Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley is a former Head of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His publications include extensive commentaries on Samuel Beckett and Malcolm Lowry, with an emphasis on annotation that is based (with some ontological reservations) on the principles of validity, as affirmed in E. D. Hirsh, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (1976), scientific method, as defended by Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures (1997), and trivial pursuits, limericks & remainders, as exemplified by Sterne, Stoppard and Eric Korn. Favourite authors include Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, J. G. Farrell, Jorge Luis Borges, and Augusto Roa Bastos; preferred painters are “the Dutchmen” (as Beckett called the school of Rembrandt); films run the gamut from Brief Encounter to Apocalypto; cricket (India) competes with rugby league (Warriors, Panthers) & football (Liverpool); a broad love of classical music might privilege Beethoven’s late quartets and the 32nd piano sonata, yet admit Schubert, Bach (“the divine sewing machine”), Wagner’s Ring and Parsifal, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Tosca (“shabby little shocker”) and Manon Lescaut (but equally Massenet’s Manon), Strauss’s Salome, Elektra & the Four Last Songs, not to omit Bob Fosse, All that Jazz & Cabaret, or Karl Jenkins, The Armed Man … so much to admire, so little time to do so…