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Quote text: The essential insight of the concept of deterritorialization is that the organizing structure of the assemblage is (to borrow a useful formulation from Jameson) at once that which allows for maximum variation and that which itself resists all variation. It is in this precise sense a singularity at the heart of a multiplicity. Ian Buchanan ‘Assemblage Theory and Method’

I think there is something about the plurality of the ‘z’ in Twinkle Digitz. For a one-man band, it often feels like there are many voices and personalities. Whereas layered vocals and harmonies are usually in support of the lead – acting as sonic texture rather than distinct entities – Twinkle Digitz feels different. Every voice jockeying for attention, each with its own personality to push forward. Listen to ‘Dancing In My Dreams’ for example. No one puts Twinkle Digitz in the corner?

From a Deleuzian perspective, this can be understood as an act of deterritorialization, shifting the artist’s identity from a fixed, singular ‘I’ to a fluid, evolving ‘we.’ Personally, this has changed how I listen to other music. When voices are too harmonious, too blended, or too deferential to the lead, it feels somehow ‘false’ (whatever false actually is) because it lacks that messy, human reality.

This philosophy finds a clear synergy with Prince, who frequently breached the expectations of mainstream pop expectations – verse-chorus-bridge and predictable dynamics – by introducing bizarre synth stabs, jarring stutters, or shifting timbres that forced the listener to navigate the ‘rules’ of that specific song in real-time. As Ben Greenman explains,

Songs like “Automatic” and “D.M.S.R.” were stretched to their breaking point, but they only became more elastic.

Source: Dig If You Will the Picture by Ben Greenman

This is also something that Miles Davis observed too:

In order to become a great musician the musician has to have the ability to stretch and Prince can certainly stretch.

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

However, this spirit of spontaneity is perhaps best realised in the work of David Bowie, particularly during the Berlin years (Low, Heroes, Lodger) with Brian Eno. As Dylan Jones documents in David Bowie – A Life, this approach relied on creating a ‘map of the terrain’ rather than a rigid instruction manual. Robert Fripp noted:

It was very quick, very spontaneous, and the key to working both with David and with Brian was always “play.” Very good professionals often forget to play. Both Bowie and Eno play. Working with them it’s as if the only reason we’re there is to have fun and let rip, see where it goes. So, my best hunch would be there was a framework, a map of the terrain, but it didn’t tell you how you get from A to B. Working with Bowie and Eno, above anyone else I’ve ever worked with, they set up the situation for me to fly.

Source: David Bowie by Dylan Jones

While Adrian Belew’s account of recording Lodger reinforces this, describing how they engineered ‘planned accidents’ by providing him only a tempo and time signature for songs he had not heard:

The original idea with Planned Accidents was that they said there was about twenty tracks they’d already worked on, and they wanted me to go upstairs in the studio, put the headphones on, and start playing. And I said, “Playing what?” And they said, “No, you just start playing. You play what you like.” I asked if I could hear the songs first and they said no. I was just given a tempo and time signature. They said they wanted to get my accidental responses. And I said, “What key?” And they said, “No…just go upstairs, put the headphones, and play along to the song.” And they allowed me to do that twice for each song, no more. And then they’d take their favorite parts of the guitar tracks and cut them up, and string them into a composite guitar track. So all those guitar parts you hear on Lodger are things I made up on the spot to a song I’d never heard before. “Boys Keep Swinging,” “DJ,” “Red Sails”—all made up on the spot. The guitar parts were meant to sound accidental and I think they kinda do. The whole thing took two days.

Source: David Bowie by Dylan Jones

By prioritizing these accidental, multi-layered responses over a polished, top-down structure, artists like Bowie, Prince and Twinkle Digitz create an alternate form that reflects in their own way the unpredictable, fragmented nature of the human experience.

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Quote text: Musicians have to play the instruments that best reflect the times we’re in, play the technology that will give you what you want to hear. All these purists are walking around talking about how electrical instruments will ruin music. Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play. I don’t see nothing wrong with electrical instruments as long as you get great musicians who will play them right. Miles Davis ‘Miles: The Autobiography’

In Miles Davis’ Miles: The Autobiography, he recounts a time when he attended a dinner at the White House. He discusses being trapped at a table with a politician’s wife who asks Miles if jazz is “art in its truest form” or if they are just ignoring it because it comes from Black people. To Miles, this is someone trying to be hip while being deeply ignorant. So he responds, calling out what is at play head-on: the insecurity of a culture that “likes to win everything” and can not handle that Black people created an art form they can not claim. When she responds by making the insult personal – asking what he has actually done with his life – he does not hesitate. He tells her he has changed music five or six times, and then, in a moment of biting clarity, asks her what she has done “other than be white.” It is a raw confrontation that lays bare the power dynamics he has been navigating his entire life, turning a state dinner into a final, unmistakable lesson.

Reading Miles’ autobiography often feels like being trapped at that dinner at the White House, exactly where Miles found himself in 1987. You come into the experience possibly expecting a standard music biography – full of technical anecdotes, cool studio stories, and the polished arc of a genius. But Miles, writing it at the end of his life, does not care about the script you may have prepared for him, he plays by his own rules. Therefore, refusing to be a polite, compliant subject, he forces us into an unfamiliar, often uncomfortable world. In some ways, the book functions as a mirror: it inadvertently brings your own prejudices to the fore. Every time Miles corrects a myth, rejects a category, or explodes a premise about the blues, he is effectively checking you: Are you reading this to actually understand, or are you just looking for a comfortable narrative? Just like he called out Jackie McLean for not learning the standards, he does not hesitate.

By the time you finish, you realise that reading this autobiography is not a passive act of consumption; it is rather an audit of your own assumptions. Like the politician’s wife at that dinner, you might have brought your own set of “museum” misunderstandings – about his music, about race, or about your own moral consensus on how people are supposed to behave. Miles will not let you leave the table with that consensus intact. He forces you to confront the man alongside the artist, refusing to let you curate the story into something sanitised or “respectable.”

I have spent years with In a Silent Way and Blue Train sitting on my shelves, but they always felt like artifacts from a distance. To borrow from Miles, I think I had a “museum appreciation” of jazz. Ironically, it all felt “square” to me. Miles was actively fighting against that perspective his entire life.

I never thought that the music called ‘jazz’ was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic. I always thought it should reach as many people as it could, like so-called popular music, and why not?

