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What you can’t find out, and where that leaves you, is one of the places where the novelist starts. Julian Barnes ‘Nothing to Be Frightened Of’

Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confounded my expectations of autobiography. I had naively‑imagined a cradle‑to‑career narrative, where it begins with or before birth and proceeds from there. Instead, Barnes assembles something more fragmentary and different. It is a book that has all the usual autobiographical ingredients, discussion of his grandparents, parents, brother, and childhood incidents, but this is all constantly rearranged around a single gravitational force: death.

Throughout, Barnes provides a narrative with multiple threads weaved together like a tapestry that at a distance creates a coherent picture, but at its core is full of contradictions. For example, a childhood story about his grandparents’ duelling diaries comes up again and again, with his grandfather’s record of “Worked in garden. Planted potatoes” counted by his grandmother’s “Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden”. Elsewhere he contrasts his own “colouring in” of memories with his philosopher brother’s suspicion of memory altogether:

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

The focus on death also extends to discussion of free will, evolution, the brain, and religion. Barnes makes those extensions explicit. At one point he asks whether his “death‑awareness” is bound up with being a writer, and imagines a doctor offering him a brain operation that would remove his fear of death at the cost of removing his desire to write:

We have devised a new brain operation which takes away the fear of death … you’ll find that the operation will also take away your desire to write.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Late in the book he reflects on genetic inheritance and free will when he notes, almost dryly, that aspects of his and his brother’s mannerisms—“the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw … a particular kind of polite laugh”—are “definitely not expressions of free will” but “genetic replicas” of their father. Here I am reminded in some ways of Christos Tsiolkas’ lecture on doubt, fence-sitting and the importance of questioning:

I’m not proposing we always sit on the fence. However, I am suggesting that as writers, playwrights, intellectuals, we are required to doubt and we are required to question.

Source: 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture: Christos Tsiolkas by library.gov.au

Stylistically, the book feels as much like fiction as his novels feel like non‑fiction. Barnes argues that the novelist is someone who lives in the blur between memory and invention:

A novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Throughout, he keeps crossing the line between essay and story, memory and scene. It reads like an autobiographical novel that is honest about its own constructedness and place in time.

I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

These authorial asides reminded me of Paul Auster’s games in The New York Trilogy. They make the memoir feel self‑consciously written, as if the subject is not just death, but the sheer artificed nature of any story we tell about it.

Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Along with Barnes’ self-conscious style, chronology is repeatedly sacrificed throughout to theme. Interestingly, stories are actually often repeated, with a slight tweak each time. Early on Barnes warns that “there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them dead, and quite a few of them French,” and quotes Jules Renard’s line that “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish”. That warning is also a kind of method statement: the book lurches from family anecdote to Renard, Montaigne, Flaubert, Koestler, Zola, Stravinsky, and others, not as digressions but as parallel case studies in how human beings have tried to live with the knowledge of extinction. However, there is also something ironic about using anecdotes from fictional authors in that it we are never quite sure what is truth and what is narrative.

With this, we are told a story that could be true, but could also be something that we somehow will to be true. Barnes is repeatedly explicit about this risk of “willing” coherence. In a key late chapter he pushes back against his GP’s idea that dying is the “conclusion” to a life‑narrative. For him, life is “one damn thing after another” rather than a musical score with “theme … development, variation, recapitulation, coda”. He argues that although he respects our desire for narrative, it is often “little more than confabulating.”

So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Alongside narrative and coherence, misremembering is something that comes up again and again, he even quips “misremember me correctly, we should instruct”.

Having recently read Departure(s), a novel that too includes autobiographical threads, I came to this book wondering how it might be different. Clearly, it is different in that it does not purport to be fiction. But then maybe it is not really that different at all as both are forms of artifice and expression. Barnes makes the case that all art (I assume that autobiography and fiction is ‘art’?) is our feeble attempt to say “I was here.”

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers—two or three if lucky—which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Ironically, I am not sure where that leaves me, reading a book and writing a review. I am left wondering.

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Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention. Simon Reynolds ‘Futuromania’

With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

  1. “The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame… The interiorization of the narrative… encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole… The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.” From A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩
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No matter who you are—Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue, or a combination of multiple colors—you will always be in the minority. Most of the people you encounter will be different from you. No matter how well balanced you are, you can’t be all the types at the same time. So you have to adapt to the people you meet. Good communication is often a matter of adapting to others. Thomas Erikson ‘Surrounded by Idiots’

Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types – Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) – to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can reduce conflict, collaborate better, and recognise that “idiots” are usually just people different from you.

