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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
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When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. Jean-Paul Sartre ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’

A statement was made at work recently that “sometimes it is about getting things done.” Working in a large organisation, it can be easy to get bogged down in bureaucracy with things becoming stalled. Therefore, I applauded the response, for who does not want to get things done? When I was in a school if something needed to get done, most of the time it was in your control to just get it done. However, in a central organisation, there are a lot more steps to follow and stakeholders to consult, subsequently making getting things done that much more challenging. It was therefore interesting to reflect upon why getting things done may not actually be about getting things done.

For example, what is the done in the current work being done by Donald Trump and his administration to ‘get things done’? This work has included the slashing of federal spending, crackdown on immigration, reversal of policies around gender identity and a change in how it addresses international affairs. However, for me, the ‘thing done’ that has stood out was his increase in tariffs across the board. According to Trump, “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” This was all until the medicine stopped working, so a brake was pulled. Interestingly, one of consequences of this is that there is a lot more talk about tariffs and positives that they can serve. However, it could be argued that, the aura around how Trump rolled out his changes has dented the political appetite. In addition to this, it would seem that the tariffs are now blocked by the court. I wonder if in this case if the ‘thing done’ is not actually the tariffs at all, but in fact a change in conversation around trade and monetary policy? If this is so, could there have been a different approach to getting it done? I guess this is one of the challenges that the Australian government has around discussions associated with tax reforms?

Sometimes ‘getting things done’ is actually getting things done at the expense of others. I have always been intrigued when in AFL, forwards are moved into the centre bounce. Their baulking presence always look hard to match-up on. However, putting them in the centre comes at a cost, for they are no longer in his usual position in the forward line. It is a Catch-22. They might win it out of the centre, but who do they kick it to? Whereas if they do not move into the centre then the team may not win the ball out of the centre, therefore they could not kick it to them in the forward line. The reality is that you cannot be everywhere all at once. I think that this is a lesson for getting things done, it is not always possible to address all the steps and stakeholders along the way sufficiently. Therefore, getting things done is often about not getting other things done in return.

In addition to not getting things done, sometimes getting things done can involve skipping steps to speed up the process. I have lost count of the times when building flatpack kits, there were times when I overlooked a foundational step. I either missed it entirely or did not properly grasp its significance at the time, which later proved to be a costly oversight. This highlights how easily we can deprioritise steps or miss seemingly innocuous details in the push to “get things done,” only to find ourselves having to backtrack. The time spent course-correcting for such omissions—be it a forgotten field or an unaddressed policy/team impact—frequently far exceeds the original task’s duration.

Another way of questioning ‘getting things done’ is mistaking the complex as merely complicated. Dave Cormier explores the difference between the two in regards to education change.

We are confronted by the complicated/complex division everyday in education. Do I want to know if a medical students has remembered the nine steps of a process of inquiry to work with a patient or do I want to know if they built a good raport? How often do we choose the thing that is easier to measure… simply because we can verify that our grading is ‘fair’. How often do we get caught in conversations around how ‘rigourous’ an assessment is when what we really mean is ‘how easy is it to defend to a parent who’s going to complain about a child’s grade’.

Source: Making Change in Education II – Complexity vs. Lean Six Sigma (learning isn’t like money) by Dave Cormier

Sometimes what is done is thought to be doing more than it actually is.

On the flipside, when the thing done is not completed in the appropriate way, the complex can be construed as complicated. I have spent a lot of time trying to get things done, often on the side. Many of these things were outside of my ’capacity‘, they were itches on the side that I would work on, proofs of concept, improvements to current processes that worked, but could work better. The irony with so many of these solutions is that although they ‘got things done’, creating something without clear alternatives, as they were not done in an official capacity, they were often treated as illegitimate and open to critique. Here I am reminded of the concept of rouge or guerilla rewilding where things are done in spite of processes:

Guerilla rewilding is the act of introducing native animals to an area without the permission of a regulatory body such as a state environment department.

There have been examples of this overseas — there’s the infamous “beaver bomber” of Belgium, lynxes being released into the Scottish Highlands, and the suspicious re-emergence of the UK’s native wild boars.

There’s usually a libertarian or anti-red-tape element to the practice; people fed up with regulators’ often risk-averse approach to restoring nature or, in this case, saving threatened and endangered species.

Source: Unapproved rewilding stirs debate over ethics and animal welfare by Angela Heathcote

Although something is done, there are questions and concerns that may not have been considered in he process.

In the end, getting it done comes in many shapes and sizes. So when someone says we need to get something done, it can be important to go beyond the supposed common sense to ask the question what are we talking about when we talk about getting things done.

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Perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs. Ed Yong ‘An Immense World’

I think I will always remember Ed Yong as the voice who, along with Norman Swan, helped keep me informed in regards to COVID. I therefore was initially intrigued when I came upon An Immense World and found that it was in fact not about the pandemic.

At the heart of An Immense World is Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of ‘unwelt’. The unwelt is the unique, species-specific sensory bubble that every animal inhabits, the “slice of reality I can perceive.”[1]

Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

Throughout, Yong explores the concept through chapters on surface vibrations, smells and tastes; light; color; pain; heat; contact and flow; sound; echoes; electric fields; and magnetic fields. However, Yong is also keen to highlight that the concept of unwelt is more complicated than any single sense.

An animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in concert. If the sense organs acted alone, nothing would make sense. Throughout this book, we have explored the senses as separate parts. But to truly understand them, we need to think about them as part of a unified whole.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

All in all, Yong’s writing balances between “scientific rigor and personal awe.” [2] Laura Miller captures it best, calling the book a “catalog of wonders.”

One of the things that really stood out for me while reading An Immense World was the limit to what we can actually know. Whether it be the constraints of science or appreciation of differences. This is something that Michel Faber touches upon in his exploration of animals and music in Listen.[3] However, one of the biggest challenges is anthropomorphism and actually forgetting about others.

Perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

At its heart, An Immense World is about humility and serves as a corrective to the presumptions of human beings.

  1. Source: Ed Yong unlocks the secret world of animal senses – ABC listen ↩
  2. “In this book that follows on from 2018’s I Contain Multitudes, Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.” Source: ‘An Immense World’ dives deep into the umwelt of animals by Barbara J. King ↩
  3. “Cognitive neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel explains that when we humans listen to music, we predict where the next beat will be, and get pleasure either from our guesses being correct or from the rhythm teasingly wrong-footing us with unexpected syncopations. Apes just don’t get that.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
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Turn after turn they encouraged it. In China, they specifically built the software to order. In America, they put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election. And in Myanmar, they enabled posts that led to horrific sexual violence and genocide. A lethal carelessness. Sarah Wynn-Williams ‘Careless People’

Careless People spans Wynn-Willliams time at Facebook, beginning with her hire in 2011 as a ‘diplomat’ responsible for guiding the rules on data and content, until her sacking in 2017 on the back of accusations of misconduct leveled against Joel Kaplan. The book covers perspectives on a number of episodes, including the failure of internet.org, the role served by the platform in the promoting violence against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the push to get into China even if that meant supporting state surveillance, the use of image-based data associated with teens to target them, and the role the platform served in helping bring Donald Trump to victory in 2016.

The world described felt like it was somewhere between the absurdity of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the film Devil Wears Prada. Cartoon pictures to describe a cartoon world? Some of the particular stories recounted included Mark Zuckerberg’s proposal to provide internet for refugees, until someone realised that refugees do not have any money to pay, being invited to bed by Sheryl Sandberg, trying to concoct a meeting between Xi Jinping and Mark Zuckerberg, writing an email in the midst of giving birth, and being described as not responsive during maternity leave during which time Wynn-Williams’ had an amniotic embolism and was in a coma.

The further the book went on the more that it felt like Wynn-William possibly trying to get on the right side of history. Not everyone jets around with Sandburg and Zuckerberg, right? This is something that Tom MacWright touches on in his review:

Katie Harbath second-guesses Wynn-Williams’s reports of sexual harassment and expects Sarah to acknowledge “the incredible contributions of her peers” in her work – like the take-home lesson of this book is that Wynn-Williams is so great at her job, not that it’s an account of the evil at the top. Another former Facebook employee, Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, wrote that Wynn-Williams was complicit, which is something the author never denies.

Source: Careless People by Tom MacWright

I am not exactly sure what I expected from Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her time as director of global public policy at Facebook. Like Cory Doctorow, I think I was drawn to it by the fact that they tried to have it banned.

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:

So I’ve got something to thank Meta’s lawyers for, because it’s a great book!

Source: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Meta claimed that the book is ‘false and defamatory’:

The ruling says that Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by the publisher.

A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, said in a post on Threads: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published”.

Source: Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee by Guardian

I could not help see the irony of this with Wynn-Williams’ account about Sheryl Sandberg and her belief in people saying things because you want them to be true:

Sheryl, who advocates for women in the workplace day after day, in bestselling books, TED talks, and panels around the world? I remember her once writing in a message,

I always believe that when companies and people have to say things over and over it is because they want them to be true but they are not. When I was at McKinsey, they always said they were “non-hierarchical” because they were so hierarchical. Google is “not political.” One of our favorite candidates who almost joined us was “highly ethical.”

Source: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

All in all, Careless People is a sadly humorous book that pulled back the curtain on the façade.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

Source: A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top by Jennifer Szalai

It would have been more enjoyable if it were not so serious.

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Guilt is appropriate for one part of our legacy, though, What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done. We've resisted listening to First Nations people. We go on rejecting ideas that they tell us will offer a way forward. We might tell ourselves that we don't need to feel guilt for the past. But we have to accept that we're guilty for what we're doing -- or failing to do - in the present Kate Grenville ‘Unsettled’

With Unsettled, Kate Grenville traces her family history, while also reflecting on her own experience of growing up and understanding the land. She goes on a pilgrimage, beginning at Wiseman’s Ferry and following the footsteps of her forbears as they progressively moved north across several generations to Guyra in the New England region. The book explores the language we use, the place of landscape, the wider history of colonial settlement, and those silent aspects that haunt us.

Throughout Grenville’s journey, there is a continued effort to grapple with the language used and what it can tell us. Wiseman “took up the land”, rather than took the land from the indigenous people, digging up the yam daisies and planting corn. Mogo Creek means “stone axe”, however the fact that the stones used were brought in and traded left silent. As children, it was common to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’, but not settlers and aborigines? Is the use of indigenous names for places an example of appropriation or acknowledgement? Or is it about authenticating ourselves with the original owners?

