My world on the web
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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.
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.
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
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.”
The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton published in 1967 by Viking Press. The book details the conflict between two rival gangs of White Americans divided by their socioeconomic status: the working-class “Greasers” and the upper-middle-class “Socs” (pronounced /ˈsoʊʃɪz/ SOH-shiz—short for Socials). The story is told in first-person perspective by teenage protagonist Ponyboy Curtis, and takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1965,[1] although this is never explicitly stated in the book.
Hinton began writing the novel when she was 15 and wrote the bulk of it when she was 16 and a junior in high school.[2] She was 18 when the book was published.
Source: The Outsiders (novel) – Wikipedia
I was reminded of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders recently … I cannot remember exactly when I first read The Outsiders, but I am pretty sure it was at high school.
All I remember was the two gangs, the Socs and Greasers. It was interesting revisiting this after reading Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Jack Charles’ discussion of violence growing up in the 60’s:
I remember one particular evening, I saw a bunch of kids getting off the train at Blackburn station, joining the masses in the village. The numbers kept growing. The air was thick with tension and testosterone. The boys were all ribbing each other and carrying on, and it got quite intense. People started tearing palings off nearby shops, using other bits of wood and grabbing iron bars and just going at each other. It was like something out of a movie. I legged it out of there quick smart, before anyone could clock me.
Source: Jack Charles – Born-Again Blakfella by Jack Charles
However, what surprised me in returning to the text was constant presence of smoking:
Johnny had been smoking since he was nine; Steve started at eleven. So no one thought it unusual when I started. I was the weed-fiend in my family—Soda smokes only to steady his nerves or when he wants to look tough.
Source: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
And
I was sitting there, smoking a cigarette, when Jerry came back in from making a phone call. He stared at me for a second. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
I was startled. “How come?” I looked at my cigarette. It looked okay to me. I looked around for a “No Smoking” sign and couldn’t find one. “How come?”
“Why, uh,” Jerry stammered, “uh, you’re too young.”
Source: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
And
“Wanna smoke?” I offered him a weed, but he shookhis head. “No, thanks. Uh, Ponyboy, one reason I came here was to see if you were okay, but you—we—got to go see the judge tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “I know. Hey, holler if you see one of my brothers coming. I’ll catch it for smoking in bed.”
Source: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
And
First Randy was questioned. He looked a little nervous, and I wished they’d let him have a cigarette. I wished they’d let me have a cigarette; I was more than a little shaky myself.
Source: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
This is something that I noticed in my recent rereading of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye too. Other than wondering who was actually providing all these cigarettes’ (maybe they were cheaper in the past?) I was left wondering when cigarettes stopped being present in texts, moved to the margins? I cannot remember cigarettes’ in John Marsden’s Tomorrow series (checking, the only reference is Chris collecting grog and cigarettes when they were scavenging), but I am left wondering if it is just something that I am more aware of these days as cigarettes in society have changed, especially in teen books?
Continue reading “📚 Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics (Dylan Jones)”
It’s footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson’s under-16s team. She not only goes to every game (give or take), but to every training session too, shivering on the sidelines at dusk, fascinated by the spectacle.
She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs fan (with an imperfect grasp of the rules) who loves the epic theatre of AFL football. But her devotion to the under-16s offers her something else. This is her chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for his team as it fights for a place in the finals.
With her sharp eye, her generous wit and her warm humour, Garner documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. The Season is an unexpected and exuberant book: a celebration of the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit, a reflection on the nature of masculinity, and a tribute to the game’s power to thrill us.
Source: The Season, book by Helen Garner by @text_publishing
I enjoyed Helen Garner’s book The Season, in which she documents a moment in life, time and culture, capturing all the ebbs and flows of her grandchild’s U16 football season.
