Crazy, yet Cute, girl writes book about SP songs

[avsfan7733]

http://www.smashingpumpkins.com/news_10229

The Smashing Pumpkins - Tarantula Box Set by Claire Fercak
On October 8th, 2008, a book based on a personal tale of The Smashing Pumpkins' influence over one's adolescence will be released. The book, The Smashing Pumpkins - Tarantula Box Set, has been written by French author Claire Fercak and Smashingpumpkins.com has been graced with her presence to really explain how this piece of literature was created and what it means to her.
The book will be available online at the publisher's website HERE.

Also, the book is written in French, with the excerpts of certain Smashing Pumpkins songs written in English.


The Smashing Pumpkins - Tarantula Box Set

I agreed to write this book about the Smashing Pumpkins because it wasn't a biography or an essay I had to write. I am neither a journalist, nor a biographer, nor a musician. My editor, Yves Jolivet, assured me that I was completely free to write a personal piece of work, a fictional work, and that idea appealed to me. I was already familiar with this collection of novels that allows a writer to explain his particular relationship with music and to say why listening to such album or such band was a defining moment in his (or her) life.

When Yves told me that I could write about any band I wanted, I immediately thought about the Smashing Pumpkins, because it is a band that corresponds to my imagination. I rarely speak openly about the things that are dear to me. I guess it is my way of protecting them. I quite like the idea that those things should remain secret. It is easier for me to mention them in my writings, which are my private space, where I sow clues, where I hide touchstones, where I wink at the reader.

I started roaming around Smashing Pumpkins internet forums and websites only after I had finished writing the book. I didn't want to read about them before because I only wanted to be influenced by their music. I wanted to feel completely free and unattached.

At first, this book was not supposed to be issued before 2009. When my editor suggested me to write it, I had several writings underway so I didn't know when I would be able to start writing this musical fiction. During the month of June, I was an emotional wreck after promoting my novel. Everything had gone perfectly well but I had the feeling I had been left behind, that I was absolutely unconcerned by my novel's success. I wanted to be more present, to inhabit reality a bit more, but I just couldn't get myself to do it. I was restless, I had trouble sleeping, and the worst thing was that I wasn't able to feel and inhabit the novel I had started writing.

As a teenager, whenever I was looking for a haven to rest my mind, I listened to the Smashing Pumpkins. I quickly realized that the only thing I could do then, in June 2008, was write this book about the Pumpkins. It made my life less unbearable...

I had a lot of fun writing it. I was given so much freedom of expression that I could even go back over a violent scene in my last novel and re-compose it. The main character of the musical fiction could hit "rewind', then "stop". Thus, I was able to erase and put this violence behind me.

There are 33 tracks in my novel, tracks which are more like songs than chapters and which are composed of short texts and poems. In the table of contents, the tracks are timed, just like they are timed on a disc. The heroine decides to lock herself into the box set of The Aeroplane flies high. She finds herself in some music videos, in the album Adore, Siamese dream etc. More than a shelter, it is a way of life she is looking for. Not a way of life that would cure her, but the only possible way of existing when everything else is forbidden to her. She chooses to become a song, < Medellia Of The Gray Skies >. At the beginning, she doesn't succeed to do so, until one day she realizes that the shadow she sees in the box and that follows her is a shadow shaped just like her. She becomes aware that the music of the Smashing Pumpkins is what gives rhythm to her breath, to her voice and to her lungs.

Some enemies (hearsay, evil-minded people...) try to force her out of the box. When the band announces their break up in 2000, some people start hitting and kicking the box set, but she soldiers on. There is a double-bottom in the box, and the double-bottom hides a bottom. Through various levels, she can transcend the musical history of the Smashing pumpkins. She has diner with ghosts, wanders in a forest or through the desert. She walks about a vegetal world, inhabited by strange dwellers: beasts, seven moles, a gardener, an allergic waiter, a little boy and a rag doll... A bit like Alice in Pumpkin Land.

The box is infested by spiders. The heroin of the novel tells that she was bitten by one of them and is now affected with tarentism, a disease that ravaged southern Italy, from the 15th to the 17th century. This illness was cured by music and by a dance. That dance that was created by mermaids in Homer's Odyssey and was called the Tarantella. If the heroin wishes to stay alive, she cannot leave the box.

In this book, I talk about music, but I also talk about integrity. My goal is to show that, since I was a teenager, what I value about the Smashing Pumkins is that Billy Corgan is physically committed to his work: his breath, his soul and his emotion are devoted to his work. Here is a guy that never lost his sense of duty and his urge to fight, a guy that has a voice, composure, a language, and a mind of his own.

I wrote this fiction in the first person. The "I" is important to me, it is a form of resistance, a way of being physically present in the text and to fight against any attempts of standardization. It is a way of finding a voice of my own. Some paragraphs in italics are meant to disturb the sentences and allow me to insert short tales or even to let a new voice speak out. I like misleading the reader so he can create his own references and perceive elements without the fence that separates reality from the many aspects taken on by imagination.

Some of the tracks are double-entry texts: the narration in French can be intersected by a poem, also in French. Or the narration in French can be intersected by song lyrics, this time in English. I won't give out the end of the story. In a way, it doesn't matter whether the enemies succeed in taking out the girl from the box set or not, and it doesn't matter whether she dies or not. Let's leave that to our imagination and wish that, some day, the Smashing Pumpkins will make a disc, a box set, or a song in which my story's dishevelled princess will live again, even if it is as a shadow or as a ghost.

