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Genius to me, it’s not like you’re brilliant at everything, it’s when you’ve got some crossed wires within you, that makes you relentlessly move towards something at such a high level that it stands above the rest of the regular playing field. , Baz Luhrmann in Dylan Jones ‘David Bowie - A Life’

I was not exactly sure what to expect with Dylan Jones’ book David Bowie – A Life. I had hoped for a recount of Bowie’s life and career. Although this book provided an insight into the life of David Bowie, it was less a linear depiction than a many-voiced construction of “David Bowie” as artifice and myth. In the same manner as Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics, Dylan Jones uses an oral-history format to create a tapestry of perspectives and points of view, rather than a straightforward document of events. Through the numerous weaves, we are given various insights.

What stood out was that Bowie endlessly borrowed from others. Often once he got what he needed, he would then let people go. He treated collaborators and influences as material.

TONY VISCONTI: David was always tenacious with an idea and he would not let it go. He would switch very rapidly, he would listen to your idea and he would give you very little time to develop it, no more than five minutes, maybe twenty. If it wasn’t working he would say, “Well, try this, I know what it is now,” and then he would not let go of his own idea. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, because even if someone played on his album and they were the bass player or a guitarist, it was still a David Bowie album. If they had any ideas that were overlooked or slighted in any way they should have just kept those ideas and made their own album. There’s a joke in the business, that if you don’t like something you go, “I like what you just played but you can save that for your own album.”

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

The book was full of stories of rich relationships that seemingly fizzled overnight, relationships “held tightly and let go lightly.” This reminded me of Prince and the place and importance of collaboration.

What I discovered was Bowie’s relationship with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I always knew about ‘All the Young Dudes’ which he wrote for Mot the Hoople, but I had somehow overlooked Bowie’s role with albums like Transformer.

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Did Bowie rip off Iggy Pop and Lou Reed? Maybe. He ripped people off, put them on the shelf, and then would maybe come back for them. Maybe not. Lou Reed did feel used. Lou’s biggest ever hit was the Transformer album, and that was Bowie and Ronno. The only two songs that civilians are aware of are “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” Art rock geeks will be able to argue for hours over which of the two live versions of “Waiting for the Man” is definitive. But civilians just know those two songs. Lou wrote them but it was David and Mick who crafted the arrangements and made them popular.

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

I guess this is what is touched on in the film Velvet Goldmine?

Growing up, David Bowie’s music was seemingly accepted, played on repeat on Gold 104.3, something captured in Damian Cowell’s discussion of ’only the shit you love‘. However, this is far from the reality. The music was far from straight up conservative pop, but rather risqué and littered with sexual liberation and drugs.

With this in mind, I really did not know what to make of his marriage to Angie and his early life. All I could think about was what it must have been like being Zowie? Did he go to school? Going from one place to another, did he have friends? A Childhood? Here I was reminded of Claudia Karvan being brought up in Kings Cross nightclubs. As an oral history, these aspects are often touched on, but never properly unpacked.

In the end, one of the things that I was left thinking about after reading this book was how do you actually capture someone whose life was so fictional and contradictory?

Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?

Source: Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

Having watched both Moonage Daydream and Bowie: The Final Act I was taken by the way in which each documentary prioritised different facets to Bowie’s life. With this in mind, I think that Dylan Jones’ approach of leaning into the various contradictions provides the best means of making sense of Bowie.

ERIN KEANE: What is any true legacy but complicated?

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

Throughout, Jones and his interviewees keep circling the split between David Jones and “Bowie.” One admirer remarked that Iman “was married to David Jones, not David Bowie… David Robert Jones was honest, genuine, and real.” Interestingly, my biggest takeaway was that there is a difference between David Bowie, the artist, and David Jones, the man. Although we are given a glimpse of David Jones, it feels like there is always something just beyond.

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I have the right to belong in this soul-country? Do Aboriginals belong in some deeper way than the rest of us, even though none as yet lays a Native Title claim to it? Would such a pre-emptive claim of belonging—if that is what a Native Title claim is—reduce or disqualify my own sense? If so, must it always? Considering those questions, and how non-Aboriginal Australians are grappling with them, is the subject of this book. Peter Read ‘Belonging’

In Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Peter Read explores the complex, often fraught quest for non-Aboriginal belonging in Australia. Rather than offering a rigid definition, he examines this concept through a series of lenses, always keeping Aboriginal prior occupation and spiritual connection at the center of the frame.

Read’s journey begins with his personal reflection on the discomfort of loving a landscape that is also “deep Aboriginal country.” He pointedly asks whether non-Aboriginal attachment can ever be innocent when the land in question was forcibly taken. This ethical inquiry expands as Read turns to poetry, using it as a medium to hear how Australians both claim and question their right to the land.

The narrative then shifts to the next generation, where Read interviews students and young adults. He maps a spectrum of perspectives—from those who feel a “disentanglement” of personal guilt from historical dispossession, to those who identify as “world citizens,” effectively bypassing the complexities of national belonging. Read further complicates this by looking at migrant experiences, noting that for many, belonging is rooted in people, memory, and contribution rather than a sacralized connection to the soil. This leads to a difficult dialogue on reconciliation and the danger of privileging one group’s “authenticity” over another.

