The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, February 25, 2020 — 5

Guided By Voices has always 
basically been known as Bob Pollard 
and a bunch of guys with day jobs. 
He was the driving force behind 
the band in any of its iterations. 
Whether it was back in the ’80s 
when they were still recording out 
of a garage or in the ’90s when they 
sounded like they were recording 
out of a garage, Pollard’s presence 
has stayed the same.
Aside from Pollard’s constancy, 
the structure of the band has never 
been consistent: The number of 
members present and prior is 
21. The morphology of the band 
became so convoluted that there’s 
an 
official 
timeline 
depicting 
the change in formation on their 
Wikipedia. In all honesty, the only 
asset that really propelled Guided 
By Voices into becoming a well-
recognized member of the indie 
rock scene was Pollard. His esoteric 
lyricism and musical quirks were 
by far the band’s greatest strength. 
This was his band. That’s why it’s 
so surprising that he seems to be 
the one dragging the band down on 
their latest release, Surrender Your 
Poppy Field. 
This 
is 
not 
to 
say 
the 
instrumentation 
is 
anything 
particularly 
mind 
blowing 
or radical. If anything, the 
sound is a bit dated, drawing 

comparisons to Olivia Tremor 
Control or Semisonic. But even 
their critically acclaimed releases 
from the ’90s sounded dated. They 
were purposely going for a lofi
 
approach, which, in all honesty, 
sounded better on Ween’s The Pod 
or anything by Beat Happening. 
The music on Surrender Your Poppy 
Field simply gets the job done with 
the occasional standout track. A 

few notable tracks include “Arthur 
Has Business Elsewhere” and 
“Steely Dodger,” the latter of which 
sounds like The Books tried to make 
standard rock music. This is an 
improvement from their previous 
post-reformation 
records 
that 
inexplicably tried to hold on to their 
lofi endeavors from decades earlier.
The biggest problem with this 
album is that Bob doesn’t have 
anything to say. This was never the 

case beforehand, as his sharp wit 
was the biggest attraction to any 
Guided By Voices record. At best, 
he’s able to string together a few 
clever bars on the record. At worst 
... oh God. At worst, there’s “Cul-
de-Sac Kids.” Nothing about this 
song suggests a right to exist. How 
does a 62-year-old man sing “Cul-
de-sac kids have the best parties” 
and “Boy, those sac kids throw 
good parties” with any sincerity? 
The answer: he doesn’t. It has all 
of the vocal absurdity of Frank 
Zappa’s “Catholic Girls” with just 
about none of the irony. Mix this 
with the worst instrumentation on 
the album and you get a real mess 
of a milkshake. This is one of those 
songs that completely halts any 
momentum for at least the next few 
songs. Unfortunately, the album 
doesn’t provide anything to bring it 
back from such a low.
It’s a shame that one song 
functions as a grenade, wrecking 
the enjoyment of an album. 
Surrender 
Your 
Poppy 
Field 
had the potential to be a fairly 
decent record, at least relative to 
their more recent work. Instead, 
we’re given a confirmation that 
Guided By Voices should stop 
putting out records. At the very 
least they need to take more time 
crafting better sets of songs. 
When you’re putting out three 
records in one year, it suggests 
that you don’t understand the 
concept of b-sides. One can hope 
they’re only putting out two 
albums in 2020.

Guided by Voices needs to 
stop: On their new album

GUIDED BY VOICES INC.

DREW GADBOIS
Daily Arts Writer

Surrender Your 
Poppy Field

Guided By Voices 

Guided By Voices, Inc.

ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW

Adapted from the hit podcast 
of the same name, Epix’s new 
docu-series “Slow Burn” — which 
details the people involved in the 
events of the Watergate Scandal 
— has joined the trend of podcast-
turned-television shows, and it 
certainly will not be the last. In 
our current media climate, the 
endless profit possibilities that 
different intellectual properties 
offer has nearly every network or 
platform scrambling to attain the 
rights to reproduce stories we’ve 
already heard before, but just on 
their platform. There’s absolutely 
nothing wrong with adapting 
a series from one medium to 
another, but the qualities that 
make a podcast great are separate 
from what makes a television 
series great.
Great 
podcasts 
make 
you 
feel close to the text. The voice 
speaking to you invites you to 
imagine and create your own 
understanding of the story as 
it’s being told. Podcasts-turned-
television series, on the other 
hand, command you to sit down 
and take in a single version of the 
story unfolding before your eyes. 
“Slow Burn” wants us to imagine 
what it felt like to live through 
Watergate in real time. It gives 
listeners a different perspective 
on the events we think we know so 
well, stripping away the collective 
knowledge of the event in order 
to tell the story from the very 
beginning. 

