There's stuff about Taylor Swift in this newsletter
And about mental health. Have at it, search engines!
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Noah Kahan’s “thing” is mental health
I mean, lots of artists have a “thing”, right? The Eagles’ thing is deceitful women who might have magical powers. These women might be witchy in nature or they might have lyin’ eyes and be able to open doors with just a smile. Pink Floyd’s thing is World War 2 and all the trouble that fell out as a result of that, in the later albums at least. Led Zeppelin have a few things, including hobbits and the co-opting of American blues music.
But for Vermont singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, who is my guest on Depresh Mode this week, mental health is right there at the forefront of the music he makes. His signature issue, really. Noah deals with depression and anxiety and he’s recently been kind of waking up to some body dysmorphia issues that have been lingering for a while as well, as expressed in his song, “Shape of My Shadow”:
If you know Noah’s work, there’s a good chance it’s from his biggest song, “Stick Season”:
Damn that’s a good song.
Taylor Swift’s impact on a therapy practice
Let’s stay with singer-songwriters and shift over to Taylor Swift. HEARD OF HER? Probably only if you breathe air and are made of carbon. Writing in the New York Times, therapist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell says T-Swizzle has dominated her appointments as of late.
But as the Eras tour steadily lurched toward our favorite city, the Taylor-based therapy issues reached a boiling point. “How am I going to stay calm before she goes onstage?” “I need to do remote today because I can’t get Covid before the concert.” “How am I going to go back to regular life once it’s all over?” They were saying they needed to calm down and to help them do that we dug through the full bag of tricks — behavioral, cognitive, psychodynamic, existential — and explored these patients’ relationships to anticipation, to enjoyment, to self-regulation, to suffering.
Garfinkle-Crowell advises not to dismiss Taylor as just some pop singer.
(W)hat is singular about this artist, in this time, is the access she has created to a cohesive community, particularly for the pandemic generation, whose social connections grew tragically elusive and for whom the internet’s offerings assumed a central role. Whatever you are upset about, the poet laureate of this generation has got a song somewhere in her mega-oeuvre describing that precise feeling. She is not going to solve whatever problem you are having, but she is going to sit with you in it until the passage of time does its work: Look at her now.
I’ve been intrigued by Taylor’s collaborations with my favorite band, The National. These joint projects work pretty well, everyone’s very talented, but there’s a sad-dad darkness component that the casual observer might not have expected from Swift.
Am I keeping a sharp mind or, in fact, going bonkers?
I received with some elation and some dread the news that there’s a new New York Times game called Digits. Granted, the game is in beta mode and it seems like it’s only available for a limited time, but still it’s thrilling and worrisome. The process of making the game and other NYT games is described here.
NYT, of course, is the manager - though not the creator - of Wordle, which has become all the rage since launching a couple of years ago. They run a Sudoku puzzle as well, and the Spelling Bee puzzle, and of course the venerable and still challenging NYT Crossword.
I don’t do the Sudoku because Daddy doesn’t usually go for numbers but the Wordle has become as much a part of my morning as coffee and letting the dogs run into the yard to experience the joys of outdoor urination. Only after completing Wordle can I continue on my day. And only after completing Merriam-Webster’s Quordle also. I’ll start the Spelling Bee in the morning but it often takes well into a day spent coming back to it before I reach Genius level and can finally rest.
And I tell myself that this is all okay because I’m sharpening my aging mind and I’m giving my word skills a vigorous daily workout. But I also wonder this: Am I going bonkers? Am I a prisoner to my compulsions? Am I in a substance use disorder with the tiny dopamine pellets that are released when I get the answer right? Because I think I might be, you know?
Anyway, Digits is a number game and I can leave that to the number people. I won’t be playing it. At least not every day. Probably. Might. God dammit.
Postpartum depression in men
“Both parents are equally susceptible to mental health challenges during and after birth,” says Dr Sharin Baldwin, the clinical academic lead for nursing at the London north west university healthcare NHS trust. “Recent years have seen caring responsibilities become shared and there is an expectation that dads need to be more involved. That combination can create more pressure on men who want to be good dads, but might feel as if they’re not good enough or that they can’t burden their partners with their own worries.”
Uploading your dad’s work
Paul Ford is a writer and so was his dad. When father was dying, son promised to gather all of father’s works and put it up on the Internet Archive. Came out to about seven gigabytes.
Dad wrote opaque, elliptical, experimental works of enormous profanity. One of his plays was produced with fanfare in the 1970s, and many poems were published here and there, but most of the manuscripts were returned with polite rejections. He came of age, though, in an era of great writers writing greatly. You stuck to your guns and waited for people to figure you out, and if they didn’t, even after decades—their effing loss, buddy. The upshot was 70 years of writing on crumbling yellow onionskin, dot-matrix prints with the tractor feeds still attached, and bright white laser output, along with more than 10,000 ancient WordPerfect files and blog entries, including many repeats. Now all mine to archive.