"Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood."

Having recently suffered a bout of isolated transient alexia, I worry about a relapse when I encounter a sentence like that. It makes me wonder: Do I still have the ability to read?

That's the first sentence of a novel — writers put a lot of effort into crafting sentence #1, you know! — and that one is calling out to readers who are not me. Somehow every noun needs at least one adjective — or 3 or 6.

The book is "The Brimming Cup" by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It was the #2 bestseller of 1921. (#1 was "Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis.) Here's a great picture of Canfield Fisher:

"'What are you reading?' I asked. Here’s what 5 strangers told me."

Nora Krug — in WaPo — experiments with what seems to be an excellent topic as she provides more evidence that there really is — as I've said I'd observed — a talking-to-strangers trend.

"I think a lot of men view reading fiction as a frivolous waste of time. We’ve been conditioned to ignore the benefits of empathy."

"I think it’s a marketing problem. Reading should be sold to men like lifting weights for your brain. But it’s not just men. People who are happily staring at their phone all day don’t want to pick up a book. Their attention spans are fried."

From "Anthony Jeselnik: Men Should Think of Reading as 'Lifting Weights for Your Brain'/But the comedian isn’t naïve when he makes selections for his popular book club: 'Most importantly, they’re short'" (NYT gift link).

Asked "What’s a supposedly funny book that you just don’t find funny?," Jeselnik answers, "I have zero tolerance for David Sedaris." 

I wonder what David Sedaris would say about the notion that "Reading should be sold to men like lifting weights for your brain."

"Singapore will pay people to read in a government initiative aimed at mitigating the superficiality of online content and..."

"... encouraging 'curious minds, deep thinkers and informed citizen.' The city state has launched a programme called ReadSG under which people are encouraged to log their daily reading on an app in return for virtual 'coins,' redeemable for cash. The idea is inspired by the goal of walking 10,000 steps a day.... The sums of money in play are small and no one is going to get rich from reading in Singapore, although its organisers hope that the 'gamification' element and the rewards offered by the programme will motivate participants.... Someone who logged 15 minutes a day for a year would be entitled to S$7.30 (£4.25)."

I'm reading "The city that pays people to put down the phone and read a book Singapore is seeking to turn the page on ‘doomscrolling’ with a system in which readers can log their progress in exchange for cash" (London Times).

So... get off your phone... get on your phone... which is it?

Isolated Transient Alexia, Part 2.

No, I didn't have another incident, though I did run into another sentence that powerfully resisted reading. From Reddit:

But I did have to add an update to Monday's post, "Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?":

The various doctors would not simply accept my opinion that this was an isolated transient alexia — a migrainous accompaniment. They had to see it as a possible TIA. Not only were various tests ordered up, but even the best results don't eliminate the possibility that it was a TIA and so the cautious approach is to assume that it was.

Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?

JAMA Neurology abstract: "Alexia as a transient or paroxysmal neurologic event is a rare clinical finding. John Hughlings Jackson made reference to the paroxysmal occurrence of 'word blindness' as a temporary sequela of neuronal exhaustion at an epileptogenic focus.... A transient episode of alexia in the absence of accompanying neurologic deficit is exceedingly rare.... We recently observed a patient who experienced an isolated, transient alexia that appears to have been a migrainous accompaniment...."

I suspect this happened to me. Here's what I was trying to read and could not make any sense of it, and I struggled from all different angles: "The Story of the Foul-Mouthed Parrot Andrew Jackson Once Had" (an episode of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep"). 

Now, I think that's a type of headline that is objectively hard to puzzle out. I encountered another one this morning in the NY Post: "Missouri foster mom accused of trading teen for monkey avoids prison." Something about the sequence "monkey avoids prison" sends your thoughts tripping over the precipice. 

But that "Foul-Mouth Parrot" headline was entirely undecipherable to me. I searched for an entry point: What is "Story"? What is "Andrew"? "Foul"? I couldn't even think of how to begin to pronounce those words or how words work together to mean something. This not-knowing lasted for about 15 minutes, and of course, I queried A.I. about it. That was after Meade had consulted a different A.I.

And I believe all A.I.s will tell you the same thing if you put this story into it — not the story of Andrew Jackson's parrot or the story of the foster mom's monkey — the story of a reading human suddenly completely unable to read. And we did what A.I. told us to do. That's why there was no sunrise photo yesterday. Our sleep was massively disrupted. I had to get my head examined.

ADDED: I omitted a crucial detail that is why I was thinking in terms of a migrainous accompaniment. About an hour before the alexia, I experienced a scintillating scotoma — a glittering arc'd zigzag in my visual field. I've had that twice before, in 2004 and 2014. In 2014, I treated it as nothing, but it felt like a big deal in 2004. I blogged it as "My scotoma" (deliberately evoking "My Sharona"):

"Reading Count of Monte Cristo in One Sitting."

