Month: August 2025

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road

On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator, Sal Paradise. The idea for the book formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks and was then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951. It was first published by Viking Press.

On the Road – Wikipedia by On the Road – Wikipedia

With On the Road, Jack Kerouac details a series of journeys through America and through life. I wrote a longer response here.

Continue reading “📚 On the Road (Jack Kerouac)”

Read https://www.penguin.com.au/books/isnt-it-nice-we-both-hate-the-same-things-9781761340109

Charlie, a prime-time radio producer in her early thirties, has always had a big group of friends – until she left her husband, and they all sided with him. Now she finds herself floundering in a sea of awkward run-ins and silent group chats. When her best friend Genevieve starts moving on with her life, too, Charlie realises how few significant people she has around her, and what a lonely place that can be.

Dreading the prospect of returning to her childhood home for the anniversary of her father’s death, she busies herself by seeking new friendships – book clubs, pub crawls, team sports, the works. But Charlie’s determination to surround herself with unfamiliar people forces her to confront her insecurities. What kind of life does she want? And who does she really want to spend it with?

Isn’t It Nice We Both Hate the Same Things by Jessica Seaborn – Penguin Books Australia by Isn’t It Nice We Both Hate the Same Things by Jessica Seaborn – Penguin Books Australia

Isn’t It Nice We Both Hate the Same Things by Jessica Seaborn is a contemporary novel that dives into the world of Charlie, who is balancing work, family and friendship. It explores themes of relationships, loneliness and midlife.

We survived, sometimes that’s all you can do.

Source: Isn’t It Nice We Both Hate the Same Things by Jessica Seaborn

This book had me thinking about James Hollis’ book reflecting upon the challenges of midlife.

The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves. How we are related to ourselves determines not only the choice of the Other but the quality of the relationship. In fact, every intimate relationship tacitly reveals who we were when we commenced it. All relationships, therefore, are symptomatic of the state of our inner life, and no relationship can be any better than our relationship to our own unconscious (the vertical axes in the diagram).

Source: The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis

I stumbled upon it via an ABC article and listened via Libby.

Bookmarked https://blog.ayjay.org/a-concise-introduction-to-thomas-pynchon/ (blog.ayjay.org)

I would counsel the reader of Pynchon to remain conscious of (a) his changes in stylistic register and (b) his tendency to confine his own level of understanding to that of the character he is portraying at the moment, and to remember (c) his interest in portraying the “diseases of the intellect” that afflict the residents of late modernity; and I would encourage the reader further to work from the assumption that these novels evidence a mastery of the conditions they seek to represent.

Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs provides an introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon. He begins with a summary of what we know about Pynchon and an overview of his novels. He then turns his attention to the process of reading Pynchon. Although the writing itself is often clear, the real question is why is he telling us what he is telling us. This can be disorientating and hard to figure out, made even more challenging by the casual wise-ass style, silly humour and characters that serve as mouthpieces for ideas. For Jacobs this is all intended to capture the unsettling experience of life within technopoly. Obscurities subsequently need to be embraced and waited out.

Bookmarked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49 (en.wikipedia.org)

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon. It was published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. on April 27, 1966.[1] The shortest of Pynchon’s novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. One of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed; operating from 1806 to 1867, Thurn and Taxis was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon’s writing,

The Crying of Lot 49 – Wikipedia by The Crying of Lot 49 – Wikipedia

I first ‘read’ The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon twenty years ago. I remember the absurdity of Oedipa Maas putting additional clothes on in her encounter with Metzger and Wendell “Mucho” Maas hearing a fault in the violins in the muzak. However, after re-reading it, I realise that I focused on the core facts of the narrative and read over much of the questions.

