Matter Notes: A lawyer's private notes on a legal matter; considered inviolate and non-disclosable.
By metaphor and game, my occasional blog posts on the war on the humanities and other cultural atrocities;
with frequent diversions into creative matters.
In both cases, a form of work product. Scribere est agere.
I haven’t blogged in a while because, well, I haven’t. Which is the perfect introduction to pretty much anything by Stanley Fish, including Fish’s recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities”. Fish once said that “The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are […]
I get it. I really do. Science is self-correcting. It’s based on rigorous methodology, and hard observable measurable data. Hypotheses are testable or not at all. Tests yield repeatable, verifiable results or the hypothesis gets junked. Therefore Science trumps all those fluff bunny humanities subjects that “anyone can study” because “they’re all opinion anyway” and […]
Recommended: Scott Samuelson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers” (Thanks to fellow writer Matthew Graybosch for sending me the link.) The humanities do matter to real people. Profoundly. Samuelson writes about teaching philosophy to students experiencing personal tragedy: A mother who’d authorized for her crippled son a risky surgery that […]
I haven’t posted in a while, but the current hysteria in the New York Times about the loss of brick and mortar bookstores in Manhattan is so unintentionally comical and just plain awkward that I had to comment. The article, “Literary City, Bookstore Desert,” by Julie Bosman, illustrates almost everything that has gone wrong with […]
But first, as to validation. (See previous post.) I was stunned to see that there is at least one literary agent, Andrew Wylie, who gets it. Mr. Wylie said in a recent interview for New Republic what I’ve been saying here in my quiet corner of the Internet for a long time. That the publishing […]
A few months back, I wrote a piece on whether writing is a dying profession. My take was that, given the sorry state of traditional book publishers, there’s no longer any incentive for writers to honor the antiquated model of hiding their work in a drawer for years until an acquisitions editor taps it with […]
