Over the weekend, I visited the Melville House storefront in DUMBO to pick up a gift for a friend. Along the way, I also picked up Jen Angel’s history of Clamor magazine — said storefront also stocks selected titles from other publishers, including Akashic, PM Press, and Verso. I spent a fair amount of time looking at what was prominently displayed, and given that Melville House’s recent titles have ranged from Bernard-Henri Lévy’s essays on geopolitics to Tao Lin’s absurdist, moving fiction and poetry, that covered a lot of ground.
Good design has a way of pulling you in, though, and references to my home state multiply that. Which is a lengthy way of saying that I was rapidly attracted to Christian Bauman’s In Hoboken. I haven’t picked up a copy yet (I’m in my reading-nonfiction-while-writing-fiction mode at present) but I expect I will before too long; it seems to fall into a small but outstanding pocket of literature, namely: the Jersey Rock Novel.
By hook or by crook, I’m going to write an essay on this somewhere, sometime — suffice it to say that the Jersey Rock Novel is a combination of three of my favorite things that also is one of my favorite things, which is something of a neat trick. Tom Perotta’s The Wishbones definitely fits into this category, as does Rick Moody’s Garden State. (Incidentally, Moody’s introduction to a late-90s paperback edition of the same remains one of my favorite pieces of writing about music, and about music’s ability to inspire other creative works, that I’ve ever read.) The first lengthy work of fiction I ever completed to any satisfaction — a novella called “The Driver North” that I worked on from 1999 to 2003 or so — is probably my own attempt at the subsubsubgenre, albeit filtered through a hardcore-kid sensibility*.
Either way: the Jersey Rock Novel essay. Watch for it. I swear.
*-an aside from an aside: one of the major plot points involved a onetime hardcore vocalist eventually reaching the proverbial heights of fame. In the late 90s, when I was initially conceiving the plot, this seemed deeply surreal; by the time I’d finished up a cohesive draft…not so much. One of these days, I’ll get a time machine and tell my twenty-one-year-old self that one of the guys from Racetraitor will go on to be in one of the biggest rock bands in America, which will simultaneously blow his mind and be a ridiculously stupid thing to do with the fabric of space and time.
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