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A busy idiot will bask in a milieu of frenzied action—if only to incite the transient psychological relief of knowing that he is (at least) “working on something.” In the world of entrepreneurship, it is more common to meet a “busy idiot” than a “lazy person.” Anthony Raymond ‘Ikigai & Kaizen’

In Ikigai & Kaizen: The Japanese Strategy to Achieve Personal Happiness and Professional Success, Anthony Raymond offers a thought-provoking exploration of goal-setting through the lens of Eastern philosophy. Raymond’s work dives deep into the psychological and philosophical frameworks that shape our motivation, productivity, and sense of purpose.

Raymond builds his thesis around four key Eastern concepts, each contributing a unique tool to what he calls the “ultimate goal-setting toolbox”:

  • Ikigai – The pursuit of one’s true calling; the reason you get out of bed in the morning.
  • Lingchi – A metaphor for the slow erosion of well-being through repeated small stressors — “death by a thousand cuts.”
  • Hansei – The practice of honest self-reflection, essential for learning from past mistakes.
  • Kaizen – The philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement.

Rather than treating these ideas as standalone solutions, Raymond argues that their true power lies in their interdependence. This interconnectedness is a recurring theme. Ikigai without Kaizen leads to unfulfilled potential. Kaizen without Ikigai results in soulless productivity. Hansei without Lingchi lacks context. Each concept supports and enhances the others.

Raymond doesn’t stop at theory. He contextualizes these ideas through:

  • Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s work in management and systems thinking
  • Personal health and fitness, emphasizing the power of daily logs and habit tracking
  • Relationship harmony, showing how reflection and incremental change can improve interpersonal dynamics

These applications make the book feel grounded and actionable, offering readers a way to integrate these philosophies into everyday life.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is its redefinition of success. Raymond suggests that achievement isn’t about reaching a goal, but about the tenacity to keep moving forward — even when progress feels slow or invisible.

“Success is not scoring a goal,” he writes, “but the commitment to the daily grind.”

Source: Ikigai & Kaizen by Anthony Raymond

Logging workouts, journaling reflections, and making small improvements become acts of spiritual discipline. In this view, goal achievement is less like climbing a mountain and more like chasing a rainbow.

When drafting a narrative about the peaks and valleys of life, it is much more inspiring to end the story atop a peak than in a valley. But a lifelong commitment to goal attainment is comprised of both. Whenever one mountaintop is summited, a new one is immediately visible in the hazy distance; and the climb continues. For this reason, the process of goal achievement is perhaps more akin to chasing rainbows than to climbing mountains.

Source: Ikigai & Kaizen by Anthony Raymond

Ikigai & Kaizen is ideal for those tired of quick-fix productivity hacks and are ready to embrace a more holistic, meaningful approach to personal and professional growth. Raymond’s framework offers a powerful reminder: progress is possible — one small step at a time.

What small step could I take today which may (in the long run) improve my situation?

Source: Ikigai & Kaizen by Anthony Raymond

For me, it sits alongside other books such as The End of Average and Start With Why. Like those, Ikigai & Kaizen challenges conventional thinking about success and motivation. It encourages a deeper, more personal approach to growth — one that values purpose over performance metrics, and progress over perfection. This book goes beyond SMART goals to provide a whole framework.

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Whatever happens … when dealing with computers, you should never forget where the off switch is. Karl Bartos ‘The Sound of the Machine’

The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond is the autobiography of Karl Bartos, best known as a member and co-composer in Kraftwerk. The book begins with Bartos’ early life, capturing life in post-war Germany. He touches on the initial inspiration of hearing the Beatles and British beat music via his sister. He discusses how he came to be involved in music during a telecoms engineering apprenticeship, putting his hand up to be drummer in a work cover band, before pursuing formal training as a classical percussionist at the Robert Schumann Conservatory to the chagrin of his parents. After becoming involved in a number of groups during his studies – The Jokers, Sinus, conservatory orchestra – he eventually found himself invited to join Kraftwerk. He was a member of the band from 1975 to 1990. After making the decision to leave Kraftwerk in 1990, Bartos has engaged in various collaborative projects, produced his own music and been visiting Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.1

Clearly the book provides an insiders insight into Kraftwerk and their creative process that goes beyond the myth making machine. This includes many musical elements and technical choices. For example, Bartos reflects on the use of the Portastudio when performing live as their music became more complex:

The tracks for our playback were allocated according to a fixed plan: On ‘The Robots’ for example, track 1 – like on all songs – was for the sync-signal, track 2 was Ralf’s recorded Minimoog bass sequence, track 3 was for Florian’s vocoder, and the basic drum pattern was on track 4. As in our TV appearances, Ralf sang along to this semi-playback on stage in parallel with Florian’s vocoder, spoke the Russian part and played the staccato melody live on his Minimoog. I provided the organ live on my synthesizer, Wolfgang switched on a few drum fills on the Triggersumme, and Florian added live vocoder on top. In the Russian part, he shared the sounds of the electric motors with Ralf. By the way, on our 1981 tour, I only played electronic percussion on ‘Autobahn’.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

Bartos also unpacks some of the politics associated with being in Kraftwerk, such as the distribution of royalties, the balance between cycling and music, and being barred from exploring other creative avenues. For example, he recounts the way things changed when trying to record Techno Pop, the follow-up to Computer World.