Extending upon the use of language, Grenville explores the landscape that she travels through on her journey. She talks about the way in which you hear things when you stop. How the landscape was how it was because indigenous people made it that way. For the indigenous, landscape is an embodiment of who a person is, representing a different kind of love.

Unsettled serves as much as a general history of Colonial Australia, with Grenville discussing the notion of crown land, squatters and selectors, segregated reserves, terra nullius, and the lack of a treaty.

Here in Australia, we don’t have anything that can serve us as that common starting point. No treaty was ever made. There was no acknowledgement of First Nations. There was no negotiating. All that’s ever been offered is charity, to be given or withheld as non-indigenous Australians see fit. Which is why centuries after the British landed, we’re still trying to work out how to be here.

Source: Unsettled by Kate Grenville

Extending upon this discussion, Grenville reflects upon the failure of the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum. She argues that guilt is not about what was done in the past, but what we continue to do in the present.

Going beyond the history, Grenville suggests that sometimes what stands out is what is left unsaid, what is unrecorded, what is left off colonial memorials, or out of diaries and newspapers. Those things haunt. She gives the example of an account at Wiseman’s Ferry where some men rescued a cricket ball from a snake. Grenville suggests that this is highly improbable and more an example of propaganda. These stories instead serve as a tin-opener to the can of worms of the past. The particular question that haunts Grenville is whether anyone would actually write down and record a massacre of people belonging to the land? Although there were people with a moral crisis, they just allowed it to be bent.

In the end, Unsettled differs from Grenville’s fiction, such as The Secret River, which seek to go beyond the history to some bigger truth, because at their heart, a story is a lie. Although we might wonder about how our ancestors might have felt, there is a danger in imitating reality. There is also a danger of stumbling on someone else’s land through the naïve act of imagination. Instead, Unsettled seeks to suspend resolution, sit with history, with the question, to be ‘conscious of the air’, without necessarily settling on a particular truth.

It was interesting to think about Unsettled alongside Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, a book which explores the way the Australian landscape was not just found, but actively made through the words and actions of its colonisers. It was also intriguing to read this book alongside Helen Garner’s The Season and David Marr’s Killing for Country. Each book feels like a narratives that finds is way through writing.

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There are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude. Tim Winton ‘Juice’

Juice by Tim Winton is a a dystopian cli-fi novel.[1] It is set in a stark, climate-ravaged future Australia. The story begins with an unnamed man and a young, silent girl traversing a desolate landscape in a scavenger rig. Their search for refuge leads them to an abandoned mine, where they are captured at crossbow point by a solitary, wary survivor.

Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, the narrator begins to recount his life story to his captor in an effort to survive. His story reveals a childhood spent in a community on the north coast forced to live increasingly underground to escape the heat of the sun. He describes a world where the consequences of past environmental destruction are a brutal daily reality. This is epitomised in the story about the orange:

She took the orange and pulled out her clasp knife. She set the fruit on its axis and passed the blade around the rind. Not quite at the middle, but a third of the way down. She turned it until the cut met itself. Then she set the knife a little lower and repeated the procedure. When she was finished, a curl of pithy rind came away and a whole band around the middle of the orange was naked.
She put the fruit in my hand.
That’s how the world is, she said.
I don’t get it.
Leave it here, on the bench. Come back tomorrow and look at it. And the day after that. That’s the world, how it is. Most people know this. But not many understand why.
So, what’s the answer?
That’s for another time. Geography before history.
Why can’t you say?
Everything in its time and season.
Talk like this unsettled me, but I was an obedient son. I left the orange where it was. Next morning, and several days thereafter, I returned to it and saw how the wounded orange scoured and struggled to heal itself.
Whenever my mother saw me examining it, her expression was impassive. On the third day, as she passed, she picked up the orange and dug the ragged nail of her index finger into the very centre of the sphere.
What’s this part? Of the world, not the orange.
The equator, I said.
Correct.
Then she set her thumb against the lower band of skin.
See this? This is us. Just north of —
Capricorn, I said.
Yes, the Tropic of Capricorn. But all this, she said, fingering the dry band that ran around the middle, people used to live there – millions and millions of them. But not anymore. Only here. And here. Where there’s still skin. North of Cancer, south of Capricorn.
That’s where people are?
That’s how the world is.

Source: Juice by Tim Winton

As he grows, the narrator is drawn into a clandestine organisation known as the Service. This group is dedicated to hunting down the descendants of those they hold responsible for the global environmental collapse. The bulk of the narrative follows the narrator’s dangerous double life as an operative for the Service, carrying out violent missions while trying to maintain a semblance of normal family life with his mother, wife and daughter.

Juice feels like a departure from Winton’s usual fiction. I have read a few Tim Winton books over the years, including Cloudsteet, Blueback and Dirt Music. Whether it be the sparse landscape, the ever present ocean and contrast between city and country, each novel in their own way is clearly set in Western Australia.[2] Although exploring a Sydney which is surrounded by a wall, the Republic of Utah, the Arctic swamp and the Persian Gulf, Juice too is still predominantly set in Western Australia, however 200 years or so in the future. This is an uncanny landscape that has been ravaged by climate change.[3] Although weather has a place in other novels, in Juice the impact is turned up to 11. There are glimpses of the past in the pages, but gone are the animals, people and habitat. Even the coral has even been mined to support farming. With all this said, Juice is still a coming-of-age novel, so not everything is different.