Read’s investigation extends to those whose lives are physically and socially entangled with Aboriginal communities, such as pastoral workers and activists. He then tests these themes against popular culture, analyzing how Australian country music and Aboriginal performance either resist or re-imagine contested belonging. He listens for who is granted the title of “native-born” and how music navigates the ghosts of invasion and land rights.

The book concludes with a series of dialogues with prominent historians including Heather Goodall, Henry Reynolds, and Lyndall Ryan. Together, they grapple with how the “hard truths” of history—massacres and the Stolen Generations pull against any easy sense of home. For some, this historical reckoning leads to a “hard-won” sense of being not unwelcome, while for others, it results in a permanent sense of being an outsider.

Ultimately, Read argues that belonging is both personal and plural. It is not a destination, but a process that grows through listening, sharing responsibility, and seeking “equal partnership” rather than sameness. Reading this book nearly three decades after it was prescribed reading as a part of my Arts degree, the book feels just as uncannily current today in the wake of the Voice referendum and Australia’s ever evolving culture.

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The band is family. Family is the band. James Campion - Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era

Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era by James Campion argues that the usual “solitary genius” story about Prince only explains half of his greatest decade. Campion reframes the Purple Rain era as the story of a community: Prince & the Revolution and the orbit of side projects that became his laboratory.

Drawing heavily on interviews with band members and close collaborators, the book shows how a supposedly self-contained auteur depended on — and was transformed by — a multi-racial, intergender ensemble with its own personalities, tensions, and agency. Beginning with early allies like André Cymone and Bobby Z and evolving into the classic Revolution lineup (Wendy, Lisa, BrownMark, Dr. Fink, Bobby Z), Prince discovered that his most radical, popular work emerges from what Campion calls “the delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration” rather than from isolation.

Although Prince would lead varied musical groups throughout his professional life (New Power Generation, 3RDEYEGIRL), where he further explored his art with similar fervor if not as celebrated critical or popular acclaim, the band we’re focusing on in this volume is the Revolution. Specifically, but not limited to guitarists Dez Dickerson and Wendy Melvoin, pianist Lisa Coleman, bassists André Cymone and BrownMark, drummer Bobby Z, and keyboardists Gayle Chapman and Matt “Doctor” Fink. It is in this delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration that Prince realized his most compelling, radical, and popular art during his most prolific period. The Revolution was the creative apparatus in which he shattered racial and gender barriers within and beyond the music business, providing a progressive milieu for him to become one of the most important American musical figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Source: Revolution – Campion

Campion emphasizes that “the band became Prince’s voice,” capturing both his communication difficulties offstage and the emotional intensity he could only fully express in music. The book dwells on the “all‑in” expectation he imposed: no drugs or alcohol, perpetual readiness, brutal rehearsal schedules (never “practice”), and total immersion in a shared on‑ and offstage persona. The band is repeatedly described as surrogate family, a chosen tribe that helped him dismantle racial and gender boundaries while also shielding his shyness and volatility.

For Prince, the band meant being all-in—members always dressed in their stage guises, proudly flaunting their uniqueness and solidarity. There would be no alcohol or drugs. They were expected to show up on time every time and play to his specifications and expectations. This meant committing to intense rehearsals that were to never be referenced as “practice”—he preached that amateurs practice to become musicians, professionals “rehearse.” And rehearsals were where the magic began for Prince. The stage was his sacred space, in front of audiences or otherwise. It was the altar of his art—ritual bonding, telepathic connection, and creative alchemy. It was where total dedication to the craft meant proving unconditional love: The band is family. Family is the band.

Source: Revolution – Campion

Around that core, the book treats Prince’s satellite projects — The Time, Vanity 6/Apollonia 6, The Family, Madhouse, Sheila E., the Bangles, Mazarati and more — as extensions of his imagination rather than mere side hustles. These collaborations let him try on different voices (feminine, villainous, comic, ultra‑funk) and often created feedback loops: songs and ideas could be conceived for others, then reclaimed, reshaped, or recontextualized in his own work, underscoring how fluidly material moved through his ecosystem. At the same time, Campion underlines the limits of that system: there were only so many hours and only so much of Prince’s attention to go around, so something always had to give. The Time, for instance, both “enhanced and challenged Prince’s creative autonomy” and eventually grew resentful about feeling underpaid, sidelined, and used to back other acts like Vanity 6 behind a curtain, even as Prince admitted they were “the only band I’ve ever been afraid of.” Another casualty of his divided focus was Mazarati, whose self‑titled debut on Paisley Park Records received scant support and “floundered without much support from the nascent label,” briefly charting before disappearing.

Stylistically, Campion can be melodramatic and occasionally overcooked — especially in the song-by-song breakdowns — but that heightened tone suits a subject who lived in extremes. Like Rob Sheffield’s writing (fittingly, he writes the preface), the narrative walks a line between fandom and critical distance. Revolution is reverent about the music, but honest about Prince’s paranoia, emotional distance, power plays, and the eventual strain that success and control issues placed on the band.

A recurring theme throughout is the interplay between skill and vibe. Campion details how technically formidable players (Wendy & Lisa’s harmonic imagination, Dr. Fink’s synth wizardry, Sheila E’s virtuosity, the horn section’s jazz chops) constantly interacted with looser, feel-based energy — extended jams, onstage improvisations, and in-studio experiments that blurred jazz, funk, rock, pop, and electronic textures. What ultimately seems to matter most is commitment, an “all in atmosphere”, where everyone agrees to live at Prince’s pace and intensity, whether in marathon warehouse rehearsals or spontaneous live reworkings of catalog songs.

