In a spirit of anti-Franzen, here are a couple of things I learned about from Facebook and Twitter this weekend, while attending swimming lessons (not my own). Picked up from Paul Harrison on Facebook, a link to a new online journal Singularum, focussing on the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy (teaching as a theatre of cruelty, perhaps?). 

And from Twitter, here is a podcast with Spivak talking about a new book/collection, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – worrying about whether the tools of an aesthetic education (i.e. literary reading) are still useful in relation to challenges of speed, distance, digitalization, and other ‘globalizing’ things.

Never having had a proper aesthetic education, nor having ever really aspired to be a medium for one, as I grow old I find it increasingly peculiar just how much Theory is still attached to faintly reactionary models of what the task of education should be.