I had never read any of Garner’s non-fiction before, only her fiction. What I enjoyed was the way in which she captured certain things which situated the text in time, such as buying mochi at Coles, going to Dan Murphy, the Exford bus crash where people passing by set to work to help those trapped or the mushroom poising incident. This style of writing reminded me of Clifford Gertz’ ‘thick description’, where the author is a part of the scene that they are describing. However, I’m sure there is a more technical name.
I think that I also enjoyed the text as many of the places felt familiar, yet she has a knack for seeing them with fresh eyes, such as St Bernard’s:
Half the hill has been carved away to make way for footy.
I stumbled upon this (audio)book in Libby, after hearing Garner talk about it on the Conversations podcast (Media file). I also love when books are read by the author.
An exploration of the astounding musical phenomenon that is Kraftwerk, and how they revolutionized our cultural landscape
Source: Penguin
Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte is an exploration of the origins, output and legacy of Kraftwerk. I wrote a longer response here.
Listened to the audiobook via Spotify.
Continue reading “📚 Kraftwerk – Future Music from Germany (Uwe Schütte)”
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of “non-reading”-from books that you’ve never heard of to books that you’ve read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.
Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard
With How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard explains how we are always already talking about books we have not read because we cannot ever actually read them. I wrote a longer response here.
ᔥ Austin Kleon — How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre… ()
Continue reading “📚 How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Pierre Bayard)”
Many of us dream of staying as young as possible as long as possible whether we’re in our 30s, 40s, 70s or even 80s, and there’s a growing Conga line of products and people offering you just that dream. The dilemma is, which of the pills, mental and physical exercise programs, diets and superfoods actually work? Some of them do help to keep us young, healthy and living longer, others may work when the researchers get the potions right and some are a downright waste of money. So how do you know what and who to trust? That’s the journey that Dr Norman Swan is going to take you on in So You Want to Live Younger Longer?
Deeply researched and written with his trademark wit, common sense and accessibility, Norman brings together what’s known, not known, hopeful but not harmful and harmful and not hopeful, summarised with quick takeaway messages backed up by the science and evidence. No matter what your age, So You Want to Live Younger Longer? gives you the information you need to make your own choices without wasting your time and money or even missing a nice dinner because you might be on a diet that is getting you nowhere.
Norman disentangles our ‘Book of Life’ – the genes we’re born with and what we subject them to later on – and shows that in the search for youth, genes matter much less than you’d think for most of us. In other words, we can overwrite our personal Book of Life and Norman’s book will help you do it.
We can live younger, longer – at any age – we’ve just got to know what to do
Dr. Norman Swan’s exploration of how to stay young and healthy for longer. I wrote a longer response here.
Continue reading “📚 So You Want To Live Younger Longer? (Norman Swan)”
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.
Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
Source: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein is a book about the benefits of breadth in the modern world. One of the issues raised throughout is that specialisation focuses on complicated problems, but does not necessarily help with wicked complex problems. Grit and expertise only get you so far.
Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.
One of the benefits of breadth is the opportunity to come to a problem as an outsider, but with a range of references to draw upon.
In some ways this book reminds me of Amy Burvall’s argument to collecting the dots, as well as the art of holding on tightly and letting go lightly. However, breadth verses depth is also something of a wicked problem.
The If Books Could Kill podcast raised the problem that the breadth of research and anecdotes thrown together in these sorts of books can sometimes be problematic. Or as Tosin Adeoti raised in a review, it is hard to ‘distinguish fact from assumption’:
While I believe that there might be valuable insights in the book, most of them are embedded within contextually bare stories that are edited to fit a particular narrative. It is nearly impossible to distinguish fact from assumption. I suggest reading each chapter heading and skipping straight to the last two pages for a brief summary of the argument, thus avoiding wasting time on unnecessary fluff. Then, use those topics as a starting point for further study.
Source: Book Review By ‘Tosin Adeoti
I therefore wonder if the book is useful as a provocation as much as a manual for success. For example, Martin Weller looks past some of the over-simplified findings to reflect upon his experiences of ‘range’, whether it be offering different forms of assessment, the rewards that come from a breadth of experience and the benefits of different perspectives on a situation.
