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

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