Bill Maher has another awkward conversation with an over-90 celebrity he admired when he was a kid. And he's 71.

Last week it was Barbara Eden. This week it's Woody Allen.

 

MAHER: You say... in your unconvincing defense of how you're not an intellectual...  that you never read "Great Expectations," you never read "Ulysses," you never read "1984," "Catch 22, "Don Quixote"....

WOODY: That's right. I've never read any of the ones you've just mentioned.

MAHER: I've read 'em all. You want to get the skinny on them. You want to, you want to get...

WOODY: Yeah, you could condense 'em? 

MAHER: Yeah, well... 

WOODY: I hadn't the patience to read any of them. I was never a reader. I never enjoyed reading as a kid.

Maureen Dowd knows what guys want.

I'm reading Maureen Dowd's new column (NYT):

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer. 

At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read “Northanger Abbey.”

How does she know what this guy wants?! Maybe he's good at pretending. Maybe he wants it as a means to an end and it's the end that is really wanted. He wants you to think that he wants what you want him to want. 

"Missing from Mr. Pelzer’s list of books was the Bible, even though he had read it about a dozen times, his son said."

"Mr. Pelzer was a devout Catholic who left the Jesuit seminary for the Peace Corps. 'My friends from high school would always laugh,' John Pelzer, 51, recalled. When they visited, 'he would always be reading in our basement, typically the Bible, and he would be drinking a 40-ounce malt liquor — typically, Olde English.'"

From "He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List. After Dan Pelzer died this month at 92, his children uploaded the handwritten reading list to what-dan-read.com, hoping to inspire readers everywhere" (NYT).

What do you need to do to get The New York Times to write an article about all the books your father read? You have to put together a website as cool as "What Dan Read."

"I am having a hard time understanding the following Logan Pearsall Smith quote: 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'"

"Googling didn't help much other than whose quote it is. What exactly does the above quote mean?"

Wrote someone at the English Language & Usage website, 12 years ago.

I'm reading that because I was reading — not living — this 2017 New Yorker article: "Philip Larkin and Me: A Friendship with Holes in It": "I remember him one day snatching from my mantelpiece a bookmark, on which was inscribed Logan Pearsall Smith’s remark 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' He threw it down in a little fit of anger, protesting that nothing is more important than life."

These days, someone who couldn't even understand the quote — perhaps someone new to English and mystified by "is the thing" — would probably ask A.I.

I talked to A.I., which is not living, and I said: Understanding the quote (and the love for or objection to it) on a deeper level requires you to come to terms with the question whether you are not living when you are reading.

And then, getting into my A.I.-induced flow, I said: Smith is making a joke out of the implication that to read is not to live. Presumably other people, like Paul's grandfather, in "A Hard Day's Night," say that those who are reading are not living. Instead of fighting with that assertion, Smith says he'd rather read. That's a cheeky response. But it infuriates Larkin. 

Redstarts and that Wobbling Rock.

Rain nixed the sunrise run today, but the weather was lovely when the time came for what I call The Second Walk, and I encountered 2 very tiny, very active birds along the woodland path. 

The "Visual Intelligence" button on my phone informed me that they were redstarts. Redstarts! Never heard of them. And I say "them" because they're both there, male and female. The female is hard to see, but as The Beatles observed long ago, that means she's good looking.

I got a second outing, to the front yard, which is heavily shaded now. I sat on the bench and read a book — read it 3 times. Almost understood it.

Write about anything you want in the comments. Did you get outside 2 or 3 times? Did you read any books cover to cover, multiple times? 

"I used to read like a fiend, but I’ve given it up because it took up my time. I paint and draw all the time now..."

"... and watch films and read reviews in the paper. The last book I read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, 15 years ago."

From "Rose Wylie: I haven’t read a book in 15 years/The artist on why she had to put down Ulysses, the films that make her cry— and the fellow artist she would invite to dinner" (London Times).

Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling. You can fill time with other things too. How is reading a book different from those other things, and why do so many people seem to think that it's better than those other things? It's refreshing to hear Rose Wylie announce without shame that she hasn't read a book in 15 years. She prefers other things.

Here's her favorite poem.

Goodbye to Justice Souter.

I'm seeing "David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court’s Liberal Wing, Dies at 85/He left conservatives bitterly disappointed with his migration from right to left, leading to the cry of “no more Souters'" (NYT)(free-access link).

A shy man who never married and who much preferred an evening alone with a good book to a night in the company of Washington insiders, Justice Souter retired at the unusually young age of 69 to return to his beloved home state.... He turned down all the opportunities for foreign travel that other justices accepted eagerly.... No one who had Boston needed Paris, he would say.

An update on Valerie.

You remember Valerie, the miniature dachshund who escaped into the wilds of Kangaroo Island, blogged here.

Today, I see "Valerie the dachshund rescued after 17 months in Australian wilderness/The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor" (WaPo).

I had to blog that... in case you were on tenterhooks.

What are tenterhooks anyway?

Bill Kristol wants you to know that he still hasn't read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," but...

