“The sound of our voices is born of our anatomy, the way we’re shaped inside — not just a skill but part of the physical self. The prospect of not being able to sing anymore felt like contemplating an amputation.”
The singer Dessa contemplates the loss of her voice in a New York Times essay. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
. . .
▰ FLORA AURA:
"Primroses may respond to sound — but that doesn’t mean that they 'hear' the way that we do. As Schlanger writes, they have a version of 'earless' hearing: 'Sound, to them, is pure vibration.'"
The Schlanger mentioned above is Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, the subject of Rachel Riederer’s review in The New Yorker.
. . .
▰ BIRD BRAIN:
“The simple song of the cirl bunting is reminiscent of a sewing machine, or a hand-held scanning device from Star Trek.”
That’s the description of the Shriek of the Week this week. Crystal clear, as always.
I’ve been enjoying the book The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, which is credited on its cover to Lou Red, but is more accurately a posthumous book, assembled by Laurie Anderson, from materials he wrote, interview materials with Reed, and the reminiscences of numerous people in his orbit. Here he talks about the 2007 album, produced by Reed and Hal Willner, he released of music he recorded for use during his tai chi sessions. I love that he, in essence, re-created ambient music, and came to understand it deeply, in the process.
I updated the Disquiet Junto F.A.Q with for the first time since late last year. There’s a new item about how to pronounce “junto.” For the Disquiet Junto, the use of the word in the first place relates to Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, which he started in 1727. Let’s work from the assumption that Franklin’s use of “junto” was based on the Spanish word “junta,” and so pronounce “junto” the same way, with “jun” like “hoon.”
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Blue sky and fog horns means there’s a thick marine layer in the bay. I marvel at it every time.
▰ I got back into tai chi earlier this year and I look forward to having enough memory of the forms that I can listen to Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations while doing it, but for now all I’m listening to (and watching) is tai chi tutorial videos.
▰ I’ve recently taken to, once a day, looking in my email sent folder, ’cause sometimes — in an age of heavily filtered email, due to general email overload (PR, spam, newsletters, ads) — replies end up bypassing my inbox, and I otherwise might not know someone had replied
▰ Somehow guitar practice means guitar and headphone amp and headphones and iPad* for noting down chords and laptop for displaying sheet* music.
And this excludes the step where I swap the amp for an audio interface so I can feed the sound through my computer and, thus, more easily record myself (on occasion).
And yes, I’m considering an acoustic guitar.
And yes, that wouldn’t remove many steps.
And yes, I’d annoy people with my playing.
*Goodnotes, which is quite excellent, in both cases
▰ The most important day for guitar practice is the day after guitar class
▰ DJ Krust poster in the first (2000) episode of the Rebus TV series, as the detective interviews a club owner backstage
▰ Very odd when you get a bunch of alerts of people all signing up for your newsletter from the same source, but there’s no record of that source. I guess it’s paywalled or something.
▰ I’ve been typing since before I could read
▰ Overheard during my lunch walk: tourists disappointed to see a driver behind the wheel of a passing Waymo
