My first novel, Sound on Sound, appeared thirty years ago this spring.
For the purposes of this post, it would be nice if you could read it, or at least refer to a detailed review. But there weren’t any detailed reviews — pretty typical for a first novel, then and now — and the book is out of print, I think. One of the many interesting decisions Dalkey Archive’s late publisher made was to opt, toward the end of his reign, to save money, or space, by warehousing inventory in a shed in his backyard, where much of it suffered irreparable damage, including the extant stock of my book. Oh well. This is the sort of disadvantage that balances the benefits of publishing with a small press. Dalkey Archive is supposed to be bringing out a new edition at some point in the nearish future, and you’ll probably hear about it here first.
Anyway, Sound on Sound possesses an undisguised structure, fixed but lenient, intended to mimic the layered and blended assemblage of a multitrack recording, as indicated by its section titles1 — “Basic Rhythm,” “Vocals,” etc. Through an assortment of perspectives, voices, and narrative styles, it tells the story of one gig in the career of an unsuccessful New York bar band, which happens to take place on the evening of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in 1981.
Sound on Sound operates on a simple, maybe even simplistic, premise: that the weird and sometimes disturbing things that occur during the night of the gig flow from the official beginning of the Reagan era, and that the ripples spreading outward from that event continue to wreak havoc into the present day (which, diegetically, is 1991, at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War).
This premise no longer seems quite as facile as it may have when the book was published in 1995, in the middle of the first Clinton Administration. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the origins of Trumpism can be traced directly to Reagan’s putting in place policies and encouraging legislation that ultimately would lead to the fulfillment of some of movement conservatism’s wildest dreams, creating a society in which the majority is poorly educated, underserved by government, alienated from power, and addicted to entertainment and propaganda while a tiny elite possessing wealth and influence unimaginable in 1981 lives beyond accountability. The characters of Sound on Sound may live in Reagan’s world, but their rhetoric, their media consumption, their relationship to the truth and to history, their materialism, their preoccupation with fame, and their insanity are all Trump.
Sound on Sound is a curious artifact: its premise embraces an “open system” approach to narrative, allowing all sorts of historical and cultural noise to flow freely into the book, with the band’s gig serving as a node in a historical waveform. At the same time, its multitrack structural conceit imposes a “closed system” of recursive, self-referential intratextuality in which whatever has entered the novel inevitably is reprised, either through direct citation or in repurposed form, but never allowed to develop in a conventional narrative sense.
One of the reviews I did get, from Kirkus — the first review I ever received in my career — referred to all this as “pretentious technique,” a good nothing-phrase designed to put a book and its author in their places. I’ve always been fond of the book, myself. But I am a little embarrassed by its many inadequacies, and I’ve sometimes wondered how it would have turned out if I’d waited a little longer to write it, i.e., until I knew what I was doing. During the time I was working on it, from early 1990 to late 1992, I’d only recently begun reading studiously and I was taking everything I learned from what I read and immediately applying it to the manuscript (another thing pretty typical for a first novel). “Pretentious” is not quite the word. “Overreaching” works better. Possibly the most clever thing I pulled off in writing this very clever book was to present it as a pastiche, making virtue of necessity by masking my inability to do much with my influences beyond stark imitation.
Some writers go back to revise their earlier work — Henry James’ New York Edition with its Prefaces being the most prominent example I can think of — and probably a lot more of them consider it. But most, I think, move on. I’ve always been a mover-onner, for whatever reason, which is interesting, considering how much time I spend dwelling on the past and the many, many errors I have committed in it: you’d think that the opportunity to fix something pinned down and totally under my control would be irresistible. But I find writing a book to be an intense experience, and one I usually need time to recover from, and maybe that’s reason enough to not want to revisit it.
It's a little different in this case. Sound on Sound’s five sections are both completely discrete — different (pretentious) techniques, different styles, different perspectives, different voices, different tones and registers — and made up of the same elements, or polysemous signifiers, if you prefer2. “Secondary Percussion” is the book’s second and shortest section, consisting of fifteen pages of endnotes to the first section. In other words, it’s loaded with polysemous signifiers. The twist is that I didn’t actually anchor any of these notes to corresponding passages in that first section, so they’re just floating there freely, waiting for the reader to try to match them with their counterpart passages. Quel esprit! What can I say, I was in my twenties.
Anyway, I’m not “fixing” anything — I’m unlocking potential, as the motivational hucksters put it. The form taken by “Secondary Percussion” makes it an interesting thing to feed into a large language model -- in this case, ChatGPT 4o. Without providing 4o with a summary of the novel, I asked it to create the text that the endnotes gloss. I’ll share an example of the results in a moment.