This model comes from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, where he mapped four behaviour patterns (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, Compliance) that later became DISC. Subsequent practitioners, such as TTI Success Insights, has since operationalised it into assessment tools and corporate profiling systems. However, Erikson also makes the case for the universality of the patterns with comparisons with Hippocrates’s four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the Aztecs fourfold categorising via the elements fire, air, earth, water, mapping them to leader‑types, easygoing “air” people, community‑minded “earth” people, and quiet, powerful “water” people.

Although I appreciated the way in which this book captures the way that we are all different, I am left wondering if there is a danger of prioritising nature over nurture, as if our own identity and difference is static. Although it is fine to say that I am a ‘Red’, I wonder if this is something that can be worked on? To become a little more ‘Blue’ say? Alternatively, I wonder if we are different colours in different situations, with little evidence to help differentiate between what is the ‘true’ and ‘false’ self. This is something that Erikson touches on:

Consciously or subconsciously, surrounding factors cause me to choose a particular course of action.
And this is how we act. Look at this formula:

BEHAVIOR = f (P × Sf)
Behavior is a function of Personality and Surrounding factors.
Behavior is that which we can observe.
Personality is what we try to figure out.
Surrounding factors are things that we have an influence on.

Conclusion: We continually affect one another in some form or other. The trick is to try to figure out what’s there, under the surface. And this book is all about behavior.

Source: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

With this discussion of difference I am left thinking about Todd Rose’s discussion of the end of average.

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Source: End of Average by Todd Rose

For Rose, people vary across multiple dimensions, aggregating to a single score or type distorts that reality. Used lightly, colour models therefore can serve like a transport map, good enough to navigate some conversations. However, taken too literally, they risk flattening the very individuality Rose is arguing to preserve.

I was left challenged about an organisation expectations and how they balance with people and their colours. If we are to follow Erikson guide, is there actually any point expecting people to create clear documentation or collect the appropriate information relating to an incident if they are not that way inclined? Or should we accept such perceived incompetence? Here I am reminded of Adam Fraser’s discussion of misalignment between behaviour and values. I guess one approach maybe to treat the various labels as a hypothesis about behaviour, not a justification why we can not do something.

If there is any action to come from Erikson’s book it might be to complete some sort of DISC assessment to get a better appreciation of my own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder if this would be useful in conjunction with some sort of coaching program with a focus on growth.

The real issue at hand is that often when people overlook DISC, it’s because they use it to set a firm expectation of understanding people and their behavior rather than using it as a guideline towards growth.

Source: Here’s What’s Wrong With The DISC Personality Assessment by Chad Brown

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Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictional possibility. Julian Barnes ‘Departure(s)’

In a recent newsletter, Laura Hilliger posed the question about why we read memoirs and biographies:

Why do you read memoirs (if you even do)? I read biographies and memoirs partly because I seek to understand the inner lives of people who are known for things.

Source: FBT on Glistening and Gobsmacking by Laura Hilliger

I was left thinking by this and the way in which memoirs and biographies are often written about ‘people who known for things’. Personally, I feel more drawn to memoirs and biographies in the hope of knowing more about myself. Here I am reminded of Michel Faber’s point about art holding up a mirror:

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

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

For example, I am drawn to memoirs like Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop and William McInnes’ Fatherhood which capture the seemingly banal. I am also drawn to those who provide a reminder of an uncanny world, such as Jack Charles’ Jack Charles – Born Again Blakfella or Eddie Betts’ The Boy from Boomerang Crescent. Here I reminded of a quote at the end of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River:

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

Source: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Although I find the various anecdotes of the rich and famous interesting and sometimes entertaining, I am not sure what stories such as David Grohl’s account in The Storyteller of flying back to Los Angeles during an Australian tour to attend a daddy-daughter dance tells me about myself and my world? I was left pondering upon all this while reading Julian Barnes’ novel, Departure(s).

I came upon Departure(s) via the local library’s BorrowBox collection. I had always wanted to read more Barnes, other than A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which I read at university in Ian Topliss and Chris Palmer’s course investigating 20th Century Literature. However, I have never ventured beyond, even if as Barnes jokes about wearing a bag “BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE”. It therefore seems somewhat ironic to start the venture by reading Barnes’ last novel.

As for me, I am now 78, and this will definitely be my last book — my official departure, my final conversation with you. Finishing my last book in my own time and then going silent at least has this useful consequence: it means that you will not be cut off — as Brian Moore feared- in the middle of writing.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

It almost feels like beginning at the end, arrival rather than a departure?

