In your mind's eye, picture an instrumentalist playing a solo. Let's say a pianist performing a prelude and fugue from Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier.” Now abstract the instrument—in your imagination, make the instrument invisible. Watch the pianist's hands air-play every note, every chord, and every sequence. In the absence of the piano, we can really see that the pia-nist's fngers are dancing an elaborate and meaningful choreography.

In truth, we don't need to make the instrument invisible. The dance of the fngers is obvious to the attentive eyes. Our job is to develop a skillful dancerly sensitivity in everything that we do with our fngers.

Find a surface: table, countertop, armrest, the back of a guitar, the sides of a cello. You’ll be an amateur anatomist without a specialized vocabulary. And you’ll be an amateur clown and mime delighting in doing fun and funny things, some of which will be ridiculous before they become divine.

We’re used to fnding parallels in the anatomy of the arms and legs: the upper arm is the thigh, the elbow is the knee, the forearm is the calf, the wrist is the ankle, the hand is the foot, the fnger is the toe. I suggest that you tweak the imagery when you practice your fnger dancing: the fnger becomes not the refection of a toe but of the whole leg and foot. You might think of the fnger's three phalanges as the thigh, the lower leg, and the foot. This empowers the fnger, giving it presence, strength, and agency.

Repetition is the foundation of life.

Breathing is a repetitive act that you perform thousands of times every day. Walking is repetitive, too, whether you walk down the block to the bakery or take ten thousand steps as a meditative exercise. You might not notice how many times you chew a mouthful of peanuts, but it's unlikely that you chew only once or twice before swallowing the 20 crunchy things. Kissing your lover is also repetitive. Depending on who you are, you might give and receive a hundred kisses before you feel the urge to check the messages on your smartphone. Checking messages also happens to be a repetitive action. Sports, martial arts, dance: repetitive. Peeling potatoes, carrots, beets: repetitive. Singing, speaking, chanting: repetitive.

Let me repeat it: repetition is the foundation of life.

And if repetition is foundational, so is repetitive practice for musicians. Repetition helps you learn, internalize, remember, and integrate your musical gestures and texts. Repetition helps you become attentive and discerning. Repetition brings you joy and pleasure. Repetition can also hurt you and disrupt your music making, perhaps even your career and livelihood.

Five concepts will help you practice repetitions for 10 minutes, 60 minutes, or three hours without hurting yourself. Each of these concepts requires intentionality and awareness.

A paradigm may be informally defned as a set of values, concepts, and priorities. The set of values determines your perspective in life and your practical behaviors; you do as you believe. Diferent musicians think and play diferently because they apply diferent values, concepts, and priorities to their music making. Glenn Gould and Artur Rubinstein lived according to diferent paradigms. We might not completely understand all the intricacies of their respective paradigms, but we know that they were diferent from the other. We can see and hear the diferences, and we can tell them apart from a single note or a single phrase of music played by each of them. In addition to their music making, their entire existences were lived according to their individual paradigms.

We might liken your paradigm to a master puppeteer, in command of your actions. Your aspirations and motivations, your habits and routines, your choices and decisions, your repertory, your career, your practicing and performing, your sounds, your rubato, your articulations and dynamics: all of it is determined by your paradigm. But you’re not the unwilling victim of the puppeteer, because you’re the puppeteer yourself. It's possible—and I’d say urgently necessary—for you to become alert to your paradigm, and for you to play with it, so to speak (Figure 1.1).

Simplifying greatly and perhaps dangerously, I’d like to contrast two foundational paradigms for musicians.

The Religious Context of Falwell's Connection with the State of Israel

In his book, Falwell talks about the frst time he understood the importance of Israel to a believing Christian, which occurred during his religious studies at college.“ Chapter after chapter, book after book, the scriptures tell the story of those whom GOD chose and how He helped to bring about their creation. He made a covenant with the fathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He promised them a great nation in the promised land. ‘And from My people of Israel,’ GOD promised, ‘will come a Messiah who will save all people from their sins.’” The understanding that the Israelites are GOD's chosen people recurs throughout Falwell's writings, speeches, and declarations as a cornerstone of his faith. Falwell expected every believing Christian to understand that the Israelites are GOD's chosen people and that they need and are obligated to live in peace in the land promised to them by GOD almighty himself.

