Category Archives: Books

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr

June 28, 2010 By in Books, Culture, Essays, Nonfiction, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

One irony of this post is that you’re reading a piece on the Internet about a book that is in part about how the Internet is usurping the place of books. In The Shallows, Carr argues that the Internet encourages short attention spans, skimming, shallow knowledge, and distraction, and that this is a bad thing.

He might be right, but his argument misses one essential component: the absolute link between the Internet and distraction. He cites suggestive research but never quite crosses the causal bridge from the Internet as inherently distracting, both because of links and because of the overwhelming potential amount of material out there, and that we as a society and as a people are now endlessly distracted. Along the way, there are many soaring sentiments (“Our rich literary tradition is unthinkable without the intimate exchanges that take place between reader and writer within the crucible of a book”) and clever quotes (Nietzsche as quoted by Carr: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”), but that causal link is still weak.

I liked many of the points Carr made; that one about Nietzsche is something I’ve meditated over before, as shown here and here (I’ve now distracted you and you’re probably less likely to finish this post than you would be otherwise; if I offered you $20 for repeating the penultimate sentence in the comments section, I’d probably get no takers); I think our tools do cause us to think differently in some way, which might explain why I pay more attention to them than some bloggers do. And posts on tools and computer set ups and so forth seem to generate a lot of hits; Tools of the Trade—What a Grant Writer Should Have is among the more popular Grant Writing Confidential posts.

I use Devonthink Pro as described by Steven Berlin Johnson, which supplements my memory and acts as research tool, commonplace book, and quote database, and probably weakens my memory while allowing me to write deeper blog posts and papers. Maybe I remember less in my mind and more in my computer, but it still takes my mind to give context to the material copied into the database.

In fact, Devonthink Pro helped me figure out a potential contradiction in Carr’s writing. On page 209, he says:

Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies […] every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.

But on page 47 he says: “Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements.” So if “sometimes our tools do what we tell them to,” then is it true that “The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function?” The two statements aren’t quite mutually exclusive, but they’re close. Maybe reading Heidegger’s Being and Time and Graham Harman’s Tool-Being will clear up or deepen whatever confusion exists, since he a) went deep but b) like many philosophers, is hard to read and is closer to a machine for generating multiple interpretations than an illuminator and simplifier of problems. This could apply to philosophy in general as seen from the outside.

This post mirrors some of Carr’s tendencies, like the detour in the preceding paragraph. I’ll get back to the main point for a moment: Carr’s examples don’t necessarily add up to proving his argument, and some of them feel awfully tenuous. Some are also inaccurate; on page 74 he mentions a study that used brain scans to “examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction” and cites Nicole K. Speer’s journal article “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” which doesn’t mention fiction and uses a memoir from 1951 as its sample text.

Oops.

That’s a relatively minor issue, however, and one that I only discovered because I found the study interesting enough to look up.

Along the way in The Shallows we get lots of digressions, and many of them are well-trod ones: the history of the printing press; the origins of the commonplace books; the early artificial intelligence program ELIZA; Frederick Winslow Taylor and his efficiency interest; the plasticity of the brain; technologies that’ve been used for various purposes, including metaphor.

Those digressions almost add up to one of my common criticisms of nonfiction books, which is that they’d be better as long magazine articles. The Shallows started as one, and one I’ve mentioned before: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer: maybe. The answer now, two years and 200 pages later: maybe. Is the book a substantial improvement on the article? Maybe. You’ll probably get 80% of the book’s content from the article, which makes me think you’d be better off following the link to the article and printing it—the better not to be distracted by the rest of The Atlantic. This might tie into the irony that I mentioned in the first line of this post, which you’ve probably forgotten by now because you’re used to skimming works on the Internet, especially moderately long ones that make somewhat subtle arguments.

Offline, Carr says, you’re used to linear reading—from start to finish. Online, you’re used to… something else. But we’re not sure what, or how to label the reading that leads away from the ideal we’ve been living in: “Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”

Again, maybe, which is the definitive word for analyzing The Shallows: but we don’t actually have a name for this kind of mind, and it’s not apparent that the change is as major as Carr describes: haven’t we always made disparate connections among many things? Haven’t we always skimmed until we’ve found what we’re looking for, and then decided to dive in? His point is that we no longer do dive in, and he might be right—for some people; but for me, online surfing, skimming, and reading coexists with long-form book reading. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had the fortitude to get through The Shallows.