Coming to it again, listening to the audiobook via Spotify this time, I could not help be make connections with other texts such as the paranoia within Franz Kafka’s The Trial or the play on the detective trope within Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I also appreciated Will’s point on the  Mapping the Zone podcast:

Will: It feels very hard for me to view this book as anything but an extension of a postmodern extension of ‘god is dead’. There is nothing we can do in a society, where the game is rigged, and the people who’ve already won the game can change history. There is nothing we as individuals, or as a mass, can do to reach back and try and recontextualise and try and put firm grounding under our feet. All we can do is struggle forward and grasp onto what we have at hand and accept that what we know is not that which we can trust to be true and not necessarily in a conspiratorial sense, but that everybody misremembers, and we have so many people in control with control who are fundamentally still human that we cannot in the end find transcendence, we can not find truth, the capital M morality. All we can find is either a framework that we decide on and therefore we cannot truly believe, or we have absolute insanity as evidenced in Oedipa in Chapter 5.

I think that I felt more confident now with a reading that was open to questions, interpretations and red herrings. I was left wondering if it is something of an allegory to the experience of reading, where the death of the author leaves the reader as executor of a will, which is a strange experience where the book often knows us more than we know ourselves. The book, in this sense, acts as a mirror. As we try to solve the mystery of Pynchon’s text, we are forced to confront our own assumptions, our need for order and meaning, and our willingness to believe in conspiracies or coincidences. The novel, like the Trystero for Oedipa, reveals our own interpretive biases and psychological tendencies. By reading it, we are not just discovering the book’s secrets; we are discovering ourselves. The ambiguity of the ending—the “crying of lot 49″—leaves the final meaning unresolved, placing the burden and privilege of conclusion entirely on the reader.

Bookmarked https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/worklife-with-adam/worklife-the-myth-of-genius-qLPRndwkZJH/ (listennotes.com)

What does it mean to be a genius? Journalist Helen Lewis is the author of the new book The Genius Myth, which offers a provocative analysis of how we put brainiacs on a pedestal. In this episode, Helen and Adam unpack our cultural myths about geniuses and explore the dangers of treating them like demigods. They also discuss what Helen learned from the wives of male geniuses and how child prodigies can avoid struggling as adults.

WorkLife: The myth of genius with Helen Lewis – Worklife with Adam Grant (podcast)

Helen Lewis talks to Adam Grant about genius, arguing that it is better to think about acts of genius, rather than people as genius, verb not the noun.

If it has all gone wrong focus on creativity, if it has all gone right focus on humility.

This makes me think about the question whether great people can ever be good? And what are the conditions that produce genius? From the perspective of education, do great teachers make a great school?

Read https://davidgillespie.org/portfolio/taming-toxic-people-2/

Psychopaths are often thought of as killers and rapists, but up to 10 per cent of people are probably psychopathic without being criminals. Science suggests psychopaths don’t have empathy. Although charming in the early stages of a relationship or employment, they will leave you feeling cheated and humiliated, will dominate and manipulate you, denying reality to the point where you question your sanity.

Psychopaths derive power from creating chaos that renders the rest of us immobile with confusion and resentment.

The everyday psychopath is at best disruptive, and at worst highly dangerous to your day-to-day life. At a societal level, their presence in powerful positions can be disastrous.

Psychopaths have always been around, Gillespie argues, but were traditionally constrained by social disapproval. But as community-building institutions dissolve, so does our ability to use social tools to constrain the psychopaths among us.

Taming Toxic People is a practical guide to restraining the difficult person in your life, be it your boss, your spouse or a parent. It is also a serious and meticulously researched warning if we value a free and well-functioning society: if we don’t understand and act to manage psychopathic behaviour, Trump is only the beginning.

Taming Toxic People by David Gillespie

With Taming Toxic People, David Gillespie dives into the world of the psychopath in four parts. In Part 1, he unpacks what constitutes a psychopath, including the lack of empathy. In Part 2, he explores psychopaths at work and at home. In Part 3, he provides tips for dealing with psychopaths. While in Part 4, he explains how changes individualism and social media help foster psychopaths.

I was left wondering whether all ‘toxic’ people, personal or professional, are in fact ‘psychopaths’? For example, I feel that there are more nuisances in a workplace then just those in management. I guess that is the most common position to focus on? Or the most obvious?

