S P I N E L E S S  B O O K S

Recently, I moved from Cincinnati, Ohio to Spokane, Washington. Though I divested myself of most of my belongings before leaving, one of the things I made sure to bring with me was a small yellow Post-It note (why are most Post-Its yellow, I wonder?) that has the following three words scrawled on it:

guitar screech

string

(Actually, the note should have read: “guitar string screech,” but as it was just a memory-jogger-note for this “From the Editor’s Skull,” word order didn’t finally matter.)

During my last weeks in Cincinnati I began listening—obsessively—to Eva Cassidy’s haunting version of “Over the Rainbow.” I’d put the CD in my crappy CD player, set the repeat function, and lie in the dark listening to the song over and over and over. Or I’d do the same thing with the iTunes version on my laptop. It was if I couldn’t hear the song often enough. After innumerable times through the song I became particularly aware of an inadvertency that for a long time I had not consciously noticed before: Cassidy is accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar and a couple of times you can hear the screech of the strings as she shifts from one chord to another. This guitar screech is a common enough occurrence and my guess is that most of us simply do not notice such moments when listening to guitar, or if we notice, just ignore it as being irrelevant because it is, after all, inadvertent. However, as soon as I became conscious of the screech, it became part of the song for me; as I continued to listen to the song, I began predicting the screech’s appearance in the same way that I knew that at this point in the song Cassidy was going to sing softly or that now she would attack the song with full-throated abandon. Aside from being a sonic addition to the song, the screech provided a visual suggestion, as though it was encouraging me to see Cassidy’s fingers slide up or down the guitar neck into a different position. Certainly, with today’s technology, a version of the song could be produced in which the screech disappeared, but I am certain that if I heard such a version now, I would think that something vital was missing.

Once the screech became a part of the song for me, I began wondering about the whole phenomena of guitar string screech. Did guitarists try to eliminate it? Did they even notice it? Were there ways to guarantee screechless chording, or was it simply a given that eventually fingers on strings will produce a screech now and again? I could have probably found answers to these questions by asking a few guitarists I knew, but before I had a chance to do so I became fascinated by another question: had anyone written a piece of music that demanded that the screech be considered integral to the music? That is, was there a song that when transcribed included some notation that indicated that the guitar player should make sure that when shifting from this chord to the next that the screech of the transition should be definitely heard, that the player should do whatever necessary to actually produce the screech, as the composer considered the screech to be a note or a set of notes that the composer wanted to be present? I did pose this question to a guitar-playing friend of mine, one who also has, it seems, an encyclopedic knowledge of guitar music and players. He couldn’t think of any composition that would fulfill the parameters of my query, though he did mention Eddie Van Halen’s technique of scraping the strings to produce screeching and wailing. But I knew, without even hearing examples of this mode of playing, that that wasn’t the same thing, certainly not what I meant (though I would have liked to seen how such a solo might have been transcribed in one of those guitar magazines that show guitarists how to play the guitar solos of their idols). I imagined that someone like John Cage, if he ever composed something for guitar, might have thought to include chord-shifting-produced screeches as part of the composition, the way some of his other compositions took into account the ambient and accidental noise produced either by an audience or whatever prepared instrument was being featured.

I never got the opportunity to explore this question of intentional guitar string screech, as the necessities of moving from Cincinnati took over my life. This Skull is my first chance to return the question. I’d like to think that I am the first to consider this question, the first to ponder the possibilities of intentionally incorporating the accidental sounds involved in changing chords on a guitar into a musical composition, but I am much too suspicious of the notion of originality (as Ecclesiastes says: there’s nothing new under the sun) to compliment myself in such a way. So if anyone out there knows of an example of this type of music-making, please let me know.

By now, all of you regular readers of my Skulls (all 2 or 3 of you) will be wondering how I will take this essay to its inevitable conclusion, i.e. how I will relate whatever’s on my mind to Spineless Books, since that has been my pattern in each and every Skull I have written. I, too, have wondered the same thing. Somehow, this aesthetic question seemed to me, from the outset, to be connected to the Spineless Books mission. But I couldn’t exactly explain why, except by invoking cliché notions of the avant garde (which, I suspect, doesn’t even exist anymore, the avant garde, that is, since fashion moves so quickly these days, with every “radical” advance in the arts becoming traditional and fixed—accepted—almost as quickly as it can be announced, so that nothing can be “new” or “shocking” long enough to make a difference before it is co-opted by some commercial enterprise and turned into an ad campaign for some multinational corporation’s product). Perhaps, though, that is all I have to fall back on. Spineless Books is dedicated to those art forms that lurk on the margins of the “dominant discourse,” whether aesthetic, academic, or commercial. Spineless Books champions those literatures that don’t have many supporters anywhere else (just as I imagine that there aren’t a legion of composers planning to use guitar string screech in their next song).

However, if you are a writer who uses the literary equivalent of guitar string screech in your writing and are seeking a publisher—well, you could do worse than query Spineless Books. We welcome the screech: that’s what we’re looking for.