As a story, for me it sits somewhere in-between Cormac McCarthy’s spare description of a ruined world presented in The Road and Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of people’s response to the climate crisis in The Ministry for the Future. Unlike McCarthy’s world, which feels like there has been a particular event (or maybe that was just the film influencing me), Juice makes clear that the situation is in response to the climate. While The Service reminded me of Robinson’s terrorist group Children of Kali, who grew out of a devastating heatwave in India that killed millions.

The novel serves as something of a call to arms. However, unlike Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, it is not necessarily clear what the particular call is. It feels like it is less about preaching and more about asking questions and living with the ambiguity.

He has written this book to make people think about the trajectory that the world is on and the interests that are driving us down that road, but not necessarily what they can do about it. Because it is likely that even Winton would agree that while the response he imagines in Juice – taking violent revenge on those responsible for the state we are in – may be one some readers might wish for, it is not one they can really do anything with.

Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman

In some ways Juice is also a novel hope. This hope isn’t a naïve optimism for a perfect future. Instead, it’s more grounded in the enduring capacity for human connection, resilience, and the potential for moral courage even in the face of despair.

The ‘juice’ of the title is thus presented not only as a colloquial term for the energy produced by oil companies – the companies had ‘every sort of juice. The stuff that drove engines, trade, empire’ – but also the energy that drives the hero’s motivation and resilience, his ‘moral courage’, as the author described it in a recent interview. ‘It takes a lot of juice to perform,’ his fictional counterpart observes.

Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton

This hope actually extends beyond ‘humans’ to the accommodate androids as a means of survival.

Overall, Juice is an important read. As with so much of Winton’s writing, it provides a means of wondering and imagining.[4] In the case of Juice, this is wondering and imagining about the possible future we are entering.

The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they’ll deceive themselves.
All people?
All the ones I’ve known. Everything you read in the sagas.
Even now?
Especially now. Like I said, there are lots of things we don’t know. Stuff that’s obscure. Even hidden from us. But there’s plenty we prefer not to know. Things we don’t dare remember. Sometimes that’s a mercy. Other times it’s a form of servitude.

Source: Juice by Tim Winton

Side note: I listened to David Field’s reading of the text. Although, I could not shake my memory of ’hungry thirty’ throughout.

  1. “Tim Winton is far from the first author to write post-climate-change fiction. For those coming to this from the science fiction side, the world-building is a bit lacking. The narrator’s mission never really makes a lot of sense. Better examples, for those interested in the genre, are Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age, and Clare Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus.” Source: Tim Winton Juice Reviewed by Robert Goodman ↩
  2. It sometimes feels like Winton is almost sponsored by the Western Australian government? ↩
  3. It would be interesting to have a book set 200 years in the past, when the British first colonised? ↩
  4. “In a 2013 interview, Winton remarked that ‘fiction isn’t a means of persuasion. Fiction doesn’t have answers. It’s a means of wondering, of imagining.’ Although the way it envisages climate catastrophe is thought-provoking, it is ultimately this creative projection of ‘wondering’ and uncertainty that makes Juice a profound as well as an enthralling novel.” Source: Paul Giles reviews ‘Juice’ by Tim Winton ↩
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Nostalgia can grow on most surfaces, but some surfaces are more hospitable than others. Michel Faber ‘Listen’

Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber is a meditation on what it is we talk about when we talk about listening to music:

This is a book about music, and about the people who listen to it – your friends, your neighbours, me and you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

It is made up of a number of sections, each containing a bricolage of reviews, online comments, interviews and Faber’s own experiences, to address a particular idea. These sections often read as much as self-contained essays, but as a whole, they bleed into each other to create an intriguing exploration.[1] Although the book is not intended to be Faber’s reflection on music, his style of writing cannot help being personal. This feels something akin to what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’, where layers of meaning and context are meticulously woven into the narrative.

As a book, Listen explores a number of questions. For example, what is it that we are actually hearing? How does this differ to what animals hear? What is the actual place and purpose of music? For adults? For children? Emotionally? As an accessory? As a commodity? Does listening to and engaging with music actually make children smarter? What are the stories we tell and are told through music? Who tells these stories and why is so much music in English? When is music just noise? Is Nickleback’s music really that bad? Is it still ok to listen to Morrissey? We are going to listen to Taylor Swift forever, right? How does music play out in the brain? What does it mean to be a fan? What is the place of music reviews? Is classical music just a fancy orchestral cover band? What is the place of music in space? What are the appropriate precautions to take when listening? Vinyl is better, right? Can everyone really sing? Or is it okay to fake it with a backing track? However, more often than not, these questions are left ambiguously unanswered with the reader simply left to dwell on things. Almost like a warning, Faber states in the beginning that he is here to “change your mind about your mind”.[2]

By its meandering nature, Listen is one of those books that sows many seeds. Some of the tidbits that took are that: “the world is intrinsically silent.”[3] “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do.”[4] “The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise.”[5] Classical music is “a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.”[6] “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get.”[7] “The only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.”[8] “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more.”[9]

Just as a black hole is defined by what is not there, but should be, Faber’s taste and preferences are glimpsed at or inferred throughout. There are times when I am really drawn into Faber’s discussion of his love of Coil’s Astral Disaster, his father’s collection of schlager or Jane Tabor’s ‘A Proper Sort of Gardener’. However, these threads are a distraction from what this book is really about and that is ‘you’ as the reader. As he states in the introduction:

Art does not ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. It holds a mirror up to you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

This made me wonder if Listen was actually written in the margins of another abandoned book?

