My world on the web
NATIONAL BESTSELLER An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultura…
ᔥ in How Spotify hacked our ears (and our data) — Switched On Pop ()
The one thing that stood out to me was that way in which the idea of ‘India’ feels a little false and disengenous at times.
These days we are used to understanding human geography, making our mental maps, in terms of the boundaries of nation states. Most of history, though, has not been like that. Often the migrations and movements of peoples have resembled matter dissolving and re-forming, coalescing, spreading huge distances across the face of the Earth. Standing at the centre of the Old World, India has experienced such flux from prehistory to the present. Although often portrayed as a static civilization, resisting change, India has, in fact, been amazingly fluid and dynamic: the borders of her civilization have spread far beyond the boundaries marked on today’s maps. Dravidians, Aryans, Greeks, Turks, Afghans, Mongols, Mughals, British … all played their part, bringing new languages, cultures, foods and ideas to the deep matrix of Indian identity. The tides of her history have been a constant interaction between the indigenous and the foreign.
Source: The Story of India by Michael Wood
Golden ages, though, are problematical things, for they never exist in reality; they are imagined pasts – literary creations made for a purpose, and capable of very different readings, both creative and destructive. They perhaps tell us less about the past than about the present – and about our imagined futures.
Source: The Story of India by Michael Wood
The strong perception far back in time, then, is of a broad cultural unity. The British would make their own vital contribution to this. Look at any map of India in the British handbooks of the Raj, and you will see pink covering the lands from Burma to Baluchistan and from Bhutan to Kerala, bounded by the natural frontiers of the sea, the Khyber, the Himalayas and the eastern jungles. Within the map, though, is the image of one of the most ingenious and adaptive empires in history, an immense patchwork loosely embracing almost a quarter of the population of the planet. In different colours are an amazing 675 feudatory and independent princely states (of whom seventy-three were ruled by rajas ‘entitled to salutes of eleven guns or more’). Two of them, Hyderabad and Kashmir, are each the size of a large European country. This was the British solution to the diversity of India: an incredible political sleight of hand. An arrangement so extraordinary that it is hard to believe that it actually existed on the ground rather than just in the mind. But it was India.
Source: The Story of India by Michael Wood
I wonder if when talking about India (or Indian) it is important to clarify what is actually meant? For example, the ‘India’ (modern day Pakistan) encountered by Alexander the Great is vastly different to today’s civilization and culture. For one thing, this was before the spread of Islam and Mughal rule. Thinking about this all alongside Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, I feel I am always left wondering about the conflict of whose India too?
In the end, I feel that I was posed with more questions than answers.
I came upon the book via BorrowBox.
On a side note, I called a school I had not spoken with for quite a while (probably over five years). I said it was ‘Aaron calling’ and the admin actually remembered me. It really helps having social capital sometimes.
On the personal front, a few things reminded me that I had got out of the loop with my plogging. I subsequently bounced back clocking up more than 50km this month. As we are in the office more now, I have also been doing more lunchtime wellbeing sessions with my colleague, which involves two flâneurs wondering the city.
I also bought a new phone, a Samsung S24, which was on sale, after the screen of my S20+ decided to sporadically start flickering like a strobe light. With it I got a ‘military’ proof case, lets see how that goes? I stuck with Android as Moon Reader has become an integral part of my reading workflow.
Here is a list of books that I read this month:
In relation to music, I have been spinning Twinkle Digitz’s record which was finally released. While listening, I have been thinking about Liz Pelly’s point in her book on Spotify:
If we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don’t protect working musicians’ abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that will never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away.
Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly
With regards to my long form writing, I punched out the following:
BGM is the fourth studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, released on March 21, 1981. The title stands for “Background music“,[1] though Japanese TV and press advertising alternately used “Beautiful Grotesque Music”.[2] This album was produced by Haruomi Hosono. Recording started on January 15, 1981, in an effort to release the album by March 21, 1981. The album was the first of any kind to feature the Roland TR-808, one of the earliest programmable drum machines;[3] YMO had already been the first band to use the device, featuring it on-stage as early as 1980.[4][5] In addition to the TR-808, this was also their first studio album recorded with the Roland MC-4 Microcomposer.