One of the useful take-aways from the book were Gillespie’s habits to support people in coping with psychopaths:

  • Culture of honesty
  • Avoid secrecy
  • Decentralise decision-making
  • Promote open communication
  • Encourage communal investment in goals

For me, these feel like best practice and I would assume that they should probably be encouraged with or without the questions of toxicity. Here I am reminded of the work of Alma Harris and Michelle Jones around disciplined collaboration and distributed leadership. Interestingly, so many roads seem to lead back to trust. Here I was reminded of Paul Browning’s book Principled.

On the flipside, Gillespie also provides a list of rules for surviving the psychopath at work:

  • Rule 1 – Accept reality
  • Rule 2 – Remember this is temporary
  • Rule 3 – Be polite
  • Rule 4 – Maintain privacy
  • Rule 5 – Be honest
  • Rule 6 – Fact-check everything they say
  • Rule 7 – Be compliant
  • Rule 8 – Be emotionless
  • Rule 9 – Work hard on your support network
  • Rule 10 – Be prepared

I listened to this book via BorrowBox.

Read https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/fredric-jameson-live-theory-9781441185327/

Ian Buchanan explores and illuminates how Jameson forms his concepts and how they operate, providing a fascinating account of Jameson’s important and ongoing contributions to Critical Theory. The book provides a clear sense of his overall project and the marvelous productivity of his thinking. Motivated by a desire to inaugurate social change by illuminating the obstacles standing in its way, the aim of Jameson’s work is to dishabituate us from the comfortable feeling that modern life is enhanced by the global grip of capitalism.

Source: Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan (Continuum – Bloomsbury)

Through Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, Ian Buchanan explores Jameson’s concepts and how they all operate. I wrote a long response here.

Continue reading “📚 Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan”

Bookmarked https://www.rrr.org.au/subscribe (rrr.org.au)

Triple R is a not-for-profit community media organisation that runs on the goodwill, hard work, passion and dedication of 800 volunteers and staff, and the generosity of the subscribers, donors and sponsors who fund the station.

The station provides an alternative to networked commercial and public media, giving voices to issues of social justice; and many people, causes and opinions that may not otherwise be heard.

Your annual subscription fee funds the station, and you become a member of a genuine and broad station community.

Subscribe — Triple R 102.7FM, Melbourne Independent Radio by Subscribe — Triple R 102.7FM, Melbourne Independent Radio

Listening to Andrew Ford’s interview with Liz Pelly about her book Mood Machine on The Music Show, I was left wondering how we go beyond Spotify and support artists. I already purchase physical music and digital media, but I wonder if that is enough. I therefore returned to supporting local radio as this provides a place and platform for artists to grow … I hope.

Bookmarked https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2025/03/classroom-guidelines-for-student-ai-use.html (controlaltachieve.com)

Now there are dozens and dozens of sample guidelines and policies for the classroom, and I have shared many of them in the past. Over the last few years I have reviewed these examples, spoken with educators across the country, and worked to identify the critical elements of classroom AI guidelines for students.

In the end I created two things:

  • A comprehensive template with classroom guidelines for student use of AI
  • A powerful prompt to help you modify my template to fit any grade level and any subject area

If you don’t already have a set of AI guidelines for your classroom, or if you are looking to improve the guidelines you do have, then I believe this template and prompt will be a great asset to help get you there.

Control Alt Achieve: Classroom Guidelines for Student AI Use – Free Adaptable Template

Reading Eric Curts’ discussion of classroom guidelines, I am reminded of Doug Belshaw’s suggestion that the first place to start with digital literacies is to collectively define what it is within the context of its use.

ᔥ “Eric Curts” in ControlAltAchieve 💡 #145 ()

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineland

Vineland is a 1990[a] novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s reelection.[6] Through flashbacks by its characters, who have lived during the ’60s in their youth, the story accounts for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describes the traits of the “fascistic Nixonian repression” and the War on Drugs that clashed with it; and it articulates the slide and transformation that occurred in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s.[6][7][8]

Vineland – Wikipedia by Vineland – Wikipedia

Vineland is Thomas Pynchon’s follow-up to Gravity’s Rainbow. It explores California in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, and touches on themes such as State repression, the erosion of liberties and the influence of media on our lives. I wrote a longer response here.

