Walking down the sidewalk, I sometimes fasten on a phrase from a classical piece in my mind's ear. I make it into a loop. Over and over I hear it, hum it, sing it, effectively turning the bit of music by Beethoven, or Mozart, Gershwin, Schoenberg, or Radiohead into minimalism. I go through the phrase dozens of times. I'm stuck on it and in it -- an obsessive, vastly-extendable run-on sentence, an earworm. Did people used to do this? Strolling … [Read more...]