The visual element that “Slow 
Burn” returns to the most is the 
image of an empty living room 
that screams 1970s — a wooden 
coffee table, a walnut bookshelf, 
an FM radio controlled with a 
dial. With each return, it becomes 
easier to imagine yourself being 
there, living through the events, 
catching a snippet of the daily 
Watergate news coverage as you 
go about your day.
The brilliance of the title 
“Slow Burn” is how host Leon 
Neyfakh perfectly evokes the 
feeling of a literal slow burn 

with his suspensful storytelling. 
Recounting 
history 
through 
our 
collective 
memory 
often 
results in only remembering the 
popular assumptions and forced 
narratives. In other words, we 
remember the outcomes, but not 
the specifics, such as the people 
involved.
“Slow Burn” is all about 
the people involved. Neyfakh 
repeatedly invites us to forget 
about what we already know 
about Watergate and imagine 

ourselves as observers who have 
no idea what the “third-rate 
burglary” that barely made it 
into The Washington Post might 
eventually 
lead 
to. 
Neyfakh 
loves bringing our attention to 
figures who “played roles in the 
story that are larger than history 
remembers.” The series opener is 
centered around Martha Mitchell 
— the wife of Nixon’s Attorney 
General — and outlines her 
role as the initial whistleblower 
in the Watergate scandal. The 
episode also recounts the Nixon 
administration’s successful smear 
campaign to dismiss Mitchell as a 
crazy alcoholic in order to control 
the narrative. 
Without Mitchell, it’s very 
possible 
that 
the 
truth 
of 
Watergate would have never 
come out. Mitchell’s courage to 
speak out, the steps taken by the 
government to keep her quiet 
and to turn her into some sort of 
delusional person are not talked 
about as often as it should be. The 
relevance of Mitchell’s treatment 
by the press and the Nixon 
administration 
is 
particularly 
relevant considering the way our 
current president disregards and 
discredits anyone who speaks out 
against him. This episode details 
Mitchell’s role in Watergate, and 
the rest of the series should bring 
back important figures that have 
been forgotten by history and the 
slow burn of the truth. The next 
time someone tells you a story 
that’s so outrageous that you 
can’t believe it, remember that 
sometimes the craziest thing to 
come out of someone’s mouth may 
very well be the truth.

Slow Burn

Series Premiere

Epix

Sundays @ 10 p.m.

JUSTIN POLLACK
Daily Arts Writer

Watergate’s ‘Slow Burn’

EPIX

Sometimes it’s actually worth 
reading the jacket copy — a lot 
hides there. Lidia Yuknavitch’s 
debut story collection, “Verge,” 
is, apparently, “a group portrait 
of 
the 
marginalized 
and 
outcast in moments of crisis.” 
Yuknavitch apparently “offers 
a shard-sharp mosaic portrait 
of human resilience on the 
margins.” The blurbs on the back 
of the book have more to say 
about this theme: the novelist 
Dorothy Allison writes that 
“I know these people, I know 
their dilemmas, and where I 
don’t recognize them, I believe 
them.” The essayist Melissa 
Febos offers that the stories 
“showed me how resilience is 
forged through survival, beauty 
through 
brokenness, 
joy 
by 
fire.” In the acknowledgements 
to the book, Yuknavitch writes, 
“to everyone anywhere living 
in the in-between of things: I 
get it.” As it turns out, this use 
of the term “marginalization” is 
used in a slippery, broad way; it 
encompasses anyone who is in a 
position somewhat illegible from 
the point of view of normative 
society. 
Yuknavitch 
writes 
about both war refugees and 
women frustrated with their 
relationships, 
incarcerated 
people 
and 
people 
who, 
dissatisfied with bourgeois life, 
begin to identify with elsewhere. 
The key is a sense of incongruity 
with the dominant narrative of 
what a person should be doing. 

I 
am 
focusing 
on 
this 
peripheral material — jacket 
copy, acknowledgements, blurbs 
— because it necessarily primes 
readers for the text, and because 
Yuknavitch 
herself 
doesn’t 
frame these stories, yet they 
clearly go together. “Knowing 
people” and “believing them” 
are functions of compassion — 
the statements in the packaging 
of the book indicate an ethical 
bent to Yuknavitch’s fiction, 

one where bearing witness to 
the lives of marginalized people 
is a way to find out about “the 
world we live in now.” Empathy 
seems to be the function of this 
book, its rationale. In this book, 
we as readers will bear witness 
to the stories of the resilient 
outcast, broadly defined; we will 
have compassion for them. This 
framing material is basically 
an insistence on Yuknavitch’s 
ability as an author to shape 
these particular experiences into 
a form that readers will be able to 
understand. 
I’m 
interested 
in 
the 