Continue reading “📚 Vineland (Thomas Pynchon)”

Bookmarked https://www.youtube.com/@MappingtheZonePodcast (youtube.com)

We are a podcast dedicated to examining the works of author Thomas Pynchon in an informal, conversational manner. Each episode, we take a deep-dive into the book we are focusing on—we explore the references, characters, plot, and everything in between from a non-scholarly point of view. We are just four fans who love these books and can talk about them endlessly.

Mapping the Zone Podcast – YouTube

I stumbled upon the Mapping the Zone podcast while reading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. The podcast involves slow readings of Pynchon’s novels by four readers: Cody, Will, Luke and Kate. I really enjoy the way that each episode is broken down into its parts, something akin to literature circles, including summary, an exploration of ideas, key quotes and most Pynchon moment. A lot of this is inspired by the Reddit Thomas Pynchon Reading Groups. I also appreciate how the breadth of speakers often provides a difference of perspective. It has definitely encouraged me to dive into more Pynchon.

On a side note, I enjoy some of the banter that occurs. For example, at the end of a conversation about Chapter 15 of Vineland, Kate stated the following:

I’d take Korn over Limp Bizkt, but I’d also take arsenic over hemlock.

I often find myself making note of other books, music and film to explore.

Read https://www.hachette.com.au/william-mcinnes/fatherhood-stories-about-being-a-dad

Bestselling author and acclaimed actor William McInnes returns with a book about a subject close to his own heart: Fatherhood.

William McInnes, one of Australia’s best-known storytellers and actors, has turned to a subject that is close to his heart. Fatherhood is about family, about memories of his father and the memories he’s creating as a dad himself, with his own son and daughter.

Warm, witty and nostalgic, these tales are just like a friendly chat over the back fence, or the banter of a backyard BBQ. They will stir your own memories: of hot summer days and cooling off under the sprinkler while Dad works in the garden with the radio tuned to the sports results; that time Dad tried to teach you to drive – and then got out of the car and kissed the ground; or taking your own kids on a family road trip.

Fatherhood is full of memories: the happy, the hilarious, the sad, bad, and the unexpectedly poignant moments. You will laugh, you may even cry – but you will recognise yourself and those you love somewhere in these pages.

Fatherhood: Stories about being a dad by William McInnes – Books – Hachette Australia

I stumbled upon William McInnes’ memoir on Fatherhood via the Conversation podcast. I grew up with McInnes seeing him on Sea Change and more recently on NCIS Sydney. I always took him as a serious actor, what I had no idea about was his self-deprecating humour. This was hit home with McInnes’ reading of the book via Libby.

Through Fatherhood, McInnes reflects upon being a son, observing other people’s fathers, and his own experiences of being a single father of a son and daughter after the death of his wife, Sarah Watt. The pieces brought together sometimes repeat or contradict, however with this aside they all still focus on the central topic.

The interesting thing that McInnes touches on throughout is that being a father means different things to different people and how it has changed in time. He also highlights the importance of honesty and humour, especially when coping with grief.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Agent

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is an anarchist spy fiction novel by Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, first published on 12 September 1907.[1] The story is set in Soho, London in 1886 and deals with Mr. Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy for an unnamed country (presumably Russia). The Secret Agent is one of Conrad’s later political novels in which he moved away from his former tales of seafaring. The novel is dedicated to H. G. Wells and deals broadly with anarchism, espionage, and terrorism.[2] It also deals with exploitation of the vulnerable in Verloc’s relationship with his brother-in-law Stevie, who has an intellectual disability. Conrad’s gloomy portrait of London depicted in the novel was influenced by Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.[3]

Source: Wikipedia

I realised that I had not read any of Joseph Conrad’s stories, other than Heart of Darkness. I therefore decided to listen to The Secret Agent via Audible.