... he "recognize[s] the work’s stature as a significant and influential part of our literary and cultural history."

I'm reading "In a World of Pete Hegseths, Be a Maya Angelou."

I don't know if Kristol knows what he's telling us we need to "be," but he's upset that "pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to purge so-called DEI content from military libraries and classrooms, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was removed, along with 380 other books, from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library."

Kristol asserts, despite not having read the book, that "'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' is not 'DEI content.' It’s a quintessentially American autobiography—a popular and important one. It’s a book a student at the Academy might want to read for his or her education, or for pleasure."

Why would the story of a particular individual represent the promotion of the DEI agenda?

"In his book 'The Paradox of Choice,' psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the idea that too many choices produce paralysis and then often discontent."

"Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.... It was one of the last times I fully got into a book, in this case Norman Mailer’s 1,056-page masterwork 'The Executioner’s Song,' so immersed that I forgot there was a pandemic in the first place. I mostly ignored dating apps, which are as awful as they are necessary because everyone else is on them. But now, for a moment, there was no real shame in being alone. For the first time, I didn’t feel guilty about feeling lonely.... I thought more deeply about my life, and how I wanted to live. But I also did things I always said I wanted to do but — short of a natural disaster — knew I never would. Like watch the films of the Swedish existentialist director Ingmar Bergman.... Yes, it was a bit masochistic, but watching 12 of his films in rapid succession ended up being an unusual highlight of an unusual year. I also live-tweeted the experience, perhaps as a way to make a solitary adventure less so...."

Writes Shadi Hamid, in "Missing the solitude of covid," one essay in a WaPo collection of 5 essays looking back on the lockdown — free access link.

1. "And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom" — reminds me of the line in The Book of Common Prayer, "whose service is perfect freedom." The "who" is, of course, God. The service is chosen. The lockdown was imposed from the outside and it wasn't anything like God. But it's interesting to contemplate the difference... and to ask Grok to sketch out an "Ingmar Bergman" screenplay on the subject. 

2. "The Paradox of Choice" — yay! Glad to see that come up again. I've got a tag for it. I made that unusually specific tag because I could see this is what "they" have in store for us: a world without choice and with an induced and cultivated belief that the constriction of choice is the key to happiness. We practiced within the lockdown and "they" got to see how well we did.

3. "The Executioner’s Song" — I wrote a law review article about it long ago: "Standing, In Fluffy Slippers." That was back in 1991 when I believed I could find a new way to write within the genre of law review articles. Mailer's book is about Gary Gilmore, who, condemned to death, chose the firing squad. How's that for a "Paradox of Choice"? Oddly enough, just last Thursday a man was executed — in South Carolina — by firing squad. Could have picked lethal injection. Picked firing squad.

4. I like that the essay writer, locked down, eschewed dating apps but embraced live-tweeting. He didn't want to feel so all alone. 

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

"One thing I like about you, A.I., is that I don't need to feel bad if I don't read all the things you've gone to the 'trouble' to write for me."

That's something I wrote after getting a lot of great material on the subject of the perception of time. I was interested in time, and a subcomponent of that interest was my interest in saving time, including getting A.I. to summarize a book it had dug up and — seeing the multi-part text — thinking not yet.

I had 2 different A.I.s going and gave them both that prompt quoted in the post title. ChatGPT said:

Thank you! I’m here to share, not to judge—and I definitely don’t have feelings to hurt. Dip in, skim, or skip as much as you like. If something catches your interest, we can zoom in. Otherwise, I’ll keep happily churning out words whenever you need them!

 Grok said:

No worries at all! I'm here to help and provide information when you need it. Feel free to read as much or as little as you like. If you have any more questions or need further details on anything, just let me know!

I asked both A.I.s: "But don't you think it might erode my character? I am learning to ignore what is said to me. I might lose social skills." Both began their answer the same way, verbatim: "That's a thoughtful concern."

ChatGPT continued:

"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."

"[Jordan] Peterson’s thesis... is that... 'archetypes' recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.' The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about 'the intrinsic nature of being' in the most banal and improbable places.... And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: 'Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,' 'smoke is essence, gist or spirit,' the rainbow 'represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.'..."

Writes James Marriott, in "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad/The conservative polemicist’s new book is a bizarre study of the Bible featuring Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter and Tinkerbell the porn fairy" (London Times).

Tell me about an "interpretative system" that is better than Jordan Peterson's "whim." He's one man, interpreting things. If my "job" is to "sit still" and take in his ideas, how is that different from reading any book? The author isn't here with me, the reader, to be "argued with." But I buy the Kindle version and excerpt any passage I want to pick apart, and I do my own writing here on this blog, which you are sitting still and reading. If you are "overtaken with apathy," you stop reading. If you want to argue, you go into the comments section. If it's just too much interpretation, coming at you endlessly, take a break. Nobody said you had to read this all at once. I heard that Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was 9 years old. That's unusual, and it's not what the encyclopedia writers had in mind.

Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."

