Interview with Nathaniel Mackey

There’s an energy of desire that especially drives From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanates, a certain energy, a fascination, a fantasy: What is it like to be a musician? What is it like to make music? Not having a literal experience of that has put me in the position of imagining it, dreaming it. The first letter in Bedouin Hornbook comes out of a dream in which I’m playing music. So I do think there’s something to the idea that the writing is a kind of phantom limb that does the work the nonmusician I am wants to do in music.
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• Archive: Issue 2 (Mar 2007)