Matthew Gavin Frank’s music playlist for his book Submersed – Largehearted Boy
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Matthew Gavin Frank‘s book Submersed is a fascinating dive onto deep sea exploration and true crime from one of our most talented writers.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Frank, an accomplished author of narrative nonfiction, uses his terror as inspiration for this exploration of personal submersibles. . . . Frank’s painstaking research . . . yields evocative mini-portraits, whatever his subject. . . . The sheer depth of Frank’s skill [means] we can smell the damp wood and tequila in the Alaskan cabin where one Nazi-obsessed submariner builds his vessels. . . . His book . . . conjure[s] so vividly Wall’s character and the tragedy of her death.”
In his own words, here is Matthew Gavin Frank‘s Book Notes music playlist for his book Submersed:
Submersed begins with an investigation into the beguiling subculture of DIY submersible obsessives—those who are so compelled to sink into the deep sea that they become amateur backyard submarine-builders and, should they set sail, sometimes do so to their own detriment (or to the detriment of someone else). Soon, the investigation encompasses much more, as the compulsion to sink to depth uncannily begins to dovetail with darker, more threatening traits. The book is a foray into the world of deep-sea divers, yes, but also into the obsession and madness that oceans inspire in us, and the story of submarine inventor Peter Madsen’s murder of journalist Kim Wall.
Weaving elements of true crime, science writing, and reportage with the strange history of the submarine, the mythology of the deep sea, social and psychological inquiry, and the physical and mental side effects of sinking to great depth on the human body, Submersed attempts to get to the bottom of this niche human obsession to chase the extreme in our planet’s bodies of water, and the exhilarations and consequences that result.
“The Water Song” by The Mountain Goats
One DIY submersible enthusiast I visited was fashioning a sub in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, outside his off-the-grid one-room cabin. It looked like one backyard kiddie pool downturned atop another, and appeared no more seaworthy than that. Another was going to use a home-built submersible to search for a legendary gold boulder, rumored to be at the bottom of a deep Canadian lake since the 1890s. Another was busy trying to build an underwater mansion, so as to avoid having to live and endure time up here on the surface, on dry land. Another built a giant pipe organ made of old ship horns and train whistles, which he’s convinced is the loudest instrument ever constructed; he keeps it in his dad’s basement. And then, there was Stockton Rush, former CEO of OceanGate, whose ill-fated Titan submersible imploded while journeying to tour the wreckage of Titanic. I myself—who can’t swim, and who has had a lifelong fear of the ocean—dove to 2000 feet in an amateur submersible off the coast of Honduras. When I’m in the middle of a book project, I’m somehow able to tuck my phobias into a kind of rabid curiosity. And the curiosity then somehow dampens and cushions those fears, and my awareness of the danger. It’s probably not a good quality to have. Throughout the writing of the book, I kept interrogating the parameters and manifestations of wonder, tracing the whimsy, the hubris… In Submersed, I wanted to engage the eccentric micro-community of DIY submersible enthusiasts, and to scratch at their obsessions and their actions for some kind of larger—if elusive or illusory—meaning; some kind of sly microcosmic comment on the human condition and on human longing. But, in my research, I also bumped up against misogyny, murder, and disaster. I couldn’t help but confront and interrogate the inflection points at which a sense of wonder sours into something more malign. Anyhow, this song was playing in my head as I went down in that submersible in Honduras, until the sight of the bioluminescence out the porthole squeegeed my brain clean.
“By Eleven” by Alejandro Escovedo
It’s not so much the lyrics of this song, but the elegiac feel of it that makes me think of a frozen world beginning to thaw, heaving up long buried stories both beautiful and horrific. As the book opens, we meander through an industrial neighborhood of Copenhagen, gathering its histories and mythologies as the icicles drip, before finally landing on a discovery that pertains to the murder engaged in the book. The tone of this song complicates the role of elegy in weird ways. It proves, of course, that elegy is commemorative, sure, but also catalyzing.
“Milonga Loca” by Astor Piazzolla
Before the submarine, there was the diving bell, and before the diving bell there was the ephemeral but persistent human dream of sinking, the nagging drive to embed the body into some balloon-like enclosure and float alongside the fishes. To see as they see. The diving bell—a rigid, airtight capsule lowered to depth and raised by a winch-driven cable from a support platform at the surface—was first chronicled by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. Aristotle, who is often cited as the “father of marine biology and biodiversity,” spent at least five years of his life on the coast of Asia Minor, and there, he may have used the diving bell to observe and to first classify and name our sea creatures. Aristotle was able to see his obsessions from a scholarly remove, and to recognize that his drive to spend so much time at depth may have begotten a sort of madness. I envision him lolling beneath the surface in his bell, the tether animated in the tides of the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, Aristotle—breathless with depth and excitement— as he recorded what he saw. And I think of this song—which bounces with a kind of hypnotic madness—as I imagine Aristotle seeing sea cucumbers and anemones, isopods and jellyfish for the first time.
