by Mark Harvey
Most people don’t want to hear your sob stories, even if they pretend to be caring listeners. Even a good friend listening to your personal version of Orpheus and Eurydice—and making all the right noises—is probably focused on whether to put snow tires on their car Thursday or Friday.
Some of us turn to music to ease our mortal wounds and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why sad music is actually helpful. I turn to either classical or country music when I need to feel better about a loss or when things just won’t go my way. There is a vast distance between the ultra-cultured notes of, say, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the decidedly baseborn lyrics of the country songsters I like. But lo and behold, each can have its healing powers, and a little of each might be the key to a good diet.
You can hear the grand wounds and the bending of the Weltgeist in classical music and it often involves losing a village or watching Napoleon fail at taking Russia. The great composers endeavor to capture tidal movements and tidal emotions. They have a whole orchestra with bizarre instruments such as glockenspiels and contrabassoons, to accompany the more common violins and pianos. To play in a great orchestra takes merely 15 years of daily practice from the age of four along with some otherworldly talent. So if you wake up feeling sad about the fall of democracy in Europe, by all means, reach for your Schubert or your Brahms. That’s what it takes to handle the bigger themes.
Country music is less ambitious and more concerned with things like, “Whose bed have your boots been under? And whose heart did you steal I wonder?”. But when you’re in the throes of a tawdry breakup, the clever, brassy lyrics of a Shania Twain or a Jamie Richards might offer the fast, powerful relief you need and can’t get from the refined classical music.
Good country music has the boomy-bassy-twangy sound made by simple instruments such as slide guitars, fiddles, and banjos. It can be plaintive and crooning but part of what makes it successful are clever, ironic lyrics. Read more »
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. In the second article I’ll take a close look at a famous Shakespeare sonnet (129) in terms of a model of the reticular activity system first advanced by Warren McCulloch. I’ll take up the problem of coherence of oneself in the third article.
Before I met Hayat Nur Artiran, I had only had a raw understanding of what female selfhood may look like, a notion I have been attempting to refine in my writings over many years. Here, at the Mevlevi Sufi lodge in Istanbul, I received a lifetime’s worth of illumination about the power of the spirit in the company of Nur Hanim, beloved Sufi Hodja and the President of the Sefik Can International Mevlana Education and Culture Foundation. A researcher, author and spiritual leader on the Sufi path known as the Mevlevi order (based on the teachings of Maulana Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi Rumi, known in the West simply as the poet Rumi), Nur Hanim’s accomplishments shine a light on an ethos that has transformed hearts for nearly a millennium. More instrumental than personal achievement in this case, is the Sufi substance and finesse that Nur Hanim has nurtured in the running of this Mevlevi lodge. Spending a day here, on my most recent visit to Istanbul, I came to experience what I had thought possible, based on my Muslim faith, but had never witnessed before: men and women coexisting, learning, working and serving in harmony, a place where one forgets the ceaseless tensions between genders, generations, ethnicity, or those caused by differences in religious beliefs or the self-worshipping individualism that has become the insignia of modernity. 
Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.
