I’m going abroad for the first time this summer, and they have repeatedly told me (like they know I’m silently, ferociously refusing the command) to bring a good pair of walking shoes. Walking shoes. The term alone strikes fear in my heart. I devoted 13 days to fretting constantly about it and on the 14th day I entered a shoe store, dragged in screaming by my sister and her best friend. With shocking ease, I had picked out a cheap pair of leather sandals and was strutting about the store, hollering ‘I didn’t know that it was possible for a shoe to have an ergonomic design but no fashion flowers embroidered on them!!’ I sailed around, flipping my hair and murmuring nonsensical Italian words, until I was brought to a screeching halt by this question:

“Do you think mom will like them?” Lib asked. 

She wouldn’t. Our mom started smothering us with makeup before we were old enough figure out which of our features she was trying to disguise. She attended Bob Jones which is, in reality, a Southern Baptist University, but in her mind exists as an institute for the criminally insane where the administration refused to promote her from ‘assistant prayer captain’ to ‘prayer captain’ because they deemed her a clotheshorse (they also deemed interracial dating an abomination in the sight of the Lord, but they saved that battle for the supreme court). After slaving over our last Christmas card photo for an entire afternoon, mom tossed it aside muttering, “What was the theme here: baggy clothes?” We knew she would take one look at these shoes, pause for a beat longer than it would take to avoid conflict, and say:

“They look…orthopedic,” Forced grin. “Is that what you were going for?”

I was acting this out through a slapstick comedy routine in the aisles of Rack Room, still wearing my orthopedic sandals, when I heard a giggles coming from a pair of loafers. A woman poked her head up and continued laughing. Then she narrowed her eyes.

“I’ve got a proposal,” she said, swirling the tumbler of scotch that had materialized in her hand. Huddled next to the Shape-Ups, we devised a plan to thwart the Buy-One-Get-One sale. We would purchase our shoes together and split the savings. If I had to buy ‘good walking shoes,’ I could at least do it by running an organized crime ring out of our local mall. I approached the register with my orthopedic sandals, my middle-aged bargain-minded stranger, and a look on my face that I hoped said ‘Snitches get stitches (in the shape of fashion flowers).’ It must have come across more as ‘math is not my strong suit’ because the entire ordeal saved me six dollars and the indignity of purchasing shoes who’s target demographic has at least one artificial hip. 

According to my mom, my great-grandmother has a pair “just like that!”

There’s a dream I have where my brow is always furrowed. Something’s gone wrong but I don’t know what yet. I push my tongue against my front teeth and they start to give. They’re loose in pink pockets of gum. A single tooth loses hold and comes out. They all start to fall, hitting the ground with the tinkle of broken glass. I am falling apart. There’s a complete and overwhelming terror in dreams that you never seem to feel when you’re awake. Sheer horror overtakes me and it doesn’t let go until I snap awake, probing to make sure my teeth are firmly in place. 

-

Can you remember the feeling of a loose baby tooth? Darting your tongue back and forth to make it wiggle? Pushing it as far forward as it would go until you tasted the blood underneath? Were you always surprised at how sharp its edges were, or how you could fit the tip of your tongue into the gap that had started to form between flesh and bone? There was always a little pain right at the end. The tooth was dangling by a sliver of pink from the top of your mouth. You used your cotton t-shirt to dry its slippery surface. You finally got a good grip on it and pulled. Do you remember the burst of pleasure? That alien artifact sitting in your palm and the warmth of exposed gum it left in its place. It was you once, a part of you that made up your mouth and head and jaw and helped you chew and might have been the key to learning to whistle if you’d just left well enough alone. It used to be you, and now it’s just a white pebble in your hand. It used to be you, and now it’s just a quarter. 

-

In the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacan warriors were sacrificed in necklaces made from the teeth of their enemies. The ancient Maori wore necklaces of human teeth that belonged to their deceased relatives. On her Get $leazy Tour, Ke$ha wore a necklace made out of a tooth that a fan sent her. 

