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March 25, 2021
Bess Winter's Playlist for Her Story Collection "Machines of Another Era"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Bess Winter’s collection Machines of Another Era is truly wonderful and awe inspiring. The stories and characters still haunt me months after I finished the book.
Amber Sparks wrote of the collection:
"Bess Winter’s stories are lovely and lithe and odd; much like scraps of paper and curious photographs found tucked away in old books, they haunt in corners of the mind for a long time after reading, full of ephemera and wonder."
In her words, here is Bess Winter's Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Machines of Another Era:
Nina Simone—“Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (Live)”
Besides my own work being about time and history, I think everyone who makes art is, in some way, trying to stop time. Nina Simone’s glorious cover of the Fairport Convention song is about the closest you can get to actually stopping time for a while. If you need to feel something big about life, this is a good song. I have listened to it off and on for years whenever I feel like a little speck in a major universe (which is most of the time). I often feel that way when I’m writing.
Ron Sexsmith—“Man at the Gate (1913)”
Many of the stories in Machines are set in my hometown of Toronto, and you can’t get much more Toronto than Ron Sexsmith. I love this song, in which the speaker looks at a 1913 postcard of Trinity Bellwoods Park (now a hotspot for the farmer’s-market-browsing, brunching, bocce-playing hipster set) and muses about the life of the man standing in front of its gate. Many of the stories I write are based on archival photos of Toronto and I’m sure that I’ve seen this particular photo at some point, if it’s a real photo. I’ve also seen Ron Sexsmith, himself, get pounced on by an enormous dog at Trinity Bellwoods Park.
Nick Drake—“One of These Things First”
Here’s a wonderful song about things. Writing about things is something I do a lot. I also think often about incarnations and reincarnations. My stories are about the way things travel through time, how they outlive us. The idea that in a former life one could have been a clock or a boot is both unsettling and oddly comforting. Why not? What’s so special about being a person, anyway?
Silver Jews—“Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed”
There are several ponies in the collection, made of different mediums: porcelain, cotton, and actual pony. One of these ponies, Niblet, gets his tail cut off, and this song is for him.
Anthropomorphized animals play a big part in Machines. Its opening story is about Koko the gorilla and her use of sign language. The whimsy of this song, juxtaposed with its deep cynicism, is what makes it an especially good fit for the book. David Berman/Silver Jews have been a major influence on my sense of the world and sense of humor for a long time, and I’m still grieving the loss of Berman’s voice.
Jacques Offenbach—“Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille” from Tales of Hoffmann
I’m fascinated by dolls, the history of dollmaking, and the ways women’s history is embodied by dolls. You’ll find several dolls in the book. One particular story in Machines—“Talking Dolls”—is specifically about a doll just like Olympia, the creepy automaton with which Hoffmann falls in love in Tales of Hoffmann. This is her song, and it’s bonkers and delightful even if you’re not an opera fan. If Edison’s Talking Doll, the subject of “Talking Dolls,” could sing, she would sing this aria. Poorly.
Kate Bush—“Wuthering Heights”
Haunted, ethereal, weird—I needed something for this playlist that captured the Victorian mourning that happens in several of the collection’s shorter pieces and “Wuthering Heights” just felt right. As a grad student I considered Kate Bush one of my literary muses, imagining that my work would sound like her if it were music. That’s embarrassing to admit now.
Nick Cave—“The Curse of Millhaven”
Girls can be bad, bad, bad. There are a lot of bad girls in this collection (I love them!). They commit various crimes.
Oscar Peterson—“Round Midnight”
This song actually plays in the background of the final story in the collection: a work of metafiction that revolves around my mother’s run-down apartment building, which is fabulous and noir as hell and full of dumpster divers, former models, lounge musicians, dog groomers, and those who claim connections to royalty. Oscar Peterson really did live in the penthouse in the 1980s. This song is so beautiful that it still makes me cry, and I listened to it on a loop while I wrote the story. I was trying to figure out how to describe the living, breathing way Oscar Peterson plays the piano, like he’s talking. Now when I hear it I always think of the late nights I went up in the 1950s-gold elevator that took Oscar Peterson to his penthouse, with its wooden scrollwork and its shuddering movement and its strange smells.
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