Source: BGM (album) – Wikipedia
I am late to the party with Yellow Magic Orchestra. Dylan Jones touches on them in Sweet Dreams, placing them alongside Kraftwerk, but I had never consciously listened to their tracks. “Cue” (キュー) was shared with me on a playlist, which led me to BGM. I really enjoyed this album, its drive and textures. I assume YMO were an inspiration for Severed Heads and Lindstrøm. Also, pretty sure that Mark Ronson sampled “Ballet” (バレエ) in his track “True Blue”.
On a side note, I tried listen to some of the other albums, but was a bit confused by some of it.
Rememberings is a memoir by Sinéad O’Connor published on 1 June 2021 by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Books
Source: Rememberings – Wikipedia
Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir, Rememberings, offers a glimpse behind the curtain, reclaiming the narrative of her life in the process. I wrote a longer response here.
How to change your settings
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Jamie Marsland (pootlepress.com)Say goodbye to cumbersome writing tools and hello to PootleWriter – the revolutionary writing app that puts simplicity and speed at your fingertips.
Unlike AI-powered alternatives, PootleWriter is a human-designed solution that prioritizes your writing experience.
Source: Introducing PootleWriter: Your Friction-Free WordPress Writing Companion – Pootlepress
I have tinkered with some Micropub clients in the past, including Indiepass (was Indigenous) and Monocle, however I always found that they did not match how I write on my site.
If you've gotten cash from an ATM, you've interacted with a COBOL-based system. Here's why this old programming language will probably outlive us all.
Source: If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it? by @ZDNET
Nine hot pop songs drawing influence from an 80s childhood, a 90s adolescence…. and beyond.
A heady mix of electro pop, synthwave and psychedelic ROCK delivered with post punk ‘tude and some ‘umour simmering beneath the surface. It’s a pretty nostalgic sounding record.
Recorded in the summer of 2024 at Sound Park Studios as it was being demolished (and rebuilt soon afterwards)…. I went in with lots of half cooked, home baked tracks and got Idge to run them all through his deluxe analog gear and make them sound delicious. I took in loads of snacks too, which really got the vibe going.
Mastered by Richard Stolz at Woodstock studios who ran it through some more deluxe analog gear, and brought it to a polished pop sheen. I’m really stoked with how it turned out!
Released February 18, 2025
Source: Debut, Self Titled Album, by Twinkle Digitz by @bandcamp
I wondered if I was ever going to hear Twinkle Digitz in full hi-fi, not just via a lockdown recording. I always joked that it was going to be some kind of Chinese Democracy? I wondered if pressing of the album was held up by Taylor Swift Industrial Complex. But really I wondered how many artists with the creativity condition aren’t given the permission, the time, the space and funds to complete work? I guess in the end what matters is being grateful that it is finally here.
There are some disparate albums that desperately try to sound whole, but end up sounding disjointed. Twinkle Digitz self-titled debut album is definitely disparate, with so many sounds and influences spread throughout. Rather than sound like a group of random songs with no sense of continuity (listen to Daniel Johns’ FutureNever for example), it feels like different sounds and ideas – robotic voice(s), syn tom-toms, spoken samples – are used to anchor the listener, while at the same time invite them into a wider cinematic universe. (I know Bat for Lashes wrote Lost Girls as a soundtrack to an imaginary film where a gang of biker women who roam the sunset streets of an eerie, make-believe vision of LA. There is a similar quality to this album, I am just not sure what the imaginary movie is.) I think this sense of continuity is what makes the album an improvement on the live set. I had heard the majority of the songs across the three times I have seen Twinkle Digitz live, but I believe the whole is greater than there parts. It truly feels like an album, especially with the Brian Wilsonesque slow jam Wait in the Future (Friendo) that it finishes with.
Another interesting element to this album is that even with all the pastiche references to the past with synths, drums and vocal treatment, I feel there is only ever one Twinkle Digitz. Reading a few books about post-punk lately (Rip It Up and Start Again, Talking with Girls About Duran Duran, and Sweet Dreams), I can’t help but hear a nod to Haysi Fantayzee in the music of Architecture in Helsinki or Scritti Politti in the music of Yeasayer. However, I feel it is harder to make such explicit through-lines with Twinkle Digitz. I remember reading a comment from Peter Walsh about the Go-Betweens in the early days and how you knew what records they had been listening to.
PETER WALSH: They’d never say it, but you could tell which part of the record collection he’d (Robert Forster) listened to in the two minutes it took for him to write that song.