-

I’ve never had a cavity but I one summer woke up to a screaming pain in my bottom tooth. “It’s dead,” said the dentist. “It’s the result of blunt trauma to the tooth that could have happened anytime. You could have been three years old. You could have been playing hockey.” As I wondered at his choice of examples, he sprayed a Q-tip with liquid nitrogen and pressed it against my dead tooth. I couldn’t feel it. During the operation, they dug a little hole into the back of it. When the drill reached the root, the smell of decay filled the room. This whole time it had been rotting inside my tooth.

-

When my sister and I visited our family in Virginia, we were always put in the dusty back bedroom of my grandfather’s, who we never referred to as grandfather but only as ‘Paw-Paw,’ a title that made us feel as though were yelling every time we used it. He fed us pizza rolls for breakfast. We sat on the sticky linoleum tiles while he made grumbling comments that were vaguely directed at us. Then, at the end of every meal, he would expertly work a finger around in the back of his mouth until he dislodged his dentures. They would fly out of his mouth unceremoniously, ribbons of of spit trailing behind. He would then grin broadly at us, lips curled up to reveal what was left after a bullet hit his mouth in Vietnam. I could never eat pizza rolls again. 

-

It looked liked a discarded pile of metal shavings, but it was covered by a plexiglass case so I knew it was art. It was sitting on a white pedestal in the corner of the room. I read the title: Thirty Pieces. Thirty pieces was how much it took for Judas to betray Jesus. I always wondered how they landed on that number and if there was any haggling involved. He didn’t even keep the money afterward. No one really knew what to do with the money, how to spend the handful of coins that had killed the Christ. In the end, it bought a field with clay as red as blood. Now it’s used as a burial ground. Thirty pieces bought a place to bury bones and a kiss in the garden. I moved over there slowly, careful to spend time nodding at the blank screen being projected on the wall nearby so the other patrons could tell I was a woman of refined taste. With my nose pressed against the class and museum security glaring, the pile of objects came into focus. Thirty tiny teeth.

-

I pulled my sister over. She grimaced as she recognized the shapes, even though I’d been with her when her own baby teeth fell out, usually tied to a string attached to the doorknob I was holding. We couldn’t explain why that still pile of gray teeth, carved from lead, sent a shudder through us both. We saw the milky white of our smiles in the mirror and the red rims of the trophies we’d placed under our pillows at night. But those were ours though. Little parts of us that we still claimed as our own. These lead teeth were abandoned. Unclaimed remnants of something unknown. I saw flashes of broken glass, shiny gums, linoleum tiles, and decay. I don’t know why but I looked away. 

We’re interested in genius. We’re interested in epic ambition. We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine. If we are drawn to Infinite Jest, we’re also drawn to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Songs, for which Steven Merritt wrote that many songs, all of them about love, in about two years […] We have an obligation, to ourselves, chiefly, to see what a brain, and particularly a brain like our own, is capable of.

- Dave Eggers, in the foreword to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. 

The Magnetic Fields is the monstrous brainchild of singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt. Over the course of his work, and even within a single album, his sound shifts from distorted synth to sweet, honest folk. His rough, gravelly vocals are countered often by the harmonies of Susan Anway or Shirley Simms, stretched into beautiful melodies or an unyielding drone; sometimes they’re absent completely. In his three-volume album 69 Love Songs (1999)there are nods to every imaginable style, from Scottish folk to Philip Glass minimalism to punk rock to acoustic ballads. There is an ode to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and a cover of John Cage’s 4’33”.

One of the geniuses lurking in the shadows of childhood also makes an appearance in 69 Love Songs. The album showcased Daniel Handler — known more widely under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket — on accordion. This sent me into the kind of frenzy that would cause my 11-year-old self to bow her bespectacled head in shame. It wasn’t always easy to read his novels through the perpetually tinted glass of my transition lenses, but I managed. 