During our production of Techno Pop, we forgot the method we’d used in our writing sessions, where the three of us improvised freely and kept coming up with diverse pieces of music and recording them. We would pick pieces from various sessions – often recorded months or years apart – and blend them into a synthesis, an organic whole. Instead of remembering how our most authentic and probably therefore most successful music had been made, we fixed our gaze on the mass-market music zeitgeist. But comparing our own ideas to other people’s work was anti-creative and counterproductive. We were no longer capable of looking further than the end of our own noses. It didn’t help if we discovered elements of our own musical DNA in other artists’ songs. We weren’t interested any more in inventing our music – all we wanted was to sound better than others, or not worse. We’d forgotten our night-time sound rides, where all that counted was whether the music spoke to us or not.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

All in all, Bartos’ exploration is always done in a somewhat dry matter-of-fact manner that never quite veers into the world of gossip. As Chi Ming Lai’s captures:

Born in 1952, Bartos was a happy child and his optimistic disposition is a key aspect of this book. While the bitterness that was apparent in Peter Hook’s NEW ORDER book ‘Substance’ is largely absent, ‘The Sound Of The Machine’ is also not the laugh aloud read that Stephen Morris’ two memoirs or the “sex und synths und schlagzeug” romp of Wolfgang Flür’s ‘I Was A Robot’ were.
What ‘The Sound Of The Machine’ has is informative breakdowns of how iconic pieces of music were constructed, commentary on the frenetic pace of technological development and confessionals on band dynamics. It also documents a very human group of men enjoying football, champagne, dancing, cycling and even taking time out to see The Eagles.

Source: KARL BARTOS the Sound of the Machine by Chi Ming Lai (Electricity Club)

I imagine that this peek beyond the curtain is what would entice many readers, myself included. However, Bartos’ methodical approach also provides an insight into his personal thinking on music and technology distinct from Kraftwerk, and the everyday life of a musician. As the book went, I felt that this was just as interesting if not more so than untangled traces of myth and origin stories.

Some of the topics that Bartos touches on include the relationship between computers, music of the fleeting nature of the moment:

Few will deny that computers have changed the world – but music is still music. And when we listen to it and our brains are flooded with sound, it stimulates regions where ‘social, primeval and abstract emotions’ are seated, as the neuro-scientist and music scholar Daniel Levitin writes. That’s why we have strange sensations, feel moved and often speechless. It’s no wonder; music is a matter of life and death – and of immortality. With music, we experience the fleeting nature of the moment, but also a world beyond time. There is music, after all, that exists only in our thoughts. All that is something computers know relatively little about.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

Live music and the ephemeral flow of time:

Playing live corresponds to music’s ephemeral nature. Just like life itself, music takes place in the flow of time. Because time only moves in one direction – forwards – it can’t be repeated. That’s what makes a live performance unique, and the most primordial way to experience music. When we record music, we capture a moment on a medium, rather like film. We can listen to this document of a time over and over. Not unusually, the result is an artistic product of astounding force of expression, but – and this is due to the nature of the thing – it is simply a different animal to the vibrant venture of a concert.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

The value of music in an era of streaming:

More and more, one thing is being pushed into the background – the very thing pop music used to stand for: shared human experiences. Music in the streaming age is no longer the medium that connects me up with an idea, gives me an identity, expresses my life and my generation, the way pop music was ever since the days of rock’n’roll in the fifties. It appears that music has become a by-product with no value. In a sound cosmos in which I can listen to all the music in the world, randomly and therefore with no meaning, music loses significance, becomes arbitrary. It becomes muzak.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

The book ends with an interesting reflection on the changes associated with electronic music over time and the move into the digital world:

Whatever happens … when dealing with computers, you should never forget where the off switch is. It’s really very simple: we musicians have to play our music the way we think it and feel it, as well and as intensely as we can – that’s all that counts. In my understanding, art is not something that can be subjected to algorithms, but a concept and its marketing can.

Source: The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond by Karl Bartos

I was really intrigued with this change from the initial fervor to the corporatisation, especially after reading Dylan Jones’ book Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics. I think this change can be understood using Gilles Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of de-territorialisation and subsequent re-territorialisation, where the initial liberation of synth/sampling practices as liberating is then standardized through the move to digital production.

It was interesting to think about this divide between Bartos and Kraftwerk in comparison with Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with his album, Only the Shit You Love. Like Bartos, Cowell provided a deep dive into his life outside of TISM. Although he touched upon some aspects of TISM, it felt strange to talk about a topic that, like Kraftwerk, is so immersed in myth and intrigue. As much as we might think we want to know, I wonder if when it comes down to it that there is something in the longing for something, rather than actually attaining it? The strange thing though is that without Kraftwerk, or in Cowell’s case, TISM, then we probably would not have come to be talking about the topic. With this in mind, by the end of the book I actually felt that Kraftwerk was a distraction. Maybe some myths are best left lying?

Originally published in German in 2017, the updated English translation was published in 2022. I listened to Jim Boeven’s reading on Audible via the Plus Catalogue.

