The Sonic Youth Literary Canon Gets a New Entry

At the Strand the other day, Thurston Moore was working his way through a stack of hardcovers, signing copies of “Sonic Life,” his 2023 memoir and history of Sonic Youth, the band he co-founded. The “T”s and “M”s in his signature were tall and lanky like he is, with a dense thatch of lowercase lettering that evoked the sixty-six-year-old’s never-changing Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo haircut. The quiet was occasionally interrupted by the boxcar roar of a cart full of books being wheeled across the strip-wood flooring.

“I just wanted to write,” Moore said, hefting his five-hundred-page book, which goes deep into the esoterica of the downtown musical avant-garde of the eighties. It is scant on dish about the breakup of Moore’s marriage, in 2011, to Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth’s bassist and vocalist, which also ended the band. Gordon wrote at length about their creative and romantic partnership and its dissolution in her well-received 2015 memoir, “Girl in a Band.”

“When I got a book deal, it was all about writing a personalized memoir,” Moore said. “I wasn’t interested in that so much.” Moore speaks like he writes, in well-formed sentences delivered in a professorial tone, with the same earnestness he brings to his onstage experiments in artful noise, such as the show he played recently at the Stone, in Greenwich Village, with Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, his former bandmates. His father was a philosophy professor, who also taught music appreciation; his death, in 1976, when Thurston was eighteen, was a life-changing event that led to his leaving college and moving to a tenement in the East Village

“I wanted to be part of this whole world that I’m just enamored by,” Moore said, of his later-life turn to prose. He gestured around at the rare books lining the walls of the third floor of the Strand, the lower-Manhattan bookseller that opened in 1927, on now vanished Book Row on Fourth Avenue, and moved around the corner to its current location, at Broadway and Twelfth, in 1956. “It was very similar to being young and saying, ‘I want to make records, too,’ ” Moore went on. He is nearing completion of a second book, a novel called “Parsnip & Boomerang,” for the two main characters. “Of course, it’s about a couple on the Lower East Side in the early eighties, who live in a tenement building. It goes off into light surreality, and there’s interaction with the downtown early-eighties hardcore scene.” Mainly, he said, “I wanted to write a story about two young people with very modest lives who find each other in the community of downtown punk rock, and their connection to each other is nothing but utter beneficence and pleasure. Even when things get out of hand, such as the pets escaping, and they have to search in the streets of New York, every moment is amazing.”

Moore surveyed the wall of first editions, and made his way past Joyce’s “Ulysses,” O’Connor’s “Wise Blood,” “Candy,” by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and a James Schuyler novel called “Alfred & Guinevere.” “I find there’s great meditational value in browsing libraries and books, even online,” he noted. “I’m all about first editions. I am constantly perusing secondhand-bookseller sites.” He lives in London with his wife, Eva Moore, formerly Prinz, a book editor who was the other woman in the Moore-Gordon split. “I go into every thrift store and charity shop,” he said. “I am really into small pamphlets of postwar avant-garde poetry, like the stapled mimeos from the Poetry Project and Ted Berrigan’s C Press. I’m not so interested in buying a three-thousand-dollar edition of a John Ashbery book. I find that a little distasteful.”

He resumed browsing. “The band was sort of defined by the literary interests that each of us had,” Moore observed. They shared an interest in the Beats, Philip K. Dick, Jim Thompson, and Harry Crews. “Everyone was reading Harry Crews books,” he said.

On the shelf, there happened to be a first edition of Crews’s 1969 novel “Naked in Garden Hills.” Moore picked it up. He recalled that decades earlier Gordon had a side project with Lydia Lunch, the New York no-wave star, and after writing a song with Crews’s title they decided to call the band Harry Crews. Sonic Youth played a gig in a bar in northern Florida. “We walk in and Harry Crews is sitting there, cowboy hat tucked over his eyes, boots up on the table. He said, ‘I just wanted to meet somebody who named themselves after me.’ ” The author stuck around to watch the show. “Later I saw an interview where Crews was asked what he thought,” Moore said with a chuckle. “ ‘They were nice people, but that’s the worst music I ever heard,’ ” he drawled. “ ‘Who the hell listens to that stuff?’ ” ♦