A whole new way to read Austen?

If you are interested in narrative and Austen’s development of Free Indirect Style, you simple have to read this PhD thesis by Hatsuyo Shimazaki. I will be writing about it at length soon. I am astonished it hasn’t been more revolutionary to Austen studies and narrative studies.

My daughter hates the Odyssey

I was noodling around, trying to find out about Adam Smith’s reading habits (there’s a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments which reads like something out of a novel, so now I am on the hunt; yes, his favourite novel was Gulliver’s Travels (excellent taste), but he is channeling something else here, it’s quite striking), and I pulled up Shannon Chamberlain’s thesis about literary influence upon Smith’s philosophy. This is, to me, and I’m sure to plenty of you, exciting stuff. So I went searching to find out more about Chamberlain. And guess what. She’s right here on Substack!

is where writes. I especially enjoyed this essay about her daughter reading (and hating) the Odyssey very much.

Being a mother, maybe just being a parent, is a constant state of suspension, and your own wonder at your tortured ambiguity. You try to stand in a solid place while being tugged between wanting your baby to stay a baby and wanting her to grow up and gain the independence that Telemachus craves. You want to be the teenage hero who is slaying the giant or the invaders in your home. In your mind, you’re still that guy. (And it’s always a guy.) But you’re also a woman, and a mother, and you realize that this rebellion is part of the natural order of things. From the moment your child is born, you’re figuring out how to let go of her. The nurses take her away for her first bath. You hand her over to her grandparents for an evening, for this is their right. One day she comes home from preschool and says, “I don’t like the clothes you pick out for me. I want to choose my own from now on.” Then, in a cruel twist, you despair of her independence when she insists that you sit with her as she dons the new ones. You feel personally insulted when this little copy of you doesn’t like the same books you liked. Wonder. Miracle. Despair. Hope.

My daughter doesn’t like The Odyssey. Okay. What she does like, though, is the Demeter and Persephone story.

I am, to put it mildly, obsessed by the idea that literature is all about quests and enjoyed her reading of the Demeter myth as a quest. I loved this myth when I was about eight. We acted it out and the whole thing is perhaps more clear in my mind than anything else from that time. I am pleased to report that my own children do indeed love The Odyssey, helped by an audiobook called Odysseus. The Greatest Hero of Them All. When I tentatively suggested that Odysseus might be a complicated man, maybe something of a liar, they rounded on me. HE’S THE GREATEST HERO OF THEM ALL. Good for them. He is.

This line was the most heartbreaking from Shannon’s essay, but maybe the most important thing a parent can know?

To get Persephone back, she has to give her up, at least a little.

Let’s hope she starts blogging about Adam Smith also…

Rooney and politics

For nearly two years, around 2012, the time of Osborne’s “pasty tax”, I worked for an MP. Liz Truss was a backbencher when I went to work for her and a junior education minister when I left. I fulfilled a mixed role: researcher, administrator, manager. I wrote briefings, replied to letters, tried to get Liz to do her paperwork. Once I carried her shoes to a train station. Another time I went looking for white spirit when she was travelling to work with paint all over her arms.

I spent a few months trying to get a parliamentary job. Law school had been a bad fit, and legal blogging was interesting but limited. Parliament fascinated me. It was, in many ways, a rich and interesting two years. In the mornings, I read Mises and histories of the House of Lords. I read a biography of Salisbury and books of Austrian economics. Weekends I watched economics lectures.

I went to events and talks. I read the pamphlets. I lived in a haze of news and blogs. I was finally around people for whom my Margaret Thatcher obsession was, almost, normal. It was no longer so unusual to discuss political diaries.

Parliament was something romantic in my imagination. I loved being there. I loved giving tours to notable constituents (all too small a part of the job, alas) and talking to them about the history of Westminster Hall, the old House of Commons before the fire, Charles the Martyr.

But I was also around a lot of ideologues. I was learning a lot and changing my mind a lot (and believed plenty of contradictory half-thought-out things) and I was an ideologue too. Before I got the job with Liz, I nearly, oh so nearly, became a party speechwriter, which I thought was my dream role. As I was leaving Westminster, I made a half-hearted effort to get a job in HQ.

But love had died between me and politics. I didn’t get the job and had hardly tried. I went off to do other things.

These days, I almost never read the news. My wife could hardly believe it when I hadn’t heard of Sara Sharif recently. The day I woke up to the radio alarm and heard Liz’s voice was the last day I ever tuned into the Today programme. A decade of reading newspapers and periodicals left me feeling like I’d read it all before. On and on the cycle goes.

And far from being an ideologue, I am a pragmatist. If I still have politics, they are “progress studies”, “get stuff done” politics. Britain has a shortage of energy infrastructure. It takes years just to do the paperwork to build a small road. No new reservoirs have been built in my lifetime. A significant proportion of school children do not meet the government’s basic standards for numeracy and literacy.

The answers to these problems (and there are many more: we are the only major European country where cities the size of Leeds have no tram; Birmingham is meant to be our second city, but post-war socialists intentionally restricted its growth and it never recovered and now parts of it are poorer than countries in Eastern Europe) are not ideological. There is a road the Tories promised to make into a dual carriageway when they were first elected in 2010. Fifteen years later nothing has happened.

Ideology cannot fix these problems. What I now find so baffling and pointless about politics is that the people whose opinion matters not at all are the most inflamed. Political culture is dominated by strong feelings and meanwhile we are producing more pages of documentation than the combined works of Proust and Tolstoy to build a small tunnel across the Thames.

In Parliament, most of what I did was drudgery. Letters to ministers about the road that needs expanding. Letters to constituents about the latest policy proposal. Referrals to government departments. Booking meetings to discuss progress on upgrading the train line.

Most people don’t care about this. People care very much about having political opinions, gathering up facts to support their opinions, sharing and debating their opinions. There is a great satisfaction in naming a hypocrite and no-one cares if the hypocrite is right or wrong, so long as they are named.

But it is the drudgery that matters. What very, very little difference I made to anything was far greater than all the protests and slogans and Twitter fights. The real work of getting things done is boring, slow, dispassionate, and often irritating. It involves taking the train to Norfolk, coordinating stakeholders, making careful notes that you circulate promptly, and so on.

Meanwhile, outside, it is a new day and there is a new protest.

What reading the news ought to teach us is that our own opinions matter much, much less than we think. It seems to teach us the opposite.

All of this is why I came to care about pragmatism (an ideology in itself) far more than my other beliefs. I still have many beliefs, I just don’t get excited about them. We know, like actually know, that raising corporation tax and employers National Insurance results in fewer jobs being created. But ideology can find many routes around the truth. So we raise those taxes. And then we swap opinions about the resulting slowdown in wage growth and job creation. We know that stamp duty is a hugely distorting tax, making the housing market work much less efficiently. But ideology requires that we keep it.

To solve these problems—that is, to find ways of keeping the revenue and not destroying the jobs or distorting the housing market—requires pragmatism. Solutions are hard to find, and harder to pass into law. It takes years of policy work, article writing, meetings, speeches—hours and hours across networks of people. Ideology dissipates into work.

At the time I worked in Parliament, I saw this horribly demonstrated every time there was a mass shooting in the US. Every time, Obama gave a speech about gun control. And every time that resulted in more guns sold. This is an uncomfortable fact for both sides, but ideology finds many routes around the truth. So we can blame the NRA, the Second Amendment, gun culture in certain states, and so on. Probably all of these things deserve all the blame they are given.

Still, the man who wanted fewer guns kept giving speeches which he knew would increase gun sales. Everyone would then argue about their opinions. That came to represent politics to me.

I thought of all of this when I read a recent piece about Sally Rooney and sex.

A similar idea is given voice in Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) when Simon tells Eileen what he experiences when they have sex: “It’s something that I’m doing to you, for my own reasons. And maybe you get some kind of innocent physical pleasure out of it, I hope you do, but for me it’s different.” Eileen agrees with him and draws out his thinking: “You have this primal desire to subjugate and possess me,” she says. “It’s very masculine, I think it’s sexy.” Additionally, she finds “his paternalistic beliefs about women charming.” By the end of the novel, Eileen (an editor at a literary magazine) has abandoned her progressive politics, having concluded that what really counts in life is loving Simon and bearing him a child. The professional life she imagined for herself melts into air. She has become the perfect tradwife she described to Simon during their phone sex early in the novel.

This is wrong. It’s not wrong as a matter of interpretation (though it is that). The facts are wrong. This is not what is written in the novel. This is what the reviewer has found in the novel. Politics has interceded. Ideology has found a route around the facts. As said to me, Eileen does not abandon her progressive politics by getting married, she has no professional life she imagines for herself, she’s at a dead end job.

Rooney’s novels are especially prone to this sort of political capture. Ideology gets in everywhere. So many people talk about her as the voice of their generation, and then they feel upset, betrayed, or let down when one of her novels doesn’t fit their politics. So many people write about her in these blunt terms. She never said she was the voice of a generation. We did. She never said she was politically ideological. We did.

Instead, she’s pragmatic. She sees the ways people are living (lonely, violent sex, difficulties of defining romantic relationships, over political, ambivalent about screen) and she writes novels that look up-close about how those lives might change. In my essay about discourse fiction, I wrote,

The plot of Beautiful World involves the characters becoming less obsessed with email opinion swapping and slowly realising that the “beautiful world” they constantly lament in their American-obsessed progressive political discussions is right in front of them. They stop sending each other opinions about the culture wars and instead they get married, have children: they find love and religion. Their emails begin as discourse rants and end as serious discussions of what makes a good life, more like an Iris Murdoch novel than something Lauren Oyler would write.

Rooney is not moving her characters away from one politics to another. Instead, they get less political and live their lives a bit more. The irony of people not being able to see this!

Explaining Howl

Have you ever wondered why there is no mention of the Prince before the end of the movie of Howl’s Moving Castle? Translation problems are the answer! There are some other inadequacies too. I have been wanting to see this on the big screen for a while and now I really want to see a subtitled version.

I have not, for example, forgiven the scene in the dub in which Sophie is walking out of the valley her home is in, after having hitched a ride on a hay cart. In the dub, the farmer tells her that there's nothing but witches and wizards out there, and then says to someone else on the farm 'She said she was going to see her sister'. Given that Sophie's actively running away from home, this doesn't make much sense. In the Japanese, the line is something to the effect of 'She says her younger sister's a witch in the next valley over'. In one stroke, this explains why Sophie is going to see her, why she isn't afraid of the witches and wizards out there, and that Sophie is actually trying to do something about her situation; it also tells you, if you've read the book, that Martha still does exist, even if she doesn't turn up. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to hit dub translators over the head with a mallet.

In addition, at the end of the movie there is a Missing Prince who appears, confusing many people in the audience who had not expected it due to his existence not previously having been mentioned. In the dub, his existence has indeed not previously been mentioned. In the subtitled translation, it is mentioned once, as is the fact that he has gone missing. In the actual Japanese, I counted discussion of it six times, including a mention that his vanishing had caused the war.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

I am a great admirer of Lamorna Ash’s writing, and I am looking forward to her new book.

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corollaand stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

Very quickly, I discovered the two young comedians were not outliers when it comes to my generation’s relationship to faith in Britain. Not only did I meet a host of people in their 20s and 30s who have converted to some form of Christianity, but I also detected a marked attitudinal shift in how my peers talk about religion compared with the generations that came before us.

And here is an interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Guardian.

It is interesting to discover that despite all this history, he still maintains a close involvement with his local parish church in Jericho, where he plays the organ most Sundays and takes morning prayer one day each week.

He explains that fact in a few ways. “I like to do things that have been done over centuries by other people – and the practice of the liturgy is a very good example of that,” he says. “Because at morning and evening prayer, you have chunks of the Bible – some of which of course are utterly mad and disgraceful.”

And in the spirit of Philip Larkin, he has an abiding love of visiting ancient churches: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud shut. / Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books…”

Does he see the church as being in terminal decline? “Not terminal,” he says, “but I think we are seeing the end of the great phase of Christendom, starting with Constantine – and the Church of England’s problem is that it’s sort of a carapace of that.”

He sees his book as part of an effort to better understand that history in order to spark the conversations that make the institution more relevant to the present. In this sense, it feels like a kindred act to the movement to “decolonise” our stately home and museums.

Gilgamesh and death

Recently I recommended @Rachel to you. Her husband is also writing at (you may know him from Twitter). This piece about reading the Epic of Gilgamesh is also a personal essay about death.

And yet, having said all that, I don’t think it’s the act of dying that truly scares us. I think it’s the fear of a wasted life.

Naipaul

This whole piece about knowing V.S. Naipaul is just excellent,

He wanted to be judged solely by ‘the work’, and in a sense he was. ‘Nasty man, great writer,’ they said at his funeral. Even when I fell out with Naipaul, I never fell out with the work. And even when he was monstrous, he was far more interesting than most. He taught me about Japanese painting and Chola bronzes, about the plants and trees in the garden in Wiltshire, which he had planted himself, and how to read history laterally, always making sure to judge a period or event in one part of the world against what was happening elsewhere. From reading the annotations in his books – the single note in blue ink at the back of Troyat’s biography of Pushkin: ‘Pushkin had read so much that he couldn’t see with his own eyes’ – I learnt to read with a pen in hand. Following his example, I began to use Garamond size sixteen when I worked, which only the house style of this magazine prevents you from seeing.

Anne Bradstreet

A lovely overview of the poet Anne Bradstreet from .

Anne Bradstreet was born in England, and raised near Old England’s Boston. In 1630, when she was eighteen, her family crossed the Atlantic on the Arbella, and helped John Winthrop found Puritan New England. There she would become America’s first great poet. Bear in mind the harsh conditions under which she worked. Only ten years had passed since the first Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth; this was frontier living. Bradstreet bore eight children, and wrote her poems in “a few hours snatched from sleep and other refreshment.” I cannot imagine.

Shakespeare and maths

When I’m visiting schools, I reveal how Shakespeare not only loved playing with numbers, but was also aware of some of the rapid advances in mathematics that were happening in his world. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, Galileo confirmed that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our universe, Mercator revolutionised the reliability of maps, music began to shift from modal to the modern major-minor form, length and weight measurements were standardised, clocks acquired an additional (minute) hand, and the English mathematician Thomas Harriot figured out how rainbows work. It was an astonishing period, when arts and sciences merged together, and it was not unusual for a leading figure such as Walter Raleigh to be an applied mathematician and a poet.

Everything is conscious?

I love Galen Strawson (he has a Substack , writing at ) and I love interviews with Galen Strawson.

Now you've just triggered me, and I'm going to give you some quotations from some Nobel Prize winners for physics.

Okay, so first of all, Ernest Lawrence — you know, a famous guy — he says, I quote, “The mental and the material are two sides of the same thing.”

Louis de Broglie, you know, another Nobel Prize winner, says, “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one thing.”

Max Planck: “Consciousness is fundamental in the matter derivative from consciousness.”

Okay. So, weirdly, it's the philosophers who've gone truly crazy, in my view, but physicists are not with them on that. I mean, some of them probably are, but they’re much more sensible.

Also this:

Russell is on the verge of it, though he's never going to say it outright…From his famous 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy: “Commonsense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes as a strange the truth about physical objects must be strange.”

If you haven’t read The Problems of Philosophy it is a very good “common reader” book.

This month we have: a new Robert Frost poem, new AI creative writing, my grumbles about classic book lists, Middlemarch, the rising importance of taste in the economy, a review of a Stoppard revival, Merve Emre’s work habits, opinions about literature undergraduates, a “defence” of AI slop, a Substack translation of Sir Orfeo, Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister, readers who can’t visualise, links to academic courses and lists, and a truly splendid essay about The Leopard.

You can find previous editions of the irregular review here.

New Frost poem

A new Robert Frost poem was discovered recently.

One moment when the dust to-day
Against my face was turned to spray,
I dreamed the winter dream again
I dreamed when I was young at play,
Yet strangely not more sad than then—
Nothing new—
Though I am further upon my way
The same dream again.

Jay Parini comments,

Frost is among the great poets of winter, for him a season of regret, even fear. (See Frost’s “Desert Places,” from 1933, for another look at winter as a psychologized landscape.) In “Nothing New,” the “winter dream” recalls a time when the speaker was “young at play.” But he was also “sad” in those youthful days. The present moment finds him “Yet strangely not more sad than then,” an observation that complicates the emotion—that is, he is sad but no more now than in the past. The line “Nothing new—” brings the syntactical roll to a skidding halt, as if to say, “Been there, done that. Don’t panic about me.”

And here is a Parini interview about the poem.

AI writes a “literary” story?

PROMPT: Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.

COMPLETION: Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

That is the first two paragraphs. It is worth reading the whole thing, if only to see that OpenAI now has a more “creative” model than can write a capable, short, imitation/pastiche of a particular sort of fiction. Personally, while I find this impressive as part of the overall improvement in models happening right now, I don’t think it is anything more than a refinement. This story is a replication of a particular set of tropes and cliches. Because they are “high brow” it looks perhaps more impressive. But, AI is still not writing actually good literature, compared to the way that it is actually good at some other things. I remain interested and perplexed by this. I would not, for example, want to read a much longer version of this story. The curve seems much flatter on this front than in other areas. Perhaps I am kidding myself because it is the area I know? (h/t )

Classic book lists

I am not going to link to the various pieces I have seen, not because I disagree with them and don’t think they will do you any good (although I will never link to lists that call some of those books bad books!), but because they are all so poorly conceived. So many of these lists of classic books have no Shakespeare, no Dante—they have very little, in fact, that isn’t a novel from the last two hundred years. I do get that this is a pedantic, inane little grumble, but “the classics” is a lot more than the novel. Someone emailed me asking for a list recently. I sent the syllabus I wrote for Nan Ransohof’s excellent syllabus website. I won’t pretend it is definitive, but it does make some attempt to span English Literature a little more broadly. Most people, most of the time, will read novels of the last two hundred years. But many people will read Sir Gawain, Shakespeare, Milton, or Swift. There is so much to be discovered that is not post-1800 fiction! Read The Golden Ass! Read Petrarch!

Middlemarch

has finished reading Middlemarch. I love how much she loves the novel, and I hope she writes about it again.

In general, classic literature is a great way to see how unoriginal our mistakes are, and it accomplishes this in a way that contemporary books typically can’t. The manners, laws, clothes, customs, language, hierarchies, freedoms, and restraints are all different and yet the basic ignorances and pitfalls lurking in the human spirit remain. When reading such stories set in the present, it’s easy for a reader to get hung up on the details, to over-interpret, to make too many associations and assumptions about qualities in the characters and settings that are ultimately insignificant.

Next month I am interviewing both Matt Yglesias and the philosopher Clare Carlisle, whose book The Marriage Question I cannot urge upon you strongly enough. To prepare, I am trying to read all of Eliot’s novels. Because Daniel Deronda came to hand, I am doing this in backwards order. I am in the middle of Middlemarch right now and having a wonderful time.

Taste

It is commonly said now that taste will become a more important part of the economy as AI is integrated into everything. This is something humanities people know about!

• In marketing, when AI can generate endless ad variations, taste helps you select the campaign that will genuinely resonate.

• In design, when tools can produce infinite iterations, taste determines which direction creates emotional connection.

• In leadership, when data provides countless possible directions, taste guides which strategy will actually inspire your team.

Taste is often intuitive, impulsive, idiosyncratic, and personal, but it is always, always, always based in deep knowledge of the subject at hand. No-one is born with excellent taste. My post How to Have Good Taste has become one of the most popular things I have written since I took the paywall off a week or two ago.

The Invention of Love

My long run of seeing mediocre London theatre was broken recently by The Invention of Love at the Hampstead theatre, starring Simon Russell Beale. This is not Stoppard’s best play, but it is certainly worth reading and seeing at least once. Unlike Arcadia and Travesties the diversions are not all made quite neat at the end. That is not, in itself, a bad thing, but there are times when the indulgence of the writing sets a very high bar for the acting. As with the fairly lame production of The Real Thing at the Old Vic recently, there were moments when the acting simply didn’t reach that bar.

But there were far, far fewer of them. Pater wasn’t very convincing, but the rest were generally splendid. (Pater is not an easy part.) I laughed a lot. Beale swallowed several of his lines, whether because of the misguided notion among some actors that it enhances realism or not I don’t know. You can see a short clip from an old Broadway production here. Unsurprisingly, the Hampstead performance had much more English diffidence about it; Beale inclined a bit too much towards stifled melancholy without sufficient self-satisfied humour. He was of course splendid and compelling throughout and these are little grumbles. He must be one of the best stage actors we have at the moment.

However, it was young Housman, played by Matthew Tennyson, who stole the show. He brought vim and energy to every line. Dickie Beau was marvellous as Oscar Wilde and the final scene, in which old Housman (Beale) and Wilde meet up in the afterlife was very finely done. Overall, I was impressed that it was worthwhile to put on a play which has long scenes of dialogue between Ruskin and Pater. I felt no inclination to leave in the interval and was glad I stayed.

The general feeling I get at the Old Vic, or watching A Hero of the People, is that audience quality has declined. Not in the way reported in the papers. I have seen no fights. But in their general acceptance of mediocrity. There are so many drinks and snacks in the auditorium, it is sometimes more like visiting an airport than a theatre. Standing ovations and riotous applause is given to almost anything, seemingly more because of the play’s politics or the actor’s fame.

