The Pims Reader Round-Up # 1
My goal with these round-ups is to help introduce my readers to each other.
I’d like to help people who are interested in the creative and contemplative potential of the art of memory find each other.
Even though my readership is still quite small, I’ve already been blessed with a talented following.
Many of you are rockstars, and deserve more love.
Most of the posts I share will be from readers who are actively engaging with the newsletter, for the simple reason that it’s a lot easier to discover what you’re writing about if we’re having conversations with each other! I will also occasionally share posts from subscribers and followers who I haven’t engaged with if I notice they’re newer accounts with fewer subscribers.
I want to help encourage newer writers who subscribe to keep sharing their works.
Substack’s discovery algorithm leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s better than many other sites, but the way to spread your writing here is by hustling and talking with people. It’s not always comfortable, especially if you’re an introvert.
My readership here was non-existent before I started posting notes.
If you’re a new writer on here, and you’re not getting much traction, don’t assume it’s because of your writing.
I’ve shared translations here of works written by absolute geniuses. Giordano Bruno has hundreds of books written about him, and who knows how many academics have spent a solid portion of their careers studying him. Yet, the first English edition of his Cambrai Dispute resulted in crickets.
If someone like Giordano Bruno can’t get noticed on here, don’t take your own lack of traction personally.
It’s not about you.
On Substack, we all have to do a bit of street barking in order for people to find our writing. I’m not a fan of the hustle, but it is what it is.
My hope is that these reader round-ups will help people discover your writing so that you don’t have to spend quite as much time engaging with the algorithm.
Now, on with the show.
Simon Jackson, Voice & Verse and
Simone Kotva, Techniques of Ecstacy
I want to start by thanking Simon Jackson & Simone Kotva for boosting my newsletter as much as they have, it’s very appreciated.
Simon is the director of music at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and his essays feature some of the finest poems and pieces of music the world has to offer. If you enjoy timeless sounds that will lift your spirits, or you’re interested in how words and music work together, get your headphones ready and check out his Substack.
His most recent post is about Henry Vaughan and Music therapy:
Near the start of this piece is a work of calligraphy by Simone Kotva, who has been very helpful in bringing attention to the Pims project. Thank you Simone for all the times you’ve shared my newsletter with your readers! Your support has made my work here much more rewarding.
Simone is a scholar-practitioner of Christian mysticism, and her newsletter Techniques of Ecstacy will offer plenty of insights for your own spiritual work.
An excellent quote of hers:
The way I see it, every mystical text is an invitation to experiment, practice and observe results.
Some snippets from her latest post:
Take Teresa of Ávila, for instance. It was Teresa’s experience of contemplative prayer that encouraged her to develop a new religious rule for her Carmelite order, in which every monastic was provided with two hours of daily alone-time for contemplation. When you read Teresa, you get the impression that monastic life is necessary for mysticism.
But. Teresa’s example should always be studied alongside that of lay persons like Jeanne Guyon. Guyon was a widow who developed methods inspired by Carmelite spirituality outside a monastic community. It should also be studied in relation to many passages in monastic writings that talk about the accessibility of spiritual exercises and the non-exclusive nature of mystical union.
And:
Affordances (a term I picked up from Gregory Bateson’s work on ecology and cybernetics) are things that we perceive to facilitate specific actions within an environment. Affordances are especially striking when a thing has been designed for a specific use. We see a bench and we perceive it as a place especially suited to sitting. In the same way, we see a Carmel and we perceive its regula vitae, its “rule of life,” as especially favourable to mysticism.
But affordances become what they are in the interaction between environment and perceiver; they are never tied intrinsically to the action they are perceived to facilitate.
I love learning about the ways people engage in contemplation (especially the transcendent kind), so Monasticism, Mysticism and Affordances hit that sweet spot for me, and I hope it hits yours too.
For those of you looking for something to listen to, here’s a podcast where she discusses the sorcerous Saint Cyprian:
She’s also just released an essay on Simone Weil:
This is a fun essay that discusses her relationship with Simone Weil, which is the inspiration behind her name. I’ve been meaning to read Simone Weil for awhile, I have several friends who have recommended her to me, so I think it’s time.
A snippet:
After opening the door to Weil and I, I let it remain open—for a while. Some of my first published articles were about Weil, and I let my namesake direct my research for about a decade. The final chapter of my first book ends with Weil-inflected thinking and its title, Effort and Grace, is an obvious nod to Gravity and Grace.
On an aside, how did your parents choose your name? I was named after Mark Antony. My father was not a fan of the Antony part, so Mark was the compromise. Valentine was also briefly in discussion, which I think would have ended with me living a very different life.