Still, I don’t like reading on my Kindle very much because I’ve discovered that I often tend to hop back and forth between pages. In addition, grad school requires citations that favor conventional books. And for all my carping about the lack of causal certainty regarding Carr’s argument, I do think he’s on to something because of my own experience. He says:

Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For well over a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

He says friends have reported similar experiences. I feel the same way as him and his friends: the best thing I’ve found for improving my productivity and making reading and writing easier is a program called Freedom, which prevents me from getting online unless I reboot my iMac. It throws enough of a barrier between me and the Internet that I can’t easily distract myself through e-mail or Hacker News (Freedom has also made writing this post slightly harder, because during the first draft, I haven’t been able to add links to various appropriate places, but I think it worth the trade-off, and I didn’t realize I was going to write this post when I turned it on). Paul Graham has enough money that he uses another computer for the same purpose, as he describes in the linked essay, which is titled, appropriately enough, “Disconnecting Distraction” (sample: “After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn’t realize that it evolves.” Guess what distraction evolved into: the Internet).

Another grad student in English Lit expressed shock when I told him that I check my e-mail at most once a day and shook for every two days, primarily in an effort not to distract myself with electronic kibble or kipple. Carr himself had to do the same thing: he moves to Colorado and jettisons much of his electronic life, and he “throttled back my e-mail application […] I reset it to check only once an hour, and when that still created too much of a distraction, I began to keeping the program closed much of the day.” I work better that way. And I think I read better, or deeper, offline.

For me, reading a book is a very different experience from searching the web, in part because most of the websites I visit are exhaustible much faster than books. I have a great pile of them from the library waiting to be read, and an even greater number bought or gifted over the years. Books worth reading seem to go on forever. Websites don’t.

But if I don’t have that spark of discipline to stay off the Internet for a few hours at a time, I’m tempted to do the RSS round-robin and triple check the New York Times for hours, at which point I look up and say, “What did I do with my time?” If I read a book—like The Shallows, or Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I’m most of the way through now—I look up in a couple of hours and know I’ve done something. This is particularly helpful for me because, as previously mentioned, I’m in grad school, which means I have to be a perpetual reader (if I didn’t want to be, I’d find another occupation).

To my mind, getting offline can become a comparative advantage because, like Carr, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,” and that someone is me and that someone is the Internet. But I can’t claim this is true for all people in all places, even as I tell my students to try turning off their Internet access and cell phones when they write their papers. Most of them no doubt don’t. But the few who do learn how to turn off the electronic carnival are probably getting something very useful out of that advice. The ones who don’t probably would benefit from reading The Shallows because they’d at least become aware of the possibility that the Internet is rewiring our brains in ways that might not be beneficial to us, however tenuous the evidence (notice my hedging language: “at least,” “the possibility” “might not”).

Alas: they’re probably the ones least likely to read it.

When dialog works: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind

June 26, 2010 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m rereading Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which gets better with each repetition; the first time I got lost in the plot and was more annoyed by the occasional cliche than I am now. Now the cliches seem more like cheek and a nod back at pulpy origins. This bit of dialog reminds me about a lot of what works in the novel, especially the over-wrought language of Fermín, the older rascal who takes to advising the young and overly proper Daniel:

‘People who have no life always have to stick their nose in the life of others,’ said Fermín. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘About my lack of guts.’
‘Right. A textbook case. Trust you me, young man. Go after your girl. Life flies by, especially the bit that’s worth living. You heard what the priest said. Like a flash.’
‘She’s not my girl.’
‘Well, then, make her yours before someone else takes her, especially the little tin soldier.’
‘You talk as if Bea were a trophy.’
‘No, as if she were a blessing,’ Fermín corrected. ‘Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.’

I love the second line, and the first spoken by Daniel, whose acknowledgment that they’re discussing “my lack of guts” implicitly admits that Fermín is already right, and Daniel knows it, but he still needs to be talked into doing something about it. He’s too passive—and knows that, too—but is also so passive that he doesn’t really know how to stop being passive. He can only offer objections when he should be as direct about Bea as he is about solving the mystery of Julian Carax, which is the plot’s primary strands and one that interweaves with the others.

That said, the passage isn’t perfect, and “trust you me” is probably a translator’s error. But I didn’t notice it as I read: only caught it as I began writing this. The novel is sufficiently involving to make one forgive minor sins. “Trust you me” could also be Fermín’s character: he’s stuff with half-believed folk wisdom (“Life flies by, especially the bit that’s worth living”), and only half believing it that lets such wisdom be funny—and, strangely, truer than it would be from someone delivering ridiculous lines like “Destiny is usually just around the corner” straight. Fermín also does imply that Bea is an object (which is objectionable; how many of us want to be “a trophy?”), but he doesn’t believe it: that half-belief lets him get away with it. We love his cheek, his pretend expertise (Daniel is “A textbook case,” as if textbooks are written about smitten adolescents, rather than novels), and it’s sustained throughout the novel.

So you want to be a writer, or an entrepreneur, or…

June 25, 2010 By in Books, Nonfiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’m reading Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s book Rework, which has lots of potentially pernicious advice in it but also has this bit, which is good: “What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.” This is equally true of writing, but a lot of would-be writers seem to like the idea of writing more than the actual writing itself.

I often offer this challenge to people who say they want to or wish they could write a novel:

1) Turn off your Internet access and cell phone.

