from the nytimes:

Music and speech are similar and somehow linked in the brain, but they are also separate. One can have amusia, for example, and be unable to perceive melody, but have no difficulty with speech...

How strange that words and melody, which can be married so completely, can sometimes be severed. How odd that a person could appreciate poetry and not melody, that somewhere in the brain a line is drawn between the lyrics and the tune.

if I ever write another book, I may call it amusia. I think this line is fascinating.

which reminds me that I heard for the first time the beach boys' vegetable song from smiley smile and you know what? I did smiley smile! which is funny b/c moments before I listened to mingus on piano (I didn't even know he did that) and I weepy wept. it was a very fast turn around. made me feel a mite crazy.

and in other music/lyric news, apparently they just came out with a new movie version of phantom of the opera, which is now stuck in my head all the time like an earworm! (leading me to adopt headphones as a semi-permanent appendage, in a self-conscious attempt at earworm substitution). the thing that kills me is that, back in the days of my early adolescence (ten, eleven years old) I listened to that soundtrack (in sleep he sang to me/in dreams he came/that voice which calls to me/and speaks my name) on repeat. when most kids were getting educated in the ways of the beatles or salt n' peppa, I was on the broadway train (I was gonna be a broadway actress/singer when I grew up).

and what I've learned is that, like a lullaby your mom sings to you when you're little, there are musics that are permanently lodged in the recesses of your mind. I realized yesterday that I still know almost all the words to phantom of the opera, les miserables, tommy, cats, guys and dolls, and rent (at least). I haven't listened to any of these cds for years and years, and yet they're all there, looping eternally deep in my subconscious.

why couldn't I have been an adolescent bartok freak? why did my parents never listen to the beatles?

and when I dream again/till now I find/the phantom of the opera is there/inside my mind

life is so unfair.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
--P.B. Shelley, Epipsychidion


is what I needed to read last night after sunshine went back east to rise and be and the western mountains slumped with sadness. nevermind the fickleness of the author, he was a romantic anyway and I'm not so much of one; I am not so fickle as mister shelley, who was probably something of a bastard and a misogynistic one at that. still, a good rhymester (well, mostly. there was one time he rhymed hope with antelope. it disrupted the romantic reverie I was indulging in and inspired in its stead good hearty 21st century laughter).

still, one wants to read the romantics when one is feeling all wistful and the wist is a simple one of a boy being suddenly gone when once he was here.

la la la la.