Texture In Music Quotes

His fingers touched the strings and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once.

Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words

All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. "You do not know what you are missing by your micro-scopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art . . . We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must be by now completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hot by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words.

…For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For love there are a million variations, a million nights, a million days, contrasts in moods, in textures, whims, a million gestures colored by emotion, by sorrow, joy, fear, courage, triumph, by revelations which deepen the groove, creations which expand its dimensions, sharpen its penetrations. Love is vast enough to include a phrase read in a book, the shape of a neck seen and desired in a crowd, a face loved and desired, seen in the window of a passing subway, vast enough to include a past love, a future love, a film, a voyage, a scene in a dream, an hallucination, a vision. Love-making under a tent, or under a tree, with or without a cover, under a shower, in darkness or in light, in heat or cold.

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

If time has taught me anything, it’s that our differences are what make this life unique. None of us are exactly like the other, and that is a good thing because there’s no right way to be. The room mom, the working mother, the woman without children, the retired grandma, the mom who co-sleeps, the mama who bottle-fed her baby, the strict mom, the hipster mom, the one who lets her kid go shoeless, or the one who enrolls her baby in music enrichment classes at birth—whoever, whatever you are, you’re adding spice and texture and nuance into this big beautiful soup of modern-day parenting. I can look at other mamas and learn from them. I can also leave the things that don’t strike me as authentic or practical for our family. You can do the same for your own. That is the beauty of growing and learning and figuring out exactly who you are.

What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn't it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour rid. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hot by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But... how to say it?

There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication. something both timely and timeless

The fact is that odors and flavors are created entirely inside our heads. Think of something delicious—a moist, gooey, warm chocolate brownie fresh from the oven, say. Take a bite and savor the velvety smoothness, the rich heady waft of chocolate that fills your head. Now consider the fact that none of those flavors or aromas actually exist. All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.

I've got my Motown girl-group music playing, and my supplies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I've cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrapbook has texture. It's thick and chunky and doesn't close all the way.

The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It

Achilles nodded and bent over the lyre. I did not have time to wonder about his intervention. His fingers touched the strings, and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once. A few hairs slipped forward to hang over his eyes as he played. They were fine as lure strings themselves, and shone.

No mask you might don, whether cast in gold or comprised of dust, can disguise you from me. In a thousand ways you are revealed to me: The way you illustrate a comment with your fingertips; the manner in which you tilt your head while listening to music; the quick intake of breath that precedes your laughter; the quality of your stillness. I have only to lift my hand to mimic the slope of your shoulder; close my eyes to map the blue-filigreed veins inside your wrist; inhale to recall the fragrance of you. I am an expert on the texture of your skin, a scholar on the changing hues of your eyes, and an authority on the cadence of your breath. And yet I do not need eyes or ears or hands to know you. Shut away, blinded and deaf, I would still know you. I would still hear you, see you, feel you in my very core. You may as well accuse the sky of not knowing the moon, for that is how fixed you are in the firmament of my heart. And like the moon, whether you choose to shine or not, here you will remain forever. So I pray you, Lady Lydia, do not ever say again, I do not know you.

Love yourself and others, appreciate beauty, art and music, laugh as often as possible, empathize with others’ pain so that it may be diminished even if only for a moment, appreciate the flavors and textures of a finely cooked meal, let a cool breeze caress your skin on a warm summer night and drift off to a peaceful sleep. Thank

Since there are always talented players in these emerging categories, no matter how grating they may be to the ear of the more traditionally inclined, I was not surprised when the heavy metal band Metallica achieved a style that was huge and orchestral in its guitar textures, showing itself to be perfectly capable of producing beautiful melodies with unusual, finely constructed harmonies.

Ty was silent, and in that silence, Kit thought of Ty's headphones, the music in his ears, the whispered words, the way he touched things with such total concentration: smooth stones, rough glass, silk and leather and textured linen. There were people in the world, he knew, who thought human beings like Ty did those things for no reason - because they were inexplicable. Broken. Kit felt a wash of rage go through him. How could they not understand everything Ty did had a reason? If an ambulance siren blared in your ears, you covered them. If something hit you, you doubled up to protect yourself from hurt. But not everyone felt and heard exactly the same way. Ty heard everything twice as loud and fast as everyone else. The headphones and the music, Kit sensed, were a buffer: They deadened not just other noises, but also feelings that would otherwise be too intense. They protected him from hurt. He couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to live so intensely, to feel things so much, to have the world sway into and out of too-bright colors and too-bright noises. When every sound and feeling was jacked up to eleven, it only made sense to calm yourself by concentrating all your energy on something small that you could master - a mass of pipe cleaners to unravel, the pebbled surface of a glass between your fingers.

Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

That particular fear has the texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is the fear that comes from the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.

Crystalline, chromatic scales converging and diverging into endless series; and synthetic harmony of the formulae of Taylor and McLauren, wholesome, square, and massive like the "trousers of Pythagoras." Sad melodies dying away in waving movements. The beautiful texture of the spectrum of planets, dissected by Frauenhofer lines ... what magnificent, what perfect regularity! How pitiful the willful music of the ancients, not limited except by the scope of their wild imaginations!

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion...

What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.

The fact is that odours and flavours are created entirely inside our heads. Think of something delicious. A moist, gooey, warm chocolate brownie fresh from the oven, say. Take a bite and savour the velvety smoothness, the rich heady waft of chocolate that fills your head. Now consider the fact that none of those flavours or aromas actually exist. All that is really going on in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavourless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.

Achilles nodded and bent over the lyre. I did not have time to wonder about his intervention. His fingers touched the strings, and all my thought were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once. A few hairs slipped forward to hang over his eyes as he played. They were fine as lyre strings themselves, and shone. He stopped, pushed back his hair, and turned to me. "Now you." I shook my head, full to spilling. I could not play now. Not ever, if I could listen to him instead.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

Music is carried by the vibrations of molecules of air, like waves upon an ocean. It perhaps uniquely captures and conveys the interior landscape of one human mind to another, holding our tears and sweat, pain and pleasure, packaged as paeans and preludes and etudes and nocturnes. It is the texturization of the deliquescence of time, the ebb and flow of mood and meaning. It ruminates, vacillates, contemplates, and stimulates. In music we organize and fantasize, arranging the elements of music-melody, rhythm, and harmony-into meaningful shapes and patterns. Its rhythms move our hands, feet and bodies to the pulses of the universe. Its harmonies breathe with the exploratory intricacies and curiosities of relationship and proportion, consonance, dissonance, assonance, and resonance. Its melodies flitter into flights of fancy, weaving woe and wonder.

Sshhhhh from rain, pitpitpit from hemlock, bloink from maple, and lastly popp of falling alder water. Alder drops make a slow music. It takes time for fine rain to traverse the scabrous rough surface of an alder leaf. The drops aren't as big as maple drops, not enough to splash, but the popp ripples the surface and sends out concentric rings. I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain. The reflecting surface of the pool is textured with their signatures, each one different in pace and resonance. Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. To many people in many cultures, music is an important part of their way of life. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.

Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But...how to say it? “Look,” he tried, “put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory.

It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back—promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is. At first, I didn’t see the point of an orgasm. It seemed like an annoying abrupt spasm that interrupted things just when they were getting interesting. But gradually it started to take longer to get to, and to unfold into its own experience, and then it became this sought-after thing in the distance—like during the long periods in a symphony when nothing seemed to be happening, when it was just shifting textures, and then a glimmer of the soaring sought-after melody shone through—and the fact that you could glimpse it, even for a second, was a miracle that promised everything, that deferred everything to the future, and made living seem worthwhile. I knew that what I had experienced was clitoral orgasm, which was immature and incomplete and somehow selfish and immoral, by comparison with a vaginal orgasm. The flickering, pulsing, agitated feeling I had sometimes afterward was proof. It wasn’t real or right by yourself. But what was the man going to do—how was it going to work? I tried again to put in a tampon. ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY.

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climbed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kachenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink... each of them separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this... how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. "Nothing so sweet, dear friends -" Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank. There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour... But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one... Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.

