Matt Kaul

Matt Kaul

'What man needs is silence & warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.' ~Simone Weil

Reading

Book Art

The Power Broker

Robert A. Caro

    What is mobile is always the most just.

    ~Robert Walser. So many great sentences in Walser. 📚

    Every last silly little thing has its unspeakably swift justification, its good clever grounds.

    ~Robert Walser in 1907, writing about the Internet 📚

    Jaron Lanier, being typically insightful:

    “We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make …

    Then, in all labyrinthine economies

    there are obscure nooks into which Authority never pokes a suspicious nose

    ~Auden, “The Horations”

    What has become of us as a people that we can possess the beautiful only in dreams.

    ~Robert Walser

    Currently reading: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 📚

    The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see …

    I encountered a stunning book of photos on the Getty’s website today: Kazumasa Ogawa’s Some Japanese Flowers, from 1896.

    19th-century photograph is always shocking & disorienting—how foreign, yet contemporary. 📚

    Currently reading: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany 📚

    Her contention is that control over our own inner life will become increasingly fraught in coming years, as advances in neurotech & pharma combine to create new ways of …

    Rest in peace, Kenzaburo Oe. My friend Caleb introduced me to Oe back in 2004 or 2005, and I came to love his novels A Personal Matter and An Echo of Heaven.

    His Paris Review interview is truly fascinating.

    Rest in peace, Wayne Shorter, one of the very greats. 🎶

    Current listening: Kendrick Scott, Reverence.

    A 2009 album featuring some incredible players: not just Scott, but Gerald Clayton, Walter Smith III, Mike Moreno, and Derrick Hodge. 🎶

    Attention is how one disposes oneself to the world.

    ~Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

    The more I use Arc Browser the more I love it—and I’ve been using it a lot! It restores some joy, some delight, to using the Internet. 🔗

    Start of a new season for my beloved MNUFC tonight. I’m not optimistic about the season, but I am looking forward to it! ⚽️ #COYL

    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?

    Nicholas Dames on literary studies 🔗 📚

    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 …

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

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

    Current listening: Chris Potter, Got the Keys to the Kingdom. 🎵

    Absolutely scorching live set featuring a dream-team of some of my favorite musicians: not just Potter, but also Scott Colley on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Craig Taborn on piano. …

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

    Reading stories about Davos attendees’ optimism, I’m reminded of Iain McGilchrist’s insight that our brains' left hemispheres—the blinkered perspective that dominates our modern world—are blithely optimistic, even in the face of …

    Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚

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