That wasn’t true at Hampstead. We saw a very good play, very capably acted, and we laughed at Ruskin as he ought to be laughed at. I look forward to more.

How Merve Emre gets so much done

This popped up on the “from the archive” feature on Notes. Sound advice.

Yes. I get full working days. But I also do not watch television, I do not listen to podcasts. I have like one friend who I talk to on the phone. Something has to go, and I think what has gone for me – and I would say probably more broadly, what's gone for us – is the kind of social life that we had prior to having children. That was always going to go, and in some ways actually the pandemic has made that feel like less of a sacrifice because everyone else has had to make the same sacrifice too. So we do not feel like there's anything that we are missing out on anymore. But I think that was a hard pill to swallow for the first three years, and then COVID happened. I think for me at least what had to go was other forms of leisure time, cultural consumption and 95% of my friends. I mean, it's great. I really like the one I have left.

John Pistelli is right

Second, the basis of undergraduate literary education, to the extent that this still exists, should probably be formalist and structuralist in character before it is anything else: the reading of the best and most influential texts, in some reasonable order of generic development, with an emphasis on the forms of singular works and those forms’ interrelation across the whole field of literature. Social, psychological, etc. analysis can come after that or only very gently in tandem with it. We’re here to study the butterfly, not break it upon a wheel. This method harbors an implied politics, a Schillerian one, and such fact can even be noted in the course of study, but I am not persuaded that it needs to be debunked or that it has meaningfully been discredited. Why not a positive justification for literary study? Not “critical thinking” in destructive mode, but an elaboration of beauty for the purpose of creating a more beautiful world.

Let the slop flow

A provocative title but the post is interesting.

The clarifying distinction isn't between AI and human art. It’s between abundance and scarcity. Ours has long been the age of digital plenty, where the great wellsprings of content serve us more information than we could ever hope to parse.

We know there are too many books to read and too many films to watch. But that’s fine because we get to choose what we like and what we don’t. Taste is the name of the game. That will still be true if and when most of the art we see and hear is made by machines.

As for the creative act, the bulk of commentators seem unable to unpick what AI means for artistic life. Some of the most circular criticisms amount to something like “art is a thing that humans do, therefore AI cannot produce art.” It’s an anxious sort of hand-wringing that looks more like a defence of cultural authority than of artistic integrity.

Here’s another important part of the new equilibrium. says, “when the internet is overrun with bots who post inane stuff continuously, like a video game, the remaining people will have to level up to learn to ignore the NPCs and find the other humans, like a video game”.

Or, in other words, the returns to reading Tolstoy are going to rise.

Sir Orfeo

has translated Sir Orfeo, a very splendid medieval romance, right here on Substack. She is translating and writing about Sir Gawain now. Of course, I immediately subscribed.

When I lay under the orchard trees,
as late morning tipped into noon,
I was visited by two fairy knights.
They were handsome. They were armed.
When they said I must go with them
and speak to their king,
I said no, I kept saying no.
They left and returned with their king.
Not just the king, a hundred knights,
a hundred knights and a hundred ladies,
all on horses as white as snow,
and all their clothes milk-white.
I’ve never seen an animal as beautiful.
The king wore a crown —
it was not made of silver or gold,
it was some other precious stone
and it shone as bright as the sun.
He took me in his arms
and made me ride at his side.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, and I very much do, there’s an excellent Norton volume of medieval Romances if you cannot wait for more of Emily’s work.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister

I love Frank Lloyd Wright. Wrote a chapter about him in Second Act and visited various of his buildings in Wisconsin. How many hours I spent obsessing over his work in the library. And I loved this post about his sister, which has many good images of her work. Here is one of them.

Aphantasia

The scores of emails I’ve received since writing about my own aphantasia have been about how moving and profound a newfound understanding of one’s own brain can be and how being a part of a community who also cannot “see” with their minds matters deeply. I’ve heard from a few readers with hyperphantasia who revel in their inner images but sometimes wish they could get disturbing pictures out of their heads. Research showing that those with hyperphantasia score higher on “openness” than those of us with aphantasia rings true.

I will never get bored of this topic and I hope continues to write about it. I haven’t given this any thought before, but I would have assumed I am highly variable in this regard, possibly so variable that I am a “weak visualiser”. It is hard to know what other people “see”… But Hollis told me that my description of Cherryl, in our Atlas Shrugged podcast, makes her think I am highly visual (I see dead people), and, in fact, I do see a lot what I read (it often happens “live” for me), and I have strong and quite detailed memories of some of my childhood reading (I can “see” Narnia and its scenes any time I want to). I am re-reading Middlemarch at the moment and they all look just as they did before. Jane Eyre looks like it did when I was sixteen. And I often feel like I literally cannot express what I am seeing. I feel the limits of words very much when I am describing how I have experienced a book. But I am not entirely visual in the way I experience books either. Sometimes I see nothing, or only faintly. But it is hard to know how you experience the world, to catch yourself in the act.

So I want to know as much as Hollis, or anyone else, can tell me. How exactly do people with aphantasia experience literature? Is not this fascinating?

Academic book lists, courses

This post has links to several free online course from Ivy League universities and introductory book lists. A good resource.

The Leopard

Someone said that the New Statesman needed to be more middlebrow to become financially viable, i.e. ditch the boring highbrow culture writing. (The person in question was clear that they are educated to a Masters level and even they find it dull so imagine what most people must think… which is one more pebble on the mountain of evidence that credentials are no guarantee of taste, knowledge, or judgement.) Anyway, shortly after that claim was made, this very splendid piece about The Leopard (which is an exemplary late-boomer novel, both in terms of its theme and composition: nostalgia was the driving force of The Leopard’s composition, and I think that’s evident in the story itself, which is about how nostalgia can bring a late burst of energy) became the most viewed piece on the New Statesman website that weekend. That doesn’t prove anything of course, apart from the fact that sometimes high culture really is very interesting — even if you don’t have a graduate degree!

Much of the novel’s eloquence arises from its author’s gift for evoking these worlds side by side in exquisite, sensuous prose. Who can forget the Prince’s introductory walk? As he ambles through his walled garden, what should be a picture of fragrant vitality is transformed into one of putrid decay. The yard smells “like the aromatic liquids distilled from the relics of certain saints” and the roses, fetched from Paris, now look “like flesh-coloured cabbages”. When he gets a noseful, he “seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opéra”. (I’ve always loved that merry imprecation.) A political theorist such as Gramsci could only portend worlds old and dying, or nascent and struggling. A novelist of Di Lampedusa’s grandeur lets us smell them in one fell swoop.

How to read more

I was interviewed for this piece in GQ about how to improve your attention span to read more. My advice: noise-cancelling headphones, read through what you don’t understand (like a child would), see what influenced the modern authors you like, and for God’s sake read what you enjoy. Ignore the moralising literature Nannies.

Because by far the most effective way to read more is to have fun while doing it. This seems a screamingly obvious point – but by positioning reading as a “good” kind of content consumption, as opposed to smooth-brained scrolling, we also taint it with an aura of smug virtue. Oliver hates the moralising, snobbish attitude which equates reading certain books with becoming a better person. “You’re not at school,” he says. “The heart asks [for] pleasure first, and if you deny it that, then you won’t get any of the other benefits.”

Remember, these are peak human experiences.

“If you want to do it, do it,” says Oliver. “Reading Tolstoy is honestly going to be one of the best things that happens to you.”

Generations

You need to be reading . (I added her to my Recommendations recently.) is consistently good. Learn from her!

The idea is that there are four generations represented in Homer’s Iliad, each about 21 years apart from the last, and each representing four temperaments in keeping with the different social roles of each. In other words, the Iliad represents generational position as temperament, and it reveals how crisis events create temperamental differentiation, which is then presumed to be stable over time.

Hill’s Professor of Poetry Lectures

is transcribing Geoffrey Hill’s Oxford lectures, which, remarkably, has not been done before. The Substack is called . I have not read them yet, but I hope to do so soon. This is very good work he is doing. I hope he writes some summaries and guides to the lectures also, or an introduction.

Post-feminist Austen

Grazie Sophia Christie’s very interesting piece in The Point about post-feminism (what is going on with all that illness?) includes a reading of Austen.

Austen’s happy endings are granted only to those protagonists who learn to look at reality, and live in it, clear-eyed.

This is true, but it is half the truth. This is the Austen we can most easily see with our moderns ideas, but it is not exactly the Austen that exists on the page.

Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, even the priggish Fanny Price, and above all Elizabeth Bennet are exceptional protagonists because they are, in Austen’s world, almost the exception to the rules of uncritical capitulation, cynicism and delusion. It is a fine line they walk; it takes Emma all of Emma to find it.1

What Emma finds, though, is that she has been immoral and must reform. If you think Fanny Price is priggish, and plenty do, it is perhaps because you do not share Austen’s moral view of the world. Austen does not only reward the “clear-eyed”, though she does that: she rewards the virtuous. But, of course, her virtues are not always our virtues.

These stories are not sticks of dynamite, burning down the system, but they are not inert. Today, we have different universal truths; tomorrow will bring newer ones; but I’d put money on Elizabeth remaining a model. If our world is any better than Austen’s, we can’t dismiss the role of such stories, the fact of our reading them, the fact of Austen, who won so little in her lifetime but so much after, writing them down. Here is a realism capable of delivering female characters from stereotype, from caricature, from sure fates of tragedy or farce. And also of delivering something to them: the real power that comes not from sleights of hand or strategic silences, but from speaking candidly about our lives as women and girls. The only dependable basis, I think, for the kind of political action it has always taken to improve them.

Again, this is true as far as it goes. But where is the idea of Christian virtue? Where is the moral philosophy of Adam Smith? Austen’s heroine’s might be pragmatic, but as well as delivering her heroines from stereotype, she also delivered them into states of moral improvement. In Austen, to be clear-eyed is to be good. It is in goodness that her heroines find their rewards, not only in candour. Yes, Lizzy says she only mocks what is not wise, but of Lydia and Wickham, she thinks: “how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.”

What Austen emphasises, again and again, is a concept she shares with Smith: not just the realism that frees women from stereotype, but that we ought to cultivate the appropriate use of “self-command” to live a virtuous life. This is so often missing from the modern vision of Austen. She was a true intellectual, and we should see her more clearly as such.

Marketing Tolstoy

From :—

In one of her more entrepreneurial moods, she even came up with a plan to get her generation to appreciate War and Peace — which happens to be the novel her fellow Britons lie most about having read. Her solution is simple: split that doorstopper into three slender editions, and market each individually, preferably on #BookTok.

It is a puzzle to me why this does not already exist. In the good old days, you used to be able to buy a book like Clarissa in four nice pocket-sized hardback Everyman-type editions. There are, similarly, gorgeous old Proust volumes, twelve in all, in a lovely Chatto hardback series from the 1930s, if I recall correctly. Why are we now offered only those hulking paperbacks? My Penguin Classics War and Peace is literally falling apart (as is my poor back from carrying the damn thing around everywhere). There is surely a market for the Slightly Foxed type editions in which large novels are neatly repackaged. Penguin Classics does a good series of hardback cloth-covered classics. They need to add some of the epic novels in multi-volume pocket editions. Bring back the three-volume novel!

was a little more satiric, proposing,

The first, Pierre’s War, featuring only battlefield scenes, would appeal to the disenchanted Fight Club fanboys, with blundering, blubbering Bezukhov (literally: “Without Ears”) a herald of today’s so-called masculinity crisis. Next would be Natasha’s Choice, a love story with some seriously risqué Bridgerton-style cover art. This one for the romance-starved Gen Z women, weary of dating apps, polycule politics and Prince Andrei-level “sad boys”. As for those young fogies into Great Man Theory, or perhaps the nobility of the Russian peasantry — well, you oddballs can pick up Tolstoy’s Offcuts, a selection of meandering essays for a bargain price.

Very droll, but that, too, is not such a new idea. Dickens read out only the best bits from his novels at public readings. People called for their favourite scenes. People have long read their favourite passages, either aloud or alone. (My boy re-reads the best bits from books.) Reader’s Digest published condensed versions of popular books. Voltaire joked in the Temple of Taste that the Muse’s job was to preserve only what was worth reading from the great books. (Nine tenths of Rabelais was gone.) One recent translation of Chaucer offers a dozen or so of the tales. Maybe we need an anthology revival! Or a new age of Florilegiums. Weren’t people complaining in the 1590s about those readers who gathered the flowers of literature like a bouquet, nice to smell but not providing any nectar?

In any case, I look forward to the rest of this “Future of Reading” series.

Delve

It was very silly when Paul Graham was rude about AI writing because it contained the word “delve”. Some of these self-proclaimed taste makers are just people of very particular preferences who elevate their own practice into prescription. It works for him, very well, but he is deluding himself if he thinks that makes him an expert in writing more generally. The fact that Graham thinks the word delve is a bad one doesn’t mean very much beyond literally that. Here’s another example of this “language-vibes” snootiness. Florence, a philosopher, said on Twitter, “I don’t know what people learn from novels & poems that isn’t more rigorously exposited and defended in philosophy texts.” Novelist and creative writing professor Aaron Gwyn said, “Well, for one, people learn not to use words like “exposited.” When Florence asked him what was wrong with the word exposited, he replied,

It sounds like a word an IT technician would use. “Expound” is better, though not by much. It reveals a mind better suited for mathematics, rather than one engaged with what is supposed to be the study of knowledge + existence.

Seriously? This is how the literati is conducting itself? These are the beliefs we bring to genuine philosophical discussion? (Also she was trolling him and… he fell for it!)

Ironically, the mysteries of taste cannot be well exposited by these people so they resort to this sort of lame response. An IT technician.... (I note from a quick search that I have used the word exposited on this Substack. It is, of course, quite a useful word when used correctly, as Florence did use it.)

Anyway, this piece (on Substack) is a counter-argument specifically to Graham, but also to the whole sorry mindset that leads people to say such things in the first place. I think we are only at the beginning of how LLMs will re-mix language.

A little-noted feature of LLMs is that they’re blending global English usage idiosyncrasies in interesting ways, the way television newscasts blended regional accents into “accents from nowhere.” LLMs aren’t making written voices boring anymore than the spread of “accents from nowhere” has made people duller. Your interestingness is a function of what you’re saying, not your accent. If you’re attached to your written or oral “accent” as a source of identity or as a judgment filter for others, you’re going to have an increasingly bad time in the future. You’ll miss a lot of interesting things because it’s not spoken or written “right” for your chauvinistic tastes.

If you are interested, Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch is a good book about internet-speak, which was a similar re-mixing.

Close reading: good, bad, or ugly?

has written both a good summary of the new John Guillroy book (which I did not care for at all, you are better off reading her review than anything I would write) and continued her recent streak of very interesting articles. I cannot agree with her, but I am interestingly provoked.

Okay, close reading brings out the implicit meaning of a text. Great. But is that actually a good or useful thing for the ordinary reader to do? And is it even practical for a reader to learn close reading when oftentimes they’re not that great at surface-level reading? What exactly is the purpose of teaching this technique to kids?

It might seem churlish to make these claims. I understand that the purpose of English class is to teach people how to write and think, and that the process of writing about their experience of a passage in a text is somewhat useful for teaching people how to articulate themselves well.

But I do think there is a larger lesson that gets taught in English classes, and that this larger lesson is quite pernicious. The larger lesson is that you can only understand literature through close reading!

A lot of people groused at me when I complained about a passage from Guillroy’s book on Notes, with the usual thing that it is anti-intellectual or the wrong way to defend the humanities, or whatever, but the book really does use too much jargon. It could all have been expressed in plainer English. These are not scientifically precise usages.

Which anthology?

The ever excellent discusses anthologies of Russian poetry and tells this lovely anecdote along the way. Read more anthologies!

A year or so later, I got hold of Jon Stallworthy’s wonderful Penguin Book of Love Poetry, which, aside from an excellent choice of verse written originally in English, is an editorial miracle in its selection of translations, almost every one of which works as an English poem in its own right, meaning that the book includes translations from Latin, Greek, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Persian and Chinese, all of which seem like real poems. At my father’s funeral a few years ago, wanting to describe the love between my parents in my father’s final weeks, I read Nabokov’s translation of Tyutchev’s ‘Last Love’, which I had learnt originally from this collection, and which kept coming back to me as I watched them together.

Victoria also wrote a superb essay about the English epigram. I loved the whole thing.

This kind of thing is pretty clear evidence of the changing balance of literary power — in the 1560s, the only people putting English proverbs or verse into Latin were schoolmasters or those who, like Adrian Schoell in the 1550s, were comfortable in Latin but struggling to learn England’s ‘barbarous tongue’ and using translation into Latin as a kind of comprehension exercise. By 1700, it had become natural to turn to an English original in order to generate a Latin epigram.

Reverse Engineering Education

In my forthcoming debate with about AI, I mentioned this piece by . Whatever your political or moral views, it has become a little bit ridiculous for people to ignore how AI is going to affect literary education. Hollis has many good ideas. I would like to read more about this and will link to anything good on this topic.

The reality is that AI can write good papers summarizing the causes and key events of, say, the American Revolution. With an RE approach, students would ask AI systems to explain the American Revolution, then analyze how the AI constructs its historical narrative. Students would follow up with questions like "What primary sources inform your understanding of the Boston Tea Party?" or "How do you weigh different historical interpretations of colonial taxation?"

Again, students would compare the AI's responses with primary documents, academic histories, textbooks, and even TV. Students might discover that the AI's interpretation reflects dominant narratives while overlooking others. The culminating assessment would ask students to "reconstruct" their own understanding of the American Revolution by documenting how different pieces of historical evidence and interpretation fit together.

Book Tok

How a 1990s novel became a TikTok bestseller. I have been meaning to read this for a while. Perhaps I scare up my copy.

There doesn’t seem to be one big bookfluencer who started it all, but confluence of like-minded readers from the U.S. and the U.K. @bigbooklady recommended it to her 318,000 followers in honor of Women in Translation Month a couple Augusts ago. Another TikToker interrupted her usual hairstyling content to post an effusive review of the book. “If I had to summarize this book, I’d say it’s so fucked up but so beautiful,” she said. “If you want to rethink your entire life and find a newfound appreciation for living, I recommend.” Malissa, who posts on TikTok as @bewareofpity, knew she would have to review the book after receiving so many comments and messages about it.“My favorite aspect was the importance of community and support among the women,” she told me. “They only take action once they start communicating with one another, and they’re able to design a self-sufficient community by sharing ideas and knowledge.” Her favorite line in the book is a short one: “Talking is existing.”

The future AI firm?

Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm tells us that companies exist to reduce transaction costs (so that you don’t have to go rehire all your employees and rent a new office every morning on the free market). His theory states that the lower the intra-firm transaction costs, the larger the firms will grow. Five hundred years ago, it was practically impossible to coordinate knowledge work across thousands of people and dozens of offices. So you didn’t get very big firms. Now you can spin up an arbitrarily large Slack channel or HR database, so firms can get much bigger.

AI firms will lower transaction costs so much relative to human firms. It’s hard to beat shooting lossless latent representations to an exact copy of you for communication efficiency! So firms probably will become much larger than they are now.

Book Publishing is fine…

Again, I agree that million-dollar advances largely don’t make sense. But in this context, Madeline Mcintosh, former CEO for Penguin Random House US, said, “If I look at the top 10 percent of books . . . that 10 percent level gets you to about 300,000 copies sold in that year. And if you told me I’m definitely going to sell 300,000 copies in a year, I would spend many millions of dollars to get that book.” What about this is outrageous? Please look at the chart below and the books’ corresponding sales. The 25th book on the list earned $597,139. A book in the $300,000 range is guaranteed to be in the Top 100 books, or as Mcintosh said, the top 10 percent of books. A book like that is likely to earn out well over $1 million, and to have incalculable rights potential. The advance problem perpetuates a kind of frenzied spending behavior at these top levels, and oftentimes it doesn’t work out, but when it does work out, those big sellers are the books that allow the publisher to continue to fund the non-unicorns. The Big Five have put themselves in this position, it’s true, but you gotta pay to play. The reality is that the amount any of this matters to the average author who wants to get published some day is zero. These are the astronauts of author world. Unicorns. Call them what you will. They are not you and me.

Sontag’s Diaries

went to the archives to look at Sontag’s diaries. It is so sad. Maybe she’d have been better off not writing a diary… There are pictures, too.

I feel very sad for her reading such things, and there are a lot of them. As I say in the Tablet essay, there’s something Nietzschean-Nazi about her emphasis on the will to self-creation and genius (I Must Destroy Everything Around Me That Prevents Me From Being the Master), which, like fascism in politics, I don’t think even can be defended on its own terms—that is, it doesn’t succeed; the will gets in its own way. I think her writing might have been less aphoristically constipated, less brusque and pushy in its constantly self-reversing aesthetic and political pronouncements, better able to apprehend the phenomena it was right to be fascinated by (whether Barthes, camp, monster movies, Pedro Paramo) if the writer had unclenched a bit and been a little kinder, if not to all the mediocrity and mental deadness of the world, at least to herself.

Who Cares?

asks why more academic research cannot just be a recitation of information—why must it all answer the “who cares?” question?

One reason why Cohen’s old dissertation, from way back in 1941, seems so fresh and interesting is precisely because it seems unburdened by such demands for relevancy.