Marguerita & the Humanities Society
Next, I want to thank Marguerita & the Humanities Society for being one of my first boosters. Her early encouragement was helpful at a time when I wasn’t even sure if I should keep the Pims newsletter going.
She has a thoughtful Substack that offers, among other things, enjoyable vignettes of talented authors and other luminaries.
I’m a fan of her two posts on Leonardo DaVinci. I’ve got a lot love for polymathy.
Her latest vignette is on Thomas Hardy:
And a snippet:
Thomas Hardy created characters who were vivid within landscapes and villages that felt real. He had a gift for narrative and used Biblical illusions to show how human beings were victimized by the Victorian conventions. Themes of inflexibility in marriage, denial of sexual justice, inequality of education for the different social classes — were all important issues to Hardy. Each novel he wrote progressively explored more complex issues and addressed those societal conventions.
In 1895, a British newspaper branded Thomas Hardy as “Hardy the Degenerate” for his novel, Jude the Obscure. The book was condemned as decadent and indecent for its attack on marriage, sexuality, and religious cynicism. The backlash was so severe and intense. A bishop actually burned a copy of the book in an act of political theatre. As a result, Hardy gave up novel writing entirely and focused solely on his poetry.
Kristian Evans, Of The Devil’s Party
Kristian Evans is a poet and editor, and the co-founder of Modron magazine. His most recent work on Substack is the Dreamlife of Oak Trees. A little taste:
The dune sand is hot and silky and squeaks under my boots as I slide down its side. The late May sun is high and fierce and blazes back at me as if every surface were a mirror. My skin tingles and burns, my hair is damp under my hat. I’ve been walking for miles now and I need a rest. There’s a tree down there on the edge of a dune slack, big and squat and in full leaf; an oak. I suppose I must have been in the sun too long, because I feel the tree turn its attention on me as I approach, and the distance between us evaporates.
It’s a great piece, and you should read the whole thing.
Kristian also shared a fantastic recitation of Tales from Ovid by the poet Ted Hughes, who did the entire performance from memory:
I’m going to have track down a copy of “By Heart” to learn about the imagery chaining method Hughes taught other poets. The fact that Hughes picked it up from Frances Yates (one of the most influence mnemonic researcher ever) is a great piece of memory trivia that I’m happy to have learned.
Andreas Pattichis, Two Minds
Andreas Pattichis is a Ph.D candidate writing about the relationship between AI and human beings. One of my goals with this newsletters is to teach people healthy ways of engaging with AI using the power of memory, so his substack aligns quite well with my interests in the technology.
I enjoyed this piece of his:
In it, Andreas compares the differences between how humans retrieve memories through association with how AI’s retrieve things through similarity. It’s a great overview of human retrieval investigated through a technological lens.
The art of memory is also the art of retrieval, so essays like this are a welcome addition to the literature.
A quote on the limitations of similarity search:
The problem is that similarity quietly becomes a substitute for relevance.
But relevance is larger than similarity.
Two things can be semantically similar and not meaningfully connected.
Two other things can be deeply connected and not semantically similar at all.
Adam Robbert , The Base Camp
Philosopher Adam Robbert has a great introduction on askēsis that you can read on his website . It kicks off with this definition:
Askēsis is a spiritual exercise that results in a transformation of perception through the cultivation of a certain mode of being.
If you’ve been following the Pims newsletter for awhile, you can see why I might be interested in the history of askēsis. I want to sit with his writing for awhile, which i’ve only just started working through, but from my first taste of it, it looks like has a lot to offer those of us looking to create deeper contemplative practices.
Adam also has notes from his dissertation available over on his Substack:
A snippet from the essay::
Askēsis, in the sense I am using the term, invites us to expand what properly constitutes philosophical training to include a wider complement of faculties. Sensation, perception, thought, feeling, imagination, intuition, and contemplation reemerge on this account as sites of philosophical refinement and attunement, not reductively as assistants or underlaborers to reason, but as crucial constituents of the cultivation of perception as such.
What I want to show is that askēsis, so understood, is neither a preparation for philosophical insight nor a supplement to it, but the medium through which such illumination is achieved. In this sense, the practices of self-transformation that the philosophical tradition offers us alter what comes to presence for the practitioner as intelligible, and thus bear directly on the practitioner’s relation to reality itself.
Now I’m going to have to track down some copies of Pierre Hadot’s books too, who features prominently in both pieces.
When you join Substack, you have to make peace with the tsundoku life. Your reading list is going to grow like kudzu.
For those prefer videos, I haven’t watched this yet, but I plan too:
Askésis as a Way of Life: On Saints, Mystics, Monastics, and Philosophers.
John Fisher, Text Savvy
John Fisher runs Text Savvy, a newsletter that has written a lot on the subject of memory.