The Secret Agent explores the twists and turns in unravelling a terrorist attack. As Will Self highlights:

Since this is a novel concerned fundamentally with physics—understood as the interactions of moving bodies within defined spaces—Conrad preoccupies himself a great deal with their minutiae, focusing, for example, on Mr Verloc’s black bowler hat, not only because of its overt and deathly symbolism, but because its gyres and tumbles are also synecdochically attuned to those of other, larger and more significant bodies. In our own era terrorism has been treated jocosely by satirists—sometimes, as in the case of the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, at the cost of their lives. Chris Morris’s film Four Lions pretty much does for contemporary British-born Islamist wannabe terrorists what The Secret Agent aimed to do for its readership: it made them see what repelled Conrad about all “revolutionists,” which was their absurd moral vanity—believing, as they truly do, that they really know what’s best for everyone. And moreover, to expose the paradoxical cowardice in such an attitude; just like the contemporary suicide bomber, the evil Professor, who walks the streets of London ever prepared to blow himself—together with whoever might accost him—to pieces, is really a craven figure, unable to assume the very ordinary burden of survival.

Source: Why Conrad’s The Secret Agent is the perfect novel for our time by Will Self

It is not Heart of Darkness. Although both books provide an insight into a different world, I did not feel for the characters in The Secret Agent the same way that I did with Heart of Darkness. However, I wonder if I came in expecting the novel to be something that it has no responsibility of being.

The content and complexity of The Secret Agent reminded me in some ways of Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, although they both come at the situation from a different perspective.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit

The Hobbit is set in Middle-earth and follows home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit who joins the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin’s Company on a quest to reclaim the dwarves’ home and treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo’s journey takes him from his peaceful rural surroundings into more sinister territory.

Source: Wikipedia

I stumbled upon a reading of Tolkien’s books by Andy Serkis, the actor who played Golem in the film adaptation. I had read the book before and seen the films. Coming back to it, I feel like that there are so many moments were the narrative could break and fall apart, the journey stops, but there is always something which keeps it moving, a gift or a discovery.

What have I been up to? I always feel like it is nothing, but it is clearly something I guess. Beyond the usual of doing the shopping, cleaning the house, and other trivialities of life, this has been another month of small things, especially during the school holidays. Some such small things included playing rummy with my grandfather, exploring the ruins of Rockbank Inn and a whirlwind visit to Adelaide, staying in Henley Beach. Can I just say, I am always amazed at the different pace of life in Adelaide, especially the proximity of everything.

At work, the next part of the project I am a part of was announced. This review has been years in the making. It has highlighted the future of where we are heading, but it has also shed light on the present problems that often get lost in the everyday work. (They will just disappear if we pretend they are not there, right?) I wonder if with any sort of change, it takes two to tango, that is the past practice and the future state? Or maybe it is better considered a game of snakes and ladders?

Even with all the reviews on current and future states, I still find so much of my work is still trial and error, finding the best solution based on the situation served up. I wonder if this is simply reality? Or a failure of our rollout of the agile methodology? So much of our learning associated with agile is focused on the technology, however I wonder what matters more, the what or the why? I am often left wondering how we form better habits beyond the clicks and whistles?

Here is a list of books that I read this month:

  • Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire – A novel that provides a different perspective on the Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba.
  • Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence – A novel that unpacks the life and relationships of Paul Morel from childhood into adulthood.
  • Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson – A critical look at postmodernism, arguing that it is the cultural consequence of a new, globalized phase of capitalism.
  • Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan – An investigation into the ideas of Fredric Jameson, including his influences and an exploration of his key texts.
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka (re-read) – A novel exploring the sense of paranoia and alienation associated with being arrested for an unknown crimes that nobody can really clarify.
  • D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber – A tale that traces the mission to find the lost letter ‘D’ traversing two worlds.
  • Kim by Rudyard Kipling – A novel that follows the life of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy living in Lahore, providing an insight into British India.

Other than Damian Cowell’s new single, no new music this month. Spent a lot of time listening to the holiday playlist curated by my daughter. This actually led to me writing a post wondering about the stages associated with listening to music

Podcasts that stood out this month:

Bookmarked https://johncurtinhotel.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3dfeac10-bf27-44eb-b226-aabe8fb4fa6c (johncurtinhotel.oztix.com.au)

Arseless Chaps – Damian Cowell and Tony Martin. It’s a TISM front man and comedy icon’s electrobanger duo.

In the grand tradition of Groove Armada, Daft Punk, The Presets and Barlow and Chambers, Damian Cowell – the guy who pretends to be the singer of TISM – and comedy royalty Tony Martin knob twiddle their way into your nervous system.

