Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard”
“Not change, but transformation.” – Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, p. 15 Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind”
“The contemplative life remains freely available to us though our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, and intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery.”* – Franklin Foer, World Without Mind (2017), p. 232 (*In his… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Robert Atwan On Essay Aesthetics
In his forward to The Best American Essays (2015), series editor Robert Atwan suggests some stylistic attributes of the essay form. Ideally, essays: • foreground the writing process in the writing itself • allow the author to reject any authoritative posture • are an anti-systematic, anti-rhetorical method of composition • are prose with an unfinished… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Michael Robbins’ “Equipment For Living”
“I used to try to listen my way under my skin, but it turned out that listening was my skin. Listening to records was not just something I did, it was who I was. Not a day passed, for years, that I didn’t spend hours sitting in front of my stereo or burrowing into my… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: “Tympanum of the Other Frog” In John Corbett’s “Microgroove”
In the preface to his excellent book Microgrooves (2015), critic and musician John Corbett recounts listening to the sounds of frogs by a pond with his father when he was eight years old. Corbett’s dad told him to focus on the sound of one particular frog among the full chorus. “Now, he said, keeping that… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Robert Barry’s “The Music Of The Future”
“There is a specific temporality to social media. It is a time of perpetual manufactured crisis, in which we are constantly being prodded, reminded, and cajoled into updating, clicking our approval or disapproval, or merely checking in and registering our presence.” “But if social media constructs its own time, what kind of music would be… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Dominic Pettman’s “Sonic Intimacy”
“An interesting pedagogic exercise in sonic economics: identify and attend to the most prominent voices of capital. At the time of this writing, candidates might be Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Christine Lagarde, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on. Toward the other end of the spectrum: a humming child laborer in… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Repetition And Baking Analogies In Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”
“We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult…Anyway, we cannot keep still: we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Arvo Pärt On Reduction
“You can drown in the sewage water of our time’s creativity. The capability to select is important, and the urge for it. The reduction to a minimum, the ability to reduce fractions–that was the strength of all great composers” (114). “Reduction certainly doesn’t mean simplification, but it is the way–at least in an ideal scenario–to… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Notes on Formalism in Dave Hickey’s “Pirates and Farmers”
“In music we start with the parts and adduce the whole” (87). “We try to isolate the critical frequencies, ask the right questions, and never gain knowledge or truth…So formalism doesn’t do answers because answers, would conclude the endless dance of inquiries that keeps the work alive” (88). “So formalism begins with an instantaneous sense… Continue reading
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