My Brief Career as a Painter

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 5 Comments

One of the most rewarding side-effects of my teaching in the Shimer Great Books School has been the exploration of art that it prompted. I’ve written here before about how my teaching of the Shimer fine arts seminar spurred me to get to the bottom of the whole Cézanne thing and about how I’ve tried to make sense of Rilke’s writings on art. Indeed, Cézanne has been something of a project for me — I have been a “collector” of his works at every museum I’ve visited (including some rarities held in Australia) and a large-scale print of the painting of Mont Ste. Victoire pictured above has been hanging in my office for many years.

And more broadly, I’ve done a lot of reading on the history of art, especially the work of TJ Clark. One thing that draws me to Clark’s writing — especially The Painting of Modern Life — is how much it echoes the “close reading” style of analysis that I’m most attracted to in literary criticism and continental philosophy. He gets down to the nitty-gritty of brush strokes, an approach that I first encountered in Svetlana Alpers’ wonderful book Vexations of Art, a staple of the Shimer fine arts course for many years. I now have definite opinions about brush stroke style, with a strong preference for the Titian-Velázquez-Manet arc of looser, more visible strokes.

But — paging Alanis Morrisette — I had never actually laid down a brush stroke in oil paint myself, at least until last week. Continue reading “My Brief Career as a Painter” →

You Must Change Your Life: How to Manage Your Email

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 3 Comments

On April 1, 2004, the problem of email was definitively solved. That was the day Google released Gmail, which remains the best possible implementation of electronic mail. Their attack on the problem of email was twofold. First, they released the user of any need to decide when or whether to delete a message by providing near-infinite storage. Second, they released the user of any need to sort through that mail by providing powerful search functionality, along with optional filters and labels. Now, users could simply “archive” emails that are not immediately actionable and always know they could find them, allowing them to preserve their inbox as a more functional space for genuinely new messages.

The way many people use this powerful tool is simply tragic. Again and again, I hear tales of people with 10,000+ unread emails in their inbox. When I suggest that they should simply archive everything, they retort: “But how would I find anything?” The answer, of course, is under “All Mail.” That’s where your mail goes when you archive it. When you click on that, you can regain access to the nightmare of unorganized masses of email that you apparently crave. And so the number one tip I would give to every user of Gmail is to “select all” and hit archive, over and over and over, until you hit the bottom of your inbox.

Once you get to that point, here are some strategies I have adopted to keep my inbox as clear and functional as possible. My goal is to reserve the inbox only for things that I need to respond to within the next 24 hours, otherwise everything is archived. (I should clarify that I opt to use the “default” inbox because I don’t trust automated filters and also because I’m a bit of a control freak. You may find those features helpful, but I can provide no advice on them.)

First, Always Be Archiving. The default setting for sending email is to “send and archive,” which clears out anything you’ve responded to. Hopefully if further action is needed on that conversation or task, the person will signal it by writing you back.

Second, Always Be Unsubscribing. If you are getting genuine junk mail, you should scroll down and find the unsubscribe button if possible. Gmail has an automated unsubscribe function, but it doesn’t work 100% of the time. The best way to keep your email from piling up is not to receive it in the first place.

Third, Always Be Filtering. I intentionally subscribe to several mailing lists, but I prefer to read them at my own pace. To keep them from clogging the inbox, I set up filters that apply a label to those messages (e.g., “Newsletters,” “Job Listings,” “Cultural Events”) and then — crucially — skip the inbox. They then pile up in a little line on the side rather than clogging the inbox.

Fourth, Labels Are Your Friend. In addition to my filters, I have labels for “Airline Miles” (which includes my TSA precheck number for reference), “Travel Info,” and “House Stuff.” This gives me easy access to frequently used emails without needing to leave them in the inbox.