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

After reading this autobiography, I found myself wondering if jazz was, in some ways, the “grunge” movement of the 1950s, gritty, responsive and fallible. But I also started to feel that “jazz” is really many things at once. Miles himself moved through a series of different forms, from postwar bebop to cool jazz to fusion, never standing still, always changing.

People who don’t change will find themselves like folk musicians, playing in museums and local as a motherfucker. Because the music and the sound has gone international and there ain’t no sense in trying to go back into some womb where you once were. A man can’t go back into his mother’s womb.

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

This evolution was not just artistic, such as experimenting with modal music – it was as much technological. Throughout, Miles treats the history of recording technology as a series of shifting frontiers. He describes the move from 78s (limited to approximately 3 minutes) to the 33-rpm LP as the liberation of the long-form improvisation. What I had never appreciated with In a Silent Way is how, technologically, it was not even possible to press an album like that when Miles started.

When he pivots to the electric guitar and the wah-pedal, he is not just chasing trends; he is reacting to the texture of the changing world around him, drawing from the energy of Hendrix and Sly Stone. In some ways, I think this was part of Miles’ love for Prince – another artist who reacted to the world in a similar way.[1]

By the time he is wrestling with 80s synths, he is clearly hunting for something that feels vital to the current moment. Critics loved to accuse him of “selling out,” but reading it in his own voice, you realise it was the opposite: he was terrified of becoming a caricature of his “cool jazz” past.

There is a deep, almost Merleau-Pontian truth to how Miles moved through the world. He understood the central argument of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who famously wrote that “the body is our general medium for having a world.” We are not just ‘thinking things’—we are embodied agents.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty described this state of total immersion—the point where the instrument is no longer an object, but an extension of the self—with striking accuracy:

“There is an objective sound that resonates outside of me in the musical instrument… a sound that vibrates in me ‘as if I had become the flute or the clock,’ and finally a last stage where the sonorous element disappears and becomes a highly precise experience of a modification of my entire body. […] either the sound and the color… sketch out an object, or at the other extreme of experience, the sound and color are received in my body, and it becomes difficult to restrict my experience to a single sensory register: it spontaneously overflows toward all the others.”

Source: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D.A. Landes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When Miles says his horn is “as much a part of me as my eyes and hands,” he is not speaking metaphorically. He is articulating that same fusion where an instrument ceases to be a tool and becomes part of a lived reality.

The people who frustrated him – the critics, the politicians, the teachers – were all trying to treat him as a “museum piece”: an object to be summarised, categorised, and pinned to a wall. Miles fought back because he knew that true “Jazz” and true life can only be lived from within. He protected his music not out of arrogance, but to prevent the vibrant, lived reality of his art from being turned into a dead, conceptual idea.

If Merleau-Ponty explains how Miles felt his instrument – as a lived extension of his own body – the philosopher Gilles Deleuze helps us understand what he was doing on stage. Deleuze might say that Miles was constructing an ‘assemblage’: a machine of intensity where the man, the horn, the air, the suit, and the room all collapsed into a single, flowing vitality.

In Deleuzian terms, you cannot separate Miles from his trumpet, because he was not just a man ‘playing’ an object; he was engaged in an act of ‘becoming-trumpet.’ This is exactly why the ‘museum’ irritated him so much. Museums are ‘arborescent’—they are like trees, with fixed roots, hierarchies, and categorised branches. Miles, by contrast, was a ‘rhizome’ – he grew horizontally, shifting genres, plugging into synths, fusing with Hendrix, playing with Prince – and refusing to ever stay in one spot long enough to have his roots pinned down. He was a force of constant change, forever chasing the new.

The appeal of the new, I imagine, must be that it does something the old cannot achieve. The new then, is not merely the different, but that which makes difference possible, and it is this power which can only be realised in a relationship between the object and a subject that is the basis of its appeal.

Source: Deleuze and Pop Music by Ian Buchanan

Miles’s refusal to be rooted in a ‘museum’ was not just aesthetic; it was inherently political. It was his way of surviving a society that desperately wanted to pin him down. This refusal to ‘sell out’ or be categorised is nowhere more potent than in his writing on race.

The refusal to “sell out” or be categorised is even more potent in his writing on race. We are given a sense of what it meant to be Black in mid-century America, mostly in passing. He describes doing a cameo on Miami Vice in 1986, where a co-star asked him how he felt acting. His answer was flat and devastating:

“You’re acting all the time when you’re black.”

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

He unpacks this by saying Black people “put on masks and do great acting jobs just to get through the fucking day,” because if white people really heard what was on their minds “it would scare them to death.” In a few lines, he turns a TV bit part into a metaphor for survival: life itself as performance under white scrutiny.

Earlier, while studying at Juilliard, he touches on a different version of the same thing. A music history teacher explains the blues as the sound of poor Black people picking cotton and feeling sad. Miles explodes the story: his father is a rich dentist in East St. Louis, he plays the blues, and “my father didn’t never pick no cotton.” He is furious at a book by “someone who didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.” It’s an institutionalised misreading of Black life.

Put together, those scenes show why the book feels less like a “race tract” and more like a lived anatomy of American race relations. As the reader, you are following him through concerts, schools, and TV sets, and you see the same pattern: Black genius constantly having to play a role or push back against people who think they already know what Black music means.

That brings us back to that state dinner. When Miles challenged that politician’s wife, he did not just smile and grin. When she asked why he was there, he told her he had changed music five or six times – and then he asked her to tell him what she had done “other than be white.” It was a raw confrontation that laid bare the power dynamics he had been navigating his entire life.

There is a final, brutal honesty about his less admirable self. The same raw directness he uses to dismantle racism is turned inward, facing his struggles with addiction, his volatility, and his violence toward women. Throughout, he never tries to smooth this over with an easy apology.

In my life I have few regrets and little guilt.

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

If anything, he often makes things more messy by recounting a story only to then provide Miles’ truth about the situation.[2] Rather than break through the myth to some truth, we are instead left wondering what is true about any of it. For example, he talks about the story that he showed up in the rain with his horn in a paper bag and Clifford Brown “took pity” on him. Miles says that is movie stuff and explains why it could not have happened that way. It feels like the ‘truth’ of that situation is not necessarily the point. What is important is that Miles was totally out of it, stuck in an addiction to heroin.

In the afterword, Quincy Troupe spoke about the choice to retain this rawness:

Some of what he said was so explosive, we ultimately had to edit it out of the book for legal reasons.
…
We decided to take the calculated risk of offending the squeamish in order to preserve his true voice.

