and soil. Some have lyrics–-most don’t—allowing me to loosen my grammar and senses of meaning and letting me examine movements and stillnesses in the world far different from my own.
Omni Gardens, “Watering Plants”
This album was made at the beginning of the pandemic for people to listen to while watching their plants grow. This song specifically feels exactly like that, but maybe outside by a stream. I listened to this one on loop while writing the book; it let me become tiny. To me, it’s similar to those timelapse videos of an apple being placed in a glass terrarium where all the organisms then move to consume it.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Thousand Knives”
I agree with this strung-out person on Reddit: “I decided to listen to a record that would be guaranteed to take me someplace else.” It’s one of my favorite songs ever.
Eola, “And I Know”
The book involved working through varied forms of intelligence and knowledge systems. This produced tension in the act of writing and also how the work was rendered on the page, meshing scientific fact with fantasy and myth, and finding aligned and competing truths in both. This song, and the entire album, and pretty much all work by Edwin (Eola is his solo album) and Andy White, pushed forth the writing process. The repetitive line, “I know, I know, I know that there’s nothing I know” felt like a central emotion, for everything to have conviction in its way of knowing and unknowing. This song also gave me permission to do whatever I wanted with the project and work against convention with purpose.
Together, Edwin and Andy are Tonstartssbandht. In an interview, they talk about how they weren’t concerned about having total silence and control while recording, you can hear the train passing by outside and the sounds of the water heater, a roommate showering or making eggs. The writer César Aira has said similarly, that if he’s writing somewhere and a bird flies by that the bird goes into the story. I think these approaches create a fluidity in the work that can’t be manufactured or reverse engineered, and that this fluidity is a form of nature. I can be so rigid and exacting with words that I needed these influences.
Gold Celeste, “Can of Worms”
“Open this can of worms / They said it would be good for you”—little Gelsomina, the old French Bulldog, contracts parasitic worms, and this line gets at her predicament, a harmful parasite that also sets forth her awakening and transformation. My partner often repeats a line from “The Man in Bogotá,” a short story by Amy Hempel that gets at the same idea: “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” It’s something we remind each other of when something not so great happens in our life, and it’s true for the most part. How could we know?
Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band, “Anchin Kfu Ayinkash”
An incredible song that never gets old. There’s nothing I could write here that would add to the experience of listening to it.
Hiroshi Yoshimura, “GREEN”
A melancholic but content song. Although, it’s been written that the album is “an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings,” so other listeners might feel differently. Sometimes while working on a project, it can be easy to get wrapped up in its big sweeping elements, and this one slows it down and creates time for the details. I specifically wrote about light and water while listening to this song, trying to feel what it would be like to be microscopic and inside bubbles of foam. Patrick McCarthy of the record label Temporal Drift (who reissued Yoshimura’s work) said that his “melodic choices are also so gentle and memorable, they feel like they have always existed.” Yoshimura said of his other album that he would appreciate it if it could be listened to like air. I think these are better, more fundamental ways of saying what we mean when we use the word ‘timelessness.’ This interview, where these quotes are from, has many more treasures about Yoshimura’s approach to visual and conceptual art.
75 Dollar Bill, “Singularity 06: Anchor Dragging Behind”
We play this if we have a song stuck in our head or have watched something unsettling and need to wash ourselves of the feeling. It’s cleansing in this way, and a great place to start or end each day with a project. Or start or end each day.
Eola, “Big Chestined Nights”
To be “experimental” in your work requires engaging with art that is trying to do the same. This song and the next drove the ending of the book, a feral chunk of text from the point of view of both Gelsomina and her worms, a grotesque animal ecstasy. It comes as no surprise that the primary thrust of the writing came from Eola, once again, by an artist who was a linguistic major and says of himself: “I don’t know why I’m into goopy word shit. I love making up words, visualizing sick unused vowel pairings, trying to learn different writing systems. I’m just really inspired and fascinated by languages and writing. It’s just my jam.” I found this out after a long obsession with the work, which felt very serendipitous. I spent so much time trying to cut, collage, and bend sentences, to use words in new ways, and allow sound and texture and feeling to propel the narrative rather than literal meaning. He says another song is “nonsensical” and that could be said of many of his, and I like this idea because you still have a grasp of what’s being communicated. I hoped to achieve the same in parts of my book.
Eola, “Not Getting”
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” (Samuel Beckett). No words in this choral one, but some utterances with a lot of emotion.
Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. The Oldest Bitch Alive is her first novel.