Autumnal Ruminations + Book Club 1 WEEK DELAY! (Patreon)

People tend to breathlessly thank me for Book Club delays so I'm sure this is Good news.

If you planned on spending today cramming for tomorrow like me, then just feel good that you're ahead. We'll be back next week with more people present and more breath in our lungs.

The penultimate chapter, Programming For the Millions (2016), feels momentous. It's the first chapter in this collection to reference the previous essays, transforming the book into a unified whole right at the end. In doing so we start to piece together decades of experience culminating in these final pieces in 2016 & 2017, when the internet leapt out of our computers and ate us alive.

Don't wanna rush this.

Tomorrow when I was going to be posting the penultimate thread I will instead sit down and runkle through previous threads and catch up on responding to comments! Which is something I really value doing and I know is important but takes a lot of energy. So it will feel really good and right to schedule time right in the pocket where a post should be.

Always unspeakably honoured that people participate in these with me. One of the things in my career I'm most proud of, really. Glad the Book Report Editor team is hot on our heels to immortalize the experience. Anyone who wants to chat more about the book is extremely encouraged to show up to the livestream on Monday Sept 30 @ 4:30pm EST.

The lore ever unravels........[-----—-----][the validity of the verb 'runkle' is entirely unauthorized and unsubstantiated. just felt right.]

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[Pic of me doing my job (reading), before i get back to doing my job (editing)]

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1. ++[[[....Artifacts of Intellectual Growth....]]]++

I recently bought a physical study notebook. All my notes till now have been inside of my mind and in pages/scrivener documents. Time to generate artifacts for my intellectual life too.

Was convinced to do this because:

am surrounded by uni students returning to class, entranced by the aesthetic & energy

inspired to retain information better for future lectures and fielding Zoom Q&A livestreams, ensuring I have strong repetitive exact grasp of concepts, and then intentioanlly reducing them to coherent creative expressions without fudging details or blowing up too sprawly

Read in Ralph Barton Perry's biography of William James a passage wherein Perry deduces that while James was a science student at Harvard, he was also growing actively interested in philosophy, language and religion, as evidenced by(!) recovered study notebooks<3

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To conceive James during these years as engaged in the study of chemistry, comparative anatomy, or medicine, is to form a very inadequate idea of his intellectual development. He was perpetually grazing and ruminating, wandering wherever the pasturage was good. Fortunately two notebooks of the year 1862-1863 have been preserved, in which appear... pencil drawings, historical and literary chronologies, sayings of Charles Peirce, an outline of the French Revolution, and abstracts of Büchner's Kraft und Stoff, Max Müller's History of Ancient Sankrit Literature, Farrar's Origins of Language, and Jonathan Edward's Original Sin.

- Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Briefer Version) [1948] (p. 71)

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So romantic to have this embodied paper trail of ones professional growth. So beautiful and tangible to generate physical products of intellectual labour. Keep track of where you've been, sink the study deeper into your body, act like an actual student.

Ralph Barton Perry was a pupil of James's, and his biography is constructed out of about a trillion handwritten letters to and fro James family members over like 150 years. Reading this history told through correspondence has been deeply intimately revealing and affecting for me, and heavily influenced my advocation in What Is To Be Done? (A Manifesto to Return to Web 1.5) for young people to begin scrapbooking, keeping journals and writing each other letters, in order to CREATE PERSONAL HISTORY in a way our phones and apps don't incentivize.

Now it's got me realizing a little too late one of the key features of research and study is... writing things down. I have stacks and stacks of raps I wrote in my adolescence. Tons of it is cringe, but I like seeing the 10 thousand hours in physical reality. Time to build it in the intellectual arena too.

This is why I always acquire physical copies of the books I study btw. I want a library of books that I have read, rendering all this digital work physically real in my embodied space.

I will probably make some emotional video about this physical artifact thing eventually.

In the meantime here's me taking notes on John Dewey as referenced in F.S.C. Northrop's The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (1947) and Macmurray's Reason and Emotion (1935).

Shout out to Barely Bruised books in Ottawa, which sold me this copy of Reason and Emotion. Shout of to Ellen, for buying me my first Macmurray book The Structure of Religious Experience. His philosophy of art, God and relationship is growing to be foundational for me, which means it will eventually become relevant to you as well.

His writing on discipline is helping me a lot. He completely rejects any notion of discipline through repression, using the mind to dominate the body, obeying rules regardless of your desire not to, suffering in order to bitterly achieve goals. He posits instead discipline is the inevitable result of healthy experience. It's the pure joy of living.

[Discipline's] achievement is shown in the freedom and grace of action; in its rhythmic quality; in the abscence of jerkiness and effort. These are the external signs of discipline. The inner signs are the feelings of freedom and joy and ease in action which testify that all the necessary factors are co-operating harmoniously in the production of the desired effect.

- John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion [1935] (p. 84)

Relatedly....

