How Music Works, by David Byrne

Every page left me torn -- keep reading, or share ALL THE THINGS with anyone present?

Every now and again, you come across a book that tangentially interests you, and then it rearranges the bricks in your foundation. It makes you think about how you come into contact with the world. It alters how you fit in with the world, too.

(More than likely, such books come across you and not the other way around. Books can be crafty like that.)

How can I pin down any single way this book redecorated my brain-plots when it coaxed open my mind in so many directions? I certainly pay less attention to music than many people, but for all that, I think I pay more attention than some. I notice the type of music playing in various stores (and not just when it's Christmas music in October). I try to ensure that smaller-time artists whose music I enjoy get supported by my money so they can continue making music. I bemoan the corporatization of the radio and the channels through which popular music delivers itself to us, the listening public, all the while acknowledging that I enjoy some of that very music.

Neil Young's Greendale tour: "Support Our War" -- on a Clear Channel billboard

But what do I know about the forces that shape our music? Not just the songwriters and the producers and the record labels and the means of distribution, but the venues, the scenes, the environments, the rituals, the cultures, the technology? Turns out, I hardly knew a blessed thing.

Then How Music Works came across me. From the title, I expected only a practical and theoretical look at the science of music: say, how its sounds are produced, what effect it has on us, how our brains interpret it, and so on. That's all in there, to some extent, but the book is so much more than that -- and so much more fascinating! David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame and serious experimental reputation, examines not just how music works as a transitory sonic effect, but also how it functions with us and how we function with it. (The dude can write, in that charming intellectual way that's conversational without ever dumbing down to the reader. How many writers of such deep subjects can claim that talent?)

Music, Byrne says (and I agree), is not the isolated art we often think it to be. Context shapes music just as much as music shapes context. He explores beautifully how music is better for being terrestrial, for being ephemeral yet not ethereal. Limitations on creativity spark innovations and developments and surprises -- so yes, let's acknowledge that Bach's music was shaped as much by his church and its organ as it was by his genius, and the Ramones were catapulted as much by the scene at their regular club as they were by their talents! Let's understand how recorded music differs in its very essence from live music, and then acknowledge the merits of both!

Let's recognize that we shape the music we listen to, just as it shapes us!

This book may not change how you acquire recorded music, or the type of music you listen to, or whether you play music of your own. But it's a bit like watching a documentary on factory farming. When you do each of those things, you will be aware of how you acquire, what you listen to, whether you play. You will understand that you are participating in a community that extends to wherever in time and space there is humanity.

Your foundation will change to allow for just how connected you are. Aren't these devious books the best?

Why Is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond

Support the blog. Get the book. Then impress your friends with your knowledge of concealed ovulation and penile evolution!

Assumptions are part of our daily lives. And for good reason -- imagine if you had to qualitatively assess every aspect of your regular day. You assume that the food at the grocery store (and in your pantry) is edible. You assume that even the idiot in front of you will drive through a green light. You assume that you will, indeed, wake up tomorrow instead of dying in your sleep. These patterns lead to a certain degree of predictability. They happen to be right (most of the time), and therefore to spare some brain power for the surprises of the day, we assume them to be given.

Basically: it works this way most/all of the time. It makes sense this way. Why imagine it any other way?

When something deviates from our assumptions, it's abnormal. Weird. Strange. An aberration. Which is why we think so many animals have the weirdest mating habits. Mantises and some spiders eat the male during copulation? Chimpanzees' lady-butts swell during ovulation? We humans procreate just fine, thank you very much. Our system is tried and true. Why can't these other critters behave more normally, like us?

This is why I love to have assumptions challenged and perspectives placed in context. We assume humans are normal because we have to in order to function. But in so many ways, taken in the larger contexts of primate-kind, mammal-kind, and animal-kind, we are the freaks. The kooks. The evolutionary deviants.

From time to time, we all benefit from a little bit of reality check. Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality puts our species into perspective and tries to riddle out why we're this particular kind of peculiar. The reframing of perspective is hijinx-level fun in your brain cavity.