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

This candor forces the reader into a difficult position: you aren’t reading the story of a hero or a saint, but the story of a man whose brilliance and destruction were inextricably linked. He presents these flaws with the same matter-of-fact rhythm as his musical triumphs.

As the book reaches its final pages, the frantic, jagged pace of his earlier life settles into something like a final, unedited transmission. There is a distinct shift in his style – a man racing against the clock. The rhythm is relentless. One sentence, one thought, then the next. Then, then, then. God. Family. Animals. Music. He is simply trying to get the weight of life out onto the page before he runs out of time.

I’m an instinctive kind of person who sees things in people that other people don’t see. I hear things that other people don’t hear and don’t think are important until many years later, when they finally hear them or see them themselves. By then, I’m someplace else and I’ve forgotten what they’re seeing.

Source: Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis

In the end, the reader is forced to sit with the uncomfortable reality that his brilliance and his violence occupy the same space, and you cannot simply walk away from either. Like the politician’s wife, you are just left to sit with it and ponder. This struggle is something that Francis Davis captured:

Autobiography is a problematic literary form, because it’s never clear which is being submitted for the reader’s approval, a book or its author. Davis writes that he loved Parker as a musician but “maybe not as a person,” and the Miles Davis who emerges from Miles—as complex as any character in recent fiction—elicits a similar ambivalence from the reader.
His treatment of women is contemptible: he isn’t averse to slugging them to keep them in line. It isn’t bad enough that he talks with unconvincing remorse of hitting his own women; the story intended to illustrate Billy Eckstine’s tough-guy credentials has Eckstine slapping a would-be girlfriend while Davis looks on approvingly.

Source: The Book on Miles by Francis Davis

For me, I am going to leave the final words with Nick Cave, while I listen again to In a Silent Way:

Perhaps it is better to simply let Morrissey have his views, challenge them when and wherever possible, but allow his music to live on, bearing in mind we are all conflicted individuals – messy, flawed and prone to lunacies. We should thank God that there are some among us that create works of beauty beyond anything most of us can barely imagine, even as some of those same people fall prey to regressive and dangerous belief systems.

Source: Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #48

Like Cave says, we are all messy. But listening to In a Silent Way – or reading Miles – reminds us that this messiness does not disqualify the art. We do not have to choose between the brilliance and the destruction; our job is simply to hold both truths while the music plays.

  1. I would love to have Miles’ insight into Prince’s later, more experimental periods, particularly his pivots into jazz-inflected albums like Old Friends 4 Sale. ↩︎
  2. Troupe explains that: “The book came together after countless hours of interviewing, not only with Miles, but many others who knew him intimately and some who didn’t.” I get the feeling that many of the interviews involving others were used to help capture the myth of Miles. ↩︎
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Bob’s modules were open-ended and interactive: they could speak among themselves and perform changes back and forth on each other before their processed sound went to the final output. Albert Glinksy 'Switched On'

With smartphones and laptops everywhere these days, providing easy access to soft synths at the click of a button, it is easy to forget how revolutionary early synthesisers were and how much effort they demanded. This is brought to the fore in Albert Glinsky’s book Switched On – Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution.

Switched On is part history and part biography, intertwining between the Bob Moog and the times and technology that existed. Although clearly about Moog, the book also situates itself alongside other developments at the time, including Buchla, ARP, Roland, rather than treating Bob Moog as a lone genius. It also ties together various stories involving the various Moog synthesisers, such as The Beatles and “Here Comes the Sun,” TONTO, ELP, “Switched on Bach”, into a coherent context.

The book itself is structured as a six‑part life story that tracks Moog from “The Flushing Geek” kid tinkerer, through the boom of “Cosmic Sounds,” into repeated “Short Circuits” and financial crises, and finally to his late status as “The Grand Poobah.” Each part groups a run of short, titled chapters that read almost like self‑contained vignettes or case studies rather than dense musicology. Formally, the book moves in these six acts, but within that arc Glinsky keeps the ‘great inventor’ myth as a question. Moog is constantly on the edge, living off family loans (especially Aunt Florence), SBA loans, remortgages, and side consultancies. The revolution in sound is built on a persistently non‑viable business and an extended kin network – especially Shirleigh – that kept him afloat. For example, at the same period that Moog was drowning in debt and trying (and failing) to close a bailout deal with investors, the Small Business Administration named him “Small Businessman of the Year” for New York State.

Ironically, that same month, the New York State Small Business Administration contacted Bob to let him know he’d been named the SBA Small Businessman of the Year for New York State. The honor was awarded based on the company’s astounding growth, culminating in $526,000 in sales at the close of fiscal year 1969. When Bob accepted the framed certificate on May 26, the SBA never noticed that his operation was being propped up by its own loan—a liability he was now hard pressed to pay off.

Source: Switched On by Albert Glinksy

This had me thinking about Brian Eno’s argument that “beautiful things grow out of shit.” I was left wondering how many other Moog’s were out there who did not succeed, failures for whatever reason, the ‘shit’ lost to history, that made Moog’s creations possible?

It was interesting how the MiniMoog (or Model D) that I feel the name ‘Moog’ is best known for was not actually designed by Bob himself, but emerged from Bill Hemsath and Jim Scott tinkering with parts that were lying around the factory. The instrument grew almost accidentally, then was refined into a product Bob was initially lukewarm about. This contrasted sharply with Moog’s vision of modular systems as open‑ended networks rather than fixed, pre‑wired instruments.

Bob’s modules, though, were open-ended and interactive: they could speak among themselves and perform changes back and forth on each other before their processed sound went to the final output. In other words, each module had many potential functions. An oscillator could be a sound source, but it could also control the volume of the amplifier, replacing a human hand turning the volume up and down with a knob. An oscillator could also be used to control the panning of a sound back and forth between speakers, or to control the opening and closing of a filter. A filter could feed back on itself and act like an oscillator. An oscillator could control an amplifier that controlled a filter that controlled another oscillator, and so on. There were virtually no limits to the combinations.

Source: Switched On by Albert Glinksy

This tension between open‑ended and pre‑packaged tools echoes Brian Eno said in an interview with Ezra Klein about the DX7 and the dangers of making things too easy.[1]

Another striking thread running through the book is the persistent anxiety around the new technology: unions and traditional musicians repeatedly fear that synthesisers will replace “real” players. This is something that also came up in Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams.