2. (((>>.,.,.Peterson Academy & Intellectual Accountability.,.,.<<)))

I have been featured in the news!

Calgary Reporter Alex Boyd interviewed me for the Toronto Star on an article about Jordan Peterson's new online unaccredited education platform.

Link to the full article here.

I think I come across a bit vague and stupid, unfortunately, and I could either say I wish she picked smarter quotes of mine or I wish I was more coherent in the interview. This is another good reason to start studying with a notebook, working at clarity and consistency instead of relying on fluctuating intuitive skill.

I am proud at least of leading her to the moment with John Vervaeke on Tim Ferris's podcast where he talks about his participation in Peterson Academy, which became a significant section of the article.

Something in the Peterson research that has reared its head again and again is this idea of intellectual authority. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, should we listen to him on philosophy and theology? For that matter, how the fuck am I trusted to do any sort of serious appraisal of Peterson's philosophical work? I don't have ANY degree!!!!!

Surely credentials are not everything. Expertise and Quality is not guaranteed by a piece of paper. In the digital age we are finding more and more instances of trusted voices and talent rising outside of any official established institution. But this also allows us to mistrust experts and indulge in intellectual laziness, just consuming whomevers content makes us feel good and validates what we already think. So what are the responsibilities of "intellectual" influencers?

I am contending with/calibrating against having a career in unaccredited unsanctioned for-profit education. As per usual Jordan Peterson is my dark mirror, doing essentially the same thing as me with instructive examples on what paths to avoid.

John Vervaeke recently has left Patreon and podcasting for similar reasons.

In that video he explains the stress and temptations of being a "public intellectual", appearing on podcasts and accruing an audience outside of academia in the wild west of the online attention economy. Out of a conviction that it is his purpose to educate people and his wise wariness of becoming trapped in some other social position, he has decided to narrow down his online presence to formal, curriculum based education. Y'know with courses and readings and lectures and tests and stuff.

His smaller, more humble version of unsanctioned public education is, in my opinion, much MORE ambitious than Peterson Academy. Neither claim to accredit, but Peterson Academy is so flashy and expansive, so oblique about credentials and self confident about its supposed "ideology-less" education, so conspiratorial about actual university in its marketing, announcing itself as an actual alternative to the hopelessly corrupt woke academic institutions, which is all of them.

On top of this it looks like they plan to use AI to generate AND evaluate the tests. So there's no manpower ensuring any education is actually happening. No mentorship or followup, no standards. People can just rail these lectures without retaining a damn thing.

Another notable difference is that Vervaeke set up The Vervaeke Foundation, a nonprofit entity that ensures he will not personally pocket any of the profit raised by his public philosophy work. Everything Peterson does, of course, is an entirely for-profit enterprise.

Vervaeke's platform promises less and asks more. Readings, tests, assignments, live Q&As, tighter focus. This all sounds like I'm shilling for it, but I'm just critically evaluating the pitches and plans in accordance with my values.

So. I'm keeping an eye on such things because this is where all this research of mine really ought to go. Some sort of useful tool for others to use, something that points beyond myself rather than hikes me up on some Tower of Babel. I have ideas for little courses on particular subjects, although I find the prospect daunting. I will need more time. But the monthly Zoom Livestreams an my new notebook are attempts to wade gently and trepidatiously into those waters.

NOTE: that I have not signed up for either service yet. I might pay for Peterson Academy once it's been running for a while, to peruse out of professional curiosity both sincere and morbid. The Vervaeke course I might buy sooner and more earnestly, if I can get a couple homies to go in on the group discount....

Artful marketing!

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3. {~~BACK TO SCHOOL RAP HOMEWORK~~}

One of the most meaningful things I've ever been told was that a few of my audience members have started to listen to hip hop for the first time because of me. You have no fucking idea how special that is to me. Hip hop is really my first passion, but I've grown into the knowledge that rap won't be the grounds upon which I relate to most of my audience. With the Album of the Month now, I can share some of this passion with you, and since I've always felt autumn is a uniquely fantastic time to listen to some particular rap albums, here are a few more recs for those who don't normally listen but would like to listen to what I am listening to.

MODERN AUTUMNAL RAP ALBUMS:

May The Lord Watch - Little Brother (2019)

No News Is Good News - Phonte (2018)

CLASSIC AUTUMNAL RAP ALBUMS:

The Main Ingredient - Pete Rock & CL Smooth (1994)

Things Fall Apart - The Roots (1999)

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(((you ever notice how in the last 20 years many artists stopped writing the Title/Artist on the actual album cover? This is likely because with the rise of iTunes and digital music libraries the album title and artist are always displayed as text beneath the album art, making writing on the actual picture redundant. This is obviously a transition in tendency, not absolute rule, but you can see it demonstrated really starkly in the album covers above.)))

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Okay, I am going to get back to editing this September video, which I am really enjoying doing.

See ya in the movie thread, next Wed. for Social No Para, and whenever I'm done editing this video.

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