  1. See Chi Ming Lai’s review on the Electricity Club website for a more detailed breakdown of the book ↩︎

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Numbers. Words that sound like English but make no sense. Thomas Pynchon ‘Mason & Dixon’

In Alan Jacobs’ introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon, he describes Mason & Dixon as Pynchon’s ‘most profound’ work:

Mason & Dixon (1997): The only Pynchon novel set wholly before the twentieth century tells, in remarkably though not uniformly faithful eighteenth-century prose, the story of the mapping of a great Line that changed the course of history — in very large ways — and also describes the complicated friendship of the men who mapped it. In my judgment, for what that’s worth, this is the most profound of Pynchon’s works.

Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs

After finding a narration by Steven Crossley in Audible’s Plus catalogue and a read-along on the Mapping the Zone podcast, I decided to dive into the wilderness.

Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow, I entered Mason & Dixon with little appreciation about what lay ahead of me, other than a fictional account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the mapping of the Mason Dixon Line. I wonder if this was actually a benefit?

The story is split into three parts. In the first – Latitudes and Departures – we are introduced to the Mason and Dixon, the world that they lived in and their work for the Royal Society in capturing of the transit of Venus in 1761. The middle part – America – takes us to the new world and the surveying of the land. The last part – Last Transit – circles back around to the transit of Venus in 1769 and their legacy after their work on the Mason-Dixon Line. However, this is a story that goes beyond a mere narrative.

I remember reading in Now You See It Cathy Davidson recounting the awareness test from Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.[1] I was reminded of this with Pynchon’s treatment of history. There are so many elements in Mason & Dixon that are both rooted in real history and pushed into a realm of pure Pynchonian absurdity. Maybe it is a line in a diary or some piece of history that sits in the margin, which is then taken to its extreme. A prime example of this is the ‘mechanickal Duck’ that follows the Mason and Dixon. As Brett Biebel highlights, this is based on a historical invention:

Jacques de Vaucanson French inventor who made some of the first robots, including (in 1739) a realistic mechanical duck that could eat food and then excrete it. Though the eaten food was stored in one compartment and the excrement pellets in another, the robot gave the impression that the duck was “digesting” its food.

Source: A Mason & Dixon Companion by Brett Biebel

This is where Pynchon’s treatment of history feels different to something like Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang in that Pynchon really doubles-down on the ambiguity, placing it front and centre. The book is filled with digressions, rumors, and apocryphal tales that disrupt, interrupt and reinterpret the official history of Mason and Dixon. Perspectives of Native Americans, enslaved people, and other marginal groups, highlight the power dynamics inherent in historical storytelling.

In addition to history, Mason & Dixon explores the concept of space, moving from a physical frontier to a metaphorical, psychological and invisible boundary.

There is a Post-Script in Emerson’s self-school’d hand, exclamatory, ending upon a long Quill-crunching Stop. “Time is the Space that may not be seen.—”

Source: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

To borrow from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the Mason-Dixon Line is a paradoxical attempt to create a tracing that functions as an reterritorializing map. However, Pynchon’s narrative constantly undermines this, showing how the “map” of the Line fails to contain the lived reality of the space. The wilderness, the native peoples, and the very characters themselves serve to deterritorialize attempts for order.

Mason & Dixon persistently exposes, satirises, and destabilises binaries—science/occult, astrology/astronomy, empire/colony, map/territory, reason/madness, freedom/slavery, North/South. The Line itself produces ‘Bad History’ that divides peoples and drives conflict.

“To rule forever,” continues the Chinaman, later, “it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt ’em,— ’tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation.”

Source: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

Aspects like the Wedge’s ambiguous space, Indigenous paths, feng shui, Jesuit geometries, and rhizomatic social scenes all work to undercut either/or logics. Instead, the novel enacts a practice of creating new realities and new knowledges in their turn.

As readers, we mirror Mason and Dixon by tracing our own lines through the text, constantly attempting to make sense of it. Trying to make sense of the text. However, every time I re-trawl back through my notes – quotes, thoughts and ideas – I am left either contemplating something new or recalling something previously forgotten. This experience confirms the text’s multiplicity.

It is interesting is to consider Mason & Dixon today, long after the surveyors lived and the book was published in 1997. Devin Thomas O’Shea suggests that Pynchon’s exploration of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of the federal government in Vineland provides lessons for today as political figures cut back on spending. However, in A Mason & Dixon Companion, Brett Biebel suggests that in a polarised world, Mason & Dixon offers the complexity and nuance that we need more than ever.

We are routinely forced onto a zero or a one, a “liberal” or a “conservative” spectrum, and the great virtue of Pynchon, the great virtue of Mason & Dixon, is that they both resist automatic categorization. Call the novel difficult if you wish. Obscure. Dense. Too demanding or time consuming. But what it really is is layered (and keenly aware of the knife’s edge separating delusional conspiracy from scientific “Enlightenment”). It promotes complexity and nuance and the weighing of difficult moral and emotional trade-offs, and in today’s America, we need that more than ever.

Source: A Mason & Dixon Companion by Brett Biebel

Given this contrast, I wonder if Pynchon as a whole is as important today as ever – a writer who, instead of providing a “degraded attempt” at making sense of the world, helps call out its multiplicity. Alan Jacobs further supports this by noting Pynchon’s concern with the ‘insoluble obscurities’:

Pynchon is a riddling writer, but he is also concerned with those insoluble obscurities that cannot be fought but must simply be waited out.

