Saturday, August 1, 2015

Song of the Day #173 - matryoshka - Evening Gleam Between Clouds

Today I am giving a talk about "the value of literature"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4cT2UxK5IM

Since "song of the day" is half the time "blog of the day" aka "actual blog" I'm gonna talk about this and then maybe the song later and feel OK that I didn't express what was so good about the song lol. Cause this is a very good song by my favorite band off an album that's like top 10 for me. Anyways yeah I have a friend who runs something called "learning night", which is a thing she started with her roommates like a year ago. It started with them just giving ~20 minute informal talks to each other in her living room, little educational things on stuff they're passionate about. Now it's up to like... maybe 40-50 people each meeting? It's pretty crazy. The first time I went, one of the speakers couldn't make it so I did an improvised talk on basic income, cause it's what the guy was gonna talk about. Then later I helped a friend of mine give a talk about ssbm. But now it's ALL MINE and i had TIME TO PREPARE and that makes me a bit more nervous tbh lol. So I'm gonna go through my main talking points here:

-First I'm gonna ask "who here has read a book in the last year?" but not so aggressively lol
-Then I'm gonna ask like "okay but who has read LITERATURE???"
-Which of course leads into "what is literature?"
-And basically I'm gonna say that it's really hard to actually find some quality that makes something literature besides that people say it is
-But that that's okay, because that's actually prolly one of the most functional definitions of literature
-Literature is a term that guarantees that the work you put into the text will be rewarded
-Okay but what sort of work is that?
-It's like a long term empathetic process
-You have to empathize both with the characters and the author
-You're both being told a story and are able to examine every choice involved in it's creation
-And you have to find meaning and understanding through that
-Okay but what are the rewards??
-One is directly linked to the process itself: the brain loves to "socialize" in this regard, we're very good at it, serotonin etc.
-The other big one is that you get a lot of perspective and such
-OK but why books? Cause other mediums could do this too
-Well books are the most active medium, which heightens the sense of "work" in this process, and thus reward
-Also books have hella complexity potential
-And we've been making long form literary novels for longer than almost any other form of art, so we're super good at it
-And there's an amazing legacy of good lit already
-OK THAT'S IT ANY QUESTIONS??

SOUNDS GOOD, i think i didn't forget anything.

Anyways here's a few points about this song:
-At 3:44 I can hear the facebook messenger sound. Am I crazy? What's the deal??
-Nothing in my talk (or in this blog post) could ever explain the appeal of just the TITLE of this song, so what can I really have said about books?
-Okay but this song title is pretty AMAZING
-And so is this song
-It's pretty much just "standard matryoshka", like it's all just stuff they do on almost every song, and there isn't a whole lot they don't do on other tracks (the nature sounds around 2:45 are prolly the most unique aspect)
-And still I'd sacrifice maybe 100GB of other music to save just this song
-That's how good this band is for me

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