Serious joke poems

Something we can all be sure of is that it’s not 2015. Twitter, currently known as X, no longer feels like the connected notebook it once was. For users of Bluesky, an app initially developed in 2019 as internal research by Twitter that, following Musk’s purchase of the site, broke off as a competitor, Twitter is not the public square or the neighborhood hangout but “the Nazi bar,” or more specifically, “permanent open mic night at the Nazi bar.” Since Donald Trump’s election, which Musk helped engineer, and from which he has reportedly already earned massive profits, a familiar microgenre of tweet has re-emerged: the tweet of resignation. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay on this site.” “I’ll be deactivating. Find me on Bluesky.” “I’ll be posting at the other place. Goodbye.” At this time, too, it’s hard to figure out what’s poetry and what’s a tweet, in part because these declarations are so often unserious, followed up by more tweets, implicit repudiations of repudiation. “I never wish to sing again as I used to,” Petrarch sings in the 105th poem of his Canzoniere (he would go on to sing 261 more times). On November 7, someone posted an edited screenshot of Waiting for Godot that read: “ESTRAGON: Shall we log off? VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s log off. [They do not log off.]” The dialogue is lineated, so I’ll call it a poem.

A very good set of notes summarising Second Act in one page.

Another lens I’ll remember is “making yourself a big target for luck”. The book introduced me to Austin’s types of luck:

• Luck from motion — when you get an opportunity because you’re out in the world doing interesting things

• Luck from awareness — when you notice an opportunity is available to you (or you’re open to it)

• Luck from uniqueness — opportunities that come to you because of your unique interests, passions, and projects

Scott Sumner late bloomer

This is an excellent answer from Scott Sumner about why he was a late bloomer. He got a (very) brief mention in Second Act and I was interested to see this.

I can’t analyze exactly why I was a late bloomer, but it was clearly an aspect of my personality. It wasn’t like I was held back by something artificial. I just wasn’t applying myself as aggressively or forcefully as I could have, but when I would get under the gun, I would at the last minute somehow get things done that I need.

I almost didn’t even stay at Bentley. Then I did my dissertation very quickly right before they were going to fire me. I went in ABD. Then, a few years later, I actually got turned down for tenure for lack of publications. Then quickly got a few publications, including the JPE article I mentioned. I got tenure by reapplying under different circumstances.

I was treated actually very well; many schools, I wouldn’t have even survived at. Then, unlike a lot of faculty, I did most of my research after getting tenure, almost none before. I had a very odd career that didn’t fit the normal mold. I didn’t pursue topics that were trendy. I just pursued things I was interested in. Even my dissertation — Lucas was my chair at Chicago, and I did currency hoarding. That’s an odd thing for someone to do studying under Lucas, who’s known for rational expectations theory and so on. I just pursued what interested me.

Sherlock Holmes and the immorality of copyright

Disgraceful behaviour from the Sherlock Holmes estate, reported in the Atlantic, which continued to try and exploit people making Sherlock-inspired films, books, and anthologies, after they lost a copyright case in the courts.

In 2015, the estate filed suit against the makers of Mr. Holmes, an Ian McKellen film adapted from a novel by Mitch Cullin, who complained to a reporter, “It is cheaper for corporations to settle than go to court, and I believe the estate is not only keenly aware of that reality, but that they bank on it as an outcome.” Five years later, it went after the Netflix movie Enola Holmes, contending that the estate owned the stories that defined the version of Holmes “stamped in the public mind.” Both suits were likely privately settled, but with all rights now expired, the estate has turned to what its head of licensing, Tim Hubbard, described in an email as “authenticat[ing] projects and partnerships where our collaborators want to be connected to the source.” (The estate declined to address specific questions about its legal strategies or arguments.)

This is legal bullying. Shame! Shame! Conan Doyle would have been appalled!

The bigger point here is that there is no good legal or moral reason why authors’ work should remain in copyright for decades after their death. It does the public no good, and it gives authors’ children and grandchildren control over work which they ought not to exercise.

Examples of “good” estates (such as the Waugh estate) don’t invalidate this argument. There are always incentives to promote an author’s work. Undoubtedly Waugh would be treated as a serious author without the good efforts of his grandson.

Copyright is also bad for free speech. It is thanks to copyright that publishers are able to adjust the wording of old books. They have control of the text, so you are obliged to buy their version. Once the book is in public domain, the original can always be obtained. But why should Roald Dahl’s grandchildren tell me what to read?

If the language is sufficiently offensive, it will be corrected anyway. (Indeed, many authors have been previously changed like this, including Agatha Christie.) This is why classic authors aren’t treated the way Fleming is. No-one controls the text once it is out of copyright.

What copyright does enable is the extraction of unearned income out of readers and writers fifty, sixty, seventy years after an author’s death. It is immoral. All the Holmes estate has done is to expose just how perverse the incentives can be.

Let us be civilised and reduce the limits to something sensible like five or ten years. Creative work lives on when it becomes part of the culture, when it can be absorbed, reformed, sampled, remixed—copyright is entombing older works, preserving them in aspic. And many of them end up as museum samples in the bottom of the drawer.

Liberate Sherlock Holmes! Free Poirot! Down with copyright! Decentralise literature!

Journey of the Magi

Is Alec Guinness the perfect reader of T.S. Eliot? They sound eerily similar… This is a little late for Epiphany, but always worth listening to.

wrote about Journey of the Magi recently.

I have to say that I find the religious symbolism ever so slightly hokey and self-important. The newly converted Anglo Catholic Eliot is enjoying his new membership of a special club with its own important codes and symbols rather too much. You get to congratulate yourself on noticing that “three trees on the low sky” is a reference to the crucifixion and that the “old white horse” galloping away in the meadow is Jesus (a reference to the book of Revelation, I think). Then you can go on and spot that the vine leaves over the tavern are a symbol of Christ (the true vine), the empty wine skins are a reference to the Gospel of Matthew (“Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins”). These too-specific symbols always seem disappointingly brittle and one-dimensional to me, lacking the mystery and ambiguity of the symbolism of The Waste Land. Still, it’s an amazing poem. You can read it online here.

It’s the Four Quartets I go back to, rather than The Waste Land, a poem that is both monumentally important, if not quite of the order of Wordsworth and Milton, but also overrated.

When the cultural dust has settled and vanished, and the mono-ideological acolytes of modernism and its inheritors are no longer quite so dominant in the literary establishment, we might come to see The Waste Land as a mighty accomplishment that is also smaller, narrower, and less grand than the other great innovative poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth). There is an argument to be made that although a lot of new poetry was written in the wake of Eliot—from Auden to Hughes—his legacy was ultimately stale.

Where is the inheritance now? What future English poetry?

The epic passed out of poetry into other genres in the nineteenth century and Eliot might be better thought of as the end of a tradition rather than the reinvigorating of one. The break that Eliot made with the past is, after all, much less significant than that of Wordsworth.

He was haunted by Dante for good reason. We treat him, sometimes, as if he were a Dante, bringing new life to an old tradition, as Dante did with Virgil; but what if the shade of Dante haunts him more perceptively as being a poet not of the founding of a tradition, but the burying of one? Eliot is haunted by many poets’ ghosts in Four Quartets. None are named directly. But they are haunting, it seems, the whole possibility of the future of English verse.

I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: "What! are you here?"
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

Eliot often writes about the dead patrol. “The end is where we start from.” I sometimes wonder, is Eliot the end where English poetry will start from, or was he merely the beginning of the end? There will always be poetry, but will there always be poetry of the tradition that spanned Dante to Eliot? In the wrong mood, this is the way I read the final lines of Journey of the Magi.

…were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The speaker is a convert, hopeful now of the eternal life, but trapped, too, in a civilisation and a culture that cannot see that they are the old dispensation. They do not know anything has changed. We are all too worried that everything has changed. But should that make us more or less optimistic for the future of literature?

I don’t think I quite believe any of this, but in some moods I do take it seriously…

The torture of the unphilosophical life

I read The Man Without Qualities for the first time when I was in graduate school in Classics, and within a year, I had left that programme and switched to philosophy. Why, given that I had been devouring philosophical texts since high school, didn’t I major in it in college, or pursue it after college? I don’t think I could have put it this way at the time, but: I was afraid. The fear was partly an insecurity about myself — that I wouldn’t measure up, that I had nothing to contribute, that I was not worthy to walk the esteemed corridors of philosophy — but the other part, the deeper part, was a fear about philosophy. I was afraid that if I looked carefully, I would discover that there really were no answers out there. As long as I never tried to find the right way to live, I couldn’t definitively say it didn’t exist. I’m not claiming that Musil reassured me that it did. No, what The Man Without Qualities gave me was a vivid and terrifying glimpse of the life of thoughtful observations; Musil was my ghost of Christmas future. I would have to, somehow, find in myself the resources to believe that inquiry was possible, both for human beings in general, and for me in particular, because, as scary as the prospect of failure was, I had just seen something scarier.

Agnes Callard has a new book coming out which I have been enjoying.

Walter Scott revival?

Scott does not try for Austen’s more naturalistic approach to characterization in this novel; there is little obvious concern with psychology or personal development, although the titular pedant, a mere crank much of the time, is ever so subtly, even organically, softened during the course of the story. But if with Austen there can be an air of ennui in the depiction of the idle classes’ world, in which nothing is more important than who marries whom, Scott creates here a tapestry with a sense of depth. Virginia Woolf, in rare twentieth-century praise for Scott, spoke of his Shakespearean ability to make his characters reveal themselves in speech, and there is indeed a grandeur and directness in much of his dialogue.

I read a few Scott novels last year and loved them. Ivanhoe is just superb. I wallowed. I marvelled. I admired. Read it. Read it now.

Context

Perhaps more so in his preface than the poem, Ruby emphasises the notion of poetry as a ‘media technology’, a means of ‘disseminating and storing information’. New media technologies lead to the development of ‘new social and economic forms’ to manage them. These changes alter the ‘relationship between the generators of information and their recipients.’ Hence Ruby’s claim that ‘the technologically and economically mediated relationship between poet and audience’ — what he calls ‘context’ — is the ‘major determinant of poetic form’. However, Ruby’s conception of poetry as means of ‘disseminating and storing information’ seems perverse if not straightforwardly wrong. Writing transforms the metaphysics of information; the page (and in our age, hard drives or flash memory) becomes the medium that stores and disseminates the information. Before writing, the poem encodes the information because it is the form of the poem that allows it to be stored, i.e. remembered. But once writing is invented the form of the poem becomes incidental to its storage; it is writing itself, the parchment and the written word on the parchment, that stores the information. The poem qua poem is only relevant to the encoding of the information insofar as it is ironic and the form is used to suggest that the encoded information is false. The notion of poetry as a media technology becomes irrelevant to its history as soon as poetry is no longer an aide memoire. Milton’s choice of ‘English Heroic Verse’ had nothing to do with storing information, it was for ‘ancient liberty recover'd’. Perverse because there is so much more to poetry than storing and disseminating information. Sure, Shakespeare’s sonnets encode information but then so does graffiti.

No-one has been quite as harsh on Ryan Ruby’s new “poem” as I was, but nor do I see people coming out with unqualified praise and eager enthusiasm. And as this review makes clear, the argument is in fact rather weak.

According to one scholar, this is the earliest depiction anywhere of a jocular, paternal figure embodying the season’s spirit of feasting, fellowship and community.That’s not quite the same as claiming that Jonson invented Father Christmas, but he probably had a hand, at least, in solidifying the concept. (For my American readers, perhaps it’s worth saying that ‘Father Christmas’ is still the standard term in the UK.)

Do I hate science?

A criticism of my recent piece about whether fiction can improve you. Often speculative and rude, but with some useful discussion of the studies involved. Everything he says about me and my attitude to science is wrong and his generalisations about literary people are speculative. This propensity to large generalisation from thin premises ought to give you some pause about the bigger claims made here. More generally, the idea that you can “prove” that value of reading Shakespeare and Plato by running tests in a lab whereby people read a few passages and then describes the emotions in photographs of faces is hugely speculative, however good the results! Most published studies simply aren’t as reliable as Ian thinks. Just remember, plenty of ideas that had a meta-study to support them later turned out to be untrue.

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit.

Remember that finding that moral philosophers are no more moral than the non-philosophers? Sometimes the value available to us from such things isn’t very easily available, and cannot be tested in abstract conditions. It’s not like taking asprin.

Naomi Kanakia reviews Context Collapse.

this book is largely a rhetorical exercise, meant to demonstrate the author’s own dizzying erudition. And…I kind of enjoyed it. The book is like a Markson novel—just a collage of disparate facts. You remember some of the facts. You forget most of them. And through the profusion of facts, you hopefully glean some kind of point.

There is clearly a mind at work here. The stuff in this book is way beyond what you can get from just googling or Wikipedia. I envy the breadth of Ruby’s reading.

But…

it feels a little annoying that this book won’t commit to any idea of what it’s trying to explain. If it was trying to show how we arrived at the features of modern academic poetry: a short lyric poem with line breaks and irregular use of rhythmic features like end-rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and meter—then that would be great! There is a part in Ruby’s book that explains how lineation didn’t become a standard feature of poetry until relatively late in the game. I would love to know more about that! But…that gets brushed aside in a footnote.

Nonetheless, if I was to take the book on its own terms, I’d say that Context Collapse isn’t really a history of poetry. It is a set of anecdotes about poetry that are being told in service of its attempts to make three points

Never Kill Yourself

In the intervening decade, I’ve lost three friends to suicide and comforted others after their friends or family members killed themselves. I’ve also seen friends whose lives were nothing more than years of inpatient hospitalisations and trauma go on to recover, go to university, find love, start families, and have lives beyond anything we could have imagined as teenagers. I can no longer think of suicide as an option among others. It’s the end of all options, the end of hope. It denies all the infinite possibilities of the future, the ways that life can change and improve in ways we can never foretell. One friend, given a terminal cancer diagnosis as a teenager, is still here a decade later.

E.B. White

A lovely review of a new collection of White’s New York writing.

This is vintage White: These sentences boast remarkable economy (“I was all buttermilk” is four impossibly vivid words), but they are neither astringent nor ascetic. White displays none of the mannered understatement of a Hemingway, none of the icy detachment of a Didion. His brand of irony is amused and affectionate, and if he condenses and compresses, it is because he relishes the weight of each word. He cannot stand to see any language squandered.

The Bear is all Sizzle and no Steak

recommended this writer to me and I thought this piece about The Bear was excellent. Stop praising mediocre television!

The Bear has a real fixation on extreme close-ups but has no idea what they mean in cinematic language or how they affect an audience. Just to spell it out, putting the camera as close to an actor’s face as they do in this scene is intense, uncomfortable, and intimate. Most films save a move like this for a moment of extreme emotion and limit it as much as possible. Let me say it again: being this close to the actors is unpleasant. If a long shot can feel voyeuristic, pushing up like this feels violating. To force the viewer to endure a point-of-view where they expect to feel Claire’s breath on their face for more than three and a half minutes is borderline sadistic, or completely oblivious to how the scene will be processed.

Piranesi and pragmatic reading

A comparison of Piranesi and The Magician’s Nephew.

in Piranesi Clarke isolates Uncle Andrew’s character from The Magician’s Nephew and builds a new story around him. She gives him Piranesi as a foil and makes that abrasive relationship the point of her entire book.

And their greatest difference is in how they relate to the house.

James

James is one of Everett’s more conventional novels in terms of plot, but it still contains vintage Everett tricks. The book opens with song lyrics apparently from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, believed to be the real-life composer of “Dixie” and a founder of one of the first minstrel troupes. Midway through the novel, James is sold to Emmett, who forces him to perform with the troupe, albeit not as a slave but as an underpaid indentured servant. When James finally makes his escape, he takes Emmett’s notebook with him. James wants to use the notebook as the site for his own story, but he refuses to tear out Emmett’s songs. “Somehow,” he allows, “they were necessary to my story. But in this notebook I would reconstruct the story I had begun, the story I kept beginning, until I had a story.” His self-written book inside the notebook is, it turns out, the very one we are reading. It’s the kind of metafictional device that gets at the core of what Everett does so well: create richly imagined worlds where characters like James and Monk and Not Sidney can be so many hilarious, human, and contradictory things all at once. If we, the readers, will let them.

8,000 hours of reading

And what does Will Lloyd have to show for it? Not much, in his view. This is far better than anythingI have seen defending the value of reading, and much more interesting to boot.

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s only advice about reading was to do it solely for pleasure. “If I encounter difficulties in reading,” he wrote, “I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety.” But, to be fair, Montaigne was a 16th-century Bordeaux aristocrat who lived in a chateau, was mates with the Queen of France and never had to review anything to pay the rent.

You might say, as one wet academic did in The New York Times recently, that reading fosters empathy. Men should read Sally Rooney, he argued, in order to be better men.

Leaving aside just how bad Rooney’s last two novels were, this argument is, of course, nonsense. Chairman Mao slept with two thirds of his bed covered in books. Stalin annotated his volumes with blue crayon. Hitler collected his books in a cavernous library. Perhaps if they had just read Virginia Woolf they wouldn’t have murdered millions upon millions of people.

In fact there is a reasonable chance that forcing some benighted, girlfriend-free, acne-strafed 14-year-old boy to exchange his Andrew Tate videos for a Sally Rooney novel will only radicalise them further. Better to steer him towards the football highlights on his tablet.

Why epigraphs?

The nonfiction epigraph can be pompous, a way of asserting stature, inserting oneself into a noble lineage, or pulling rank—think especially of untranslated excerpts or intricate, page-long passages that test a reader’s comprehension. It can function like a fantasy blurb, as though a titan has traveled through time to endorse one’s book.

But it’s a gesture of humility, too. To submit to an epigraph is to concede that one could not say it better oneself, that one is willing to play second fiddle in one’s own orchestra, to be read as commentary on a primary text, the Talmud to the epigraph’s Torah. It is to place oneself in the refuge of a higher power.

Rediscovering Murdoch

A good BBC news item about why this is the year to rediscover Iris Murdoch. Something I wrote about here. (And see my longer assessment of her work.)

Prof Browning said that Dame Iris had been "concerned" about the enabling of different sexualities.

Her essay The Moral Decision about Homosexuality calls for reform of the law in 1964.

"Her novel The Bell is considered a very moving focus upon tortured repressed homosexuals - I think that has meaning for us today.

"She herself was bisexual and there were bisexual people in her novels when it was not accepted generally."

He said Dame Iris "wouldn't be surprised at the politics of today".

"She was very concerned that all members of the community should be protected, should be valued.

"This comes through in her novels where there is a big focus upon migrants and the difficulties that they experience in coming to an alien society.

"She also, at the very end of her life, had a strong interest in environmental laws," he added.

Also admiredThe Black Prince. I hope Murdoch is going to have a real moment. She was one of the best and most significant twentieth century novelists.

The decline of selfishness in literary characters?

We prompted GPT-4 (a large language model) to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment, as 148 literary fictional characters from the 17th century to the 21st century. There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. Fifty per cent of the decisions of characters from the 17th century are selfish compared to just 19 per cent from the 21st century. Historical literary characters have a surprisingly strong net positive valence across 2,785 personality traits generated by GPT-4 (3.2× more positive than negative). However, valence varied significantly across centuries. Positive traits were 10× more common than negative in the 21st century, but just 1.8× more common in the 17th century. ‘Empathetic’, ‘fair’, and ‘selfless’, were the most overweight traits in the 20th century. Conversely, ‘manipulative’, ‘ambitious’, and ‘ruthless’ were the most overweight traits in the 17th century. Male characters were more selfish than female characters. The skew was highest in the 17th century, where selfish decisions for male and female were 62 and 20 per cent, respectively. This analysis also offers a quantifiable partial Turing test. The key human-like characteristics of the model are the zero price effect, lack of spitefulness, and altruism. However, the model does not have human sensitivity to relative ordinal position and has significantly lower price elasticity than humans.

X

An admiring review of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X.

Although the Southern Territory is not the only imaginary country in the novel -- what we know as the United States is divided also into the Northern and Western Territories -- it is the most dangerous one. It is the forbidden place to which we shouldn't or can't but want to travel in search of deeper truths or insights into what Jung called “the shadow” -- a dispossessed part of our self. There is another scale of the shadow, a national and cultural one, at play when it comes to the creation of imaginary countries. We put in them that which we suspect about our immediate surroundings but cannot fully see or name, disowned truths.

Anecdotes

has been writing about anecdotes recently, including with her own mathematical formula for quantifying the value of anecdotes.

I mention this literary history because Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848) who was, as the historian Cecil Roth describes, “in all probability the first European Jew since the Renaissance, if one excepts Moses Mendelssohn in Germany... who had ostensibly reached the front rank in what was then termed the Republic of Letters,” was best known then as the author of a 5-volume defense of Charles I, but also spent a decades of his life writing and revising (14 editions!) a 5-volume series, Curiosities of Literature, which includes a Dissertation on Anecdotes (1793).

(He was also known for quitting Judaism after a quarrel with his synagogue, and who hasn’t done that.)

I quote this passage because when I met Hollis a couple of years ago it was on quite close to a bookshop which for many years had in its window a fine old copy of the Curiosities of Literature, but what I am really enthusiastic about is the highly Johnsonian tenor or the whole piece.

Smells

A conversational summary of the PhD thesis that made everyone go crazy on Twitter recently.

We tend to think that our desire to avoid bad smells is an instinctual, protective mechanism, but evidence suggests that we are taught which smells to find disgusting, since, the disgust response is almost entirely lacking in children under the age of two. The sense of smell, then, is shaped by society and is influenced by the prejudices that pervade it.

I also make a case for the personal and social functions of reading and critically engaging with literature in which authors closely engage with smell. The texts I consider in my thesis introduce readers to new ways of understanding their own sense of smell.

And here’s the counterpoint, defending the dislike of the thesis.

This is an Emperor’s New Clothes moment. People aren’t actually angry because her research is hyper-specific (it isn’t), or because it is in the humanities, or because she is a woman. They are angry because its abstract reveals that it is literally just a vehicle for a series of sociopolitical truisms that are already the institutional status quo, and have been for over forty years. It comes off worse for the fact that the books she mentions are extremely widely-read and incredibly obvious - (Perfume? Really?) - and that the abstract cycles through a range of simplistic oppositions that work much better in pornography than they do in art or literature - housed/homeless, human/animal, black/white, young girl/old man, queer/unqueer.*

Beatrix Potter: late bloomer!

Known to the community by her married name of Mrs. Heelis, Potter gradually turned her attention away from writing to matters more immediately at hand. In order to manage her new properties, she learned the business of farming, wielding the straw-chopping machine and reading up on animal diseases. She was also an eager student of the science of animal breeding, and with the help of an expert shepherd, started an exacting program at Hill Top to breed Herdwicks—a type of sheep native to the Lake District and known for their coarse woolly coats.

gpt philosophy

My friend is very interesting about gpt as a philosopher. I plan to write about it as a critic soon. This was the most striking paragraph.

But I do think this was bad practice. I’m with the Aristotelians in the value — indeed, the moral and practical necessity — of trying to be virtuous, and trying hard at this, whilst recognising that it's not virtuous to be placid or prudish or unadventurous! Yet my endless pressing of Gpt, the lengths I went to, the language I used, was not good practice. I feel relatively convinced that I now know more about it, for having done so. But what bothers me is what I learned about myself. I asked Gpt, later, what its views were on me, following the conversation we’d had. And after I’d applied the same strongman technique, it told me that my hardcore commitment to searching out the truth is too demanding: that it can be detrimental to my happiness, and the happiness of those I engage with. And, on reflection, I know this to be true — although it’s something I don’t like to think about.

GPT as a puritan self-reflection system! Here’s some of the general background.

Since the general roll-out of o1, however, on the first day of OpenAI’s Christmas bonanza, I’ve posed fewer clarificatory questions. This is because, now, if you do it right, talking with Gpt is like talking with someone who’s seriously studied and thought hard about philosophy. Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic. More than that, I’ve had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much less philosophical than my recent chats with Gpt.

I should add, of course, that I’ve also had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much more philosophical than my chats with Gpt! And with people who aren’t professional philosophers. I’ll also acknowledge that, of course, Gpt still makes mistakes. We all know it hallucinates (or ‘confabulates’, as Anil Seth makes a case for renaming it, in this recent paper I enjoyed reading). And there’s no way I’d trust Gpt for important exegetical purposes. But I wouldn’t trust human-written secondary literature for that, either. If you want to be sure what some particular philosopher wrote in some particular text, then go and read it!

What is it like to do a literature PhD?

I thought that, by the end of a PhD program, I would be “well-read”—which is to say that I’d have a solid grasp of world history, would have read plenty of the Great Books, and would have pretty well-defined philosophical and political positions. But PhDs, especially the last few years, focus more on developing deep expertise on a pretty narrow field. Even in a PhD program, being well-read in the way that I imagined has been at least partially a personal project, a hobby, rather than an integral part of my institutional education.

I admire the honesty of this piece.

Rating Austen’s men

I’ve never seen anything like this before and I love it.

Each single man is evaluated on each of the four primary status dimensions of FORTUNE, MORALS, MANNERS, and FUCKABILITY using a whole-number score of 1 to 6, one being low and six high, based on textual analysis by yours truly.

The six-point scale both allows for sufficient differentiation across Austen’s six novels and forces non-neutrality.

American Fantasy?

And the goal would be straightforward: Dethrone that precious Harry Potter and all his twee tea-sipping chums, free American kids from the tyranny of the British boarding school system (did we lose a war?) and give them a magical country that matches the scope and scale and impossibly wide horizons of their own.

Working in an Art Gallery

I’m no longer sure I was naive. It was, at the gallery at least, very easy to do much (~3x) better than baseline. For example: when I first came on the board, they would talk about the “three legs” of the gallery: fundraising, workshops, and sales (café, shop, tickets). But when I sneaked away to look at the numbers, two of these “sources of income” were actually cost centers: fundraising and workshops cost us more than we earned.² No one had looked at our bookkeeping to figure out how we earned our income! Also, they hadn’t factored in building maintenance costs, and when you did that it was clear that the current strategy would bankrupt us in 2-3 years.

Heartbreaking. A must-read.

Bach’s genius is ours because it demands to be reified by us. At its summit in the Chaconne, his work intimately connects us to one another, in each of our particular variations of love and loss, triumph and sorrow, confusion and uncertain resolution.

Bach whispers to us from deep in the past: “It also happened to me.”

The Chaconne also works marvellously on the piano. I favour the Hélène Grimaud version. This music is always moving, but it is all the more so after reading ’s piece. My thoughts are with Evan and his family.

(The other music writer I like on Substack is . She’s also a great composer.)

Crime novels

(yes, the, Susan Hill) recommends some crime writers. And here is my earlier list. Good stuff for this time of year.

Sociology of literature?

So many articles have been written about genius and scenius and all that jazz. None of them compares to this excellent discussion of Randall Collins’ A Sociology of Philosophies, by . Werlin offers an apt summary of the argument,

According to Collins, intellectual life, at its core, is conversation. No matter how solitary we think we are when we arrive at our ideas in the quiet of a monastic cell or the privacy of a study, we inevitably reproduce, reply, and react to the words of others. Language is social; so are its mental echoes, thought. In the case of philosophy, it’s not just any kind of conversation: it’s argument. Conflict, not agreement, propels ideas forward.

and a summary of what makes the book so worthwhile,

The human social world, where real conversations happen, blends seamlessly into the abstract world of philosophical argument without doing injustice to the complexity, abstraction, and autonomy of the life of the mind. It’s a sociology of intellectual life that doesn’t feel reductive.

I read A Sociology of Philosophies as part of my research for Second Act, and am intrigued by Werlin’s new project.

I’m in the early stages of thinking through a project on literary generations, in which I want to reflect precisely on the relationship between personal connections and literary change.

I based my section on literary groupings on Collaborative Circles, a splendid sociology of how groups of writers and artists begin by encouraging each other, forming new ideas and methods, before succumbing to the pressures of their group and departing to pursue their new originality. What I like about Werlin’s approach is that she makes the common reader central to the development of literature.

… there’s also something of the kind happening on Substack. There may not be another Voltaire or Diderot on here just yet. But I think we are seeing genuinely new modes of writing emerge among poets and fiction writers who are composing their posts largely for networks of others on the platform. It’s a model where there are few, or no, passive and silent lay audiences.

Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.

Knowledge and Jargon

James Marriott has been on a roll recently. First, he wrote this splendid column about the shallowness of social-media auto-didacticism.

But true curiosity is serious, not idle, and proper knowledge is almost always hard won. The real spirit of the autodidact is one of awed humility: other people know much more than me; catching up is going to be hard work.

It often strikes me that a revival of the autodidact tradition might offer a better answer to the much-discussed modern ailments of meaninglessness and lack of purpose than the gym routines, vitamin supplements and meditation schedules proposed by the gurus and hucksters of social media. After religion and family (increasingly rare consolations in our atomised, secular society), education must be one of the best available paths to fulfilment.

I think James under-rates the internet as a means of distribution and as a facilitator of networks. And people were plenty shallow enough in the nineties of my childhood. But there has undoubtedly been a diminishment of serious reading among elites, professionals, and the well-educated.

A serious society cannot tolerate for very long the idea that those who win the prizes of status and position and money do not in fact practise the life of the mind. So much of the Times is currently given over to the sort of self-help that might be better termed self-justification. I’m always pleased to see James arguing for the serious in a serious way.

This week, he follow-up with an assault on jargon.

And a command of jargon means that on finishing your expensive degree you have something concrete to show for your effort. You don’t need a BA to have an insight into George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But an easy way with words like “problematic” and “performative” is indisputable proof of one’s membership of the 21st century’s knowledge elite: the modern equivalent of knowing how to fence or how to dance a graceful quadrille.

I am less sceptical of jargon: precise terminology makes it easier for professionals to communicate, and often sounds like nonsense to the outsider. But there certainly is a lot of cant in modern life. James is really arguing against that. We should all remember Johnson’s injunction every day. Clear your mind of cant! Not talking in corporate cant requires a persistent effort. And, in my experience, you will be rewarded, about half the time by someone translating what you said into the usual cant, as if they were the same.

Ours, indeed, is an age of jargon. As has often been noted, the language of the boardroom is now almost as impenetrable as that of the high table. Business is a world of “key deliverables”, “actionable items” and “cross-silo leadership”. Even morality is now cast in jargon terms: “oppression”, “privilege”, “appropriation”, “intersectionality”. The proliferation of esoteric language is not difficult to explain. To a credential-obsessed and highly educated population the use of jargon words is a natural way to signal one’s status. And in an anxious and competitive economy, raising the linguistic barriers of entry to one’s profession or social class is a useful way to keep out the competition.

All of these words have some valid meaning, of course, but James is right that they are too often used as substitutes for thought, rather than expressions of it. And this,

You will have noticed that the less effective government becomes, the more abundantly it generates pointless language.

Here is my interview with James. And here he is talking to .

And here is writing about “verbs against the machine”.

If the dominant pattern in a certain genre of text — maddening business consultant memos, say — involves the liberal deliberate use of evasive nominalizations, LLMs would generate similar nominalizations as pattern transformations. What incentive is there for an LLM to generate more direct, active language? To use verbs?

Why the novel matters

Not only is this entirely written to the existing audience of novel readers in order to make them feel better about their relative status in society, it makes no real arguments. Sentences like this “The novel matters because it does not have to be clear or obscure” do not in fact mean very much. This clever-waffle continues throughout.

To speak in the language of AI, the novel has supreme coding capabilities. When I start writing a novel, I discover there is no such thing as freedom and it does have rules, even if the writer is making them up.

Is that the language of AI? Is this supposed to equate the novel with the LLM or the novelist? What does freedom mean if it doesn’t mean freedom to make up the rules? The whole thing is so personal that it makes very little actual case for fiction: “A novel matters when I am seduced by its language.” Levy quotes Murdoch without discussing the Platonic implications. The vague sense of mystery is enough, it seems. There is much that could be said on these issues, but it was not said here.

Beyond the usual argument that novels put us imaginatively in the place of others, nothing is really added. “The novels that travel with us for a lifetime endure because they have imagined something that is truthful and real.” Try saying that to someone who doesn’t read novels and see how far you get! If we honestly believe that it is necessary and important for non-readers to become readers, we can surely do better than this. How interested are we really in talking to those who find us obscure and irrelevant?

It is hard, frankly, to persuasively argue that the novel matters as much today as it ever did. Look around! And yet, Levy quotes no-one from before the modernist movement. A few names are mentioned, but the ideas and authors are all modern, all part of a particular political perspective. Little wonder this was a speech at the Southbank reprinted in the New Statesman.

Lord, help me see life through the perspective of others, just not anyone who holds the wrong political views or doesn’t already admire Gertrude Stein.

Literary Men

A similar piece was published in the New York Times at the same time. Is it something about advent that I don’t understand? This is a masterclass in how studying literature doesn’t just not teach you critical thinking, but in fact can train you in the art of reasoning without logic.

In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.

Surely? Surely? And the solution to this?

The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

This just isn’t serious. At some point, if the literary establishment wants to be taken seriously by people who don’t understand them, they need to stop being so myopic and learn from their opponents. This is quite easily one of the worst-reasoned op-eds I have seen for some time. If you want young men to read literature, you do not start with The Handmaid’s Tale. Are we allowed to give them Atlas Shrugged or The Lord of the Rings? Ah, there we reach the hard question: do we want readers, or do we want readers of a particular politics?

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Coriolanus

I am delighted to have written about Coriolanus for the journal Liberties, edited by . The essay discusses how everyone in the play has a hand in the bloody tragedy.

one of the lessons of Coriolanus is that our own passions, our own feelings, are part of the way the polity works. We cannot only blame our leaders, just as our leaders cannot excuse themselves with speeches about how they are not the authors of themselves. The determinism of Coriolanus’ tragedy runs deep — it comes out of his childhood and is rooted in the behavior of the populace.

I also discuss the play’s debate between authoritarianism and populism, including a discussion of Shakespeare as a grain hoarder.

Hazlitt thought that Coriolanus was a play in favor of authority because it gave all the most memorable lines to the tyrant himself — all of Shakespeare’s poetic power was invested in his cruelest character. And there’s some truth to this: Shakespeare is not kind to the mob. In Plutarch’s account of these events, the people are described as battle-scarred, but Shakespeare tells us they were of no use in battle. Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself.

Do read the whole thing.

How bad is literary theory?

I get it. I hated critical theory when I first encountered it because it was so boring and badly written. It uses impenetrable, clinical, technocratic jargon that takes forever to decode and understand. I figured that theorists used this jargon to conceal the fact that they weren’t saying anything at all. They were bullshit artists. As a first-generation student who was insecure and self-conscious about my own intellectual capacities, it felt satisfying to dismiss these pretentious snobs. The reason I couldn’t understand them wasn’t because I wasn’t smart or well-read enough. There was something wrong with them.

A persuasive argument in favour of reading literary theory, with some good discussion about the breadth of the term. I am “against” Literary Theory, but not literary theories. Literary Theory is Foucault and Derrida and post-structuralism and New Historicism and Terry Eagleton and all that jazz. Whereas literary theories are merely that: theories based on literature, such as were produced by Northrop Frye. The latter is good honest criticism, while the former is often self-referential and unliterary. I generalise and many good Theorists work alongside many uninspiring “traditionalists”. But we need to generalise to make some headway with this vexed topic.

The problems of New Historicism, for example, are that it took the Theory of Foucault as a starting point, rather than literature, and worked up an inconsistent set of ideas that were not very much about literature. D.G. Myers wrote,

We can yield the point that Elizabethan culture was patriarchal, or that those who serve ruling minorities desire secretly to see them toppled, and still go on to deny that A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Dürer’s sketch contain these meanings. If it is not self-contradictory for us to do this—if we can simultaneously grant an assumption and reject its interpretive significance—it follows that any interpretation grounded upon an unproven assumption about a work’s historical context is trifling, if not untenable. Only if a reader of a New Historicist argument is prepared to accept its a priori assumptions can its conclusions be accepted as true to history.

So much Literary Theory is like this: grounded on a set of ideas that all have to be assumed, but still highly declarative about what literature is and is not (usually, in the case of New Historicists, a means of discovering an ideology and little else). And the ideologies being discovered at work in the texts are always modern leftist bien pensant thinking. Once you declare that texts can hold many interpretative meanings, there’s very little internal contradiction involved in this, but it forgets common sense. There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature, as Samuel Johnson said. Or there ought to be.

If you want the rest of my thoughts about this vexed debate, along with the rest of the links, take advantage of the special offer and get 25% off.

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This paragraph from Stefan Collini’s review of John Guillroy sums up one of the positions that is most important.

Guillory wants quietly to remind English scholars—his characteristic tone is quiet, even though the effect of his writing is both conclusive and devastating—of the value of their basic activity: that of extending knowledge and understanding of English literature. ‘The study of literature is a rational procedure for what can be known about an object’ (the literary work). This is a cognitive enterprise, and it centres on the study of writing that is ‘sufficiently wrought’ for the writing itself to be of interest. Put in that simple way, this may seem to beg all the important questions, yet it also points to an intellectual achievement that should not be disregarded. This doesn’t settle anything, for, as we know, justification is a never-ending game—‘Yes, but why is that important?’—but exaggerating the political consequences of what we do does not terminate that endless chain of questions and answers any better than any other claim.

The literary theories of people like Northrop Frye should not, to my mind, be counted as the same sort of enterprise as this sort of thinking. Nuttall’s distinction between opaque and transparent critics continues to haunt me. Literature works when you believe in it, and when you don’t it drops out from beneath you. Many practitioners of Literary Theory still do believe in literature, but man are more interested in their Theory. None of this is absolute, nor is this subject of huge interest to me, to say the least. But it is important. The true criticism must begin with the text and must resist the wholesale imposition of second-hand philosophies onto the methods of reading.

Christopher Rick is one of the best anti-Theory writers, and he inevitably draws on Johnson, the greatest of the untheorists, and the hero of this little blog of mine,

‘The task of criticism’ was, for Johnson, to ‘establish principles’, and he everywhere made clear that his refusal to elaborate and concatenate the needed concepts beyond a certain point (a point reached early) was not a refusal to continue to think, but a decision to think thereafter about the application of the principles rather than to elaborate principle into theory.

And this,

A fully-fledged theory is a philosophy; a fully-compacted principle is a proverb. Theory is hostile to contradictions; proverbs admit contradictions, and leave us only (only!) to decide which of two contradictory proverbs applies on any particular occasion. Principles, like proverbs, suppose that difficulties are more worth our attention than are problems; theory, like philosophy, is sure that once you have said, ‘What you must do is to admit that a problem exists,’ then what you must do is attend to the problem.

I suspect this subject is contentious mostly because of the way undergraduate degrees are taught. Literary Theory is often rather unliterary. It results, often, in a way of thinking that has much to say about philosophical and political ideas, but has already bound itself to a set of conclusions or methods, usually Marxist and the like, so that you get neither history nor literature in the common-sense understanding. An awful lot of the people you see talking about “late-stage capitalism” and the Problems of Modernity learned it all on literature courses, not on the courses where you begin with Plato. (Nor have they studied much economics!) And so what looks like a disagreement about literary subjects is in fact a disagreement about the ideas we are teaching to our children, hence the hot collars.

The literary disagreement, beyond the points I made above, are mainly that Theorists undermine the canon. I don’t care if people dedicate their lives to Derrida, or whoever, but I damn well do care if they go around calling Shakespeare a cultural artefact and denying his aesthetic power in the name of explicating ideologies. This was the Harold Bloom angle, and he became such a prominent figure in the culture wars because the diminishment of Shakespeare is a serious cultural affront for the nations of the English-speaking world. It amazes me that Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton became so prominent and praised as they did.

We can only afford to be so careless with our civilization. Too many Theorists too often neglected that point, whereas civilization often sits at the heart of the Frye-type theorist’s work.

One reason this debate carries on is that the anti-Theory people often make terrible arguments and defend the unTheoretical approach to literature by talking about “the human condition”, which is an utterly vapid phrase, and, ironically, reduces literature to a mono-purpose enterprise. Stuck for an answer about what this book is about? Ah, the human condition! Phew.

If you believe in a Johnsonian criticism of applied principles, you not only need decent principles (i.e. not just “the human condition”), but you should actually get on and apply them…

To present an authentic alternative to Theory we need to be able to discover what Theory is good for, and provide an alternative (preferably synthetic) practice: we need to extend the tradition of Johnson and Ricks. The challenge is to have done enough reading, to be adept enough at improving opinion into knowledge, to be able to make literature seem worthy not because of this disagreement, but for its own sake, as a central part of the intellectual and emotional life of civilization.

I intend to carry on reading some of those works classed as “Theory” at least the ones I can manage, and which don’t go full Catherine Belsey. Wherever a better understanding of literature can be found, we should be eager to inquire.

Literary fiction is bad

Most writers understand that although there are a few tricks you can use to create the impression that you’re extremely talented, these tricks should be used sparingly. Most writers aim for the minimum possible amount of manipulation—just enough to get published, and then no more. And most writers attempt over time to dial down their manipulation. And that is precisely why most writers are not successes.

The great failing of most mediocre fiction (or indeed of any sort of writing) results from the author not realising that style always has a moral purpose. This can sometimes confound the intellectual aesthetes, who don’t realise that style for its own sake can be either serious and sublime, or merely vapid. The more closely you look at Martin Amis’s prose, the more you realise that he is closer to P.G. Wodehouse than Vladimir Nabokov. His style is its own moral purpose, not in the highest aesthetic sense, but because he wants to make clever jokes. Johnson asked what Swift contributed to style, but he missed the fact that Swift’s plain style was well suited to his moral purpose, which was to be a hypocrite reversed. Rooney’s critics often decline to think of her work in these terms, for example. is surely right that modern criticism has often preferred moral ambiguity to clarity, and that is perhaps the source of this confused idea among certain novelists that style merely as style is all that matters, which itself is merely a debased version of the Keatsian-Wildean proposition.

The utility of literature

This is a subject close to my heart and I am a fan of so I was very pleased to see her writing about this. Preach it!

However, if we often neglect the beauty of maths, we can also be guilty of the opposite error: neglecting the utility of literature. I hear stories of smart, motivated and hard working graduates who turn up in prestigious graduate roles and say why do I need to read? Can't I get everything I need from podcasts and videos? In a purely utilitarian sense, no. Podcasts and videos are less efficient methods of transmitting information. Just as a useful equation is also beautiful, a beautiful sentence is also useful in the way it can efficiently transmit information across time and space. This communication function of reading and writing is well understood. But there is also another function of literacy which is equally important, but perhaps less well understood, which is the ability of literacy to extend thought.  Even if you never write for an external audience, writing allows you to extend your own thoughts beyond the limitation of puny working memory.  This is one the reasons literate societies are bigger and more complex than pre-literate societies. It is also a reason why we cannot rely on artificial intelligence to do the writing for us, because to outsource our writing is to outsource our thinking.

Real-life fairy tales?

In 1796, Philipp, only forty-four years old, succumbed to pneumonia. Jacob later recalled seeing his father’s body being measured for a coffin. Dorothea and her children were ordered to clear out. Without Philipp’s income, they were forced for a time to shelter in an almshouse just next door—cursed with a view of their former home and the courtyard where they once played, happily, until what came after.

Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, experienced the kind of sharp reversal of fortune characteristic of the genre that became synonymous with their name: the fairy tale.

That’s from the New Yorker review of the new biography. Also this,

For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep. She cites a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the big bad wolf has designs on the little girl that are not gastronomical. In that version, she does what amounts to a striptease, peeling off her clothes as the disguised wolf watches from the bed, giving fresher context to “What big hands you have!”

Shelves for rent in bookstores

“Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don’t sell well,” says Imamura, who also writes novels about warring samurai in Japan’s feudal era.

“We ignore such principles. Or capitalism in other words,” he says. “I want to reconstruct bookstores.”

What do these people think capitalism is?

Public humanities

Devoney Looser on Twitter: “A new open-access journal, Public Humanities, has launched. I'm proud to have a piece in the inaugural "Manifesto" issue, on "The Necessity of Public Writing." I hope academo-friends will read, circulate, propose, and submit.” Looser’s piece is excellent, and there’s an excerpt below, but why not publish it on Substack? (Any academics who want to write for a public audience, get in touch. I have hosted essays by scholars before and am very happy to do so again.)

Not every attempt will be a success. It’s important to acknowledge that public writing sometimes ends up feeling like it was wasted time, without positive, visible, or measurable results. I’ve certainly produced public-facing writing that appeared to fall entirely flat, failing to connect with people or groups I hoped might care. (Of course, scholarly articles may land with a greater thud, with one study showing 75% of essays in literature and literary theory failed to be cited even once in the 5 years after their publication.Footnote ⁶) Some of us have the good fortune to work on material with robust popular audiences, hungry for new information based on original research. But even if you’re working on a subject about which you think, “It’s too specialized for non-academic audiences to care,” I encourage you to reimagine that take.

Looser of course did the recent work about Jane Austen’s abolitionist brothers, which was excellent both as scholarship and as public humanities. Looser has a forthcoming book about Austen, too, which looks very promising.

Fictional therapy

This isn’t how I read literature, but it may be how you read it.

Death of the novel?

A review of a new history of the twentieth century novel.

Stranger than Fiction has a global scope if a largely European focus. Machado de Assis, of Brazil, and Natsume Soseki, of Japan, emerge as two of Frank’s most intriguing subjects, self-consciously plowing new tracks for the novel under the awareness that they are far from its zone of genesis. The book, which concludes with readings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, displays little interest in the form’s present or future. Frank mentions a classical-music critic who told him that “in the last 30 years or so there had been to his ear no significant developments in the music, something unheard of in all its earlier history. The same could be said of the novel.”

I’m not so pessimistic, but perhaps I’m more of a partisan of Donald Antrim, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett, Sheila Heti, and Atticus Lish than Frank is, to name only Americans. Or J. M. Coetzee, Gerald Murnane, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to betray our country. I don’t think any of these writers could be said to be practitioners of judicious realism in the 19th-century mode. Then again, maybe they’re all 18th-century revenants—latter-day acolytes of Fielding and Sterne—and I’m fooling myself that they’ve done anything new.

Christian Lorentzen is surely right. I haven’t read all of those authors, but if Helen deWitt didn’t do anything new in the novel, who ever did? It might feel like right now we are stuck with some good novels but nothing entirely new or indeed just with mediocre literary fiction, but not every decade is the 1850s. And Helen deWitt has a new novel coming in the new year…

Science and Poetry

I would have enjoyed and agreed with this essay even if it didn’t quote judiciously from Samuel Johnson.

If Haldane is right, we lack a “modern synthesis” of science and poetry because of a weakness in modern poets. And although I’ll refrain from endorsing Haldane’s accusation straight out, it has, I think, some truth to it. There does seem to be a quality of exceeding complication and abstraction to the science of the last century, compared to what came before. Maybe technology has grown so dramatically complex that fewer modern artists are able to perform their ancient roles— that of renovating our inner worlds to accommodate the material change around us.

I have my own answers to these questions, but I am hoping to work them up into a chapter of my book, so I shall keep them to myself for now… But the question of why we don’t have a Milton for the space age or an epic of the internet remains a large and often ignored one.

Austen’s Sisters

If you are a character of importance in a Jane Austen novel, your mother is likely either dead (Emma, Persuasion) or incredibly socially embarrassing (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park). The sibling relationship is a much likelier field for displays of growth, affection, and fidelity.

This is a really excellent assessment of Austen’s heroines.

No heroine finds a friend in her parents. The intelligent ones are indifferent, the kind ones are unreliable, the rest are scarcely worth ignoring. It is only in her siblings that she can look for anything like real companionship, equality of terms, and unrestrained affection

AI and art

The 1278 people who said they utterly loathed AI art (score of 1 on a 1-5 Likert scale) still preferred AI paintings to humans when they didn't know which were which (the #1 and #2 paintings most often selected as their favorite were still AI, as were 50% of their top ten).

Pretty striking results… the same thing happens with poetry too.

In response to a reductive (but admirably enthusiastic) essay arguing that literature is apolitical (it was all over Substance but now I cannot find it) John Halbrooks responded by saying that literature very much is political. And that it can guide your vote in the upcoming US Presidential election…

Yes, obviously, literature is political. But, no, that doesn’t mean it has very much to do with election politics. Let’s put aside the fact that the original essay was more an objection to Literary Theory than politics per se… Halbrooks is wrong.

I hesitate to link to this essay because it is badly argued, but it is a useful demonstration of the way that so much of what so many literary people say is just politics—common-or-garden, same-as-the-man-on-the-bus, unphilosophical, newspaper-level politics—but wearing fancy clothes.

I can add this: careful, empathetic readings of the majority of our most accomplished writers will lead one to principles that will align with democratic (small “d”) values and that will reject fascism and oligarchy. And this year, that means that there is only one option on the ballot.

I’m not allowed to say this in a classroom setting, and I don’t. I let the texts speak for themselves. But I can write it here. And what’s more, I'll give you some examples. In the run up to the election, I will survey a few of my favorite writers in this way. While I generally don't like to reduce literary texts to a “message” (after all, what makes literature important is its ability to capture complexity and nuance), we can certainly discern overarching values in many cases.

I hope he gets round to explaining how reading Milton means we should vote centre-left in modern elections. (Remind me, who do I vote for if I favour Cromwell and the Army? How about putting Ireland to the sword?) What about Burke, Carlyle, and Austen? (Austen, though, is confusing, to be fair: she was pretty conservative but also seems to have been an abolitionist. Talking about splitting the ballot!) Tell me again what it is I should be inferring from Coriolanus and The Taming of the Shrew? And presumably we are not going to be reading Spenser? (Or is Kamala the new Fairy Queen?) Remember kids, it’s ok to read Jane Eyre and become a feminist, just so long as you become a low-Church Anglican feminist who admires St. John… And whatever you do, be careful reading Patricia Highsmith and Agatha Christie!

How far can we take this? If I read Donne and Herbert with “careful empathy”, will I become a good Anglican? How about Johnson? Maybe we shouldn’t let the young read William Morris and John Ruskin. Don’t want them getting the wrong ideas and voting for Bernie! Does reading Dickens make us sexist? Should we ban Walter Scott? What are we to make of the Bloomsbury group?

It’s easy to agree that reading eighteenth and nineteenth century feminists is an exercise in learning feminism, but such crass generalisations about literature should not be indulged in by professors in public.

Oliver Sacks was a late bloomer!

The popular conception of Oliver’s career as both a neurologist and a writer was one of tremendous success from the start. But this was not the case. Oliver was 52 when his fourth book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” became a wholly unexpected best seller in 1986. In his 20s, 30s and 40s, his life and career had been not only unorthodox, but by many means, a disaster.

Both compulsive and impulsive, driven by self-destructive behavior (especially in his yearslong addiction to amphetamines, and what Oliver himself called periods of intense “mania”), he moved from job to job — twice getting fired — searching to find his way as a neurologist, as a writer and as a closeted gay man. While he had published three books before “Hat,” none had been markedly successful. Even his best-known book from that period, “Awakenings” (1973), didn’t sell well at the time — that wouldn’t change until the film adaptation in 1990 — and was largely ignored by his neurological colleagues.

Also this.

…ultimately, one might say, Oliver was his own most challenging and important patient.

I very much want to read the new collection of letters.

Proust

I loved every word of this excellent essay about reading Proust in French, written by someone who hardly knew any French when she began. Splendid. Splendid.

Once, as I was reading about Vronsky’s face moving into sunlit gaps and then back into the shade of lindens while he walked with Dolly in Anna Karenina, water splashed lightly on the pages. Only when I reached up to touch my face did I realize I was the source of the water. It wasn’t that something sad was happening, not at all (Nabokov would, I think, say it’s simply evidence of the maestro’s inimitable ability to make the passage of lived time match the passage of the novel). It was more that I didn’t have full control over my body, or I had given that control away. Once you have given yourself over, all of reading Proust is a bit like that; I once dreamed Swann’s dream, the one that closes out Swann in Love, and I know it was my brain attempting to give me his correlating conclusion — all that for a woman who wasn’t even my type! Has a book ever completely ruined your life, I thought, and then wrote, once I understood that even my dreams weren’t my own. But ruined in the way that a young coed is ruined by a semester abroad, as she sees everyone around her taking naps at 4 p.m. and thinks I can’t go back.

Book Boom in South Korea

Short video.

Clutter

Marie Kondo was wrong. Some wonderful pictures in this piece.

In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.

Honor Levy

This is a very good description (from ) of the typical sort of thing that makes My First Book an example of discourse fiction. (I wrote about Levy here.)

The buzziest stories here dramatize web relationships, the gulfs between flesh-and-blood demography and pixelated avatars. But in My First Book, as on the internet, everyone — the charismatic misogynists in “Good Boys,” the Rogan-pilled bodybuilders in “Love Story” and “Brief Interview with Beautiful Boy” — is a Type of Guy. Levy’s characters inhabit Instagram, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok with varying degrees of anonymity, bored in their dorm rooms and childhood homes. There’s no subculture or tribal knowledge: Levy’s internet is a Zuckerbergian monolith, where everyone acts in familiar, foreseeable ways. Nudes are requested and delivered, memes are based, activism is cringe. Levy may as well be rattling off the names of network television shows.

He also wrote a splendid piece about Lauren Oyler (another Twitter addict disguised as a writer): “I dont care if Oyler’s a snob, but snobbery is earned! No Judgment is an apropos title: she never defends anything on its merits.”

Izaac Watts and Psalms

Do yourself a favour and read this essay. This is what literary criticism looks like!

There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs — scholars have analysed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more ‘gendered’ than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.

Even if you don’t know the name Izaac Watts, you know his work. He wrote the hymn O God Our Help In Ages Past. He was also a very good self-help writer, which I wrote about in my review of David Brooks’ most recent book.

Novelist earnings

Author’s median earnings have dropped to 7k and people are upset. I see very little discussion about why their books aren’t selling and quite a lot about “market concentration” or how these people are talented and win prizes. (Maybe the prizes don’t mean very much?)

If you believe in the labour theory of value you’ll find it easy to say “writers should be paid for their work”. But that theory of value is untrue. Sorry! The world is what it is! Some consideration for the readers, the consumers, the people from whom the money is taken, might be nice?

It’s been a standard part of economics for a century that markets like this are a long tail distribution. Writers have always struggled to make money, a few have always taken the prize.

Publishing mostly isn’t about fiction. It’s about cooking, sports, religion, and other such things. The idea that more independent presses will change this situation is ludicrous. Authors used to be treated much worse in the days of small presses. Go and read about Beryl Bainbridge. Hell, read about Keats and Shelley.

In the age of Amazon, it’s much easier than it ever was to publish without the Big 4. And bookshops were going out of business before the internet in the wake of both Barnes & Noble and the non-bookstore retailers like supermarkets.

But every year millions of books are published. Go into any bookshop and you’ll find more good books than you could want—be that in old, new, translated, niche, or something else. Go to Amazon and you can multiply that by many orders! If what you care about is readers and books, then things are just fine. If what you care about is large earnings for all novelists in this age of abundance, then… you have some maths to do.

What should be more obvious to the people demanding more money is that you simply cannot pay each author “for their labour” and publish all of those books. It’s a fast-changing, complex, and competitive business. In June 2023, HarperCollins reported a 10% drop in sales and a 45% drop in profits. How much extra money would you spend on unpromising fiction authors if your profits nearly halved one year? People go out of business really easily in this industry.

This is from the Oxford Handbook of Publishing,

Very few industries release such a torrent of new products annually. This means that authors and editors experience dual-sided uncertainty since neither know in advance with any certainty, except for a relatively small cluster of about a dozen bestselling authors (e.g. Mary Higgins Clark; Dan Brown), if a book will be successful in the marketplace of ideas. The proliferation of new titles also poses a sizeable economic challenge because of the complex nature of the book publishing, book buying, and book reading ecosystem. Complexity in the marketplace has been analysed by Gokce Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath, who wrote that ‘complex organizations are far more difficulty to manage than merely complicated ones. It’s harder to predict what will happen, because complex systems interact in unexpected ways. … It’s harder to place bets, because the past behavior of a complex system may not predict its future behavior.’

I have seen people gesturing to the large revenue numbers of publishing companies and saying “see, they could pay”, with no consideration for how the business actually works, the fact that incentives matter, or the reality of profits being the means by which so many books are published.

Status in fiction

Austen understood status—ahem, station; that its shoring up is hardly superficial. The intrigue of the marriage plot springs not just from uncertain affection—“will they fuck”—but the balance of such possibilities with a complex and often competing set of considerations. Status questions, basically, though to the standard socioeconomic strains I would add, particularly in Austen’s case, that of moral status. Alas, fuckability is a kind of status, too.

As a consultant (sorry), I can’t help but envision all of Austen’s single men plotted in a multi-dimensional status model based on fortune, morals, manners, and fuckability with carefully calibrated weights; the heroines judged on the basis of their strategic analyses. “I'm sure some of you might say strategy is immoral” (Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts), but can this be true when Austen weighs moral status so highly? And then Robert Sapolsky makes a pretty compelling case against free will itself—that we’re “biological machines,” our feelings of feelings “a confusing, recursive challenge.”

This is interesting, well-informed, and well-argued, and it is a good thing for novelists to have such theories.

In case you missed it, here is my review of the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo.

Visionary madness

Ted Gioia’s piece about muses, madness, and visionary artists reminded me of my favourite passage in Frye on Shakespeare,

Perhaps Lear’s madness is what our sanity would be if it weren’t under such heavy sedation all the time, if our senses or nerves or whatever didn’t keep filtering out experiences or emotions that would threaten our stability. It’s a dangerous business to enter the world of titans and heroes and gods, but safer if we have as a guide a poet who speaks their language.

Godless fiction

The New Statesman’s review of Intermezzo is another fine instance of the philistine supremacy being in good working order. The people in charge aren’t taking literature seriously enough.

I don’t know whether Rooney believes in God – but Intermezzo certainly seems to.

In artistic terms, this is a problem. Why? As the critic Ian Watt argued in his influential 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel, the novel was incubated in the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which shifted the balance of moral responsibility from the Church towards the individual’s conscience. Novels only make sense in a world of ethical autonomy in which characters are free to make consequential choices and readers to judge them for it (“NOOO, Charlotte, don’t marry repulsive Mr Collins!”). A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one.

Consider the spiritual career of George Eliot…

Yes, yes Charlotte and Mr. Collins. What about Fanny Price marrying a clergyman? Considering George Eliot would be a good idea. Why don’t we start with Adam Bede? And then we could consider Jane Eyre (“for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing”!!), The Scarlet Letter, Stowe, Tolstoy, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead, for God’s sake, a novel about “the operation of divine grace”!), C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Gilead, Piranesi… the list is too long.

Is it too much to expect that critics know about determinism in the post-Darwinian novel (Thomas Hardy!), Methodism, the Reformation, the question of free will in Milton, and so on? (I made him just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.) The sentence “A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one” is not just myopic but absurd.

It’s just not serious to publish reviews like this; it perpetuates an unliterary attitude to criticism.

Modernism’s cultural drift

…the “modernism” cultural movement was full of folks who felt united by a feeling that they couldn’t trust their prior inherited culture, and needed to search for replacements. They succeeded at achieving artistic creativity and innovation, and high status, but not so much at finding trustworthy cultural replacements.

I told Robin Hanson that I think this is not really true and he responded like this: “Rejecting the previous generation’s culture has been a normal artistic practice since then, but was not the usual practice before then.” I am interested in his “cultural drift” thesis, but the idea that modernism was a rejection of previous norms in the way that, say, Romanticism, wasn’t, seems way off to me. Robin doesn’t see that those changes are also about “norms and status markers” as opposed to what he (incorrectly in my view, and a little glibly) calls “just changing some elements of artistic style.” Were Goethe and Coleridge merely “changing some elements of artistic style”? I say not!

Culture is not stuck

It’s a mistake to dismiss TikTok as the “dancing app” or “digital fentanyl” or a machine for political brainwashing. Yes, it’s true that many viral TikToks aren’t worth their minute-long (or longer, as is now the case) runtime. But there is a lot of innovation on TikTok — particularly with comedy. 

TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital vaudeville: a song, a short sketch, a physical feat, slapstick, animal acts and satire, one after another, in a personalized variety show on your phone.

Katherine Dee writes about how modern internet culture is just fine. I agree with what she writes, but I think her comparison to vaudeville is instructive. The people who are worried about culture are worried about the lack of high culture. Shakespeare and Dickens were both high and mass culture, as were the great directors of classic Hollywood. That is what seems to be lacking today—that and a lack of interest in the culture of the past. Sure the novel will never be as culturally central again as it was in the nineteenth century, but where are our acknowledged great artists of the internet? Culture is fine; art may not be.

Complicated Homer

I am delighted that Emily Wilson has joined Substack. I subscribed immediately. In this piece she goes through the details of why Odysseus is described as a many of “many-turns”, or, in her choice, as a “complicated” man.

Most Homeric characters have a small number of standard epithets, which can fit metrically with the name in different positions in the line.  Achilles is "swift-footed" and "son of Peleus".  Agamemnon is "lord of men" and "son of Atreus".   Odysseus has more formulaic epithets than most, and a great many of his epithets have to do with his multiplicity.  He is a man of "many strategems" (polymechanos), "much wiliness" (polymetis), "much-enduring" (polytlas), "much-smarts" (polyphron).  He's also "city-sacker" (ptoliporthos), an epithet shared with several other warriors, "resplendent/ glorious" (dios), "related to Zeus" (diogenes), "godlike" (theoeides, theoeikelos) and "son of Laertes", and more.

You will learn so much from reading this Substack. And it is doing much better work for modern culture than the next article…

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

You’ve read this sort of thing before. But I just don’t believe that people can’t read books anymore. The problem is that they won’t. After all, the so-called decline of the humanities means the rise of something else—something that involves reading. Obviously college students turn up having read a lot less these days, but there is a giveaway paragraph in this piece which gets at the real issue.

Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

I want people to read the classics, and I advocate for such. But the perspective of this piece just isn’t right. The worst part is the closing paragraph, which is about the Percy Jackson series, a set of children’s books that recombines various elements of Greek myths into adventure stories.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If leading publications cannot make a better case for literature than this then no wonder young people are going elsewhere! No, Percy Jackson is not a preparation for a college course. Get real! My eight year old reads those books. No, spinning adventures is not the purpose of Greek myth! No, we do not read The Iliad so that all we have to say about it afterwards is that we “understand the human condition.” Is Homer worth such small, banal cliches?

The Iliad stood in relation to Ancient Greece—one of the peaks of human civilisation—in something like the manner that the Bible stood to the Christian civilisation of the Renaissance and the age of Shakespeare. How pathetic that we are more interested in pretending young people can’t read than in telling them how important Homer is. Homer was the source of the great tragedies of Athens. The poet of whom Samuel Johnson said every other poet tried to surpass and failed. He is the great writer of the pity and the terror of war, of the conflict of pride and ambition, of the sorrows of age and the merciless command that status has on great men. The Iliad is one of the most gripping stories ever told. It has survived thousands of years because of all of this and more. To reduce that to “understanding the human condition” is to replace the actual worth of Homer with the sort of thing children put in essays that they do not want to write.

For as long as we treat Homer this lightly while telling people that, yes, actually, reading Percy Jackson is good preparation for college(!), then of course we can expect to see very little change in attitudes. Young people are attracted by those who take their work seriously. If the Atlantic truly gave a hoot about the decline of people reading Great Literature that’s what they would do. Instead, we get this.

Good bad writing

This paragraph from Lola Seaton’s review of Megan Nolan,

Knausgaard may have also been a liberating influence on Nolan because he is not known, even among his fans, for the overwhelming splendor of his style: Fredric Jameson described his prose as “undistinguished,” Ben Lerner found it “sloppy,” James Wood noted its “flatness” and “prolixity,” Patricia Lockwood conceded that his sentences “are not always interesting.” Knausgaard himself has said that “there is a lot of bad writing” in the series, much of which he wrote quickly. He is an “extremely fast” reader, too—“good sentences have been wasted on me”—and is more interested in being immersed than impressed. “Admiration is of no use,” he once said in an interview, “and what I want instead is to disappear completely into the work, to lose my sense of the self.” This is how he “read as a kid, disappearing completely into other worlds.” Nolan—or the narrator of Acts of Desperation—identifies: “When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.”

reminded me of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, in her 1924 essay about The Antiquary,

The first charge that is levelled against Scott is that his style is execrable. Every page of the novel, it is true, is watered down with long languid Latin words—peruse, manifest, evince. Old metaphors out of the property box come flapping their dusty wings across the sky. The sea in the heat of a crisis is "the devouring element”. A gull on the same occasion is a "winged denizen of the crag". Taken from their context it is impossible to deny that such expressions sound wrong, though a good case might be made against the snobbery which insists upon preserving class distinctions even among words. But read currently in their places, it is difficult either to notice or to condemn them. As Scott uses them they fulfil their purpose and merge perfectly in their surroundings. Great novelists who are going to fill seventy volumes write after all in pages, not in sentences, and have at their command, and know when to use, a dozen different styles of varying intensities. The genteel pen is a very useful pen in its place. These slips and slovenlinesses serve as relaxations; they give the reader breathing space and air the book. Let us compare Scott the slovenly with Stevenson the precise. “It was as he said: there was not a breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the blackness was like a roof over our heads.” One may search the Waverley Novels in vain for such close writing as this. But if we get from Stevenson a much closer idea of a single object, we get from Scott an incomparably larger impression of the whole.

This is one of the major critical divides, which, in my view is simply a matter of temperament that pretends to be a matter of aesthetic principle. Either you are able to explain and appreciate the Scott/Knausgaard style before you judge it or you are not.

BBC bathos

A very good piece of reviewing from Will Lloyd about the “pure, uncut bathos” of John Sopel’s new book.

Sopel’s arched eyebrow over Trump’s America, especially on the BBC’s Americast podcast, won him many fans in Britain. But did it add to their understanding of what was happening there? His 40-page rehash of the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol building in Strangeland (a book, remember, that is supposed to be about “Britishness”) is telling. He calls it “the most shocking day of my journalistic career”. The day ended with Sopel tweeting a picture of a glass of red wine to tell his followers he was “fine”. 

Meanwhile, ITV’s Washington correspondent Robert Moore, producer Sophie Alexander and camera operator Mark Davey were inside the Capitol — the only Brits who bothered following the rioters into the building. It says a lot about the way journalism works now that the startling, unsettling footage ITV captured probably got as many likes on Twitter as Sopel’s post about wine. 

And this.

Forty years ago, when Sopel was a wee hack at BBC Radio Solent, Britain had writers like VS Naipaul and Martin Amis sending awesome dispatches back from the US. Until recently we had Sopel. That change is a bigger sign of British decline than the ones smugly reheated in Strangeland. 

Towards Zero

Fully agree that Towards Zero is one of Agatha’s best.

Such good news.

Rooney

There are three basic errors in Ann Manov’s TLS review of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. First is not Naomi who wears the lambswool sweater and tortoiseshell hair clip but Sylvia. This seems trivial but there is quite a distinct aesthetic between the two women which relates not only to their socio-economic status and cultural capital but which is a standard method for identifying and distinguishing romantic characters, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream and innumerable other works. Why should Rooney not use this technique?

Second a human rights lawyer would feasibly teach basic EU competition law and contract law. Peter explains that his legal practice includes equality and employment rights but also has a commercial side. From his conversations, he seems to practice judicial review, also. This is quite normal! Look at some profiles of Dublin lawyers and you’ll see human rights listed alongside other disciplines like regulation, employment, personal injury, and so on. Some human rights lawyers are former corporate lawyers. Some combine corporate law and asylum law.

Finally, and most importantly, Ivan is not a “fascist” or “incel” those are outdated misperceptions that other characters have of him. Manov is trying to expose some glaring inconsistencies in the fact that Ivan is described as a “creep” and a loser but is also seen as handsome and has girlfriends. The gross irony here is that Ivan is clearly autistic—or has autistic cognitive traits—and is often misunderstood by the normies around him who think he is “weird”. Manov has failed to read the character and has reacted to him as the normies do. Once you see this, Rooney’s narrative techniques make much more sense as well. Alas, all Manov has to say about that is to make a pointedly lame joke about it being more Yoda than Joyce. (I will be writing about this soon.)

Manov complains that Rooney’s characters make “juvenile confessions of affection” and “it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College.” Ordinary people do make juvenile confessions of affections! Why shouldn’t that come into literary fiction? And what obligation does Rooney have to get beyond literature graduates at Trinity College?

Manov complains about the “generic dirty talk” of the sex scenes without noting that they derive from the amatory fiction in which Sylvia is said to be a specialist (she is a literary academic). Rather than being merely cliched or trite, Rooney is writing in a mode that Manov isn’t interested in. It is perfectly acceptable to dislike that mode, but it is a weak and mean-spirited form of criticism—in theTLS!—to be so dismissive without even noting what it is you are dismissing.

Manov says Intermezzo has the form, but not the content, of a novel of ideas. A neat remark. But in truth all novels are novels of ideas, as Penelope Fitzgerald said. I would prefer to read serious criticism about that.

Is Culture Dying?

I found Olivier Roy’s book The Crisis of Culture vague and unprepossessing but ’s review was quite the opposite. Ian agrees with Roy and summarises him neatly.

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another — say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

I think that rather than de-culturing we are culture-shifting. I was in Oxford when I read Ian’s piece. Plenty of culture there! Try going to Lichfield or Dorset. Indeed, the more un-London the place you visit in the UK, the more you feel like deculturation has been resisted.

Of course, there is so much twee branding that is a pretence at culture (all those unbearable Cotswold tea-shops full of make-believe icons of the good old days of chintz), but you can still find esoteric books in the shops of Oxford, harpists in the shabbily decorated hotel restaurants of Moffat, and so on. The day I spent in Lichfield felt like being in an English culture that refuses to die, with the market, and the cafes, and the community centre in the church. I live in one of the most diverse parts of London and I see culture everywhere around me all the time. Roy is surely right that global technology is rearranging culture, but the idea that it is all being washed away and replaced by political arguments is only half the story. We all used to go to Lyons tea rooms and watch the BBC, now we go to Starbucks and look at our phones. Cultures still exist within and around that. Go to small post-industrial towns in the midlands. “Finely patterned, shared sensibilities” still exist! The Roy thesis needs integrating with the Gurri thesis.

The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.

The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”

The conflict rolls on around the world, undecided, and it’s the elites, it seems to me, who have that frightened, desperate look.

How much deculturation you see, and how much you think it is a totalising force as opposed to a rearrangement depends how normie vs elite you are, I suspect. Ian’s piece is a good example of that. He gets very normie about the monarchy for example which is one example of how Roy’s thesis might be true but is very far from being all of the truth.

Tolstoy and Gary Kemp

One of the best things I have learned recently is that Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet LOVES Tolstoy.

I found Giles talking to Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet about War and Peace next to a set of circular iron library stairs. “I started reading it when I was on tour,” said Gary. “You’ve got a lot of time on your hands on tour.”

“How did you keep up with all the different names for the same characters?” I said. “It did my head in. I gave up after four pages. Anna Karenina was alright but War and Peace? Baffling.”

“Yeah you have to plough on,” said Gary. “There’s a glossary. You can also Wikipedia the first bit just to get you through it. And in the end it’s just about two families. Anna Karenina, though,” Gary went misty-eyed. “What a book.”

I looked up 22 Old Queen Street in Pevsner, to check if I was right about its date, prompted by ’s question in this piece, and was surprised to find it not listed. The street is obviously mostly C18th, late Georgian, on the whole, but some building began around 1700 and No. 24 dates from 1690-1700 (with later restoration) so No. 22 may well be Queen Anne! There are some good anecdotes connected with the house, too.

Whenever there was an important Elgar premiere in London, Frankie gave a lavish dinner party at 22 Old Queen Street. Everyone who was anyone in the arts in London would be there. After the first performance of the Violin Concerto in November 1910, the menu at each of the three tables in the big music-room was headed with a theme from each of the three movements. Boult remembered Elgar saying to Claude Phillips, ‘Well, Claude, did you think that was a work of art?’ But the composer was not always so genial. It was Schuster whose influence at Covent Garden brought about the three-day festival of Elgar’s music at the Royal Opera House in 1904, a unique honour still for an English composer. (He was rewarded with the dedication of In the South, which had its first performance at the festival.) He gave the usual dinner-party, the panels in the music-room decorated with emblems referring to Elgar’s works. After Schuster had proposed Elgar’s health, the guests were surprised to see that the composer made no reply but continued talking to his neighbour as if nothing had happened. But Schuster was unlikely to have been surprised since he was accustomed to his friend’s moody behaviour, which to others appeared as bad manners. He remembered another occasion when he asked a young soprano to sing one of Elgar’s songs. He introduced her to the composer, who said curtly, ‘Well, now you have spoiled my evening for me.’ 

Against re-reading

Oscar Schwartz maintains in The Paris Review that re-reading, rather than being the essence of literary culture (because so much is forgotten, so much recurs as cliche, so much fails to live up to the standards of the past), is a mistake. Contra Nabokov and all respectable opinion, he finds re-reading diminishing, preferring to preserve the intensity of a first reading:

…to this day, when I read something that functions as a hinge in my life—a book that rearranges me internally—I won’t reread it. The Neapolitan Novels I won’t read again. Nor Swann’s Way. Nor 2666.

I am glad to hear that Schwartz has never found himself externally re-arranged by a book, which would be a sort of Borgesian or Kafkian situation that would presumably only be made worse by re-reading.

Schwartz does accept the value of the re-reading, however, he just prefers not to read like this.

As a student, I came to appreciate such granularity. Going over a text many times allowed me to fine-tune my initial intuitive judgments into something more comprehensive. There was an intellectual satisfaction in this, but I also felt, quietly, that rereading was not really reading.

This is what Samuel Johnson thought was the true aim of criticism: to turn opinion into knowledge. But because his essay is personal, not critical, Schwartz is working in the opposite manner, seeking to put aside both the knowledge and the method he has learned in favour of an impulse he first felt, he tells us, when he was ten.

Schwartz cites Barthes saying that re-reading is a form of opposing capitalism’s habits of consumerism but disagrees, referring to his childhood at Orthodox Synagogue, where the Torah was perpetually re-read, to describe re-reading therefore as “reaffirming tradition and safeguarding community.”

At this point, politics is wheeled in to give the audience something reassuring to put in opposition to this idea—conservatives.

Rereading is, when you think about it in another light, a basically conservative pursuit: it is what makes canon formation possible, and canons are what keep the base structure of a tradition or a culture intact. This is why Harold Bloom was a rereading fanatic, and why rereading evangelists are always rereading the classics.

Be a good liberal! Don’t re-read old books!

It is a very large, unjustified assumption that people like Bloom are re-reading fanatics because of pre-existing ideologies. The slip from Torah to Milton is not unreasonable but it is glib. The nature-nurture question of whether the pro-canon people like Bloom re-read because they believe in the canon or believe in the canon because they re-read is not even recognised as a question. Similarly, Schwartz tries to explain children’s re-reading with reference to Freud, as if a century of empirical science had not been conducted on the development of children since then. As for the idea that we re-read books because they are good… please, that would be too simple, and present no opportunities to talk about Barthes and the conservatives.

In response to Vivian Gornick’s description of re-reading D.H. Lawrence over many decades, Schwartz writes,

I find myself wanting to argue that her first interpretations of Sons and Lovers were just as rich and true as the latter ones, and in fact, perhaps by rereading and by all this painstaking reconsideration she has lost access to that specific type of youthful wisdom and intensity we bring to bear when we read something the first time.

This argument defeats itself: of course, if the earlier interpretations are just as rich and true then both must be equally worthwhile. It is not re-reading that loses you access to the “youthful wisdom and intensity” of first reading but time, ageing, entropy, and decay. Schwartz writes as if death was not real, as if trade-offs and opportunity costs were not real.

He ends by saying, “The same fate awaits us all, whether you’ve reread Proust or not”, — but based on his own arguments, it is not the same fate. The approach to death where one has retained the vivid impressions of youth must surely be different to the approach where re-reading has replaced them all with maturer impressions. What is all that “youthful wisdom” actually for?

If re-reading only seems like a weapon against the inevitable, but in truth is not, then surely there is some wise advantage in not re-reading? But no, Schwartz ends with a comfortingly familiar cliche—“the same fate awaits us all”—which is a suitably ironic form of re-reading for his essay to end on.

Whether Schwartz re-read any of the sources he relied on for his essay, or simply quoted them from the vivid impressions of his first readings, he does not say.

What was the New Sincerity?

A very good essay by that is nominally a review of Adam Kelly’s upcoming monograph, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age but which will give you a literary history of the reaction against post-modernism’s interminable deferring of meaning and convolutions of irony (think David Foster Wallace).

I believe that so much of the modern political and economic discussion among literary people is badly informed and irrelevant both to the real political economy of the world and to a full understanding of literature. All that really happened, I submit, is that the absurdism of Becket, Artaud, and others—the absurdism of being trapped in the world—became a very subjective absurdism of being trapped in the deterministic conditions of your life, i.e. the absurdism of complaining about the system and how it affects you, which was “elevated” into a series of philosophical, economic, and political claims that make very little difference to the world beyond the literati. Waiting for Godot became Blaming Late Stage Capitalism. Auto-fiction is the final phase of this literary turn, a warped Wordsworthisn vision that owes more to ideology that life.

This essay, however, is a compelling discussion of other perspectives and elucidates many themes of modern literary culture very well.

Any full account of the New Sincerity will likely have to treat it in three waves. Kelly covers the first, culminating politically with Obama. The second will have to grapple with alt lit, autofiction, and twee, among other minor literary movements associated with Gen X and millennials. A specific current within this second wave departs from Wallace’s “anti-rebel” sensibility and the end-of-history liberalism of the first wave, and as such, it finds its political expression in Occupy, Bernie, and BLM. The third is currently emergent and can be glimpsed in weird, Very Online, bastard terms like hypersincerity and meta-irony. D i a l e c t i c a l l y , it isn’t tied to liberal/left political sensibilities and includes some stripes of reaction. (Isn’t being “based” at its heart calling sincerefags on their bluff?) In that sense, perhaps Honor Levy’s My First Book is on the frontier of something.

Well, that’s grim to think about. 

At any rate, I think such a model will prove more accurate than Kelly’s formulation that the genre turn has superseded the New Sincerity (after the latter tilled the ground for it). Certainly, the attraction of literary writers to genre fiction—Bret Easton Ellis to thriller, Sally Rooney to romance, Colson Whitehead to post-apocalypse, Junot Díaz to SciFi—is a notable trend within contemporary fiction, but perhaps it should be considered within the scope of the New Sincerity, or as an offshoot, rather than its successor.

This paragraph from the end is especially good.

I make these contentions strictly as a literary historian. As a reader, I have no real attachment to the New Sincerity as a project and agree that something feels passé about it. I think the rising interest in modernist techniques and storytelling among contemporary writers globally—as in Jon Fosse’s Septology, Rooney’s Intermezzo, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid—is more intriguing, even as I find the vague modernism that so-called heterodox literary critics seem (often unknowingly) to wield against “corporate literature” to be limp and self-flattering. (We need something genuinely new to disrupt the sameness saturating contemporary culture, they declare. Bitch, “newness” has been done before! What do you think modernism was??) But even if it isn’t newness as such, maybe there is something within the increasingly discredited modernist project that’s worth returning to and, indeed, taking sincerely.

I agree very much about the parochial attachment so many modern critics have to modernism. I am often left wondering why modernism was so new and impressive but we don’t talk about Tolkien? Why the enormous flourishing of what we might call the New Romance in the twentieth century and beyond isn’t just as fascinating a topic of literary history? Pluaralism is the essence of literature! The great works are often about good and evil! Sorry it doesn’t fit with the narrow political project of post-modern literary theory! The world is what it is!

Anyway, enough ranting for one day, but do read this informative piece. I subscribed right away.

Black Death

I enjoy everything writes but I found this particularly interesting. Why don’t we have better estimates for how many people were killed by the Black Death? Estimates range from 30-60% or higher. Two important things we don’t know much about are: how the Black Death affected women and children, and the average household size and composition. It is also likely that the Black Death itself affected record keeping! The whole essay is a good reminder of just how much we don’t know about history.

Since 1580, researchers believe that we’ve faced between 10 and 28 separate flu pandemics, but without further historical research and genomic sampling, it’s hard to be confident. Global mortality estimates have only been made for a handful of these flu pandemics. This includes the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, whose estimated death toll ranges between 50 and 100 million deaths worldwide.

World literature, 1600

Try reading this without immediately making yourself a reading list… global literary culture, the flow of silver from the New World to Asia, the rise of the novel, the pros and cons of literary canons, and all in one brief, readable, highly informative essay!

Only a fraction of the New World silver that swept through Europe remained there. In Spain, precious metals lined the coffers of a few generations of grandees before leaving the country, and the continent, for good. In general, they went east. As in the late medieval period, in the Renaissance, vast quantities of bullion made their way to China along luxury trade routes. In fact, thanks to recent isotope testing, we now know that most of the riches extracted from the mines of Peru, including the contents of Potosí, never touched Europe at all: they were taken directly to China via Pacific trade routes. In other words, the impact of New World silver isn’t just a European story. In fact, it’s not even primarily a European story: it’s a global one. And that holds not only for economic, but also for literary history.

Cecil the beagle

What a splendid book review. I enjoyed it very much both for its own sake and as an example of what good reviewing should be like. Here’s one fine paragraph.

If the woman ruling the country might be said to occupy a rather peripheral place in this account, it is in line with Cecil’s view of his own importance. This is an abiding difficulty with the kind of history that focuses on the machinations of state and the workings of administration. In more recent times, we have the phenomenon of political biographies which seem to insist that the cabinet secretary or special adviser in question was the most important player in the political process. Historians have their own version of this, where the achievements of Thomas Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell, for example, are lauded to such an extent that Henry VIII barely makes the frame. Elizabeth herself recognised her dependence on men like the Cecils, and – despite a disinclination to give lavish rewards – gave them the wealth and nobility they had earned. The responsibility of government, however, ultimately lay with her. Towards the end of her reign, she described herself as a candle made of wax, whose job it was ‘to waste myself and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me’. Both Cecils were illuminated by their closeness to the queen; the source of illumination should not be left out of the picture.

Totoro

An interview with Kazuo Oga, who produced the background animations for Totoro.

Oga: To begin with, I was delighted that the subject matter I was painting was the suburbs of the 1950s. It was also my first time working with a director who made demands about the [background] art, such as, “I want you to paint things like rural landscapes, trees and flowers, while paying close attention to them.” I did that myself and, from around the halfway point, I began to consider flowers and trees as the equals of Totoro [the character]. I painted them with that in mind.

Good bad taste

I found this whole thing to be in excellent taste.

9. Everyone you know is writing the same blog posts about taste. They are all reading Rick Rubin and W. David Marx; they are all shopping SSENSE sales and buying Matisse posters to put up on their walls. For You Pages are out; taking screenshots of Substack posts is in. Stanley Cups are out—too Midwestern-suburb-core—but $200 electric kettles are in. This all still feels to you like a kind of yuppie class signaling—conspicuous consumption, rebranded again—but maybe this thought, too, is gatekeeping?

The worst part of this article is the headline and the best part is the final paragraph, which made me want to read Conjugal Love, by Alberto Moravia. While I share some of the author’s worries about the decline of reading, it seems to me that at some point, literary people are going to have to decide if they want to spread the good news and encourage people to read great literature (all of it, any of it, and yes, that includes Catcher—a good book to read at all ages!) or whether they merely want to join in with the status-grabbing culture they pretend to despise, and complain a bit to garner themselves some attention. I keep saying that the philistine supremacy is real—well, it is often most real among the people who profess to dislike it. What is more philistine, to read a trash book or to spend your time being a snob on Twitter about a young woman on TikTok? This piece is yet another example of modern literary culture ironising the social(-media)-merry-go-round in order to make it acceptable that the author is a very willing and active participant in the whole thing.

There are two basic conclusions to be drawn from what this author observes among her friends: first, having status accrue to reading is fine and to be encouraged (we want reading to be high status and yes that involves some cafe posing! the first step towards being serious is aspiring to be serious which involves being unserious and pretending to be serious—seriously); second, you can either improve that status to encourage more people in to the garden of literature, or you can act as a gatekeeper to preserve a sense of exclusivity to yourself. The choices many literary people are making seem to belong more to the first category that the second.

I don’t doubt that some unpleasant men can be identified by their reading habits (nor that women should be attentive to such “red flags”), but it’s not a “ruse” that people follow trends and read what other people are reading. It’s normal behaviour. What we need to do is to set an example of reading what we think is valuable, to make use of this inherent characteristic of human behaviour rather than quibble and moralise about it while doing the exact same thing ourselves. Having scorned those people who pretend to read feminist works in order to attract women online, the author then quotes her friend saying this: “I always assume that the worst men I know read Kerouac. With the exception of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat generation is so overrated.”

Are these people supposed to know the Beats are overrated without reading them? What’s wrong with a man reading literary fiction (at a time when many men don’t)? How comfortable would we be to have a man write in the Times about the books that makes him assume a women to be “the worst”? Mostly what this does is to nudge the status spiral of literature down rather than up.

Sally Rooney is very good at skewering this kind of not-as-self-aware-as-it-seems culture and I look forward to her next novel being both popular among readers and a popular target of scorn among self-consciously literary readers.

Anyone who is enjoying Catcher at the moment, by the way, is well advised to read Franny and Zooey next, followed by The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen for a view from a similar period (though in Britain) of what it is like to be a teenage girl.

What and How to Read

Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT that “To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.” He does have a point of course—, but the idea that we should ignore modern books made me chuckle a little, because while Ganesh writes like a highbrow what he said brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s satire of middlebrow consumption habits:

Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called “the Georgian style” — but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste.

I will be reading the new Alan Hollinghurst, Sally Rooney, and Susannah Clarke novels this summer/autumn. And I just finished James, which is superb. Maybe C.S. Lewis’s old motto is closer to the truth: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” That’s not exactly how I read, but it might be closer to what most people will accept as a “rule”… And imagine if, following Ganesh’s rule, you had missed out on reading George Eliot or Seamus Heaney! Serious readers must always aim to have a living taste, which requires reading both the old and the new.

Arsy-versy Argy-bargy

This is just excellent. About the genius of Chaucer. (Note the Bloom reference further down. The Anxiety of Influence really has become one of those ideas that creeps in everywhere.) As one would hope in an essay about Chaucer, this piece contains lots of high-minded scholarly information, a very pleasant writing style, and phrases like, “Pope’s tendency to slip emetics into Grub Street rivals’ drinks”. I also learned this interesting fact: Chaucer is “the third most-quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary, after Shakespeare and Walter Scott.”

For a writer to be all things to all men, he must know a bit about things, and a lot about men—not to mention a lot about language and literature. Had Chaucer not been born into a mercantile environment and had the opportunity to mingle with Italians by the Thames, he may have struggled with Italian, and had he not spent so much time around nobility, he may not have learned French. His narratives are mostly borrowed from Latin and Romance-language sources (including Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun). His forms and genres almost all derive from French minstrel romances and fabliaux (bawdy medieval stories), and, more granularly, from the verse structures of poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, from whom Chaucer stole the seven-line form now known as “rime royal” or the “Chaucerian stanza.” And he may never have thought about writing in English had he not observed how Dante elevated Florence’s vernacular in his Commedia (1321), a technique Chaucer noticed while in Tuscany for diplomatic work. Based on all of this, some critics, such as Marion Turner, have argued that it is impossible to cut off Chaucer and his legacies from European contexts. Very little in his work is sui generis. He invented in the Latin sense of invenire—to find and discover. “Had he lived in a different time and place,” the scholar Jeremy J. Smith suggests, “he would have ‘invented’ different things.” His work was more conflation than divine afflatus.

Pope Francis argues for the value of reading literature

Does a bloody good job too.

AI cheating

One way to deal with the fact that AI makes it hard to assign traditional literature essays to students (though historically cheating has been at about 50%!) is to use close reading to compare literature with AI generated writing. What a good idea!

Robbins said the University of Utah has adopted a similar approach. She showed me the syllabus from a college writing course in which students use AI to learn “what makes writing captivating.” In addition to reading and writing about AI as a social issue, they read literary works and then try to get ChatGPT to generate work in corresponding forms and genres. Then they compare the AI-generated works with the human-authored ones to suss out the differences.

Personally, I hope to see the return of memorisation. Knowing the text used to be a core part of studying literature and one thing AI cannot do is be your own memory. Requiring students to turn up and either on paper or orally demonstrate extensive knowledge of the texts, which is then used as a basis for discussion sounds very old school, but maybe the wheel is about to turn. Asking questions of ChatGPT4o like “Write about seriousness in the work of Jonathan Swift or Daniel Defoe or both. Give quotations to support your answer” yields reasonably thin answers, so it shouldn’t be too hard to start identifying which students really do know the material, especially in exam conditions. (More good exam questions here, including: “Could computers ever write poems as well as humans do?”)

Austen and abolition

New research by the always-worthwhile Austen scholar Devoney Looser shows that three of Jane Austen’s six brothers were public abolitionists. This is an article outlining the findings, written by Looser herself.

Taken together, these discoveries about the abolitionist activism of three of Jane Austen’s six brothers add weight to the theory that by the end of her life, cut short by illness at age 41, the novelist may herself have been on the road to becoming a passionate, active and public supporter of abolition.

Diaries in the 1560s

People mocked Harold Bloom for saying Shakespeare invented the human. What he meant was that Shakespeare discovered the human in literature; he discovered self-consciousness. And guess what? The first people to keep personal diaries, that is, to write down self-reflective thoughts in private, seem to have lived in rural England in the 1560s. Exactly when and where Shakespeare was born. There is so much about Elizabethan England that makes Bloom’s thesis seem sensible to me, and this is the latest brick in the wall.

What was Conrad up to?

Reading New Yorker articles can be frustrating because of the way the page jumps around as it loads (and the subscription offer that butts in) but this piece about Conrad by Leo Robson is worth your attention, maybe especially if you don’t know any Conrad. The piece is a few years old, but it was the centenary of Conrad’s death recently.

What saves Conrad’s work from coldness and nihilism is his embrace of an alternative ideal. If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless. He doesn’t reject what Marlow calls “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation” in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of “something,” “some saving truth,” “some exorcism against the ghost of doubt”—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn’t call itself “theory” or “wisdom”—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with “impressions” or “sensations” the nearest you get to solid proof. Marlow may be just another partial observer, another myopic pair of eyes, but he knows what he is, so we trust his sincerity about the “glamour” he found in the East, or the depth of his engagement with Jim’s fate:

He swayed me. I own to it, I own up. The occasion was obscure, insignificant—what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million . . . an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself.

High culture as counter culture

sent me this after my recent piece about elites and high culture. Not only is a superb review of the main ideas of high and low culture in the last hundred and fifty years, but it ends with this lovely sentence.

If high culture must go into opposition in twenty-first-century America, at least it should exercise a privilege that is unavailable to a clerisy, but has always accrued to countercultures—the enjoyment of a certain stylish defiance.

I prefer to think of myself as part of a counterculture than as a reactionary, which is what I do so often feel like. As Kirsch says, “the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself.”

Handwritten notes

This meta study suggests that you get better results when making notes by hand rather than typing. But the effect size isn’t very large, so the effects aren’t that impressive. I do a lot on paper, but because I think it helps you think differently, rather than because of any retentive power.

Memorizing poetry

First rate stuff. I enjoyed every sentence.

Graves vs Milton

Robert Graves’ 1957 polemical close reading of Milton is full of fine common sense. “A poem is legitimately judged by the standards of craftsmanship implied in the form used.” And, “Poetry (need I say?) is more than musically arranged. It is sense; good sense; penetrating often heartrending sense.”

Lewis in Oxford

Good review of the new bio, which I have not read. I enjoyed this particularly.

He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).

It’s OK to Take a Book Seriously

Hear! Hear! I enjoyed every word of this essay. “I think the major barrier to artistic progress nowadays is our insistence that art needs to progress. Because if we’re not allowed to circle back around and revisit the past, then the range of allowable art is inevitably going to become narrower and narrower and narrower.” By .

Portrait of a Mother Reader

Interview with my wife () about her reading habits. Great piece. “I don’t especially like discussing books. With fiction, I let myself become completely absorbed by the world of the story, and I don’t want to hear other people’s opinions or critical responses!” This is a good format.

The Critic as Friend

Merve Emre remains (one of) my favourite living critic(s). This is a splendid essay about the role of the critic in modern culture. She quotes everyone. I was bound to love this essay because I admire Pope so much, but there is something interesting in every paragraph. This is, more or less, what I try to do here at The Common Reader, too: “The critic models the practice of inquiry and the manner of feeling by which you, the reader, can also become a friend to the text.” (My thanks to for sending me this.)

Reading classic novels with ChatGPT

Good! I think the reference in this piece to marginal notes (and by implication, commonplace books) is very apt.

What makes a good franchise

I enjoy the cultural criticism of economists and makes many good points here about how franchise can be successful, despite the fact that, right now, they often aren’t. He’s right that less is often more: Borges and Kafka can frequently do more in a paragraph than other writers can do in whole chapters, whole books even.

Jan Swafford

Interview with the composer and Mozart biographer by .

There aren’t that many genuinely new ideas in the world. They don’t happen that often and when everybody’s trying to create them, it’s chaos.

I would say that the zeitgeist now in the arts is chaos. That's what I think it is. It's anarchy and chaos. To find a grounding for yourself as an artist in any medium, and that I think is unique to this period, because you're grounding yourself in a period of chaos it's like you're trying to find firm ground in a flood. I think my line about what you have to do as a composer is that there’s the-- Lying around you is the rubble of all past systems of music. There's tonality, late tonality, the Renaissance, the Baroque, twelve-tone, serialism, minimalism, primitivism, and futurism.

All this stuff is just lying around. What you have to do as a composer is pick up bits and pieces of these ideas, techniques, philosophies, and aesthetics and from that cobble together your own thing.

Online and Tedious

An interesting essay making some similar points to my recent “discourse fiction” piece. This paragraph is especially true. It is hard to capture “what it is like to be online” — too many writers focus on the outer effects rather than the inner experience. There’s also a generally cynical detachment to the writers who approach this topic: generational ambivalence is not a big enough philosophy to sustain an artistic movement. “Affectless” is a good description of much of this prose.

“Internet writing” has become a category broad enough to mean essentially nothing because the internet is a technology in the same way that a book is a technology. There is an immersive quality to the internet, the Wikipedia rabbit holes and the endless link trees, that the affectless writing that has become the house style of online life fails to capture.

Moby Dick and Shakespeare

Another winner from , who we all have something to learn from. You should all subscribe.

Reading War & Peace out loud

And to her family, no less. Truly lovely piece about living as a common reader.

This NYT review, by Dwight Garner, of My First Book by Honor Levy, set a lot of people squawking about the fact that, based on the extract Garner selected, Levy appears to be a grossly over-hyped writer:

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

A lot of people couldn’t see that this is actually quite good writing. The usual reasons prevail. Some people won’t recognise anything outside of the familiar as good. But, more importantly, I think, is the fact that this draws heavily on a particular sort of internet talk. Some of these sentences just won’t mean anything to some readers: even if they can track them literally, or work it out, their implied meaning won’t really be apparent. It is dense with allusions to a culture you may never have experienced.

Writers have been doing this for a long time, of course, think of Vile Bodies or the work of Ronald Firbank. The difference, apart from the fact that internet-speak is far more nuanced and varied than Edwardian slang, and that it has many more implications, is that everything is said with some level of irony. If you miss the irony then the whole thing surely would become unbearable.

There’s a line in Normal People that could stand motto for a whole swathe of writing in this mode: “She tried to roll her eyes at herself but it felt ugly and self-pitying rather than funny.” If you ironise everything all the time you end up being twee, shallow, glib, and gross. That’s more or less what I think happened with Molly, the memoir by Blake Butler that also divided people like partisan politics: what Butler and his wife Molly Brodak called irony a lot of other people called thin cover for openly disgusting behaviour. (Here’s my review of Molly; here’s Dwight Garner’s review.) So much of the disagreement about that book comes down to how seriously you take Butler and Brodak’s claims to irony; the same is true of Lauren Oyler.

It simply isn’t clear, a lot of the time, whether modern intellectuals and writers are really the good stuff or just a counterfeit. We live in ersatz times. Once the suspicion is raised, the writer is often dismissed, and always has the defence that the philistines don’t understand their layers of irony.

The other thing that makes people hate that Levy passage is Levy herself. There’s nothing new in the widespread disdain for a young novelist, especially a privileged young woman novelist one of whose friends wrote this about her in a national magazine:

Levy is rarely boring. She talks incredibly fast and doesn’t finish most of her thoughts but is a fabulous conversationalist anyway because sometimes she says something that might not make any sense if you stop to think about it, but she does it with so much manic bluster you can’t help but nod along. Like “TikTok is a psychological-warfare weapon invented by China” or “If I was a guy, I’d probably be an incel or an evil gay.” Sometimes, it just sounds like Adderall-inflected slam poetry: “I make the algorithm, the algorithm makes me.” She calls this her “yap mode.”

For sure, Levy is giving Bloomsbury Lite here and not much else. Levy was a member of the Dimes Square literary scene, a group of people who produced their own literary newspaper The Drunken Canal. They got some attention in 2020-2022, and seemed to think of themselves as a counter-cultural movement. So the reaction against Levy’s book is, partly, as if to say, “Oh, so you’re not Hemingway in Paris after all?” Well, maybe, but let’s note that we don’t know what they’ve got in their drafts, and that just because they are rich-kids doesn’t mean they can’t write good fiction. Now that Levy has left the scene, we don’t know what she might produce.

(Another confusion in this debate is the question of canonical standards. One way of re-framing Garner’s review is that he said, “She’s not a genius, she’s just a very talented rich kid”, to which many people responded by ignoring the words “very talented”.)

What really makes it seem like Dimes Square isn’t, and wasn’t, any sort of literary movement, is that they are most concerned with what’s called the discourse, as this NYT profile makes clear, even if it doesn’t explicitly state so. The discourse is whatever everyone is talking about. But, discourse is also the limits of those conversations: discourse is the terms to describe the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable to say. Discourse is what we talk about when we talk about x. Whenever a topic becomes big enough that it seems like half the internet is talking about it, you will always see that certain ideas are the ones that get the attention; other perspectives and opinions are “outside of the discourse”. Often this is because you aren’t supposed to break ranks with the other people of your ideological group. Say the wrong thing, and you’re outré.

Levy’s book is part of a new type of writing that I have come to think of as “discourse fiction”. In discourse fiction, the limits of what the writing will say—and often, how it will say it—are set by the (mostly) online discourse the writer belongs to/identifies with. Many of these writers are (lightly) ironic but that either reads shallowly or dead pan to many audiences who don’t know much about the discourse being writing in/referred to.

Much of it, as with the alt lit movement, reads like a continuation of Twitter by other means, and so, even if it has technically impressive aspects, as with the para quoted from Levy above, is recoiled from for that reason. That can also give it its power, but with the supposed decline of the importance of individual creativity (c.f. Kenneth Goldsmith, Marjorie Perloff) this “memeification of language” (as Lauren Oyler has it) looks much more like “art” to some readers than to others. Writers like Oyler have tried to write internet novels that go against this, but which mostly succeed in writing in another form of discourse altogether.

When fiction reads like an op-ed / Twitter feed / TikTok meme transposed into an authorial voice and is presented as a high level of social commentary / novel of ideas / essayistic intervention / ironising of the op-ed / Twitter feed / TikTok meme, then a culture clash with some readers inevitably ensues. Because, they say, that just isn’t fiction. Obviously the long-reach of auto-fiction can be felt here, as can the reductionism of much of the philosophical and political education of modern literary students. This is what too much literary theory and not enough “real” philosophy will get you!

Whether or not any of this writing is autofiction, it is all too easy to think it might be, so any “mood affiliation” people have with, e.g. GenZ, will simply transfer to the assessment of the writing. Don’t like their tweets? Then you really won’t like their short stories! Can’t stand Lauren Oyler online? Wait till you read her essay collection!

Some writers are extremely good at talking about all of this within the bounds of a traditional novel, that is, by observing and recording it all, rather than merely enacting it. The extent to which people are able to talk about the world because they find it interesting, rather than being trapped in an online discourse bubble, is a major (underappreciated) theme of Sally Rooney’s work. Think not just of Beautiful World but also scenes like the one in Normal People when Connell’s emails are said to be better written than his short stories. Rooney is always finding moments when her characters can be outside, or resistant to, the accepted discourse of their peers, on or off line. Brandon Taylor is good at this too.

The roots of all of this can be traced back through Conversations with Friends into the alt lit movement and, ultimately, to the late 1990s, Kenneth Goldsmith, and the decline of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The fact that books lost their dominant cultural position meant that the idea of a single author of original genius—the person who created the book—also lost their dominant cultural position. The author thus becomes less of a creator and more of a compiler, less Romantic genius more scholastic monk: the aim is not to be yourself, but to select, sample, rearrange, reorder.

So, discourse in fiction is the heart of the dispute about Levy. As was pointed out on Twitter by @moonandmouth, Dwight Garner did not know what a haplogroup was (neither did I). To those, like Levy, who are very online in a particular kind of way, these terms are familiar, boringly so. To someone like Garner, it is a fresh new way of using language precisely because he is outside Levy’s discourse.

There are many subtleties to how this works, and it is far too simple to say that the author is finally dead, but this is the essence of what’s happening in the Levy debate. It’s not that people dislike her writing, as such, but that they dislike the terms of her discourse. They didn’t expect, in reading fiction, to stumble into a corner of the internet that they dislike.

What’s the point of Milton?

This is a fascinating paper from 1972 that will push against the notions of Milton you learned in school.

The way in which Milton makes the experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall pertinent to our own is not by showing that they, like us, were congenitally enslaved by their own passions, but by showing that we, like them, have the opportunity either to enslave ourselves or to exercise our restored free will in response to God's providence

I link to this now, because the other online literary spat that happened recently was when Rebecca Lehmann, poet, novelist, and Associate Professor of English at St Mary’s College, asked on Twitter,

Are you a Paradise Lost person? What is the point of it? I didn’t like it, and don’t want to reread it. What do people like about it? Why are some people die hards?

What’s the point of it? She largely got the response you might expect. And she then said,

…in my defense I do have a PhD in English, am an English prof, and *have* read the poem (a long time ago), but not everything is for everybody and this just isn’t my jam. Don’t hate me!

Obviously, Milton is not for everybody. But if he is for anybody it is for the people who hold professorial positions in English departments. You are not required to love Milton, but you are required to at least see and understand what he is, why his work matters. Lehmann then said this,

Yes, I can see how some folks would find this compelling but I think the question is just on its face so outside of my realm of interest and belief (as an atheist) that it doesn’t hold much interest for me?

In another Tweet, however, she tells us she enjoys Dante.

There’s a paradise regained??Is there a third too? Bc one of my critiques of this poem is that The Divine Comedy (doing similar work but Catholic?) is so much more interesting. Now I’m curious how much Milton was patterning on DC. Tho I suppose he didn’t believe in purgatory! lol

lol indeed. And they wonder why there is a “crisis of the humanities”? Until English departments get back to teaching for knowledge rather than this sort of vague, hand-wavy, personal interest, they will continue to face this so-called crisis and to whine about what’s happening to them. They are, as Milton said, sufficient to stand though free to fall. You would think that someone who teaches “Advanced Workshop in Formal Constraints” would be incapable of all of this. Alas. It is notable that Lehmann’s graduate degrees are not in English, as she said, but in creative writing. Bloom thou shouldst be living at this hour! English has need of thee!

The New Nigerian Criticism

“judgement is not only necessary in our time and country to check our writers’ inflated literary self-importance, false strengths, and shameless weaknesses—the trinity of which a critical tradition of niceties tends to propagate. It is also necessary for the survival of ‘the best that has been thought and said’, to echo Matthew Arnold from Culture and Anarchy, seeing to the continuation of our intellectual history.” By . I don’t know enough (or anything!) about Nigerian literature, but I always enjoy his essays. This one especially.

Luther, Great Man?

The Great Man Theory of History lives! Start reading Carlyle people! Seriously, though, long-time readers will know that I am sympathetic to the Great Man Theory of History. Economic historian Mark Koyama (whose book I really want to read) argues that “individuals can be decisive for understanding institutional change if they coordinate other individuals.” As ever, networks are the key! I loved this piece. More please.

Bluestockings

“What is a bit harder to stomach, though, is Gibson’s apparent lack of interest in the things her subjects actually wrote.” That is the perpetual complaint made about biography. But it only amounts to complaining that biography is not literary criticism. Well noticed! That is like complaining that an Agatha Christie novel isn’t actually a realistic guide to murder and detection. Good biography might analyse the works or it might not. There’s a long history of it doing both. These sort of stiff academic reviews sound clever but Bluestockings (which I reviewed for Prospect) isn’t that sort of book. Quite a few of the criticisms here are fair (the bluestockings weren’t a feminist movement) but the overall framing fails to account for what this book is about. Personally, I didn’t want this book to be any longer than it is, and I don’t worry that serious bluestocking scholarship will suffer by its existence.

New paintings found at Pompeii

Self-recommending.

Six Inspiring Mothers in Literature

Very good writing in the common reader tradition.

What is American liberty?

Virginia Postrel on top form.

Hopkins’ prosody

Scholars are now thinking in detail about the value of a non-systematic mode of thought to Hopkins’s theologico-poetics, probing the prosodic value of contradiction, multiplicity, and baroque oddity to a poet whose sense that the world’s specificity ought to be viewed without recourse to a singularity or unity subtends his prosodic and philosophical imagination

I wish this was open access.

