The Power of Music

I recently started an interesting book from The Best American Series. This book is The Best American Nonrequired Reading (2007) Edited by Dave Eggers. Its basically a compilation of literary works that were found interesting by the 'experts'.
The most interesting story I've read so far was an article from Spin by Jonathan Ames who went to a goth music festival. Though he was unaccustomed to this unique type of music, he found some very intriguing thoughts on the culture and on life.
The first idea that I found note-worthy was a line from a song that was being performed : "Feeling empty because there's something to say,". Ames goes on to say that all one can really express is pain. This made me wonder about happy works of art, music, and writing in general. By showing happiness are they expressing pain? Maybe they're covering their inner grief by telling the world "Hey, I'm really OK. I promise" just to get people off their backs. They don't want the world nagging or bugging them about always being so angry and dismal, so with all their works that show their venting of anger, they throw in a joyful piece to cover it up. Therefore all their work is focusing on the pain they feel. Or maybe the author of this article was just overwhelmed by the contrast in culture and the focus on pain.
A second point I found interesting was an interview with Mark, one of the organizers of Gothicfest. During the interview, Mark gets into talking about how his father abuses him and that he never fights back. He comments, " 'As much as I don't like him, I love him because he's my father. So I just take it...'". I found this beautiful. Since Mark still loves his abusive father, it shows how he's connected to other humans. He knows when its right to do something just because it's right. This is really the whole idea of concerts and a culture of misfit people. Never ending love. If you ever go to a concert, even a scary goth one, you'll never be rejected or hated, because everyone in that room understands the pain of being different and alone. They understand that its not alright to hurt others physically or socially. So this music, this expression and venting of suffering brings them all together to share the security of being understood.

That is pretty powerful.

reading post numero uno. (free response)

For the first post I thought I’d start out simple with an intriguing science article from The New York Times. It is called “ Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math” by Natalie Angier, written on Monday, September 15th. What first caught my eye was the article’s title. It was interesting to me because I always find myself on math test looking at a question that I have no idea how to answer. So I guess and fill in the bubble that I see best fits the question. But time and time again, the results come back showing that I am simply a terrible guesser, therefore saying my gut instinct does not have any correlation with my mathematical abilities.
Once more my initial thought was wrong- the article was actually about how visual approximations relate to one’s competence in math, and how at a young age, children can be trained to make quick ballpark estimations of numbers or situations to be able to make right decisions. Also, according to the article, this ability to make such computations has only been developed in humans in the past few thousands of years, showing one way of how the human brain has evolved. Though the scientists provide a disclaimer saying they don’t know quite how the two brain functions work (approximations and specific computations), I still find it interesting that they can tell there’s some sort of correlation between the two. You might assume that somebody would be good at math if they were good at guessing, but then again, just look at me. Maybe I just need to train my brain to get better at guessing. Its fun that scientists are making these fun discoveries to remind people to think about little things (like glancing at something then approximating and evaluating in order to make a decision) you might do on a daily basis anyway.
article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/16angi.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

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This is a blog to inform you about my literary endeavors, meaning I get to talk about the random things I read. That'd be about right...