In a discussion of the track ‘Luminous Beings’ on the Song Exploder podcast, Jon Hopkins spoke about his process of creating something in order to destroy it:

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)

I wondered about this idea while reading Michel Faber’s book Listen and the autobiographical material.

In the introduction, Faber explains that this book is one that he always wanted to write. However, while reading it I was left wondering exactly what the initial idea for the book was? Faber states that the purpose of the book is to ‘perceive your stuff differently’.[10] However, like Hopkins’ initial idea, I wondered if there was an initial autobiographical ode to music which the book actually deconstructs, a reflection similar to say Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, that was destroyed to write this story.

Listen covers so much territory. The catch is that it often demands of the reader to stop and consider.[11] I just wonder how many readers would actually dedicate the time to properly engage with it? Interestingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Faber explains that the original script was much longer.[12]

All in all, I am glad I stumbled upon Listen on shelf of my local library, while randomly perusing while my daughter was looking for books. It is definitely a book that I feel has changed my mind about music and listening and helped appreciate the small things.

  1. “The author, writing with refreshing openness and stylishness, proceeds exactly down that path, tackling all manner of listening-related subjects, from volume to genre to atonality to classical music to white bias. The book is a heady brew of energetic essays, each one enjoyable, although it can be difficult to discern a throughline of thought or even, sometimes, the relevance of a given essay to the book’s expressed central aims.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber [6/10] – Read Listen Watch by Andres Kabel ↩
  2. “Reading this book will change the way you listen. I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  3. “The world is intrinsically silent. When trees fall or bombs explode or violinists pluck pizzicato, all that happens is that the surrounding air is disturbed in various ways. Atmosphere is displaced. This displaced atmosphere is what enters our ears, and we do the rest. Our ears and brains are musical instruments. To be precise: our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing. The world is playing us.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  4. “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do. An adult is capable of phrases like ‘sinister, stalking guitar riff’, which sounds cleverer and more definitive than ‘Argh! Vampires!’ But is it? Whenever we find ourselves feeling superior to a child who is expressing their naïve opinion of what music is about, we should ask ourselves: What is it about my own response that’s so much better than this child’s?” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  5. “The symbolic resonance is clear: avant-garde art will swamp us if given half a chance. Parochial art which harks back to a bygone era is a bastion against the dangerous incomers. The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise. We don’t want any of those noisy harbingers coming over here, stealing our time and violating our brain cells.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  6. “Rather than feeling like a tribute band, it almost feels like a séance to me. I mean, Beethoven couldn’t have played a string quartet, so it’s not as if he was able to make it exist; he didn’t do it. You’re enabling his concept to come to life. So I always think of it more as a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  7. “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get. Almost inevitably, there will already be some unwanted pops, clicks and rustles, because molten polyvinyl chloride is prone to manufacturing defects – rogue bubbles, irregularities in the heating and cooling phases, or impurities in the vinyl itself. Each additional play will degrade the surface a little more.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  8. “I also respect that some people enjoy the sound of vinyl more than they enjoy the sound of digital. Music happens in the brain, not in some abstract realm of graphs and meters. If the ‘warmth’ of vinyl’s groove rumble makes you deeply happy, you are more blessed than a CD nerd who is deeply dissatisfied by the kilohertz parameters of the 1995 German remaster compared to the 2003 Japan-only remaster that he can’t get hold of but has read about in a hi-fi magazine. … keep in mind: the only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  9. “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more. Having once felt well-informed and connected, you will feel yourself growing increasingly ignorant and out-of-touch. More and more of the new music you wish to understand will be made by, and for, minds that don’t work like yours. Music which speaks to formative experiences that didn’t form you, music which riffs on cultural allusions that elude you, music which has no use for all the things you’re an expert on. The future is here and you’re not part of it.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  10. “Many books about music are a glorified display of the stuff the author owns, which he (it usually is a he) thinks you should own too.† It’s not the aim of this book to make you own more stuff. The aim is to help you perceive your stuff differently.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  11. Personally, I had to read it twice to really take it all in. Even then, I feel I could easily have gone back and read it all over again. ↩
  12. It would seem that Faber listened to his editors and trimmed it back. Although I wonder if there is a means of publishing these pieces left on the chopping board elsewhere, in a blog or something, similar to Andrew Stafford’s ‘Notes from Pig City’? Or maybe I just need to read it a third time. ↩
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If you tell the truth – and I always do – you shame the devil. Miriam Margolyes ‘This Much Is True’

I came to Miriam Margolyes’ memoir This Much is True for the humour and Margolyes’ reading of the book. However, I got so much more.