When I tried to get in touch with Billy Corgan, I had almost finished the first draft of the text and I knew exactly how I wanted the final version. I did not know precisely what I wanted to tell him or to offer him, but my instinct told me to contact him anyway. I wanted him to feel as free as did to write whatever he wished to write. In the end, he sent me two beautiful texts that perfectly fit with my text, although He had only read the first pages of my book, translated in English.

Claire Fercak was born in 1982 and studied philosophy in college.
She is a writer for Verticales-Gallimard publishing house and she also writes for younger readers at the French publishing house L'Ecole des loisirs. Claire's first novel, Rideau de verre (glass curtain) was issued in 2007.

The Smashing Pumpkins / Tarantula Box Set will be available as of October 8th (published by Le mot et le reste)

Photo by Catherine Helie-Gallimard

Visit Claire Fercak's website here (Site is written in French!)

His first text, the track number 'zero' of the book, is about poetry. It is the ideal foreword since it announces my poems without describing them. It is at a distance from the plot but at the same time, it agrees completely with my questioning on language and writing. His text also permits me to refer to the track in which I talk about Billy Corgan's poetry book that I really like.

Billy's second text is at the end of the book. It is the hidden track, almost invisible, which is located after the end of the book in grey characters. It is a sort of duet between Billy and I. The second text he sent me is about ghosts and their whispers. It is just the right echo to the end of my book. It allowed me to compose a three-entry track, the only one in the book: the writing in French is intersected with a poem in French and with a text in English. To me, Billy's participation gave its full meaning and legitimacy to the book. It made sense for the book and for me. It is pretty awesome to realize how right I was to choose to write about this band in particular more than any other band.

http://www.smashingpumpkins.com/gall...rcak_small.jpg
Claire Fercak

[avsfan7733]

it actually sounds kinda interesting.
a little weird, but interesting.

[MonteLDS]

frenchy knows some stuff about this

[Sebastian]

I can't stand the words "box set" anymore.

[Slurpee]

I'd like to set something in her box.

[skipgo]

weird.

ima write a book about netphoria.

[Pizza Club]

Do not want

[skipgo]

i want to write a love story about eulogy and caine walker.

[waltermcphilp]

Originally Posted by skipgo

i want to write a love story about eulogy and caine walker.

will it be a pop up book?

'Pull the tab to give Eulogy a reach around'

[wHATcOLOR]

AHAHAHAH, that's a girl?>>hhahaha!!

[rolmos]

it's a trap!

[avsfan7733]

do a barrel roll

[skipgo]

Originally Posted by waltermcphilp

will it be a pop up book?

'Pull the tab to give Eulogy a reach around'

i like the way you think.

[Rickpat12]

I saw my life flash before my eyes.

[MstrGhost]

[rant]
On a sideways rant, I absolutely hate those godawful kind of glasses. They completely make a girls face generic by distracting one from her natural shape.
So they think these pictures from above with the eyes looking over the glasses look smart, adding only to a pseudo-intellectual look. That's only generic for french bitch.
All black squarish thick frames are the worst offenders.
[/rant]

[T&T]

tldr..
skimmed down, but;
where's the "box" part in this>?

[skipgo]

hi

[RopeyLopey]

Dear Claire: heroin and heroine are two different things.

Cheers,
RopeyLopey

[RopeyLopey]

Originally Posted by MonteLDS

frenchy knows some stuff about this

no shit

[slunken]

http://www.smashingpumpkins.com/gall...rcak_small.jpg

looks like jimmy in drag

[???]

whats her myspace

[Banana]

Looks like a guy

[Mo]

I bet that's Fysche, isn't she French Canadian?

[trev]

Originally Posted by antipop

I bet that's Fysche, isn't she French Canadian?

that was my first thought from the thread title

[D.]

what kind of name is Tarantula Box Set

[ravenguy2000]

Originally Posted by D.

what kind of name is Tarantula Box Set

a shitty one

[spidersoma]

i can't take this seriously when one of the shittiest SP songs ever is in the title

[jtrimble]

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x49...ercak_creation

[waltermcphilp]

interesting. i certainly didn't understand a word of that.

she may or may not have said "pineapple" somewhere in there.

[stumpycat]

You know, a few paragraphs into reading this, I was thinking, "Man, Billy would totally eat up this sort of shit."

Then, lo and behold...

When I tried to get in touch with Billy Corgan, I had almost finished the first draft of the text and I knew exactly how I wanted the final version. I did not know precisely what I wanted to tell him or to offer him, but my instinct told me to contact him anyway. I wanted him to feel as free as did to write whatever he wished to write. In the end, he sent me two beautiful texts that perfectly fit with my text [...]

His first text, the track number 'zero' of the book, is about poetry. It is the ideal foreword since it announces my poems without describing them. It is at a distance from the plot but at the same time, it agrees completely with my questioning on language and writing. His text also permits me to refer to the track in which I talk about Billy Corgan's poetry book that I really like.

Uh oh.

Billy's second text is at the end of the book. It is the hidden track, almost invisible, which is located after the end of the book in grey characters. It is a sort of duet between Billy and I. The second text he sent me is about ghosts and their whispers. It is just the right echo to the end of my book. It allowed me to compose a three-entry track, the only one in the book: the writing in French is intersected with a poem in French and with a text in English. To me, Billy's participation gave its full meaning and legitimacy to the book. It made sense for the book and for me.