books

The Eternal Recarrance

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Henry Oliver:

And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

The entire review is worth reading because of its thoroughness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polite and respectful demolition job. None of the clichés of the decline-of-reading-genre and What It All Means are left standing, and I hope they are never rebuilt. This passage in particular is the goods, as Bertie Wooster would say. It has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and find no flaws. It makes me smile for two reasons. One, it shows that little has changed since Nicholas Carr was delivering the same jeremiad fifteen years ago, to name just one antecedent, and two, it shows yet again the tendency of public intellectuals to inflate their personal problems into a diagnosis of societal decline. Civilization is collapsing? No, that’s just your self-image. You struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. I’m sure that’s painful, but do be courteous enough to leave me out of your therapy session.

465

By in battling personal entropy, books No Comments

And so I think that in all languages the word meaning virtue did not originally have any other meaning than strength, vigor (of mind or body or both, or some mixture of the former and the latter, but certainly first and foremost the latter). So much so that primitive man and antiquity does not and did not recognize any other virtue, any other perfection in man and things except force and strength, or certainly didn’t recognize any virtues that were separate from those qualities or whose essence, and main character, and form of being, and rationale as virtues and perfections was not contained in them.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Squatted 465 this week. Am I especially virtuous? Well, that’s not really for me to say, but…

You Are Not Yet the Person That You Are

By in aphorisms, books, identity, jests japes jokes jollies, the big sleep No Comments

No phenomenon excites me more than waking up. Nothing tends to produce a more extraordinary idea of…everything, than this autogenesis — This beginning of what has been — which itself has its beginning = What is, — and that is all shock, amazement, contrast. As a result, a state of equidifference occurs as if…there were a moment (extremely fragile) in which you are not yet the person that you are, and you could come back to life as someone else!! A different memory would develop. Whence fantasy — the external individual unchanged, and the whole psyche replaced by another…!

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

Been there, done that. It never gets old for me. Every morning, consciousness returns before the person quite does. Memory restores the name, the history, the attachments, the unfinished business. Within seconds the seam disappears and we say: I woke up.

Perhaps memory is the nearest thing we have to a personal essence. Infancy suggests as much from one direction. Logically, I know I suffered, feared, and was comforted as a baby, but I remember none of it. Those first few years belong to my biography almost as though they happened to someone else. Dementia approaches the same condition from the other end: consciousness may remain after much of the remembered person has vanished. Eventually others can remember your life better than you can.

Death ordinarily hides the distinction because body, consciousness, and memory usually expire together. Imagine, then, being offered immortality on different terms. You may live forever, but every so often you will go to sleep and wake without a single memory. A new personality will form, live for decades, and in turn be erased. The cycle will continue eternally.

Would you accept? Probably not. What most of us want preserved is not consciousness in the abstract but this accumulated life: these people, these memories, this particular past. An immortal succession of amnesiacs sounds less like eternal life than endlessly repeated death. And yet infancy presents the puzzle in reverse. We readily say that the memoryless child was me, while recoiling from the idea that a future memoryless consciousness could also be me.

But there’s no reason to make this an entirely serious thought experiment. Comedy is as much the stuff of life as anything else. I can easily envision this as a warehouse snafu from my own experience. Picture it:

Two people fall asleep at 11:17. During sleep, whatever process normally returns yesterday’s memories to the correct waking consciousness routes them incorrectly. At 6:42 the next morning:

“Why am I in this house?”

“Who is this woman?”

“Why do I apparently know how to drive a tractor-trailer?”

“Why do I have seventeen years of memories of being married to some guy named Dennis?”

If you swap autobiographical memory only, the body retains procedural knowledge. So the concert pianist wakes with the truck driver’s childhood and marriage but discovers that her fingers can still play Chopin. The truck driver remembers conservatory training in exquisite detail but can’t make his hands perform it. Each possesses somebody else’s explanation of skills that remain physically lodged elsewhere. Emotional residue could make it stranger still. You wake with no memory of your wife, yet her presence produces an inexplicable feeling of safety. Or you remember being desperately in love with someone else’s husband while your own nervous system recoils from him because it has never met him.

Everyone spends the first half of the story insisting, “I am obviously the person whose memories I have.” Then somebody asks, “But if his memories are in your brain and your memories are in his, which one of you is actually you?” And both reply: “Jesus Christ, not now.”

I could see this being something like Monsters, Inc. rather than Freaky Friday. The comedy lies in the collision between the sacredness of personal identity and the banality of inventory control. Sleep already has a vast, hidden logistical infrastructure, and most nights it works so efficiently nobody notices. Memories are processed, sorted, tagged, and returned before waking. Dreams are damaged packaging. Déjà vu is a duplicate shipment. That thing where you walk into a room and forget why you’re there is a partial pick error. Then one morning somebody opens the wrong carton. The person wakes up in the correct body. Name on the outside is right. Address is right. But the contents don’t match the manifest.