And all I can think about is that it's not over and I'm tired and I'm ready to go but I'm still here. And I have to do it again and again and again." He leaned back in his chair. "You think about that before you tell me I've got it easy." I stayed silent a while before speaking. "So why don't you end it?" "Suicide?" "If your life is such a hell," I asked, "why bother? Why go through it again and again and all those times?" "Because of..." He stopped and looked at the ceiling. After a moment he shrugged. "Because of children," he said, "because of smiles and sunshine and ice cream." "You've got to be kidding." "You don't like ice cream?" Elijah shook his head, "It's the best. Imagine how excited I was when someone finally invented it. " "Sunshine and smiles don't make all that other stuff go away." I said, "This isn't a fairy land." "No," he said. "It's the real world. And the real world is the most amazing thing any of us will ever experience. Have you ever climbed a mountain? Walked through a garden? Played with a child? This isn't exactly a revelation John. People have been praising the simple pleasures since even before I was born, and that's a very long time." "You don't do any of those things." "But I have my memories," Said Elijah. "And I have even simpler things. Music. Food. Everybody likes bacon." "I'm a vegetarian." "Asparagus then," said Elijah, "roasted in pan. A little olive oil and a little salt - you the get the most incredible flavor - almost like a nut. But deep and rich and the textures just perfect..." "I've tried it." "The world is more than sadness," said Elijah, "i have a hundred thousand memories in my head. I can't remember all of them, or maybe even most of them, but they are so much happier than sad. For every dead mother or brother or child there are a hundred breezes, a hundred sunsets, a hundred memories of falling in love. Have you ever kissed anyone, John?" "I don't see how that's any of your business." "A first kiss is important. Most people only get one. But I can remember a hundred thousand of them. How could I give that up?" he shook his dead, smiling for the first time. "The world never gets old, John.

In Bezug auf die bewusste, geduldige, überwältigend entworfene und ausgearbeitete Textur seines Werkes ist Bach das genaue Gegenteil Beethovens. Selbst in den späteren Kompositionen, die den direkten Einfluss von Bachs Kontrapunkt zeigen (die Fugen op. 106, 110 oder 130, die Missa solemnis und andere), ist Beethovens Stil dramatisch - er drängt mit Phrasen von unwiderstehlicher Energie vorwärts, erobert neues Gebiet und strebt weiter, statt zu konsolidieren und mit kreisender Bewegung stetig auszugreifen, wie es bei Bach der Fall ist. In jedem seiner Werke verwendet Beethoven für diesen Angriff - entweder in der Exposition, Durchführung oder Reprise - andere Ansätze, die häufig winzig und themenlos sind, kaum mehr als gebrochene Dreiklänge (wie im ersten Satz der Eroica) oder thematische Muster, aus wiederholten Tönen gebildet (der erste und zweite Satz der Siebten Sinfonie). Bach ist episch, Beethoven dramatisch. Ich finde so faszinierend an Bachs letzten Werken (der h-Moll-Messe, den Goldberg-Variationen, der Kunst der Fuge, dem Musikalischen Opfer), dass er, anders als Beethoven, dessen Werke aus der dritten Periode die Gattung sprengen und eine Reihe zerstörter, unvollendeter, fragmentarischer Formen zurücklassen, offenbar bestrebt ist, jede Nuance, jede Verflechtung, jede Harmonie und jeden Rhythmus in das Ganze einzubeziehen.

Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way.

He took a stool two away from Enid. She didn’t look up from her drink or glance his way. On the other side of him a guy wearing a porkpie hat was bouncing his head up and down as though to music but no music was playing and he wasn’t wearing earphones. A rainbow of rusted license plates took up most of the back wall—probably plates representing all fifty states, but Simon wasn’t really up for checking. There were neon signs for Miller High Life and Schlitz. An oddly ornate chandelier hung from the ceiling. This place, like the inn, was all dark wood, but that was the only similarity, like this was the poorest of poor cousins of the inn’s rich dark wood. “What’ll you have?” The barmaid’s hair was the color and texture of the hay on that hayride and done in a quasi mullet that reminded Simon of an ’80s hockey player. She was either a hard forty-five or a soft sixty-five, and there was little question she had seen it all at least twice. “What kind of beer do you have?” he asked. “We have Pabst. And Pabst.” “You choose for me.

Music tells us things—social things, psychological things, physical things about how we feel and perceive our bodies—in a way that other art forms can’t. It’s sometimes in the words, but just as often the content comes from a combination of sounds, rhythms, and vocal textures that communicate, as has been said by others, in ways that bypass the reasoning centers of the brain and go straight to our emotions. Music, and I’m not even talking about the lyrics here, tells us how other people view the world—people we have never met, sometimes people who are no longer alive—and it tells it in a non-descriptive way. Music embodies the way those people think and feel: we enter into new worlds—their worlds—and though our perception of those worlds might not be 100 percent accurate, encountering them can be completely transformative.

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion…

It certainly made for music that relied less on melody and conventional song structure and more on mood and texture.

