2023
- Learn - “Here’s what I’ve learnt.” Curator
- Share - “Here’s what I’ve found.” Expert
- Tell - “Here’s what I’ve done.” Mentor
- Be - “Here’s who I am.” Role model
Visions of a utopian Middle Ages
Finished reading: Matrix by Lauren Groff 📚
I found this an intriguing, highly fictional reconstruction of the life of a medieval convent. The version of Marie de France presented here - visionary, heretical, fiercely compassionate - is certainly doing far more than just filling in the gaps in the historical record. The author makes her a really intriguing, though surely anachronistic, character. And in Lauren Groff’s Marie, there’s more than an echo of another medieval mystic, Hildegard of Bingen.
Although I fully approve of lesbian feminist seperatist utopias (which obviously hardly need my approval), I feel Groff has missed an opportunity here to present a politically pursuasive vision. In particular, why did Marie need to build a huge protective labyrinth around her convent, effectively cutting it off from the rest of the world? The medieval Beguine movement of female lay communities, was highly influential and highly urban. It’s an example of real-life utopianism that wasn’t disconnected from the rest of society at all.
Reading this novel has encouraged me to seek out the background historical research, The Care of Nuns, by Katie Bugrys.
My piano is a forest
Currently reading: The Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita 📚
I love the metaphor of the piano as a living forest, and I’m enjoying the journey of the diffident main character, Tomura, in his apprenticeship as a piano tuner. It’s certainly making me see my own piano in a new light.
What I learned from Austin Kleon about sharing what you know
Learning and sharing, sharing and learning. It’s a virtuous circle. That’s what I learned, and that’s what I’m sharing.
“it’s not about being credentialed or being an expert, it’s about seeing a space open up, starting to do work that needs doing, sharing your ideas, and sticking around long enough so people show up and you can interact with them in a meaningful way and build something lasting.” Austin Kleon
I think there are four levels of expertise, and everyone is potentially standing on one of these four steps:
When someone believes they have no expertise, that doesn’t mean they have nothing useful to say. We often learn best from those who are just one step ahead of us on the learning journey, so telling others, “Here’s what I learned today” may well be really helpful.
Without democracy, no true creativity
Finished reading: Against Creativity by Oli Mould 📚.
This is a critique of everything symbolised by Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Supposed individual flexibility, agility and dynamism are just a cover for the destruction of rights at work, leading to increased precarity. Capitalist creativity, in which everyone is supposed to see themself as a “creative”, is an attractive but empty rhetoric that increases the pressure to produce for exploitation. True creativity, on the other hand, involves “an emancipatory force of societal change” (p.46). The author points out that democratic governability is at best an afterthought, when it should be front and centre of consideration. “What if we asked one simple question before any new app, machine-learning algorithm, or smart city infrastructure were created: how can this be used and managed democratically?” (p.196).
The argument of this 2018 book is prescient in relation to the crisis of Twitter and the rise of Mastodon and the Fediverse in 2023. Could people really control their own communications channels, instead of letting petulent billionaires run everything (into the ground)? It’s too early to tell, but the signs are that there’s a new mood of discontent with “Big Social” and a search for more accountable alternatives. As Mould points out, the first step towards change is to start imagining how things could be different.
This book pairs well with Ariel Gore’s very different The Wayward Writer. Early on in this creative writing manual the author quotes Ursula Le Guin:
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”