About (the end of?) reading

Joshua Rothman on the effect AI is having on reading:

Artificial intelligence, in itself, is unmotivated; it reads, but is not a reader; its “interests,” at any given time, depend fundamentally on the questions it’s asked. And so its usefulness as a reading tool depends on the existence of a culture of reading which it can’t embody or perpetuate.

Indeed, a culture that AI is helping to eradicate, or at least change beyond recognition, as Rothman himself predicts: 

Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work... Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over.

Although maybe we’re already there. In class the other day I was talking to an articulate teenager who expressed more curiosity about her own country than her high school’s sanitised history curriculum was able to satisfy. But when I told her I could suggest a few books to fill in the gap, she visibly recoiled. That word. Books. Ugh.

PS: Gary Shteyngart foresaw that ugh, more than a decade ago.

PPS: Composers are doomed as well, it seems.

About ffwd

As is so often the case these days, I don’t know if this is real, or just ragebait. But I can imagine a great many people nodding along to it. 

About 1968

I was born in 1968, which really was one of those years, wasn’t it? The assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring and its sudden end and of course the student revolts, most famously the Paris événements. Indeed, I made my entrance in the midst of the latter kerfuffle, albeit in bucolic Devon rather than at the Sorbonne. Indeed I’ve occasionally adopted the slogan above (“May 68, beginning of a prolonged struggle”) as a statement of biographical intent.

And then I discover, in Joan Didion’s The White Album (named, of course, after one of the best records released that year), a line that trumps it: 

By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

PS: Further good stuff from the Didion: discussing the mansion being built for then-California-governor Ronald Reagan, she observes:

In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and the Book of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur...

And, yes, we used to sneer at the likes of Reagan and Dubya for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, but they now look like Socrates and Plato compared to what came after. Talking of which, the Trump presidential library is a thing.

PPS: And a further zinger:

The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

I hadn’t read any Didion before. I think I need to catch up.

About cultural snobbery

An interesting piece by Rachel Aroesti arguing that the prevalence of algorithm-driven drivel might necessitate the resurgence of cultural snobbery, allowing people to suggest that what you like is shit, actually (and as such a rejection of the hideous “don’t yuck my yum” mantra I discussed a few weeks back): 

These days, “let people enjoy things” is the prevailing attitude towards all cultural consumption... With any negativity now considered psychic violence (sometimes countered by threats of actual violence from fans), enthusiasm took over as the default mode. Ironically, considering the Gallaghers’ track record of insulting their peers, it’s a mindset that has benefited the Oasis reunion no end: don’t call them derivative, dull or lyrically inane like people did in the 1990s; just focus on the rare and precious sight of British people having fun. 

PS: Looks as if Aroesti’s a lone voice though (or at best a lonely one, as I think she might have a point). Ho hum. The best lack all conviction... Although in the midst of all that, I think someone called me a Leavisite.

PPS: Also plucked from the carnage, Brian Klaas suggests that we shouldn’t slag off Dan Brown because that might discourage people from reading anything whatsoever. But even Klaas acknowledges that “Brown’s prose is clunky, his characters so thin that they occasionally resemble crepes with speech bubbles.” So might we be permitted to hold such opinions in places where the fans won’t see them? If I point and laugh at Oasis fans in a forest while all the Oasis fans are in a stadium 50 miles away...

About men and women

I recently discovered this decade-old list of the greatest British novels, which is more interesting than most of its type for a couple of reasons. First, the critics who voted in the poll are all outside the UK, which may or may not explain some notable omissions (Elizabeth Gaskell, Martin Amis, John le Carre, Beryl Bainbridge, for example). But even more significant, of the top 10 books, six are by female authors, and Jane Austen – who would almost certainly have been at or near the top of a poll of UK critics – doesn’t figure among them, with Pride and Prejudice in 11th place. 