I’ve never enjoyed compliments as much as Cole’s. Men have always told me I was pretty, but that’s the blandest of tributes. It says nothing about me as a person. Cole compliments my taste, my opinions, and my talents. He notices things that nobody ever bothered to notice about me before, like the fact that I can taste and smell more acutely than most people, which really does make me a better cook. It’s the silver lining of my sensory issues. While I’m often distracted or stressed by light, sound, smell, and touch, I also take deep pleasure from music and food, rich colors and textures, and the right kind of touch on my skin. It’s a blessing and a curse. When everything is wrong, it’s pure torture. But when all goes right, it’s a gift I’d never give up.

Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billon-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak. Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues. To save a lot of money, go against the grain. Mexico Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common. San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues. Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there. Chicago, Illinois Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza. Colombia Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee. The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD. In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable. Tennessee's Music City There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January. New York City, New York Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities. Canada Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway. In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling. The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.

He was as interested as the rest of us in experimenting with new sounds and effects, but alongside his inventiveness he also added a more thoughtful, structured approach, with the patience to develop a musical idea to its full potential. He also looked good, and had managed to leapfrog the phase when a hair perm was considered the height of tonsorial fashion. Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way.

I first imagined each moment separate, inspired, consecutive. I could have cast the film—myself the female lead, you the star. I wore color—magenta. lavender, lime. You were in white, something textured that moved with your body. The music was sensuous, full orchestra scored for harp, piccolo, twelve double basses, a chime. The premiere, well-attended, prices high. Those who didn't like it find little to like in this world. The critics, through careful eyes, decided our performance was fresh, the location on the cliff above the ocean a splendid choice on someone's part, the humor warm. But time extracts. After the blast, the slow boil, the few grains cupped in the palm. The orchestra was really scored for wind and pelican, the dry flick of lizard. The lily, with petals like white tongues, appeared from nowhere, and the gull remained stone-still. as gulls do not do. The costumes were too simple: sun and salt on skin, and the actors kept changing roles, crawling into one another’s lines, saying the wrong words when they spoke at all, finding it hard to think in vertigo, their love clouded with a retinue of men and women, former actors who wanted the parts. The critics made no sense of the film, double-exposed, sprocket holes on either side and a garbled sound track that wove ‘always’ and ‘never’ into one word. The beginning appeared in the last scene, and the climax was a whorl of color, like looking too long at the sun through closed eyelids. One thing someone found to praise: a clear shot of a shining feather lying on a stone in the path.

It is essential to this sort of ideas that they be 'veiled with shadows,' appear 'under a disguise.' They give us the assurance that the 'great unpenetrated and discouraging night of our soul' is not empty, is not 'nothingness'; but these entities, these domains, these worlds that line it, people it, and whose presence it feels like the presence of someone in the dark, have been acquired only through its commerce with the visible, to which they remain attached. As the secret blackness of milk, of which Valéry spoke, is accessible only through its whiteness, the idea of light or the musical idea doubles up the lights and sounds from beneath, is their other side or their depth. Their carnal texture presents to us what is absent from all flesh; it is a furrow that traces itself out magically under our eyes without a tracer, a certain hollow, a certain interior, a certain absence, a negativity that is not nothing, being limited very precisely to these five notes between which it is instituted, to that family of sensibles we call lights. We do not see, do not hear the ideas, and not even with the mind's eye or with the third ear: and yet they are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the lights or between them, recognizable through their always special, always unique manner of entrenching themselves behind them, 'perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance.

Diversity is what gives colour and texture to our life on earth. Art, architecture, music, stories, celebrations, food, drink, dance: all of these are particular. None of them is an abstract universal.

It is tempting to think of such men as a deviant sub-culture, a pathological underground, a sick minority. Yet splatter films which revel in pornographic scenes where women are tortured and killed are part of the mainstream; music videos celebrating male violence against women to the point of death and beyond are also mainstream. Misogynist hate propaganda is so normalised it has faded into the texture of the everyday – and we barely notice how pervasive it is.

Sabbath rhythms are not meant for paper; they are meant to be practiced. “Holy days, rituals, liturgies—all are like musical notations which, in themselves,” one Jewish scholar writes, “cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance.

