Amanda Petrusich looked back on Bessie Smith's music at the Oxford American.

Poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti has passed away.

Esquire listed essential books Ferlinghetti wrote or published.

The Guardian and New York Times remembered him.

Stream a new song by the Natvral.

Debutiful interviewed author Zak Salih.

American Songwriter profiled Chuck D.

BuzzFeed recommended the week's best books.

Hillary Clinton is co-authoring a mystery novel with Louise Penny.

Suleika Jaouad discussed her memoir Between Two Kingdoms with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Stream a Gloria Record rarity.

Granta shared a conversation between authors Lucie Elven and Madeleine Watts.

Stream a new Adult Mom.

Philadelphia Magazine interviewed poet and activist Sonia Sanchez.

Stream a new Fog Lake song.

K Chess talked books and reading with Book Marks.

Stream a new Pussy Riot song.

Stream a new Bloodkin song.

Author Jeff Jackson discussed his music with Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

The Transmissions podcast interviewed author Peter Guralnick.

Electric Literature shared an excerpt from Emma Duffy-Comparone's collection Love Like That.

Stream a new song by Mia Joy.

The Creative Independent interviewed publisher and editor Estrella Bonilla.

Guitarist Rachel Aggs shared her favorite music with The Quietus.

Betina Gonzáles and translator Heather Cleary discussed the novel American Delirium with Debutiful.

BOMB interviewed author Matthew Salesses.

Kirkus examined the continued resonance of Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir The Woman Warrior.

The New York Times previewed March's best books.

Tor Nightfire interviewed author Cassandra Khaw.

Lucy Clarke recommended books about castaways at the Guardian.

The OTHERPPL podcast interviewed author David Tromblay.

The New York Times examined baseball's fascination with Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Literary Hub shared Jonathan Lethem's introduction to a new edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

The Rumpus interviewed author Julia Fine.

Words Without Borders interviewed poet Najwan Darwish.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.

February 23, 2021

Matthew Gavin Frank's Playlist for His Book "Flight of the Diamond Smugglers"

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In his words, here is Matthew Gavin Frank's Book Notes music playlist for his book Flight of the Diamond Smugglers:

My new nonfiction book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, investigates the role of carrier pigeons in Southern African diamond smuggling—the ways in which workers bring their trained birds into the mines concealed in lunchboxes, pack diamonds into specially-sewn bags, attach said bags to the birds’ feet, and set the pigeons into the air, where they fly to their homes and the awaiting hands of the laborers’ families, who unpack the diamonds and make their fortunes. The book also engages the endurance of personal grief, as well as issues of climate change, social justice, environmental destruction, eco-criticism, corporate colonialism, police brutality, exploitation of indigenous people and people of color, late-capitalist greed, and animal rights. And the book also engages…well… a love for birds. Throughout, in telling these stories, I tried to be open to wonder and horror, to mystification, to quiet beauty, and to flight and to music, actual and metaphorical.

“Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba

Makeba’s song wedges joy and delight into an encompassing heartbreak, celebrating the drive to sing and dance and commune amid a looming oppression. As the book opens, I sit with a young diamond miner on a beach on the outskirts of the restricted mining town of Oranjemund, just on the South African side of the Namibian border. We both hug our knees to our chest at sunset, sitting in the sand beneath a sun-bleached sign that reads, NO ENTRY. He speaks to me of the many dangers facing those who labor in the diamond industry. He speaks to me of the danger he faces simply by speaking to me. He speaks to me, joyously, of the pigeons he raises in secret as companions, and as avian accomplices in “illicit” diamond smuggling. Can Makeba’s song help to contextualize this brew of danger, joy, sand and sunset? I don’t know. I do know that “Pata Pata” was the last song Makeba ever performed right before collapsing onstage on November 9, 2008, the night she died.