“Package says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Body says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Memories are for Angela Martinez.”

“Shit. Check the invoice.”

Two clerks start frantically pulling records, comparing timestamps, discovering that Robert and Angela entered REM sleep within three seconds of each other and somebody scanned the wrong tote. Meanwhile both humans are already awake and wrecking each other’s lives.

As usual, I’m just giving away great ideas for free here.

Ripe For a Fall

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

[B]ut in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task. Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.

— Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith

A modern Westerner reading this:

Peep

By in animals, books, foolosophy, the big sleep No Comments

At night, Bunky sometimes emitted a two-syllable ribbit, a sort of croaky hee-haw: the sound we’d heard over the baby monitor. We read that only male African clawed frogs made this sound, and that it was a mating call.

I often wrote late into the night. Bunky shared my circadian rhythm. For years—ever since Bunky’s aquarium had migrated from Henry’s room to the kitchen counter—I’d been going downstairs for a snack at 2:00 a.m., and there he’d been, softly calling for a mate he’d never meet.

— Anne Fadiman, Frog: And Other Essays

The other night, I was standing outside in the evening, enjoying air that was unusually cool for August, when I heard a strange sound from the weeds and overgrowth in front of the house.

Peep.

I thought, “What the hell was that?” Then I heard it again.

Peep.

I followed the sound and could just make out a small shape among the weeds. For a moment I thought it was a bird and wondered why it was on the ground. Injured, perhaps? Surely not a baby at this time of year.

Then it came into view. It was a toad, and a small snake had its right rear leg in its mouth. The snake was latched on near the hip. The toad would struggle occasionally, trying to pull itself free, and every so often it made that sound again. The snake held on.

I stood there watching for several minutes. Sentimentally, my sympathies were with the toad. But there was nothing useful for me to do, or at least nothing I could do without simply choosing one animal over the other. The snake had to eat too. What sense was there in taking sides?

Then, for some reason, the snake let go and zipped away into the weeds. Perhaps it finally noticed the large mammal looming nearby. The toad stayed where it was, its leg bloodied, breathing rapidly. I went back inside. When I came back outside twenty minutes later, it still hadn’t moved. The snake had not returned.

Had there been no sound, I suspect the whole thing would have been less affecting. It would have looked almost mechanical: jaws clamped around flesh, muscles pulling against muscles, predator and prey each executing behavioral programs vastly older than either animal. Nature doing what nature does. But there was that peep. What did it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help?

Those questions are too human, but we can’t help but filter experience through words and concepts. A toad presumably does not possess cerebral concepts such as mercy, nor formulate a thought resembling Please, somebody help me. The sound may have been entirely instinctive, an evolved distress call produced when restrained by a predator. Perhaps it serves to startle an attacker. Perhaps it sometimes attracts another animal and disrupts the attack. One can describe the whole event without granting the toad anything resembling a human understanding of its predicament. But the next question is phenomenological: what, if anything, is happening for the animal while the sound is being made? The larger problem is that we can observe nervous systems only from the outside. We can measure electrical activity, identify nociceptors, trace neural pathways, watch behavior. But what, if anything, is it like from in there?

Bunky called at night for a mate who would never come. The poignancy of that image does not depend on imagining Bunky lying awake at two in the morning brooding over his romantic prospects. He did not have to understand loneliness in order for the scene to contain something we recognize as lonely. An organism issued a call into an environment in which the thing the call existed to summon could never appear. My toad’s peep seems like the darker counterpart. Something has me. Get away. Whatever those human words distort, whatever they add, the sound resists being reduced entirely to scenery. The toad is not saying “Oh, God, help me!” translated from Toadish. But maybe “peep” is the biological ancestor of that phrase, the single-celled organism of speech. We sense what he means. We know what our equivalent sounds would mean if a python had us by the leg.

The haiku poet Issa wrote, after the death of his daughter:

The world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…

That “and yet” is what makes the poem unbearably sublime. Issa knows perfectly well that the world is impermanent. He knows the Buddhist teaching. Everything arises and passes away. The world of dew is only the world of dew. And yet…

The world red in tooth and claw is the world red in tooth and claw. Toads eat bugs and are eaten by snakes in turn. The snake was committing no injustice. The universe had not malfunctioned. If I had rescued the toad, I would merely have substituted the snake’s hunger for the toad’s injury. Nature contains competing interests but no court of appeal. And yet…

Odds are fair that one day within the next few decades, I may find myself lying in a hospital bed, heavily sedated, reduced in outward appearance to little more than biological machinery. Opiates may have dissolved most of what an observer would recognize as personality. Death may have its jaws locked around one of my vital organs. Perhaps I will make a feeble groan. What would it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help? A neurologist could conceivably point to a brain scan and explain that the sound was reflexive. The relevant networks were firing automatically. There was no evidence that the coherent person formerly known as “me” remained present behind the sound. Perhaps the doctor would be right.