Fifth, Stars Are An Even Better Friend. I mentioned that I use the inbox for things that I need to respond to within 24 hours. But what about that vague medium term? For those kind of looming obligations, I use the “starred items” feature, which is basically a built-in “label” that can be applied to any message with one click. The email is usually not the sole reminder of these tasks — I would put any deadlines on the calendar, for instance — but having them ready to go in an accessible place makes it easier to take action once I am ready to submit the copy-edits, for instance.

Most web mail services now have ample storage space and have copied Gmail’s archive function. When required to use other email systems (such as Outlook at work), I am easily able to duplicate this system by simply creating my own folder called “Starred Items” and proceding as usual. So basically, there is no reason for you to be walking around with 10,000+ emails in your inbox, even if you don’t use Gmail.

There’s no need to imitate me. I arguably take it to an extreme: my inbox discipline is so strict that I sometimes leave emails representing certain tasks in the inbox to “punish” myself and force myself to stop putting them off. My inbox-zero lifestyle is also not absolute, because I tend to shift things from labels or starred items to the inbox when they become immediately relevant again — for instance, plane or event tickets. You may find that different workflows work better for you. Maybe a monthly “select all and archive” run is all the housekeeping you personally need.

But I sincerely do not believe that anyone finds the “10,000+ emails in your inbox” system comfortable and functional. Everyone I know who lets it get like that expresses profound stress, anxiety, and dread about their email. If that describes you, I’m here to tell you that you deserve better. And thankfully, you can easily achieve better, using the email tools you probably already use. You just need to take a half hour to learn how to actually use them and it will change your life.

The Lesser Evil

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

I hate Donald Trump with all my heart. I abhor the damage he has already done to the country, and I fear his plans. Even if he were a pure figurehead with no power to influence policy, however, it would be a daily humiliation to think that such a despicable individual, with no talents or redeeming qualities whatsoever, is supposed to represent me on the global stage. I plan to vote in whatever way is necessary to prevent that outcome, which under the current circumstances means voting for Joe Biden. So to all the vote scolds out there: you’ve won! I’m doing what you want me to do! Send me the mail-in ballot and I’ll fill it out right now, just to get you off my back.

Nonetheless, I am increasingly disgusted with Joe Biden. Continue reading “The Lesser Evil” →

Kids These Days, Part 1,000,000

~ Adam Kotsko

A fresh round of “oh my God, college kids’ reading skills and stamina are rough these last few years” kicked off on Bluesky yesterday. Obviously this is an issue that’s very close to my heart, so I frittered away my Sunday morning alternating between venting with those who vented and getting irritated with those who didn’t believe the problem was real and/or implicitly or explicitly blamed me personally for failing my students. It was about as productive as you might expect.

One thing that comes up often in these discussions is that we have to meet the students where they are and change our pedagogy, including filling in some instruction in basic reading skills. Just like literally everyone else who is worried about this issue, I do that. I have reduced reading loads and tried to focus on only the most crucial concepts. I have introduced exercises to help them learn to underline and annotate a text effectively. I have shortened and refocused writing assignments.

In some cases, these changes are long overdue — especially coming from the independent Shimer, where we were very “macho” about reading. Continue reading “Kids These Days, Part 1,000,000” →

On Teaching Janelle Monae

~ Adam Kotsko

Teaching in the Shimer Great Books Program, I’ve had to stretch myself to teach a lot of things outside my expertise, but the one I’ve found most rewarding — and had the greatest success with — has been music. Reconnecting with classical music while teaching our fine arts course at the independent Shimer was life-changing, permanently altering my listening habits and turning me into a symphony regular. I’ve also learned a lot more about jazz, though I’ve been less drawn to listen to it outside of class. In more recent years, I’ve tried to incorporate more contemporary music to make our music curriculum (now reconfigured so that music is paired with verse and drama rather than with visual art) more accessible. One piece of low-hanging fruit there has been Hamilton, which I am sick to death of but which provides easy fodder for concepts about tragedy, etc. — and the students invariably love it.

