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This book is a curious mix of deepest truths and off-handed disavowal that anything read between these covers is a shallow copy of the real truths. I get that some idealized form of the Kybalion has been whispered from lip to ear for many millennia, and the words printed by Three Initiates only offers a key to understanding the seven Principles to be unlocked when heard. Yellow Submarine told me so.

Quite a shift from the PG translation by Terry Johnson to the edgy R-rated-ness of Posner but not really adding much to Chekhov’s original except oh-so-clever metatheatrical moments: characters addressing the audience in character and late 90s/early 21st century pop culture. Just when I was prepared to agree this Life sucks, Sonia delivers a speech about invisible butterflies, only to deny it a page later.

Vanya is clever enough to know what a miserable life he and his immediate family are enduring, yet not clever enough to do anything about it. Even if he had got a lucky shot at his brother-in-law, either verbally or literally with a handgun, nothing would really change. Astrov notices the decay, like his well-diagramed forest, but cannot do anything but doodle while Yeliena protests too much about attention received.

The first three natural numbers are a lot more complex than ABC or baby, you and me: one should be a prime but not really and somehow resembles infinity; two is the only even prime and implies opposite values, the other; three takes the cake as the most mysterious prime yet, being the centre of one while also standing out as something entirely different from the first two, but it is composed of exactly those numbers.

Ah, the country life and the unsavoury aspects of being an academic well past his prime. Vanya is just barely keeping his stuff together, even going so far as dropping an F bomb in this recent translation, while the rest of his homestead are ready to riot. Kind of like where so many of us are now at with an endless pandemic stretching out before us and all the wits we had about us are reaching their sad, frayed ends.

The bleak kitchen sink drama in space becomes more of an adaptation of A Christmas Carol once Arnie and Manfred arrive at Dirty Knobby and begin the time-slip. Also seems like the self-destructive Scrooge was about to learn a valuable lesson, like his insistence on buying FDR land was the reason that Leo showed up in the first place. Instead, he dies and Jack realizes it’s been Manfred’s world all along.

The unfinished business of Synchronicity (and perhaps Mysterium Coniunctionis) led von Franz to take on the further psychological study of how number and time interact with both matter and spirit, and within the first few chapters she establishes the many facets that will be explored. The depths of atomic structure may not reach a holographic principle but rather becomes archetypal with projections.

The time-slip is more of an extreme fast forward into a posthuman nightmare of gubbish gubble that only Manfred (and perhaps Heliogabalus) can make sense of the noise while everyone else is repeating the same errors. Jack seems to be slipping backwards as he reconstructs the events leading up to the disastrous evening with Arnie, and perhaps would be better to heed Dr. Glaub’s advice, if he had been more proactive.

These early versions of the present Two Essays appear in the Appendices not so much as rough drafts or unpolished gems, but instead are evidence of how much of an impulse the author felt in finding a new path for the field of psychology, to grow and adapt with later writing. The greatest surprise here is his wariness of the unconscious, finding its more balanced fusion with the conscious in creative fantasy.

Jack’s mistrust of the Martian school system and its array of teaching machines, from master circuit to angry janitor, all works to maintain a stifling status quo: a world not fit for him or Manfred. Rather they won’t fit in. Only Arnie sees the potential of their Jungian-decoded disfigured time, but he’s only in it for the cash. Perhaps I am time-slipping, too, seeing chapter nine where a six should have been!

A brief yet revealing look inside Dodgson’s dream made into a full-blown stage production. I do not wish to contribute to the stifling cancel culture, but it really seems like Carroll is defending his bona fide pedophilia against Codlin’s salacious review. Hard to defend when he wistfully recalls the day, treats mature women, his Royal Trio, as hags, and praises “daintiest” d’Alcourt’s baby-face Dormouse.

So far the second week of August 1994 is pretty close to how it happened on this planet, politically and socially, with the exception of Martian colonists being a few decades off. What is surprisingly astute are the academic credentials forcing less educated off to a new frontier and an edgy stance on autistic children being burden on society when they will hopefully prove to be the time-slip savants the story needs.

Imagine an academic taking time from studious publications and lectures to recall an idle moment and then reworking that narrative into a twisted fairy tale that still remains a beloved classic. Now subtract all the intriguing parts he put into Wonderland and what remains is this “adventure” Underground which is exactly how it plays out: an unfinished early draft that reads like a fever ‘zine.

The last chapter sounds a bit too wishful in its thinking than a feasible approach to a country’s recovery. Get those kids off Robinhood and enlisted in the Corona Corp like wartime sacrifices of way back when. Also telling his own hard-luck story about losing a jacket with his single mom clutching every penny, it is almost as if this book is part of Galloway’s 2024 presidential bid. Take a closer look at Hardin.

A relatively short essay but one of the riskiest moves for him: admitting that he doesn’t know what constitutes the self and the many psychological processes he has studied for his career. Still boldly claiming there is more than just one “royal road” to understanding what human do, the archetypes are introduced in the proto- form, inviting readers to consider how greatly they influence us, but need not be all.

