Nov 25 round-up

My novel has been out for a month now, and sales are in double figures! I will hold off buying that yacht for a while. But it has been gratifying to get some Goodreads, BookSirens and Amazon reviews, like a real author. One reviewer called it pretentious. Moi? But they’ve been largely positive and not all by me under a pseudonym.

This month I was the external examiner for Igor Lesko’s PhD, which he completed with the OU Netherlands. It was an honor to be part of such a well researched thesis on OER policy. Igor gave an excellent defence and was awarded the doctorate. I have a fondness for the Dutch PhD viva, which is more of a public celebration than an examination. It lasts for exactly an hour, and each member of the panel has an allotted time to ask questions. It has a lot of ritual involved with titles such as Esteemed Candidate and Highly Learned Opponent (I think I may require everyone to refer to me by this title now). Unfortunately there was no budget to get me there in person, so I had to come in online, which meant my enormous head was projected into the auditorium for a full hour, like some poor man’s Wizard of Oz (see pic).

Books

John Green, who wrote A Fault In Our Stars, has since become a health champion in the fight against tuberculosis. His book, Everything is Tuberculosis, was a fascinating read, deftly combining history, science, social impact and personal human accounts. I think, like he admits of himself, I had thought of TB as a thing of the past, (I had an allergic reaction to penicillin as a child and spent a week in an old TB sanitarium, which is probably where my love of gothic horror started). This is a privilege of living in the west, but TB remains the number one cause of infectious death worldwide killing around 1.3 million people a year (it took a couple of years at number 2 during Covid). What Green conveys very well is the rage that this should be so, for an entirely treatable disease. There is a lot of racism involved in why we don’t treat it, or treat it ineffectively, but even by capitalism’s own measures, every dollar spent on TB prevention recoups around 36 dollars in saved costs later, and production. Green makes the argument that this shouldn’t be why we eradicate TB, which should be for the humanitarian reason of we can and we should.

Slightly less rage inducing was Laura Pashby’s lyrical account of her love for, and photographic capture of fog. If you’ve ever come across fog in the woods and felt all mystical, then this book is for you.

Vinyl

I picked up a release from earlier in the year, SG Goodman’s Planting By The Signs, which is a marvellous slab of southern story telling. You can feel the oppressive damp heat that makes anything apart from sitting on your porch drinking beer seem excessive.

Thanks to a wedding gift of a Discogs voucher we also treated ourselves to the 4LP expanded version of Springsteen’s Nebraska.  It’s always been my favourite Bruce album and while I’m not sure I need all four albums, the outtakes and electric versions add depth to the process detailed in Deliver Me From Nowhere. As a wannabe writer I really appreciate the noir novelist touches in his lyrics on this album – mum fingering a wedding band, an off duty cop sneaking up from behind, the gambling commission hanging on by the skin of its teeth – all of these are masterful little details that add richness.

Album of the month though is Rosalia’s Lux, which is a stunningly ambitious project, with four movements about female saints in fourteen languages. You have to admire the vision to produce this, it’s not exactly an obvious career boosting move. I have a soft spot for albums with ridiculous ambition (see also Jordan The Comeback and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) because they give me hope that artists still attempt them. AI slop this ain’t. Partly because Nick Grimshaw raved so enthusiastically about it, the album is out of stock in the UK, so I had to get one shipped from Germany.