Source: The Go-Betweens by David Nichols
Although there are clearly references throughout Twinkle Digitz’ album, they never take-over. Here I am reminded of Jon Hopkins point, made in a conversation with Jamie Lidell, that he wishes he could ‘choose’ the music he writes. Instead, Hopkins argued that we have no choice over what we do, the choice is about what our body gives energy for. All we can do is appreciate the outcome. Thinking about Twinkle Digitz, this means that even when he tries to make a 80’s synthpop track like Dancing In My Dreams, it sounds like everything and nothing all at once. A bricolage of ideas brought together to create something new. This is only extended further with the video clips. In addition to the sound, there is something to be said about the intended audience of this album.
I remember listening to an interview with David Byrne and Annie Clark about their collaboration. The first consideration about the music was what sort of venues they would be playing.
A lot of pop music originates in small, fairly intimate clubs, and then it finds itself in the unfortunate situation of, as the act gets more popular, being performed in school gymnasiums, and it sounds horrible. From there it goes from the frying pan into the fire, the act becomes even more successful and they’re playing in sports arenas where in many cases it also sounds terrible, although there’s plenty of technology to try and accommodate that as best as possible. So there’s kind of a sad example of music that really sounds great in a small space, but finds itself, when it does well, being rewarded by sounding horrible.
Source: The Inside Sleeve – David Byrne and St Vincent (ABC Radio)
This sense of starting small does not seem to be Twinkle Digitz approach (nor Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine). With so many different sounds and ideas it can be hard to work out what the ideal space or audience is (probably not necessarily The Thornbury Local nor a bath.) One of the things I was wondering about the recorded version was how the songs might differ from the live sound. As a one man band, I had imagined that many of the elements were sequenced, therefore laying these down on tape would be straightforward. A quasi-live recording. I think I was wrong. The recorded versions feel like they have taken the flesh and bones of the original tracks and built them out sonically, layering melodies and vocals, bringing in even more wacky effects, and somewhat controlling the chaos. I definitely cannot hear the interference between the glasses and the music equipment in these recordings.
All in all, Twinkle Digitz self-titled album is a pleasurable release, bringing the id to the forefront, and taking the edict of ‘treat them to an anchovy‘ to the point of sometimes forgetting the other toppings altogether.
Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about his loss of faith and increasing disgust with humanity, recounting his experiences from the Nazi-established ghettos in his hometown of Sighet, Romania, to his migration through multiple concentration camps. The typical parent–child relationship is inverted as his father dwindled in the camps to a helpless state while Wiesel himself became his teenaged caregiver.[2] His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after deteriorating from dysentery and a beating while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above him for fear of being beaten too. The memoir ends shortly after the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.
Source: Night (memoir) – Wikipedia
Like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel recounts his experience of being taken to Auschwitz and how he managed to survive. However, Wiesel takes us inside the challenges to his faith raised by the Holocaust.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Source: Night by Elie Wiesel
What amazes me about such memoirs is how much chance and luck is involved. For example, Wiesel ended up a part of the death march, when he could have stayed in hospital and been rescued two days later. With this in mind, I think this is why Wiesel felt it so important to remember.
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Source: Night by Elie Wiesel
I am intrigued that the book was initially rejected.
The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Anne’s diaries were retrieved by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Miep gave them to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the family’s only survivor, just after the Second World War was over.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl – Wikipedia
I have read a number of Holocaust memories, including Elli and If This Is a Man, but for whatever reason, I had never read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I came upon a reading by Helena Bonham Carter on Libby.
The book itself is not dour, even though the context certainly is. Beyond serving as a document of life in hiding during the war, the book provides the reader inside the mind of the author and explore various topics, such as adolescence and sexuality. It definitely put complaints about lockdown learning into perspective. All in all, it was a strange read knowing the outcome.
One of the things that I was left wondering is how much was actually known. For example, Frank makes mention of people being gassed. She also gives a running update of the Allies. In a pre-internet world, how was such information actually communicated? Was this all via radio? If so, how? What roll did word of mouth play?
“What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does reflects on all Jews.”
Anyone who claims that the older folks have a more difficult time in the Annex doesn’t realize that the problems have a far greater impact on us. We’re much too young to deal with these problems, but they keep thrusting themselves on us until, finally, we’re forced to think up a solution, though most of the time our solutions crumble when faced with the facts. It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realize them!
