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Truly acomedy of tragic proportions, a sign of a country in transition that is both particular to the end of Czarist Russia and also general enough for every generation facing upheaval. I plan to use this play as a template for differences between parents and children over their digital devices; not looking so good for the old landed gentry, whenever they are, who don’t seem to clue into the actual lay of the land.

As much as these historical accounts of Zen feel like old hat by now, Suzuki has an intriguing way of telling them that they are still fascinating and mysterious, just like the many koans he will continue to write about in this book (and many others like it). The flag, or wind, or minds flapping subtly asserts that as much as one can truly know anything, another monk has wiser words to undo any assertion or negation.

The strongest proof of Bown’s gamer dreamworld thesis is also the one I can most readily accept, as I still have vivid memories playing Link’s Awakening on my Game Boy and feeling like there is a lot more going on beyond the pixelated screen than just popping enemy sprites out of existence. Finding out that Pierre-Félix Guattari wrote a screenplay depicting a story of posthuman UIQ is icing on the cake.

Taking such an academic approach in order to attract the young ones to go out to see more (live) shows seems like a recipe for disaster, with a few too many playwright cooks wondering why their cake is dough on both sides (one side being the grey-haired patrons and the other their misunderstood millennials). Lest we forget, this is Canadian theatre, where everyone would go out of their way to welcome others.

It should be no surprise by now, more than halfway through the novel as well as close to fifty-percent through the total Dickensian output, that oddly-spoken street urchins would have such a central role to play, even in the case of Jo’s death, upon the reader’s attention. On the other hand, a conniving antagonist like Tulkinghorn for all his eloquence is only spoken of in passing, barely moving the plot forward.

It should be no surprise by now, more than halfway through the novel as well as close to fifty-percent through the total Dickensian output, that oddly-spoken street urchins would have such a central role to play, even in the case of Jo’s death, upon the reader’s attention. On the other hand, a conniving antagonist like Tulkinghorn for all his eloquence is only spoken of in passing, barely moving the plot forward.

The intriguing overarching idea of this book is to look at videogames as dreams for psychological analysis rather than literary texts in need of a Cole’s Notes interpretation. Then Bown bizarrely gives a textual analysis of the game Uncharted to show how unnecessary it is compared to delving into the depths of Persona. Asides from Japanese dreams and VR potential, I still learned more about Drake.

A smartalecey analysis of video games and the capitalist system of productivity and feigned non-conformity such games as Pokémon Go, Candy Crush and Stardew Valley represent, Bown takes the fanboy-hated subversive approach to these distractions. He argues rather than ‘wasting time’ with meaningless point-scoring, they reinforce the ‘time is money’ lie keeping us from consciousness.

A dialogue with Continuum’s own Q, Bohm demonstrates his down-to-earth physics and fondness for all things implicate. He has a fascinating grasp of the three main fields for human creativity: art, science and religion, coming down unexpectedly hard on science for reducing what can be known to mathematically-precise fragments. He offers an all-encompassing description of God, all the more reason to read On Dialogue.

The philosophic wordplay continues as Bohm bridges arts and sciences, and much else, with an etymologically holistic view of everything without making one-size-fits-all pronouncements about “all.” That there is some level of reality below the atomic level is intriguing enough to put the required mental effort to enter the vortex of artomovement yet a profound artistic understanding of uncertain sciences.

The archetypal interests of Dr. Jung and the arts-based account of his patient Miss Miller appear to be well suited to each other: she jots down a poem or mentions seeing a play, he unravels a complex web of symbols from ancient civilizations and the bible. In the most metaphorical way possible, this discovery is groundbreaking as it would break up the soil of Freudian psychology to find a fertile patch subconscious.

The Coleridgian spectrum of imagination becomes a party platter of scientific innovation, such as Newton observing an apocryphal apple fall from a tree, or Einstein visualizing a train passenger going at light speed and looking into an empty mirror. While much good has come from the rational exercise of the mind, there seems to be so many unusual and unique thought processes between the poles of perception and fancy.

For one of the few cutting-edge scientists to embrace a holistic view of everything, Bohm makes a concerted effort to prove how different the sciences are from the arts, a distinction that suggests two opposing ways of knowing that at least stand to mutually learn from one another. Whether he is playing to one side of the fence, he argue a case on behalf of the ability of abstraction to show more than we can observe.

Great Caesar’s ghost, I see what Zimmerman is doing in the last three chapters! He sets up an interpretive argument following Comte’s developmental history, much like the levels of naïveté, where religion is replaced by a legal system (often a negation of free will by setting up limitations and punishments) then leads to scientific understanding that is mostly positivist. He brings it all back home to the arts!