Source: Pynchon: An Introduction by Alan Jacobs

This analysis is perhaps best concluded by Pynchon’s own reflections on being a Luddite and what that might mean for our times.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. O boy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.

Source: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? by Thomas Pynchon

  1. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else. Because we can’t see what we can’t see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of the tosses between the people in white. I hadn’t seen the video back then, although it’s now a classic, featured on punked-style TV shows or YouTube versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The tape rolled, and everyone began counting.
    Everyone except me. I’m dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about thirty seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.
    When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted thirteen, fourteen even, and congratulated those who’d scored the perfect fifteen. Then he asked, “And who saw the gorilla?”
    I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four others in the large room to do so. Around me, others were asking, “Gorilla? What gorilla?” Some people were getting annoyed. Several muttered that they’d been “tricked.” Instead of answering them, the philosopher rewound the tape and had us watch again. This time everyone saw the gorilla.
    Source: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn by Cathy Davidson ↩

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The representational object of the cognitive map is an abstract concept whose effect is to render visible the various forces and flows that shape and constitute our world situation. To even speak of the ‘world’ is already to begin to produce a cognitive map because it is the articulation of a concrete ‘totality’ greater than what one can empirically verify. Ian Buchanan ‘Fredric Jameson: Live Theory’

I recently watched The Beekeeper, a revenge thriller starring Jason Statham as Adam Clay, a retired operative of a powerful, clandestine organisation known as the “Beekeepers” that exist beyond the CIA. The plot kicks off when Clay’s elderly landlady and friend, Eloise Parker, falls victim to a sophisticated phishing scam that drains her of her life savings, leading her to take her own life. He then takes it upon himself to ‘protect the hive’.

Our nation is not unlike a beehive, with its complex systems of workers, caretakers, even royalty. If any of the beehive’s complex mechanisms are compromised, the hive collapses. Someone a long time ago decided that a mechanism was needed to keep our nation safe. A mechanism outside the chain of command, outside the system. Its one mission, to keep the system safe. Beekeepers are given all resources, empowered to act on their own judgment. For decades, they have quietly worked to keep the hive safe. That is, until now. It appears that a retired Beekeeper has gone off program and is acting in what he mistakenly believes is the hive’s best interest.

Source: Wallace Westwyld in The Beekeeper

The problem with this is that the world that the beekeeper is protecting seems awfully small in a world so big. For example, the lead investigator in CIA is the daughter of landlady caught up in the phishing attack. Two data centres associated with scams are located in close proximity.[1] To be honest, the beekeeper seemingly lives somewhere secluded, but also close enough to get everywhere within three days.

All of this happenstance had me thinking about Fredric Jameson’s discussion of conspiracy theories and our degraded attempts to make sense of the world in his investigation of Postmodernism:

Conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt -through the figuration of advanced technology – to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.

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

In the postmodern era, the sublime is no longer found in nature, but in the incomprehensible scale of the global economic and social system. We are awestruck and threatened by a reality that is too big to see, too complex to grasp.

This problem is allegorically represented in the bedroom scene from Labyrinth in which Jareth’s offers to give Sarah an idealised, but entirely fake reality, in-lieu of her quest. He presents her with her own bedroom, a space of familiarity, comfort, and safety. This tempting, simplified reality is offered in place of a complex, difficult, and frightening one. Instead of confronting the sublime challenge of the Labyrinth (the vast, incomprehensible system), Sarah is tempted to accept a small, manageable, and ultimately false reality.

Films like The Beekeeper offer a comforting fantasy: that the complex, faceless forces of global society can be identified, located, and ultimately destroyed by a single, determined individual. They provide a simplistic, yet satisfying, way to make sense of a world that otherwise feels beyond our control. Here we are given a choice between convenience or the heavy lifting associated with what Jameson describes as “cognitive mapping”.[2]

  1. From watching people like Jim Browning, these centres seem to be offshore for legal and financial reasons. ↩
  2. “An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of Postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object -the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of Postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.” Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson↩
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Today the products are, as it were, diffused throughout the space and time of the entertainment (or even news) segments, as part of that content, so that in a few well-publicized cases (most notably the series Dynasty) it is sometimes not clear when the narrative segment has ended and the commercial has begun (since the same actors appear in the commercial segment as well). Fredric Jameson ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson is one of those books that has been on my books to read list for many years. I had engaged with parts of it at university, but never read the book in whole.

The book charts the development of new cultural dominant. It began as a paper ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in 1982, with the publishing of an initial version in a book The Anti-Aesthetic in 1983, while a fuller version of the opening chapter was published in the New Left Review in 1984. The definitive book length version was published in 1991. This expanded on the initial essay, with chapters exploring ideology, video, architecture, language, space, theory, economics and film. Each chapter balances between a focus on the topic, while also responding to a particular text as an example, such as The Bonaventura Hotel with regards to space, Andy Warhol’s screen print Diamond Dust Shoes and E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime with regards to historicism.

On reflecting on Jameson’s legacy, Terry Eagleton suggested that he had read ‘more books than anyone else on the planet.’

There was nothing in the field of the humanities which didn’t claim his attention, from film and architecture to painting and science fiction, and he seemed to have read more books than anyone else on the planet.