The book also opens a window on what it meant to work for someone with “a million personalities.” Campion tracks Prince’s different modes — tender, playful, ferociously exacting, aloof, petty, visionary — and shows how band members adapted, sometimes by naming those personas and privately decoding which “Prince” had walked into rehearsal that day. Lisa and Wendy’s stories, in particular, reveal a creative intimacy that could flip quickly into distance or punishment, raising the question of which version of him any given collaborator encountered.

Discussing her gradual understanding of the many moods of Prince Rogers Nelson the Revolution navigated daily in 2021, Wendy recalled code names they’d apply to their illustrious leader to prepare for what was to come. There was Steve, “the cool guy you could hang out with, and he wore gym socks and played basketball,” and Marilyn, a needy persona that would “talk softly, and it was like walking on eggshells.” When revealing his playful demeanor, there was George Jefferson—named after the caustic braggadocio from the seventies hit TV series, The Jeffersons, whose peacock-like prancing Prince imitated to a “t.” Oft-times the first words Prince spoke when arriving at rehearsal could put everyone on alert. If it was conversational like “Let’s run down the show from the top,” then events would proceed smoothly. But if a solemn Prince barked, “Big up!” they were in for a long afternoon into evening. But no matter the disposition, Wendy quickly noticed that Prince was always dialed in creatively and developed her own radar to adjust that dial through her personality and her playing.

Source: Revolution – Campion

This reflection had me wondering which personality Sinéad O’Connor met years ago.

In the final stretch, Campion examines the expansion into the “New Revolution,” the dilution of the tight family feel, and the slow, painful unraveling of the original core lineup. He links Prince’s deepening exhaustion with fame, the trauma of Purple Rain’s success, and his restless desire for new sonic directions to the decision to dissolve the band and return to a more solitary, studio-locked working method. The official breakup, framed by a Joni Mitchell quote about growth and experimentation over formula and hits, underlines the central tension of the entire book: Prince’s need for community versus his compulsion to shed it whenever he sensed it was limiting his evolution.

On October 17, 1986, Prince’s publicist issued a press release announcing the dissolution of the Revolution. Inside was a telling quote from Joni Mitchell, whose restless spirit he had absorbed: “He’s driven like an artist. His motivations are growth and experimentation as opposed to formula and hits.”

Source: Revolution – Campion

In the end, Revolution does not necessarily till new ground, but rather reorders familiar stories around the people who stood next to him onstage and in the studio. It suggests that the Prince most listeners mythologise — the one who made Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, and the surrounding projects — is inseparable from The Revolution and its wider universe. The book’s main contribution is to make that collective visible and to show how, for a crucial period, the band was not just playing his music, it was crucial to how he thought, felt, and changed.

I think that Steven Hyden sums it up best in his praise for the book:

Prince is commonly understood to be a solitary genius who created some of the greatest songs of the 80s and 90s largely by himself. But the reality is that he worked with scores of collaborators, the most famous being his backing band, the Revolution. James Campion finally gives the Revolution the attention they deserve, adding some necessary insight into the legend we all know and love.

Source: Praise for Revolution

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I have no idea what era of music we’re even in, now. Do we still *do* that, eras of music? William Gibson on Twitter

In an episode of the TapeNote podcast, Jamie XX spoke with John Kennedy about how a sound and device often has a particular moment. This is where it seems to permeate everything before going out of vogue.

It is what happens with all tech, it is what happened with the 808, everything has its moment, and then things have to move on. The sound of a plugin or the sound of a drum machine become the sound of a summer sometimes and I try and avoid being on the bandwagon.

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

The place of sound within time had me thinking about how, while growing up, I could tell the period with which the music was produced, based on the particular sound.

This influence of sound had me rethinking the evolving sounds of producers, such as Jack Antonoff. There are the supposedly timeless go to sounds, which for Antonoff seems to be the Roland Juno[1], but when you dive into his production videos and the evolving sound – compare ‘Don’t Take the Money’ with ‘Stop Making It Hurt’ – one of the things that stands out is the exploration of the new and serendipitous, even if it is based on something old. In Antonoff’s TapeNotes interview, the new was in the format of Soundtoys plugins, while in a breakdown of Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Manchild’, it is playing the sound through the Watkins Copicat Solid-State Tape Echo.[2]

This seeming competition between artist and world, between the exploration of ideas and following the body, has me thinking how this fits with Raymond Williams’ discussion of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural forms. Williams argued that no dominant culture ever completely exhausts human experience or potential. There are always residual elements from the past and emergent elements pushing towards the future, creating a complex and contested cultural field.

The question is what happens when aspects become residual? These ideas that get added back to the soil as fertiliser to then be repurposed later on anew? William Gibson questioned whether we even do ‘eras’ anymore, or if we have entered a state of ‘permanent present’ where everything is simply residual, repurposed anew. To borrow from Jacques Derrida, ‘every discourse is bricoleur’.

The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous – and so forth. …

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.

