Hat Trick
Hey, three in a row! I think it’s safe to say we’re officially back. Where’d we go this week?
The Synesthesia Experience: Tasting Words, Seeing Music, Hearing Color by Maureen Seaburg
For those of you who aren’t aware, my brain is wired a little differently (I know, I know, this is your shocked face). Actually, it’s wired differently in several ways but for the purposes of this review, some of my sensory inputs are odd in that they’re hooked into two (+) receptive centers rather than just one. For years, I thought everyone smelled and tasted food coloring when they saw bright red, chocolate chip cookies when they looked at Monet blue (which also, no exaggeration, hypnotizes me, I have to be physically pulled away), and linseed oil when they made eye contact with that green Van Gogh liked to use for grassy fields. Turns out, not so much. These double sensory inputs (sometimes it’s triple, quadruple, etc) is called synesthesia. Some people taste colors, some hear it, others see music, or have colors for each day of the week, or certain words. The possibilities are many and varied.
After I had Covid the first time, I lost my synesthesia and it was devastating to my cooking, to my art, and to my everyday life. I didn’t realize how much this enhanced way of seeing the world meant to me until it was gone and I didn’t know if I was ever going to get it back. Luckily, I did but, as with so many others who had Covid-induced sensory changes, it was different. I no longer smelled or tasted colors. Now, I hear them when I listen to music and they coalesce into full images that capture the essence of a song. I’ve started painting them and it’s pretty cool. I can show you the range of purples that represents Freddie Mercury’s voice or the colors and patterns that make up Ludwig Göransson’s opening theme for The Mandalorian. I can paint k-pop, classical, industrial, and riot grrrrl anthems.
And, for the very first time, a few days ago, I tasted a sound. It was David Bowles voice and, if you’re wondering, it tastes like a red velvet couch.
But that’s my story.
Seaburg’s book covers a lot of bases in brief, and it’s a great jumping off point for anyone who wants to know more about synesthesia, the way it affects people who experience it, how it enhances their lives and every day activities (interestingly, it’s rarely detrimental), and what it’s like to lose this sometimes shocking, always powerful ability neurology gives a documented four percent of the population (that number is likely higher because there are so many forms; the more rare types often go undocumented).She discusses the history of the condition, from first mention in Ancient Greece to a soaring popularity in the 19th century that led poets and artists to mimic its sensations in their endeavors, to a sort of secrecy in the 20th century that sometimes landed people who admitted to sensory linkages being diagnosed as psychotic and landing in psychiatric institutions. It is only recently that synesthesia has become a popular topic of study and discussion again, due to the fact that many well known creative figures (among whom it is eight times more common) have been recognized as being wired for cross-sensory phenomenon, including: Izhak Pearlman, Billy Joel, Marilyn Monroe, Pharrell Williams, and Yayoi Kusama. Seaburg even discusses the proposition that those with synesthesia can recognize others with the same trait due to heightened sensory inputs and processing power and that they may proved to have access to quantum thought. She goes on to discuss synesthesia experiences as a necessary part of enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism and whether or not they can be induced by a meditative state or whether those with synesthesia are drawn to a particular type of meditation because of their natural neurological status.
The Synesthesia Experience also has a fantastic bibliography from which to launch a more thorough investigation into the topic.
If you’ve ever wondering what a day in my brain is like, or that of someone else you know with synesthesia, I would definitely grab this one.
The Synesthesia Experience: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781637480175
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
Remember how, in his last book, Stephen Graham Jones proposed serial killer… -ism (?) as a bloodborne pathogen that, if it infected someone with a predisposition, screwed them absolutely and completely even if they knew the serial killer rules and did everything exactly right? Does not hold a candle to what he comes up with for vampires in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’m just going to give you one clue: you are what you eat. I swear, if the modern lore doesn’t pick this up, we are all going to be so much poorer for it…
This one took me a little bit longer to read than most of Graham Jones’s books, which I usually chew through in a couple of days but that’s not a bad thing; it’s meant to meander. It’s a tale of a century and more, of slow burn rage and revenge, of suffering and penance, of evil choices, and readers are meant to feel that. We’re meant to feel afraid and claustrophobic in the wide open spaces, trapped under open sky, deserving of the punishment coming toward us, making us wait, letting us see it trudging toward the snow toward us, coming closer and closer, bearing its fangs.
Because as Good Stab tells us, “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream American ever had.”
Look around and tell me it isn’t the dream we have coming.
“‘You tore the heart out of my people, Three-Persons,’ Good Stab said.”
And look where we are now.
“This I believe,” Arthur Beaucarne thinks to himself, “is the story of America.”
It is the story of America that many want to hide away because it might “upset the children.” They don’t care about the children. Like Arthur Beaucarne, they don’t want to take responsibility for the choices they’re making. For the terrible things they’re doing. They want the story of American to be clean and bloodless and it’s not. By trying to make it so, all they do is doom the future to the same things that haunt us now.
This book is difficult. This book is important. And you should read it.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781668075081
I Was a Teenage Slasher: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9781668022245
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell and Ashley McKenzie (Illustrator)
I’m going to put a CW on this one: main character death and pet death because it’s middle grade and y’all need to decide if your kids are ready for that.
That said: this is a really excellent portal fantasy. Boy is transported to the land where all the magical creatures live. Mayhem, shenanigans, and also some really serious stuff ensue. Since the hag is hagging again, this time on ace awareness day, I feel obligated to tell you that this is a really good series with which to wean yourself off of the wizard books and to get your kids into instead. I did a quick Google this morning and couldn’t find anything problematic about the author (I may have missed something, if so, please let me know) but the fact she wasn’t immediately revealed as an anti-ace transphobe is promising. Her end-of-book bestiary acknowledges which creatures were borrowed from non-Western cultures and the only naming complaint I have is that I kept calling the pirate berserker (yes, pirate berserker, another point in Rundell’s favor) Nighthand “Sturmhond” because Leigh Bardugo (my 7 year old nephew, who recommended the book, was quick to correct).
The thing I liked most about Impossible Creatures though, is the respect it shows its kid characters. There’s no throwing them into conspiracies they don’t know anything about and letting the people they trust manipulate them. They’re taken seriously from the jump. The adults are attentive to their needs, their wants, and most importantly, their opinions. It’s okay for them to be scared. It’s okay for them to not want to taken on adult roles they’re not ready for. It’s okay for them to take time to think things through. It’s okay for them to make their own important decisions and for them to take charge when their own lives are at stake and even the lives of others. They are whole people and are treated as such. One adult even says, at a crucial moment when the Cristopher and Mal are opting to continue their journey alone, without protection or supervision, “Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years. Why are you continuing this tedious tradition?”
The kids are smart. Most of them are alright. That doesn’t mean they don’t need help, don’t need guidance, don’t have more to learn. But it does mean they have the right to our full attention, to our regard, and to our understanding. We don’t always know best. And they know so much more than we think.
Impossible Creatures: https://bookshop.org/a/56337/9780593809860
What’s next? FT Leukens new one, Love at Second Sight and after that… who knows.