Source: Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024 by Terry Eagleton

This is something that shows throughout Postmodernism, with a wide range of references. Building on this further, Dougal McNeill described Jameson as an ‘expansive mediator’ whose style had the ability to bring together and engage with a myriad of writers, thinkers, concepts and moments:

Those gifts were other writers, thinkers, concepts, moments. Jameson served as an expansive mediator, setting up texts that promised to be an encounter between a moment or text and a diverse set of thinkers. One would learn plenty along the way in the encounter, certainly, but, as time went on, what was there to return was his style itself.

Source: The Expansive Mediator: Fredric Jameson by Dougal McNeill

An example of such an encounter in Postmodernism was Jameson’s thinking around the periodisation, which was shaped by Ernest Mandel’s book Late Capitalism. Mandel theorised a third stage of capitalism (after market and monopoly) characterised by a fully internationalised, multinational system.

In his review for the Observer, Simon Reynolds touched on Jameson’s attempt to map the new cultural dominant as ‘systematising a condition hostile to systems’:

With this book Fredric Jameson sets himself a daunting task. His aim is to define the postmodern Zeitgeist – arguably a contradiction in terms, since one defining characteristic of the “postmodern condition” is its lack of a sense of itself as ‘zeitgeist’ or ‘era’. Jameson manfully seizes these and other contradictions with both hands: his project is to root a rootless culture in its economic context, to systematise a condition that is hostile to systems, and to historicise a phenomenon whose main effect is the waning of historical consciousness.

Source: RIP Fredric Jameson by Simon Reynolds

While in Live Theory: Fredric Jameson, Ian Buchanan breaks down this effort into five principle symptoms:

  1. A new ‘depthlessness’ of the image (‘waning of affect’).
  2. A weakening of historicity (pastiche).
  3. A whole new type of emotional ground tone (‘hysterical sublime’).
  4. A new relation to technology (geopolitical aesthetic).
  5. A mutation in built space (cognitive mapping).

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Personally, I was interested in Jameson’s discussion of the ‘weakening of historicity’, our loss of ability to genuinely connect with and represent the past. This manifests itself through two key cultural practices: pastiche and nostalgia. Jameson describes pastiche as ‘blank parody’, with a focus on the imitation of past, dead styles.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony.

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

While 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, often through film. 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

This shallowness of connection subsequently compromises our ability to genuinely connect. We are subsequently condemned to a life of seeking history.

If there is any realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.

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

Jameson’s exploration of all things postmodern felt different to introductory texts, such as Christopher Norris’ Deconstuction: Theory and Practice and Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, in that it provides a particular intervention with regards to what it is we talk about when we talk about Postmodernism, from a Marxist perspective. That is, someone interested in the historical and cultural construction of things, while also avoiding the ‘absurd generalizations or abstract sophistry’

This is probably Jameson’s greatest scholarly attribute: his ability to synthesize so many disparate intellectual and artistic strands into coherent meditations without resorting to absurd generalizations or abstract sophistry gives his insights the sharp edge that so many less ambitious critics lack.

Source: Book Review by Peter Joseph Kalliney

All in all, Jameson manages to absorb the tensions in his totalising framework.1

  1. There is a part of me that wonders how much I truly got from this text? I feel like that it is probably one of those texts that I could easily come back to again and again and find something new. This is something that I think Clay Risen captures well: “Mr. Jameson’s dense, intricate prose was not for the faint of heart, and even committed readers sometimes found it rough going: He twice won the annual Bad Writing Contest, presented by the journal Philosophy and Literature. But his frequent, enjoyable insights into pop culture made the effort worth it for some readers.” Source: Fredric Jameson, Critic Who Linked Literature to Capitalism, Dies at 90 – The New York Times by Clay Risen ↩︎

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Being a successful musician means playacting all of your past traumas, and retaining your old identities like a collection of ratty sock puppets. Steve Hyden ‘This Isn't Happening’

I entered This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century by Steve Hyden thinking that it would do a deep dive into Kid A, however it is better appreciated as a discussion of Radiohead with a focus on Kid A. As Brock Kingsley captures, this is not a critical breakdown of the album:

This Isn’t Happening lies somewhere between an exegesis on Kid A and a surface-level biography of Radiohead. Both angles are interesting; and, both suffer from lack of conviction. Hyden’s engagement with the primary text (i.e Kid A) is sparse. In the first chapter, he provides a track listing of the album written “like bros quoting the Dude at a Big Lebowski convention.” The description of the tracks include lines like “Evil synths,” or “A robot ballet on the moon,” and “The only song on Kid A you could possibly have sex to.” Irony doesn’t always make for good criticism, though.

Source: To Be Excited and Confused in “This Isn’t Happening” by Brock Kingsley

The book is split into three parts: before Kid A, During Kid A and After Kid A. Throughout, we are given an understanding of the band, the context around writing and producing the album, including that ‘Knives Out’ supposedly took 313 hours to record, as well as comparison with the music that existed around them, such as U2, Travis, Linken Park and the Strokes, and wider links with arts and culture, including Stanley Kubrick and Fight Club.

If you’re in a band that has spanned multiple decades, and even multiple centuries, you will have accumulated a past that stretches as far back as the future once seemed when you were young. Which is why, as you get older, you start to care less about where you’re going. Instead, you’re more interested in figuring out how you got where you are. You realize there are parts of yourself that you no longer recognize, or even remember once existed. The past is at once familiar and weirdly unfamiliar. If you delve deep enough, you might find that you don’t really know who you ever really were. You’ll also discover the ways in which you’ve never changed, even from the time you were a child, your very own Kid A.