Source: Structure, Sign, Play by Jacques Derrida

This is where different ideas are borrowed and brought together, with one eye to their origin, and another on the new.[3]

Coming back to Jamie XX, in a different part of his conversation with Kennedy, he discussed his homage to ‘French House’.

I was going for sort of those early 2000’s Ibiza sort of French House things, but it felt too retro to be doing that again

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

Although there are references to a particular period that situates the sound in time, the sound is not a straight copy. Jamie xx is not just “sampling” French House, rather he is acting as a bricoleur, using the “ruined” text of 2000s Ibiza to build something that functions in the present. The reference to the idea of ‘French House’ is therefore a different way of bringing back the past anew. In a similar way, Tame Impala’s Deadbeat references and nods to 90s rave music, but never quite sacrifices itself wholly to this sound.

This sense of reference and play has me thinking about Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism, pastiche and nostalgia. For Fredric Jameson, nostalgia references a period that cannot be named, rather it is a perception of the present as history, a pastiche of pop images and stereotypes are used to create a feeling of a period. The problem with this representation is that it avoids the political and social realities.

Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.

Source: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson

A clear contemporary example of this “perception of the present as history” can be found in Muse’s album The Will of the People. The band described the record as a return to “tried and trusted sounds,” with frontman Matt Bellamy explaining: “It’s a montage of the best of Muse. It’s a new take on all of those types of genres that we’ve touched on in the past.” By framing their work as a “montage” of their own history, the music becomes a curated pastiche—a collection of references that seeks to capture a feeling of “Muse-ness” rather than breaking new ground.

In critique of Jameson’s arguments, Linda Hutcheon rejects the reduction of the postmodern return‑to‑the‑past as mere nostalgia. For her, postmodern works use parody and ironic “recall of history” to critically confront past and present together, not to evade the present or idealise the past. She calls it a “reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present,”

What postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present. We could call this, once again, “the presence of the past” or perhaps its “presentification” (Hassan 1983). It does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past other than through its textualized remains.

Source: A Poetics Of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction by Linda Hutcheon

For Hutcheon, what looks nostalgic is in fact irony turned back on itself and on us.

This perception of the past as a flattened “period feeling” is reinforced by Pierre Bayard’s discussion of talking about reading without actually reading. In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard discusses how to talk about books you have heard of through other books and commentary, or by skimming the actual book. It is interesting to think about Bayard’s ideas with regards to music. In music, our understanding of “80s synthpop” is often a circuitous reconstruction based on commentary, Spotify-curated “skims,” and singles that have been stripped of their original, heterogeneous context. Much like the lost second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics that Bayard discusses[4], the “actual” 80s becomes a text buried beneath layers of modern interpretation. It is only when we stop skimming and listen deeply that the homogeneity disappears, revealing a reality far more strange and fractured than the pastiche suggests.

This shift from nostalgia to a functional “attitude” is evident in the production of Charli XCX’s Brat. Discussing the album’s palette on the Tape Notes podcast, Charli, George Daniel, and A.G. Cook explain that they utilized the 808 and 909 drum machines not to recreate a specific era, but to capture a minimalist, direct “album attitude” rooted in dance music history. Here, the historic machine is not a vintage artifact to be polished, but a tool for immediate, visceral impact.

In contrast to these calculated dialogues with nostalgia and pastiche, Jon Hopkins describes a process that bypasses the intellect entirely. In conversation with Jamie Lidell, Hopkins admits he wishes he could “choose” the music he writes, yet argues that we have no choice over our output; the only real choice is deciding what our body is willing to give energy to.[5]

This suggests that the “presence of the past” isn’t a deliberate curation, but a physical haunting. While Hopkins discussed on Song Exploder how he captures a “spirit” in an initial sketch only to destroy it, highlights a form of creative destruction.

There’s a smoothness and a simplicity to that early sketch which is nothing something I am looking for … nothing I ever do in the early stages ever makes it to the end … the first things you do are only there to capture some kind of spark or some kind of spirit … you take a few days away and feel you want to be sick.

…

So the whole result of that week of sketching those first ideas has result in one sound which will be the seed which I am going to plant … Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.

Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)

He builds a structure specifically so it can fail, allowing something more “interesting” (and perhaps more emergent) to grow from the wreckage.

The question Hopkins leaves us with is whether the navigation of emergent, dominant, and residual forms is a choice at all. Perhaps the artist is not a bricoleur standing over a workbench of history, but a gardener standing in the soil of it, waiting to see which ghosts are strong enough to break the surface?

I experience this irony and dialogue with the past when listening to Twinkle Digitz. On the one hand, there are clear historical references to the 80s: the synth-heavy arrangements, the addition of a Keytar to live sets, and the performative artifice of flashing glasses and jackets. However, the music itself rarely sounds like a period piece. It differs from the “pastiche” of synthwave, where every element is polished to a high sheen; with Twinkle Digitz, everything is turned up to eleven, leaving the façade ready to fracture at any moment like a swaying Jenga tower.

Even with the explicit attempt to write an 80s synthpop track like ‘Dancing in my Dreams,’ the result remains strange and unfamiliar. One reason is that the sound palette of the 80s no longer carries its original lustre. When Prince used the Linn LM-1 drum machine to ground his album 1999, it was a conduit for the emergent, a sound from a future that hadn’t happened yet. For a modern producer, that same machine is a residual echo.

