Matt Kaul

Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

For the most part, a very good and useful book on project management—research grounded in reality, presenting some useful heuristics. Fans of Taleb & Kahneman/Tversky will like it.

Currently reading: Dubliners by James Joyce 📚

Chiefly, “The Dead.” Is there a more beautiful story?

What happened to literary studies?

If professionalization was the flaw in the construction of the bridge, making it unstable, it turns out there’s a meteor heading for the bridge anyway: the steady diminution of literature’s role in a culture where electronic, networked media is dominant. […]

By lowering the barrier to entry, the Internet encouraged an early 21st-century efflorescence of occasional criticism and spontaneous theorizing that fostered vibrant subcultural readerships.

I believe that the coming decades will be shaped by a restoration of the humanities to non-professional, non-credentialed, non-university contexts. The Internet will continue to provide new forms not just for criticism but for pursuing literary education outside formal degrees.

This will be a good thing, though, sadly, it will be accompanied by the closure of many liberal arts colleges.

Finished reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚

Currently reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

Currently reading: Night Train by A. L. Snijders; translated by Lydia Davis 📚

Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Currently reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚

Just because we don’t believe in aesthetic standards as a culture doesn’t mean we aren’t making constant aesthetic judgments that rely on a wide range of hierarchies:

[Study authors] found that writers ‘with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.’ They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine. Iowa has special clout: its alumni ‘are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.'"

I find the author’s conclusion inspiring:

Today when asked for advice about how to be a writer, I say: Find writing you love and follow it. Make those writers your writers. Read each other, publish each other, create literature that speaks from where you are.

You don’t need a BA to do this, much less an MFA. We need to rebuild cultural institutions outside the confines of our academic-media-publishing complex.

~Source

Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly.

Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work.

He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity:

Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions. Thinking develops, but that does not mean that it follows a linear path towards determinatively complete representation. It must, by its very nature, manage and reflect upon its own incompleteness and the inescapability of difficulty and mystery.

I’m now over halfway through the first volume of The Matter with Things; as with Williams, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Finished reading: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 📚

Finished reading: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy 📚