Source: This Isn’t Happening by Steve Hyden

Although there are aspects where the text rambles a little, with the common example being Hyden’s own tracklist of Kid A Mnesia. Interesting considering a combined record has since been released. However, I think that the book is still a useful reference of music in the aughts:

This Isn’t Happening, like Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s recent oral history of New York’s rock scene during the first decade of the 2000s, ought to be on the shelf of anyone who listened to and loved the music of the aughts—even when that music wasn’t always shiny and happy.

Source: BOOK REVIEW: Steve Hyden’s “This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century” by Benjamin Shull

Personally, Kid A and Amnesiac served as the soundtrack for much of my university days. I also saw them at Rod Laver Arena during the Hail to the Thief tour. However, I think that the biggest legacy that Kid A left for me was that it was ok to put the guitar down and embrace other sounds.

I listened to this book via Spotify.

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The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? Jack Kerouac ‘On the Road’

I decided to reread Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road after comments on the Mapping the Zone podcast that Thomas Pynchon is more of a beat than a hippie.

Against the undeniable power of tradition, we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

Source: Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon

I first read On the Road while I was ‘on the road’ around South-East Asia after finishing university.[1] I picked up what I am confident was knock-off copy. I remember aspects, but feel like I overlooked a lot. Ironically, I am not sure that it was the right book to read on the road, dipping in and out of. If anything, I wonder if I should probably have been writing my own book maybe?

The novel involves real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. Sal Paradise stands in for Kerouac. The book recounts several journeys across America, often with or following Dean Moriarty.

Reflecting upon the book now, what stood out to me is the picture of place and culture that the book provides as Sal travels around the country. It was interesting to compare this with Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

I was also intrigued about the place of jazz music within the text and influence on the feel and flow of the text. Here I was left thinking about F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Thomas Pynchon’s writing.

While the first-person perspective had me thinking about the unreliable narrator within The Great Gatsby, as well as Robert Pirsig’s own road journey in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I think that what stands out with returning to a novel like On the Road is the impact of my own experiences within regards to books read and life lived. I listened to this book via Libby

Well, to be technical, I was on an Intrepid tour. ↩

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Compassion fatigue would be better termed a ‘failure of the imagination’ for what this numbness in the face of the intolerable suffering of others bespeaks is an inability to get a grip on the world situation today, as it really is. Cognitive maps are urgently needed to address this deficit. Ian Buchanan ‘Fredric Jameson: Live Theory’

Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan provides an introduction to the work of American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist, Fredric Jameson:

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)

The book starts with an exploration Jameson’s dialectical criticism. At the heart of this is the demystification of the present, and opening up of a space for thoughts of the future. It is a form of criticism that is unique as it critiques its own concepts and categories at the same time as it deploys them. Breaking away from the deconstructionists, Jameson creates a form of metacommentary that involves three arguments: (1) texts are already interpreted, (2) why then interpret, and (3) why is that one interpretation is more successful than another.

Buchanan then traces the origins of Jameson’s thinking and criticism through Jean-Paul Sartre’s battle between past and future, Theodor Adorno’s totalisation, Bertolt Brecht’s historical estrangement effect and Roland Barthes’ refunctioning of concepts.

With this foundation set, Buchanan then focuses his attention on unpacking two of Jameson’s seminal texts: The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

For Jameson, The Political Unconscious differs from New Historicism in that it is committed to an object-centered point of view focused on production. This is all unpacked using a ‘multi-layered interpretive apparatus.’

The ‘political unconscious’ is a complex, multi-layered interpretive apparatus – it can now be seen to rest on the following four propositions: all cultural texts are political allegories; allegory is a cultural means of symbolically working through real social and cultural anxieties; only those texts which touch a nerve of genuine social and cultural concern will be interesting to us; and history is the ambivalent master code that enables us to decode the psychically and politically significant elements of a text.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Discussing Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Buchanan provides history of Jameson’s effort to capture the new cultural dominant, beginning with a reading of a paper ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in 1982, the publishing of an initial version in a book The Anti-Aesthetic in 1983, the publishing of fuller version in New Left Review in 1984, and then the definitive book length version in 1991. Buchanan identifies five principal symptoms of postmodernity in Jameson’s work:

  1. A new ‘depthlessness’ of the image (‘waning of affect’).
  2. A weakening of historicity (pastiche).
  3. A whole new type of emotional ground tone (‘hysterical sublime’).
  4. A new relation to technology (geopolitical aesthetic).
  5. A mutation in built space (cognitive mapping).

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan then finishes his exploration of Jameson’s work with a discussion of the ideas of cognitive mapping and utopia as being the two concepts at the heart of so much of his work.

