Sallie Ford
Distracting myself from the specter of three 14-hour workdays this week by planning for upcoming concerts. Josh Ritter, Final Fantasy, and Portland's own Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside:
Love love love these guys.
Distracting myself from the specter of three 14-hour workdays this week by planning for upcoming concerts. Josh Ritter, Final Fantasy, and Portland's own Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside:
Love love love these guys.
Josh came to visit last weekend and we drove from Hood River to Eugene to Yachats to Corvallis to Maupin and back. Lots of open highway and long conversations and good friends along the way.
This week's been a hard return to reality. Today I would much rather be out on the highway with some Robert Earl Keen turned up loud. Got some plans in April to visit the Mojave, get in some desert highway time, some desert backcountry time - can't wait.
Happy St Patrick's Day, all.
Tell me you see the light
Tell me you know me
Make it come out alright
And wrap it in glory
For one Irish rover
(wait for it.. about 2 minutes in...)
Not an unfamiliar idea in the arts, but intriguing to read about it in the context of neuroscience:
This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.
(via NYTimes)