The world red in tooth and claw
is the world red in tooth and claw—
And yet…groan. And yet…peep.

Obiter Scripta, no. 168

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Well, I have never written in blood, and I have only a smattering of Nietzsche committed to memory. But I did recently donate blood to the Red Cross, which netted me $30 in gift cards, promptly applied toward more of his notebooks from Stanford University Press, so I have at least managed the minor alchemy of turning blood into aphorisms. I like to think he’d be impressed by my dedication.

Sculptural Writing

By in ai, aphorisms, books, technology, writing No Comments

Machines are still only in their trial period. One day, perhaps, an electrophonic kaleidoscope will compose musical figures in their thousands — will invent whole series of rhythms and melodies. Man will have machines that create just as he will have machines for precision thinking — His role will be reduced to choosing. Combination factories.

The most intense feeling is only one combination among others.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

The standard complaint about large language models is that they will make writers sound alike, and perhaps eventually think alike. But Valéry’s prescient suggestion makes me wonder about another possibility. What if these machines do not merely automate an existing kind of writing? What if they also call forth a somewhat different skill in writers?

We ordinarily imagine writing in painterly terms. The writer confronts a blank surface and begins putting things onto it. A word, then a sentence, then a paragraph. The work accumulates. Even when we know perfectly well that revision will follow, our basic picture of authorship remains additive: there was nothing here, and now the writer has made something out of his inner resources and aesthetic vision.

An LLM makes possible a more sculptural way of working. Instead of confronting a blank page, the writer can begin with an excess of material. The machine can produce the boulder of text. The writer’s task is to decide what, if anything, is inside it. That sounds close to Valéry’s prediction that our role will be “reduced to choosing.” But choosing may be doing a lot of work there. A sculptor also “chooses.” This part stays; that part goes. This line needs to emerge; that mass is obscuring it. The finished form depends not on the ability to manufacture marble but on seeing possibilities in it that someone else would not see. Two sculptors can begin with approximately the same block and end with objects bearing no resemblance to one another.

Give two people the same serviceable paragraph from an LLM. One may read it and think it’s fine as is. The other notices immediately that the opening sentence is unnecessary, the metaphor in the middle is the only interesting thing there, the conclusion merely repeats the premise, and one odd phrase suggests a better direction for the whole piece. This would shift some of the emphasis in writing from generation toward discrimination. An LLM can give you ten openings before you have finished thinking about the first. It can propose twenty metaphors, five structures, three counterarguments, a dozen ways of phrasing the sentence you are stuck on. Under those conditions, producing another possibility is nearly worthless, but knowing which possibility is promising becomes more valuable. That sounds less like the traditional ideal of the writer and more like the work of an editor.

I haven’t experimented with this yet. I don’t know how it might go in practice. It probably would not go one single way for everybody. But this seems more interesting than treating AI-assisted writing solely as a question of whether the machine has “done the writing.” That formulation assumes we already know where the important part of writing resides. Well, maybe. Or maybe abundance changes where the difficulty lies. The blank page tests one set of capacities; the overflowing page may test another.

Maybe He Isn’t

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

****

As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. Similarly, in the surviving groups of the “nobility,” male and female. On the other hand, it is not rare to find today among working men, who before might be taken as the best example of what we are calling “mass,” nobly disciplined minds.

— José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

****

It would be a good thing (but nothing’s more difficult to do seriously) now and then to assume that all the ideas to which we have given most thought, the fruit of long and studious meditation are false or absurd—even though we cannot see at all how this could be.
One should treat severely everything for which one has an innate preference.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

****

Watching Over My Own Shoulder

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy, spiritual-not-religious

All I can say is Finally. I have been inept at all these things all my life. You wouldn’t believe what a mess I make out of trying to sit down. “Wait, so I bend my knees like…this? And then lower my butt…? And…oh, it’s no use, I’ve tied myself in a knot again!” And don’t even get me started on trying to put one foot in front of the other…

There is something irresistibly funny about reducing these Buddhist subjects to titles that sound like instructions written for a recently assembled android. I especially like the escalation:

How to Sit — remedial
How to Walk — intermediate
How to Eat — advanced coordination
How to Relax — frankly, graduate-level work
How to Love — whoa there, Thich. I’m still trying to get into this chair.

