Read more, Generations, Hill, Post-feminist Austen, Marketing Tolstoy, Delve, Book Tok, Close Reading, Anthology, Reverse Engineering, AI firms, Publishing, Sontag, Who Cares?, Serious Joke Poems

The irregular review of reviews, vol. XVI

Paid subscribers can join this chat thread about Pride and Prejudice. The book club meets on 16th February. The next Shakespeare book club is 23rd February. We are discussing The Comedy of Errors. I strongly recommend watching this version from the Globe.

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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 Julianne Werlin. (I added her to my Recommendations recently.) Life and Letters 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

Nick Prassas is transcribing Geoffrey Hill’s Oxford lectures, which, remarkably, has not been done before. The Substack is called Lectures and Talks of Geoffrey Hill . 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 The Hinternet:—

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!

The Hinternet 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?

Naomi Kanakia 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 Victoria 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 Sam Kahn about AI, I mentioned this piece by Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal). 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

Blake Smith 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?

Isaac Kolding 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.

1. I could write a whole essay on how outrageous it is to call Fanny Price Priggish and shall be doing so when we read MP in a few weeks. Until then I will simply register my outrage (outrage I tell you!) in this, admittedly rather priggish, footnote.