(I have an issue with the book. It puts human culture -- that is, the evolution of our mental constructs -- on the same workbench as human and animal sexuality -- that is, the evolution of our reproductive constructs. Gauging how a "natural" human behaves is impossible, because the crunchy cultural coating we all wear gets in the way. Our cultural constructs are, on an evolutionary timescale, brand spankin' new. That is, our biology is practically identical to the way it was eleven thousand years ago. Yet our self-domestication is only ten thousand years old, as earmarked by the advent of agriculture.

Our culture has not yet had time to significantly affect our evolution -- and yet our variety of culturally-imposed sexual and reproductive habits are viewed in the book as evolved behavior. I don't see how Jared Diamond could have handled it any differently, because there are no "wild" humans. But I wish he had addressed the issue more thoroughly.

What I would like to see -- listen up, science nerds -- is an exploration of how our brain plasticity interacts with our sexuality. I think that approach could reconcile our reproductive and physiological evolution with our behavior.)

Losing Julia, by Jonathan Hull

One of my dad's favorite movies is the mid-2000s Garden State so revered for its indie-rock soundtrack. My favorite part of the movie is that everyone I know takes something different from it. For my dad, the film is about a father and son reconnecting after their strained past. For others I've asked, it's about developing a friendship, discovering that happiness is more important than a career, and finding true love in unexpected places and times. For me, it's about a man becoming himself.

The beauty of our disparity is that each of us is right.

Like any thorough story, Losing Julia is about many things. A moving novel leaves part of itself in you when you finish it, and I can only speak to what I walked away with. Which is:

Live life.

Yeah, yeah, it's not new. Even Latin speakers had something to say about seizing the day, and they be old school. But old folks keep trying to tell us young farts that our youth is wasted on us, that we don't know what's important yet, and if we did we would just live for what's important rather than wasting away our time. That's what old-man Patrick keeps on about throughout the book, anyway. (Don't worry. He learns to go for the gold.)

Those old folks don't give us snappers of whippers enough credit, though: we know exactly what's important. We just have to wager a whole lot of life on our decisions, because if all goes to plan, we still have forty or sixty or eighty years to carry around with us. The trick is not figuring out what's important, so much as going for happiness now instead of mortgaging it for later.

I've never liked the motto "live like there's no tomorrow," because quite frankly I couldn't condense into every day all the big things I'd want to do on my last day on earth. Too many small things deserve to be spread out and absorbed and pondered and enjoyed. But I suppose I'm echoing the sentiment of the mantra. Go for happiness. Be who you are. Love who you love, and make sure they know it.

That way, when you're old, you won't bore all the young'uns with your drivel about the mistakes you made. You'll have them begging you for stories. And instead of putting up with whatever message you want to instill, those kids can carry away from your tales precisely what they need.

(Mad props and many thanks to my sister Kara, who gave me this book for my birthday after experiencing what it is to hunt down an out-of-print book. It now appears that a trade paperback version is available on Amazon, but who knows how long that will last.)

Charles and Emma, by Deborah Heiligman

I think the Darwins knew how to make love with their brains.
(Not to mention their bodies. Ten children?!)

As a writer, talking about writing and being a writer is one of the more complicated tasks I'm forced to undertake. The concepts are somewhat ethereal, a nuance which doesn't help matters. But what complicates the questions even more than the abstract notion of successful writing is that I'm not entirely sure what makes a writer tick.

Much easier is discussing what a writer is not. A banana. Aloe vera. Invincible.

Alone.

The concept of a writer scribbling and tapping furiously in a lonely garret must have some basis. And sure, when it comes down to putting ink on the page, no one can do it for the writer. But neither can the writer do it by himself. Leastwise, I can't.

Writing is a labor of love. But what many readers overlook is that both the labor and the love are shared. Like its other forms, the love that goes into a book, a story, a treatise, or a poem (and ultimately into the writer who makes them) is varied, passionate, and weird.

Stephen King's wife held bloody towels under his nose so he could continue typing. That's love. J.R.R. Tolkien shaped the central relationship in his legendarium after his romance with his wife -- and as for life imitating art, their shared tombstone bears the fictional characters' names. That's love. Bill Bryson's overweight, middle aged, out of shape friend joined him on a trek along the Appalachian Trail just so Bill would have someone to hike with. (Not to mention a wife who was chill with him disappearing into the wilderness for weeks at a time.) That's love. Emma Darwin, a faithful nineteenth-century Christian, debated the nature of creation with her husband Charles for decades -- not in hopes of talking him out of his ideas, but out of a desire to help him test the mettle of his theories and make them as strong as possible before publishing them. That's love.