Barnes’s Departure(s) is a hybrid work: part memoir, part essay, part novella-like narrative, all circling memory, aging and what he calls a “life sentence.” He interweaves reflections on a life marked by loss – the deaths of friends, the sudden death of his wife in 2008, and a diagnosis of rare blood cancer during the COVID19 outbreak when the world went into lockdown – with a long story about two pseudonymous friends, “Stephen” and “Jean.”

Their relationship, first at Oxford in the 1960s and then forty years later, becomes the book’s main narrative arc. Through their youthful romance, belated reunion and second separation, Barnes explores how lives become entangled, how others’ stories infiltrate and shape our own, and how memory both founds and distorts identity.

We all know that memory is identity; take away memory and what do we have? Merely some kind of animal existence in the moment.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

The prose moves associatively, like a digressive conversation that breaks its banks, blurring anecdote, criticism and confession. That meandering texture is part of the point: it enacts the way memory actually works – looping, doubling back, getting lost in minutiae – while asking what remains of a life once memory itself begins to fray.

One of the mysteries that I was left wondering about is where the real Julian Barnes stops and the fictional Julian Barnes takes over as he digs through the compost of life.

Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictional possibility.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

In some respects I guess he does not even really know and in some ways that is the point of this text. How do we know what we know is true? Is it because it was recorded in a diary or because our brain remembers it? Is all memoir in fact fiction in sheep’s clothes? I wonder if in the end the question of ‘truth’ is not what necessarily matters in this situation?

[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

Source: The Art of Fiction No. 165 (The Paris Review), Julian Barnes interviewed by Shusha Guppy

In the end, this novel left me seeing the everyday in a different light. Dwight Garner refers to this aspect in Barnes’ writing as ‘bedrock human stuff.’

“Departure(s)” brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired. Barnes’s powers of observation and comment may have diminished, but his appetite for playfulness and detail, for bedrock human stuff, remains unslakable.

Source: Book Review: ‘Departure(s),’ by Julian Barnes – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

While Alex Clark suggests Barnes’ talent is to ‘allow us to feel things.’

One of Barnes’s cleverest and most humane talents has been to allow us to feel things, ordinary things both trifling and important, about our own lives.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair by Alex Clark

Maybe in part this different light is in regards to a life to come? Or the life already here? Maybe because we are all at some stage in life even if our understanding is not always clear.

I remember taking a friend with terminal cancer to a hospital appointment. She sat in a chair while a woman doctor in scrubs knelt tenderly in front of her. My friend said in a puzzled tone, ‘I don’t know what pathway I’m on.’ The doctor looked down at her notes and replied gently, ‘The palliative pathway.’ ‘I thought so,’ my friend said. And so the news was broken. Such language will have to do. Paths are generally nice places to be on, quiet, contemplative, relaxing conduits across fields and woods and upland pastures, even if some of them end at a cliff-edge. But ‘pathway’ is now judged inappropriate by some, as it implies that one path fits all. A suggested replacement phrase is ‘personalised end-of-life care plans for individuals.’ Some of us will prefer ‘pathway’.

Source: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

In an interview with Terry Gross, Barnes discusses the importance of thinking about death on a daily:

One of my French gurus is the 17th century philosopher, Montaigne. And he said we should think about death on a daily basis. We should make it our familiar. That’s the best way of treating it. Not as some awful sort of, you know, ghastly skeleton with a scythe and its hand coming to chop us off. That we should think – he said we should think of death when our horse shies or when tile falls off the roof of a house. We should make it sort of – we should almost domesticate it, tame it in this way, and then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages. That’s a wonderfully sort of wise approach to it all. I haven’t got a vegetable garden anymore. I used to have one, and when I planted cabbages, they didn’t do very well. That’s the only fault I can find with Montaigne’s view of death.

Source: Julian Barnes says he’s enjoying himself, but that ‘Departure(s)’ is his last book by Terry Gross

I feel that it is a book that I could easily return to, skip the guide to dying picked up off the pile on the side of the street, Barnes offers a text which provides a space to stop and reflect.

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

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

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

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

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

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

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

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

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

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

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

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

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

Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?

Source: Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

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

ERIN KEANE: What is any true legacy but complicated?

Source: David Bowie – A Life by Dylan Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Revolution – Campion

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

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

Source: Revolution – Campion

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Revolution – Campion

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

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

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

Source: Revolution – Campion

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

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

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

Source: Praise for Revolution

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

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

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

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Structure, Sign, Play by Jacques Derrida

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

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

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

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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

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

Source: Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias

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

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