Contributor’s Marginalia: Nida Sophasarun responding to Rick Barot’s “Nectarine”

The following playlist grew out of my reflections on Rick Barot’s poem “Nectarine,” which meditates on the experience of nostalgia. As memories come to the foreground, each layer mirrors the search for the precise language to recreate the moment when a feeling passes into the desire for words to embody it. A requisite for the act of nostalgia, interestingly, is the presence of other people—a friend, a grocer, a writer, the reader—to help furnish and reconstruct the concrete borders of memory as a space through which one’s pre-language self may be summoned. It happens so quietly, but we are left with the primacy of feeling.

In appreciation of this poem and to indulge in what it means to play nostalgia full blast, I made a “mixtape” (using Spotify, the world’s largest Case Logic CD binder). I like to remember a craft that involves the physicality of recording time for the sake of elevating adolescent feeling. If I had actually recorded the mix on a double-tape deck boom box, it would have taken all night or a few nights because every song would have to be recorded (I can’t emphasize this enough) in real time for a 60-, 90-, or (rare, ambitious, questionable) 120-minute cassette. If one later rethought the placement of, say, the Temptations’ 12-minute version of “Papa Was A Rolling Stone,” in the middle of side B, one would have to rewind and record over it with three or four 3-to-4 minute songs. Gen-Xers had this kind of time. It was in service of creating an experience for someone else that also offered a shape to the friendship, as in: This is how I remember it feeling. Is this what you remember, too?

Liner notes: There’s a song for each line of “Nectarine.” The last Side B song would have been the “easter egg.” In the 90s, I would have collaged a cover. Finally, this won’t be my first or last time defending Beiber on a mix.

Nectarine Mixtape (on Spotify)

Side A:
If You Could Speak – God Help The Girl
Pocketful of Rainbows – Elvis
French Navy – Camera Obscura
Now & Then – Sjowgren
Crimson and Clover – Tommy James & The Shondells
Raspberry Beret – Prince
Peaches – Justin Beiber, Daniel Caesar, Giveon
Your Arm Around Me – Jens Lekman

Side B:
Here You Come Again – Dolly Parton
Sunday Morning – The Velvet Underground, Nico
Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels) – Jim Croce
California – Joni Mitchell
Lilac Wine – Nina Simone
Hello Stranger – Barbara Lewis
How Long Do I Have to Wait for You? – Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
God Only Knows – The Beach Boys

Easter Egg: Heaven Is A Place On Earth – Belinda Carlisle