I’m sure many of you read . The editor, has published a written interview with me there. (Some of you will have read my AI debate with Sam.) He asked me about my career trajectory, luck and late blooming, finding an audience on Substack, the future of Substack, my aesthetic values, Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (obviously), why I am pro AI when I am a literary type, and some other things. I declined to answer the “who would you cannibalise first” question, though as I said to , Johnson actually outlived the others. My thanks to Sam!
Here are two excerpts.
2.And you seem to have this very deep — I assume life-long — love of reading. Was that love of reading always there? How did that develop?
I don’t remember it developing. As long as I have been aware of myself, I have been like this. My father told me once that I just arrived like that. Wherever my mother took me, she took me with a stack of books. I don’t even really think of it as a “love” of reading. This is just what I am.
And this
13.You’re really an advocate for returning to the classics and to great literature over and over again. In a word, what’s the value of doing that?
Pleasure. Beauty. Excellence. Ideas. Human life is a wide affair and requires all faculties of our minds to be comprehended. Frank Kermode said that poets help us make sense of our lives, critics only attempt to make sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