Like two lawn bowlers wandering into a bush doof, Cowell and Martin sing, dance, do that widdly thing on their cheap synths, and embody the ancient philosophy of Fosagawi – full of shit and getting away with it. Make sure you’re sorted for Es, Wizz and Metamucil.

ARSELESS CHAPS – THE TRUMPET OF PAINFUL TWATS TOUR Tickets at John Curtin Hotel (Carlton, VIC) on Friday, 8 August 2025

While discussing In Waves, Jamie xx reflected upon the place of dance music as being akin to going back to church:

I think that’s what dance music has always been about. It’s kind of like it’s the first form of communication. It’s basically like church, isn’t it? That’s how we communicated before we could speak.

Source: Jamie Xx Talks ‘Life’ and Getting the Band Back Together | Capital Dance (YouTube)

I feel a certain sense of connection and communication when attending a Damian Cowell gig. Having said this, I wonder if everyone comes expecting their own version of Cowell? For me, there is a strange sense of nostalgia.

I am sure some people come wanting more TISM. In a recent podcast, the interviewer had little idea that Cowell had even recorded any music outside TISM. Although Cowell dropped a few TISM tracks, such as ‘I Shit Me’ and ‘Kylie-TISM’, this did not feel like a TISM gig. (I presume that Cowell does not thank his wife at TISM gigs?)

Personally, I find myself longing for a return to the Disco Machine and the full band sound. That has gone. Although quite a few Disco Machine songs remain, such as ‘You Asked, We Listened’ and ‘Where the Fuck’s the Venga Bus?’, they are not quite the same without the usual backing vocals.

Cowell has spoken about how only having two members in the band makes it easier logistically. However, I also wonder if it also reflects the challenge of finding space for an eight piece band, let alone managing the volume that comes with that in a venue like the Curtin Hotel? In addition to this, Arseless Chaps truly feels like a collaboration. No longer does Tony Martin ‘feature’, in many of the songs he is now very much up front driving the songs, such as ‘Pong’ and ‘Barb Wire Canoe’. All in all, these maybe the sacrifices required with regards to continuing to play music or maybe the right medium for the particular set of songs?

I wonder if there is an element of this to Twinkle Digitz too, who again played support. When you are a one-man band, I imagine that there are less restrictions with regards to rehearsing and so forth.

With regards to Twinkle Digitz, it was interesting to compare the contrast with the crowd to that at the album lunch. Although, some of the fanfare was gone, he still had the extended setup, including keytar, with some extended licks, such as the theme from The Bill even with the key change, as well as his own take on the the theme to Tony Martin’s Sizzletown. I am hoping that any new music really makes the most of the keytar.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(novel)

Kim is a picaresque novel by English author Rudyard Kipling. It was first published serially in McClure’s Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India: “The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road.”[1] The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. The novel popularized the phrase and idea of the Great Game.[2]

Source: Wikipedia

Kim by Rudyard Kipling follows the life of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy living in Lahore. It provides an insight into British India. It was interesting to compare the insight into colonialism with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_and_Lovers

Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood. The novel was originally published by Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd., London, and Mitchell Kennerley Publishers, New York. While the novel initially received a lukewarm critical reception, along with allegations of obscenity, it is today regarded as a masterpiece by many critics and is often regarded as Lawrence’s finest achievement. It tells us more about Lawrence’s life and his phases, as his first was when he lost his mother in 1910 to whom he was particularly attached. And it was from then that he met Frieda Richthofen, and around this time that he began conceiving his two other great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, which had more sexual emphasis and maturity.

