#queenan

I don’t regret the time I spent on tumblr; I wrote some pieces which I’m mildly proud of and which other people seem to have enjoyed. But I no longer endorse everything I’ve written - some past pieces on the philosophy of mathematics leave me with a twinge of embarrassment at my naivety. Even so, I’ve decided to leave everything here. I’ve had fun and learned a lot from some people here; all of you know who you are, and thank you.

Today I happened to stumble across Joe Queenan’s review of The Know-It-All, about A. J. Jacobs and his quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some called the review mean-spirited. Regardless of how uncharitable Queenan was, there was something he pointed out which rang true to me:

The animating idea of this misguided endeavor is that corralling a vast array of unrelated facts will, in and of itself, make a person more interesting. This is idiotic. Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact, because a poorly educated person does not know which facts are important. . . 

Jacobs's biggest problem isn't that he doesn't know much; it's that he doesn't realize how much educated people do know. There's just no two ways about it - people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff.

Tumblr played two roles for me - it gave me a platform to write, and I learned quite a few unrelated facts. Now that I’d like to be more systematic in my life, it’s no longer suitable for either of these functions. Calvino puts it far better than I could:

. . . for some time now my first need has been to “de-journalistize” myself, to get myself out of the stranglehold that has dominated these last few years of my life, reading books to review immediately, commenting on something even before having to time to form an opinion on it. I want to build a new kind of daily program for myself where I can finally get into something, something definitive (within the limits of historical possibility), something not dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s journalist always behaves, more or less). 

For that reason I make several plans for myself: … to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, but being careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities; and also to set up my own individual work not as a “journalist” any more but as a “scholar,” with systematic readings, notes, comments, notebooks, a load of things I’ve never done; and also, eventually, to write a novel.

​These photos are from a reading that we did in April preparing for our upcoming two days of shooting of 4 – okay, it might actually be five – scenes from the very first play produced by​ Knowledge Workings Theater:  Alms​. In the first photograph below, co-authors of that play, T.J. Elliott (center) & Joe Queenan are joined by our cinematographer, Michael Cain (right). Aaron Long (Brian) and…