By 1982, the synth had become so pervasive that it became the subject of a dispute initiated by the central London branch of the Musicians’ Union. When Barry Manilow toured the UK in January, he used synths to simulate the orchestral sounds of a big band, after which the union passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices ‘capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments’. They were particularly concerned about the possible effect on West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

It is interesting to contrast these fears with the difficulties in working with early synthesisers. For example, I never really grasped how difficult Switched-On Bach was to make. Because the album sounds so fluid, it creates the illusion of a live keyboard performance, but in reality Carlos had to record every line separately on a monophonic Moog, in tiny snippets, often just a few seconds long, constantly stopping to retune drifting oscillators and then stacking the parts to create the illusion of an ensemble.

The book also shows what happened when Carlos tried to bring this music onstage. At a 1969 concert with the St. Louis Symphony, she could only play a single melodic line over pre‑recorded or orchestral parts. Glinsky notes that, like the Beatles after Sgt. Pepper, it was “impossible” to recreate such studio‑engineered layers live, revealing that “the instrument wasn’t a great organ after all.”

On finishing the book, I was left wondering what might be different from approaching the topic from the perspective of an assemblage. “Moog” as a part of a larger configuration of drugs, counterculture, space exploration, and military research (including Moog’s own side projects in those areas), plus his various business and marketing missteps (random hiring, failed amps, etc.) Ultimately, it was a compelling read and provided a glimpse into the man behind the myth.

Listened to Jonathan Yen’s reading of Switched On via Audible.

  1. The Yamaha DX7 (1983) was notoriously hard to program: FM synthesis plus a tiny single-line LCD. Eno reportedly spent months teaching himself to use it. When he suggested to Yamaha that they improve the interface, they replied that 80% of DX7s returned for service had never been reprogrammed—people just used the factory presets. For Eno, this is the trap of convenience: when a tool offers ready-made options, we slide into “mental laziness” instead of inventing our own sounds. ↩︎

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“According to many people who’ve spent time with Prince, he was addicted to the creative process. He was constantly looking for something that wasn’t familiar to keep him interested.” Duane Tudahl Nick Hornby ‘Dickens and Prince’

After my daughter saw Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic, she asked the inevitable question: Michael Jackson or Prince? Both artists rose to prominence simultaneously, and the media has long linked them – not just because they were Black male pop icons born in 1958, but because they represented two distinct versions of the global superstar. In Dig If You Will the Picture, Ben Greenman highlights a specific divergence in their creative instincts:

“When it comes to Prince’s failure to get his head around hip-hop, Michael Jackson furnishes an instructive contrast. He also started his solo career in the disco era and, at the height of his stardom, also created slick pop records that drew heavily on guitar heroics. (He had to hire help, but he hired the best: Eddie Van Halen, Slash, and others.) But beginning in 1991, on Dangerous, Jackson began to incorporate elements of hip-hop into his music, mostly by collaborating with established talents.”

Source: Dig If You Will the Picture by Ben Greenman

Greenman’s observation underscores a fundamental difference in approach. Jackson was a master collaborator, building his vision by hiring the best talent available to execute his ideas. In contrast, while Prince certainly used collaborators – from The Revolution and the New Power Generation to the Hornheads – the vision was always, unequivocally, his own.

That philosophy shaped their recording styles. Jackson worked as a perfectionist, often spending years refining a project until every element was polished to a sheen. Prince, conversely, was a restless, prolific auteur. He built his studio environment specifically to capture ideas the moment they struck, valuing immediate expression over meticulous post-production. It feels unfair, then, to pit them against one another. One can compare them on chart performance or personal taste, but to compare them as artists is to ignore that they were working toward entirely different goals. This is also something that comes through in Nick Hornby’s book Dickens & Prince.

Hornby’s book starts from the oddness of the pairing. The spark was discovering the sheer volume of unreleased Sign o’ the Times‑era material and realising that Dickens worked that way too:

Sign o’ the Times included sixty-three songs that weren’t on the original album. Sixty-three! That’s almost four times as many as the original album, three more than Jimi Hendrix released in his lifetime, two more than the Eagles recorded in the twentieth century . . . and they were nearly all produced around the same time. (They weren’t all produced for the same record, but we’ll get to that.) The fan site PrinceVault has 102 entries in the category “Songs recorded during 1986.” And we are beginning to learn that 1986 was not an atypical year. When I read about the boxed set, I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

From there, the book bounces between the two artists. It begins with their unstable childhoods – Dickens cast into poverty when his family entered a debtors’ prison, Prince bouncing between friends and relatives after his parents divorced.

Hornby then moves to their early years and the way they rose to prominence through a combination of relentless effort and startling genius, extending this into a discussion of how other media and popular culture fed their work.

The focus then shifts to the prime reason for pairing them: work. Dickens is shown keeping multiple serials going at once, editing magazines, writing torrents of letters, rehearsing amateur theatricals, walking obsessively, and still turning out canonical novels. Prince is his musical counterpart, recording constantly, stockpiling songs, working at a pace where “first drafts” are often good enough to release:

Whether it was best Prince or average Prince, that wasn’t the point. The point was that he had to do it. “According to many people who’ve spent time with Prince, he was addicted to the creative process,” says Duane Tudahl. “He was constantly looking for something that wasn’t familiar to keep him interested.”
“He was not a perfectionist,” said Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers. “He wouldn’t have had that output if he’d been a perfectionist . . . It just poured out of him—he couldn’t wait on perfection.”

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Neither artist cared for the burden of perfectionism.

With this focus on work in place, Hornby turns to their frustration with the business world. Dickens railed against plagiaristic publishers and pirate dramatisations, while Prince fought bitterly over record contracts and ownership of his masters. For Hornby, this is the “trauma of the past” playing out:

When you look again at those icons who grew up in poverty, you can see that sometimes the trauma of the past and the bewildering nature of the fame catch up with you.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Coming from meagre beginnings, both felt chronically ripped off by the world around them.