The story begins when the unborn baby’s mother is killed when a light-aircraft crashes, triggering her birth. Born into “part of a global aristocracy” since Hellenistic times, her father Philippe treats his daughter Angelica as a sexual plaything. An art dealer Darius opens her eyes on her dependency on her father. The Shakespeare play Pericles morphs Darius into Pericles, as the challenger to an incestuous father.[2] The novel has glimpses into Angelica’s life but the bulk of the narrative is based around Pericles, his wife and his daughter Marina with asides to Jacobean London with Shakespeare and the co-author George Wilkins.
Source: The Porpoise – Wikipedia
I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time many years ago and found The Porpoise in the Libby App with no idea what I was in for. With the references to rape, I initially thought I was reading Lolita. However, the narrative then jumped into the past and never quite looked back. Overall all, The Porpoise is a story told through another story, the myth of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as a means of exploring power, lose and connection.
The intertextual nature of this text tying together myth and reality reminds me of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book. Although, I often wonder about such connections and whether they are in fact misreadings.
Reading “The Porpoise,” the reader must frequently recalibrate. Who is speaking? Whose head are we in? It is one thing to assert the uncanny potency of stories—a certain television show about medieval politics comes to mind—but Haddon’s book is almost more evocative of pre-stories: of the phase before the story is told, when it is still indeterminate, unbound from words. It could take place in modern-day England or the Homeric age of heroes. The magic vessel could be a yacht or a galley, a porpoise or a mermaid. The violence of art has to do with the way it forces these decisions, but Haddon, with his ever-shifting narrative, offers something like a stay of execution, a plane that enters the cloud and does not come down.
Source: In Mark Haddon’s “The Porpoise,” Storytelling Is an Instrument of Violence and Solace by Katy Waldman
[T]he extraordinary force and vividness of Haddon’s prose ensure that The Porpoise reads not as a metatextual game but as a continually unfolding demonstration of the transporting power of stories. Blunt, short sentences brimming with nouns – food, spices, weapons – propel the reader through a landscape vaguely familiar from legend but here brought into crisp focus. The narrative combines chilly omniscience – we are often informed of deaths to come – with an insistence on the limits and vulnerabilities of its human actors, and a second-by-second attention to fleeting detail.
Source: The Porpoise by Mark Haddon review – a fantastical voyage by Justine Jordan
track by Twinkle Digitz
“OH NO!!! SOMETHING’S GONE WRONG!!!!” 😉 A conversational narrative between an A.I. chat bot and a guy called Thomas (mainly for the rhymes available!)…
Seeing as everyone is a bit wary of A.I. suddenly appearing in all spheres of our lives, I thought I’d comment / capitalise on that!
I actually tried using an A.I. lyric generator to “collaborate” when I started writing this song – BUT I found all A.I.’s lyrical suggestions to be hilariously NAFF * (not in a good way either) , so I just wrote them myself!
*An example of an A.I. generated lyric “He drives like a car, just a filthy boy with eyes” ! That was one of the better ones !!!
Personally, I really like it when A.I. gets things wrong, when it’s in a creative way (eg. videos that look really wrong/ unreal /uncanny) – it’s the thought of A.I. getting things wrong in a destructive way which is the scary part hey!
Source: It’s Autonomous, Thomas, by Twinkle Digitz
The rolling arpeggios, the slow build, the conversation with technology, the littering of weird and wacky whoops and wizzes, is Twinkle Digitz the Man Disco Machine? I was also reminded of 80’s opera, but maybe like A.I. that was used to help write the song, I am hallucinating?
Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don’t get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding.
the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing…and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.
Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a “Copernican revolution.” By this he referred to Copernicus’ statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out.
The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
But how’re you to teach something that isn’t premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students would get something from that. It wasn’t satisfactory.
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything… from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.
Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
Poincaré then went on to demonstrate the conventional nature of other concepts of science, such as space and time, showing that there isn’t one way of measuring these entities that is more true than another; that which is generally adopted is only more convenient.
What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination… “unstuckness,” in other words…are completely outside its domain.
The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical.
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.
if you know which facts you’re fishing for you’re no longer fishing. You’ve caught them. I’m trying to think of a specific example.
There’s no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn’t know what you’re doing.
The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is that when they do it you don’t hear about it…just pay for it, in additional costs prorated through all your bills. When you make the mistakes yourself, you at ]east get the benefit of some education.