More challenging, but much more rewarding, has been Janelle Monae, with whom I feel like I have a very strange relationship. Simply put, she is the first contemporary pop artist I picked up specifically for teaching. As such, even though she has entered my regular rotation, I still have a weirdly detached attitude toward her work — at times she feels almost like a faculty colleague rather than a pop star to me.

Continue reading “On Teaching Janelle Monae” →

Nothing Matters

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

One thing that jumps out at me about the current political scene is that people are killing and dying for things that do not matter. This would be a shame in any case, but we are kind of living with this ticking timebomb of climate change that affects all of humanity as a unit (albeit in differentiated and often unjust ways, etc., etc.). And instead of dealing with that problem, we are collectively choosing to indulge in pointless hierarchy-generating and in-group behaviors that seem to become more urgent and violent the more our irreducibly shared global human problem becomes more and more undeniable.

Putin, for instance, has mused that perhaps starting a nuclear war would be a good option if Russia’s existence is at stake. He would rather that the world end, for everyone, than that anyone should live in a world without Russia in it. He is also waging a brutal and hugely costly war because of his belief that Ukrainians are “really” Russian and have been tricked into thinking they have a different national identity. But here’s the thing: Russia is made up. No one is “really” Russian, and a world in which no one saw any reason to identify as Russian would be a different world — perhaps even a poorer world, if it meant losing some lifeways or artistic or intellectual traditions — but at the same time, no one in that world would have any reason to miss the existence of “Russia” or “Russianness.” In the last analysis, push come to shove, “Russia” does not matter — except to Russians, of course, whose leader has seen fit to declare on their behalf that the continued existence of Russians is worth absolutely everything.

Continue reading “Nothing Matters” →

Cathexis Records; Or, What I’ve Been Doing As the Profession and the World Burn

~ APS ~ 1 Comment

Things are not going well for those of us teaching and researching in the humanities. You may not yet have heard that, but it is true. It is not particularly surprising, given that things are not going too well for humanity as a project either. The world, as the bard has it, is burning, so why wouldn’t our little part of the world burn with it? I am using world in the way I tend to, of course, as those will know who are familiar with my work on Laruelle and gnosis, and the influence of Afropessimism’s and Dan Barber’s analysis of world on my thinking. World is a name for the structure of a hallucinated coherence, the background against which allows us to believe in the solidity of identity for ourselves and for transcendental ideas like “history” or “nature”. I tend to think that this particular hallucination is the worst kind of hallucination. While we mostly associate hallucinations with “altered states of consciousness,” the world is a more dangerous hallucination because it is extensive with reality (though not “the real”). The threat of losing that world is extremely anxiety producing and that anxiety leads to all sorts of phobic relations to what we take as threatening our coherence, as in themselves a kind of incoherence. So the world is burning, but what that means is the violence that anxiously holds the world together is being laid bare for what it is. A chosen violence, a decided-upon violence; unnecessary under the sign of eternity, but taken as necessary to secure one’s self–which is to say, to secure the world.

I have written about elements of this both in my published academic writing and here on the blog. Recently I have been trying to think about this in a new form, specifically through music. Like most of you, I don’t really know what to do in response to the problem of the world. I have tried to think about it in terms of clinging furiously to pleasure, to beauty, and to a kind of life mediated through a specific understanding of taqiyya where one is even dissimilar to oneself. As part of that I have given a lot of my time and of my life to dancing as a kind of aesthetic practice. Imagine my surprise to discover during the pandemic how common that had become amongst academics with some even cashing in a little bit on this as an identity, as something to theorize. I don’t begrudge that theorizing, I have my own thinking about this part of my life, after all it’s been very important to me. Perhaps owing to my evangelical Christian past, I do approach publicly sharing those thoughts with some trepidation. For me, it is not about community. What is special about it feels like it has to be carefully thought through and even more carefully expressed or else I risk cheapening the experience–for myself if nothing else. So please forgive me, but this is not a post where I share explicitly much about what I think techno and partying is about. I am not ready to do that, and I do not know if I ever will be.