Another reason is that this “idea” of the 80s is a simulacrum, it is a representation of a decade that feels “real” but isn’t actually based on historical reality. On returning to the actual 80s, one finds that not only does the modern “idea” of the era not exist, but the reality is strikingly different. In this sense, the project is profoundly hauntological: the 80s sound comes apart at the seams, not as a nostalgic tribute, but as an exercise in cynical sincerity. It is a sound that breaks the spell, ensuring that our perception of the past – and the present it haunts – is never the same again.

  1. This timelessness is something Nicolas Godin from Air spoke about on TapeNotes podcast when unpacking their album, Moon Safari. He also talks about the collection of hardware he recommends, including a Prophet 5, a Roland Juno, a Minimoog and an ARP 2600. This is also something Mark Ronson has discussed . He talks about starting with a Juno synthesiser, some kind of Moog, an MPC and a Nord Electro. ↩
  2. “This is how I started to make this track feel like something that wasn’t just coming from a place where you know it’s coming from,” Antonoff explains. “And when you start doing things like this, it informs everything.” Source: Behind the Track｜’Manchild’ by Sabrina Carpenter (Youtube) ↩
  3. Jack Antonoff’s refusal to let a sound sit in its expected place can be considered as an example of how artists negotiate what Williams calls ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ forms. ↩
  4. “The second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, impossible to find even in a library of infinite capacity, is no different from most other books we discuss in our lives. They are all reconstructions of originals that lie so deeply buried beneath our words and the words of others that, even were we prepared to risk our lives, we stand little chance of ever finding them within reach.” Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard ↩
  5. This is something that Lorde has discussed in her own way. “Best thing you can make is the thing only you can make.” Source: TN:158 LORDE & JIM-E STACK (Album: Virgin) While Sufjan Stevens touches on being present. “I don’t really arrive with an idea, I just try to physically be present and allow my body to enter into a musical space. Sometimes on the piano it’s just shapes, physically engaging with an instrument is really important.” Source: Sufjan Stevens reevaluates ‘Carrie & Lowell,’ 10 years later : All Songs Considered : NPR ↩
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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway ‘A Farewell to Arms’

Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms follows Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in the Italian army during World War I, and his love affair with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. Across five books, Frederic is wounded, sent to Milan to recover, deepens his relationship with Catherine who in turn becomes pregnant, returns to a collapsing front, deserts during the chaotic retreat from Caporetto, and eventually escapes with Catherine to Switzerland. Their brief mountain idyll ends in devastation when Catherine dies in childbirth and their baby is stillborn, leaving Frederic alone in the rain.

For me, A Farewell to Arms is a kind of cross between Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Like On the Road, it often feels like Fredric is moving from one thing after another, going from town to town, front to hospital, retreat to escape, all rendered in a simple, episodic style. Events keep happening – injury, love, retreat, escape – without the comforting sense that they are building toward any sort of clarity or heroic meaning. There is always endless conjecture about when the war will end and who will win.

Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.

At the same time, the atmosphere throughout recalls Apocalypse Now in its sense of the fundamental meaninglessness of the war and the smallness of the individual caught inside the military industrial complex. Frederic is a minor component of a vast war machine, an ambulance lieutenant whose actions rarely seem to change anything. We are not even sure why he is necessarily where he is in the first place, other than that he is an American medic serving in the Italian Army, most likely as the Americans had not actually entered the war at this stage. The arbitrariness of violence is highlighted in moments like his being severely wounded while doing something as mundane as eating cheese near the end of Book One, rather than in some grand, heroic charge.

“Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?”

“No,” I said. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

The system’s attempt to reframe this accident as heroism – something worthy of a “silver medal,” a sign that he has “helped someone” or “done his part” – feels hollow. It dramatizes the pressure to manufacture meaning and glory out of random suffering.

This tension between lived meaninglessness and imposed narratives of honour runs throughout the novel. Official language – medals, promotions, rhetoric about sacrifice and patriotism – floats above a reality of mud, cholera, artillery, and arbitrary death. Frederic’s growing refusal to accept these stories culminates in his desertion and in the bleak ending with Catherine’s death, where there is no consolation, no noble cause, no redemptive purpose. This feels like a contrast to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which is set in the trenches. Although there is nothing necessarily ‘heroic’ about Remarque’s novel, it at least feels like it is at the heart of the battle for World War I. All in all, Hemingway reminds us that war is never a single story, but a tangle of competing, often contradictory narratives.

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Awkwardness or “being awkward” is not a property of individuals. That’s partly a consequence of the metaphysics of awkwardness: it’s a property of social interactions, not people. While some people may be more prone to awkward feelings, or to evoking those feelings in others, that is not the same as being awkward itself. Alexandra Plakias ‘Awkwardness: A Theory’

Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias unpacks what we talk about when we talk about awkwardness. Plakias explores how awkwardness differs from embarrassment, shame, being uncomfortable, and anxiety. There are no awkward people, but rather awkward situations.

I think that there are no awkward people, only awkward interactions. This may strike some readers as unacceptably revisionary. Virtually everyone either thinks they know an especially awkward person, or self-identifies as one. But this is wrong: awkwardness or “being awkward” is not a property of individuals. That’s partly a consequence of the metaphysics of awkwardness: it’s a property of social interactions, not people. While some people may be more prone to awkward feelings, or to evoking those feelings in others, that is not the same as being awkward itself.