Flipping through the volumes, they all had that vaguely-Hallmark feel to them, the rhetorical equivalent of incense. Which can itself be a vibe the self-consciously “mindful” or “spiritual” person starts chasing. Brad Warner wrote a funny post about this once. Suddenly an activity that required no conceptual apparatus at all has acquired a little supervisory bureaucrat in your skull. Am I sitting correctly? Am I walking mindfully? Am I sufficiently present while eating this sandwich? Was that loving enough? Shit, I forgot to relax properly.

“Mindfulness” starts as an attempt to remove mediation and often ends by supplying a whole new layer of mediation: the vocabulary, the posture, the tea, the breathing exercise, the self-monitoring, the little internal narrator saying, I am now eating this raisin mindfully. You are no longer merely eating the raisin; you are watching yourself play someone who eats raisins correctly. As Alan Watts said, “In the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy — so as to be sure not to miss anything.”

In a lot of popularized spirituality, a temperament gets smuggled in as an anthropology. Calm, deliberate, unhurried, observant, undistracted consciousness becomes what human beings are supposedly like when they have stopped doing life incorrectly. Then the restless person, the daydreamer, the enthusiast, the obsessive maker, and the person whose mind wanders while his hands work all become defective versions of the sage. But absence is also part of consciousness. Fantasy, reminiscence, anticipation, abstraction, or getting carried away by an idea while your body performs some dull task aren’t necessarily failures to inhabit your life. They are your life. Some of humanity’s better products were almost certainly conceived by somebody who was doing a lousy job of being present while washing a plate.

Obiter Scripta, no. 167

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies, obiter scripta, socmed

At last, after talking for thirty hours on end and instructing me in all man needs to know, the Sage concluded:
“Now I shall sum up my teaching. It is contained in two axioms:
“‘All different things are identical.’
“‘All identicals are different.’
“Ring the changes in your mind on these two propositions and you will see, firstly, that they are not incompatible; next, that thought can formulate only one or the other and can only move from one to the other. There is a time for one of them and a time for the other, and the man who thinks the one will think the other. That’s all.”

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

I believe the Sage later became editor-in-chief of Engagement Today, where these two axioms remain the entire editorial manual. He’s teaching the manufacture of takes:

“All different things are identical.”
→ “Actually, Weightlifting and Reading Are the Same Activity.”

“All identicals are different.”
→ “Why Reading Is Nothing Like Weightlifting—and Why Confusing Them Is Dangerous.”

“There’s a time for one and a time for the other.”
→ Publish the second one nine months after the first.

Unhappy Endings

By in books, foolosophy, history

I recently read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy documenting his travels as a young man walking across Europe in 1934, from Holland to Constantinople. This is from The Broken Road, the third book, describing his encounter with what sounds to me like the Bulgarian Elmer Fudd. (The initial sentence, beginning on the previous page, starts, “an old man all in brown sat reflected…”) Most of the narrative throughout the trilogy is carried by Fermor’s descriptive density rather than excitement or adventure, but this was my favorite moment of genuine humor. It’s wonderfully dry because Fermor never steps outside the narrative to explicitly tell us that the man is ridiculous. He simply keeps adding details until the scene becomes a cartoon. A gun with a report like an exploding bomb; the hunter hidden by a cloud of smoke; zero ducks to show for it.

The gun itself sounds less like something designed to kill ducks than something designed by ACME Co. Another tremendous bang and cloud of smoke, and again the ducks sail on “undepleted” (with one, perhaps, pausing to rearrange his bill). The hunter’s response is not to reconsider his marksmanship, or his rickety weapon, but to shake his fist and call the ducks pimps. “Oooh, you scwewy pezewengi!” Fermor’s deadpan assent to this odd insult makes it even funnier. He could have written, “he cursed the ducks as pimps,” which would merely report eccentricity. Instead he momentarily lets the old man’s world govern the prose. The ducks have behaved without honor. They have evaded justice. Therefore: pimps. Why not?

This passage, from earlier in the book, is more representative of the general poignancy the reader feels throughout the trilogy, knowing with hindsight what “Europe, 1934” means. The Russian exiles were, in one sense, right. The Soviet regime was not eternal. It really was “rife with the germs of its own dissolution.” But a “temporary” madness can last longer than everyone who remembers the world before it. History did eventually turn the wheel, but these men were no longer there to be carried home.