Source: Wikipedia

D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is a novel that recounts the life and relationships of Paul Morel from childhood into adulthood. Along the way, it unpacks Morel’s relationship with his mother and two women, Miriam and Clara. The novel does not necessarily provide a linear structure with clear outcomes and resolutions. Instead it captures the messiness and ambiguity of life that lingers long afterwards. Celebrating the 100 year anniversary, Blake Morrison captures it well:

For those new to his work, Sons and Lovers is the place to start. Though it came after The White Peacock and The Trespasser, it reads like a first novel. This isn’t only because it’s life writing, recreating scenes from the author’s own experience. Nor is it because the story concerns childhood and adolescence and all that go with them, including fear, shame, self‑consciousness, emotional hypersensitivity, sexual awakening, and the hubristic certainty that (as Paul Morel puts it) one is “going to alter the face of the earth in some way”. There’s also the freshness and intensity with which Lawrence presents the Morel family – as if this was the only family in the world where the parents don’t get on, the father drinks, the mother resents her son’s girlfriends, money is short, art and literature become a refuge, and so on. At 27, Lawrence was well-educated and widely read, but the style of Sons and Lovers is wonderfully unknowing – no distancing English irony breaks the spell. Irony wasn’t in Lawrence’s nature, and at the time he wrote the book he didn’t have the leisure for it anyway.
…
It is a difficult novel to classify, whatever the terms – not quite a Bildungsroman, a novel of growing up, since Paul isn’t exclusively the focus of attention; nor a Kunstlerroman, a novel about a writer or artist, since Lawrence, unlike Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, treats aesthetic aspirations as secondary to an emotional and sexual education. “Gothic” or “pastoral” won’t do, either, though there are elements of both. Perhaps “social-realist” comes closest, though not if it implies Dickens or Trollope. “A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,” Lawrence wrote. He was remaking the English novel, which is why Sons and Lovers fits none of the categories.

Source: Sons and Lovers: a century on by Blake Morrison

Reading Sons and Lovers, I was reminded of Werther in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In particular, there is a psychological depth in both books, that explore inner. In a letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence summarised the plot in a letter making connections with Goethe:

It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so her children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers – first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. It’s rather like Goethe and his mother and Frau von Stein and Christiana – As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fritter, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul – fights his mother. The son loves his mother – all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The conflict goes on between the mother and the girl with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother, go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But, almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

Source: Wikipedia

Bookmarked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(Maguire_novel) (psychopomp.com)

Wicked is a darker and more adult-themed revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, its sequels, and the 1939 film adaptation. It is presented as a biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, here given the name “Elphaba”. The book follows Elphaba from her birth through her social ostracism, school years, radicalization, and final days. Maguire shows the traditionally villainous character in a sympathetic light, using her journey to explore the problem of evil and the nature versus nurture debate, as well as themes of terrorism, propaganda, and existential purpose.

Wicked (Maguire novel) – Wikipedia

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire provides a different perspective on the Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. This time, the focus is on Elphaba. Amongst other things, the story explores the question of what it means to be evil:

“Pigspittle,” said Avaric. “Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn’t progress . . .”
“I think it’s a presence, not an absence,” said an artist. “Evil’s an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other. It’s not us.”
“Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?”
“Oh go on with you,” said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity.”
“Evil isn’t a thing, it’s not a person, it’s an attribute like beauty . . .”
“It’s a power, like wind . . .”
“It’s an infection . . .”
“It’s metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation—”
“Blame it on the Unnamed God, then.”
“But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?”
“It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less—”
“I like pain, if I’m wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me—”
“No, you’re all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart—the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience—”
“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven’t wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”
“Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite.”

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

I came to the book after the musical and film took over the house. I wondered how the book compared. Interestingly, the musical really hones in on particular relationships, at the cost of others.

As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing that came of Wicked, the book, is that it gave someone the idea to make Wicked, the musical. This play is great! I like musicals in general, and this was better than average. It was everything the book should have been. Instead of being a meandering, slow-moving plot about a despicable character, it tells us about an Elphaba that I can actually relate to. The play is much more focused on the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, which gave it a much stronger core. In the book, the two were only anywhere near each other in one section.

The musical is focused around both of them, starting at Shiz, the college they both went to, and progressing to their meeting of the Wizard. From there, their paths diverge, but they are still both relatable. They both want to change the world, but Glinda tries to do so by society-approved advancement through government, and Elphaba tries her own radical ways. We already know how this works out for them, of course, but I still rooted for Elphaba because she was clearly a good person at heart with a good cause.

Wicked – Novel vs. Musical – PSYCHOPOMP.COM