I’m quite sure you picked this book up hoping I’d make you laugh. That’s what I seem to have become best known for. I lack the filter others possess and out of my potty mouth pop filthy sexual anecdotes, verbal and physical flatulence on a grand scale. I swear, I fart, I draw attention to things best left unremarked – and it seems it’s made me popular. Please don’t think I’m unaware of my duty to both entertain and shock you, but I won’t allow my book to be just dirty talk. Let me tell you the truth about myself, too.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

As you would expect, as an autobiography, it covers the usual backstory, whether it be Margolyes’ family’s Jewish heritage, upbringing in Oxford, education at Newnham College, Cambridge University, and life beyond, including properties in England, Italy and Australia. She also unpacks her diverse career, working her way through radio, voiceovers, drama, Hollywood and now documentaries.

Gifted with so much confidence, everything is placed on the page. This includes recounting the recording of a soft-porn tape Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook and doing black face, twice.

If you tell the truth – and I always do – you shame the devil.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

One of the things that is common with celebrity autobiographies is the incessant name dropping, such as meeting both Queen Elizabeth and Mother Teresa. However, Margolyes takes name dropping to the next level. She has so many friends, with 11,833 names in her phone.

Most people like to pounce on an empty bench, but I long for human communion – that to me is Holy Communion. I love talking to people, and asking them questions. They’re giving me a present of their stories. Talking, listening, learning what it’s like to look through the eyes of another soul.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

On the flip side of this, she also calls out those who are not ‘friends’.

Throughout, Margolyes provides an insight into the challenges associated with being a working actor (or actress). For example, she recounts the story of how they were going to replace Snape after Alan Rickman challenged the contract.

The final, very long, book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was being filmed in two parts. Warner Bros decided that both parts would be filmed together – and therefore he was only due one fee. His gifted agent, Paul Lyon-Maris, pointed out that if the films were separately released, Warner Bros would receive two incomes. Therefore, Alan Rickman should also get two fees for appearing in both parts. Warner Bros refused and said they would have to recast. Recast Snape? Alan smiled. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. The day before shooting was due to start on part two, they agreed to pay Alan both fees. You do wonder sometimes about the mental acuity of Hollywood moguls.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Like Sam Neill, Margolyes did not attend drama school. She is therefore happy to celebrate the various people who have helped guide her along the way.

How much of it is training, how much of it is innate? A mixture of both. I have no formal training: I didn’t go to drama school, mainly because I was already twenty-two when I left Cambridge and I didn’t want to remain a student for another three years. I read quite a bit about theatrical technique but mainly I have learnt on the job and through observing others.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Throughout, she gives a masterclass of sorts, explaining how she fashions characters:

When I read a text, I use the bricks of my own personality to fashion a character. It’s the text that gives you the mortar, the other elements of what you’re creating and what you have at the back of your mind’s eye. When I get a play script, I want to see if the character has changed at all during the course of the piece. Is there an arc to the character? Or, if not, does she move in any way from beginning to end? If there is no movement, I have to try to put it there, because it’s boring to know everything about a character from the minute they step onto the stage. The actor or actress must surprise the audience in order to engage them and to entertain them. That’s what I look for in the writing. But the surprise must be organic, from within. Imposing it won’t work.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

A part of this is about being open and available for the moment of discovery:

I try rather to discover what it is that opens the door to a character for me, and it’s always different things – maybe a single line of my script, or something that another character in the play says. I see every rehearsal as an opportunity both to offer and to glean something new from my fellow actors – as long as you are receptive to that dialogue and you open yourself to the moment, the process of finding your way into a character becomes a continual foreplay. Every inch of your skin has got to be sensitive to the moment, and if you’re lucky, the moment comes – but it can go again just as quickly. It is a flash, and you can’t control it and you can’t compel it – you just have to be available. That’s the most important thing: you make yourself available for the moment.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

Intriguingly, she explains why she dislikes people seeing rehearsals as they serve as a space to see what it means to be on the stage:

I think that you see how you want to appear on the stage. And I don’t mean physically: what I mean, rather, is that somehow you ‘see’ what you want to do with your character, how you want her to be. What is her reality? You glimpse it, distantly, and as you rehearse, and with the help of your colleagues and your director, and the costume department and the make-up artist, and so on, gradually, it all feeds into your ‘being’. Then the creation, your character’s being, starts slowly and imperceptibly to take root, and to be there for you to step into on the first night, or whenever the first audience appears.
That’s why I hate it when people ask to watch a rehearsal. Sometimes directors say, ‘Oh, I’ve asked a few people to come in to see how we’re going.’ I can’t bear it, because a performance is a fragile butterfly of a thing – and it has to be coaxed and nourished and soothed. Exposure too early is scary and frightening, because an actor’s nature is to perform – that is what we do. And that’s how we think of ourselves – we are the performers and you are the audience. When we see an audience, we will perform, but if we’re not ready to deliver our performance, then something phony, invented and inorganic is risked being laid onto the fragile structure that is slowly coming into being.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

This has me wondering about how we engage with creative work before it is complete, such as listening to demos or reading drafts.

One of the aspects that expanded my thinkingafter reading Margolyes’ book was the role of males and the place of gender. She shares cases of studied cruelty associated with the Footlights and Warren Beatty’s question, “Do you fuck?” Margolyes highlights the limited interest in feelings from many of the men in her life.

I realise I’m generalising but from my experience I find that the range of thought and conversation in most men is limited. They’re not interested in feelings. Many men react with horror and fear when a woman starts crying.