Continue reading “Cathexis Records; Or, What I’ve Been Doing As the Profession and the World Burn” →

The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 12 Comments

This morning I published an article on Slate about the decline of reading comprehension and resilience among college-age students. In the piece, I try to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that I must be indulging in a typical “kids these days” criticism before assessing the most commonly-discussed potential causes of this phenomenon (smartphones and covid lockdowns) and concluding that changes in reading pedagogy are the primary culprit. Even within just a few hours, the response has been gratifyingly positive — meaning that I have been basking in the repeated social media dopamine hits rather than doing what I intended to do once the article was published: follow up with a broader reflection on my concerns about the degredation of people’s ability to understand and engage with the world around them in a realistic way.

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification thesis has been getting a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. As Google in particular cannibalizes its own flagship product, simple access to information has declined precipitously. But beyond the asset-stripping enshittification Doctorow identifies, we need to acknowledge that there was another, broader enshittification of our relationship with information already implicit in the shift to the “information age.” Continue reading “The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis” →

What does it mean for the people to rule themselves?

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

In recent months, American political discourse has been dominated by bad-faith arguments that disqualifying notorious and unrepentant insurrectionist Donald Trump from running for president, under a provision of the Constitution that could not be more clearly intended for a situation like this short of literally including Trump’s picture, is non-democratic. The “reasoning” seems to go that there are people out there who want to vote for Trump and not allowing them to do so is anti-democratic. To the extent we get any further insight, the pundits usually extrapolate that an election in which Trump supporters’ desires are thwarted would be regarded as illegitimate, hence damaging our democratic institutions. Better for democracy, then, to allow the dude who took office after losing the popular vote, attempted a coup to overturn the election after he lost even with the ill-gotten gains of incumbency, and jokes about becoming a “dictator” on day one to run for office yet again — ignoring the fact that the majority of Americans do not want him on the ballot at all.

All of these arguments are obviously beneath contempt and everyone making them should be ashamed of themselves. The punditocracy has always been full of short-sighted fools eager to make apologetics for power, and this is only the most glaring recent example. The fact that these arguments find an audience, however, points to a deeper problem: no one really has a clear idea of what democracy is or should be other than “voting.” And that is partly a result of our Constitutional settlement, which was carefully designed to have just enough voting to appear democratically legitimate while also throwing in enough random veto points to make sure the popular will could almost never find full expression. The reason they designed it that way is because they were all — slavers and queasy allies of slavers alike — convinced that democracy was bad and the popular will would only ever want wicked and destructive things. Such is the foundation of “our democracy.”

An alternative view would have to take seriously the idea of democracy as a form of self-rule of the people, by the people. Continue reading “What does it mean for the people to rule themselves?” →

Things I’d like to work on before the world ends

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 3 Comments

I would like to write up my comparison of Paul and the Qur’an as a proper academic article, which would allow me to finally convert my hard-won teaching competence in Islam into officially certified scholarly expertise. It would also be a genuine contribution to the literature as far as I am able to discern. Unfortunately, the literature includes a monograph that is written in German.

I would like to expand my classical Arabic reading beyond the Qur’an to include ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan at the very least.

I would like to refresh my Greek by working through Pharr’s Homeric Greek textbook and study at least some selections of the Iliad and Odyssey beyond that, such as the helpful annotated text of Odyssey Books 9-12 that I have on my shelf (alongside the German monograph on Paul and the Qur’an, the Arabic text of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and Pharr’s textbook). My very ambitious goal for this, aside from enhancing my teaching of some of our most common core texts, would be to return to the texts of the Gospels with more of an eye for Hebraism vs. more idiomatic Greek. I have no idea what I could realistically do with that in terms of writing or teaching — it would just feel very satisfying to have some sense of it.

Continue reading “Things I’d like to work on before the world ends” →