Before proceeding, I’d like to reproduce a couple of pages of “Secondary Percussion,” to give you an idea of how it works:
Also, a necessary acknowledgement: “Secondary Percussion” owes a large debt to James McManus’ Chin Music (1985), a neglected, apocalyptic novel about a White Sox pitcher searching for his wife and son amid urban chaos as ICBMs speed toward Chicago with their doomsday payloads. One section of the book, beginning in the exact center of the Grove Press edition and extending for twenty-seven pages, consists of 3603 brief numbered entries. It baffled and fascinated me when I encountered it, and I borrowed it gratefully.
OK. These are the instructions I provided to ChatGPT 4o: “Here are a group of endnotes to an unspecified text, although I will tell you that it is the complete text following the page we examined earlier [I had provided it with the first page of the first section]. I would like you to (a) read and summarize the text, (b) offer an analysis and interpretation, (c ) offer a critique, and (d) write the text that the footnotes gloss.”
Here are the summary and analysis/interpretation (I was less interested in the critique, although I did laugh out loud at 4o’s warning that the format left “little room for quiet pathos”):
I asked 4o to generate several variations of the “underlying text,” as 4o puts it, pursuant to the prompt. Interestingly, in addition to the comparatively straightforward narrative I’ll reproduce here, it volunteered to generate assorted formal variations including an oral history, a personal letter, a rock critic’s retrospective view, and a first-person narrative — each of which appears in, and in some cases constitutes, other sections of Sound on Sound.
Absent contrary instructions from me, output was fairly brief, so it wasn’t able to use all of the endnotes in any one variation — a flaw, I suppose, although I was willing for the purposes of this post to accept the tradeoff of brevity for comprehensiveness.
All of the variations generated by 4o have their merits. Insofar as intentionality is concerned, 4o mostly gets it ”wrong” each time. Obviously, it couldn’t reconstruct the underlying text solely from the diffuse material I provided it. No person or intelligent entity could -- including me, with my intimate sense of the novel. That material is not a master key. Navigating it, 4o arrived at its own set of conclusions. And yet the output shares a lot of DNA with an underlying text unexamined by ChatGPT. I can recognize a version of my work that might occur in an alternate universe.
This example serves as the basis for the vignette I decided to develop:
As I discuss in this post, I generally treat raw output as material to be developed, rather than something to be used as-is. (In this instance, I made alterations without pursuing further mediation from an LLM operating as a text-to-text transformer.) With a few exceptions, I didn’t attempt to bolster or establish cohesion with the logic of the novel, creating a vignette that, sketchy and allusive though it may be, operates according to its own rationale and establishes its own fictional limitations. I borrowed, when I felt like it, from some of the other variations created by 4o. Here's what I made:
(1)
Jay said the snow was going to refreeze, but nobody listened, and it had already happened by the time Nat slipped on the front steps at 144 Prince, carrying the busted bass head in one hand and a coffee in a blue paper cup featuring faux-Greek figures and decorative ornamentation in the other. We are happy to serve you, it said. He didn’t fall, just struggled for an instant to keep his feet. Dave was behind him, eating potato chips, watching without expressing concern or offering help.
Inside, the elevator was out again, probably not sabotaged, although that was the persistently unfunny running joke. Upstairs, inside Zounds, someone had spray-painted “DO NOT FEED BACK” on the inside of the door to the common room. Jay was already up there, coiled tight on the couch with his legs tucked under him. He was listening to Joseph, who was explaining about black music again. He was eloquent. He used his fingers to depict the spreading branches of a large musical tree. The blues a giant limb, branching off here to form rhythm and blues and there to form western swing. Another was church music. His arm arced to indicate its limb springing from a mighty trunk, bearing musical fruit. Jay shifted uncomfortably. Joseph said he was looking for the end of the line. No one asked what he meant. He wore the same jacket he’d worn the night the International Brotherhood of Housewreckers held its sangria fest and two guys fell off the roof. That, Joseph insisted, was “a pattern, not a tragedy.” Then he left.
They were supposed to be rehearsing before the gig, but the space was a disaster. Darlene Sweet had left what looked like a meatball hero on top of Nat’s Bassman 2x15 cabinet, congealed and wrapped in a napkin on which “Love, I” had been written in lipstick. What did she want from him? She also had left another Barbara Cook record spinning unattended. Someone had pushed the broken Wurlitzer away from the wall and left it in the center of the room. The two rack toms had been removed from the kit and were missing, as were Jay’s pedals -- stolen, perhaps, or sacrificed in some quasi-symbolic performance piece by the Brotherhood.