Beauty is more than just pictures on a wall. It is also about colors that bring pleasure, smooth and nubby textures that reward the touch, the wafting fragrance of food in the oven that keeps us sniffing appreciatively, the comfort or excitement of music on the stereo. Beauty is found in the way we light the rooms (we keep a well-stocked shelf of candles and lighters in constant use), the books we open again and again, the way we arrange the furniture and set the table. It is found in natural objects we use for decorating potted plants, shells, autumn leaves, always fresh flowers or pine boughs brought in from our yard and open windows that draw the eye toward the beautiful outdoors.

As Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, “Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.”1 Some say that this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we have only one chance, one fleeting opportunity to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened. Imagine, as composer Milton Babbitt did, that you could experience a book only by going to a reading, or by reading the text off a screen that displayed it only briefly before disappearing. I suspect that if that were the way we received literature, then writers (and readers) would work harder to hold our attention. They would avoid getting too complicated, and they would strive mightily to create a memorable experience. Music did not get more compositionally sophisticated when it started being recorded, but I would argue that it did get texturally more complex. Perhaps written literature changed, too, as it became widespread—maybe it too evolved to be more textural (more about mood, technical virtuosity, and intellectual complexity than merely about telling a story).

Significantly, rhythm and texture are the two most difficult aspects of music to express in conventional Western musical notation. These qualities, some of the most resonant and important in contemporary popular music, and in some ways the most “African,” were excluded from, or maybe simply outside of, the system by which music was traditionally taught, passed on, notated, discussed, criticized, and—very important—copyrighted.

Meditation # 3 Writing Coffee! Today there are so many cafes to choose from. I’m in NYC now and have a choice of 5 ‘coffee shops’ within a 2-block radius. When I lived here over 20 years ago that would have looked more like 1 cafe in a 12-block radius. Not including Bodegas! Find your way to a cafe—by yourself. You’re allowed a newspaper, book or digital device of your choice but also bring along a pen and paper. Get your favorite hot beverage. Teas are nice, too! And relax. Mindfulness training reminds you to pause. To be observant. To not only look but to see. Try that now—if you are in a cafe. Notice everything! The walls—their color and texture, what’s hanging on them. Is there a theme? I.e. Do you notice photos of bread being made? Flowers in baskets? Coffee beans being harvested? What are the sounds? Do you hear a cappuccino machine frothing fresh milk? People talking? Music being streamed in the background? What are the smells? Are they heavenly? Breads? Dark roasts? What do you feel? Are there people around? Do you feel comfortable? Are you self-conscious? Take out your paper and write your responses down. All of them. Without judgment. You have just been creative!

There is a way of pleasing most people and still not hurting one’s aesthetic standards,” he wrote, “and that, I feel, should be the aim of a composer.” Britten’s way of having his cake and eating it too often involved a kind of radical thinning out of textures, the use of imaginative instrumentations, and employing common tonal chords that have been defamiliarized or spiked with a “wrong” note, such that the harmonies often feel at once modern and antique. But paired with this commitment to public legibility was also an integrated social vision for music, a keen desire to bring his art form down from the mountaintops.

Though the walls were glowing orange, the place still felt pitch-black. It shone in a way that didn’t cast light on anything but itself, which reminded me of photos I’d seen of coral during the night. The texture of the walls felt the same as the mushroom ghost, as though I had been eaten up by a giant balloon. I imagined the house sucking up all the air, suffocating me. After I died, it’d absorb me too.

But for thirteen-year-old Maricela García, it was more than that. The blind girl knew many of Selena’s songs by heart and competed in talent contests singing her music. Before the show, Maricela said, ‘“I can’t see her, but I want to touch her.” Selena got the message and came out to meet the girl, taking her hand and letting her feel the texture of the black leather motorcycle jacket she was wearing.

Synesthesia is a unique sensory phenomenon that affects less than ten percent of the world’s population. A person with synesthesia—or “joined perception”—often experiences multiple sensory responses when only one sense has been stimulated. Many creative people experience this comingling of senses: the painter Kandinsky saw colors when he listened to music, and the musician Billie Eilish reports a wide array of synesthetic experiences that include color, sound, texture, and temperature.

omnipresent, neither of which God desired for me to be. As I read the Gospels, it became clearer and clearer to me that Jesus himself was not selfless. Jesus went into the mountains and prayed to the point that even his disciples could not find him. Jesus ate. Jesus drank. Jesus slept. He took care of himself. And never once was Jesus hurried from place to place, controlled by a busy schedule. Jesus lived a rhythm completely different from anyone around him. The rhythm of his life was, in itself, a prophetic act against the rhythms of the world. Sabbath rhythms are not meant for paper; they are meant to be practiced. “Holy days, rituals, liturgies—all are like musical notations which, in themselves,” one Jewish scholar writes, “cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance.

