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February 13, 2023
Curtis White's Playlist for His Book "Transcendent"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Curtis White's Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse is an smart and timely exploration of the West's fascination with Buddhism.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Provocative...[Transcendent] amounts to a convincing case that will resonate with progressives seeking to 'free ourselves from the [capitalistic] world that we were born into' and 'change the way we live.' Scholars of Buddhism will benefit from White’s shrewd takes."
In his own words, here is Curtis White's Book Notes music playlist for his book Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse:
Given the nature of my new book, this playlist writes itself. I say that because much of Transcendent is about music and music’s endearing ability to provide pleasures that are so intense that they border on the mystical, or at least the mysterious.
Father John Misty, “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”
I open the book by wondering why my sense of the best cuts on Father John Misty’s 2012 album, Fear Fun, so nearly reflects the judgment of some fifty million fellow listeners on Spotify. Is it our biology, something in the song that trips a dopamine trigger? Or, worse, is it merely that the song is an algorhythmic hit, a contagion of repeat listens that is finally empty of meaning? Or is it something more mysterious than that? As Hua Hsu observes in his new book Stay True, “I finally felt in my body how music works. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God.”
Idles, “1049 Gotho”
Musical transcendence takes many forms. It’s not all about channeling God. There is also social transcendence in music. Music can ask us to rise up and retake our lives from what oppresses us. The neo-punk band Idles thrashes the conventional in order to make way for freedom and kindness. Really loud kindness.
Thelonius Monk, “Monk’s Point”
As Martin Williams writes in the liner notes to the album Solo Monk, “’Monk’s Point’ is the most refined example I have ever heard of Monk’s way of bending a piano note—not of slurring together two successive notes, but actually producing a continuous curve of sound—an impossible technique.” In this way Monk creates a musical beyond. Like a Buddhist adept, he says, “Silence is the loudest noise.”
Mommas and the Papas, “Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon”
There is an essay in Transcendence titled “Music’s Music” in which I suggest that what is beyond musical communication or pleasure is music’s Music, what jazz bassist Victor Wooten confesses to in saying, “I listened to Music in the past but only in a one-sided way. I only listened to what I wanted to hear, not what Music had to say.” This old Top 40 tune by the Mommas and the Papas may seem a strange song to illustrate Wooten’s point, but transcendence can happen even within the products of the music industry. After a single meditative opening verse, “Young Girls” suddenly surges forward—without a bridge, just the briefest crescendo from the drums—surges on a chorus of startling power, as if they’d just been listening to Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus: “Young girls are coming to the ca-a-anyon!”
Gustave Mahler, Kindertotenlieder #1: Nun will die Sonn‘ so hell aufgeh’n“
Sad beyond sadness, beautiful beyond beauty, and transforming, this is Mahler at his most spiritual. The amazing thing is that he was so often capable of approaching spiritual transformation...without ever quite arriving. Which is why he had to start again, write another song, another symphony. Mahler felt that the spiritual truths of the great composers were socially and humanly transformative, and that if their works were allowed to become part of the hedonistic amusements of Viennese café society, then all that music provided was sacrilege. The suffering implied in this song is so pure that it will make you happy.
As Stevie Wonder put it, “Joy Inside My Tears.”
Stevie Wonder, “Pastime Paradise”
Speaking of Stevie, I close with this miracle because I happened to listen to it immediately after concluding this playlist. It has nothing and everything to do with my book.
You’ll see.
Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose works include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, and, more recently, The Science Delusion, We Robots, and Lacking Character. His essays have appeared in Harpers and Tricycle. He taught English at Illinois State University. He is the founder (with Ronald Sukenick) of FC2, a publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors. He lives in Port Townsend, WA.
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