Richard talked about phase coherence, or lack thereof, and how it all sounded like shit, and how was he supposed to do anything without his tom-toms? He was the closest to being ejected from the band. Candidates were not infrequent. They were supposed to run through new material—“Cheater’s Oath,” “Feed the Feedback.” Dave wanted to rehearse “All About Heartache,” “Style Bite,” “Kid With the Snowman,” and “Deli Rock.” Jay refused. He said that deli rock wasn’t a sound. It was a way of ordering. It was about knowing the rhythm of the counter. You don’t go in there asking for a turkey sandwich like it’s a question. You declare it. Also, he wouldn’t touch anything from the 8th Street sessions until someone found his pedals or admitted that they had pawned them. Nat asked why he hadn’t asked Joseph while he was still there. He was the obvious suspect. They argued about sandwiches.
Susan Dennis dropped by looking for Jay. She left with a zine and a Diet Pepsi. Joseph had been spotted down the street, outside M&O, telling someone from the Soho Weekly News that Zounds had achieved overwhelming equity and might secede from the collective altogether. They were rentiers. He’d shaved the left side of his head, claiming that it was an homage to his Yoruba ancestors. He also claimed that he’d gotten into a fistfight with Ishmael Reed over whether Hendrix had been assassinated. He smelled as if he’d peed in his pants. “I am this close,” he told the reporter, holding up fingers smeared with blue ink, “to getting Murdoch’s money.”
(2)
They took the long way uptown. When they finally loaded into Cheaters for the Inauguration Bash, everything was behind schedule. It smelled like stale beer and cigarettes inside. Darlene was crying at the bar, talking about Mary’s estate and the cursed bronzer she kept in her purse. There was a signed photo of Alfred Lutter taped to the mirror behind the bar. The inscription read “See me after class.” A fat woman wearing a gold lamé dress, sneering, asked Jay whether this was still punk or just elaborate mime. He didn’t answer.
It was too late for a soundcheck. Besides, the electricity at Cheaters was sketchy—Poindexter swore the board was being tapped by the Brotherhood. Their small and disloyal audience was already filing in. Joseph sat up front and Miles and Maureen discreetly changed seats. “What you got here, and I’ve said this elsewhere, is a cultural resistance movement disguised as a noise complaint,” he said.
They got two songs in before they blew a fuse. There was shouting. Joseph could be heard yelling from the back of the room, ”Play the menu!” Someone knocked over one of the PA columns. Richard was screaming about sabotage and threatening to call someone, maybe his mom. He threw a drumstick, hitting Nat. “This is why nothing gets mastered any more,” said Jay. They weren’t paid.
Afterward, they regrouped at M&O. No one was hungry. Jay got a knish but just dropped it into his coat pocket. Nat ordered an onion bagel and sailed it across Thompson Street. Dave improvised an ode to the miracle of salt and vinegar chips. Richard claimed he had seen the number 6 glowing in gold on the subway entrance and that it meant the hostages were free and the devil had taken the White House, but allowed that it might have been a station ID. Jay told him to shut up.
Back at 144, the air smelled like lighter fluid and Oodles of Noodles. Darlene was back upstairs, playing Barbara Cook at full volume with her bedroom light off. Someone had scrawled MERCY BEAT! in lipstick on the cracked mirror. Joseph had left behind a handmade flyer, unspecific as to time or place, for his upcoming reading of a manifesto titled “No More Myth Before Marketing,” which he’d written out on someone’s tuition invoice from NYU. Dave found it taped to the fridge. Jay called Susan and invited himself over to her house. Richard called the 24-hour Anheuser-Busch hotline. Nat fell asleep on the couch. It was the only honest thing he’d done all week.
I’ve always thought of “Secondary Percussion” as a kind of ghost text -- it answers questions that no one has raised about points that can’t be located with any certainty in a piece of writing that can only be identified contextually. Although the “underlying text” appears to leave a residue amid the endnotes, it’s possible that it doesn’t. In fact, it’s possible that the very idea of an underlying text is false. So any hope of recovering that text via reverse engineering is deliberately chimerical. The act becomes one of reestablishing contact with some of the dormant premises of a 30-year-old novel and thereby creating a new artifact. The act is a séance.
Although not by the title of the whole, a deliberate misnomer.
Talk about pretentious!
361, actually, including π nestled between 3 and 4.
Very fond memories of this book. I’ve got a galley copy around here somewhere. I’m gonna look for it.
I just wrote this to Bison, who should subscribe:
This book (SOS) is the one I stole from for my unpublished book Double Cascade; or, Anatomy of a Fall.
Sorrentino left some drafts in the waste basket in my apartment, which he had been subletting. I was sure he'd recognize the appropriations.
I'm not sure if he might own the only existing copy of Double Cascade.
Another ghost.