“Sleep to Dream” by Bettye LaVette
Only in 2010 did the US Navy lift its ban on women on submarines, prompting the question—why, specifically, on submarines? It’s not hard to impose a Freudian analytical framework over and onto the sub, and those who are drawn to it. Many have seen the sub as a safe haven from surface mores and government strictures. The sub, for these men, is a place of ultimate control, where they can exact a brief lordship over their own womb-like world—a womb created by them, for them, and that gives back by incubating only them. This song serves as a foil to, and a rebuke of their drive to drag wonder into such self-serving spaces. Turn it up, drown them out.
“Get Thee Gone” by The Geraldine Fibbers
As if stalking some temporal siren song, humans were drawn to conceive of the submarine long before an actual version (and its many prototypes) were engineered. In the Vedas, for instance—the primary sacred texts of Hinduism, composed in Sanskrit around 1500 BC—in the story of the god Shiva, fire and water collide in the form of the “submarine mare,” a creature with the head of a horse and the body of a sea serpent, engulfed in flames. She wanders the ocean floor, as if the brilliant ghosts of the wronged and the trespassed upon, breathing fire, burning the water, and burning in the water. The gods fear her. The universe fears her. To retore the balance of power, she scorches the sons of kings. This song plays as she does so.
“Village Green Preservation Society” by The Kinks
We rove among a convention held by the PSUBS consortium, the Personal Submersibles Organization of Amateur Submarine Builders and Underwater Explorers. When thirty some-odd personal submersible enthusiasts converge in one place, and when that place is a Hampton Inn in the middle of Michigan, hijinks ensure.
“Olivia-step On the Roach” by Cyro Baptista
In 1620, Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch glassworker, was commissioned by the King of England to fabricate a “diving boat”—the world’s first submarine by modern design standards. It was a wooden ship canopied with animal skins and waterproofed with rendered animal fat—like plastic-wrapping a Tupperware bowl. It was rowed underwater with oars. Given its materials, even underwater it apparently smelled like a slaughterhouse. This song scores its maiden voyage in the River Thames, which was both bumbling and exhilarating.
“Georgia Lee” by Tom Waits
This song evokes the bewilderment and stubbornness of grief, encompassed in the beautiful but stark indifference of the seasons and the ocean, and maybe it plays in the aftermath of Kim Wall’s murder, as loved ones left behind drive over Øresund Bridge, connecting Sweden to Denmark, the water beneath the color of graphite.
“Life Fades Away” by Roy Orbison
I lower myself into that amateur submersible off the coast of Honduras. The space seems hardly larger than a laundry dryer, and I press my nose to the viewport and breathe and wait and hold my breath. It feels airless and humid. The captain pulls the heavy hatch door closed, and seals it. My heart races, and I sweat and bite my lip and I have to say something to him. I open my mouth, and this song comes out as we descend.
“Stork & Owl” by TV on the Radio
This one’s for the ascent, three hours later.
“La Malagueña” by Gaby Moreno
Now, in the aftermath of the Titan submersible implosion, I find that even my ruminations and desire to contextualize the incident—especially when held up against my own amateur submersible dive—have taken on a stubborn redundancy. I’ve probably watched too many Bond movies and can’t help but think of the dark side of chasing this exploratory impulse, especially if the vision belongs to an ultra-wealthy Stockton Rush-type. Still, I don’t regret having dove—thankfully surviving—in that home-built submersible. What I saw down there was indeed wonderous, but also in a torturous kind of way. I think about it every day, and so, from time to time, I get lost, foggy, as if still down there with the bioluminescence. As if holding a note until I go dizzy.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Matthew Gavin Frank’s playlist for his book Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
Matthew Gavin Frank’s playlist for his book The Mad Feast
Matthew Gavin Frank’s playlist for his book Preparing the Ghost
Matthew Gavin Frank’s playlist for his book Pot Farm
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, Preparing the Ghost, Pot Farm, and Barolo, as well as the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Iowa Review, Salon, Conjunctions, The Believer, and the Best Travel Writing and Best Food Writing anthologies. He’s a professor of creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is also the Nonfiction/Hybrids Editor of the literary magazine, Passages North.