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

Awkwardness relates to social norms. Often people choose to stay silent to avoid awkwardness, makes lonely situations lonelier. In many respects, it acts like a diagnostic tool. Awkwardness is about unscriptedness. Scripts function as collective resources. Who has access to which scripts (e.g. etiquette, gendered expectations, classed norms) tracks power and privilege. Power shows up in who gets to name situations and impose scripts

Reveals a way in which we ostracize and punish those who fail to fit into existing social categories; a way in which we’re dependent on—and limited by—social scripts and norms for guidance, and the way in which these frequently let us down by coming up short when we need them.

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

The answer, for Plakias, is not to eradicate awkwardness or become “awkwardness psychopaths,” but instead learn to better tolerate and interpret awkwardness.

Plakias’ call to learn to live with awkwardness reminded me of Donald Winnicott’s ‘good-enough mother’ which helps a child build resillience. Plakias could be understood as arguing for good-enough social scripts. We can create environments where awkwardness is expected, tolerated, and used as a prompt for revising scripts rather than as a reason to exile people.

Eliminating awkwardness is not, in itself, the goal. Instead, we should focus on noticing where it arises—which subjects are awkward to discuss? Who do we find it awkward to interact with, and when?—and taking opportunities to develop better scripts for those areas of our lives.

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

Plakias’ discussion of shame and silence also had me thinking about the work of Brené Brown and the vulnerability. Awkwardness is often the price of vulnerability around taboo or stigmatised topics (race, periods, salary, harassment, postpartum bodies). In addition to this, just as awkwardness is intersubjective, so too is vulnerability, which is not something that can be engaged with individually.

I listened to Patricia Shade’s reading of the book, after stumbling upon it via Plakias’ interview on The Gray Area.

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When we own our stories, we finally get to write the ending. Brené Brown ‘The Power of Vulnerability’

The The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage by Brené Brown is an audio course draws from I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly. In it, Brown challenges the idea that vulnerability is a weakness to be hidden. Instead, she highlights how it is in fact the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and the human connection we all crave. By examining the armour we wear (perfectionism, numbing, and the foreboding fear that joy is too good to last) Brown invites us to trade our shields for the courage to show up and be seen, even when there are no guarantees.

Brown highlights a series of ‘guideposts’ to support the journey.

  • Cultivating vulnerability and letting go of what people think
  • Cultivating self-compassion and letting go of perfectionism
  • Letting go of numbing and powerlessness
  • Letting go of certainty
  • Cultivating creativity and letting go of Comparison
  • Cultivating play and rest
  • Cultivating calm and stillness and letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle
  • Cultivating meaningful work, letting go of self-doubt
  • Cultivating laughter, song and dance – letting go of cool

These practices require us to dismantle the “shame gremlins” that whisper we are unworthy of love and belonging. By cultivating authenticity over “fitting in” and choosing self-compassion over the crushing weight of perfectionism, we begin to realise that our imperfections are not inadequacies, but rather what connect us to the rest of humanity. We learn that the opposite of play is not work, but depression, and that true belonging only happens when we present our authentic selves to the world. Ultimately, Brown’s research serves as a call to arms for the ‘spirit’.

Wholehearted people are spiritual people, that is, people who believe that we are connected to one another by something greater than us.

Source: The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown

What resonated with me about Brown’s work is how shame fits with the discussion around work-life balance, in particular I was taken by the importance of play and creativity when it comes to being more vulnerable. I was particular reminded of something Doug Belshaw once wrote:

All of the most awesome people I know have nothing like a work-life ‘balance’. Instead, they work hard, play hard, and tie that to a mission bigger than themselves.

Source: Work-life balance is actually a circle, according to Jeff Bezos by Doug Belshaw

Just as we may say, “I don’t do vulnerable”, it is so easy to say we do not have time for play, creativity and rest. But as Brown captures, this is not an option. As an example of such balance, I am reminded of John Spencer’s discussion of pursuing other interests:

Taking a different approach, John Spencer has his own solution to the personal problem. He and his wife give each other one night a week to pursue other interests. This means going somewhere else, whether it be Starbucks or a microbrewrey, and focusing on something unrelated to teaching.

Source: It Takes a Family – A Reflection on Support Networks that Make Leadership Possible

What challenged me is that non-choices such as numbing or perfectionism are choices in themselves.

You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.

Source: The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown

Also, vulnerability is not something that we can do ourselves, rather it is something that we need to do within a community.

My particular actions are to not say ‘yes’ to everything, I need to embrace Brown’s mantra, “Choose discomfort over resentment.” The question I have about this though is that people then figure out who the person is that does say yes, the weak point. I guess this is why you cannot do vulnerability alone. I also wonder if team-building activities could be made more meaningful if we actively invested in elements of play and creativity, something like Genius Hour, rather than going bowling or getting a coffee?

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Poets are the shock troops of language – they can get behind the walls of the mind and liberate thoughts and feelings. Martin Flanagan ‘The Empty Honour Board’

The Empty Honour Board is Martin Flanagan’s memoir of his experience at a school and church embroiled in sexual abuse. It came about after Flanagan heard so many people describe experiences that did not correlate with his own. He therefore decided to reclaim his own story, rather than let others’ simpler narratives define it.

