Year: 2013

John Thompson describes harnessing raw sound, and eventually experimental music – such as the monotonous Krautrock seen above – to cope with a high-functioning developmental disorder:

Eventually, I learned to self-medicate through sound. Repetitious and regular sound is best for this purpose: laundry machines, police sirens, ticking clocks, ceiling fans. Sometimes I would hide in the dark of the crawlspace behind my bed and hold my enormous Manx cat to my ear as he purred himself to sleep. … Since that time my most beloved music has been characterized by revolving motifs and pointillism, from Can and kosmische to the rigid corners of dance music to its strains that felt more pure. Disabused of its human elements and compartmentalized into patterns, music presented itself as bare scaffolding that I could drape myself over. This music is what I’d been waiting to hear in that crawlspace, the order I’d been seeking all my life.

It was like this that I discovered there was a socially acceptable side to stimming, that I wouldn’t always have to pace, or torture my fists. Sound in a certain orderly placement exerts the same curtailing force on my mind that movement used to, and my headphones are a leash that keeps me in check. I wear them constantly, and although I’m aware that their constant presence can be seen as strangely hostile in some environments, they are a safety net I can’t afford to forfeit. Music is my sensory diet and also my self-care kit.

Recent Dish on the therapeutic quality of music here.

Meagan Day mulls it over:

Bodie, California is a ghost town. Or rather, it was a ghost town—now it is a historic park and tourist destination. It endures in a state of “arrested decay,” meaning that nothing can be newly constructed onsite, but neither are its standing buildings permitted to deteriorate any further. The state of California has suspended the town in its process of ruination, stabilizing its entropy and halting its decline. If its decay is forestalled, its grounds rigorously maintained and its aesthetic carefully cultivated, can it be called a ghost town any longer?

(Photo by James Gordon)

Reviewing a new edition of John Updike’s short stories, Scott Dill praises the late writer’s attention to the surface of things:

What shines so pervasively in his short stories is the ability to burnish everyday routines with those carefully chosen adjectives. He may not convince us with weighty theology, but he does give us a grammar for praise. When our sins harden us to God’s goodness, Updike not only reminds us of it, but he surprises us with specific gifts, faithfully retrieving them for us to taste and see. In these stories, the famous chronicler of adulterous affairs (twice profiled on the cover of the magazine Time) appears less as a lascivious provocateur than as a patient archeologist, polishing each fragment of human desire for our inspection. True, several stories explore the moral failings of marriages gone awry while simultaneously celebrating infidelity’s sexual pleasures. Yet this is a function of what we might call, with all due respect, Updike’s shallowness. In one of the adulterous stories a man tells his lover, as he ends their affair, “For me it was wonderful to become a partner in your response to textures. Your shallowness, as my wife calls it [ … ] broke a new dimension into my hitherto inadequately superficial world.” When I was recently asked if I could justify having students read Updike’s sensual descriptions, I should have responded that such shallow sensuality would do them good.

From the newly-released Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume II:

We deal in a curious and laughable confusion of notions concerning God. We divide Him in two, bring half of Him down to an obscure and infinitesimal corner of the world to confer salvation upon a little colony of Jews—and only Jews, no one else—and leave the other half of Him throned in heaven and looking down and eagerly and anxiously watching for results. We reverently study the history of the earthly half, and deduce from it the conviction that the earthly half has reformed, is equipped with morals and virtues, and in no way resembles the abandoned, malignant half that abides upon the throne. We conceive that the earthly half is just, merciful, charitable, benevolent, forgiving, and full of sympathy for the sufferings of mankind and anxious to remove them.

Apparently we deduce this character not by examining facts, but by diligently declining to search them, measure them, and weigh them. The earthly half requires us to be merciful, and sets us an example by inventing a lake of fire and brimstone in which all of us who fail to recognize and worship Him as God are to be burned through all eternity. And not only we, who are offered these terms, are to be thus burned if we neglect them, but also the earlier billions of human beings are to suffer this awful fate, although they all lived and died without ever having heard of Him or the terms at all. This exhibition of mercifulness may be called gorgeous. We have nothing approaching it among human savages, nor among the wild beasts of the jungle.

Michael J. Altman pays tribute to religious historian Mircea Eliade, whose comparative approach “dominated the field of religious studies in the latter third of the twentieth century in America”:

Eliade refuses to explain religion. Rejecting the reductionism of psychoanalysis or sociology, Eliade demands that religion be understood “on its own terms.” We do not explain religion, rather, the historian of religion describes and categorizes religion. The historian of religions looks for symbols, myths, and archetypes through comparison. Because the sacred is sui generis, unique, irreducible, we should seek understanding, interpretation, and pattern. Explanation is anathema.