Sounds Busy

Like many people, I work better with some background music – especially soothing instrumental music that’s not too distracting. So, for the past couple of years, I’ve been collecting tracks that work well for me in a single long playlist; currently, I’m up to 548 songs, or about a full work week’s worth.

In case your own COVID-lockdown listening is getting a bit stale, I’m embedding that playlist here. It’s not ordered in any intentional way, as I tend to simply shuffle my through. And while only the first 100 show up here, I believe you’ll get the full lineup if you add it to Music on your iPhone or Mac.

Fire it up, and get to work!

Strung Up

When I was a child, my parents would put me to sleep by playing The Woods So Wild, a suite of Renaissance lute suites performed by the great Julian Bream:

Ever since, I’ve found the sound of classical lute and guitar exceedingly relaxing. Enough so that I even purchased a nylon-stringed guitar myself some years back, and have spent time practicing at least semi-regularly since. While it’s far below the trumpet, and really even below the piano and upright bass and possibly even drums, in terms of my instrumental competence, I can still play a mean “Packington’s Pound” (track 3 above), which is pretty much all I need.

Anyway, also throughout my childhood, I spent a bunch of time on various Pacific islands. My father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, sub-specializes in ocean medicine – if you get the bends in the Pacific, there’s a decent chance you get med-evaced to him. So, during summers, he would head to islands on work trips, to meet local physicians and dive operators and the like, and I got to tag along. (Rough, I know). As a result, I also picked up an early love of slack key guitar, a style of open-tuned, finger-picked playing invented in Hawaii after the military left a huge number of guitars on the islands after WWII, and young-musicians there self-taught without knowledge of traditional tuning and technique.

For example, I’ve listened the grooves off of Keola Beamer’s Mauna Kea (White Mountain Journal) ever since it was released, and I was thrilled to see it used, a decade later, as the soundtrack for Alexander Payne’s wonderful The Descendants:

So, in the midst of this pandemic, and particularly in need of musical soothing, I was particularly excited to discover Yasmin Williams, an unorthodox finger-style lap guitarist. On her latest album, Unwind, she also uses tap shoes, a cello bow, and whatever else she can think of to make music that sounds both contemporary and timeless:

Unwind is great, as are the other albums above in this post.  Especially in these anxious times, I give all of them two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

Sitzfleisch

In standard style, I’m doing my best to watch all of this year’s Oscar contenders, at least in the major categories. Thus far, Jess and I have slogged through Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Marriage Story, Little Women, Bombshell, and The Irishman, with Parasite next on deck.

And, in short, boy are movies long.

Perhaps it’s that I’ve been watching more TV shows than movies of late. Or that my ability to focus for extended stretches has decayed in this frenetic digital age. Or just that my brain has addled (and my bladder further shrunk) in my advancing age.

But, whatever the reason, I’m finding it harder than ever to keep giving a crap all the way from opening scene through credit roll.

Still, I do want to keep slogging ahead through the balance of the list – if just to keep current on cultural literacy, as much as anything else. And who knows? Maybe after those dozens of hours, I’ll even have regained the ability to sustain my attention for an entire movie at a clip.

Never Be Royals

I’ll be honest: I’ve never really been that interested in the Royal Family, and I’ve only followed in passing the Megan Markle / Prince Harry departure drama. As an American, I don’t read British tabloids, so it was difficult for me to evaluate the whole situation. Was Markle really getting a raw deal in the press, or might the whole thing be overblown?

Until, that is, I came across this Buzzfeed article, comparing coverage of Megan Markle and Kate Middleton. In the same publications. For doing literally the exact same things. After which, all I can say is: boy do I fully endorse the move.

Good luck to them both, and to baby whatever-his-or-her-name-is. Now back to ignoring the Royals per usual. God knows we have plenty of disasters to keep an eye on right here at home.

Terwilliger

A classic I recently stumbled across again: Theodore Geisel’s (aka Dr. Seuss’) graduation speech to the 1977 class of Lake Forest College, reproduced below in its entirety.

—

My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when there were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
‘To eat these things,’
said my uncle,
‘you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid
BUT
you must spit out the air!’
And
as you partake in the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.

 

Word Up

My whole life, I’ve loved words.  Enough so that, when I was just four or five, whenever I learned a new one, I’d walk around for the subsequent week trying to wedge it into as many sentences as I possibly could.  A voracious reader from even that age, I stumbled across most of my new words in books.  And, each time I did, I was assiduous about looking it up.

But, over the decades, I ran into fewer and fewer words that I didn’t know.  Until, eventually, I had fallen out of the definition-hunting habit.  When I did find something new, stopping my reading, even just to make note of the word, seemed an undue hassle.  And I could almost always roughly grasp the word from context.  So, instead of pausing to Google, I’d just plow ahead.

