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

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

Duhigg provides four rules to support ‘learning conversations’:

Four basic rules that create a learning conversation:

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

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

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

Source: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

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

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

Source: Make it Awkward! by Alexandra Plakias

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

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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 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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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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Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. Robert Pirsig ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

At its heart, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a simple tale that praises basic values and decries ugly technology. Pirsig tells his story while riding the secondary roads across the Dakotas to the mountains, touching Yellowstone National Park before a pause in Bozeman, Montana. From there, he crosses into Idaho and over to Oregon before dipping down into California and reaching the Pacific coast and San Francisco. Pretty good trip, really.

Source: Zen and Art by Mark Richardson

I always find it strange how the same book can take on different lives based on the actual experience of reading. I was given Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Stacey and Dan for my birthday. Dan’s dad taught high school philosophy and Dan said it was a good introductory text. I must admit, I’m not sure I took it all in at the time (I feel I took more in this time.) Although I remember the discussion of gumption, “the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going,” and the different appreciation of the motorcycle. I feel that a lot of the philosophical side may have gone over my head as I did not necessarily have the patience or prior knowledge to connect it to.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a novel intertwined with different threads. It is part memoir, tracing Pirsig’s own life and experiences, part travelogue recounting a journey across America from east to west, part philosophical treatise, exploring the question of quality, and part reflection on life with mental illness. On the Overdue podcast, Andrew Cunningham and Craig Getting suggest that it is similar in style to Moby Dick where the story is interspersed with other narratives about the philosophy of quality. While Pirsig once explained the various characters a ‘Greek chorus’:

Pirsig: I explained to them that the story isn’t really about them, that they are like a Greek chorus there to “Oh” and “Ah” and give a semblance of reality to a tale that seems always to ride at the very edge of incredibility and needs all the help it can get.

Source: Zen and Now by Mark Richardson

However, the relationship with Chris does balance things and provides more than a chorus.

Personally, there was something compelling in re-reading the novel having lived more of a life. I feel like I have gone through my own Phadreas-like experience. (Although it may also be something of a mis-reading of quality.) Not a psychotic breakdown, but a grapple with ideals. I tried to get students to self-grade themselves. (See for example reflections on Genius Hour, Robotics and Digital Publishing.) I tried to help them manage their own inquiries and ‘turn into free men.’

The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

It too felt like a battle between doing something because it has always been done that way as opposed to developing a deeper appreciation of the practice itself. My students were confused as this somewhat contradicted what was happening within their other classes, it did not necessarily make sense. (I say this, but interestingly in cleaning up some old school things that I kept for far too long I actually found a card from a student thanking me for the opportunity to develop an excursion, which I guess was a win.) I do not believe my intent was not directly inspired by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but if we are to believe Pierre Bayard, that we are the sum of our accumulated books, then it must have inspired me in some way on the journey.

One of the things that I was surprised by was how useful the book was for my work with technology as it was personally. In particular, I was left thinking about Pirsig’s list of gumption traps. Whether it be external setbacks:

  • Inadequate tools or materials: When the tools or materials you have are not suitable for the task.
  • Environmental factors: Such as poor lighting or uncomfortable working conditions.
    Or internal hang-ups:
  • Value Traps: These block affective understanding. For example, when you undervalue the importance of a task.
  • Truth Traps: These block cognitive understanding. For instance, when you have incorrect assumptions or misunderstandings about the task.
  • Muscle Traps: These block psychomotor behavior. An example is physical fatigue or lack of coordination

It was also interesting to consider the various lessons as I have been watching the house being built across the road by the owner builder. Each day he returns, either overseeing the various trades or working away on things. It often seems like he is not doing much, but as Pirsig suggests, he is probably looking at the underlying form.

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

All in all, there was something about Pirsig that reminded me of something I read once in a review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:

When did he first find evidence of the alien landscape that’s inside his narrator Christopher’s head? “Oh, I think that if you’re a writer you have that in your own head from quite an early age. I think it’s true there are two types of kids as school. One type probably breezes through school like gazelles across the veldt. For the more troubled types on the edge of the playground, how you get from one day to the next is a mystery. All writers come from the latter, because only if you’re in that group does the working of the human mind become an object of interest.”

Source: Mark Haddon: This year’s big read by John Walsh (Independent)

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Kraftwerk are not just a man-machine, they are also a myth-machine. Uwe Schütte ‘Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany’

Kraftwerk is one of those artists that I grew up with a particular impression, cold, robotic, strange, almost comical. A lot of this was based on seeing Autobahn played on Rage late at night / early in the morning. However, my listening never really went beyond this. Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany offers an introduction to the band beyond first impressions.

Uwe Schütte covers the origins of the band in post-war Germany, with the influences of American culture and Andy Warhol. It then works through their various albums, the inspiration and intent around each, as well as how they were received. While the book ends with the legacy in regards to the New Romantics, inspiring acts such as Depeche Mode, and laying the ground work for acts such as Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, who are/were able to operate as something of ‘machine’ separate from the humans.

Throughout, the book, Schütte explores the way in which Kraftwerk were/are a ‘man-machine’ where they worked beyond the individual. This was in part captured in the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, where the act was more than just the songs, but rather the the whole package, including multimedia presentations and artistic representations. With everything being a part of the act, this in turn opened the door to various myths to fill the spaces left spare. For Schütte, this all comes back to the question about whether they were in fact as important for music as The Beatles?

What is Kraftwerk’s legacy? Were they as (or even more) important than The Beatles in the development of pop music? Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them? And to what extent did their early decision to remain fiercely independent, running their own label and, more significantly, their own studio, set a model for other bands and producers? How did the overarching concept of the man-machine influence later (male and female) artists in the realm of electronic music? And are Kraftwerk not just a man-machine but also a myth-machine?

Source: Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte

What I found interesting was that there particular legacy, when they released  Autobahn  (1974), Trans-Europe Express  (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), and Computer World (1981), was only a seven year period. Beyond that, they seem to have played on their legacy as a multimedia act. In that way, I guess they are similar to the Beatles? With regards to the legacy, it is hard to appreciate now the impact that they would have had at the time, when electronic music was not as accessible as it is today. This is something Dylan Jones captures in his book Sweet Dreams. I also cannot be helped thinking about TISM with regards to the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.

With this in mind, it is strange how music comes in and out of vogue, how certain songs continue to live on, while other songs and artists slip back into the culture consciousness. I definitely came away from Schütte’s book with a deeper understanding of Kraftwerk, even more so than say Double J’s tour de force. Now to go back and listen with this new appreciation.