“Ketine” by Ali Farka Touré

This slow, droning, meditative blues manages to entrance, while—perhaps via the rattlesnake-y percussion—also managing to disquiet, to build a kind of suspense. It’s not entirely safe to give oneself over to its spell, but one is helpless to resist. One just has to hold on, and be transported, as if tied to the feet of a diamond-bearing smuggler pigeon as it takes off from the mine, and rises over the aerial ropeways, stout ladders joining the stepped catacombs and blind alleys, pyramids, plateaus, arroyos of mud; the boys and men who dig until their bodies break. One can only dig into the earth so deep before the earth decides to collapse.

“Andizenzi” by Kanyi Mavi

Urgent and incantatory, Mavi’s stew of synth, chorus, explosive percussion and wordsmith-ery evoke also an amalgam of beauty and brutality, anger and wonder. Until very recently, much of South Africa’s West Coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and was officially closed-off to the public for the better part of 80 years (the heyday of diamond exploration and mining in the area), plunging the local communities into a mysterious isolation. Recently, De Beers even had a shadowy agreement with satellite companies to scrub the images of this so-called Forbidden Zone from their recorded files. It was, essentially and officially, an erasure from the earth. A blank spot on the map. A redacted place. A non-country within a real country. Terra incognita-meets-planned-community. According even to the satellites, it didn’t exist. Heavily-armed security forces guarded (and still guard) its borders. And surrounding this zone is the richest bulb flora arid region on the planet— blanketed, for two weeks’ time in the middle of August, in an overwhelming kaleidoscope of orange and purple desert flowers.

“Pomp and Pride” by Toots and the Maytals

Speaking of those desert flowers, I was lucky enough—during one of my research trips to South Africa— to have witnessed this brief bloom. The world seemed to have gone Oz-like, and I drove a rental car through all of this floral psychedelia, blasting some Toots. The roads, during this two-week window, are jammed. Bloom-obsessed tourists descend on the region hoping to spot and photograph as many of the 3,000 plant species as possible, and temporary “Flower Hotlines,” replete with all the latest updates, spring up. People drive recklessly in order to outrun the dusk hours when the flowers close up for the night. In the evenings, tourists fill under-prepared cafes, sip Chenin Blanc, and compare pictures, speaking animatedly of kaleidoscopes and rain-daisies. And then the two weeks are up, and the flowers die, and the land’s apparent infertility is restored. Every time I imagine the flowers opening and closing, I imagine them opening and closing to the bounce of this song.

“Police and Thieves” by Junior Murvin

When laborers affix too many diamonds to pigeons, the exhausted and overloaded birds tend to falter, and to land at random along the beaches of the Diamond Coast. When De Beers officials caught wind of this, they had it declared illegal to raise pigeons in the region. In fact, in 1998, a local lawmaker made it illegal to not shoot a pigeon on sight, should one have the means to do so. Still, so many raise pigeons in secret, and sometimes successfully smuggle diamonds using this method. If one is caught keeping these birds, the local police are given leeway to enact “unofficial” forms of punishment. Rumors abound in the region of such “offenders” having had their fingers broken, or eyes excised, or hands or ears or feet, or head cut off. Murvin’s falsetto haunts the song’s lyrical content, and yields the sort of protest that longs to ascend from atrocity, without ever turning away from it, taking to the sky, but never forgetting the blood.

“Type” by Living Colour

At one point in the book, I find myself riding on the back of a Land Rover, passing around a bottle of brandy with a bunch of gun-toting anti-pigeon militia members. Though not officially sanctioned by De Beers, these militias thrive here, contracted to kidnap people’s pets right from their coops on nighttime stealth runs, and bring them to isolated spots on the beach hidden among the labyrinth of dunes. Here, they make a game of executing the birds. As they allowed me to bear witness to the slaughter, this song—especially the live version in which Living Colour includes it in an extended melody with their (also awesome) song “Elvis Is Dead” and their cover of “Police and Thieves”— made a surprise and appropriate appearance in my head, serving to italicize my shock in the face of all of those dead birds.

