Andy Mister's Liner Notes is a semi-narrative prose poem, a meditation
on alienation and pop culture. Beginning with the Beach Boy's unfinished
masterpiece Smile, Mister describes a world populated by ghosts. Adrift
on a sea of drug use, boredom and popular entertainment, Mister traces
his relationship to the obsessive collection of ephemera and the
coterminous feelings of isolation and loss. Like an iPod on shuffle,
lyrical descriptions of urban landscapes and memories of failed
relationships mix with song lyrics and deadpan anecdotes of death,
failure. In the end a life, like the book itself, is assembled from the
detritus of pop culture. As he writes, Each billboard is a monument to
our ability to believe in anything, at least for a moment. Then it's
gone. But belief's shadow remains, amid the news of a world shot full of
holes, which Liner Notes' hauntings seem to delineate like the chalk
figure at the center of every homicide scene we've ever imagined
ourselves appearing within There'll probably be some music there, lining
your eyelids.I love the blunt care for real time, with all its gaps &
noises & bends, Andy Mister takes in the searching, powerful scroll of
paragraphs that make up Liner Notes. Working through the implied vision
of an undecided note taker prone to stark assertions and excavating
insights to perception, Mister puts songs at the heart of his
relationship to language & digs away at the disappearances they reflect
in their, and his, histories. The world becomes boring when you brush
away the detritus says the same mind that listens to own its aloneness,
& desires, evenly, to dissolve each distance in distance. -Anselm
BerriganAndy Mister's loving and disturbing notes create a complex
harmony (sympathy) between public noise and private revelation. In the
midst of Liner Notes we read: Childhood is a song I can barely remember
the words to. They only come back to me when I am thinking of something
else. that something else is at the heart of this compelling and magical
book. Listen! -Peter GizziJim Carroll's People Who Died comes
immediately to mind, but Liner Notes has more in common with David
Markson's late books or with Frank O'Hara's Hatred than with any pop
song. What's most evident, though, is that Andy Mister cares for his
readers by caring about his subject. He's your friend, and he's alive.
-Graham FoustI had forgotten with what feverishness I used to study the
back jackets of my LPs. Was I seeking to understand my desire? The
sadness of desolate beauty? The sensitive youth's love affair with
death? It's all here-as breathless and disarmingly self-conscious as the
sweetest parking-lot kiss. I love this book. -Jennifer Moxley