In his book, Listen, America, Falwell discusses the prophecy of the attack that would befall Israel at the end of days. Falwell's interpretation describes the attack by Israel's enemies, the primary enemy being the Soviet army with its Arab allies. He quotes chapters 38 and 39 from Ezekiel's prophecy describing the battle against Israel and interprets: “Russia will be defeated, and Israel will succeed for the second time to be saved by the hand of GOD.

I knocked over my bedside water-bottle one night and didn't notice until dawn that the books sharing the plastic tray on the bedroom floor had been lying for some time in a pool of water. Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018) had soaked up the liquid and expanded into a bulging slab of paper-pulp. Harman's book suggests that objects remain always in some way foreign and opaque to us. We can never know them totally. They have a life of their own that we are wrong to discount or dismiss simply because its is invisible to us. To the extent that they never cease to be mysterious and inaccessible, they can be assumed to have agency, identity, in ways that we usually only admit to humans, and to a limited extent, to sentient beings such as animals. What we cannot know, Harman suggests, should be assumed, potentially at least, to have all the features we reserve for ourselves, even though – indeed precisely because – we cannot know them.

The Pelican paperback that I had coveted in large measure because it was a Pelican (and thus endowed with the aura of the old-fashioned artefact associated with my childhood and with a fantasized liberal post-war English world now forever gone) swelled up like a grotesquely inflated cushion within the bulging paper covers. I laid the sodden object out to dry in the sun, and over a period of weeks it gradually relinquished its moisture, leaving an undulating block twice its original thickness, with a spine now so concave that it looked like a cylinder split open down one side.

I put together a collection of informal videos inspired by the themes from Hands, Wrists, Fingers. These aren't instructional videos that explain the book's exercises, but performances in which I respond to ideas from the book. I didn't aim to be comprehensive. Instead, I selected a few concepts and recorded my confrontations with them—partly for my pleasure, and partly to invite you to play the game in turn. Many clips feature my own compositions and improvisations. Below I list all the compositions I used, including those by other composers. I didn't think it was necessary to title or credit my improvisations. “Scordatura” refers to unorthodox tunings for string instruments.

The video clips are posted on the book's dedicated online page, hosted by Anthem Press. Look for the Links menu here: https://anthempress.com/ hands-wrists-fngers-pb.

Chapter 2, “The Body is Culture”

1. Painted Hands (“Boy Joy,” for solo cello in scordatura, and “Parade,” for Native American fute)

Chapter 5, “Expressive Gesticulation”

2. Expressive Gesticulation

3. Speedy Gesticulation (“Puro Açúcar,” for voice and cello in scordatura)

4. From the Elbow

5. Coincidence (“Convocation,” for solo cello in scordatura)

Chapter 6, “Sounds Made and Sounds Heard”

6. Clapping

Chapter 7, “The Dance”

7. Walking Fingers

8. Dance of the Wrists (“Shadows,” for solo cello in scordatura)

9. Dance of the Fists (“Sunshine,” for voice and piano)

Background on Christian Theology and Its Afnity to Israel

The period after the Six-Day War (The 1967 War), which was also Israel's 25th Jubilee year, was a period of “rebirth” for Evangelical theology in general and the Christian Lobby that supported Israel in particular. David Katz claims that one of the infuential connections to Evangelical theology in the modern era is the book The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, frst published in 1970 with the help of Carol Carlson. According to the author and editor, 25 million copies of the book were sold, making it the best-selling book in Christian tradition, other than the Bible itself. According to Katz, this book has had such a signifcant impact, partly due to its dynamic description of the vision of John of Patmos, which unrolls before our eyes, starting with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. According to the belief of observant Christians, this period, which comes every 50 years and is called in Hebrew “The Jubilee year,” is a substantial milestone in the development of the relationship between the Evangelical Church and the people and State of Israel. Jason Olson also refers to 1967 as a turning point, claiming in his book that: “1967 was a vindication for fundamentalists. GOD proved that he stood by Israel. History has proven this.”

