July 25 round-up
July has been one of my busiest ‘academic workload’ months since leaving the OU, being the examiner for two PhDs, a Professorial promotion case and completing my reports as external examiner at Warwick. It’s good to occasionally flex the academic brain muscle still.
And yes, I have to confess, I have been enjoying the comedy around the Warwick “Beyond” rebrand. It has become a byword in our house already, for any pretentious but ultimately meaningless marketing twaddle.
In other news I finished copyediting and revising my novel – a psychological horror titled The Recluse Rules. I have commissioned a cover (through the very useful site Reedsy), so hoping for a September Kindle release. Let me know if you do reviews and want an ARC.
Books
In my previous post I mentioned two books I’d read (Scott Poole’s Wasteland & Caroline Fraser’s Murderland) that I made connections between, even if they weren’t necessarily there. Simon Roberts’ The Power of Not Thinking provided a well written account of the value of embodied knowledge and what this means for the limitations of AI. Maren has blogged some thoughts about this. Roberts book is not anti-Ai but rather a reminder of how different types of knowledge are required. This approach was also borne out in Big Data Baseball, where Travis Sawchick goes beyond the Moneyball love of pure analytics and repeatedly praises the power of combining expert knowledge with the value analytics brought to ending the losing streak of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Vinyl
Definitely the album of the month, and probably year, was Wet Leg’s second album release, Moisturiser. While their debut had a quirky, catchy indie sound, their expansion to a 5 piece has seen them develop their sound to this year’s killer album, with hints of Elastica, Kings of Leon filtered through the uncanny. They’ve also undergone a radical image overhaul and frontwoman Rhian Teasdale is annoying lots of men, by being female, young, queer, mocking Oasis and, most egregiously of all judging from Facebook, not shaving her armpits. For men whose entire personality is shouting along to Cigarettes and Alcohol, this kind of behaviour should come with a health warning as it seems to make them combust with rage. More power to her (the Lambrini Girls are also doing sterling work in this area).
Welsh singer Gwenno released her fourth album, Utopia, full of creamy vocals, rich textures and, for the first time, the majority of lyrics in English (rather than Welsh or Cornish which she has utilised so beautifully hitherto). It sounds like cocktail hour Dionne Warwick mixed with the dreamy synth of Air. Here’s the title track:
