Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Matthew H. Birkhold’s “Metronome” (2025)
“…psychologists like Carl Seashore and Edward Wheeler Scripture considered performers’ discrepancies from the metronomic beat an ‘artistic deviation’ and held the ‘successful player’ to be the musician with the fewest rhythmical variations from the precise metronomic tempo. They wrote books and authored studies advocating for this new type of musician” (45). “The internal pulse upon Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W. David Marx’s “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century” (2025)
“The term paradigm, despite rampant overuse in marketing copy and mocked as meaningless jargon by The Simpsons, describes a specific phenomenon in social science: the macro-values that set the logic of our choices and aesthetics. When a new paradigm emerges, the previous established styles lose all their value” (123). “The logic of ultrapoptimism ultimately blessed Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ben Ratliff’s “Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening” (2025)
“It occurred to me that there was a connection between the act of listening and the act of running, and I began to write from that point of connection” (24). “I am talking about running the song: a way to engage with the music’s forward patterns, its implications, its potential, its intention, and even its Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World” (2011)
“…in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before” (6). “Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity” (7). “We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Loomans’ “Time Surfing”(2017)
“Being attuned to time, allowing it to ripen, trusting your intuition, using what emerges. It’s like surfing. Surfing with sensitivity and finesse over the ever-changing waves of time. Time Surfing” (31). “Choose one thing as your main task right now. Don’t have all kinds of different files open simultaneously as you work on them a Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Tim Berners-Lee’s “This Is for Everyone” (2025)
“What I was beginning to see was that information was meaningless in isolation. Instead, what truly mattered was the relationship between one piece of information and the next. Context…” (59). “What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. And, to do that, you had to let Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Bernt Spiegel’s “The Upper Half of the Motorcycle: on the unity of rider and machine” (2010)
“We are so well adapted to the things that we always have around us that we don’t see how they ‘actually’ are anymore, and thus we don’t even notice fundamental traits–for example, how unbelievably complicated it is to handle a motorcycle properly.” “But there’s a trick to understanding it: we can take this familiar thing, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Lewis Hyde’s “A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past” (2020)
“Memory and forgetting: these are the faculties of mind by which we are aware of time, and time is a mystery. In addition, a long tradition holds that the imagination is best conceived as operating with a mixture of memory and forgetting. Creation—things coming into being that never were before—that too is a mystery. Writers Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World” (1983/2007)
“Where there is no gift there is no art” (13). “Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that ‘I,’ the artist, did not make the Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ian Penman’s “Erik Satie Three Piece Suite” (2025)
“Certain pieces by Satie are like someone took the lovely opening minutes of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert and cut away all the subsequent faff and bore and chaff and chore and ego moan.” (54) “IN-BETWEEN All those in-between emotions it’s hard to name. Old time feelings in danger of disappearing. Staring into space vs Continue reading
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