Grocery stores are an exercise in psychological manipulation. It is virtually impossible to enter a supermarket intending to buy a quart of milk and emerge with only the milk. First, consider the entrance. Once you enter the grocery store, you must traverse the entire store in order to reach the checkout line. And where do the entrances to grocery stores usually leave you? In the produce department. You are surrounded by scents, textures, and bright colors that result in a surge of endorphins. The lighting of the store is manipulated to make fruits and vegetables appear at their brightest and best. And of course, the dairy aisle—one of the most popular locations to visit—is always hidden in the back of the store so you are forced to pass through a wealth of tempting products before reaching it. Even the way the shelves are organized is a psychological trap. The most expensive items are always placed conveniently at adult eye level, with the generic brands placed down by your knees. Sugary cereals or other items meant to appeal to children are placed at eye level for children. Even the giant size of the shopping carts is intended to encourage more purchases. “Even the music is meant to manipulate us,” I explain to Luke. “A study of supermarket shoppers found people spend more time shopping when stores play music. You’ll notice there are no windows or clocks or skylights that give you any external time cues.

He didn’t know what to do with his hands as he looked down at the sleeping general. Arin thrust them into his pockets before they went for the throat. He reminded himself why he had come. He ripped open the man’s jacket. Arin reached for the inside breast pocket, located exactly where the man had tried to touch his chest as he had lain bleeding on the road. Arin’s fingers met paper. He pulled it out, its texture suede-soft from having been handled so much. It had been unfolded and folded many times. It was sheet music. At first, Arin didn’t understand what he looked at. Kestrel’s handwriting. Herrani script. Musical notation in crisp black. His own name leaped off the page. Dear Arin. Then he recognized the music as the sonata Kestrel had been studying when he’d entered her music room at the imperial palace in late spring. It had been the last time he’d seen her before the tundra. He had thought it would be the last time he would ever see her. Arin hastened from the tent. He couldn’t read the letter here. But he didn’t know if he could read it anywhere, if any place would be private enough, because being alone meant he’d still be with himself, and he hated to remember how he’d left Kestrel that day, and what had befallen her after. He was desperate to read it. He couldn’t bear to read it. He resented that her father had kept it. He wondered what it meant that her father had kept it. Arin was only vaguely aware of having stumbled through the noisy camp and into the woods. The thought of reading the letter felt like a violation, like he’d be reading a letter meant for someone else. Yet it had been addressed to him. Dear Arin. Arin read.

When she'd come down to the kitchen after her shower, she'd deliberately left the lights off. She liked the way the cake looked in the bright light of the full moon that was streaming in through the windows. On the kitchen table a wooden spoon sat in a small saucepot, which held crushed hazelnuts that had been soaked and heated in Frangelico, next to the bowl of thick, velvety pastry cream she had prepared earlier. She released one of the layers from its baking pan and settled it onto the cake plate. She had sprinkled them while they were still warm with the same infused brandy, so they were now redolent with a harmonious perfume of filberts and chocolate. She deftly spread some of the pastry cream on the first layer and sprinkled a tablespoon of the crushed nuts on top of it. She added the second layer of cake, more buttery cream, and a dusting of nuts. Angelina always aimed for an extra shading of flavor when she created a recipe, something to complement and embrace the most prominent flavor in a dish, something that tickled the palate and the imagination. Here, she had chosen aromatic, earthy hazelnuts to add an extra dimension of texture and taste. She'd heard someplace that some musical composers said that it was the spaces between the notes that made all the difference; when you were cooking, it was the little details, too. Each layer of the dense cake covered the one beneath it as she laid them on, like dark disks of chocolate eclipsing moons made of creme anglaise instead of green cheese. In short order, the sixth and final layer had efficiently been fixed into place. She took a half step back to check for symmetry and balance, then moved on to the frosting. She poured the mixture of butter, milk, and chocolate that had been resting on the stove top into a mixing bowl, added a pinch of salt, a dash of real vanilla extract, and began whisking it all together with powdered sugar, which she shifted in stages to make sure that it combined thoroughly.

Whatever comes under the heading of fugal form partakes in some way of the nature of a fugue. You already know, I feel sure, that in texture all fugues are polyphonic or contrapuntal (the terms are identical in meaning). Therefore, it follows that all fugal forms are polyphonic or contrapuntal in texture.

But it is the personal synthesis of elements taken from a wide variety of historical styles and periods that most strongly links the church music with Vaughan Williams’s output as a whole. This can be observed anywhere but is perhaps best illustrated by the Mass, a work whose neo-Tudor associations have obscured awareness of a wider eclecticism. Techniques favoured by sixteenth-century English church musicians – false relations, fauxbourdon-like textures, contrasts between soloist(s) and the full choir – are indeed present, but they are combined with others – canon and points of imitation, sectional division of the text (articulated by textural contrasts), emphasis on the church modes – that were the lingua franca of the period, common to English and continental music alike. Even these Renaissance techniques are but a ‘starting-point’32 for what is clearly a highly personal essay, however.

After dinner I text Chris to see if she wants to come over, but she doesn't text back. She's probably out with one of the guys she hooks up my scrapbooking. with. Which is fine. I should catch up on I was hoping to be done with Margot's scrapbook before she left for college, but as anyone who's ever scrapbooked knows, Rome wasn't built in a day. You could spend a year or more working on one scrapbook. I've got Motown girl-group music playing, and my sup plies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I've cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrap book has texture. It's thick and chunky and doesn't close all the way.

For those unhappy with modern society, folk music suggested the colors, scents, and textures of a more authentic time. The folk scene offered a purer cultural identity, or at least the fantasy of one.

The voiceover promised a baker in Terre Haute, Indiana, who saw colors when he heard music, every note bringing with it a vivid shade on the color spectrum. There was a flutist in Hamburg, Germany, who experienced flavors as shapes and textures. Her favorite was white asparagus, which was a pleasing hexagonal form with smooth bumps all over its surface. There was a writer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who saw all her words in colors because each letter of the alphabet appeared to her in a different hue. According to the voiceover, the name of the writer's hometown, with its preponderance of vowels, which were jewel tones of reds and oranges and pinks, was her favorite word.

I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs. Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn't let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax's novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parent's bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked. I'd read something in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story. Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as 'inspiration' or 'having something to tell' and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of the narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas. My second great occupation, or I should say my first, was far more suited to comedy, and at times touched on farce. There was a time in which I fell in love on a weekly basis, something that, in hindsight, I don't recommend. I fell in love with a look, a voice, and above all with what was tightly concealed under those fine-wool dresses worn by the young girls of my time. 'That isn't love, it's a fever,' Fermín would specify. 'At your age it is chemically impossible to tell the difference. Mother Nature brings on these tricks to repopulate the planet by injecting hormones and a raft of idiocies into young people's veins so there's enough cannon fodder available for them to reproduce like rabbits and at the same time sacrifice themselves in the name of whatever is parroted by bankers, clerics, and revolutionary visionaries in dire need of idealists, imbeciles, and other plagues that will prevent the world from evolving and make sure it always stays the same.

We do not know. All that we know is that we lack a tongue that could reveal, a language that could perfectly express the wild joy swelling to a music in our heart, the wild pain welling to a strong ache in our throat, the wild cry mounting to a madness in our brain, the thing, the word, the joy we know so well, and cannot speak! All that we know is that the little stations whip by in the night, the straggling little towns whip by with all that is casual, rude, familiar, ugly, and unutterable. All that we know is that the earth is flowing by us in the darkness, and that this is the way the world goes with a field and a wood and a field! And of the huge and secret earth all we know is that we feel with all our life its texture with our foot upon it.

I was hoping to be done with Margot's scrapbook before she left for college, but as anyone who's ever scrapbooked knows, Rome wasn't built in a day. You could spend a year or more working on a scrapbook. I've got Motown girl-group music playing, and my supplies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I've cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrapbook has texture. It's thick and chunky and doesn't close all the way.

That is the sum total of what “rock” is now for the people who listen to rock radio and attend festivals like Rock Fest—an inscrutable equation that plugs old-world rock hedonism passed down fourth-hand from Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith into the bludgeoning, sadomasochistic sonic textures of post-grunge and nu metal. It’s party music for people who hate their lives.

and are often taunted regarding physical features like their eyes, nose, teeth, neck, knees, feet, voice, hair texture, or their complexion. Boys are criticized for liking girls; girls are criticized for liking boys. Some boys don’t care for sports. Some girls don’t like to play house. Teenagers require more sleep. Kids have always had their own way of communicating, their unique style of clothes and hair, and distinctive music. Kids go through awkward times where they don’t think they’re attractive, smart, or interesting. What is key in all of this is that a parent should communicate nothing but acceptance for the unique characteristics of their children. When they do that, a child senses the kind of acceptance that God has for us in our uniqueness. What is key in all of this is that a parent should communicate nothing but acceptance for the unique characteristics of their children.

