Big questions?

I'm reading "The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take/It’s an ungodly amount of reading and no easy A. So why are freshmen lining up to get into Humanities 10?" (Wall Street Journal).

The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?” 

The students burst into applause.

Big questions? I'd say small questions.

I'd ask — instead of "Why read novels at all?" — why go to college to read a novel and to listen to a professor comment on the likability of characters and whether we identify with them. That sounds like a local reading group that barely gets off the ground. 

That reminds me. Last night I dreamed I was a law professor again.

"The age of AI will disrupt the workplace in all sorts of ways. But the work will continue..."

"... as other kinds of work have continued through technological disruptions. People still run the 100-meter dash, even though a car or a cheetah could do it faster. We still cook elaborate dinners, even though the frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes. We still have dinner parties, even though we could stream wittier banter from Netflix — because we are humans, and we want to seek excellence, not just consume it. AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work. But if so, it will also make it easier for us to focus on the reasons that work is worth doing."

So says Megan McArdle, in "Every novel might have to pass an AI test soon/Artificial intelligence threatens writers’ livelihoods. It may also remind them why they write" (WaPo)(gift link).

The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute. Strike the "highly" and maybe you've got the beginning of a good enough analogy.

Also: "a car or a cheetah could do it faster" — there's no antecedent for "it." Do what faster? Anyway, it's not that people run the 100-meter dash, it's that other people care about and watch them running. Speed is interesting to us because of whatever it is that is going fast. We also care about and watch cars and cheetahs going fast, but it's not the speed per se that matters. It's the thing that's managing to go that fast. I've been impressed by a fast-moving tortoise.

As for reading, there are different kinds of readers. I don't think I'm the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains. Does it bother me if readers of hackwork are not getting human hacks? Maybe it does!

"For a minute I thought this was going to be another Anne Carson post."

Wrote Smilin' Jack in the comments to the post that begins "His English mastiff was dying, so he hired her to read its mind. But when she met the man with the messy hair, he kept apologizing for his casual outfit."

And isn't this a lovely tribute to the literature Nobelist who's found her way into a few of my posts? 

There are some writers who rearrange your vision so that other things look as though they are influenced by her mind. That may be what Carson did to Jack and it may be what Carson did to me. Maybe I am picking out different things to blog or finding excerpts in some new way, framing the post differently, and maybe Jack is reading these things differently. 

Don't you want writers to shake up your world? Don't you want to live in the enchanted world where dogs send you messages that psychics step up to translate? 

Carson says some things about dogs. Like this, from page 142 of the Kindle edition of "Wrong Norma" (commission earned): 

"The color, I think, for many people maybe has been drained out of life..."

"... and when they were to point at it, maybe, if the reality is, yeah, dude, you're distracted all the time, and you scroll easily forgettable largely gray homogenous slop on a daily basis and your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears you think about what that consumption pattern is like you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis...."

Said Chris Williamson on the new episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast, titled "Why Life Feels So Dull All The Time (and how to fix it)."

He's talking with Robert Greene, who has a new book called "The Law of the Sublime" (commission earned). Maybe he's got the answer to our problem of colorlessness. 

Williamson prompts:

Alexithymia.

I'm reading "My Fiancé Won’t Touch Me. Should I Still Marry Him? Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied" (NYT).

From the letter writer:

Our therapist and I suspect undiagnosed alexithymia (or difficulty in experiencing and describing emotions), while he defensively attributes it to mere “emotional reserve.” After a year of failed couples counseling, we are living in a completely platonic relationship.

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

"... the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us..."

Ever since my experience with "the foul-mouth parrot Andrew Jackson once had" — which required me to get my head examined — I've been on the lookout for sentences that resist reading,  perhaps to the point where I consider the possibility that I have lost the ability to read. 

In that light, I contemplated this famously long sentence by Virginia Woolf, which begins her essay "On Being Ill."

"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death

"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).