neural renovations
Sunday, October 28, 2007
you may notice i've knocked up a few bits of iron around here and shot the sidebar out with a .22. it's amazing what you can achieve while not working on your second book. let me know if there are any legibility issues (esp if you use a PC).
excitement of the week: oliver sacks has a new book out called Musicophilia. among other neurological quirks like the guy who was hit by lightning and suddenly became a composer, the book claims to explain earworms. i am waiting with bated breath. perhaps there's a scientific explanation for 'yellow submarine' being the aural equivalent of drain cleaner.
reading the synopsis for 'musicophilia' i was reminded of a scottish woman with full-blown dementia in the nursing home where i worked as a teenager. she had been an opera singer of some repute. her husband would visit her regularly, and they would sing magnificent duets, their wavering, elderly voices floating down the corridor. i would take her tea in the evening after he'd left, and she'd invariably ask who that awful man was who kept coming into her room. but she remembered the music perfectly.
my grandfather could recite poetry from his hospital bed, even after he lost the names of his children.
it's because of Sacks that i spent a portion of my teenage years wanting to become a neurologist, before i figured out it was the characters who interested me, not their actual brains. his skilled presentation of different ways of perceiving the world, without pity or a need to normalise, indeed with a delightful sense of wonder in the diversity of human experience, was a formative influence. solace, too, for a mad kid who wandered around with words in her head, had the odd migrainous hallucination, and hung out with demented old people.
margaret atwood (another formative influence) wrote a hilarious essay on writing poetry which also explained the phenomenon beautifully: "...that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit"
no shortage of long dark tunnels round here. i wrote recently about the writing/mental health tangle-o-string. what troubles and also excites me is that the two are interdependent. that the crazies are the very things that make the creative mind work. i like to think my little demons keep the mill wheel running, when they're not getting up to mischief. i do have to bring them into line now and then. with the help of writers like Sacks, i have managed to avoid, if not going mad, at least being defeatist about it.
here's the NY times review of Musicophilia - there's a good long excerpt over there too.
excitement of the week: oliver sacks has a new book out called Musicophilia. among other neurological quirks like the guy who was hit by lightning and suddenly became a composer, the book claims to explain earworms. i am waiting with bated breath. perhaps there's a scientific explanation for 'yellow submarine' being the aural equivalent of drain cleaner.
reading the synopsis for 'musicophilia' i was reminded of a scottish woman with full-blown dementia in the nursing home where i worked as a teenager. she had been an opera singer of some repute. her husband would visit her regularly, and they would sing magnificent duets, their wavering, elderly voices floating down the corridor. i would take her tea in the evening after he'd left, and she'd invariably ask who that awful man was who kept coming into her room. but she remembered the music perfectly.
my grandfather could recite poetry from his hospital bed, even after he lost the names of his children.
it's because of Sacks that i spent a portion of my teenage years wanting to become a neurologist, before i figured out it was the characters who interested me, not their actual brains. his skilled presentation of different ways of perceiving the world, without pity or a need to normalise, indeed with a delightful sense of wonder in the diversity of human experience, was a formative influence. solace, too, for a mad kid who wandered around with words in her head, had the odd migrainous hallucination, and hung out with demented old people.
margaret atwood (another formative influence) wrote a hilarious essay on writing poetry which also explained the phenomenon beautifully: "...that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit"
no shortage of long dark tunnels round here. i wrote recently about the writing/mental health tangle-o-string. what troubles and also excites me is that the two are interdependent. that the crazies are the very things that make the creative mind work. i like to think my little demons keep the mill wheel running, when they're not getting up to mischief. i do have to bring them into line now and then. with the help of writers like Sacks, i have managed to avoid, if not going mad, at least being defeatist about it.
here's the NY times review of Musicophilia - there's a good long excerpt over there too.
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