“Factory” by Bruce Springsteen

In 1870, Cecil John Rhodes, founder of the De Beers conglomerate, came to South Africa from England. In diamond fields of Kimberley, Rhodes, with the financial backing of a British banking company (with whom he had familial connections), was alone in being able to afford steam pumps to eradicate the water from flooded claims, which—given that they were presumed ruined— he originally bought for a song. The miners slated for De Beers’ underground work would line up single-file by 5:00am, and trundle down the shafts to chip away at the rock with pick-axes. The workers were charged with squeezing themselves into crevices so tight that they had to chip mere millimeters from their bodies. As such, toward the end of the shift, ghostly parades of human-shaped depressions were left in the rock, hard outlines of the men who once labored there. “And you just better believe,” Springsteen sings, “somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,” and, still today, along South Africa’s Diamond Coast, in bars called Diamond Hunters, and bars called Fortune’s, I saw knife-fights stop just short of the stabbing, because the men know they have to line up single-file by 5:00am, and trundle down the shafts…

“Dollar’s Moods” by The Jazz Epistles

Msizi, one of the young diamond miners to whom I spoke, loved jazz. He especially loved The Jazz Epistles, a 1950s Johannesburg-based band who recorded the first-ever album by a Black South African group in 1959. Msizi raised pigeons in secret, and, exhausted, post-shift, he would often go out to his coop and hum some of their tunes to his favorite pigeon, Bartholomew. “Dollar’s Moods,”—which somehow braids an elusive and subtle mournfulness into what seems to be a cheerful and exuberant primary line— is named for the volatile temper of the band’s piano player, Abdullah Ibrahim, aka Dollar Brand. After the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre (during which South African police opened fire on Black protestors demonstrating against apartheid policies, killing 69 people), the apartheid government doubled-down on their viciousness in order to discourage future protests. As part of this doubling-down, jazz was banned—the music could no longer be performed either in public or in private, could no longer be broadcast on the radio, or sold to fans. The lives of the musicians were threatened, and less than a year after recording their first album, The Jazz Epistles were forced to break up. When Msizi hummed this song to Bartholomew, the bird would raise and lower its wings, but its feet would remain fixed—evoking the machinations of flight, without rising.

“Birdland” by Patti Smith

John James Audubon on watching flocks of pigeons pass overhead: “A thundering storm of beating wings and dung like melting flakes of snow.”

A song about the role of dreaming and self-delusion in the endurance of grief and a persistent sense of estrangement (in a Didion-esque “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” sort of way), “Birdland” can serve as a sort of soundtrack to many of our myths in which pigeons and diamonds intersect. (In drafting FLIGHT OF THE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS, I had to eventually cut so many of these myths out of the book!) For instance: Indra, the bright red and four-armed Vedic deity, possessed as his weapon of choice the fearsome vajra, a thunderbolt coated in diamond dust, making it both indestructible and irresistible, the pointy ends of which were used to ritualistically eviscerate the ignorant. The vajra was forged by Tvastar, the artisan of divine gizmos, who had the ability to take the form of a dove and who would do so in order to sing angry birds to sleep. Indra’s mount, Airavata the albino elephant, was blindingly white, and generously endowed with four tusks and seven trunks, and was descended from a great serpent—the same one responsible for producing—after eons of Darwinian evolution, of course—the pigeons. As if a bird, Airavata hatched from an egg, which was nursed and pacified by the quiet hymns of the creation gods, and when this egg cracked, it yielded, along with the white elephant, an ocean of milk, which itself served as an amniotic bath to which earthbound mortals in need of hope could aspire to return, as if wayward homing pigeons to the comfort of their coops.

“Imayini Yase (Coalbrook Mine)” from This Land Is Mine: South African Freedom Songs