I have heard that there are two kinds of welders: production welders, who don’t like tricky setups and enjoy doing the same thing over and over again; and maintenance welders, who hate it when they have to do the same job twice. The advice was that if you hire a welder make sure which kind he is, because they’re not interchangeable.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side… that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
I came upon Richardson’s book via the Art of Manliness podcast episode celebrating 50 years since the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
He wasn’t just looking for a nice vacation; he wanted to figure out “quality” as a thing in itself, not just a description—a noun, not an adjective. He wanted to learn what’s needed for his life—my life, everyone’s life—to move up a notch, to be the best it can be, truly harmonious in a world swamped by so many improvements that they buckle under the weight of their time-saving intentions. As a busy parent juggling work with family, that perspective struck close to home.
At its heart, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a simple tale that praises basic values and decries ugly technology. Pirsig tells his story while riding the secondary roads across the Dakotas to the mountains, touching Yellowstone National Park before a pause in Bozeman, Montana. From there, he crosses into Idaho and over to Oregon before dipping down into California and reaching the Pacific coast and San Francisco. Pretty good trip, really.
I wrote to him and asked for a meeting, and he wrote back right away. “The best place to meet an author is on the pages of his book,” he wrote kindly, turning down the request. “Anywhere else is a disappointment, believe me.”
Pirsig: I explained to them that the story isn’t really about them, that they are like a Greek chorus there to “Oh” and “Ah” and give a semblance of reality to a tale that seems always to ride at the very edge of incredibility and needs all the help it can get.
Take the time to decide what you want; then take the extra time to make it happen according to your own terms. Slow down. Always remember that the real motorcycle that you’re actually working on is the cycle called Yourself. Attain peace of mind. And he’s right, even more so in our stressed-out new millennium, with its cell phones and Black-Berrys, than back in the three-network world of the 1970s. We’re all so busy catching up that we’ve forgotten what we’re chasing.
Pirsig: Writing this book was a compulsive act and whoever stood in the way of it was going to get hurt.
Maybe Pirsig’s right about the loneliness being there only when you’re among other people. People are always a reminder of what’s so far away.
There are times on this trip that I feel a bit like Chris, dragged along by the narrator and forced to go the extra miles to reach the night’s destination.
Change is inevitable, but it strikes hard when it seems to end in emptiness.
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
Source: Lord of the Flies – Wikipedia
I read William Golding's Lord of the Flies a few years ago when it was one of the options in the literature circles. I remember the death of Piggy, but nothing else particularly stayed with me.
It is interesting rereading this after reading the commentary around how the historical case was different. I wonder if that is the fault of the book or the fault of the reader? The seed that may have produced the idea (along with The Coral Island) does not need to be reflected in the actual novel? With the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I have been listening to a range of podcasts reflecting upon World War II and the Nazis. It leaves me thinking about the history that is forgotten because nobody was able to pass it on. With this in mind, if a bunch of boys had been marooned on a tropical island, without any sense of order, how long would they last until they had [depleted all of the resources](Galapagueana | Pirates, whalers, settlers and scientists), such as pigs and fruit trees?
I listened to the book via Libby.
“Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." […] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.”
“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
Metal, marimbas, vampires and EDM: ABBA’s Lay All Your Love On Me as you’ve never heard it before, with producer Paul Mac and composer Alice Chance.
This is the first episode of Cover Story, a new series from The Music Show in which Andy and his guests take songs of the popular music canon and examine their cover versions, for better, worse, and weirder.
Source: Cover Story: Lay All Your Love On Me – ABC listen
In the first episode of a series discussing cover songs, Andrew Ford, Paul Mac and Alice Chance discuss ABBA’s Lay All Your Love On Me. I liked Paul Mac’s use of ‘Consumptionwave’ to describe the artists whose voices sound so thin and fragile it is as if they have consumption.
The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.
Source: Pluralistic: MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing (04 Feb 2025)
Oh my days, how am I only just discovering the latest album by jamie xx (released last September)?
What an absolute banger 🤘
https://album.link/gb/i/1746750796
These lessons are the openings of the twenty chapters of my little 2017 book On Tyranny, which has just been lightly edited since in successive printings to account for the Big Lie, the coup attempt, the war in Ukraine, and the risks we face in 2024. The lessons remain the same.
Source: Twenty Lessons On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder