Frost, AI, Classics, Eliot, Taste, Love, Emre, Schiller, Slop, Orfeo, Wright, Aphantasia, Lists, Leopard

The irregular review of reviews, vol. XVII

Welcome to the irregular review of reviews, a monthly round-up of links to interesting (literary) essays, as well as my short (or not so short) commentary, either on the essay or the topic. Topics have ranged from Tolstoy to Matthew Perry. Sometimes I review other things too.

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.

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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 Rohit Krishnan)

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

Catherine Lacey 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. Rohit Krishnan 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

Emily Spinach 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 Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) 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.