Their final shared vulnerability is women. Clearly, there were Prince’s string of partners and two marriages, and Dickens leaving Catherine for Nelly Ternan. But women also exposed something in each: for Dickens, the way he mishandled his marital break‑up in public and how certain female characters seem to absorb his unresolved feelings; for Prince, a need to seduce not only in bed but also in the studio:

“He’d meet a girl and take her back to Paisley and record a double album with her overnight,” said former manager Randy Phillips. “It would be ready the next day. Arnold [Stiefel, co-manager] had a conversation with him and said, ‘Stop doing A&R with your dick.’ ” Lots of rock stars have managed to seduce young women without having to write a dozen songs and produce a whole album for them, so this process was very particular to him, and seems to demonstrate—as if you couldn’t have guessed from hundreds of his song titles—that sex and the creative process were very important to him. You know the sort. He couldn’t so much as look at a girl without wanting to check her levels.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Hornby suggests that both artists would have benefited from therapy. I suspect Sinéad O’Connor would have agreed.

Across all of this, Hornby keeps circling back to what he finally states outright near the end: the book is “about work.”

This book is about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connecting with so many people for so long. That’s why I have photos of them both on my office wall. They will stay there for as long as I need them, which will be for the rest of my life.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Both were addicted to work. For Dickens, if it wasn’t a novel, it was a play; if not a play, then letters. For Prince, there were always more recordings, more ideas, and – famously while on tour – aftershows following the official gigs. This “work” was more than a pay cheque, it was a compulsion.

Returning to beginning, to compare Prince and Jackson is to ignore that they were working toward entirely different goals. If Jackson was a perfectionist seeking to build a monument, Prince and Dickens were conduits seeking to build an oeuvre. In an episode of Rock’s Backpages, Hornby suggests that errors become a mark of creativity:

There is a thing with great artists that there mistakes become their signature.

Source: Episode 143 : Nick Hornby on Prince (& Dickens) + Boz Scaggs audio interview (Rock’s Backpages)

This fundamental difference is precisely what Nick Hornby explores in Dickens & Prince. All in all, it is a fascinating book that helps shine a different light on creativity. It was also interesting to think about this alongside Brené Brown’s work on courage and vulnerability.

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The number one piece of advice I have for you is to parent the child you have, not the child you thought you’d have. Penn and Kim Holderness ‘ADHD is Awesome’

ADHD is Awesome, by Penn and Kim Holderness (award‑winning creators, podcast hosts, and winners of Season 33 of The Amazing Race), is a funny, research‑informed (they are not doctors[1]), and deeply personal reframe of ADHD from “deficit” to difference.

The book is structured in three parts:

  • Getting to know ADHD – how ADHD is diagnosed, what’s happening in the “staccato” brain, and the huge variety of ways it shows up in real people.
  • Changing the narrative – challenging stigma, owning strengths, and treating ADHD as “an explanation, not an excuse”, and providing a new name “VAST” (variable attention stimulus trait.[2])
  • Strategies to thrive – practical routines, tools, and relationship habits to manage distraction, emotional regulation, and daily life, while leaning into creativity, hyperfocus, and humor.

Listening to the audiobook (via Libby) was useful because Penn and Kim narrate in their own voices, highlighting the contrast between the person with ADHD and the partner supporting them.

What resonated with me about this book is the deeper appreciation of the challenges associated with ADHD. Penn talks a lot about everyday distractions, from forgetting to put a mug under the coffeemaker so the coffee spills everywhere to coming home from Target with sunglasses, a DVD, and a basketball needle but no avocados he went in for. He also gives a vivid sense of the “voice of ADHD in the head”: the shame of leaving keys on top of the car again, or melting down as a kid over something as small as being asked to put shoes away, then feeling like you’re “broken” rather than someone with a legitimate brain difference. At the same time, both Penn and Kim keep stressing that ADHD shows up differently for everyone: as Kim puts it, “our experiences are just that: our experiences… One of the glories of ADHD is that its presentation is as unique as the people who have it”.

I am left thinking about Liz Wiseman’s book Multiplier and the ‘accidental diminisher’, that is where supposed good deeds can have negative consequences. For example, Wiseman talks about leaders who ‘set the pace’, go ahead and do the work, rather than distribute tasks.

As leaders, sometimes the faster we run, the slower others walk. When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Thinking about ADHD, it feels like there is a constant question associated with knowing when to challenge particular actions and when letting go is chronic rescuing. As they explain in the book, “ADHD is an explanation, not an excuse.” The question is whether the support building capability or just creating dependence?

In the classroom, I find a big challenge with moving boundaries associated with having neuro-divergent students and how that fits with rigid rules and structures. It is important to differentiate between patterns of behaviour hurting others, eroding trust, or blocking the learner’s own growth, compared with when the “problem” is mostly about neatness, preference, or strict conformity to rigid structures that were not built with neurodivergence in mind.

Here are concrete ways, drawn from the book, to support someone with ADHD:

  • Learn about their experience and validate it: Say things like “Wow, that sucks” instead of “You should have…” when ADHD causes a problem, to reduce shame and increase connection.
  • Offer empathy before solutions: Make connection your first move, then problem-solve once emotions are regulated.
  • Lend a practical helping hand: Help clarify priorities, break tasks down, or quietly pitch in when they’re overwhelmed, rather than waiting for them to ask.
  • Use gentle reminders and external supports: Offer to help set up systems: lists, calendars, phone reminders, written instructions—then let them run those systems themselves (“never try to remember something if you can write it down instead”).
  • Adjust expectations and “parent/partner the person you have”: Especially with kids, distinguish ADHD symptoms from stubbornness and rethink what “success” should look like for them (“parent the child you have”).
  • Share the load and delegate, don’t martyr yourself: If you’re the main support person, get help with chores, clutter, and logistics so you do not burn out, and consciously delegate tasks instead of silently doing everything (“ADHD takes a village”).
  • Notice and praise effort and strengths: Point out what they do well and when their ADHD traits are assets (creativity, humor, loyalty, quick thinking). This reinforces “ADHD is awesome” as a lived reality, not just a slogan.
  1. “Before we get started, let’s make one thing very, very clear: I am not a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am not a doctor. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat: I am not a doctor. I do not have a medical degree—I don’t even play a doctor on TV—so the best advice I can give you about medication is to go to an actual doctor to discuss whether it will work for you. (Medication works for a lot of people! I just don’t happen to be one of them.)” Source: ADHD is Awesome ↩︎
  2. Dr. Hallowell also agrees a name change is in order. As he sees it, the current name is inaccurate. He explained, “I reject the deficit disorder model because it’s wrong, and it’s demeaning. When you use it, you get started on the wrong foot. Would you want to marry someone who was referred to as ‘boring, stupid, and ugly?’ That’s kind of what the current name is saying.”2 He’s been a longtime proponent of trying to change the name to VAST, which stands for “variable attention stimulus trait.” Source: ADHD is Awesome ↩︎
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The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Cixin Liu ‘The Dark Forest’

Where The Three-Body Problem laid the historical and theoretical groundwork for a cosmic crisis associated with alien contact, Cixin Liu’s sequel, The Dark Forest, shifts its focus entirely toward the gruelling, multi-century labor of constructing a future world. It stops being a paranoid tech-thriller and becomes an epic sociological experiment.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Wallfacer Project—and its shadow twin, the Wallbreakers—where a handful of individuals are granted near-absolute power to design opaque, private strategies, while an opposing class is tasked with exposing and sabotaging them, turning human psychology itself into the primary battlefield.