Back in November, however, I came across a surprising use of ‘salient’ in an Economist article.  And, as I happened to be sitting next to a physical dictionary, I paused to look the word up, discovering a second definition I had never known: an outwardly projecting part of a fortification or line of defense.

I have a longstanding weakness for secondary meanings – ‘pedestrian,’ in the sense of ‘commonplace,’ being a favorite – so I wrote the new definition of salient down in my journal.  And then, a few weeks later, I stumbled across ‘anatine’ in a short story, looked it up, and wrote that down, too.

From there, a new habit was born – or, more accurately, an old one rebirthed.  In the few months since, I’ve already picked up otiose, rachitic, oneiric, diluents, vitrine.  And I’ve reminded myself of words I knew, but that were parked too far in the recesses of my brain to be called up for conversational use: parvenu, febrile, palimpsest.

Much like my five year old self, I am now truly smitten with those discoveries and re-discoveries.  Though, unlike the words I was excited about 35 years back, these I’m sadly forced to largely keep to myself.  Use ‘anatine’ or ‘oneiric’ in conversation with all but the nerdiest and wordiest of fellow readers, and I’d likely get nothing but a confused stare in response.

Even so, I’ll be back to looking up new words as I discover them, and will continue to expand my list.  If nothing else, it makes me awfully happy just to read them over, to roll them around in my head, to see how they feel coming to life on my tongue.

Sorry, Morrie

Yesterday, as I was chatting with a friend, he referenced something in the book Tuesdays with Morrie and I admitted I’d never actually read it.  As I told him, I had no interest in it.  Though, honestly, I couldn’t really tell him why.  Or even precisely what the book was about.  I just knew that it was wildly popular, in an inspirational, Chicken Soup for the Whatever kind of way, and so I disliked it on principal.  Which, once I said it out loud, sounded more than a bit dumb.  So, on his strong urging, I borrowed my friend’s copy, and read through the first half this morning.  And, I am dismayed to admit, it is actually pretty much delightful.

Whether it’s my New Yorker soul, my Silicon Valley roots, or just douchey hipster affectation, I’ve always gravitated towards the new and the cool, the up-and-coming, the overlooked favorites of those in the know.  From spotting talented bands before they go mainstream, to eating at top-notch restaurants when they’re still just in soft opening, it’s satisfying to feel like you’ve found something amazing before the rest of the world has caught on.

Which is fine.  But the problem is, I realize I’ve also generalized that to believe the converse, and to distrust anything that achieves too much popular success – especially when it comes to books.  So, for example, it was only this past year that I finally read All the Light We Cannot See and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—two genuinely excellent books that I really liked, yet that I had also previously avoided liking (or even reading) because I felt like too many people had liked and read them already.

And, written in black and white, that’s patently ridiculous, the sort of myopic snottiness that would make me roll my eyes if I saw someone else doing it.  Yet, looking back, I can see I’ve done it myself, over and over, whether with The Life of Pi, or The Help, or Water for Elephants, or probably dozens of others, too.

So, it appears, I need to stop judging books by their proverbial covers.  Or, at least, by the ‘#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER’ taglines and ‘Oprah’s Book Club Selection’ stamps running along the cover tops

Keep Driving

It’s been a frustrating and impatient few weeks on my end, so I was glad to come across a favorite E.L. Doctorow quote, about driving at night:

“You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Pretty good advice for life.

 

One is Silver

Early last year, I read that Kushner’s Angels in America would be coming back to Broadway, and realized I’d never actually seen either half of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, staged separately but part of a single whole), on stage or even on TV (via Mike Nichol’s famed HBO adaptation).  Nor had I even read the play.  So, I got a copy, and banged through it in a single evening.  And while, in some ways, it felt totally dated—an artifact of an earlier NYC where AIDS was a new and ascendant threat and being gay and out meant something very different than it does today; in others, it was totally prescient—in its choice of villain, for example: the closeted yet AIDS-stricken New York attorney Roy Cohen, who famously mentored the (rather constitutionally similar) Donald Trump.

But, in short, Angels blew my mind. And it led me to search out and try to fill other lacunae in my cultural literacy—first more plays (like the Shakespeare and Chekhov I’d missed; so many Richards, so many melancholy Russians shooting themselves), then onto novels (ones I truly loved, like Ishiguro’s perfect Remains of the Day and Proulx’s sly The Shipping News, as well as others, like Updike’s Rabbit Run, that I found easier to admire than enjoy).

