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Oct 2, 2026 ∞

Now you can listen to Writing Slowly

As attentive readers of this website will know, I’m happily using micro.blog as the site’s hosting platform. Micro.blog has a surprisingly wide range of features and it comes with several associated mini-apps, which provide easy access to those features. One of the apps is called Wavelength, and it has just been updated. This has inspired me, finally, to actually make use of it.

Wavelength makes it easy to edit and publish voice recordings and now with Wavelength I’ve been recording my voice, reading aloud a number of the longer articles on this site. So if you navigate to one of these posts (nearly twenty of them so far) you might find there’s now a little ’listen’ button, which will enable you to hear me speaking my own written words.

Why bother doing this? Well, so far it’s been quite fun, and you might just enjoy the opportunity to hear the person behind the writing.

I feel these days it’s more important than ever to lean into our own humanity. Sure, you can get a better, more professional experience elsewhere, enabled no doubt by AI automation and by the mimicking of human experience rather than the real thing. But as I’ve pointed out before, my range is me.

There’s an increasing amount of slop online and this is one small way to show my words are handmade and originated from a real person.

I’m celebrating the human touch and trying to respect you, dear reader, as a real person too.¹

You’ll be relieved to know that while I might still insist on writing slowly, I speak at a reasonable speed.

So do let me know what you think, and whether I sound like you imagined I would. And if you’d like to subscribe to the weekly e-mail digest, there’s never been a better time to do so.

Talking of which, now would also be a pretty good time to check out my book, Shu Ha RI. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.

A microphone is mounted on a black adjustable arm against a white wall.

unless you’re actually a bot, scraping my voice to make scam adverts to send to my friends and family – in which case, my respect will be commensurately diminished. ↩︎

Sep 27, 2026 ∞

Bookshops in Sydney. How's it going?

In the house by the ocean where we’re currently staying there’s a copy of Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, For the Time Being. In the inside back cover there’s a label from the store where it was purchased: Norton Street Books in Leichhardt, Sydney. That book shop has long since closed, so long ago that I’ve never personally heard anyone mention its existence. But then this year when Berkelouw Books, also on Norton Street in Leichhardt, announced they were shutting down I realised I’ve been living in Sydney for long enough now to have experienced the closure and opening of many bookstores over the years.

A label for Norton Street Bookshop in Leichhardt, including an image of a woman reading while sitting beside a cat, is displayed on a book page.

A good decade before COVID, around 2010 there was a period when it felt as though there was a real culling of Sydney bookshops. This was around the time Dymocks closed several of their CBD branch stores to focus on just their flagship store on George Street. Each closure felt like the end of an era. Cumulatively it was seriously worrying. And then the turmoil grew worse.

Sep 27, 2026 ∞

Faint praise for categories

Author and activist Rebecca Solnit isn’t too keen on the apparent eagerness to categorise.

“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.” — A is for Airtight Categories

I’m not all that keen on the established categories myself. Not in my notes, anyway, and often not in my life. I’m not looking for categories. Instead, I’m usually looking for patterns.

I feel that placing an idea or concept in a category tends to close down further thought, like closing the lid on a box. In contrast, discovering a pattern tends to be just the start of consideration, of enquiry, of conversation, not the end of it.

Patterns invite a sense of wonder; categories tend to deny it. As Solnit said I her book Hope in the Dark, “the Moon is profound except when we land on it”.

Being quick to categorise can look like a neat short-cut to understanding, but it often doesn’t work out that way. Established categories can hide more than they reveal. Relying on them can be a way of fooling yourself into believing you know more than you do. One of the reasons I write slowly is to allow myself space and time to think through my ignorance — and to think things through by writing them down. Solnit says:

“We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted.”

Well, I feel being uncertain or uncommitted isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and writing slowly isn’t necessarily a sign of laziness. Look where certain, committed and fast has got us in recent times.

And admitting that you don’t know, far from being a sign of ignorance, is often a hallmark of expertise. That’s the paradox of mastery. It’s why the expert must remain a beginner.

One kind of category I do have time for is the category that no one has thought of yet. Creating new categories of thought is how the world is re-made. It’s curious that those who are the keenest on categories tend to be the least receptive to the idea that we just made them up.

“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.

Further reading:

A circular blank space in the center is surrounded by abstract watercolor patterns in shades of blue and green with black and gold lines.

Sep 22, 2026 ∞

There is something you find interesting

💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989.

I’ve mentioned Annie Dillard previously, and in fact have quoted another section from this very article.