This book is peppered with tributes to collaboration, some very up-front, some more subtle and circumspect. Collaboration is not just an alternative mode of artistic creation (in fact, revisionist literary histories suggest that co-authorship may have been the norm from which the Romantic single author deviated, only to then claim normativity for itself), but the alpha and omega of all creative work. At the end of the day, we collaborate with prior texts, language, with light, with the earth…Collaboration is, ultimately, the only ecological principle. And in a world that separates, collaboration is resistance. ‘Every act that brings change is collaborative’, writes John (see page 69 below). Our consumer culture elevates the commodity per se to the status of cult. But without the consumer, no commodity: this is the quixotic truth of regimes of austerity that only the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to drive home to the global elites. Even the commodity hides in itself a lost collaboration, a ‘per se’, a ‘for self’ that is also ‘for’ the ‘self’ that engages with the commodity. In the purchase, there may be hidden a poem, a collaborative transformation of a prior material that the market does its best to occlude, but that stubbornly comes to the fore, provoking novel transformations, reappropriations for rogue purposes...

Against the norms of individual scholarship and original research – two versions of the same thing on the axes of society and history, space and time – in the humanities and in the creative arts, collaboration offers a model of creativity that countermands both norms.

Imagine a complete database of every conceivable gesture: all gestures for all purposes, from all cultures and all personality types. In your daily life and in your music making, you’re an individual embodiment of this infnite database, occupying your own corner of it. Going deeper into the gestural database and expanding your territory is a sure way to enhance your Creative Health.

This chapter presents games and exercises that require make-believing and pretending. You might fnd it unnatural to practice gestures that don't refect your personality or your aesthetics. But would you like to improve the use of your hands, wrists, and fngers? Would you like to refne your instrumental technique and energize your musical interpretations? Would you like to heal your hurts and overcome your handicaps? Come and play these games, even if they seem strange to you (Figure 5.1).

To start, you’ll speak and gesticulate in a variety of styles. Use a paragraph of written text, a poem, a set of instructions; count numbers out loud, in sequence or at random; talk to an imaginary audience; or practice together with a friend, a colleague, or a student.

• 1. Use both hands together, working symmetrically as a sort of metronome or marker of emphasis. Always use the same gesture, maybe a chopping motion which could be big or small in amplitude. You’ll embody a one-gesture personality.

• 2. Use a single hand, just adding a few random waves to the discourse. Do two versions, with your dominant and your nondominant hand. The waves are diferent from the chopping motions of the previous exercise (Figure 5.2).

(dated 31 October 2020 and provoked by the blog entry on the Future Library of 19 August 2020)

I apply for:

1. Handwritten text in native language and signed (if you don't feel like write yourself, I’II take care of it).

2. If you wish, also translate into the language you feel closest to.

3. Choose paper to liking, possibly heavy (dimensions cms. 30 x 40 or close).

4. If too complicate or laborious, send text by e-mail.

A warm and cordial greeting. Italo Lanfredini

dear italo thanks for your invitation. i think you are a great sculptor and i admire your working with landforms and growth, with nature and the breath.

Though I have been International Editor for the Kenyon Review for over fourteen years now, this is the first chance I’ve had to compile a selection of Australian work for the journal. Although I have recently enjoyed editing The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry for an American audience, it's particularly edifying to be able to present a range of ‘genres’ in this special issue.

Selected in conjunction with my friend and the Review's Editor, David Lynn, the work that is included in the issue gives a cross-section of one of many different collective interpretations of contemporary Australian literacy practice. It is easy to make a claim that a country's literature is going through a rich period of creative energy; in essence, this is de rigueur for the collector, collator, or anthologizer to claim. Most often this is probably true if enough people have desired and bothered to produce such a selection. I present this selection not so much in an aesthetic light (which I always suspect as being more curatorial and illustrative than generative), but rather in the light of necessity, of compulsion.

I feel there's a drive, an enthusiasm, and a shout-out in Australian writing at present that demands it be heard. It can be political, ethical, and moral in its orientation, but it can also be a case of ‘look and see and judge for yourself’ – an investigation of a country constantly struggling to come to grips with collective identity when so many identities have been denied, or hidden, or disparaged or, for that matter, highlighted as authentic.

‘This strange, little floating world’

The young single women on the Corona, which took 373 emigrants from Plymouth to Adelaide in 1882, called their ship ‘this strange little floating world of ours’. Michel Foucault emphasised this strangeness when he called the ocean-going ship a heterotopia – not a fantasy place like a utopia, but a place that was different, connected to the normal world but yet a place that was in some way Other. A heterotopia, as Foucault defined it, was a small part of the world, and it reflected it as if in a mirror. It denoted a space more or less isolated, more or less self-contained, outside everyday dimensions of time and space. The examples he gave of such heterotopias included the asylum, the monastery, the brothel and perhaps even the colony. The nineteenth-century ship was a ‘different space’ par excellence, not least because it sailed from brothel to brothel and from colony to colony, joining up other heterotopic spaces like dots in a puzzle.

This chapter examines reading and writing practices within the special spaces of both emigrant and convict ships making the long journey from Britain to Australia or New Zealand, and back. Those on board found themselves part of a community, randomly formed and of finite duration. The ship's community was an accidental one, made up, as one ship's newspaper, the Sobraon Gossip put it, of ‘a medley of random units and promiscuous individualities’.3 The members of this community felt a sense of exile and isolation as they made the crossing between two worlds. After considering their reading practices on board and the literary landmarks which guided them, I turn to writing genres unique to long-distance ocean-going travel – the shipboard diary and the handwritten ship's newspaper.

In defending themselves against the ever-more aggressive encroachments of utilitarian, market-oriented, skills-based demands for cost-effective education and research, the humanities often fall back upon a claim for the intrinsic worth of some scholarly pursuits: forms of academic inquiry that are per se valuable and need no justification beyond themselves. The close reading of a poem, the detailed annotation of an ancient manuscript, the philosophical parsing of a concept, are said to be valuable per se, in and for themselves.

Such argument for such intrinsic value may resemble those of the ecologist who defends an area of ‘old growth forest’, perhaps even a single tree, of the urban heritage expert who speaks out for the preservation of a listed building, or of the curator lovingly caring for a single rare artefact. But none of these comparisons really has any weight against the imperious demands of the monetarized return-on-investment model of knowledge because effectively they both operate with the same logic: that of the isolated, reified commodity, cut loose of its history of production and its environment of use-value. Intrinsic value is the value of capitalist mobility and exchangeability. Per se is a moneyed myth. In positing the quality of ‘in itself’, or of intrinsic ‘value’, we in fact invest in matter or the object under consideration qualities beyond itself.

Australian Readers and Writers

Australia is, and since 1788 it always has been, a reading society. Several historical indicators underline this underestimated aspect of Australian culture. The enormous volume of books imported to Australia from Britain provides one kind of evidence. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, imports reached flood proportions. By 1875, Australia and New Zealand together surpassed the United States to make Australasia the largest export market for British books.1 Melbourne received more colonial editions than any other port in the British Empire. Between 1900 and the Second World War, one quarter of all British book exports were destined for the Australian market.2 Nationalist historians, taking their cue from Henry Lawson, have usually deplored Australia's cultural dependency on the products of Paternoster Row, the heart of London's publishing industry.3 They argue that it deepened Australia's colonial subordination to the metropole and stifled the emergence of home-grown literary talent. But the stream of cheap books arriving from Britain was a boon to avid Australian readers, as well as a source of profit for Australian booksellers.

The proliferation of regional newspapers offers another kind of evidence of Australia's love of reading. In 1904, the government statistician counted 315 newspapers appearing in New South Wales alone, of which 107 were published in Sydney and its suburbs.