Quiet

[thanate]

[warning: these are all youtube links]

The world is full of people posting end-of-year link lists of various sorts, and I have about fifteen or twenty things open in tabs that I'd like to read if only I felt like spending a week or so staring at the computer (to add to the rather long list of things I already have bookmarked that I meant to pass along to other people...) One of the things I have gotten to are several other people's annotated books read lists (you would think I'd eventually get around to writing up my own, but... not so far.) and most recently I've cadged Susan Cain's Quiet from scribofelidae and the library, as I was also entertained by her TED talk on introversion. And horrified by the picture she paints of the modern grade school experience, but that's a different problem... I only got it last night, but I'm enjoying the book so far, despite being not particularly in her target audience of people who need convincing.

Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure that the entire time I'm reading the book, I shall have the song of the same name stuck in my head. The version I have is off of Jean Redpath's Now & Then* and I like it a great deal better than the original-- for those of you not familiar with Jean Redpath, she does things like this: Leaving the Land, The Wild Geese, and a lifetime's worth of Scottish folk songs. Last I heard, she was still working on recording the complete Robbie Burns, which is a bit less my thing, but the fact remains that if I spent about 4x as much time singing as I do, I might someday sound as good as she can. Of course, assuming young Miss Radiator doesn't turn out like my brother (who hated vocal music from day one) I'm making myself an audience for the next few years.

Having thought of it, I now contemplate acquiring a few more albums for myself; the timing would be sort of traditional, as my mother & her sister got a Jean Redpath record out of the library the winter I was born and sang me the lum hat wantin' a croon song as a lullaby. (It's the second one here, starting ~2:40. A fine moralistic tale involving being washed out to sea over a broken-down top hat and a dead skate.)


*I find I'm not actually sure how one is supposed to notate album titles. Huh.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I italicize album titles and put song names in quotes, though I have no idea if that's "correct".

[stephanie charette (from livejournal.com)]

Her TED talk was very powerful. I had some issues with a few later chapters, but I swear that the relationship chapter totally nailed me and my ex.

It does try to convince as much as comfort, but I think extroverts that subscribe to you-must-be-like-us-or-else aren't likely the ones to read it. :/

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I think most of my dissonance is that I didn't get a lot of the "no really, you have to be an extrovert!" programming. There's a bit of culturally assumed social stuff I eventually had to work out for myself (flatly refusing to go out to dinner with 20 people, for instance, or just realizing that my idea of a fun party doesn't require me to pay attention to more than four or five others at a time) but I never got the pushback for wanting to spend time alone.