Ways to Work with Anxiety on Your Own 1. Get out of your head by turning all your attention to the soles of your feet. Feel the ground underneath them. 2. Practice your deep belly breathing. 3. Take a walk outside and observe the scenery. Name three colors, name three sounds, name three textures. 4. Remind yourself that you are anxious and therefore it is not a good time to draw conclusions about the future until you are calm. 5. Remind yourself that you are anxious and the feeling is temporary. 6. Focus on the anxious body sensations with compassion and curiosity—and without judgment—until they subside. Remember to breathe deeply as you focus. 7. Imagine a peaceful place or a time when you felt confident. 8. Imagine something soothing like beautiful music, or hot sun on your skin, or being hugged. 9. Do some exercise like jogging or yoga, or go to the gym.

Some ways to increase the enjoyment of your food and mealtimes include: •Sitting down at a table to eat, versus eating standing up, in the car/bus, or at your desk. •Making your environment a pleasant one. For example, dim the lights, light a candle, have soft music playing, or eat outside. •Compose your meals with a variety of colors and textures. •Take a few deep breaths or pause for a moment of gratitude before the meal. •Engage in mindful eating, i.e., let yourself savor each bite of food, slow your chewing, and really notice how the food feels, smells, and tastes. •Choose foods you like, and do not force yourself to eat things you do not like the taste of.

Beginning a mindfulness practice, no matter how small, can be immensely helpful in healing disordered eating, as well as helping in other areas of your life. For this activity, you may begin by simply choosing one piece of food—such as a piece of chocolate, a raisin, a slice of watermelon—or a complete meal. 1Create a relaxing ambiance by putting on quiet or soothing music, lighting a candle, or dimming the lights. 2Become aware of your hunger level. 3Sit down at a table. 4Note the smell, texture, and temperature of your food. 5Take the time to chew. Try for at least 10 chews per bite, and note whether you prefer to chew on one side of your mouth or the other. Pause to take a drink, and notice the qualities of what you are sipping (is it cold, warm, bubbly, refreshing?). 6Put your utensils down while you chew. 7Periodically notice your hunger level until you end your meal.

This idiotic notion of house and field slave – when you are all dying slaves! They will have you argue amongst yourselves about hair texture, too. They will infiltrate your music, your dances, your inventions, your artistic expressions, and stupefy your culture and vilify it, too, then make money off your art and have you say and do things that weaken your blood bond.

Everyday I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative , with the painting of texture, with the timrbres and colors of the staging. With the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas

A little drab from the outside, maybe: slow, or plain. But who, outside, will ever see it, or learn the subtleties of its textures, the specific tensions of its warp and weft? You have to get inside to see anything worth seeing, you have to listen long enough to hear the music. Or possibly that's a thing you just tell yourself when it becomes clear you won't be leaving. Sometimes that seems more likely. It's hard to say for sure.

Sometimes you get so jazzed on the moment you can actually hear the universe sing, as you swing from life’s high notes and hit the low notes equally, improvising artistically without missing a beat or hanging on like a leech, leaving each passing moment to zone in on the texture of the next melodic tones life continually brings‬.

To begin with, though being sensory sensitive can often be painful and overwhelming, it can also come with a unique set of advantages. Autistics like me with heightened sensory awareness tend to experience the world in a deeply enriched way which allows us to notice subtleties that others usually miss. This can lead to a greater appreciation of art, music, and nature, as we can perceive nuances in color, texture, sound, and flavor that are less apparent to others. Sensory-sensitive people also often exhibit heightened emotional empathy, as our keen perception enables us to pick up on smaller emotional cues. This makes many of us excellent listeners, as well as compassionate friends and partners. Moreover, our sensitivities can foster creativity and innovation, as we have rich sensory experiences to draw from for inspiration. So, while sensory sensitivity definitely has its challenges, it also opens the door to a world rich in detail and depth of experience and can even be a regular source of Autistic joy.