In the process, I also stumbled across an original copy of Sartre’s What is Literature, a book both off-putting and deeply fascinating, which gave me a lot of food for thought in my fill-in-the-blanks reading quest.  Though it’s a meandering polemic, one of the points on which Sartre seems particularly insistent is that books are written from a cultural context to an audience that shares that same context.  And, therefore, that when we read things years down the line, from our new context, we invariably have a different, much paler experience than the author intended.  Or, in other words, that my catch-up reading is a waste of time.  Because, as Sartre at one point puts it, “bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked.  Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot.”

On the one hand, I take Sartre’s point.  As I noted, my experience of reading Angels would have been quite different were I a young gay man in NYC in 1992.  And I’m sure, generally, that there’s something far more visceral, far more alive, about engaging with art that, in turn, engages the very world you inhabit.  Yet, on the other hand, I also suspect Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is optimistic.  And since, over time, a sort of Darwinian winnowing occurs, while what people still read from 5 or 50 (much less 500) years ago may indeed be dated, it’s also likely to be better than most of what you can pull off the ‘new and noteworthy’ table today.

So, for the time being, I’m trying to hoe a middle road: I’m still working through the endless list of all the great works I’ve somehow missed, but alternating them with the most promising of current releases.  Because, with apologies to Sartre, it seems to me that it’s choosing solely one or the other that would be bananas.

Communication Breakdown

Twenty years back, I read Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand in a gender linguistics class at Yale.  A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the book again.  Paging through the introduction, I decided it might be worth a second read.  After two intervening decades, full of a lot of dates, a failed marriage, and a truly wonderful current long-term relationship, I thought I might get something different out of the book with older, wiser eyes.

Indeed, it turned out to be great, and more than worth the repeat time.  Previously, I remembered it mainly as the origin of the ‘men don’t ask for directions’ trope that has since pervaded cultural common sense.  After this second pass, while I still don’t agree with everything Tannen concludes, and am sometimes not a fan of her methods (she bounces back and forth between citing research-based conclusions, and then riffing broad theories based on anecdotal excerpts from random short stories and plays), I found nearly every page a source of insight or food for thought.

Fundamentally, the book starts from the proposition that men and women have different conversational aims: women are primarily concerned with intimacy and use communication to establish connection; men are primarily concerned with independence and use communication to establish hierarchy.  While generations of subsequent self-help books (like the seemingly endless Men are From Mars series) have been penned using a dumbed-down version of the same argument, they pale painfully in comparison to Tannen’s original.

But the book goes well beyond that simple start, illustrating the myriad other ways that things can get lost in translation between men and women, and between any number of other divergent groups, too.  For example, in a chapter about interruptions, Tannen makes clear that ‘interrupting’ is much more complicated than just the mechanical question of whether two people’s words overlap.  In certain cultures (what she calls “high involvement”) people over-talk as a way to egg each other on with questions, agreement, support, etc.  Whereas in others (“high consideration”) the exact same over-talk might be seen as dismissive and rude.  She analyzes a transcribed conversation between six friends at a dinner party, and concludes:

In my study of dinner table conversation, the three high-involvement speakers were New York City natives of Jewish background.  Of the three high-considerateness speakers, two were Catholics from California and one was from London, England.  Although a sample of three does not prove anything, nearly everyone agrees that many (obviously not all) Jewish New Yorkers, many New Yorkers who are not Jewish, and many Jews who are not from New York have high-involvement styles and are often perceived as interrupting in conversations with speakers from different backgrounds, such as the Californians in my study.  But many Californians expect shorter pauses than many Midwesterners or New Englanders, so in conversations between them, Californians end up interrupting.  Just as I was considered extremely polite when I lived in New York but was sometimes perceived as rude in California, a polite Californian I know was shocked and hurt to find herself accused of rudeness when she moved to Vermont.

The cycle is endless.  Linguists Ron and Suzanne Scollon show that midwestern Americans, who may find themselves interrupted in conversations with Easterners, become aggressive interrupters when they talk to Athabaskan Indians, who expect much longer pauses.  Many Americans find themselves interrupting when they talk to Scandinavians, but Swedes and Norwegians are perceived as interrupting by the longer-pausing Finns, who are themselves divided by regional differences with regard to length of pauses and rate of speaking.  As a result, Finns from certain parts of the country are stereotyped as fast talking and pushy, and those from other parts of the country are stereotyped as slow talking and stupid, according to Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara.

The whole book is chock full of this kind of stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Indeed, if you’re a man or a woman, and you regularly talk to men or women (and, especially, if you’re in or would like to be in a heterosexual relationship), I’d say it’s an essential read.