I might say that I can only hope to be as successful as those authors. But that's not true -- I can work my tail off in an effort to be as successful as those authors. I believe I can do it, too. My writing may not be as evocative, as epic, as humorous, or as revolutionary as theirs (yet). But I have one thing each of those authors has, the one thing without which they could not have written their books.

Love.

Anything can happen in a book. So in a very real way, love makes everything possible. With freedom like that, let's see what we can accomplish together, shall we?

The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge, M.D.

Once in a great while, you find a book that knocks you silly while you're reading it and that changes you. This is that book. Only, it turns out that every book you read alters your brain. This one just helps you recognize the process.

This week, in the midst of reading The Brain That Changes Itself, I recommended it to a friend who is uniquely religious and incredibly well educated. She seemed intrigued by my description of the brain's phenomenal plasticity as outlined by Dr. Doidge, but straight away she declared that she would be unsatisfied with the book. She believed it, like other science books, would fail to take account of the soul while fully addressing the physical aspects of the brain.

Leaving aside the point that science and religion are two different games and applying one to the other is like playing tennis by Dungeons & Dragons rules, I had two questions for my friend: If you believe God in whatever form created the universe, is it not reasonable to think that by better understanding his handiwork you could better understand the nature of him? and, What is so wrong about finding miraculous that which we have here, on this planet, in this physical universe, without having to ascribe to it some unattainable, and by definition incomprehensible, religious context?

The questions are more important than the answers, so let's leave behind my friend and her responses. Whatever your beliefs on the physical brain's relationship to the mind/spirit/will, we now have empirical evidence that the brain is malleable well beyond our infancy. Environmental and social factors shape it, certainly. But the really cool part is that our thoughts alter the actual structure of our brains. Our minds can define our cranial anatomy!

Tell me, how does that belittle or ignore the presence of the soul? Our consciousness, at least as much as our environment, has the capacity to shape how we function. We determine ourselves!

Since reading The Brain That Changes Itself, I can hardly move a finger or take a step without wondering why my brain is organized the way it is, and how I'm changing that organization with each action and each thought.

Yes, our brains are products of our early childhood, of our most formative and plastic years. But no part of that programming is set in stone. Which means your conscious thoughts have control over yourself to a greater extent than most Western societies ever believed. Do you feel incapable of working at your computer without first checking Facebook and conquering another game of Spider Solitaire? You can alter that neuronal pathway to make your routine what you want it to be. Do you feel like you'll never be able to ride your bike up that steep hill? Visualize yourself doing it enough -- really working to accomplish it -- and your brain will actually strengthen itself for the real deal.

Those are the routinely applicable aspects of this book, the everyday motivational abilities our consciousness has over the physical aspect of our brains. The real inspiration comes from just how freaking powerful the brain is, to the point where it can compensate for its own damage and help stroke victims relearn movement of paralyzed limbs, help autistic children differentiate sounds and distinguish interpersonal cues, and help elderly people keep their brain activity young.

Call our brain plasticity an inconceivable accomplishment of evolution or a gift from God, whatever fits your worldview. Either way, its abilities astound me, and this book reconfigured my mind. Literally.

Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon

It's like The Maltese Falcon with long hair, surfer rock, and reefers

The very distinction between mystery stories and hardboiled stories is the neatness of the world in which the detective snoops. Saying that an Arthur Conan Doyle or an Agatha Christie (or heck, even an Edgar Allan Poe) mystery is comparable to a Dashiell Hammett or a Raymond Chandler novel is like saying pennies and pipes are the same because they're both made of copper.

In one case, the ills of the world stem from a single source, and logic and level-headedness can riddle out the problem. Cut down one rotten tree to save the forest. In the other, crimes are less clear-cut, stickier, and far more wide-reaching. Cut down one aspen, and its roots will still feed a hundred other connected trees.

Isn't life hardboiled? How often can we solve a problem with a single solution while preserving the world as it was? You're overweight; the solution is not simply cutting calories or taking longer walks, but a range of approaches without a definite end point, some of which are outside your immediate control. Your nation has an epidemic of mass shootings; where in the nebulous web of causes and possibilities can you reduce the chances of death by firearms?

