My Life and Thoughts

Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

Eventually, however, I realized it isn’t so bad to be the 10th person writing about a given subject, because by then there isn’t so much exposition left to cramp your style and get in the way of whatever really interests you: in my case, the phenomenon of charm.

While investigating the subject of charm, I came across an interesting article called “On Charm,” by Stephen M. Rittenberg (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 68 (1987): 389–96). The basic idea is that charming patients make their psychoanalysts fall asleep, thus derailing the desired trajectory “from sleeping ignorance to wakeful knowledge.” Rittenberg supports his theory with anecdotal evidence:

On occasion I have experienced an abrupt unpleasant feeling about a treatment, somewhat akin to being jolted awake by an intrusive alarm… A sense of having missed the boat or that something has derailed the treatment journey occurs. There is usually a feeling of foolishness, of having been taken in – “Why hadn’t I realized before?”

In short, these patients had charmed me and that charm had cast a spell over the treatment, temporarily or permanently halting it.

Considering these experiences led me to wonder: What is charm? How does it work? How and when are we as analysts susceptible to being charmed by patients?… I inquired of analytic colleagues and found that indeed a number of times they had been charmed out of the main therapeutic tasks of analysis. What makes a person susceptible to charm? Perhaps scrutiny of my own susceptibility and its specific, possibly idiosyncratic mode of expression – sleepiness – might help answer these questions.

What I like about this article is that at first you think he is talking about metaphoric sleepiness, but then later it turns out the guy actually falls asleep during therapy sessions. If this sounds interesting, then you should definitely read my article, because I also write about my own empirical experiences with falling asleep.

Interestingly, you can actually hear Al Jolson singing “Sonny Boy” on a CD compilation called More Songs for Sleepless Nights. Part of the reason it’s interesting to me is that, before they gave me the Vampire Weekend assignment, the Guardian had initially asked if I wanted to write anything about Elizabeth Hardwick, the recently deceased author known for her semi-autobiographical novel called… Sleepless Nights! I guess this is what is commonly known as: the circle of life.

Tags: music, publications, reviews, today's youth, Vampire Weekend, w00t!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.