Fermor’s best touch is “sudden giveaway silences.” The sighs express nostalgia; the silences betray doubt. Some part of them knows that Grand Duke Cyril and the double eagle are ceremonial props in a story they tell one another because the alternative is admitting that exile is permanent. Hope continues in speech, then falters whenever the room goes quiet. And “autumnal sadness filled the long room” is wonderful because the season is historical as well as emotional. These men are the scattered surviving leaves of a political and social world whose winter has already arrived.

The best sentence of the whole trilogy for me, though, is this one: “Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.”

“As it turned out” is especially brutal in its mildness. No trumpet blast, no retrospective prophecy. Just the belated knowledge that history had already begun its work while everyone was eating, talking, flirting, offering beds, discussing history, and going about ordinary life. And “invisibly burning” avoids the smug consolation of inevitability. Fermor was walking through a Europe with Hitler and Stalin in power, but the people he met did not experience themselves as characters in the prologue to disaster. Their futures were hidden from them, as ours are hidden from us. Only afterward does the route appear strewn with powder trails.

The final phrase is almost painfully restrained. He could have named executions, exile, war, occupation, dispossession, suicide, disappearance. Instead he uses the language of stories — “unhappy endings” — as though the euphemism were the only way to hold all that accumulated knowledge without crushing the sentence. The reader almost leans forward to grab at Fermor’s lapels. “No, not ‘nearly all.’ Which ones? What happened to Nadejda? To Rosa? To Lise and Annie? Did anyone get across a border? Did someone marry and disappear into Switzerland?” Instead, “unhappy endings” leaves them where Fermor himself largely had to leave them: walking away from him into an approaching darkness.

One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime. One should be able to detect the muffled bang of the starter’s gun.

Here the “muffled bang of the starter’s gun” announces beginnings. A book, a friendship, a love affair, an idea enters your life almost casually, and only afterward do you discover that the course has been set. You wish retrospectively that there had been some audible report: Pay attention. This is one of the moments from which the rest of your life will proceed. Later, the powder-trail sentence gives the image its terrible inverse. Those people too have already crossed an invisible threshold, but this time toward catastrophe. The fuse is burning while they are still talking, dancing, drinking, flirting, making plans. Nobody hears the match being struck.

We imagine a life as a sequence of recognizable turning points because retrospect supplies the punctuation. While living it, though, the crucial moments usually arrive disguised as ordinary afternoons. The conversation that becomes a lifelong friendship does not feel different from ten forgotten conversations. The person whose loss will divide your life into before and after is, at first, simply someone sitting across a table.

But we were talking about endings. And so, after all the extravagant precision of Fermor’s descriptive prose, he reaches the thing that matters most and can give us only a few restrained syllables of judgment: unhappy endings. The great raconteur suddenly has almost nothing to say.

Ink Libel

By in ai, books, extraordinary popular delusions, media/propaganda, the madness of crowds

Pulping our humanity!

Horrific destruction!

A CULTURAL CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!

Wait, what’s that?

But contrary to many news reports, the old books bought from these sellers do not appear to be “rare” in the typical sense of the word. According to Becker and the online discussions I read, the books in these orders are almost entirely nonfiction, were mostly published from the 1970s to the 1990s, and were written in a variety of languages. Becker wrote in a blog post that he has received orders for “stuff like The Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver from 1995 or How to Use Corel WordPerfect 1991.” These belong to a category of books that you could call rare because a small number of copies remain, but they may also be out-of-date, undesirable to readers, and not valuable per se. In some cases, booksellers have noted, the cost of shipping exceeds the books’ resale value.

 

Oh.

Boy, do we look foolish! If only some idiot blogger had kept his head while the rest of us were losing ours!

Well, mistakes were certainly made — and amplified, and magnified — but extremism in defense of The 1995 Insider’s Guide to Metro Denver is no vice, as I believe Erasmus might have said. At any rate, I’m sure we’ve all learned just enough to save face without forcing us to question our priors — so, no harm, no foul; all’s well that ends well!

I don’t want to let the Atlantic fully off the hook, though:

Regardless, the idea of an AI behemoth destroying books has sent a bolt through the collective psyche. Book destruction is historically linked to authoritarian regimes and attempts to control public discourse, as well as ancient tragedies—the burning of the Library of Alexandria comes to mind. The encroachment of AI, particularly in the realm of books, is now everyday news: Last month it emerged that a top-selling Kindle book may have been partly written by AI, and grandparents are buying children’s books filled with AI-generated slop.

Even if a literal book burning is not under way, the process of ingesting millions of books, stripping them of authorship, and blending them into a homogenous “intelligence” branded with the name of a chatbot certainly feels destructive. It masks the hard work and collaboration that goes into knowledge creation, undermines incentives for authors to write books, prevents experts from finding one another, and gives AI companies tremendous power over what information people can access. Given this scale of cultural damage, the physical destruction of books seems almost quaint.