Liu does not just build a world, he maps the psychological, political, and material fractures of humanity under the weight of an impending, existential apocalypse on a number of fronts. Through the devastating collapse of the Great Ravine and the sheer shock of the Doomsday Battle, the novel grapples with a staggering central dilemma: How do we address a future that is fundamentally beyond our ability to truly imagine?

When thinking about the massive timescales (a four-century countdown) and the sheer, unfathomable expanse of the universe in The Dark Forest, we are drawn directly to philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject.

In The Ecological Thought, Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium.

Source: Wikipedia

The impending Trisolaran invasion is a classic example. It is too vast, too slow, and too technologically alien for the human mind to compute as a singular event. Humanity cannot look directly at the crisis; they can only experience it through its fracturing fragments – the sudden lockdown of subatomic physics by the sophon, the environmental collapse of the Great Ravine, or the terrifying silence of deep space. From a narrative perspective, Liu tries to capture this impossibility by having characters put into hibernation and then woken at different periods capturing how the perspective on what the problem changes over time.

As we cannot mentally grasp a hyperobject, our greatest vulnerability becomes our own cognitive shortcuts. As a wise adage notes: our greatest risk is our assumptions. In the case of The Dark Forest, this mistake is played out when military generals assume a space war will play out like the 19th-century Sino-Japanese War, trying to tie agile starships to rigid planetary fortresses. We assume the future is just a larger, shinier version of the past.

The single, frictionless Droplet methodically punches through the hulls of the entire human fleet in mere minutes. It is a brilliant, terrifying exploration of the limits of knowledge. Humanity’s reliance on metaphor and artistic interpretation completely blinded them to a literal, strong-interaction kinetic weapon.

Roughly thirteen minutes passed from the moment the probe started its attack until the fleet command system arrived at the correct assessment. Given the complex and grim battlefield conditions, this was fairly quick, but the droplet was quicker. In twentieth-century naval battles, there might have been time for commanders to be summoned to the flagship for a conference once the enemy fleet appeared on the horizon. But space battles were measured in seconds, and in that thirteen-minute span, more than six hundred warships were destroyed by the probe. Only then did humanity realize that command of a space battle was beyond their reach. And due to the sophon block, it was beyond the reach of their artificial intelligence as well. Purely in terms of command, humanity might never have the capacity to engage in a space battle with Trisolaris.

Source: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

The universe is not a vibrant, welcoming network of alien cultures; it is a pitch-black forest populated by armed hunters stepping silently through the trees. Because of the vast distances of space, no two civilizations can ever establish true trust, nor can they know if the other is benevolent. Therefore, the only logical, self-preserving choice upon detecting another lifeform is to eliminate it before it has the chance to grow and eliminate you.

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

Source: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Luo Ji’s final victory is a masterclass in cosmic irony and dark humor. He does not defeat the Trisolarans by creating a bigger, more powerful weapon. Instead, he accepts his role as a Wallfacer, steps entirely into the dark, and sets a semantic trap. By threatening to broadcast Trisolaris’s coordinates to the hidden snipers of the universe, he uses the truth of cosmic sociology as a shield.

I listened to The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen) on Audible, narrated by Daniel York Loh.

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In Plato's Timaeus, the 'soul of the world' is said to be shaped like the letter X, and this same letter, Chi in Greek. can also be used to refer to Christ. In summary, I think it is a wonderful coincidence of opposites that this symbol can stand at once for something unknown or mysterious and, at the same time, for a specific point or place of significance. Daniel John Pilikington ‘X’

In Daniel John Pilkington’s book X, he collates a series of “X”s photographed during COVID, usually used to stipulate the distance people were asked to stand from each other as a precautionary safety measure – “stand here, 1.5m apart”. This is contrasted with a poem on the facing pages, which strings together different definitions of X as verb, noun, adjective, abbreviation, symbol and icon.

On the surface, the concept seems simple. But I am not sure it is “simple” any more than John Olsen’s paintings were seen as “simple” when dismissed by critics as something a child could have done. They could not.

But important art – maybe even great art – like Olsen’s, tells us a lot about who we have been, who we are and maybe who we might be, if looked at closely enough. This is Olsen’s great bequest to this country.

Source: John Olsen, like all great artists, told us a lot about who Australians are – and who we might be by Rex Butler

There is something haunting about Pilkington’s book in that it to addresses who we have been, are and might be, leaving the reader feeling different afterwards.

Walking around Melbourne, you can still see remnants of COVID: a faded X no longer active, an errant sign about washing your hands. In practice, these actions felt obvious at the time. (For example, I remember Maciej Cegłowski’s point that in some cultures mask wearing is a routine precaution, not just a COVID measure.) Yet these gestures and marks have become imbued with much more meaning.

This had me thinking about Ian Buchanan’s discussion of the Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari’s concept of Body without Organs in “Becoming Mountain”. For Buchanan, the Body without Organs (BwO) is not a stable “thing” or inner essence, but a produced field of experience that allows certain intensities to run. Different people, in different situations, form different BwOs. A BwO is assessed by asking: why this BwO, by these means, with what consequences?

Seen that way, Pilkington’s Xs are not just traces of policy; they are part of a series of assemblages:

  • As form of content, the X is tape or paint on concrete, a printed decal, a spot on the floor framed in a photograph.
  • As form of expression, it is an instruction (“stand here”), an element of public health discourse, an icon of social distancing, sometimes a symbol of state overreach or civic solidarity.

The “meaning” of the X is not in the mark alone but in the way these material and expressive dimensions are yoked together at particular moments.