assumptions 
inherent 
in 
empathy, 
especially 
as 
an 
ethic of literature, especially 
when “literature” means $26 
books published by an imprint 
of MacMillan. I feel like an 
audience is implied when a 
book claims to be a vehicle for 
empathy. This is to say, two 
groups of people are created by 
books like this — the readers, 
the ones who empathize; and the 
subject, who is empathized with. 
This, of course, is common 
in fiction. The way Yuknavitch 
writes about her subjects is often 
troubling, though. The opening 
of one of the shortest stories in 
the collection, “A Woman Going 
Out,” is a minutely detailed 
description of a woman shaving 
her legs in the second person: 
“Take the razor up smooth 
against the slight resistance of 
stubble, flick the wrist at the top, 
dip the head into the water, swish 
it around, then back down to the 
ankle for the next run. Flesh 
smooth-appearing in a track 
through white foam. Do it again.” 
Like the flesh appearing from 
under the leg hairs, Yuknavitch 
likes to slowly reveal her subjects 
at the beginning of the stories, 
starting 
disorientingly 
close 
and then slowly zooming out. 
This story, which is less than a 
page long, reveals the woman’s 
genitalia in a moment that feels 
like it was meant to trip up the 
reader. “Over the knee to the 
thigh, pause; same with the 
other leg, pause; scrunch it inch 
by inch up the thighs to the balls 
pushed back up into the cave, to 
the penis tucked tight between 
the legs and secured with a 

thong … ” 
We do not, in fact, see the 
trans 
woman 
going 
out. 
It 
stops here, in her bathroom, 
letting the body signify in 
place of the woman’s mind, 
personality or actions beyond 
the cosmetic; it effectively erases 
her 
personhood 
as 
separate 
from her body. The story relies 
on 
the 
reader 
experiencing 
the trans woman’s genitals as 
surprising and alien; the story 
gets its narrative shove from the 
othering of the titular character. 
I’m not mentioning this story 
because I take special issue with 
Yuknavitch’s fictional treatment 
of trans people. I’m mentioning 
it because outside of the context 
of 
the 
collection’s 
thematic 
umbrella, this story would be 
fully visible as a mechanism for 
othering a person. I found myself 
wondering after this story about 
how much of the depiction of 
people on the “verges” of things 
requires establishing their state 
as abject.
This same kind of othering 
appears 
in 
different 
stories 
in other guises. In “Second 

Language,” a Lithuanian woman 
is engaged in prostitution in 
Portland. She doesn’t understand 
English very well, and navigates 
her new country in a dissociative 
haze. The prose style Yuknavitch 
uses is intensely bodily and feels 
slightly unmoored from reality. 
“The front man lived near a 
freeway — what freedom was 
it meant to have? — in a snot-
colored two-story house with 
black plastic in the windows 
where curtains in the windows 
where curtains should be. When 
she knocked on the door, her 
throat cords braided and her 
vertebrae rattled.” There is an 
intense fixation on this woman’s 
body, even outside of the sex 
scenes, the story is full of pale 
wrists, neck veins, intestines. 
The story’s fixation is on how 
the experience of prostitution 
robs the woman of her ability to 
understand herself or her world, 
her lack of fluency in English just 
another way she feels displaced. 
Her body becomes the only thing 
that signifies, and all it signifies is 
a use value — the meaning of this 
woman’s life is stripped away by 

the new country, her experiences 
there. It’s more than a little 
painful to read. The ending is 
unsatisfyingly redemptive — the 
woman tells a Slavic folktale as 
a way of furtively hanging onto 
some aspect of her self-definition 
(“There was one thing besides 
her body that she possessed — 
a story, in a foreign tongue but 
still a story”) and in the end 
Yuknavitch’s 
story 
takes 
on 
the character of a folktale. The 
woman guts herself with window 
glass and spills her entrails onto 
the pavement, and in doing so 
calls down greywolves from 
the 
mountains 
surrounding 
Portland, who avenge her against 
her clients and her pimps. The 
ending of the story is something 
like the statement of a moral: “I 
tell you, do not go near that place. 
Do not go near it. Greywolves 
guard the ground there. Girls are 
growing from guts, enough for a 
body and a language all the way 
out of this world.”

Empathy ill-defined in 
Lidia Yuknavitch’s ‘Verge’

BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

PBS

Verge: Stories

Lidia Yuknavitch 

Riverhead Books 

Feb. 4, 2020 

TV REVIEW

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

