Trigger warning: everything under the sun, not that I go into any detail here, I promise. Finished reading this last night before bed, my ninth novel of 2023, after several weeks of purposefully not reading it right before bed, or when I ate, for that matter. The incessant violence of Hurricane Season isn’t what I worried might keep me up. What threatened to keep me up was trying not to imagine the effort that went into accomplishing the writing in the first place — the effort not on the part of the violence’s many perpetrators, but on the part of the author, Fernanda Melchor, or her translator, Sophie Hughes, not that authorship isn’t its own form of perpetration, or a translator a sort of accomplice, or that writing isn’t its own form of violence. Not, no — perhaps because. Hurricane Season is a Rashomon of abject poverty, written in sentences that seem to go on indefinitely but in fact largely adhere to civil society’s conception of grammar. By the end of one such sentence, you might be at an entirely other interstice along the story’s morbid timeline, or considering the world from the point of view of another dissolute character. But like the sentences, the broader chapters adhere to a certain logic, to an unwavering sense of ordinary reality, and they wend their way back to where they started, as if each life-altering incident and each fleeting association are merely byways to a sense not just of closure but of absolute, wearying, ceaseless inevitability. After about a quarter of the way through the book, I almost put it down for good. I’m not big on torture horror, less so when among the victims are the readers themselves. But when I realized that each section had a different character as its narrative avatar, I decided to stick with it. A puzzle emerged, all the better one for which a solution isn’t the point. The point is that the puzzle exists in the first place — that lives could be this intermingled and this alienated, this interdependent and this diametrically opposed, that they could fit together and yet not yield a satisfying whole. I alternated with lighter stuff (a history of mysticism, a pulp noir, a by-the-books spy novel, some utterly mainstream comic books), and slowly made my way. I started reading this because I saw it on a list of novels by someone on a list of someones, all of whom read books that were current and literary and demanding. Apparently a film is being made of it. I can’t imagine ever watching it. Imagining it was hard enough.
From San Francisco, California (and Japan): embracing contradictions, reading to compose
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s Your Name? Kei Terauchi Sideboard
Where Are You Located? I currently live in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, California. I was born in Chiba, Japan, and grew up in Tokyo and Saitama, playing the piano, in the 1980s. I suppose I was gifted but I wasn’t a very good student. I refused to learn to read music for years and really did not like practicing. My family moved to Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, in 1991 for my father’s work. There my piano lessons felt less confined, but I still played the classical canon of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, etc. I studied French literature and music at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. My senior thesis for French was on the retelling of Tristan and Isolde in literature and — you know it — Wagner, and my music project/presentation was talking about and performing pieces from the Second Viennese School, Berg’s Sonata Op. 1 (which is honestly more Romantic than Second Viennese), and Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19.
I went to SUNY Stony Brook and got an MA in Music Theory/History with a focus in music and technology. My master’s thesis was on Der Lindberghflug by Weill and Hindemith. I guess music in academia in my time was very Germanic! To support myself financially I worked as a bartender in NYC and got sucked into the restaurant world. This derailed me from the trajectory of waiting for a tenured professor to pass to finally land a faculty job in a university music department. I worked in some very nice restaurants in NYC, Kyoto, Japan, Minneapolis, Napa Valley, and SF, for 17 years, until I fell into the start-up philanthropy work I’m currently in.
What Is Your Musical Activity? Since I left academia I always played the piano and jokingly called it my party trick. Honestly I wasn’t very inspired for a number of years. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial uprisings — the murder of George Floyd and anti-Asian hate crimes in particular — made me rethink about the limitation of playing the classical repertoire, dead white men’s music, on the piano. At this time I had also started an MA program in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and as I learned to think more critically about the world I decided to push the realm of critical thinking into creativity. This is how I started to make my own music based on my own experience for the first time. I start with conceptualization, then make that into music. The “style” of my music varies quite a bit because I borrow various musical techniques to make what I’ve conceptualized, but I think I have my own recognizable sound. My master’s thesis is about my compositional process accompanied by a dozen pieces I had written during my first and second years in the program. Some Junto projects I have participated in overlap with these.