One day I rang my brother Tim and said, ‘Doesn’t it strike you as strange that lots of people who weren’t at our school are certain they know what happened there, and you and I were there and we’re not?’ He agreed it was strange. And so, hesitantly, I began to write. Why? Because, in the end, that’s what writers do.

The book is more than a memoir about the experiences at school, whether it be colleagues, bullies, teachers and the life of a boarder. Instead, it keeps jumping between boyhood scenes and their subsequent afterlives. Whether it be through personality, relationships, ethics, and politics, it is a book that explores the way in which our experiences in school often stay with us all through our lives. For example, Flanagan credits his experiences with fighting and the culture of violence for instilling in him a ‘hard edge’.

I believe my old school helped shape me as a journalist. It taught me what not to fear and gave my ambition a hard edge.

Although I had read pieces of Flanagan’s work over the year, particularly when I used to read The Age, I was unsure what to expect from this book. To be fair, I actually stumbled upon it via Spotify recommendation. (Not sure what that says about me?) I was also drawn to it as it was also read by Flanagan himself.

In part I was intrigued to read how the abuse could occur and yet stay hidden. Flanagan describes the isolation and power imbalance of boarding school, including examples of grooming framed as education or care. For many, the feeling of shame and sin kept them quiet. While any claims at the time were either brushed off as ‘fooling around’ or perpetrators were sent for psycho-therapy.

Interestingly, Flanagan places all of this within a wider culture of abuse, which normalised cruelty.

I watched out for the priests like pedestrians at zebra crossings watch out for cars. In my critical year, the third, when I was 13, it wasn’t the adults who put terror into my heart, it was the boys.

Any full appreciation of what went on in places like my old school has to take into account what the boys did to the boys.

This culture was not uniform and differed between the ‘day rats’ and the boarders.

I want to make it clear that the day boys had virtually no part in the narrative I’m now outlining. The day boys, otherwise known as ‘day rats’, were from another planet. You could like day boys, and have relationships with them, but there was a level of psychodrama to the place which they couldn’t know. They came and went – you stayed. They arrived in the morning, hopefully with plenty of food, and left in the afternoon, lunchboxes empty. Scrounging food (called ‘scunging’) was a hard-practised, competitive art. Eric hated it. He said the food provided by the school was ‘perfectly adequate’. Imagine, if you can, a stew with gravy that looked like grey clag, containing a few cubes of gristle served with a blob of powdered mash potato. Most kids got by on bread and jam.

Although Flanagan discusses his formal pedagogical successes, such as being introduced to Lord of the Flies and winning the senior English prize, so much of his discussions are about what he learnt beyond the classroom in dormitories, on ovals playing sport, and on the road hitchhiking.

Beyond discussions of the past, the memoir also doubles as a philosophical dive into memory and the art of writing. Whether it be the mapping human experience:

I’m a journalist. My job is mapping the rough, incomplete terrain of human experience.

Poets as shock troops of language:

Poets are the shock troops of language – they can get behind the walls of the mind and liberate thoughts and feelings.

Or the contrast between stories and preconceptions:

I think stories start where your preconceptions end.

Overall, Martin Flanagan’s The Empty Honour Board is a fascinating dive into a different time.

Do you want to know what happened at places like the school I went to in the 1960s and ’70s? I’ll tell you what I know. I speak for no-one but myself.

In part, I was reminded of Damian Cowell’s reflection of his ‘private’ education in Episode 11 of Only the Shit You Love – The Podcast. Mindful how things change, he too was cognisant of respecting that although a school may carry the same name that it does not necessarily mean that it is the same school today. I was also left thinking about Paul Browning’s book on responding to such a situation as a school leader. With this in mind, I was left thinking of a quote at the end of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River:

His children’s children would would walk around on the floorboards and never know what was beneath their feet.

Source: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

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Tuberculosis in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us. John Green ‘Everything Is Tuberculosis’

In his book, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green draws a parallel between the history of tuberculosis and the political choices that continue to shape the world. As Norman Swan once described COVID-19 as a “political pandemic” – one perpetuated by political choices rather than intentionally caused – Green shows that tuberculosis (TB) is fundamentally the same. The book, centred around the concrete, human experience of ‘Henry’ from Sierra Leone, argues that TB’s deadly persistence is as much about our society’s systemic injustices as it is about the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium itself.

Green explores the different versions of TB, its long history, and the stigma surrounding it. However, the book’s most damning insight is that contemporary TB is primarily a disease of social determinants.

Over a century ago, African American physician Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams pointed to the real drivers of TB, a view that Green champions today:

How might the contemporary story of tuberculosis be different had we listened to African American physicians like Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, who noted over a century ago that the real cause of TB was not race but “poverty, bad housing, bad sanitation, bad working conditions, long hours, high rent, [and] poor food”?

Source: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

This systemic failure means that access to health and life itself is determined by geography and wealth. Green highlights this inequity:

A child born in Sierra Leone is over one hundred times as likely to die of tuberculosis than a child born in the United States. This difference, as Dr. Joia Mukherjee writes, is “not caused by genetics, biology, or culture. Health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, lack of medical care, and other social forces.”

Source: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

Ultimately, the book concludes that we are the primary vector, not the microbe. The persistence of TB stems from human-built systems for resource allocation.