I’m always happy to see his notes on my feed, since he often shares studies and other works that help buttress my belief that knowing things is important to solving problems.
His latest post:
He offers up a critical take on “teaching thinking”:
Teach students knowledge, and they will be better thinkers. We cannot tinker with their thinking directly, and it would not be ethical to do so even if we could. We can influence what they think about. Beyond that, we’re just making it up, and that’s irresponsible. The job has boundaries, and that’s one of them.
I share the sentiment. There are some loaded assumptions in teaching people “how to think” that are worth challenging.
He caps his essay with this excellent passage:
what worries me about education’s packaging and promotion of ‘thinking’—especially contentless thinking—is that it causes people to believe that full working memories—hard thinking—make productive people, or smart people, or intelligent people, or caring people, or, sheesh, knowledgeable people. But that’s not true. They usually just make stressed people, anxious people, busy people.
As I’ve I discussed in other essays of mine, I have ADHD. My working memory is subpar, to put it gently. Mnemonics has allowed me to engage with what I’m reading without having to rely on my working memory to parse it. It’s the difference between going for a jog while carrying a backpack full of heavy weights, and doing it unencumbered. I can now sit with the ideas of a book without worrying about them falling out of my working memory. And yes, it turns out it’s a lot less stressful thinking about a book when you’re not trying to juggle inside your head.
Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly, The Vocation Project
Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly is the lead writer over at the Vocation Project. In its own words:
The Vocation Project is a research and education collaboration seeking to answer some of today’s most pressing questions regarding work and happiness.
Patrick is the reason I finally got around to reading Paolo Rossi’s Logic And the Art of Memory, which is a great book that made me much more sympathetic to Early Modern critics of mnemonics.
The Vocation Project’s most recent post is about how the decline of traditional markers of adulthood is impacting Generation Z:
But Gen Z lacks any real milestones for maturity. Traditional markers of adulthood—home ownership, marriage, career advancement, and so on—largely seem out of reach.
This essay tackles a problem that’s reaching crisis levels.
When we fail to provide young adults with a sense of cultural continuity, one where they know where they come from, where they are, and where they’re going, we throw them into a maelstrom of uncertainty that’s hard to navigate.
Failing to create the conditions so that the young can successfully complete their journey into adulthood is a major societal failure.
The social body has its own type of zeitgeibers, external cues that let people know what the time is. Now that these cues are no longer stable or common, the newest generations are having trouble orienting themselves.
A propos of nothing:
Newer Newsletters
I’ll wrap up this week’s reader round-up with three works by newer Substackers who only have a few pieces shared so far, and who I hope will continue writing more works.
Beatriz Nunes, Spitting on Apophis
Next is Why We Should Have No Hope by Beatriz Nunes:
This is a thoughtful piece on depression and the often overlooked side effects of medication:
as often happens, very little information and interest exists in proper research on the secondary effects of these drugs, especially on the unsexy subject of the dreams of the depressed. Do depressed people even dream to begin with? And if they do, do we really want to know what’s happening down there? Not forgetting that if you take an antidepressant the usual doctor’s recommendation is just to top it up with a sleeping pill and problem solved. No dreams and good night, baby. Just please, don’t bother us with your nightmares.
Next up, is The Year I Left by Máirghréad:
It’s a biographical piece on the difficult act of leaving school. If you’ve ever found yourself turning away from one life path and walking down an entirely different one…
What people ask me most these days is “Do you regret it?” It’s a complicated answer. I know that going to college was the wrong choice for me, but it taught me a lot about how to be a person. The feeling reminds me of a line from LCD Soundsystem: “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision—for another five years of life.”
Matthew Andrew, Dwelling in Tension
Over at Dwelling in Tension, theologian Matthew Andrew shares his excellent long-form essay On Patience.
It’s a deep dive on the virtue of patience, and it deserves more attention:
The Great Famine, in the fourteenth century, killed about ten percent of Europe’s population. Later in that same century, the Black Death would see some towns lose up to half their population. The Ars Moriendi, a work on dying well, emerged from this unimaginable calamity: The Art of Dying. Within the Ars, five virtues implicitly counter five deathbed temptations. In this post, I want to examine one of these virtues: patience. To endure suffering without succumbing to sorrow, to experience pain and not despair, to be in discomfort and not lose hope—these find their remedy in the single virtue of patience.
I hope you find at least one essay in this batch that resonates with you.
I’m sorry for all those I’ve left out! If you follow or subscribe to Pims, share your latest essays in the comments for others to find.
Thanks for including me in this Mark! Your substack is easily one of the best things I’ve encountered on here - it’s completely transformed my (previously relatively weak) attempts to work with the arts of memory practically - keep up the good work!
Thanks for including me Mark! A pleasure to hear your breakdown, as always.