Christmas, science, context, suicide, E.B. White, Bear, Piranesi, James, reading, epigraphs?, Murdoch, selfish, X, smells, Potter, gpt philosophy, PhD, rating Austen, American fantasy?, Art job

The BUMPER CHRISTMAS EDITION of the irregular review of reviews, XIV

Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

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

BDM 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 John Pistelli 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

Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) 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 Rebecca Lowe 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.