Anyway, Dillard put her finger on the reason I wrote my little book, Shu Ha Ri, the Japanese Way of Learning. Not that no one else understood the concept (I mean, almost everyone in Japan probably understands it better than me), but that I’d never seen a satisfying book-length treatment. So that’s where I began, by expressing my own fascination.

Why I wrote the book on Shuhari and what’s in it for you

Sep 21, 2026 ∞

A matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee

So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon.

It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans.

Here we have:

A Valve that can’t be Ghosted
Three Cold Hands
True Kintsugi
Forge-smith
The Ledger Remembers
Unpoisoned Firstflag

And they’re not even trying.

Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with them is another. Presumably that’s next week’s task.

Reviewing Banks’s 1996 Culture novel, Peter Tieryas said:

💬 “Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee.”

Weird how accurately this turned out, especially since Banks wrote the novel thirty years ago, while owning just a fax machine and two answering machines which he didn’t even use. No internet, no email and certainly no AI agents conspiring galactic domination in slang.

Well in case you’re interested, here’s a pretty extensive list of the actual Culture ships mentioned in the novels.

Sep 20, 2026 ∞

The consolations of literature

On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.

I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.

In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:

💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.

In a way

It was fun

Not to see Mount Fuji

In foggy rain.”

Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.

Auto-generated description: A paperback copy of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Bashō, part of the Penguin Classics series, is shown with a price sticker and detailed text on the cover.

Sep 20, 2026 ∞

Between the lines by Rachel Dioso-Villa

I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up.

The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form.

An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making of notes can be an art in itself, and how from this repeated practice larger themes gradually arise — in this case, a self portrait.

A display features hanging translucent fabric panels with watercolor portraits and handwritten text in various styles and colors.

Here’s the write-up:

💬 “Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.””

You can view the artwork at the artist’s Brisbane Portrait Prize site.

The idea of note-making as art has arisen in several different places, including in the work of Georges Didi-Hubermann, and Daniel Wisser.

Sep 15, 2026 ∞

I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club

The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.

Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.

You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.

I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.

Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.

*You can follow along with the continuing adventures of Writing Slowly by means of the RSS feed, or if you prefer, you can subscribe to good old email. *

Aug 26, 2026 ∞

Thoughts on The Mulai, a novel by Munir Hachemi

The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).

I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.

This is the kind of intellectual science fiction that intrigues me: lost or unknown ‘alien’ civilisations, or the remnants of failed attempts at planetary colonisation, clinging on to what they remember of ‘civilisation’, or perhaps abandoning it for something stranger and more adaptive.

Familiar tropes are hard at work here. The mysterious nearly-human culture with its almost-but-not-quite-indecipherable language. The unreliable anthropologist, who reports on their observations and is both repelled and strangely attracted to what they encounter. The sudden reversals of expectation and the uncomfortable presentiment of doom.

I’ve enjoyed several books that work with and extend these ideas. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time asks whether it’s possible to work for a better future without succumbing to Utopian fantasies. China Miéville’s Embassytown addresses the near impossibilities of translation across incommensurable cultures and physiologies, as does Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life”. Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden explores the travails of the descendants of human colonists, abandoned on an inhospitable planet. Bird Deity by John Morrissey depicts the stark brutality of planetary colonisation that exploits everything it touches while understanding almost nothing of the indigenous inhabitants it depends on (Here’s a review). And hovering behind all these works is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, that “ambiguous utopia.”

I make this litany to mark out the familiar territory, but as Chris Beckett said of his novel, “it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.”

And indeed these recurring themes remain vital. How are we to encounter the strange, the radically different, the inexplicably other? It’s something people seem to be terrible at. In her review of Embassytown for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin observed:

“There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?”

The eponymous Mulai of Hachemi’s novel are definitely not familiar. They aren’t aliens, but for Dr. Nahum Cordovero, the “archaeologist” who comes to study them in their 159th year of isolation, they might as well be. They are the survivors of a failed attempt at planetary colonisation, terraforming pioneers, abandoned when their distant sponsors became preoccupied with a war.

After generations of abandonment the Mulai have forgotten almost everything about the advanced technology that still keeps them alive. They have long sublimated their hope of rescue into a more abstract eschatology: “The tree comes.” This mantra comforts them, perhaps especially due to its lack of any connection to reality.

Since arriving on this barely inhabitable planet they have rapidly and comprehensively transformed almost every aspect of their previous way of life. To Dr. Cordovero, everything about them is tantalisingly hard to understand.

As he comes to terms with the language of the Mulai, it both clarifies the culture and renders it harder to interpret. His status as an outsider is tested to breaking point. By learning the language, the culture it represents begins to interpret him.

Meanwhile, Faida, one of the Mulai, is also finding it hard to understand life. Having embarked on a quite different quest, she has encountered a book hidden by one of the original colonists. The reader may recognise it almost at once as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but to Faida it’s a deep enigma. She resolves to attempt the impossible: to break with taboos in order to translate this strange artifact into the Mulai language.

From these different angles, then, questions of language, culture, and interpretation are problematised rather than reaching a clear resolution.

Hachemi’s previous novel, Living Things, observed that nuances and misunderstandings “are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence”.

The reader is deeply implicated in this process. How to make sense of this fragmented narrative? What do these strange words mean? What is the actual purpose of Cordovero’s mission and what are the implications of his heavily censored conclusions (censorship presumably being a condition of their existence)?

“El árbol viene” — “The Tree Comes” — is the original Spanish title of the novel. This is the meaning of mu lai, 木来 in Chinese. It’s part of a sign at the entrance to the dome under which the Mulai live, which, if it wasn’t for the weathering of the planet’s fierce seasons, would still read 未来, wei lai. The now missing extra stroke would signify, “Future”, the official, long-forgotten name of the original mission.

The word Future is displayed in multiple languages, including English, Chinese (with a missing stroke), Russian, Arabic, and Korean, separated by vertical bars.

This is a sign that we’re firmly in the territory of metafiction. It is also a reference to one of the works quoted in the epigraph to the novel, Argentinian author Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. This work declares “the future is over” at the same time as it pulls apart the famous claims of the Swiss linguist of the tenuous relationship between the word “tree” and the living tree it signifies.

An oval-shaped label contains a black silhouette of a tree above the word Tree, separated by a horizontal line.

The metafiction deepens as the reader is led to wonder about the importance of de Saussure’s linguistic theories and their appropriation by Jacques Lacan via Libertella’s satire. The same applies to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with two fictional works repeatedly alluded to as the narrative progresses: the Libertarian Codex, and its “first amendment”, the Teachings of Flukeh.

All is puzzling fragments in this tale told through a multi-authored collection of papers, disjointed in time and of often dubious perspective. This sense of spatial, cultural and literary estrangement is surely appropriate for a novel fundamentally about estrangement. I found it deeply compelling and finished the book in two intense sittings. No sooner had I read the last page than I found myself turning straight back to the first page to re-read with a new, if still very incomplete understanding. “The future is over,” begins Dr. Cordovero. But that’s just the start.

There’s a great review of The Mulai by Xiao Yue Shan in Asymptote Journal. It’s worth reading even if you don’t read the novel.

And from an interview with the author (in Spanish) I discovered he seems to have a Mulai glyph tattooed on his forearm. Now that’s commitment to your art.

See more on the IndieWeb Book Club

Now read:

César Aira on the constant flight forward

Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.

References

Beckett, Chris. Dark Eden. Corvus, 2012.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harvest Book / Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.
Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others, Small Beer Press, 2002, pp. 91-140.
Hachemi, Munir. Living Things. Translated by Julai Sanches. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024.
Hachemi, Munir. The Mulai. Translated by Julia Sanches, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 2014.
Libertella, Héctor. El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000.
Miéville, China. Embassytown. Del Rey, 2012.
Morrissey, John. Bird Deity. Text Publishing, 2026.
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1985.

Aug 19, 2026 ∞

Collecting notes is just the start

“The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument. Will the museum use it to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? Or will it continue to project the power of colonial gain and corporate indemnity?” — Ahdaf Soueif, On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees Soueif2019resigning

As a resigning member of the board of trustees of the British Museum, novelist Ahdaf Soueif was in a strong position to understand the point of collecting. His words, written in 2019, stand for any form of collecting, from world-leading to extremely modest.

Soueif reminds us that any collection is only “a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument”.

His resignation follows what I take to be an increasing realisation that in spite of the PR, through its collection and curation the British Museum really does perpetuate a colonial worldview, and is an instrument of destructive power. In particular he calls out the Museum’s continued sponsorship by oil multinational BP, its lack of leadership on the issue of the repatriation of looted artefacts, and its reluctance to support fair work conditions for ancillary staff in the wake of the collapse of service provider Carillion.

He asked of the Museum, not entirely rhetorically, it is to be hoped,

“will it be involved in making a world that is habitable, just, interconnected and open for the next generation; or will it continue to collaborate with those who are unmaking the world before our eyes?”

I think that this might apply as a test of any collection, at least in the following sense: Is the act of collecting making or unmaking the world?

In some very small way, even my collection of notes must play its part. Is my act of collecting making or unmaking the world?

Hence: publishing is important. It’s not enough to keep collecting. The aim is to make something and to share it with others.

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References

Further Reading