The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.

Source: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

The book suggests that true progress on TB requires a shift in focus from cheap diagnosis to a broader consideration of human costs. TB, which can be dormant in about 90% of those infected, reminds us that we are all connected to this silent threat. To eliminate it, we cannot rely on medicine alone. We must address the fundamental root cause: injustice.

We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.

We must also be the cure.

Source: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

I came upon John Green’s book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection via his Crash Course Lecture summarising the book.

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If we know how to sit down together, listen to each other and, even if we can’t resolve every disagreement, find ways to hear one another and say what is needed, we can coexist and thrive. Charles Duhigg ‘Supercommunicators’

Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg is an exegesis into what it means to communicate, whether it be what it is we are communicating, how we feel about it, and who we actually are, all with the overall focus being to connect with others. Miscommunication occurs when we fail to achieve this connection, often because we are not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. Here is how Duhigg summaries the book in the introduction:

This book, then, is an attempt to explain why communication goes awry and what we can do to make it better. At its core are a handful of key ideas.
The first one is that many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds. However, if we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our partners, at the same moment, we’re unlikely to connect with each other.
What’s more, each type of conversation operates by its own logic and requires its own set of skills, and so to communicate well, we have to know how to detect which kind of conversation is occurring, and understand how it functions.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

To communicate well, you must detect which kind of conversation is happening. For instance, when someone seeks empathy (“Jim is driving me crazy!”), a practical suggestion (“What if you just invited him to lunch?”) will likely cause conflict because of the mismatch of mindsets.

At the heart of a meaningful discussion is a ‘learning conversation,’ where you seek to understand how others see the world and help them understand your perspective in return. Anyone can become a supercommunicator (or superconnector?) by learning to recognise opportunities to align mindsets, listen for ‘truths’ and connect.

Duhigg provides four rules to support ‘learning conversations’:

Four basic rules that create a learning conversation:

  • Rule One: Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occuring.
  • Rule Two: Share your goals, and ask what others are seeking.
  • Rule Three: Ask about others’ feelings, and share your own.
  • Rule Four: Explore if identities are important to this discussion.
Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

However, one simple learning strategy to connecting, beyond the quiet negotiation of what and how, is to simply repeat what the person has said.

So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said.
And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

As a book about conversations, I was left with a number of questions and wonderings I had while conversing with the text. Firstly, there was a lot of discussion around alignment, but it takes two to tango? Here I am reminded of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener and whether alignment can be solitary, especially if the terms of conversation come from the listener:

If you want to connect with someone, ask them what they are feeling, and then reveal your own emotions. If others describe a painful memory or a moment of joy, and we reveal our own disappointments or what makes us proud, it provides a chance to harness the neurochemicals that have evolved to help us feel closer. It creates an opportunity for emotional contagion.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

What happens when something like the emotional is not reciprocated? Or if there is a power imbalance where there is little effort or respect?

Duhigg talks about the power of being ‘neurally entrained’ and being on the same page. I always thought the negative to filling in the narrative gap with regards to ‘North Star’ vision was that we then filled the space ourselves. However, what is missed with this is the positive benefit associated with alignment and everyone being on the same page.

There is something about neural simultaneity that helps us listen more closely and speak more clearly.
Sometimes this connection occurs with just one other person. Other times, it happens within a group, or a large audience. But whenever it happens, our brains and bodies become alike because we are, in the language of neuroscientists, neurally entrained.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Associated with being connected, what this book helps highlight is how central communication. It is often suggested that every company is now a data company, therefore designed to capture information. I wonder, thinking about this book, if every company or job is first and foremost a about communication and connection, rather than data? For what do we have without connection?

Communication is so important that a summary of CIA training methods puts it right up front: “Find ways to connect,” it says. “A case officer’s goal should be to have a prospective agent come to believe, hopefully with good reason, that the case officer is one of the few people, perhaps the ONLY person, who truly understands him.”

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

The book itself is structured around the different kinds of conversations, with a short guide to using these. In the section on emotional conversations, Duhigg provides some useful cues around online conversations.

When talking online, remember to…
• Overemphasize politeness.
• Underemphasize sarcasm.
• Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges.
• Avoid criticism in public forums.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Although ‘online’ can be appreciated as referencing social media and online spaces, I think that these points are helpful when thinking about conversing in more private spaces such as Microsoft Teams and even email.

In talking about difficult conversations, Duhigg suggests that we should embrace discomfort as a point of helpful feedback.

Discomfort pushes us to think before we speak, to try to understand how others see or hear things differently. Discomfort reminds us to keep going, that the goal is worth the challenge.

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Interesting thinking about this alongside coaching and ‘Active listening’. I was also left thinking about Alexandra Plakias’ argument that awkardness is not a personal problem, but a social one.

Contrary to popular belief, our awkward moments aren’t cringeworthy. Rather than cringing inwardly about them, we ought to examine them more closely. Because once we realise the true nature of awkwardness, we can stop seeing it as an individual failure and start seeing it as an opportunity for social change. In short: we should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously.

Source: Make it Awkward! by Alexandra Plakias

All in all, For me, Supercommunicators provides a useful provocation through which to consider things through. The book provides a useful framework for appreciating the sort of conversation being had and how to seek alignment in order to better connect.