During the heart of the pandemic, the X helped compose a BwO organised around bodily spacing and fear of contagion. It territorialised space: organised who could stand where, choreographed queues, recalibrated our sense of “too close”. That same material mark could, for others, compose a very different BwO: an X as emblem of governmental control, an ironic point of resistance, or simply a piece of theatre to be ignored.

After mandates ended, the X deterritorialised from its practical role – no one lines up on it anymore – and reterritorialised as something else: a ghost of lockdown, a small jolt of unease, nostalgia, quiet anger, or blank indifference. The intensities it carries have changed, but they have not disappeared.

In that sense, there is not one X but a series of assemblages over time that let different intensities run across the same graphic form. The book itself participates in this process. By collecting and reframing the Xs, Pilkington’s project reterritorialises them again – not as directives for conduct but as objects of memory, reflection, even aesthetic appreciation. Reading Pilkington’s Xs through Buchanan’s lens makes it harder to see them as mere leftovers of a health campaign: they become points where content and expression, policy and affect, past and present, all momentarily resonate – small, mute marks that once choreographed bodies and now continue to organise memory.

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is the first instalment in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. It revolves around the question of what would actually happen if humanity made contact with an alien civilisation. Rather than offering a standard first-contact narrative, Liu constructs an intricate, multi-layered world anchored by historical and scientific elements. The story starts with the psychological trauma of Mao’s Cultural Revolution before moving to the isolated Red Coast Base where secret deep-space communications are first broadcast. In the modern day, this history collides with a terrifying physics crisis where renowned scientists encounter impossible experimental results. Through the eyes of nanotechnology researcher Wang Miao, the narrative uncovers a virtual reality game that simulates a chaotic world orbiting three suns, leading to the revelation of a doomed alien group, Trisolaris. To ensure human submission, the aliens deploy Sophons, which are eleven-dimensional proton supercomputers designed to disrupt human science.

Multiple sophons may be able to form a system to sense the macro world through quantum effects. For example, suppose a nucleus has two protons. The two of them will interact and follow certain patterns of motion. Take spin: Maybe the direction of spin of the two protons must be opposite from each other. When these two protons are taken out of the nucleus, no matter how far apart they are, this pattern will remain in effect. When both protons are made into sophons, they will, based on this effect, create a mutual-sensing system. More sophons can then form a mutual-sensing formation. This formation’s scale can be adjusted to any size, and can thus receive electromagnetic waves to sense the macro world at any frequency. Of course, the actual quantum effects necessary to create such a sophon formation are very complicated. My explanation is only an analogy.”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This culminate in a brutal tactical showdown along the Panama Canal against the traitorous Earth-Trisolaris Organization.

The novel explores several themes, most notably the limits of knowledge. Liu suggests that our fundamental understanding of physics might not be a universal truth, but rather a localised chance.

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe.
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

While human comprehension is presented as having hard boundaries, strictly limited by our specific placement in time and space. Alongside this cosmic humility, the book dives into the friction between the individual and the system, demonstrating how massive, systemic political movements can crush and reshape single lives. In a devastating domino effect, the ideological trauma inflicted on Ye Wenjie by the state causes her to make a catastrophic cosmic choice that dooms the entire human race.

What are they locking?
YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Ultimately, The Three-Body Problem is a novel built around many layers, with each revealing a different perspective. Although we are position to like some characters more than others, Liu has a way of empathising with everyones perspective, for they are all history:

The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called Maple recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The final impression of the book is one of profound existential dread, it definitely left me feeling incredibly small and utterly insignificant in the grand scale of the universe.

He felt like the starry sky was a magnifying glass that covered the world, and he was a tiny insect below the lens with nowhere to hide.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It delivers a massive, thrilling intellectual challenge that leaves your head hurting in the exact same way it does after watching say Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. However, even with all the dread, there is still hope, that even if humans are bugs, bugs always still manage to find a way to survive and prosper.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.
The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
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Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about. Liz Wiseman ‘Multipliers’

With Multipliers, Liz Wiseman contrasts two types of leaders: multipliers, those who draw out and often double the capacity of people around them, and diminishers, those who stunt others’ growth and contribution. The book explores how this divide plays out in several dimensions, including how leaders use resources:

Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they manage hierarchy:

Each time people who uphold the beliefs are rewarded, the culture is strengthened; likewise, every time diminishing behavior is overlooked, that culture is diluted.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they challenge and debate:

Once an opportunity is seeded and intellectual energy is created, Multipliers establish the challenge at hand in such a way that it creates a huge stretch for an organization.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they invest in people:

Perhaps the only thing harder than watching an A+ player leave your team is knowing that you were the one who encouraged them to move on.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

And how “accidental diminishers” unintentionally shut others down:

As leaders, sometimes the faster we run, the slower others walk. When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Rather than treating these as simple opposites, the book shows a spectrum of behaviours: some multipliers amplify more than others, and some diminishers have a stronger negative impact than others. It also highlights that diminishing is not always intentional. For example, leaders can withhold investment, over-direct, or dominate discussions without realising the effect they are having.

The closing chapters focus on practical strategies for becoming more of a multiplier and for handling diminishers when you are not in charge. These include defensive moves (protecting your autonomy and space to think), offensive moves (such as creating a “user guide to you” so others know how to get your best work), and ways to shift conversations and expectations so that more people can contribute at their full intelligence.

What resonated with me is going beyond the leader as genius. One of the things Wiseman talks about again and again is moving from “genius” to “genius maker”, that is leaders who leave others feeling like they are the smartest in the room. This is epitomised with the Disraeli quote:

We began this inquiry with an intriguing observation about two political leaders paraphrased by Bono, musician and global activist. He said, “It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person.” The observation captures the essence and the power of a Multiplier.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

The discussion of a multiplier making you think you were the “smartest person” had me thinking about David Weinberger’s adage that, “The smartest person in the room is the room.” It also had me wondering how this idea of “genius maker” sits alongside Brian Eno’s idea of scenius:

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Source: Scenius, or Communal Genius by Kevin Kelley

Something Austin Kleon sums this up as follows:

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

Source: Scenius by Austin Kleon

I wonder if a true multiplier is actually someone who creates an environment, rather than individuals. This also had me thinking about multiplicity alongside Alma Harris’ work on distributed leadership and disciplined collaboration.

