The name Rick Moody will be familiar to anyone who keeps current with American writing. He’s the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and his lauded 1994 novel The Ice Storm was filmed by director Ang Lee. Moody is hanging around the MAGNET shop this week mostly because of his side job as one-quarter of the Wingdale Community Singers, a remarkable collection of writers, musicians and artists of varying stripes. Once pegged as an “urban folk” group that wrote old-timey songs about modern topics such as cross-dressers and funky Brooklyn culture, the Wingdales just released their second album, Spirit Duplicator, on the Scarlet Shame label. In addition to his writing and recording projects, Moody is guest editing magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our Q&A with him.
Moody: Another book, this one incredibly difficult, really, but more than rewarding if you read it in small morsels, which it is happy to allow you to do, as it’s composed in fragments. Theodor Adorno was a music critic, in addition to being a philosopher, and even in translation his prose sounds like the prose of someone taken up with the questions of modern music. Pinning down Adorno’s positions is folly (although he seems to have a lot of difficulty with Freud), but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the sound of his prose, and the incredible delicacy of the way metaphor works in this book. He’s a melancholic, and one who describes his abject despair in loving detail. Few writers since have gotten close.