Its a TikTok thing. I'm seeing 12 videos in this group. Check it out. Reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a thing these days, but why? It's super-long, so people have been avoiding it, but word has got out that it's a very exciting, gripping read. If you like — or think you might like — video of people reading, click through. It really is people reading — reading "The Count of Monte Cristo."

By the way, I have not read "The Count of Monte Cristo." It was my father's favorite book, or so he often said, often conjoined with the opinion that he hated "The Return of the Native." I have read "The Return of the Native" and 4 other Thomas Hardy novels. My son Chris recently read "The Count of Monte Cristo," though his main reading project is biographies of U.S. Presidents.

This post was inspired by a comment from Jaq on my previous post, which is about the decline of childhood reading. Jaq wrote: "Just bought The Count of Monte Christo [sic] through your link, and there it sits, like a cinder block on my coffee table, will I finish it? Now I guess I’ll have to, but it will hardly fit in my hip pocket the way I always sported one as a teenager. You can’t blame kids though, we are the ones who invented the crack, I mean smartphones."

And here's the latest photograph from a presidential biography sent to me by Chris. The scene is JFK's reception for black leaders on the 100-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation:

"Looking back, I grew up in the last great age of childhood reading. Juvenile bookworms..."

"... were still a regular sight in the early Noughties. You could glimpse our kind on trains and in cafés: wan, bespectacled and dreamy, trailing after our parents, clutching our grubby, sticky copies of The Chronicles of Narnia or Northern Lights. It was the era of Philip Pullman, of Horrible Histories, of Artemis Fowl. Above all, it was the age of Harry Potter, with its feverish midnight queues of miniature witches and wizards up past their bedtime to get their hands on the latest instalment (my sister and I went to the cavernous, warehouse-sized Borders bookshop at Silverlink Retail Park wearing bin bags for Hogwarts capes).... [A]s the age of print fades away and the angry, distractible age of the smartphone dawns, I think we find ourselves facing a post-literate world that will resemble the pre-literate world: less democratic, less rational and less enlightened...."

Writes James Marriott in "The 36 books that changed my life/An obsession with words got the Times columnist through his eccentric childhood and his parents’ divorce. Now 33, he has written a book — in praise of reading, of course" (London Times).

I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list. I've read many of the books, and I was motivated to buy one of them on the spot — "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Another — "In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." — I would have bought if there had been an audiobook. 

Marriott's new book is "The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," and I will buy that too when it comes out in October, assuming there's an audiobook. There are some things I know I need to walk to read. 

If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.

"When I’ve alluded to my penchant for audiobooks... I’ve occasionally been chided and told that they’re bastardizations of the real thing..."

"... and that printed volumes are truer to an author’s intent, better suited to lingering over language, superior through and through. Maybe so. But do the evangelists of that religion pause to wonder why we heretics exist? Some of us worship differently not because we haven’t seen the light, but because we don’t see well."

Writes Frank Bruni, in his newsletter (NYT gift link).

He describes his vision problem: "Almost nine years ago, I had a stroke that ravaged the optic nerve behind my right eye and rendered that eye pretty much useless. I wrote about that in this 2018 essay.... Since the incident, my slightly off-kilter monocular vision hasn’t deteriorated further.... [There is a] gap between what each of us struggles with and what the people in our orbits know or see of it.... It’s the source of so much ignorance, insensitivity and even cruelty."

(If you click through to the newsletter, you'll see the headline is "Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican." You might want to read that. I did, but then I didn't want to blog about it... and did want to blog about the old audiobooks issue, even though I've blogged it many times before, as a click on my "audiobooks" tag will prove.)

"We do not become good readers and learners by mastering generalizable skills but rather by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information..."

"... that allow us to make sense of a text. A child who knows a lot about baseball will do a better job reading and summarizing a passage on baseball than a child with a higher reading level but no knowledge of the subject. From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story not only because one is beautiful and the other is not, but because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture. It thus increases our conversancy with all the texts from that culture. That is why it makes sense for fifth graders in Texas to read 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,' 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' 'Paul Revere’s Ride' and even, speaking of baseball, 'Casey at the Bat.'"

I'm reading "What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List" and "Texas Book List: See What Students Will Be Required to Read/What is essential reading? Texas has an answer: Classics, including the Bible" (NYT gift links).

I liked reading that booklist. Interesting to see various Bible readings pop up amid the poems and storybooks. You know what the first Bible story is? I comes up in Kindergarten: Jonah 1:1-5, 10-17, 2:10. What translation?, I wonder. And what verses are skipped over? Are the little ones going to read...

The water came over me and choked me;

the sea covered me completely,
and seaweed wrapped around my head.
I went down to the very roots of the mountains,
into the land whose gates lock shut forever

"I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning."

"Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories.... Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.... Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."

Writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff, "a neuroscientist who studies curiosity," in "We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask" (NYT).

Intriguing questions that popped up for me: 1. What kind of name is "Le Cunff"? 2. "The danger is not.../It is..." seems to be one of those things — like em dashes and the word "delve" — that A.I. tends to write, so did Le Cunff use A.I. to write this essay?

Answers: 1. It means "the gentle," "the affable," or "the debonnaire." 2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did. 

"Readin' the classics and pickin' up plastics: Litterature."

I'm a big fan of volunteer litter picker uppers, and why wouldn't it entail reading the classics? 12 more episodes: here.

"He read 'Moby-Dick' at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory."

"As an after-dinner party game, he liked to recite 'Paradise Lost,' starting from any line a tipsy guest chose."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Inside the Mind of the ‘Man Who Read Everything’/A collection of Harold Bloom’s letters details the working life of one of America’s most influential intellects" (NYT).

"He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment."

"No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, 'The Town and the City.' I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home."

Writes Joyce Johnson, in "What Gets Kept/More than half a century after 'On the Road,' Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew" (The New Yorker).

I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me.... that killed me. I read the line out of context to Meade and he laughed.

When do you ever say, I thought I was reading that book, but, really, that book was reading me?

More generally, when do you ever speak of interacting with an inanimate object and reverse the usual directionality of actor and acted upon?

I can only think of one example, something I considered the funniest thing in "A Hard Day's Night" when saw it the first time:

 

"[His wife] might have knitted it"/"She knitted him."

I asked Grok to help me think of other examples, and it gave me the highbrow answer: "When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

"The worst part about AI is that it is giving the experience of competence to people who are stupid."

"These people who now are firing off 30-page Claude AI slop documents and they think they're smart and brilliant. They're following up with you, asking you to read them, and you check them out. None of it makes sense! These are people who, before AI, they were incompetent people. They couldn't even make a document, they couldn't write a good 2-page document, they couldn't organize their thoughts. Because they couldn't do that, they actually couldn't produce any output. And now they can produce output. They produce extremely long outputs that are terrible. It's because they, for the first time in their lives, have the experience of competence. It's making the rest of us miserable."

Says Jake Abrams, on TikTok. I prefer to read his comment as text, but you might want to observe him and see if it affects your reaction to what he's saying. I saw this first as video and decided to blog it but took the trouble to make a transcript because I find the video distracting. He drops the microphone at the end.

Clearly, he thinks he is one of the smart people. He doesn't like the stupid people horning in on the space that belonged to him and his people — you know, the ones who were always producing documents that gave off the impression of competence. Have those documents been making much sense? Were they concise? 

Now that everyone can produce long documents that look good superficially, what's going to happen? If people continue to read documents, will they separate out the search for what was written by A.I. or will they judge everything skeptically? It's more likely that they will use A.I. to read the documents and to assess them critically. In the end, who's going to feel that they are "smart and brilliant"? Is Abrams afraid that those he wants to view as stupid, perhaps because they didn't go to a good college, are going to play the game of using A.I. better than those who thought they had it made because they did go to a good college?

We'll see who picks up the tools and uses them best. 

In the UW Arboretum...

... there were some blossoming magnolias...

... but mostly the trees were bare.

We kept stopping at benches and catching up on our reading. Have you forgotten the pleasure of reading outdoors?

And don't be telling me those aren't magnolias. This comes up every year. I looked back to last year. It was precisely the same day that we went to the arb — April 13th: "These are our magnolias. You don't need to tell me that your magnolias look different or that only your magnolias deserve the name magnolias. These are magnolias."

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"Am I being performative?"

AND: "Marine destroys woke college professor."

"So, buy books at an estate sale, remove the dust jackets, then organize by color? Fire the podcaster and rehire your book reviewers."

Says a commenter at the WaPo article "The multiuse home space trend is coming for your dining room/A DIY dining library can create the perfect space for reading, crafting, work or dining with friends. Here’s how to get one."

The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:

Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.

I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.

Gavin Newsom requests that we spare him our fake fucking outrage.

You didn’t give a shit about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations shitholes — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia?

Spare me your fake fucking outrage,… https://t.co/ABNZJQJLcj

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) February 23, 2026

So Gavin's playing a major role in the normalization of "fuck." That's one of the ways he's like Trump. I'm starting a "Newsom is like Trump" tag. You'll see.

But I need to call attention to his use of the word "spare," which we were just talking about, here, 3 days ago, after the father of the gold-medal-winning figure skater said "I spared no money, no time." Compare that to Newsom's "Spare me your fake fucking outrage." "I spared no money" means I held no money back. And "Spare me your fake fucking outrage" means don't give me any of your FFO — hold it all back.

I've thought about it a lot, and "spare" is not a contronym (AKA a Janus word). It does not belong with the notorious "cleave" and the king of confusion "sanction."