What do you do with a Ph.D.? ROCK.
Speaking of Drew Daniel from Matmos, I recently caught up to the author/area musician/associate professor at Johns Hopkins and asked what keeps his nose in a book.
Personally, if I were in a band with MY boyfriend, I'd just run away to Europe and play music all the time. But I guess there's no health insurance with that plan.
To diverge a bit from our regularly scheduled book discussion, Matmos released an album earlier this year, Supreme Balloon, and if you're at all interested in experimental music, or want to hear what the Baltimore scene sounds like these days, check them out. But wait, there's more! Daniel, who apparently never sleeps, also has a side project called Soft Pink Truth.
Between all this bookwriting and musicmaking, Daniel was kind enough to explain his own reading inspirations:
My own summer reading has pinballed between recent examples of what we could call pop-neurology (Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music, Kagan's What is Emotion and Damasio's Looking for Spinoza) and some of the classic works from the Renaissance that seem to weirdly resurface in the recent texts (Spinoza and Descartes).
What drives me to read is a simultaneous desire to know what the current state of the conversation is, and my desire to "double check" that conversation against what has already been established. I like the resulting anachronistic feeling, and I think reading can usefully connect you with distant communities and foreign expertise.
Can you tell he has a Ph.D. in English literature?
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
Comments
I like his music better than his book selections....
Posted by: Pat | July 31, 2008 12:16 PM