I came upon Ian Buchanan’s book while looking for secondary material after reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. One of the things that I enjoyed about Buchanan’s book was the way in which he placed Jameson’s texts in context. I also enjoyed the interview between Buchanan and Jameson at the end of the book, especially the question of how to teach and instruct:

IB: Your role as an intellectual is to teach and to instruct, so perhaps you can offer some advice on how to do this. FJ: Well, I guess I’m tempted to begin an answer to that question by repeating the Sartrean, Heideggerian, maybe even Lacanian idea that we’re never in the truth, we’re always in error, méconnaissance, various ideology, illusions of all kinds and that the truth is not a place that we can remain in, even though every so often we can have fitful glimpses of that truth and try to hold on to a moment of authenticity that’s con- stantly slipping away, imperilled on all sides, and necessarily condemned to disappear into ideology and reification. Human beings are always inauthentic but are occasionally capable of some moment of authen- ticity. I wanted to insist on the way in which a genuine dialectical thought really has that shock of repositioning ourselves for a brief moment in the truth or in authenticity, but only for a fitful moment. I’m not sure that this can be taught except by example – I don’t mean by my personal example, but by examples of moments in which all of a sudden we grasp this larger movement of the dialectic.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

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Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience

I decided to dive into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland after reading an article by Devin Thomas O’Shea I stumbled upon in the Lithub newsletter. O’Shea suggests that Pynchon’s exploration of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of the federal government provided lessons for today as Donald Trump and DOGE cut back on spending.

Vineland is apt for our moment since the plot is set in motion by Reagan’s slashing of the federal government, unwittingly severing millions of connections, setting in motion events beyond anyone’s control, resurrecting the suppressed.

Source: Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now by Devin Thomas O’Shea

Therefore, after finding an audiobook version on Audible, I dived in.

I feel like ‘reading’ may not quite be the right verb when it comes to Thomas Pynchon or even listening to an audiobook. I feel that my failure with Pynchon is that I dive in looking for ‘fun’, but quickly bump into ’hard fun‘. Responding to the dangers of ‘getting through’, Alan Jacobs reflects upon these two modes of reading.

There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.

But when you’re reading for fun, don’t worry about “getting more from a book.” Just do whatever you most enjoy.

Source: Getting Through by Alan Jacobs

I would love to sit down with the book and a pencil and read away, but fear I would never get anywhere that way, so I compromise with listening and annotating an ebook as I go.

I sometimes feel like listening can be akin to driving through a country town at 80km per hour. Yes you have been there and you can recall the main attractions, but it is not the same stopping and spending time walking the streets. To counter this, I listened to the Mapping the Zone podcast alongside listening to Vineland. The podcast focuses on a slow readings of Pynchon’s novels, one section at a time. Each episode breaks things down, exploring key ideas, quotes and Pynchon moments, something akin to literature circles.

I had previously ‘read’ .

Some critic Vineland for being overtly political and polemical, some for not taking itself seriously enough to be leftist literature. Always with so much going on, I wonder if Pynchon’s fiction can be considered what Roland Barthes’ described as ’writerly’ and always open to vastly divergent interpretations. As John Walters suggests in his review of Vineland:

I approach the novels of Thomas Pynchon with trepidation, knowing that I’m only going to comprehend and appreciate a portion of their mysteries and treasures.

Source: Book Review: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon by John Walters

In an attempt to untangle the various threads, Dan Geddes highlights five themes that run through Vineland:

  • Infiltrating resistance
  • State repression
  • The war on drugs and the erosion of liberties
  • The tube
  • Productive and non-productive work

Throughout, Geddes suggests that Pynchon creates a picture of where we are and where we are going:

Pynchon is a precise chronicler of 1980s America. In less than 400 pages, Pynchon connects situations from 1980s Northern California, and follows family links back to 1940s Southern California, covering the counterculture, federal law enforcement, the military, the film industry, and links it to the American and Japanese mafia, martial arts. Pynchon is at his very strongest in his historical flashbacks, where he can merge history with his own fabrications. He does it all believably, with rich detail, and with his patented style of humor, which is to describe precisely, and to bear merciless witness to violence and artificiality of the world. There is no more able fictional chronicler of where we are and where we are going.

Source: Pynchon’s Vineland: The War on Drugs and the Coming Police-State by Dan Geddes

Also alluding to the hear and now, Andrew Gordon argues that Vineland touches on the cultural contested terrain associated with the sixties. It provides a ‘countermyth to the official stories’.

According to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, “history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory” (“False Documents” 25). Vineland is such a superhistory; it provides a countermyth to pose against the official stories, writing our times more truly through the play of imagination. In all his fiction, Pynchon has helped to create and to recreate our history.

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon by Andrew Gordon

Towards the end of the novel, Pynchon himself uses a quote from Emerson to capture this sense of recreating of history:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience quoted in Vineland

I was intrigued with the argument that Vineland was described as ‘Pynchon-lite’. Although it is not Gravity’s Rainbow, it still offers so much. What feels different is the depth and breadth of characters. The comparison that came up again and again on the Mapping the Zone podcast was with David Lynch and movies like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. There is always something deeper, darker, murkier, lying just beneath the surface. Things are never as they seem.

Along with the comparison between DOGE and Reaganomics, I was left reflecting upon the focus on the Tube addiction explored throughout the novel and was left thinking about the way in which the place of media has only increased with the advent of tablets, streaming platforms and social media. I feel that the current debates are not just a continuation, but an acceleration of the same anxieties that fueled Vineland.

In the end, I was left wondering what Pynchon would look like in an Australian context? And who are the Australian authors who best capture ‘where we are and where we are going’?

