Elvis Costello is nearly 10 years my senior which means, as he was putting out what the first and (for me) strongest three records of his career — My Aim Is True (1977), This Year's Model (1978), and Armed Forces (1979) — I was just hitting my teen years and discovering the energy and excitement of punk, post-punk, and power pop. Elvis, along with the Clash and XTC were, so far as I was concerned, too smart, too cool, and too great.
Now, thanks to a tip from my friend Susan D., I've discovered an absolutely fabulous quote attributed to Elvis:
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It's a really stupid thing to want to do.”
Makes sense to me — and I say that as someone who's in the biz I'm in because some editor way back when told me I could keep the record if I wrote a review for his paper.
The quote that Susan D. pointed me too is in a post by Andy Heidel in which he links that quote to some new books about music, one of which is the latest from Oliver Sacks.
I haven't yet read Sacks' newest — it's called Musicophilia and explores several brain dysfunctions as they relate to our ability to understand, remember, and create music — but I have had the chance to listen to a lecture he gave on it.
And there's a pretty good review essay on Sacks' latest book in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. I only call it “pretty good” because reviewer Colin McGinn efficiently and effectively Sacks work as a clinician, neurologist and writer but misses the point when it comes to the music. What is it about music, about rhythm, harmony, pitch, and tone that moves us in, so far as Sacks is concerned, the deepest places in our brain, soul, and heart. Again: I haven't read Musicophilia so I don't know if Sacks gets past the neurons and chemistry of the brain and into the mystery of the connection our species has with music but Sacks certainly seems to get into it in his TVO lecture.
In any event, you can listen to the Sacks podcast, too, via Big Ideas, the weekly program on provincial public broadcaster TVO.
FWIW, I subscribe to the podcasts of Big Ideas using Apple's iTunes. To find the Sacks podcast, use iTunes; go to the iTunes Store and search for TVO. Then look for the “Big Ideas” icon and click on it. The Sacks podcast is from Feb. 23 of this year. It's terrific.
Now the Big Ideas series is something I check out every week although I don't find all of the ideas big or necessarily interesting.Your appetite for individual lecturers will depend on your intellectual tastes but here are my recommendations:
– Dec. 8, 2007 – Jay Melosh talks about what killed the dinosaurs
– Dec. 15, 2007 – Eric Thurman explains the theory behind the system of microcredit and makes a compelling case that microcredit, more than any other kind of aid program, has the potential to lift many parts of Africa and Asia out of poverty.
– Jan. 12, 2008 – Naomi Klein plugs her latest book and has what turns out to be a rather funny but powerful anecdote about being injuried in a car crash in post-Katrina New Orleans.
– Feb 2, 2008 – Harvard's Steven Pinker swears like a sailor — and explains what's going on in the brain when we do that and why we use the naughty words we use. This was tremendously entertaining.
– Feb 9, 2008 – Rory Stewart makes me sick with all that he's done and seen in his — what? — first 35 years. He's tutored royal princes, written books, learned to speak Urdu, Nepali, and Persian, walked — that's right, walked — 6,000 miles across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Iran, and India He talks here about rebuilding Afghanistan.