The mirror world continues to glimmer with the somber wit as Alice approaches the crowning eighth square. The standout chapter has the White Knight’s delusional inventiveness, and the way that Alice responds at the prospect of hearing another poem wins the whole game. And then, whoosh, back where she began as unimaginative Alice, berating a kitten for not taking part in her dream or Carroll’s row row Romanticism.

Only six months since Alice’s previous adventure, but a full seven years for Carroll to mature as a storyteller, making this Looking Glass world more enigmatical and Alice’s interactions with what she found there more purposeful. On her way to becoming queen, she meets many a ridiculous character, but each seems to represent some aspect of discretion Alice must learn. Especially when listening to nonsense poetry.

This long-overdue disruption to postsecondary education does not seem as radical as alluded to in previous chapters. Instead, it stays with the status quo only accelerated by the pandemic: top schools retain their elite status, mid-level colleges start struggling and the low-ranked places close (something already in the cards regardless of global lockdown). Galloway must like posting as a prof despite his profession.

Unicorns speak yogababble? Disruptors in the marketplace exploiting the T algorithm? Benjamin Button products? How much of this insight into a tumultuous period of global economics comes from the author’s Mad Libs-style phrase-making, or is it lingua franca? He is at least on the up-and-up when disclosing where he has invested, but is a little too fond of praising companies that are gangster rather than doing good.

The alarming aloofness with which Galloway reports on The Four main Big Tech corporations and their race to the top of the two trillion dollar pyramid makes any thought of disruption seem impossible. Amazon and Apple use the lure of consumer items to gain control of health and well-being, while Google and Facebook tighten their grip on media sources we have access to, chipping away at a public knowledge for ad space.

Leaving aside the over-explained puns and put-downs of Oxford colleagues, this love letter to a way-too-inappropriately aged Alice continues to make its heroine out as unimaginative and dull, barely able to keep up the Mad Hatter, Mock Turtle or the King of Hearts’ court without causing trouble for everyone around her. And then, of course, it all becomes a dream some sister has, another kid that Carroll was wooing?

At the heart of this book are the two main, homogeneous methods basically relying on stats or stories to share research. As much as Leavy encourages transformative, socially just efforts, there must be countless articles and reports using these methods to shut down underperforming schools, further disenfranchise people and discredit health care systems. Has society sidestepped ethics for the sake of academic careers?

A philosophically insightful opener, calling on Aristotle and his view on time, leads to a business insiders’ view of the past ten months that abandons metaphysics (by paragraph three) in favour of Wall Street Journal and Washington Post feed. Nevertheless an intriguing investigation of what went wrong but also profits for some, mostly Googlish red social media as opposed to virtuous blue privacy!

The legendary Wonderland would have a lot more to wonder at if the prissy, precious heroine Alice could spend less time worrying about her stature or nonsense and just get on with exploring. The book is halfway-done by the time she meets the Cheshire Cat and has her madness pointed out. Knowing the backstory of a mathematically-minded Dodgson and his pervy predilection for little Liddells makes his creativity creepy.

The huge narrative void created by the departure of little Paul, followed shortly by the greater Paul leaving London for a vacation, begins to be filled with Dickensian additions: young innocents like Florence and Walter tossed about by fate, scheming middlemen vying for social advancement, struggling Gills and Tootles sinking further into ruin, and clueless dolts like Mr. Toots somehow becoming a romantic nonpareil.

Easy to overlook the amount of time a story takes when performed on stage, especially when “the two hours’ traffic” typically translates into one hectic week rather than the nine months depicted in the scene headings. The climax slows down to a moment of stillness for a reunited family as far away from digital devices creating separate worlds, with Kenzo interacting IRL while Ms. Asada bundles up stacks of yen.

The original source of this play, Chikamatsu’s Shinjuten no Amijima, has encoded itself onto a kotatsu drama as Hiroshi and Naomi face the potential suicides of their offspring: an older son who is already long gone and nowhere to be found and their difficult daughter hiding in the shadows at home. At least it is clear which one of them is the titular kuroko as Ichiro maintains his family’s tragic mode.

Was this book really about Baron Munchausen, or simply an early form of fan-fiction forgery? Much like in-world appearances of Don Quixote and Rousseau, there is a presence yet no life in what appears. Where is the ride on the cannonball or pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, signifiers of someone else less maniacal than this Munchausen? Perhaps I missed much of these bits in the sequence of sentence fragments.

As much as I suspect the playwright only has a cursory understanding of virtual reality and gaming culture, Shigematsu certainly gets a bead on the isolated yet liberating potential of the digitally immersed. Maya chooses to escape the real life her parents struggle to provide for a family falling apart due to a national malaise while an enterprising outsider Kenzo constructs a virtual wormhole to help them be whole.

A hero for a vastly different time, whose gleeful whim to find the source of the Nile propagates so many of the colonialist crimes for following centuries not even: Rousseau, Voltaire or Beelzebub offer any resistance to the Baron’s bold plan to get African moon emigrants addicted to fudge. Even at a moment of satire with the white slave traders he has an obvious bout of indignation, not really helping anyone else.