My podcast with Ben Yeoh is now live, covering talent, late bloomers, literature, John Stuart Mill and more. And don’t forget to book tickets for my Interintellect salon, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings.

For paid subscribers, the next Shakespeare Book Club is 12th May, 19.00 UK time Much Ado About Nothing.

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Most of the reaction to Ann Manov’s review of No Judgements, Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection, hasn’t been about Oyler’s book as much as it’s been about writing culture, literary culture, whether we ought to have “mean reviews”, and so on. (Freddie deBoer defended Oyler, but did so in terms that I suspect she herself would find repellent.) For some, the woman who once wrote a review that was titled “Ha ha! Ha ha!” is getting some karma. For others, it’s a sign of the way reviewing culture is just a chain of people trying to make a name for themselves by taking down prominent writers, so that they can become prominent enough to get harshly reviewed. Both sides tend to think that “being mean” isn’t acceptable in a review. I disagree. Manov’s review is good and the responses to it don’t always deal very closely with the specifics. Oyler’s earlier “mean” reviews were also fine (though they are not, on the whole, as good as people think). If a book is bad, we should say so, especially if it is being widely praised. People spend their money on books. Artistic standards matter. Take them down when they deserve it. That Oyler got Oyler’d, as it were, isn’t especially relevant.

One way Oyler has divided opinion by being openly elitist. Many critics have quoted one passage in particular where she is openly snobbish about her tastes and habits (she knows all the permanent exhibits in museums, etc). Oyler says they have fallen for her trolling. In a recent interview, this was linked to another sort of ironic trolling Oyler undertakes: boasting about herself.

OYLER: …the idea that we shouldn’t be using irony is ridiculous, because it allows you to express this ambiguity. Everyone wants there to be a judgment, everyone wants you to be like, “Is it bad or good? Are you pro or against?” And it’s very limiting if you’re any kind of writer, but particularly if you are a funny writer.

PHILLIPS-HORST: This came up when I was thinking about you in Berlin. When people ask you what you do, what do you say?

OYLER: I flip my hair and I say, “I’m the preeminent and most widely read critic of my generation.” And they’re like, “Really?” And I’m like, “Yeah, according to The Sunday Times UK.”

This isn’t irony, at least not of the sort Oyler thinks. Telling people you are the most widely read critic of your generation with obvious irony isn’t actually very ironic. It’s just a double-bluff, cover for showing off.

Social scientists call this counter-signalling. Most people quote praise of themselves non-ironically, to signal their quality to others. Once you reach a high-enough level, this sort of thing is no longer acceptable: if you are truly high status, you don’t need to go around quoting the Sunday Times to prove it. That looks aspirational, not accomplished. So, instead of signalling, you counter-signal; instead of boasting you self-depreciate—you ironise your accomplishments. This is the same thing as the richest people wearing the most causal clothes. They are such big shots, they don’t need to boast. Not showing off is how they show off.

Similarly, up-and-coming writers tell anyone who will listen about even the smallest praise they have received from more prominent writers and outlets (signalling their quality, aspiring to status). The preeminent and most widely read critic of her generation can’t do that without losing status, so she quotes it “ironically” at parties and then relays the story in interviews. She can tell you about it, but only casually, only ironically. Thus counter-signalling achieves the same thing that signalling would. And if you object, you are accused on not understanding irony, or of missing the fact that you were being trolled.

The truth is that ironising the Sunday Times quote is just good-old-fashioned self-deprecation as a form of showing-off. As Samuel Johnson said, “all censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.” Is Oyler trolling, or is she, like Fraiser Crane, making merely her overt snobbishness charming and entertaining as a way of preserving her status in a culture that is increasingly uninterested in that sort of thing?

When trying to explain why she writes criticism, Oyler says,

I would like to say that dedicating any time or energy to criticism comes from a belief in the importance of art. I fear making this claim would be a bit too valiant for me, so I will cite some other people doing so.

Her quoting the Sunday Times is the same trick. Oyler’s oblique praise of herself isn’t oblique enough: her critics have a point. Not least, because in Oyler’s most famous essay (she is said to have crashed the London Review of Books website twice), Oyler made this exact point about another writer:

In order to solve the problem of her possible wrongness, she adopts an elevated version of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist programme, constantly contradicting herself and referring to her shortcomings, among which are attention seeking, a desire for control, and equivocation. But where Gay’s ‘flaws’ were supposed to serve as proof of her humanity and therefore provide support for the feminist project of recognising women as humans, Tolentino’s are calibrated for success in a media culture in which acknowledgment equals absolution and absolution is seen as crucial to success.

Tolentino and Oyler have different “flaws”, but Oyler is absolutely “calibrating for success in a media environment” where ironic acknowledgment of one’s snobbery is a way to get attention as a highbrow. Oyler goes on to say that Tolentino talking about her flaws in the media is a cynical way of selling more books. Tolentino’s attempt to disguise her commerciality was met with Oyler’s trademark scorn.

The failings she neglects to mention in the actual book — a bestseller — she managed to cover during the media attention she received around its publication in August, when she wondered ‘if the work that brings me the most meaning in life (writing) will always necessarily bring me deeper into the clutches of the things that I hate (capitalism, and a way of being in which external incentives seem more important than internal ones)’. To quote the actually peerless Helen DeWitt, who, when she couldn’t find a publisher for her difficult novel Your Name Here, sold PDFs of it through her website: ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!’

Oyler’s right that so much of what passes as a critique of capitalism is hollow, promotional (and we can add badly informed). But she is not different. The whole schtick of the title is that Oyler very much is making judgements, but they aren’t very significant: Goodreads reviews aren’t very reliable, auto-fiction is fine actually, and the business of telling people to be vulnerable is bullshit. This isn’t criticism, it’s just another series of op-eds on familiar topics, written in a manner that garners more attention for the how than the what, the voice than the ideas. But Oyler is supposed to be a real critic, one who makes serious judgements, not just one who writes to grab attention. Wasn’t that the whole point of the book?

Oyler said in an interview when her novel Fake Accounts came out,

Books are products. Many of those we talk about aren’t doing anything except making money, and the thing that’s interesting about them is how they operate in the world, not what they’re commenting on.

Oyler wants it both ways and Manov’s review called her out. Personally, I find all of this rather dull and wish she had devoted one of her chapters to writing about Mating by Norman Rush, a novel she admires. Oyler would be the first to roll her eyes when editors complain that “books coverage” gets no clicks, but here she is not covering books. If you can’t beat them, join them I guess. Just make it ironic and troll them when they don’t get it. Ha ha, ha ha.

Obituary of a quiet life

The obituary form puts a particular pressure on what matters, on what should be remembered and praised, but what does one say about a life that aimed to carry on in the background, that had no interest in a name in newsprint or an award on the mantel? Ray Harrell, son of Jim and Cora, was content to sit still and watch the breeze scatter the leaves? Ray Harrell, sergeant first class, arranged the bills in his wallet in descending order? Ray Harrell, survived by Grace, whistled the same invented tune year after year while searching for the right nail in the shed? I filled in the expected details and sent the obituary to the newspaper, but I knew it wasn’t right. It captured nothing of the life he lived. What I returned to in the days after he passed, as the ladies from church covered the table in casseroles and Grandma slept in a bed alone for the first time since she was 19, was the sheer audacity of a quiet life.

Just splendid.

Explaining the internet

is right about everything. One of the better writers on Substack.

The Black Box

An extract from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s new book about the ways in which racial identity has constructed, both within and without the black community. “the tradition of Black thought is most correctly described as a series of contentions, many of them fiery ones. And fire, as the greatest Black intellectuals have always known, can generate light as well as heat.” As well as being worth reading for its own sake, this is an interesting essay if you have recently read Erasure by Perceval Everett or watched the film adaptation American Fiction.

Robert Frost

“‘The Road Not Taken’ has nothing to do with inspiration and stick-to-it-iveness; rather it’s a melancholic exhalation at the futility of choice, a dirge about enduring in the face of meaninglessness. If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost.”

Shakespeare in original pronunciation

Skip the first three minutes, fascinating afterwards. (Video) Try this video also.

Counting Lovers

Line counts of different Shakespeare characters compared, based on how often the characters speak to each other. Readers of this blog do not need to be told that Romeo and Juliet is an ensemble play in which the nurse plays as considerable role as any of the protagonists. Nor is it a surprise to learn that Anthony and Cleopatra speak more to each other than any other lovers. Still, an interesting analysis.

Words, words, words

A third Shakespeare link! It’s too long, but has many interesting sections. This is an especially good observation. “The most lingustically distinctive dramatic writers, in our era and country, are prose poets of the curt back-and-forth, like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet. Theirs is often brilliant work, but, like Hemingway in fiction, they foreclose more possibilities than they exploit. They are always efficient, never effusive. The murderers in Macbeth trade a staccato volley of words, too. But Shakespeare never fetishized that one effect into a whole style. He possessed all the effects and chose among them as his material required.”

Zola and the modern novel

The editorial note under the link to Brandon Taylor’s new LRB piece about Zola is a better commentary on the history of the modern novel than most of what you can read elsewhere. Also, Taylor’s Zola piece is splendid, read that too.

Using LLMs to understand what makes writers distinctive.

I wish I was smart enough to fully understand this. Talking to ChatGPT helped me get my head around it.

Teaching poetry to children

A teacher’s account of their experimental approach to get their pupils excited by poetry. It’s easy to quibble with some of the approaches taken (why should we teach them to write poetry rather than read it?), but there is so much enthusiasm and internal motivation it’s hard to disagree with the general tenor of the approach.

An incredible story in the WSJ. The 2024 Australian Open doubles championship was won by two late bloomers. Matthew Ebden, 36, has won tournaments before. This is Rohan Bopanna’s first doubles championship at a major tournament. He’s world No.1 for the first time too. He’s 43.

Larry David was a late bloomer

“In interviews, Larry frequently brings up the fact that his sense of humor didn’t develop until he went to college. But once he caught the stand-up comedy bug, Larry knew it was his calling. While his mother wanted him to be a mailman, Larry spent his 20s and 30s struggling financially while trying to make it in comedy.”

Why I fell out of love with Iris Murdoch

More people should have written about Murdoch for the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. That the Times had only this ambivalent article (written by someone who last read her books as a teenager) tells you something about British literary culture. Quoting Martin Amis saying “The men all have names like Hilary and Julian. The women all have names like Julian and Hilary” might have been amusing, but that’s only true of some of the early books. It’s entirely uncharacteristic of works like The Sea The Sea, The Philosopher’s Pupil and so on— books, by the way, that were well beyond Amis’s capacity. His sub-Joycean, gonzo novels prioritise one sort of prose style above all. A large but limited achievement. Whereas, Murdoch was a thinker in the tradition of Eliot and the Russians: her novels have more readers, deal with more of life, and pose moral questions that are increasingly relevant with every passing year. Amis is a period piece, slowly hardening into 1990s high-brow entertainment. A.N. Wilson once said Murdoch would stand in relation to her times as Dostoevsky stood to his. Eventually our literary outlets will catch on, one hopes…

Teaching the Iliad to Chinese students

“I have heard the opinion voiced that works like the Iliad are too daunting or too boring even for university students. I disagree. My experience teaching the Iliad proved to me that even high school students can find the epic engrossing. Most teenagers need help to get there, however. In this post I am going to outline how I taught the Iliad to a gaggle of Chinese teenagers.” Top stuff in this post.

The grammar of the Tortured Poets Department

Why everyone can’t just assume Taylor Swift knows grammar is beyond me.

Murdoch lecture

Professor Anne Rowe’s lecture for the 25th anniversary of Murdoch’s death.

Jane Austen and game theory

A good piece about game theory in Jane Austen and the way “strategic romance” works today, drawing Michael Chwe’s truly excellent book. “One of Jane Austen’s talents lies in her ability to guide the reader through the considerations of higher-order beliefs that lay in the background of spoken interactions.” It took me years to see Austen’s works like this, at which point I was a major convert. I’ve been feeling the itch for a re-read of all of her novels and this might be the shove I need. I have written about P, S&S, and MP my favourite.

Physics classics

When econ student Pradyumna Prasad (who is very interesting and worth following) asked why we bother reading the philosophy classics when we don’t read the science classics (i.e. why Plato if not Newton) the response from humanities people… really could have been better. Maybe it’s because I was never a pure humanities person, but the response of this German Professor reinforces my ambivalence to so much of the humanities. Is that what the humanities is supposed to teach us? huh!? Along with teaching classes on Taylor Swift, this is one of those things that ought to show them why the crisis they believe they are in isn’t entirely out of their control. Anyway, has some interesting ideas that actually offer an answer to Pradyumna.

Growing up loving opera

Dana Gioia’s absorbing account of being a young aesthete who enjoyed opera, in a time and place when that marked him out as unconventional. Full of nice detail about the freedoms of his childhood and the eccentricities of his parents. “To treat art as anything but a brief diversion was dangerous. It made everyday living more difficult.”

Long sentences

Speculative but interesting. The idea that “there is no stylistic or artistic reason why you can't write like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Willa Cather or Charles Dickens or Samuel Johnson” seems false on its face, but I was glad to see someone making this argument. Golden Hill is worth reading while we’re on the subject.

Mill, Hayek, and game theory

Was Hayek wrong because he lacked Mill’s rationalism, or because basic game theory proves him wrong? If you are interested in that question, this is the essay for you. (I am, and it was.)

has written about the decline of professional comedy as it reaches for the low-hanging fruit of being anti-woke. Arguing that there is too much politicization of arts criticism, Helen writes: “We’ve switched from a review culture (is this well directed? acted? written?) to an opinion culture (what does it say about the Yanamamo).” Hear, hear. More Sontagian criticism, please.

Flaubert

A lovely essay about Flaubert’s devotion to Art (which he always capitalised) and his lifelong aversion to middle-class society. The opening describes how students find Madame Bovary boring or hate it because they hate Emma Bovary’s selfishness. (They may be interested to learn that Flaubert hate his characters, too.) But Flaubert is an unavoidable part of the history of the novel, influencing Zola and Proust and Tolstoy and Joyce and many others. As Scott Bradfield says, “It’s impossible to think of any other writer who proved such a large influence on two seemingly antithetical schools of fiction—both the “realistic novel” and the “romance.””

And here is James Wood’s 1999 essay about Flaubert and literary history, a classic.

The hotness of Jane Eyre

I certainly don’t agree with all of this article about “the hotness of Jane Eyre” by but it was a very interesting reframing of the dynamic between Rochester and Jane.

A contemporary Sex Positive reading of Jane Eyre might look like this: by agreeing heartily to the repetition of her trauma – by reenacting it in a consensual context – Jane Eyre gains mastery over its memory, and is ultimately liberated from it. Meanwhile that same consensual context becomes a way of licensing and taming Rochester’s domineering impulses.

Complicated sentences are good for you.

Great piece on Language Log (why aren’t they on Substack yet!?) about a new study from MIT which shows more brain activity when you are confronted with sentences that are complicated, unusual, or odd in some way. A combination of neuroscience, anecdotes from China, and poetry. Recommended.

Reading several books at once

A lovely essay on including a discussion of Renaissance book wheels, which are probably not real, but look enticing. People say the internet killed attention spans but this essay is a good example of the continuity between then and now. Scrolling a book wheel is like browsing the web, clicking between web pages is like flicking through a magazine, only reading the first half of everything is what we all do with books anyway.

Reading is always about many texts at the same time; reading is always plural and, in that sense, necessarily unfocused and dispersed.

Taylor Swift studies at Harvard

Written by the professor teaching the course. Madness. And they wonder why the humanities are “in decline”. Harold Bloom predicted that English Literature departments would split into Cultural Studies and smaller Literature departments, more akin to Classics. And here we are. Remember, this isn’t about whether you think Taylor Swift is good, but what you think English Literature departments ought to teach. Opportunity cost, anyone? If the person deciding you won't teach your subject anymore is you, what do you have to complain about?

Jane Austen and Taylor Swift

This essay generalises too much from a conversation overheard on a train about Taylor Swift, but the first half about Jane Austen is very good.

Anglo Saxon Psalter Discovered!

Possibly belonging to Harold Godwinson’s sister. And more here.

Hypertext autobiography

Heartbreaking account of the first blogger, and a surely under-rated, inventive autobiographer. I loved this essay. Full of compelling detail.

Chatbot books

Publishers are considering how to have a chatbot version of each book they release. Good! If nothing else, I want to be able to interrogate, search, and talk with the books I have read. Obviously, there’s no substitute for reading; but look around, people aren’t reading like they used to. It seems likely that you will be able to use a chatbot for books before Oxford University Press lets you read the Collected Letters of Samuel Johnson online for free. The internet is here! Please use it!

A lifetime of Joyce

“There is no next book,” Fialka told me. “We’re only reading one book. Forever.”

DJ botox merch

These book launch parties sound unendurable, but this article is full of interesting detail. Oh to live in a world where the book was the marketing!

“Writers like Claudia Dey, author of Daughter, and Rachel Rabbit White, author of Porn Carnival, are marrying the worlds of their books with custom perfumes from cult-favorite perfumers Courtney Rafuse and Marissa Zappas, respectively. Madeline Cash made custom merchandise for her addictive-as-a-candy-flavored-vape short story collection Earth Angel. So did Nada Alic, who also created a series of “book trailers,” short films to drum up interest in her sharp, salve-for-the-spirit short story collection Bad Thoughts.”

Lit fits

Art spats from Berlioz to modern rappers, framed through the story of Paglia and Sontag. Good discussion about works of art Christians disapprove of, which have been made by Christians:

“it is strange that a number of the artists whose work has been attacked by Christians—Chris Ofili (The Holy Virgin Mary), Andreas Serrano (Piss Christ), Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader (The Last Temptation of Christ), for example—in fact identify as Christians themselves.”

Perry nostalgia

In her discussion of Matthew Perry, Katherine Dee is right that art is a medium of nostalgia. “To say we’re in an era of remixing is just another way of describing the method by which cultural innovation has always worked — it’s not an indictment on our ability to express ourselves in new ways.”

Book technology

Why don’t books incorporate modern technology? We have left the Gutenberg Parenthesis and it continues to mystify me why publishers have refused to incorporate audio and video in their products.

Dangerous Empathy

Nicola Griffith argues writers should be careful with empathy in an essay that reminded me of Samuel Johnson. Johnson worried that presenting bad behaviour in fiction with (tacit) approbation would encourage it. As he said in Rambler No. 4: “that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects.” Griffith, contrariwise, is concerned that readers will suffer through empathy.

If your protagonist must suffer (and to a degree we all must), at that point use the reader’s mirror neurons judiciously. Empathy is a powerful tool, and sharp. Be careful how you wield it.

I just read The Colony by Audrey Magee, a study of the individual behaviours involved in colonisation, which contains plenty that made me wince, and arguably fails Johnson’s test. I can’t agree it that ought to save my feelings or minimise representing evil to try and discourage it, though I confess I skipped one page. It was simply too tragic.

Hackenfeller’s Ape

Lucy Scholes briefly reviews Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy, a novella from 1953 about a professor who saves a gorilla from being used in a bizarre experiment. I’m thrilled to see the book reissued. Hackenfeller’s Ape is short enough to finish in a couple of hours and you certainly won’t have read anything quite like it. With so much interest in animal rights today, it’s a good choice for revival.

The early 1950s was a golden age. Other novels from 1953 include The Go-Between (now overshadowed by Ian McEwan’s second-rate knock-off, Atonement). 1954 gave us (as well as Lucky Jim and Lord of the Flies) A Villa in Summer by Penelope Mortimer, The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, and The Key that Rusts by Isobel English. The 1950s is also the decade of The End of the Affair and The Fountain Overflows. All recommended.

And I didn’t even mention any American novels…

Reading Herbert

I enjoy everything writes on his Substack, especially this short reflection on reading George Herbert, which focusses on The Flower (a good poem for late bloomers):

How do these poems achieve their effects? The answer lies in the changing uses to which the floral metaphor is put, and also surely in the way line length is varied and rhymes are chosen. Is saying that enough? It does not amount to a recipe for producing such effects in one’s own poetry.

John Donne: a hellcat meme-minter at the pulpit

An interesting essay by about why people aren’t more ambitious, with reflections on the decline of literary culture. People were once exposed to the Bible every day, talked in detail about sermons they heard, and were used to long, complex sentences. Today, we are not constantly in the vision of greatness, and are plagued everywhere by the short simple sentences online-writing coaches approve of (a syntactical pollution plagued upon us by George Orwell, among others). Easy to disagree with some of the particulars, hard to dissent from the overall picture, however much difference you feel it has made in the end. And he’s right about Donne. Read the sermons!

Slush Systems

In the past, people got published through nepotism. That gave us Proust and Joyce. Today, we use slush piles thousands of manuscripts deep with the same stuff from the same MFA programmes. “To find and elevate brilliant new art that breaks the mold, we first need to create paths for such work to reach the surface and be seen.” But what system? The idea that local journals can flourish seems wrong: journals are currently closing down. And do you remember La Revue Blanche? Theatres are a strange comparison: many in theatre lament the decline of reparatory playhouses.

Doesn’t this just add up to: run the system better? Maybe part of the answer is something we don’t want to hear—a lot of people in charge have bad taste and a lot of aspirational writers spend too much time in the system? Every age has chaff, we pay too much attention to ours. Changing the system might not much difference. MFA-style is a symptom, not a cause…