Going beyond the question of success, if the focus is on wicked problems, I feel that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work is a better place to start? I was also reminded of Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question too in regards to engaging with the unfamiliar.
Source: The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin Smith-Ruiu
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is could have been called “what we talk about when we talk about the internet”. Through this book, Justin E.H. Smith explores the basis of the internet in attention, the link to the past in figures such as Liebnez and Lovelace, the blur of where it starts and stops, as well as metaphor as a way of understanding.
Listened to audiobook via the Libby app.
Continue reading “📚 The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is”
Prominent Australian educator Paul Browning faced this situation when the school he led became embroiled in The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Principled draws on Browning’s first-hand experience of navigating an organisation through this highly public ethical crisis and outlines the challenges he faced as a leader. Bringing together evidence-based research and over 20 years of management experience, Paul Browning offers timely advice on the 10 key practices that can help executives build and develop skills to become more trustworthy leaders.
Source: Principled by Paul Browning
Paul Browning’s book Principled explores how trust can be destroyed and subsequently regained. It builds on his PhD and early book Compelling Leadership: The Importance of Trust and How to Get It. The aim is to provide practical advice that can be adopted by any leader wishing to become a more trustworthy leader.
There are ten practices associated with building trust discussed in the book:
Each chapter includes an explanation about what the particular practice, how you know when it is not working, and particular tips to help improve in the particular area.
For example, in the chapter on listening, Browning provides the following strategies for getting better:
All throughout, Browning supports his discussions with concrete examples from his own experience as being principal of St. Pauls.
Principled is a useful book to think about and reflect upon practice at any level of leadership, whether it be capital L or small l. It is also one of those books that you can easily come back to focusing as a reference and guide.
A useful introduction can also be found here.
In reality, Odell’s book is a critique of the dystopian current state of affairs, where even our attention has been capitalised upon through our use of social media. Odell’s book is an anti-capitalist challenge to social media, advertising, and the hyper-accelerated news cycle that dominates our lives. Though Odell is not anti-technology, she argues that the current state of technologies, specifically the monetisation of our attention through social media, is disrupting our ability to create physical communities and negatively affecting how we express ourselves. Counter to positive discourses about social media and the free speech it supposedly affords us, Odell posits that the addictive social media scene curbs our right to not express ourselves, depriving us of longer thought-processes, maintenance work, and community building.
Source: Revolutionary (Un)Productivity: a review of Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing’ by Nicole Froio
In response, she collects together a range of ideas paying better attention to the world around.
It is not about logging off so much as a non-prescriptive guide to nudging yourself into caring about things that are not on your phone. Not because it is a moral good or will make you a well-rounded person, but because it’s soothing and enriching and fun.
Source: How to Do Something by Meaghan O’Connell
Bringing together ideas from thinkers, such as Haraway, Deleuze, Jamieson, James, Benjamin and Solnit, the book is more of a meditation, rather than a rigid guide, for how to do something more meaningful, human and interesting.
Her book is also worth reading for the ways in which it follows one person’s path toward liberation: As a deeply connected subject of the Internet, she shows us how she has found some peace.
Source: Jenny Odell and the Quest to Log Off by Kevin Lozano
Continue reading “📚 How to Do Nothing – Resistance to the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell)”
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that deals with the fallibility of human knowledge. It was first published in 2001. Updated editions were released a few years later. The book is the first part of Taleb’s multi-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled the Incerto, which also includes The Black Swan “The Black Swan (Taleb book)”) (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile “Antifragile (book)”) (2012), and Skin in the Game “Skin in the Game (book)”) (2018).
Source: Fooled by Randomness (Wikipedia)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores the ways we are often unaware of randomness in the world. This comes in many ways, whether it be by overestimating causality or seeing the world as explainable. This is the first book of the Incerto series, a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty.
Continue reading “📚 Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb”