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• Already by then a rather outdated term, “postmodernism” never quite gelled with Murnane’s writing.
• Review: Murnane – Emmett Stinson (Miegunyah Press) It is with this exact observation that Emmett Stinson begins his new critical study of Murnane.
• Written for Miegunyah Press’s “Contemporary Australian Writers” series, Stinson’s Murnane is compact and accessible, designed to interest potential and beginning readers of Murnane.

The breathing author

• After a brief stint as a seminarian, Murnane trained as a teacher, then taught in primary schools from 1960 to 1968.
• From 1980, he lectured in creative writing at Prahran College of Advanced Education (now Deakin University), retiring from that position in 1995.
• He has since produced a further seven books, along with a fully restored version of an earlier book.
• Murnane’s many self-imposed rules, such as never wearing sunglasses, never using a computer, and never travelling in a plane (see his 2002 essay “The Breathing Author” for a full list), seem to mirror the contents of his fiction.
• His performance teasingly invites readers to connect the real-life (“breathing”) author with the narrators (or “implied authors”) of his fiction.

Inventive and playful

• All manifest his distinctive rigour, exemplified by his famously “chiseled sentences”, as J.M.
• His work is technically and conceptually inventive, even playful, and it has attracted admiring readers at home and abroad.
• In recent decades, his readership has grown significantly, enhanced by the internet and social media, which have allowed niche readers to connect with each other.
• Noting all this, as well as the vagaries of Murnane’s publishing history, Stinson ponders his subject’s somewhat divided Australian reception.
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Post-break

• Their purpose is to revisit, reorder, ramify and complete Murnane’s body of work as a whole.
• Stinson wants us to recognise “Murnane’s desire to frame and shape his own literary legacy”.
• I came away from them with a sharpened sense of each book, even as I could see continuities across the whole.
• The chapter on Barley Patch highlights (among other things) modes of reading and writing that are evident in Murnane’s work.

Late style, late recognition

• In his substantial conclusion, subtitled “Gerald Murnane’s Late Style”, Stinson brings these elements together, succinctly and effectively explaining his larger argument.
• It is marked by the artist’s decision to withdraw from the world, follow his or her own desires, and opt “for complexity over resolution”.
• Admitting that this may be true of all Murnane’s writing, Stinson nonetheless argues for its special applicability to the four post-break fictions.
• Beyond this conclusion, we encounter one more component: the transcript of Stinson’s recent interview with Murnane himself.

• This Father’s Day you may be rolling out your best “dad jokes” and watching your children laugh (or groan).
• Maybe you’ll hear your own father, partner or friend crack a dad joke or two.
• You know the ones:
  What is the most condescending animal?
• But dad jokes may also help prepare them to handle embarrassment later in life.

What are dad jokes?

• Dad jokes are a distinct style of humour consisting of puns that are simple, wholesome and often involve a cheesy delivery.
• You can even play around with dad joke generators if you need some inspiration.

Why are dad jokes so popular?

• Other research shows dad jokes work on at least three levels: 1.
• The fact that dad jokes are wholesome and inoffensive means dads can tell them around their children.
• When people tell dad jokes to teasingly annoy someone else for fun, dad jokes work as a kind of weaponised anti-humour.
• The stereotypical scenario associated with dad jokes is exactly this: a dad telling a pun and then his kids rolling their eyes out of annoyance or cringing from embarrassment.

Dad jokes help dads be dads

• Dad jokes are part of a father’s toolkit for engaging with his loved ones, a way to connect through laughter.
• Instead, fathers can revel in the embarrassment their dad jokes can produce around their image-conscious and sensitive adolescent children.
• In fact, in a study, one of us (Marc) suggests the playful teasing that comes with dad jokes may be partly why they are such a widespread cultural phenomenon.
• Not only is it playful and fun, it can also be used to help educate the young person how to handle feeling embarrassed.

Dad jokes are more than punchlines

So, the next time you hear your father unleash a cringe-worthy dad joke, remember it’s not just about the punchline. It’s about creating connections and lightening the mood. So go ahead, let out that groan, and share a smile with the one who proudly delivers the dad jokes. It’s all part of the fun.

• Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony, which appeared on YouTube just a few weeks ago, is the No.
• Sociologically speaking, although its content is essentially libertarian, the song muddies the waters between the American populist left and the right.
• His hit is clearly on the right of the political spectrum and lauded by Republicans.
• As researchers working in the field of political sociology, we are interested in representations of those within nationalist and populist movements.

Two visions of the “people”

• Each sees the political field as divided between the people (seen as organic, authentic and moral) and elites (which are considered disconnected, strategic, inauthentic and above all, immoral).
• In their view it is characterized by its high capital of autochthony, of “local people,” as opposed to immigrants or elites.

Work valued, work despised

• From this perspective, Anthony’s evocation of the situation of miners activates solidarity among the people who do this kind of work.
• In this way, they reconfigure their identity by responding to the contempt in which their occupation is held.
• Finally, assiduous religious practice is often associated with adherence to a populist conception of politics.

A class discourse with a libertarian dimension

• However, what sets Anthony’s song apart from the usual populist right-wing discourse is that it formulates a class opposition based on socioeconomic income.
• This goes further than the vague evocation of an opposition between common people and elites.
• This type of occupational retraining will attenuate the anxiety generated by the “New World” Anthony evokes in his song.

Inflation and ‘peripheral regions’

• Firstly, there’s the widespread perception that the left has abandoned the blue-collar workers to whom Rich Men is de facto addressed.
• Part of this segment of the population feels scorned by “elites” who monopolize symbolic, educational and cultural capital.
• Inhabitants of the rural areas tend not to feel represented by elected representatives and the media.

Polarization benefits populists

• But there are some sociological lessons to be learned about polarization.
• To defuse the polarization that feeds the populist right, its opponents must stop appealing to them as a “basket of deplorables,” to cite Hilary Clinton’s elitist phrase.
• Opponents of the populist right must also stop pathologizing them, as is often the case in psychological approaches to political radicalization.
• Rather than defusing the framing and polarization that benefit populist politicians, these approaches reinforce them.

• The HBO series The White Lotus faced stiff competition when it was launched in summer 2021.
• When the show’s trailer was released in June 2021, its strikingly novel soundtrack stood out.
• This could be heard in full on YouTube and Spotify before HBO aired the first episode that July.

Canadian composers in film and TV

• Tapia de Veer joins Emmy-winning Canadian composers Christophe Beck and Mychael Danna, demonstrating the important role Canada has occupied in producing music for film and television.
• In the early 2000s, he had a Canadian hit with the song “Supersex World,” but then turned to working on music for film and television, creating scores for series like Hunters, Humans and Utopia.

‘Haunting’ sounds

• In doing so, Tapia de Veer presents the themes and sounds that dominate the six Season 1 episodes.
• The “Aloha” theme combines vocal and percussive sounds the composer calls “tribal” and “primal,” with bird calls “for an island feel with a spooky tropical depth.”

Menacing undertone

• It provides a menacing undertone to a surface layer of popular music that tourists to Hawaii may recognize, whether it’s Louis Armstrong singing “On a Coconut Island” or the Rose Ensemble performing “Aloha ‘Oe,” a traditional Hawaiian song composed by Queen Liliʻuokalani.
• For example, when Tapia de Veer uses the human voice in the underscore, it is never with words but rather in bizarre vocalizations.

‘Renaissance’ set in Italy

• Season 2’s main theme, “Renaissance,” features flowing piano, harp and (wordless) operatic voice.
• In later episodes, this setting is localized by the use of the mandolin, an Italian folk instrument.

Disconcerting background tones

• Stories of treachery and infidelity play out in the disconcerting background tones created by Tapia de Veer and longtime collaborator Kim Neundorf, who in Season 2 has contributed to or composed over 10 tracks.
• Neundorf also worked with Tapia de Veer on the TV series Humans and The Third Day, as well as the horror film Smile.

Next season: 36 Thai gongs

It will be interesting to hear what White and Tapia de Veer decide to serve up as the music for the next ‘White Lotus’ season in Thailand. Already, the composer has teased his inclination for including the sounds of Buddhist temples and for using his collection of 36 Thai gongs “to go deep with it [and] make it take a journey.”