In one of the most ethereal dirges ever performed, a group of South African refugees commemorate the 1960 collapse of the Coalbrook Mine, which killed 408 people, at once memorializing the dead, and condemning the apartheid regime responsible for the labor laws that devalued the lives of Black workers. Though the apartheid government officially fell in 1994, many of its atrocious policies simply evolved and still haunt aspects of South African life, including those pertaining to the diamond mining industry. Oftentimes, still today, the Black security officials working for the diamond mining conglomerates have to patrol the mine on foot, while the White officials make their rounds from the comfort of white pick-up trucks, lording over the laborers who are charged with extracting diamonds from what one poetic and dystopian (and anonymous) local journalist referred to as, “A vast heaving crater. A world of dust, drought, dysentery, and flies, disease and despair, where some dig up a fortune, and others dig their graves.” And overhead, some of their diamond-smuggling pigeons fly, and some of these birds will make it home, and some people’s lives will get better and some will get worse. And did you know also that in her poem, “Pigeon Post,” Sylvia Plath wrote, “I split my soul/into twin pigeons/and hurled them hard…//With homing spiral/one drops from heaven…//my other bird,/plump-fed, admired/from an elegant nest/in the fields of hell…”? And did you know that, in Hebrew, the word yownah, or “dove,” also refers to the holy warmth generated by an act of mating? And did you know that the ancient Greeks called pigeons peristera (the female form of pigeon) and named their prettiest islands after them?

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo; the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks.

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Tracy Clark-Flory's Playlist for Her Memoir "Want Me"

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In her words, here is Tracy Clark-Flory's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Want Me:

I came of age in the nineties alongside fizzy declarations of "girl power" and exhortations to “break the glass ceiling.” It was also a time of sexualized pop culture, from Girls Gone Wild infomercials to MTV Spring Break specials. I emerged with a sense that sexual empowerment meant being both like men and wanted by them—and I set out to become an expert in both, first as a young woman coming of age and then as a journalist covering the sex beat. My memoir, Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire, follows me down that path as I report on everything from adult film sets to orgasmic meditation retreats, and reckon with the disappointments of channeling my own wanting through men.

While writing Want Me, I often looked for inspiration from the music that defined various periods in my life. Some of those songs, like the ones below, viscerally transported me back to key moments of feeling and discovery. They were the soundtrack to my writing—and maybe now to your reading—this book.

“#1 Crush” by Garbage

I write in Want Me about my tweenage Leonardo DiCaprio obsession, which led me to run a high-circulation daily fan newsletter where I recounted tabloid gossip and previewed TV appearances in screaming all-caps (“EMERGENCY NEWSLETTER!!!!!!!!!!!! Leo on Inside Edition????????”). My devotion was sparked by Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, a flashy re-imagining of the classic that introduced me to DiCaprio in his most perfect state: peeking through a forelock of golden hair with a cigarette dangling from his lips, while scrawling love poems in a notebook. The film’s soundtrack perfectly captures the moody intensity of teenage obsession, but Garbage’s “#1 Crush” does so especially with its creeping beat and melodramatic lyrics. It instantly brings me back to those early awakenings of longing and lust, before my attention shifted to what boys wanted from me.

“Too Close” by Next

Here is a song all about a guy getting an erection on the dance floor (“Baby when we're grinding/I get so excited/…You’re making it hard for me”). That is to say, here is a song perfectly made for pubescent teens living for the school dance. At my middle school, there was little in the way of stiff-armed slow dances. I wrote in my 7th grade diary ([sic] here on out), “Freaking is a kind of dancing—it’s were the guy puts his leg in-between yours and his arms around you waist and your arms around his neck. And you kinda move back + forth. It really fun.” For me, this song encapsulates not only the thrill of school dances, but also my teenage fascination with boys’ bodies, and the possibilities of their bodies responding to mine. As RL croons toward the end, “You’re making me want you.”

“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by Backstreet Boys

As I headed into high school, I gave up on my Leo crush in favor of AJ McLean, “the Backstreet Boy with tattoos, questionable facial hair, and crotch-thrusting dance moves,” as I write in Want Me. (One of those tattoos was a “69” around his navel.) AJ, who was known for humping the floor during concerts to the delighted screams of hundreds of teenage girls, was the designated “bad boy” of the bunch. He felt to me like a safe, vicarious route for expressing my own emerging sexuality. This isn’t the group’s sexiest song—but, man, did I run down my VHS taped copy of the accompanying music video just to hear AJ deliver this line: “Oh my god, we’re back againnn.”

“Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera

Ooof, revisiting these lyrics, it’s no wonder I belted them so intensely while watching MTV’s TRL after school:

"I feel like I've been locked in tight/For a century of lonely nights/Waiting for someone to release me/…My mind is saying let's go/But my heart is saying no/…I’m a genie in a bottle, baby/Come, come, come in and let me out.”

The sense of suppression, the conflicted desire, the wish for a man to set you free. Not to overanalyze, but I can’t help but think of the developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman who writes of adolescent girls’ “dilemma of desire,” in which their sexual feelings come up against the social and material dangers associated with their sexuality. During these years, the traditional virgin-slut dichotomy was starting to loosen for girls, leading to new sexual possibilities as well as pressures and contradictions. This song spoke to my own teenage attempts at navigating that shifting terrain—and maybe to Aguilera’s as well. In a few years, she would introduce her alter ego Xtina while singing about wanting to get “dirrty.”

“Midnight In a Perfect World” by DJ Shadow

This song is first love. It’s cutting class just to make out on a park bench with my high school boyfriend, who had great taste in music and a pair of oversize headphones always slung around his neck.

“Like a Boy" by Ciara

In my 20s, I wanted to be able to “have sex like a man," not exactly appreciating how this was guided by a distorted stereotype. I longed for a sense of sexual power that seemed to belong to men—whether it was around entitlement to pleasure or the freedom to explore. I grasped for that power through trying to be desired by men, and trying to be like them. As Ciara sings, “Wish we could switch up the roles” and “Sometimes I wish I could act like a boy.”

“Gimme More” by Britney Spears

As I write in my book of my marginally adult 20something life: I “routinely paired… Kraft dinners with cheap chardonnay followed by a solo dance party,” which often "turned very quickly into strip routines.” Britney Spears, and this song in particular, was emblematic of this period of privately performing in front of my mirror, while imagining myself reflected through any number of straight men’s eyes.

“S&M;” by Rihanna

I write in Want Me about how my mom’s terminal cancer diagnosis led to my experimenting with rough sex in an attempt to physically surface my all-pervasive emotional pain. Just a few months later, Rihanna released her single “S&M;,” in which she sang that “chains and whips excite me.” We were still years away from Lady Gaga singing about liking it “rough” and the release of Fifty Shades of Grey. As I write in the book, “We were on the verge of a massive mainstream cultural shift around BDSM, as well as countless think pieces about a purported, though never reliably documented, ‘rise in rough sex,' but I’d already felt the rumblings of it in my immediate surrounds.”

“thank u, next” by Ariana Grande

This song perfectly channels my feelings in looking back on my 20s: “Thought I'd end up with Sean/But he wasn't a match/Wrote some songs about Ricky/Now I listen and laugh/Even almost got married/And for Pete, I'm so thankful/Wish I could say ‘thank you’ to Malcolm/‘Cause he was an angel.” It’s playful, loving, and filled with gratitude, but all without looking longing toward the past.

"WAP" by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion

“Swipe your nose like a credit card” is one of the most delightful lyrics I’ve encountered in my entire life. Clover Hope, author of The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop, writes that this Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion song wasn’t just a “perfectly crafted duet about the slipperiness of their vaginas,” but “about women making music for women’s enjoyment, reclaiming the object gaze and the vision of sexuality that men had monopolized.” This kind of reclamation has been subject to decades of feminist debate, but all I feel when listening to this song is: Yes.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a senior staff writer at Jezebel. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Salon, The Guardian, Women's Health, and the yearly Best Sex Writing anthology. Prior to Jezebel, she was a senior staff writer at Salon. She has appeared on 20/20, MSNBC and NPR. Tracy lives in San Francisco with her family.

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Shorties (Kazuo Ishiguro Profiled, Hand Habits Covered Neil Young, and more)

The New York Times Magazine profiled Kazuo Ishiguro.

Hand Habits covered Neil Young's "I Believe in You."

February's best eBook deals.

Today's best eBook deals.

eBook on sale for $1.99 today:

Milk Bar Life: Recipes & Stories by Christina Tosi

eBooks on sale for $2.99 today:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Stream a new song by Early Riser.