Yet that top 10, and indeed much of the list, adheres very much to the Eng Lit canon. No reactionary curmudgeon is going to grumble that George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or the Brontës were only crowbarred in there to appease the feminists. Even today it would be entirely plausible to concoct a Top 10 of painting or classical music and have it populated solely by the dreaded Dead White Men. An appearance by Artemisia Gentileschi or Lili Boulanger would provoke accusations of tokenism, of DEI. But Charlotte Brontë? Well of course she’s earned a place alongside Dickens. The canon says so. And the obvious question is, why is the literary canon, in English at least, so open to gender equality, when the other arts resist it? And we could also ask whether the resources and publicity chucked at, say, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, might more profitably be offered to female painters or composers.

And then I find this pair of lists, which shows the films that have the biggest disparity when it comes to votes cast by male and female users of IMDb. Now, some of these are what you might expect. Women favour Frozen, The Notebook and (here we go again) Pride and Prejudice. Men lean to Raging Bull and Platoon. But that’s not all. All the female-favoured films are in English and in colour; the vast majority were made after 2000. The male films are at once considerably more diverse in terms of where and when they come from, and at the same time include far more (Seven Samurai, M, Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, etc) that would show up on any self-respecting film studies syllabus. Do men have better taste? Or are women simply more honest about what they like? 

PS: Belatedly, the six British authors namechecked by Donald Trump at his recent state visit. Now obviously he didn’t choose those writers (Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Lewis, Kipling) and I’d be astonished if he’d read a book by any of them, or indeed by anyone, ever. But was the fact that they’re all male a clumsy oversight by his scriptwriters, or a conscious assertion of his tiresome machismo?

About silos

From Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman:

Because in Hendon there are plenty of people just dying to explain the meaning of life to you. I guess that’s true in New York too, but in New York everyone seems to disagree with everyone else about what the meaning of life is. In Hendon, at least the Hendon I grew up in, everything faced in one direction, there was nowhere to get a grip. You needed that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn’t smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you thought of your own.

Alderman wrote this in the mid-2000s but it has had special resonance in recent days. For example, in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting it became clear that a great many Americans on the political right were completely unaware of the murders in June of the Minnesota legislator Melissa Dortman and her husband. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, or regarded the Dortmans as being less worthy of sympathy. They simply didn’t know the deaths had happened. They’re all in a big silo, all facing in one direction.

In Alderman’s novel, the protagonist (who was brought up in an Orthdox Jewish community in north London) recalls escaping from her own cultural silo by perusing the magazines in WH Smith:

I didn’t properly understand the differences between them. I couldn’t have told you about their target audiences or demographics. I read Loaded and Vogue, Woman’s Own and the NME, PC World and The Tablet. In my mind they became jumbled, those scraps of other lives. There seemed to be so many different things to know about: music, films, TV, fashion, celebrities and sex.

And if you got your information this way, selecting your favoured text from the vast swathe of titles on the newsagent’s shelves, you inevitably pick up other data, almost by osmosis. Even if your own magazine didn’t cover the Hortman killings, or the new Primal Scream album, or Versace’s autumn/winter collection, or which Hollyoaks startlet is posing in her pants, glimpsing the cover lines of the others gives you a few droplets of fact. You may not have the full story but you know these things exist.

We blame the clunky algorithms of social media for forcing us into these political and cultural silos but maybe that’s looking at the problem in the wrong way. Rather than the presence of social media, it’s more specifically the absence of what it replaced, scanning the headlines as you grabbed a paper from the station kiosk or browsing aimlessly in Smith’s on the way home from school, that ensured we knew at least a bit of stuff from the other side.

(Godwin’s Law alert.) Also nudged into the light by the Kirk thing, with specific reference to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel et al:

About Peter Kyle

“Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge.”

—Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade

About Nero

Here we are again. The core audience for Mastermind is apparently viewers who know that People Just Do Nothing is a TV comedy show, but not that Nero was a Roman emperor.