Logic does not help solve your problems when your ex-girlfriend runs off with a real estate magnate, when a dental surgery office has ghostly but undeniable ties to a drug cartel that's also a schooner, when your culture swaps the very use of logic for spiritual guidance.

Wait. Those may not be your problems, precisely. But Doc Sportello tackles them in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Pynchon's take on the hardboiled is spot-on, even after factoring in the translation to the psychedelic sixties. Pot is spiked instead of scotch, and Hollywood starlets are replaced by Gilligan and the Skipper. But Doc's problems are the same in principle if not in details to our more mundane individual conundrums. The same core issues infest Sportello's world as infest Sam Spade's and Philip Marlowe's -- and ours.

In some ways, the world never changes. From decade to decade, era to era, through cultural upheavals and technological sea changes, we deal with the same shit over and over and over. We might yearn for simpler times, but let's face it -- they never were simpler, and they never will be. Real problems are often interconnected, complex, and tangled. Their threads stretch back as far as we do, and their frayed ends are not in sight.

But does that mean we don't try to riddle the unsolvable, untie the Gordian Knot, square the circle? Hell no. Just because we can't uproot the whole forest of vice and unhappiness and serious problems doesn't mean we don't face it anyway. I think that's what the hardboiled authors realize -- we can't solve the world, but we can define it. We can make it more than livable. We can make it whatever we want it to be.

Doesn't that sound more intriguing than simply excising the problem spots from an otherwise pristine and unchanging world?

Lunatics, by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel

Hands-down, nuttiest book of the year.

The new year is upon us, and tonight marks the start of the annual tradition of assessing our lives and determining how we would like them to change. We look back over the past year, or several years, and see all the stagnation, all the accumulation, all the sloth and selfishness and business, and resolve that this new year is going to be different.

Or, if we are very, very lucky (and perhaps very, very driven), we look back and see just what we have accomplished. What we have gained. How we have changed. Then, we can look forward with the confidence born of accomplishments and decide how our future lives will be shaped by our pasts.

This process is never cut and dry, never simple, and usually not as conveniently bookended as a calendar year. Life is messy, in a way that fiction doesn't have to be. Which is why we expect the change from characters in books that we seldom recognize in our own lives. Page One is January 1st, and the final page is New Year's Eve. A character's life is never the same (or perhaps I should say "should not be the same") after a story concludes. The events and realizations affect a character just like they do us real-world folks... only usually much more neatly and tightly.

This year has been for me a year of reading and writing wildly, watching unbalanced characters in stories survive (or not) tumult greater than my own. So I figure, what better way to wrap up such a year than with a book called Lunatics?

Of all the fiction and nonfiction adventures I've been taken on this year, this one is without contest the craziest. Barry and Zweibel have a knack for what writers call "turning it faster," that ability to take a situation and test the boundaries of just how far it can be pushed. You know that moment when you think, "This can't get any worse for these characters!" and then it does? Yeah, these guys master that technique.

But it got me wondering just near the end whether they could bring it back -- whether or not I would see how the characters are altered by their experiences. The two main characters, Horkman and Peckerman, have an adventure of mishaps nuttier than most of us could imagine. But their attitudes and their perspectives, by the final page, have not changed one smidge. These are the same two deluded individuals who started the book. Yes, they had me laughing out loud and clapping my hand over my gaping mouth every five minutes. But at some point, the story needed more than humor.

It needed what we all yearn for on January 1. Change.

Who wants to look back on the past year and realize that the year has not changed them one tiny bit? More to the point, who could experience a year full of trials and accomplishments and not grow as a person?

As we slide into the new year, here's what I wish for all you Microphone readers. I wish you a year full of epiphanies and adventures, challenges conquered and struggles overcome. I wish you a year of both self-cultivation and feral jungle flowering. And I wish you the opportunity to look back on it all.

Life isn't what we do or what happens to us. Life is how those events change us, and even more so, how we change them. May you become more the person you want to be in 2013. And may your year have a storybook ending, where the hero and heroine stand atop the hill, better for accepting adventure and living their lives.