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A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t. Michel Faber ‘Listen’

We recently returned from a road trip. In the past I would play one of my playlists of 80’s music or queue up albums. I always felt that if I am driving, then I am in control of the music.[1] This time around though I tasked my daughter with creating a playlist for the drive. As the youngest, like a bower bird, she is very observant of everyone else’s tastes and likes. It also gave her something practical to do to help out with the trip. Therefore, over a few days she progressively curated a playlist.

One of the interesting consequences of this was the way that different tracks bled into each other. It was like when you mix and match different foods, where one influences the other. On the one hand this process can normalise or flatten tracks, making them seem less unique and individual. However, it also has the effect of bringing certain aspects out of songs that may have been missed on previous listens.

I particularly noticed this with the Twinkle Digitz tracks that were added and how they contrasted with the other tracks. Taylor Swift’s ‘Anti-Hero’ played after ‘Autonomous Thomas’, highlighting the rhythmic backbone of both tracks, while ‘Dancing in My Dreams’ after Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Bed Chem’, touched on the overlapping melodies, where you never quite know which is the true voice you are supposed to be listening to.[2] What I found interesting was the way in which listening to songs in a different light can give a song new life. This had me wondering about whether there are in fact different stages in listening to music?

Thinking about stages, I wondered if the structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy might be a useful model to build upon. The Solo Taxonomy is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students’ understanding of subjects:

  • Pre-structural – The task is not attacked appropriately; the student hasn’t really understood the point and uses too simple a way of going about it. Students in the pre-structural stage of understanding usually respond to questions with irrelevant comments.
  • Uni-structural – The student’s response only focuses on one relevant aspect. Students in the uni-structural stage of understanding usually give slightly relevant but vague answers that lack depth.
  • Multi-structural – The student’s response focuses on several relevant aspects but they are treated independently and additively. Assessment of this level is primarily quantitative. Students in the multi-structural stage may know the concept in tidbits but don’t know how to present or explain it.
  • Relational – The different aspects have become integrated into a coherent whole. This level is what is normally meant by an adequate understanding of some topic. At the relational stage, students can identify various patterns & view a topic from distinct perspectives.
  • Extended abstract – The previous integrated whole may be conceptualised at a higher level of abstraction and generalised to a new topic or area. At this stage, students may apply the classroom concepts in real life.

Source: Wikipedia

With the SOLO Taxonomy in mind, here is my attempt to map a set of stages associated with listening to music:

  1. Discover new music. This might be serendipitously, via an algorithm or through a playlist.
  2. Listen to new music to build a deeper appreciation. This is where something spikes our attention and we actively return to it. Here I am reminded of Ed Droste’s argument that it usually takes five listens to form a judgment on a record. (And for the tracks of an album to all blend into each other?)
  3. Make connections and comparisons. Having formed some sort of judgment, this stage involves hearing the music in a wider context, making connections with other songs and artists, categorising it, and possibly revising the initial judgment based on new inputs.
  4. Actively explore further ideas. This involves actively making further connections and comparisons beyond the music in question. If it is a new artist, it might be going into the back catalogue or exploring other work by the same producer. It might also involve secondary material, such as interviews or reviews.
  5. Being inspired and making anew. This last step involves being inspired by the music to write something new, curate a list, remix the track.

Having thought through all of this, I am left wondering if all music can magically seem ‘new’ for some in that it never ceases to step beyond background sound, but unconsciously gets consumed over time to be something that we just know, without having actively sort it out? This is what Liz Pelly touches on in her book Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, where she talks about music as being in competition with silence:

Choosing the music that soundtracks our lives can be part of how we process who we are. But Spotify’s ideal mode of lean-back listening feels different, less an act of choosing than testing one’s tolerance, how much one prefers the sound of “Deep Focus” or “Brain Food” to nothing at all. It follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration. Plus, passively soundtracking your everyday moments through song is not the only reason people listen, and the escalation of this single listening mode in service of boosting engagement is a disservice to artists, listeners, and music as an art form; it disregards the many different reasons why someone might listen to music.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

I am also aware that not everyone loves music. This is something Michel Faber touches on in his book Listen – On Music, Sound and Us:

A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t.

Source: Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber

Some people even actively dislike music, having congenital amusia, where, as Faber explains, they simply ‘don’t get on with music’.

It is interesting to think about all this alongside the discussions around reading and attention. Kevin Munger has written about the way in which our indulgence of shortform reading has shortened our context window.

By abandoning the technology of longform reading and writing, we are shortening our context windows and thus weakening our capacity for attention. At the same time, LLMs advance by expanding their context windows and refining their capacity for attention (in the form of some hideously high-dimensional vector of weights).
Attention is all we need — and the lesson of media ecology is that it doesn’t come easy.

Source: Attention Is All You Need by Kevin Munger

I wonder if the same can be said for music? Has our indulgence of background music[3] reduced our ability to listen and appreciate? What impact will this have on music with the growing presence of AI to the mix? As Faber’s book captures, this is a complex question.

  1. I have not literally glued the dial onto Gold 104.3, “only the shit you love“, as one relative did when I was growing up. ↩
  2. I think that the difference is that Twinkle Digitz often doubles down on the parts, whereas Carpenter seems to buff all edges. ↩
  3. While writing this, I am listening to Aphex Twin’s Supreme playlist. ↩On