Sticking to his ‘implicate order’ guns, Bohm takes aim at the concept of creativity by judging it as being able to step beyond mechanical patterns and discover something new or unknown. His stance as a scientist lends him the credibility to make statements based on psychology and pedagogy practice, fields beyond his realm of quantum physics, and yet gets at the heart of the wholeness his types of order represent.

The phrase ‘it is what it is’ gets called into question by the traditions of hermeneutical philosophy, where a big corresponding question is ‘how do we know what we know?’ Developing from mostly Germanic scholarly inquiry, the author raises intriguing points about the role of artistic expression and development in digital humanities but they seem to pale in significance to upcoming gritty real world problems.

The generous attitude of knowing nothing while still possessing a wealth of scientific knowledge would make Socrates proud yet drive others into a King Lear-like madness. The two authors go back a few million years to our primitive ancestors and imagine what the other universe might have looked like for them, and even with the advent of atoms, quarks and leptons, we are today still puzzled over the Lego-brick jumble.

The visions and dreams that take up about two-thirds of this way too brief book are evidence of both professor and students trying to figure out how the depth psychology being discovered in the lecture room works, drawing on classical examples as well as each participants’ wit. Not only does Jung model the role of expert, but gives time for others to get to their own poont. He also speaks to them “kiss my ass!”

Oh ho, it was the Narratron all along, recounting the discoveries of Laurence Oliphant, an unsatisfactory end of Mallory’s Leviathan, something dark from Sybil’s past plus a lot of other random Modus thrown in at the end just because they don’t really fit anywhere else. And the conceit that preceding pages were about a computer a century ahead of its time becoming sentient is undone by the authors’ afterword.

What seems like a race toward the 21st century, the decades from the postwar period into our postmodern and postliterate age are crammed with playwrights trying to assert their bold new thoughts while searching for slivers of the spotlight between the long shadows of Brecht, Artaud and other modernists. That many of these names are vaguely familiar, except in my case Stoppard, argues that theatre is now postidentity.

The long shadow across modern theatre cast by Brecht was created not only by the electrically illuminated theaters in Western Europe and the United States, but by such luminaries as Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov and gender-balancing Glaspell. The mirror held up to nature is no longer the focal point, but rather the figurative hands that hold the mirror towards the audience, asking them to question what is being shown to them.

The uncertain future of AI reveals more about human consciousness than what emerges from the circuitry of computers and robots. The most revealing is Aaron Sloman’s point of view of the mind as a series of virtual machines, doubted by some but wide-accepted by “AI-influenced thinkers” (p. 126). Less engaging is the author’s professed S-skepticism about what’s coming next with robots and Internet of Things but no AGI.

Thank god Mallory’s overlong ordeal is done, to what end remains unclear, and the narrative can attempt to braid together the many frayed storylines as Laurence Oliphant gets reintroduced. He seems to have his wits about him tracking down clues (like Sybil!) scattered about earlier iterations. He brings in his Mikado-envoy friend Mori, and there is a glimmer of Gibson’s “why Japan?” in Mori’s modernizing aspirations.

Here’s where the authors and editors get to flex their academic muscles, discoursing on such subjects as performativity, reconceptualization, race and otherness while reiterating the same small pool of Canadian plays only a handful of Torontarians saw or were already mentioned in earlier chapters. Not to say the issues raised by these theatre artists are not worthy of exploring, just makes a less grand answer to why.

Slogging through the Mallory saga with little hope of having the character of Charles Babbage make an appearance as the palaeontologist turned action hero makes his way across a stinked-up London and into the mob of anarchist calling it Babylondon. At this point, why even wonder what the story is about as page after page displays anti-Dickensian inhumanity that couldn’t solely be the work of a before-its-time Engine.

A scattershot summary of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, and just to whom was it addressed? Himself, humanists or a German chancellor whose name also begins with H? While to point of the Letter seems vague for the philosophically uninitiated, Amato’s page-long quotations of A Winter’s Tale reveal a lot more of the ethical goods: madness, grace and regeneration than most of the book musters.

Having a microchip cake and eating it too, artificial intelligence seems to be about great leaps forward for the computer and the many impossible boundaries keeping it from matching the human mind. The human element comes in the form of various programmers and developers who chip away at these walls. But it may be user-input from every spell-check and Siri question that ultimately takes the cake and smashes the gate.

Amato’s recasting of key political figures of the royal court of Elsinore as philosophical abstractions to fit Heidegger’s thoughts on being and Da is a bit too on the nose but other parts of the chapter make profound points about dasein and its negatives: death and inauthenticity. Even the famous “To be or not to be” speech leans more towards the latter than the usual go-to ode to suicide for they.