“Regardless” here is doing the work of an emergency generator after the factual power supply has failed. The current it supplies is too weak to illuminate anything, but strong enough to animate a corpse. Yes, a “bolt” did indeed shoot through the collective psyche: the mad scientists of viral outrage sent it there. They had stitched together a monster from misshapen rumors, decaying conspiracies, rotting scraps of metaphor, and adjectives scavenged from dead headlines; once electrified, it lumbered off through the global village, bellowing about antique books, pulped humanity, and crimes against mankind.

This is an embarrassing effort to salvage a virtue out of a moral panic. If I may take some creative liberties in paraphrasing, “We investigated the burning of Alexandria and found that Alexandria probably isn’t burning. But the fact that people imagined it burning reveals a deeper fire.” No, what it reveals is that your audience consists of gullible cretins who should be ashamed of themselves. I’d like to see a Venn diagram of the people forever warning us about “misinformation” and the people who instantly, uncritically believed that AI was devouring “ultra-rare” books. I suspect it would actually be a perfect circle.

(Misinformation, n. The stupid things other people believe. The corresponding belief among one’s friends is called context, raising awareness, or an important conversation.)

I’m talking about you, 404media. I’m talking about you, Ted “The Honest Broker” Gioia. I’m talking about you, Futurism. I’m talking about you, TechRadar. And you, Ryan Fleck. You, Guardian. You, Hyperallergic. Oh, there were so many of you. And let us not forget the supporting cast among the Bandar-log: the minor imbeciles, volunteer panic merchants, ambulatory rumor mills, and unpaid interns of hysteria sharing their infectious outrage on Substack Notes, TikTok, Facebook Reels, and sundry other sewage dispensers. Your appalling ignorance is rivaled only by your overweening self-righteousness. You squeezed out fake tears over library books that had not been checked out since the Reagan administration. You rent your garments over worthless monographs that had been abandoned at Goodwill and remained unbought. Were you fooled, or were you doing the fooling? Did you mistake wishful thinking for corroboration, or merely trust that your readers would? (Take your time. Neither answer helps.) The slightest ounce of skepticism or simple patience would have sufficed; instead, you mistook your priors for evidence, your indignation for inquiry, your metaphors for facts, and one another’s repetition for independent confirmation. You stand amidst a mess of fabrications and aver that your heart, at least, was in the right place, even if your brain was AWOL. You embroidered rumor, embellished speculation, and passed the resulting monstrosity down the line with the solemnity of monks preserving the Gospels, only you produced something more like The Protocols of the Techbros of Silicon Valley. The online environment is, incredibly, an even stupider, uglier place today because of your malign efforts.

In a just world, you would cancel your internet service, surrender your passwords, and sew your mouths shut. If you possessed even the vestigial stump of integrity, you would renounce all “hot takes” and wander for years like so many Ancient Mariners of epistemic disgrace, buttonholing wedding guests, commuters, grocery clerks, and innocent diners, forcing each in turn to hear the tale of your sordid imbecility, your appalling groupthink. You would conclude by saying, plainly and without qualification: “I was wrong because I was too stupid to question a story telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.” But this is not a just world. So tomorrow you will return, chastened by nothing, confidence undiminished, to pronounce upon some fresh catastrophe you first encountered nine minutes earlier. I see you, though, and I know what you are.

Obiter Scripta, no. 166

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

Such is my turn of mind that I don’t expect to learn everything, from A to Z, from books; but only to get seeds of thought that I can cultivate within myself, in my private garden. I can make something only when I set out from very little and that very little bears fruit in me; were I to take larger quantities, I’d produce nothing—what is more, I do not understand what has already come to fruition.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

My shelves are a kind of private seed bank: a library not principally of finished thoughts to be learned, but of dormant thoughts waiting for the conditions in which they can grow. I am the reverse Johnny Appleseed. I do not spread seeds of thought across the republic; I hoard them in climate-controlled conditions. I am not merely inattentive to the author’s whole argument; I am prowling through books with sacks, secateurs, and dubious property rights. Teach me? Author, feed me.

I’ve Been Around For a Long Long Year, Stole Many a Man’s Boards and Paste

By in ai, books, ohferfucksake

Well, almost. It is almost a metaphor, provided that we stand far enough away from the facts and squint until every discarded copy of “WebTV for Dummies” looks like an illuminated manuscript.

The underlying story is real. In 2024, Anthropic began an operation known internally as Project Panama. The company bought millions of used books, sliced off their spines, ran the loose pages through industrial scanners, and sent the remains for recycling. That’s the part of the story that warrants the melodramatic photograph of yellowing pages and perhaps a few mournful bars from the soundtrack to Schindler’s List. But what sort of books were they?