Many educational initiatives often start out with a clear set of practises in mind. Disciplined Collaboration instead provides a structure for staff to enquire into student learning through the analysis of data, diagnosing teaching and learning issues that students actually face, working collaboratively to build teacher efficacy and then returning to data to measure the impact.
The model is best understood by considering it as three clear stages: collaboration, innovationand impact. Overall, it is designed with the dual role of improving student outcomes and moving professional learning away from the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills, to a more active role of construction and co-construction of professional knowledge.

Source: Disciplined Collaboration: Allowing Freedom Within Form (Finding Common Ground) by Aaron Davis

I was left challenged by the question of whether we are multiplying or diminishing? In exploring the topic of vulnerability, Brene Brown explains that we cannot say, “I don’t do vulnerability”. It is so easy to say we do not have time for play, creativity and rest, or numb emotions. But as Brown captures, this is not an option. Saying no to vulnerability is saying no to growth and improvement. For example, when we numb the “bad” (pain, shame), we also numb the “good” (joy, love). In a similar way, Liz Wiseman suggests we cannot really opt out of our impact on others’ intelligence: if we are not intentionally multiplying, we are probably diminishing by default.

Wiseman describes how “there is more intelligence inside our organisations than we are using” and contrasts leaders who “saw, used, and grew the intelligence of others” with those who “shut down the smarts of those around them”. Even when she emphasises that most of us are “Accidental Diminishers,” she still frames it as a choice of practice.

Leading like a Multiplier is a choice we encounter daily or perhaps in every moment. What choices are you making? How will these choices affect what the people around you become? Is it possible that the choice you make about how you lead can impact not just your team, or even your immediate sphere of influence, but generations to come? A single Accidental Diminisher turned Multiplier can have a profound and far-reaching impact in a world where the challenges are great and full intelligence underutilized.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

My take-away from the book is that just as there is a danger with prioritising nature over nurture when it comes to red, yellow, green and blue types of human behaviour, it can be easy to label somebody as a multiplier or diminisher. However, this risks missing the nuisance. I think what is more useful is considering what are multiplying and diminishing behaviours. In some ways, I think that this is why the discussion of the accidental diminisher is useful. It feels like it provides the most potential for growth and improvement.

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You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching. Daniel Mendelsohn ‘An Odyssey - A Father, A Son and an Epic’

Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic is a hybrid of memoir and literary criticism that intertwines different narratives together, including an undergraduate Odyssey seminar, the Mediterranean “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, Mendelsohn’s relationship with his father, Jay, and close readings of Homer’s epic poem. As Dwight Garner neatly summarises in his review:

a) It is a classroom drama, a bit like Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys” or the movie “Dead Poets Society,” in that it recalls what happened when Jay decided to sit in on the author’s undergraduate seminar on the “Odyssey” at Bard College.
b) It is travel writing. Father and son decide to take the cruise shortly after the completion of the seminar at Bard.
c) It is a work of biographical memoir that investigates the circumstances of Jay’s life.
d) It is a work of literary criticism. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, employed the trick of the Trojan horse. Mendelsohn, similarly, smuggles his moral and textual ideas past you when you are distracted by the other things he’s doing.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

Mendelsohn ties these modes so tightly that it’s hard to say where criticism ends and family memoir begins. In some ways the various threads can be understood as repeating and refracting, like ring composition in the epic itself, where each loop back changes how we understand the present moment.

In ring composition, the narrator will start to tell a story only to pause and loop back to some earlier moment that helps explain an aspect of the story he’s telling—a bit of personal or family history, say—and afterward might even loop back to some earlier moment or object or incident that will help account for that slightly less early moment, thereafter gradually winding his way back to the present, the moment in the narrative that he left in order to provide all this background.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

In other words, stories keep circling back through earlier episodes, then returning us to the ‘now’ with a slightly altered understanding. The book itself mirrors this structure: classroom, cruise, childhood memories, and the father’s decline loop back on one another, each detour changing how we read the others. Mendelsohn himself discusses Homer’s famous ‘scar’ episode in Book 19, circling back to small details – a gesture, a comment in class – that are later revealed as wounds or scars. Mendelsohn argues that the:

great irony of Book 19, then, is that the scar that identifies Odysseus in such a memorable way, that proves who he is, is the visual symbol of a youthful act that is not typical of his adult behavior: the excessive caution, the guardedness, the willed reserve. Hence it identifies him (the scar proves that he is Odysseus, the person who went on the boar hunt and got himself wounded) while being, at the same time, a false identifier, the marker of a behavior that is no longer characteristic of him.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

However, as with Odysseus, we’re often left to wonder whether such reveals are true identifiers or false ones, and whether any stable ‘true’ identity exists at all.

As a format, it reminded me of other hybrid literary/biographical journeys, including books like Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now (shadowing Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Tom Roston’s The Writer’s Crusade on Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, and even Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. All are books where reading another text becomes a way of reading a life. Each uses another writer’s text as a kind of map for revisiting the self, history, and grief. Mendelsohn’s book sits comfortably among these, but its classroom setting and father – son dynamic give it a more explicitly pedagogical feel. However, as Garner notes, it resists neat didacticism:

This book does not bake its lessons up into a tidy platter of macaroons, but they are there nonetheless.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

In some respect, reading An Odyssey felt like bibliotherapy, literature as healing. Not necessarily literature that dictates to us, but rather sets up a series of questions and conditions for us to consider. Those questions – about self-sufficiency, identity, and whether we can know another person – recur in Mendelsohn’s arguments with his students and with his father, as Emily Wilson captures in her review.

The fault-lines mapped in the disagreements of father and son correspond to some of the most fascinating interpretative questions of The Odyssey itself, such as whether people ever can or should be self-sufficient, whether you have a single “true” identity and whether you can ever really know another person. The book also explores how stories and shared memories help people to form deep connections with one another across time.

Source: An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn Review – A Father, a Son and Homer’s Epic by Emily Wilson

For me, that is what made it feel like bibliotherapy: the book does not solve the riddles of family and marriage, but it provides a space for bad ideas (and good ones too) to be voiced, tested, and revised without having to be ‘right’ on first utterance, and general questions to live with. I feel that the genre‑bending nature of the book allows Mendelsohn to explore ideas that might not find a place in more academic texts.

All in all, Mendelsohn has a way of making us feel as if we are sitting at the back of his seminar room, watching the poem, the class, and his father all slowly change shape in front of us – sometimes in ways he only understands in retrospect. As Mendelsohn later reflects,

You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

I came to An Odyssey via a conversation on the Art of Manliness podcast, then listened to the audiobook (read by Bronson Pinchot) on Spotify.