Kei Terauchi Sideboard reflects on both sides of the Pacific
What Is One Good Musical Habit? 1. Go to performances, see other musicians play music, hear what they do and how they do it. 2. Reading works by authors who figured out how to tell their story their own way helped my music making. Some writers I admire are Alexander Chee, Ocean Vuong, Joan Didion, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, James Baldwin, and Natalia Ginzburg.
What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project?0551: The Bends (“Get less strict about something you’re strict about”) helped me get over my fear of composing on/for the piano!
When you make music now, would you say you find yourself “unlearning” your earlier classical knowledge, or building upon it? I don’t think I can unlearn my earlier musical knowledge. For one, that would mean erasing the muscle memory from years of piano playing. I avoided using the piano for my composition for a while but there is something physical about piano playing that I need in my life. So I began to write on the piano last summer in a way that makes sense to me. I also think unlearning tonal harmony, the language of classical Western music, is really difficult because it’s everywhere in our culture.
I think of my earlier musical knowledge like language or food you grew up with. Even if it wasn’t your choice, even if you grew up with it because of oppressive circumstances, and even if you hated it at some point in your life, cultural items like language, food, and music, you can come to accept it’s folded in your DNA. You have language or food or music to connect with others around you. So even if a musical tradition was shoved down your throat, when you strip it down to just sound, I think you can let that be, and embrace it, embrace the contradiction within yourself. I think it’s that visceral, at least for me, and that’s how I look at my musical background.
The writers I mentioned earlier showed me that you can have complexity and not have to explain everything in your work. For example, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictée is a really powerful work of art that shows that the process of creating is how, when and where we express. And she gives zero f’s if you understand what she’s talking about or not. Her writing is engrossed in the act of writing itself and I want my music making to be like that, using my own experience and sounds in my memory, the good ones and the bad ones, because they are both mine. That’s an homage to Ocean Vuong; in his On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous there’s this line, “The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit.” Making music lets me hold my contradictions, lets me be me.
▰ Here is pianist Hania Rani performing, live, some of the music from her beautiful score to the film The Giacomettis, which I mentioned earlier this month. The footage was shot at Atelier in Stampa, Switzerland. That’s a former barn Giovanni Giacometti, father of artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and architect Bruno Giacometti, in 1906 turned into the family studio. Listening to this solo concert while alone at home is a highly recommended. Headphones are great, but better yet, play it loud and transport the sonics of the Atelier into your own room.
▰ The title to René Margraff’s “Hiccup” may be the result of sorting out a playful alternate word for the light glitch the musician brings to this otherwise plaintive, subdued drone. It’s a magnetic piece, just drawing the ear in even as it risks disturbing the very trance it insinuates.
About a decade ago, a little over a year into the existence of the Disquiet Junto, I put together a Junto FAQ (frequently asked questions) because I was, in fact, receiving a lot of questions, and I figured the best way to preemptively answer them was to answer the common ones publicly. Every once in a while I’ll update the FAQ. I reorganized some of the material this morning, for the first time since October of last year. It’s available at disquiet.com/junto. The main reason I’m sharing it is to be informative to new members. The other reason is to ask if there’s anything missing or that would benefit from clarification. Thanks very much.
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ The unique digital silence when the other person due to attend your online meeting doesn’t show up, and you just hang out all by yourself in the virtual space, un-disturbable and undisturbed, for a period of time — say 10 minutes — before logging off.
▰ This week in the #DisquietJunto, participants are creating new techno subgenres (more at llllllll.co and disquiet.com/0582). I’d say “imaginary” subgenres, but they’re not imaginary because they’re then recording example tracks. So far we’ve got:
Techno Bossa
Organ(ic) Takeno
Lockdown Techno
▰ Taking an online class. Unless the concepts get especially complicated, I watch the videos at 150% of the recorded speed. The main issue is the background music can get a little peppy.