BuzzFeed recommended the week's best virtual literary events,

Julien Baker played a virtual session for The Current.

Poets discussed their favorite John Keats poems at the Guardian.

ARTnews recommended compelling artist biographies.

Cloud Nothings' Dylan Baldi talked to Bandcamp Daily about his favorite music on the platform.

Esquire listed essential books on Black history.

Cover Me shared a collection of covers performed by Bill Frisell.

Bustle interviewed Roxane Gay.

Stream a new Guided By Voices song.

Electric Literature interviewed poet Baba Badji.

Stream a new song by Smerz.

The Creative Independent interviewed advocate and author Heather McGhee.

The 2020 Bram Stoker Award nominees have been announced.

Literary Hub recommended the week's best new books.

Kirkus interviewed author Brandon Hobson.

The Rumpus Book Club interviewed Randa Jarrar.

Marie Claire shared an excerpt from Leesa Cross-Smith's novel This Close to Okay.

Book Riot recommended 2021's best speculative short story collections.

Kirkus previewed March's best books.

Literary Hub interviewed Te-Ping Chen.

PEN America interviewed author Zak Salih.

The I'm a Writer But podcast interviewed Dmitry Samarov.

If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.

February 22, 2021

Rebecca Morgan Frank's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Oh You Robot Saints!"

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In her words, here is Rebecca Morgan Frank's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Oh You Robot Saints!:

My new collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints! is populated with automata and their future incarnations, the rapidly evolving robots we live with now. As a Gen Xer, I grew up in the early days of electronic music, infused with robotic sounds and repetitions. I couldn’t have imagined the lasting imprint that electronic music would have, or that we would live in a world run by computers and inhabited by such realistic humanoid robots, much less a range of multi-use robotic creatures. Join me in this “robot parade” of robot songs of the last four decades. If anyone else is home, you may need to put on your headphones as we travel back in time, or maybe invite them to dim the lights and join you in “the robot and the robo-booge,” the only two kinds of dance in the future, according to the Flight of the Conchords’ song “Robots.”

Kraftwerk, “The Robots"

Martin Gore of Depeche Mode called Kraftwerk the “godfathers” of electronic music, and in the original Kraftwerk video for “The Robots,” the four members of the band pretend to be robots. Over the years of live performances, the band replaced themselves with robots pretending to be them. Now you can watch a band of Lego robots cover this song. Maybe we’re all replaceable by Legos.

Companion poem: “How to Make Your Own Automaton”

Styx, “Mr. Roboto”

Did you know that the 1983 hit “Mr. Roboto” is part of an album that’s a rock opera/concept album? The narrative of the album Kilroy was Here follows rockers jailed by the Moral Majority– “Dr. Righteous” is concerned with sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, including satan backmasking. But have no fear, the protagonist escapes disguised as a robot.

Companion Poems: “The Fool of Aljaferia Palace Encounters Death”

Men at Work, “Helpless Automaton”

This was the first cassette I ever bought, purchased alongside of my yellow Sony Sports Walkman for my thirteenth birthday, spent alone at an arts boarding school. Who would have imagined that the lyrics “I stay in my room / All alone in the gloom” and “To dream of your face/But a video screen takes its place” would feel so timely again now during the pandemic? Go ahead, turn it up and dance like you can’t go anywhere!

Companion poem: Ode to Loneliness

Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Go Robot”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers played in a small room at Columbia when I was at Barnard, and I have clear memories of a packed room of pungent bodies and my tiny roommate bodysurfing: I had dragged her along to her first concert ever. The thing about robots is they don’t have BO.

Companion Poem: “Mechanical Birds”

Lemonheads (with Kate Moss), "Dirty Robot"

You have to love the line, “I hate your every bolt and screw,” right? A supermodel joins the Lemonheads to cover Dutch artists Arling & Cameron’s song, “Dirty Robot” from their 2001 album We Are A & C. Check out the original and you can sing along your favorite fake robot voice with Francoise Cactus of Stereo Total, who guests on vocals: “You’re a dirty robot, I’m a dirty robot.”