Source: This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes

This reminded me of a comment in James Hollis’ The Middle Passage:

Robert Hopcke, in Men’s Dreams, Men’s Healing, suggests that it takes a man about a year in therapy before he is able to internalize and be present to his actual feelingsa year to reach where women are usually able to begin.

Source: The Middle Passage by James Hollis

All in all, Margolyes is a character full of contradictions. This includes: being a left-wing passionate monarchist, with an Order of the British Empire for Services to Drama; an atheist who still embraces her Jewish culture, such as fasting on Yom Kippur, maintaining dietary restrictions during Passover, and never eaten bacon, ham or pork; a Jew who questions the Israeli’s policy towards the people of Palestine; and proudly out, but with regrets about formally coming out to her parents. This leaves us with a intriguing and complicated story.

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Looking through algorithmic social media feeds today, a user is met with a whiplash-inducing barrage of ads, influencer garbage, and other clickbait content. It can be stressful and overwhelming. Perusing search results, too, it can be hard to tell what’s trustworthy or reputable—to comprehend how you even came to be looking at a certain photo, video, or text. On news sites it can be hard to decipher sponsored content from an editorial. The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square—it feels like a shopping mall. And streaming services are part of that shopping mall, even if their sleek interfaces don’t currently frame it that way. Liz Pelly ‘Mood Machine’

With Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly unpacks Spotify’s primary goal, that being to hook users and reduce amount paid in association stream share. Instead of challenging capitalism on the back of the pirate culture, she explains how the platform is really an ultra-capitalist advertising company. Built on the back of learnings from torrent sites, the focus is on the illusion of frictionless. However, like the illusion of processed food, such magic ignores everything involved. Everything played by the user acts as a test, with the goal of the platform becoming the passive soundtrack to our lives, where the only competition is silence itself. This constant collection of data leads to the development of a ‘taste profile’, built around the idea of what you listen to and when. This simulacrum of ourselves risks taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it into two dimensions. As a former machine learning engineer suggests:

“What do you want when you listen to music?” he continued. “I don’t think there’s a single answer. Some of the records that I would consider really life-changing, really profound, are records that in terms of listening time, they wouldn’t even show up in my top 100. Partially because they’re really challenging records. They’re records that opened me up to certain things. But they require a lot of investment. I’m not going to sit down and eat dinner to it. I need to be in a space where I can really devote myself. There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day.”

Ultimately, he determined that there was really only so much that could be gleaned from a bunch of information about someone’s listening history—from reducing a person’s music taste to a pool of data. “It’s like taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it to two dimensions,” he told me. “It still has some relation to the actual object you’re trying to study, but it leaves out a fair amount. To say your tastes are really represented by a list of the things that you’ve listened to—almost anyone would say that’s not exclusively true. They’re correlated, certainly. But it’s decontextualized. Looking at a stream of all the tracks I’ve played, it tells you something.” But there is, of course, much that the data does not say.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

For example, the focus on mood music and vibes that is a part of the two-dimensional vision is never really music that anyone knows and it does not create fans. While monetisation built around repeats moves artists away from more challenging ideas. It also leads to the development of cheaper standardised ‘perfect fit content’ where artists are legitimately paid to generate particular content – a concept similar to say a wedding artist – which Spotify then owns the masters for. One of the issues is that this all becomes centred around data about Spotify, rather than our music. Going beyond the town square, Pelly suggests that Spotify is best considered as another part of the social media shopping mall where you never quite know what is you and what is the algorithm.

In addition to corrupting the culture around music listening, Spotify pays labels and distros on percentage, rather than paying artists per play. This is further confounded by ‘Discovery Mode’ where artists can accept lower royalities in exchange for algorithmic promotion. This leads to the situation where independent artists are confronted with the question: “Is $0.0035 really better than nothing?” In case that was not bad enough, 86% of tracks with less than 1000 plays in the year are actually demonetised , while at the same time artists are being forced to do more and more.

“If retailers are going to take your vinyl album, it’s like, Well, what are you doing to tell people it’s on sale here? Are you doing street posters? It’s the same thing on digital services. It’s not just Ah yes, you’ve got a great record and we are going to support you. What’s the campaign? What’s the story? What can we expect? Have you got any festivals or TV appearances? All of these things feed into whether people support the music or not. I’d love to think it’s all about the music but it’s really not. Clearly having great music helps. But there’s actually a lot of great music out there.”

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

All in all, Spotify is akin to playing the slots where the house always wins.

For Pelly, the future involves rethinking profit motives and power structures. The fear is that with all the current constraints, we are losing music that will never be made.

if we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don’t protect working musicians’ abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that will never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

In the end, the challenge is bigger than music, it is about building the world that we want.

