Adam Walker is a YouTube figure I have. been following for a while and he has many interesting things to say:
The Music Salon was not founded with any of these things in mind, but actually it functioned for a number of years as a nexus of self-learning. I think Adam is correct that we may be seeing the first faint glints of a renaissance in the humanities and we are certainly in need of one.
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Possibly paradoxical convergence with Ted Gioia's stumping for autodidacticism?
Thanks for checking in and leaving a comment Wenatchee! My posting has been very spotty lately. I haven't been reading Ted Gioia much recently. But I was talking to someone who lives in a very different cultural realm and he too thought we might be on the verge of a renaissance of sorts. God knows what will happen on the road to it, though.
That at least some people feel there is a need for a recalibrative reset seems to be clear, even if they use some wildly divergent terminology.
A pattern I have seen in both the study of religious texts and in music theory is a proposal that scholars have been straitjacketed into top-down monothetic analytic taxonomies and that bottom-up polythetic taxonomies need to be tried out. Jennifer Eyl has written about how top-down monothetic analyses tend to not compare the Apostle Paul to his contemporaries in terms of religious practices that could be categorized as divinatory. Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms explicitly proposed a "bottom-up" approach to sonatas, suggesting that the centuries of top-down sonata definitions has led scholars down some blind alleys in terms of analysis. If "sonata" can only be one kind of thing in advance scholars will fight about what counts. If, however, we set out a range of formal relationships and patterns and go bottom-up then this could let us identify something as having a majority of sonata traits without having to have all of them (he gave three: medial caesera (repeating exposition); double return (no need to explain that) and end rhyme (recap of theme 2 in tonic key). If most "sonatas" tend to only have 2 of 3 then a sonata might not have the "double return" by recapitulating in the subdominant rather than the tonic key but it would still obviously be a sonata form (Mozart and Matiegka alike pulled the trick of recapitulation in the subdominant key that would force older top-down sonata theories to say "That's not a sonata", but Jason Yust pointed out that from about 1810 onward wrong-key recapitulations became fairly normative, if not "normal".
It has seemed in my reading of theology, biblical studies, comparative religion as well as music theory on form and analysis we're at a moment where scholars are pointing out that a whole raft of theories from the proverbial long 19th century have needed to be rejected altogether or modified so much they're not recognizable in their earlier forms. When we have Schenkerian analyses of pop songs that is certainly not what Schenker would have chosen to do, but I have actually seen some sort of useful post-Schenkerian analyses of popular song forms from Drew Nobile.
If only I knew what "polythetic" meant. But I do think that we, as in the civilized West, is trapped in a collapsing socio/cultural structure that is about to come apart from internal stresses.
Many of the people speaking of some "rebirth" of good-old humanities are hustlers whose business model in fact relies on the pathological modern attention economy. Ted Gioia and much of Substack is a good case in point. They had a limited amount of things to say and already said them more than enough, but they keep pushing out new retreads of the same stuff daily/weekly and they want you subscribed to read it all, when it’s going to compete with more substantial and edifying stuff you could be reading.
When it comes to Ted Gioia I think you are right. But I also think that you didn't watch the video I posted because your critique would not apply to Adam Walker.
So ... does Walker have a Substack?
I've only seen YouTube clips.
Well ...
https://www.adamgagewalker.com/
"... His YouTube Channel of 100k+ subscribers is home to over 200+ lectures, cultural essays, and close readings of poetry. His Substack is a Substack Bestseller and is consistently ranked in Substack’s “Rising Top 100 in Literature.”"
https://www.youtube.com/@closereadingpoetry
https://substack.com/@adamgagewalker
So maybe Anonymous can stand by their critique?
You actually think that Anonymous had a critique of Adam Walker?
Bryan, you wrote that the "critique would not apply to Walker".
If it was a critique why wouldn't it apply if Walker has, say, a Substack?
My own skepticism is whether or not the retrieval projects actually retrieve anything that isn't already still there to be discussed, but I don't think it's necessarily a hustle.
Let me summarize and explain. I put up a YouTube clip about a new renaissance possibly coming from people outside the academy self-educating posted by Adam Walker who does a lot of clips about literature. Anonymous offers a criticism of "Ted Gioia and much of Substack" without mentioning Adam Walker. Whether he has a Substack or not is somewhat irrelevant because just because you have one doesn't mean you are akin to Ted Gioia. An actual critique of Walker would involve mentioning something he said. This was a generic critique of Ted Gioia and "much of substack". I still don't see a critique of Walker. And haven't we wasted enough time on this?
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