Companion poem: “Here Come the Parasitic Robots”

Robyn, “Fembot”

“Fembots have feelings, too”! There’s much to be said about gender and robots, but I squeezed several of my favorite research finds into one poem, “The Mechanical Eves.” We live in a time of “real dolls,” but before that Edison made a bunch of talking girl dolls that were so terrifying they were reportedly destroyed, maybe even buried alive. (Can we do that to the “real dolls”?) Most “fembots” have been designed by men, so it’s nice to see one come from a woman, even in a song.

Companion Poem: “The Mechanical Eves”

Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy"

Of course, then there’s the coin-operated boy of this Dresden Doll’s single: “I can’t imagine any flesh and blood could be this match / I even take him in the bath.” But when I think of coin-operated automata, I remember one of my favorite spots from my research travel for this book: London’s Novelty-Automation, an arcade of satirical automatons. Some of my favorite automata were “Pet or Meat,” “Autofrisk,” and “Is it Art?” I hope this arcade survives the pandemic.

Companion Poem: “I Don’t Like Its Computer Face”

Alexander Bonus, “Automaton Turk”

The “Automaton Turk” was an automaton chess player that toured and beat many a champion and celebrity, but in reality¬–spoiler alert–was a hoax and one of the more fascinating fake automata I wrote about in my book. It turns out there was an expert chess player crammed into a secret compartment to move the pieces. (Edgar Allen Poe debunked the automaton chess player in depth in his essay “Maelzel’s Chess-player.) This album explores the same world of early automata as my collection, and a few more songs are populated by some of the same figures as my poems, including the tracks “Automaton Monk” and “Automaton Aviary.”

Companion poem: “The False Automaton”

Daft Punk, “Robot Rock”

When Gertrude Stein said there’s no such thing as repetition, she couldn’t have foreseen electronic music. This song makes me think of the talk I recently gave on the repeated-line sonnet, except the three-word line of Robot Rock is repeated forty or so times rather than fourteen. Yes, I counted. (Has anyone made a digital track of “A rose is a rose is a rose”?)

Companion Poem: “Ode to the Robobee”

Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot”

I know, you were probably expecting this one, and I really did consider the also great “One More Robot,” which gets at the heart of what separates us from robots: we can love. In the end, not only did Yoshimi win in my quick Twitter poll, but honestly, as someone who came of age receiving mixed tapes from everyone I ever dated, I believe transitions are key, and this had to come after Robot Rock, right? And it doesn’t get better than “But you won’t let those robots eat me, Yoshimi.”

Companion poem: “Aquanauts”

Flight of the Conchords, “Robots”

From the pilot episode of Flight of the Conchords, this song is the characters’ first music video, filmed in robot costumes made out of homemade boxes. In this pretty funny send-up, the humans are dead, robots rule the world, and “There is no more unhappiness / Affirmative / We no longer say yes, instead we say affirmative / Yes, affirmative / Unless it is a more colloquial situation with a few robo friends….” The album version offers extended lyrics and, of course, the same refrain: “The humans are dead.” Perhaps a few of those humans uploaded their consciousnesses into robot heads before they died and live on, like Bina48, which was created to mirror the (living) Bina Aspen.

Companion Poem: “Imagine Loved Letter to Bina48”

They Might Be Giants, "Robot Parade"

It seems appropriate to wrap this playlist up with a little They Might Be Giants and a robot parade. In my poem “Not Everybody Else’s Bestiary (Yet),” the parade is full of such existing creatures as octobots, robot snakes, robot cockroaches, and robot children. Remember, in the future, “Robots obey what / The children say.”

Companion Poem: “Not Everybody Else’s Bestiary (Yet)”

Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems is Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon 2021). Her debut collection, Little Murders Everywhere, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and she is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript. Her poems have recently appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Women’s Review of Books, and The Slowdown podcast, and her collaborations with composers have been performed and exhibited across the country. She teaches in the MFA Program in Prose and Poetry at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies and edits the online literary journal Memorious.

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