The article Gioia links to is titled “AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop.” Yes — old books from megasellers like Better World Books and World of Books. As it happens, I have extensive dealings with both of those companies on a business level. They both deal in general used books. They are not antiquarians. They do not deal in Shakespeare folios, medieval codices, signed first editions, presentation copies, or vellum editions of Montaigne discovered in the attic of a Loire château. They traffic in much of the same material you can find on the shelves at Goodwill or on Amazon. When your local library has a sale, the stuff that’s left over afterward might get sent to Better World Books, whose entire model relies on ex-library castoffs. Goodwills. Library discards. Are you getting the picture? These are books that no one wants, even on “fill a bag for $5” day.

Somewhere along the social-media telephone game, however, old books became “rare” books. Then rare books became “almost irreplaceable” works. Now we’re at “antique” books and “the devouring of all knowledge.” One imagines ChatGPT reclining after dinner, picking its teeth with the spine of a Shakespeare First Folio, while Claude wipes its mouth on incunabula and asks whether anyone would like the last surviving copy of The Canterbury Tales before it goes down the hatch.

“Ingesting” the contents! Like a cloud of digital locusts! Given other current trends of stupidity, I expect to read soon that the clankers are using the ink from priceless manuscripts to make their matzos.

In any event, by the time the story reaches the hysterical pearl-clutchers at Smugstack, the machines are no longer processing used-book inventory; they are putting literary culture itself through a hydraulic guillotine. Gioia may know a lot about jazz music, or even about lit-rah-chur, but like most artsy types, he doesn’t know shit about the reality and basic economics of the used-book market.

A book may be “rare” in the sense that few copies are currently listed for sale. It may be rare because it was published in small numbers, because demand vanished fifty years ago, because other copies are sitting uncatalogued in basements, or because nobody has yet thought it worth the trouble of listing one online. An obsolete service manual for a 1985 Singer sewing machine may be genuinely difficult to find. So may a regional telephone directory, a forgotten theological pamphlet, a Croatian dissertation on soil density, or a scholarly monograph on The Politics of Puerto Rican University Students. Scarcity is not the same thing as value. It is not even necessarily evidence of cultural importance. Sometimes there are few copies for sale because supply is low. Sometimes there are few copies for sale because demand is lower.

Used booksellers know this with a clarity unavailable to people who see books primarily as status symbols. A book may possess intellectual value while having negative commercial value. Someone, somewhere, might conceivably want it someday. But no one presently wants it enough to justify the shelf space, cataloguing, handling, warehousing, and shipping, things that all cost money. And eventually the book reaches the end of the line. It is then donated, pulped, recycled, thrown into a dumpster, left in a damp garage, or carried to the landfill after three consecutive library sales have failed to produce a buyer. That is the reality for most books. Several hundred-thousand tons of them per year, in fact. (And while we’re at it, there never was any farm somewhere upstate where Spot went to run and play to his heart’s content.) Ironically, the very mechanisms that keep so many old books in circulation at all — inventory software, price signals, reseller margins, warehouse rent, men with scanners elbowing through a library sale in search of profit, and a gigantic international platform for used books like Amazon — are also despised by the same ignoramuses who are currently accusing the AI companies of having tagged along with the Vikings during their raids on the monasteries. It’s almost like they don’t care about actual books so much as their their self-image as educated lovers of wisdom and guardians of knowledge.

No one writes a Substack lament when a library discards thirty copies of an outdated Windows manual. No one declares it a metaphor for civilization’s destructive relationship to knowledge when a thrift shop fills a dumpster with Reader’s Digest condensed books. No photograph of scattered yellow pages appears beside the words “almost irreplaceable.” But let an AI company buy the same dead stock, preserve its text, and recycle the paper, and suddenly we are watching the flames consume the Library of Alexandria.

What a pity that so many devoted readers never learned an elementary lesson: be skeptical of any story that flatters your prejudices so neatly.

Obiter Scripta, no. 165

By in ai, books, obiter scripta

If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take,—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting it off at will.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table

Sounds to me like what he wanted, nearly two centuries early, was an LLM. He doesn’t want an encyclopedia set, he wants a personality. A model with a customized system prompt. The one part that now seems obsolete is the enormous infrastructure required to keep the thing running. Holmes must house the critic, feed him, provide his clothing, and procure him a wife. OpenAI has simplified the interface somewhat, though the data centers are arguably the modern equivalent of all that sheltering, warming, feeding, and button-mending.