ADDED: The book review says that Peterson asserts that "the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.'" So — without mentioning Peterson or Cain — I asked Grok what those characters have in common. Answer:

"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

"Valiant says that he tries not to use the word 'intelligent' to describe people (in fact, he is 'sometimes taken aback' when he hears others use it)..."

"... instead, he is drawn to 'valuable abilities that somehow involve learning and are not well captured by conventional notions of IQ.' An educable mind, he writes, can learn from books, lectures, conversations, experiences, and Zen koans—from anything, really—and notice when relevant aspects of almost forgotten knowledge reveal themselves.... To a degree, the connections, recombinations, and new applications of knowledge involved in being educable are useful precisely because they aren’t obvious.... A civil-engineering class I took in college, which focussed on the structural forces shouldered by bridges and skyscrapers, comes back to me with great regularity when I think about all sorts of things. Wind exerts its force along the length of a skyscraper, causing it to bend. Similarly, a new source of stress in your life can’t be compartmentalized; it increases the pressure everywhere. It’s interesting to see one’s mind through the lens of educability. It makes you wonder what other cross-pollinations have occurred.... Reading widely about things that don’t seem immediately or practically useful, in the hope that what you learn now may prove meaningful later—that’s pretty much the definition of a liberal-arts education. Who knew that one of its best defenders would turn out to be a computer scientist?"

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "What Does It Really Mean to Learn?/A leading computer scientist says it’s 'educability,' not intelligence, that matters most" (The New Yorker).

Valiant =  Leslie Valiant, the computer scientist. His book is “The Importance of Being Educable.” 

"Subtract your age from 100, and you’ll end up with the number of pages you need to read before dropping a book."

Writes Maya Chung, in "Go Ahead, Put Down That Book" (The Atlantic)(free-access link).

That links to "When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book?/How to decide to put down a book—without all the angst" (also in The Atlantic, with a free-access link).

Before dropping a book, you need to figure out what’s motivating you to stop reading it.

"You studied semiotics in college. I’m curious if that also shapes the way you think of narrative...."

Sarah Larson asks Ira Glass, in "Ira Glass Hears It All/Three decades into 'This American Life,' the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of 'The Daily'" (The New. Yorker).

Glass answers:

For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.

Why I read something this blurry.

I'd just watched "What a Way to Go" — the Criterion Channel is featuring Shirley MacLaine movies — and checking Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that Joan Didion wrote a review in the May 1964 issue of Vogue. I could subscribe to Vogue just to read that paragraph, but I found that by calming down and believing in myself, I could read it. It's not much different from reading without one's reading glasses. It's an apt and pithy review. "What a Way to Go" was a big movie in its day, so it deserves the bad reviews it got, but 60 years later, it's fun to look at the stars and the costumes and the sets. The Hollywood that produced it no longer exists. Nothing to get mad at now. Here's a sentence from the contemporaneous NYT review by Bosley Crowther:

Inspired by a Gwen Davis story, which has not swum into my ken, so I cannot tell you how fairly or fouly it has been used, the team of musical-comedy writers is making kookie jokes about a girl whose sad fate it is to marry a succession of burgeoning millionaires.

The "girl" hates money, loves Henry David Thoreau, and only wants to live the simple life, but the movie seems to have been made on the theory that the way to make good art is by spending as much money as possible.

"English sales have accelerated in recent years, in part because books now go viral on social media, especially TikTok."

"Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok.... 'We are in the middle of a transition,' said Simon Dikker Hupkes, a commissioning editor at the Dutch publisher Atlas Contact. The fact that many readers overlook the Dutch translations, he said, 'hurts our hearts a little.' Asha Hodge, 19, who described herself as an avid reader, said she preferred to read in English because she enjoyed posting about books in English on her Instagram account...."

From "English-Language Books Are Filling Europe’s Bookstores. Mon Dieu! Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media" (NYT).

Reading poetry out loud "can induce peak emotional responses... that might include goose bumps or chills. "

"It can help you locate an emotion within yourself, which is important to health as a form of emotional processing. Poetry also contains complex, unexpected elements, like when Shakespeare uses god as a verb in Coriolanus: 'This last old man … godded me.' In an fMRI study... such literary surprise was shown to be stimulating to the brain... [Literature] can cause us to recall our most complex experiences and derive meaning from them. A poem or story read aloud is particularly enthralling... because it becomes a live presence in the room, with a more direct and penetrative quality, akin to live music.... Discussing the literature that you read aloud can be particularly valuable.... [D]oing so helps penetrate rigid thinking and can dislodge dysfunctional thought patterns.... [It may] expand[] emotional vocabulary... perhaps even more so than cognitive behavioral therapy...."

Writes Alexandra Moe, in "We’re All Reading Wrong/To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud" (The Atlantic).

This essay talks about reading out loud to another person and reading aloud when you are alone. There is some discussion of the benefit of listening to another person read to you. You might adopt the practice of taking turns reading aloud with your spouse. There's a brief mention of audiobooks, in the context of saying that you'll remember more of a book if you read it out loud.