Merritt writes cheeky, biting, but always sublime lyrics. Clinging to every clever verse and casually depressive lyric is a morsel of truth. Lusty quips like, “A pretty boy in his underwear/ if there’s anything better in this world, who cares?” and the resigned “Eligible, not too stupid, intelligible and cute as Cupid. Knowledgeable, but not always right, salvageable and free for the night” are met with raw reflection on love and loss:

True, I’d give my right arm

To keep you safe from harm.

And true, for you I’d move to Ecuador.

And I’d keep a little farm,

Chop wood to keep you warm,

But I don’t really love you anymore.

The bulk of this album leaves me feeling despondent but secretly relishing it. It’s the kind of music that can tap into the sort-of-sweet sadness inside of you and let you savor it. Merritt’s outlandish approach captures the little bit of insanity it takes to keep seeking out something that guarantees as much pain as it does joy. It’s that, just as much as the sheer magnitude of the project, that makes it a work of genius. 

Sounds like: whiskey in a dixie cup, smoking on the fire escape when it’s really too cold to be outside, Prozac, clove cigarettes, dressing in black and reading Camus. 

Listen:  The Magnetic Fields - “I Don’t Want To Get Over You”

When I first encountered Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans” on YouTube I couldn’t stand her. I didn’t know what to make of her theatrically sultry voice, lyrical content, or campy image. She paired lines like “you fit me better than my favorite sweater” with nostalgic footage of neon signs and a distorted recitation of the Lord’s prayer. It was such a jumbled compilation of styles that I couldn’t make sense of it. I was ready to give up and turn back to the comforting arms of Rihanna until I realized something we all had in common: Lana del Rey would make a totally insane ex-girlfriend.

I like my girls how I like my coffee: teetering on the brink of psychosis. Her recklessness, her crown of flowers, the velvet turban, the albino tigers circling her while she sat serenely atop a throne–what seemed nonsensical before now seems deliberate and compelling. There’s a manic edge to her that I find myself really relating to while I freestyle rap into a mirror wearing my ex’s sweatpants. 

Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan mingle with Britney Spears and Eminem in her list of musical influences. Lana del Rey describes herself as a “self-styled gangsta Nancy Sinatra.” Her latest album, Born to Die, lives up to that weird hybrid.

One of the most haunting elements of the album is how self-aware she is: parodying the lifestyle that she subscribes to. In her songs, she’s all red lipstick, leather skirts, and lilac fumes and she knows it. It’s how precisely she’s able to describe living on the “dark side of the American dream”–and how deftly she hides her keen observations between lines like “Boy, you’re so dope/ Your love is deadly”–that she betrays how perceptive she really is. 

In a single song, she wavers between inane and profound. The title song, Born to Die, opens with the swell of music that sounds like the beginning of a colorized romance from the 1965 until a steady beat drops and someone in the background starts to shout. In Diet Mountain Dew, she offers up the trite mantras of pop music (“You’re no good for me, but baby I want you, I want you”) with declarations of startling insight (“Let’s take Jesus off the dashboard, got too much on his mind/ we both know just what we’re here for, saved too many times”). At the very end of the album, Lana’s “Lucky Ones” leaves us at her most vulnerable. Which is to say, still wearing nothing but a halter top made out of polyester rosebuds.

“We have so much going on in unsung ways at Auburn. Like the development of a peony that can survive the rural heat. I just wonder, I don’t know, I wonder if that is happening with literature and writers, too. How are promising students found? And how does talent surface? And the people, not just students at Auburn University, but people in the community. I mean there are people that are writing in their closets and attics about the hell of living here, or the joy of it — and I’d like to find them.”

- Charlene Reddick, Film League of Auburn founder

“I’m gonna break it down to you, and it’ll change your life, alright? I feel as though music is everything. Let me show you why. Everything’s just molecules vibrating, and vibrations are the frequency of sound — so then we’re all built from sound. Everything is built from sound, so that we are music. That’s why it changes us.”

- Darius ‘Slim’ Merchant, WEGL 91.1 DJ.

Starting an series of installments with quotes from interviews that I didn’t include in the article but loved all the same!