If You Strike Reading Down, It Shall Become More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine

By in books, the geist of the zeit

I read Rose Horowitch’s essay in the Atlantic about “the end of reading.” As I’ve said many times, I think the class of people I refer to as the writer’s guild are prone to acting like Chicken Little about this issue, but Horowitch’s essay is fine as far as it goes. She surveys the grim statistics and concludes, rightly in my view, that it is ultimately up to us to choose whether we value reading books as an activity for its own sake. We haven’t been brainwashed by gadgets and evil tech-bros; we’ve done what people have always done — taken the path of least resistance, chosen easy pleasures over demanding ones. In that sense, the diminishment of reading as a leisure activity is a reversion to the mean. There will always be readers, but they may not command such high status as they once did. I can live with that.

But there’s being sanguine, and then there’s being glib. Jonathan Minnema offers a remarkably bad rebuttal to Horowitch. His opening analogy is confused from the start. Barnes & Noble created the Nook, not the Kindle. But more importantly, e-readers never posed the same threat Horowitch is describing. A Nook still asks you to read a book. TikTok does not. The transition from paper to screen changed the container; the transition from books to algorithmic fragments changes the activity itself. Personally, I don’t care for e-books or audiobooks, but they’re infinitely preferable to this garbage.

Then comes the central contradiction:

I actually see it as flourishing.

A few paragraphs later:

As fewer and fewer people read, it will become increasingly important to read.

And later still:

As reading disappears, it will start becoming cool again.

So reading is flourishing, fewer people are reading, and reading is disappearing — but its disappearance will eventually reverse itself because human beings naturally do unpopular things. Does this argument require psilocybin for maximum clarity?

His YouTube audience is the purest possible example of selection bias. A man who runs several book channels reports that the people who deliberately seek out his book channels are interested in books. That is pleasant news for him, but no more representative of the population than a powerlifting gym proving that Americans are becoming physically stronger. He briefly recognizes the problem — “it’s possible I am just insulated” — and then simply decides that he probably is not.

The retro-consumption statistics, even if accurate, do not rescue him. Vinyl can grow for nineteen straight years and remain a niche product. Film cameras, dumbphones, classics clubs, and social-media abstinence can all become fashionable among minorities while the broader culture continues moving in the opposite direction. In fact, that may be the likeliest future: not universal postliteracy, but a barbell distribution in which serious reading becomes a cultivated subculture while the median person reads less and less. His own business may be evidence of precisely that development. When a practice ceases to be ordinary, enthusiasts gather around it more conspicuously.

There is also a faintly comic leap from “young people buy vinyl” to “Gen Z will soon be unable to stop reading Anna Karenina.” The first is a low-cost aesthetic preference. The second requires dozens of hours of sustained concentration. Buying a turntable does not demonstrate that one can read Tolstoy any more than buying a Moleskine demonstrates that one keeps a serious journal. Retro objects often flourish precisely because they can serve as badges without restoring the disciplines and effort once associated with them.

His treatment of literary style is worse. The claim that sentences are shortening “not because our attention spans are dropping, but because writers are getting better” is breathtakingly complacent, reminiscent of Richard Hanania’s infamous claim that he could dash off a superior version of Shakespeare in his spare time if he so desired. Sometimes compression improves prose; sometimes shorter sentences merely reflect diminished tolerance for syntactic complexity. Style cannot be reduced to a speed test.

The “paid by the word” explanation is the familiar half-truth elevated into a theory of literature. Serialization affected pacing and structure, but Dickens did not write elaborate sentences merely to pad an invoice. Nor does it follow that abridgments are “likely better-written stories.” They may be faster, simpler, or better suited to impatient readers, but that is not the same as being better-written. On this principle, a plot synopsis would be the perfected form of every novel.

And the French Revolution paragraph may be the most astonishing:

The French Revolution didn’t begin with people yelling on street corners to join the movement. They didn’t publish articles in the papers.

Pamphlets, newspapers, political clubs, public oratory, and the rapidly expanding print culture were central to the Revolution. He has chosen one of the worst imaginable historical examples for an “invisible” revolution that did not announce itself in print.

Beneath the bluster, he has stumbled onto something true enough: decline can produce countercultures. Reading may become rarer and therefore more self-conscious, attractive, communal, and prestigious among those who retain it. Plausible enough, but it doesn’t refute Horowitch. It describes how a remnant might form under the conditions she describes. A better formulation might be something like: “The decline is real, but decline is not extinction. As serious reading becomes less culturally normal, those who still desire it may gather more deliberately, build stronger institutions, and recover some of the communal energy that mass literacy had allowed us to take for granted.” That would be hopeful without pretending that a BookTube audience, a stack of vinyl records, and a TikTok hashtag have refuted the evidence. Reading is declining, however we choose to respond to that fact.

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