Mood Machine is a strange book. On the one hand, many of the ideas neither felt new or read is somehow obvious. For example, here are some links from my bookmarks collected over the years:

  • Reflecting upon Spotify’s Wrapped, the yearly review, Kelly Pau reminds us of the place of algorithms and artificial intelligence embedded within these choices and recommendations, which often come with their own sets of biases and assumptions around gender and mood.
  • Wondering about how much Spotify understands us, Meghan O’Gieblyn explains that there are limits to how much an application can know, such as your thoughts and beliefs, personal history, and the unspoken nuances of the relationships that have made you who you are.
  • Discussing the collapse of genre and music loyalities, Jack Hamilton argues that Spotify’s main focus is time on app and the data it can collect from this.
  • The Patent Drop newsletter explores a patent for mood-recommendations based on wearable data and what this actually means. For example, do you suggest songs that allow a user to revel in that mood, or do you suggest songs that try to shift a user’s mood.
  • Unpacking the Discover Weekly feature, Sophia Ciocca discusses the three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs: Collaborative Filtering models, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, and Audio models.
  • Widening the sources of data used to help profile users, Sarah Zhang discusses Spotify’s move to team up with AncestryDNA to provide richer results and the problems with this.
  • Discussing the role of technology in our future as a part of her Boyer Lectures, Genevieve Bell argues that all companies now are first and foremost data companies, whether it be a music application, a supermarket or an airline.

Yet, I had never really joined all the pieces as Pelly does in such a concise manner in Mood Machine.

I was interested in Pelly’s exploration of the problems with how Spotify captures our data to build a profile and how this does not really capture all the ways we listen and consume. It is interesting to consider the way in which Spotify helps mold a ‘templated self’ or what David Marshall describes as a ‘dual strategic persona’. As Michel Faber captures in his book Listen, music and the act of listening is so much more than can be condensed down into a few data points.

Personally, I am always intrigued by both the suggestions for different playlists or end of year. I always wondered how this information was garnered, especially when it compiled such weird mixes as this combination of Fleetwood Mac, Nine Inch Nails, Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen, Tool and Neil Young:

A screenshot of a playlist involving a diverse range of artists.

I knew that Spotify collected information around key and scale, but I was unaware of the other elements that fed the ‘taste profile’. (Ironically, I actually listened to the above playlist wondering if in fact it worked together. Sad to say, it did not. I wonder what Spotify took from that?)

Often I will read the name of an artist somewhere, not a mood or anything, and go and listen to a track or an album to find out more. This is not a ‘like’ or anything else, it is simply serendipitously perusing the shelves. The same can be said when I dive into some human playlists, from artists such as Fourtet, Caribou, Jamie XX, Aphex Twin, Worker & Parasite and Twinkle Digitz, or based on books and podcasts, such as Half Deaf, Completely Mad, Rip It Up and Start Again and Only the Shit You Love podcast. In addition to this, there are times when I play music for my children. Yet Spotify takes all this and somehow flattens it into the same sausage.

In the end, I feel that Mood Machine provides an account of the enshittification of Spotify. With this, I appreciate the push for different models, but fear that I am trapped in convenience, especially when I am within a family account where it is bigger than me. Here I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s point about collective action:

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Source: Pluralistic: MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (16 Aug 2024) by Cory Doctorow

Personally, I have turned to vinyl and Bandcamp for supporting artists and trying to step beyond my ‘taste profile’. However, I always find limits to this. However, maybe I need to accept that frictionless experience comes at a cost:

Resisting the algorithm is hard and often requires sifting through more noise yourself to find the signal, but it is doable with intention. It takes both knowing what you are looking for and being open to finding something totally not what you were expecting.

Source: Accepting friction: listening without a streaming subscription (Part 1) – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden by Tracy Durnell

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A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track. I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that. Not be too troubled. Sinéad O'Connor ‘Rememberings’

I decided to read Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir Rememberings after being reminded of her music via a playlist shared with me. I remember reading reporting about the book and extracts when it was released, and was interested in reading it, but had lingered on my list of books to read.

The book feels like it is made up of two halves. The first part covers O’Connor’s childhood and early career, up until the fallout following her appearance on “Saturday Night Live” where she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II. This includes part of the book explores her fractured and abusive relationship with her mother, being sent to Grianán Training Centre in response to her shoplifting, her early music career, recording her debut album while pregnant, and the rapid rise associated with the success of Nothing Compares 2 U.

The second part covers the rest of O’Connor’s career. This includes a reflection on her various albums, her challenges with mental health, her experiences with drugs, her exploration of different religions, discussion of encounters with famous people, such as Mohammad Ali, and having four children with four fathers. The second part is a bit patchy, as she had a breakdown and struggled to remember anything much afterwards.

The reason I haven’t written much about what happened between 1992 and 2015 is that in August 2015, after I’d written the first part of this book, I had an open-surgery radical hysterectomy in Ireland followed by a total breakdown.
I had gotten as far as the Saturday Night Live story, but I did not write anything else for the four years it took me to recover from the breakdown, and by the time I’d recovered, I was unable to remember anything much that took place before it.

Source: Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor

Whether it be choosing to shave her head after being told to be more feminine, being encouraged to terminate her first child by record executives, tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II or escaping a pillow fight with Prince, it feels that the book was largely a cathartic effort to reclaim the narrative of O’Connor’s life. This was all brought to a head with her postscript written to her father in which she links her mental illness to being hit in the head by a train door at the age of a 11.

All in all, Rememberings is equal part sad and funny, maybe because through it all she was able to survive. Its fractured and rambling nature reminded me a little of Tony Cohen’s somewhat incomplete memoir. Listening to O’Connor’s reading (via Borrowbox) also helped make the book real, especially when she would often laugh at the humour and absurdity associated with various situations. Although not necessarily seeking sympathy, Remembering provides a peek behind the curtain.