
SWEET NOTHING
2014
THE FURNACE, HOLLOW EARTH RADIO
TUPELO QUARTERLY, OPEN PROSE CONTEST
... in her imaginative exegesis of the song Werner-Jatzke morphs Reed’s refrain into a kind of Nietzschean mantra: it’s not just “sweet nuthin’” but “The Sweet Nothing,” a blissful, transcendent nihilism represented by four downtrodden Prophets who have been captured and quantified by the system. Imagine Lou Reed rewriting “An Orison of Sonmi-451” from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
– B.E. Hopkins
I started examining intersections of audio and literature in 2013 while I was a Jack Straw writer. It was during my year there that I wrote “Sweet Nothing” as part of what was originally going to be a collection of stories using the form of a mix tape. Like key changes in a song, I am concerned with how emphasis and stress change meaning. The song “Oh, Sweet Nothing” is a great example of this for being lyrically repetitive.
Read my full interview about Sweet Nothing on The Furnace website.
Read the full review from B.E Hopkins on the Tupelo site.