2) Write chapter one over three days (or so; the actual timeframe doesn’t matter, as long as it’s short).

3) Send me the result. I’ll read it and send it back to you.

So far, I think one person I’ve offered that challenge has taken me up on it, and I never got chapter two. I interpret this as meaning that most people who say they want to write a novel (or write anything else, or learn the guitar, or get laid more, or lose weight, or start cooking, or any number of other skilled endeavors) don’t actually want to, because if they did, they would start today. If you shoot for, say, 500 words a day, you’ll have a pile of around 80,000 in six months, leaving some room for missed days, editing, and so forth.

If you shoot for 1,000 words a day, you’ll have it in three months.

This, however, is only the start, which I didn’t realize when I was nearer to the start than I am now. But if you’re not putting in the seat time, writing, you’re not going to do anything and all your intentions aren’t going to matter. Fried and Hansson are pointing this out in the context of business, where it’s equally valid, and there are probably an equal number of people saying, “I should start a business” and “I should write.” Most of them are probably better off not acting on their impulses. But if they do, why not start?

Life is complicated

June 6, 2010 By in Books Tags: , Leave a comment

“”People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.”

—Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind.

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700 – 1850 — Joel Mokyr

June 5, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Ideas matter. So does the ability to execute those ideas. Britain had both, in the form of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which were important but neither of which has been fully considered as twinned phenomena. Nows they have been, and have been impressively.

The Enlightened Economy sounds boring but isn’t, and it ties together two trends that Mokyr argues should be appreciated more: the dovetailing of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which are entangled and driven by ideas to a greater extent than previously appreciated. Both were concerned with ideas; both occurred around the same time; and many participants in one also participated in the other. Furthermore, ideas motivated both; as Mokyr says, “Ideas, in the eighteenth century as much as the twentieth, competed in a market for ideas.” But the idea of a marketplace of ideas was new and relied on a lessening of religious control and a greater willingness to challenge existing ideas and beliefs. Ideas had to be “contestable,” as well as cumulative and consensual, to become useful and lead toward exponential growth. The strange thing is still that the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen earlier or in some other place. The other strange thing is how many ideas that played out across the eighteenth century continue to play out today, as reading The Enlightened Economy or Louis Dupré’s excellent The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture shows.

In terms of economic structure and organizations, consider that Mokyr writes that “More than anything else, the reduction in [the power of British trade guilds] was hastened by mobility; many of the activities that urban craft guilds controlled could and did move out of their geographic sphere to the countryside or to towns free from guild control.” Later on the same page, he says that “The London guilds, known as ‘livery companies’ saw their powers erode when economic activity moved to the suburbs such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields.” You can see the same issues with union or government control versus the private sector, which is still widely debated.

The same basic dynamic has been occurring in the United States for decades: heavy manufacturing in the Northeast and Midwest has become more mobile, both abroad to places like China and Mexico as well as to union-unfriendly Southern states like Alabama. Recent wrangling around car company bailouts showed that political logic follows economic logic: senators representing states with BMW, Toyota, Honda, and Audi plants fulminated against bailouts, while northern states where unions still have some power favored bailouts. In the meantime, however, union power has been waning in the private sector for years, even as it has grown in the public sector, where the inability of cities, towns, school districts, and the like to go bankrupt thanks to immediate competition allows unions to exist. Still, the overall direction of the world is obvious to current observers, even if it wasn’t to many eighteenth Century ones. The power of individual and capital mobility lessens the power of rent seekers (Mokyr: “In the second half of the eighteenth century, most important intellectuals became increasingly hostile to what modern economists would call rent-seeking, namely the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth”).

As mentioned previously, one major issue and still unresolved issue is why the Industrial Revolution happened when and where it did. Almost no one knows. The discovery process itself became systematized:

The pre-modern economies were at times capable of creating radical inventions, but such advances tended to settle down rather quickly into new dominant design largely because most inventions were arrived at through trial and error and hit-and-miss procedures. Systematic research and development based on something we would recognize today as scientific rigor was still highly uncommon.

And those techniques are only more common because we pass them down and forget less successful techniques.

Of course, Mokyr is in part writing about the current economy: he writes about workers, locations, idea transmission, and more. Today, Richard Florida relies heavily on concept of “the creative class” (I wonder if I’m a member) in his writing and “highly qualified personnel” (HPQs), as Alex Usher calls them in an academic context. The most interesting thing is how (relatively) few of such people, networked together, can make an enormous difference in not just the quality of their own lives but the productivity of everyone around them. As Paul Graham says in “Taste for Makers“, “Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison […]” I’ve been looking for more formal studies of the general ideas around talent clustering but haven’t been able to find any. Nonetheless, such people are likely to be the ones who push society forward through thinking or finding new ideas, becoming repositories of ideas, or seeking new methods of doing things. As Mokyr says:

[… I]t is important to realize that an economy in which there are innovators is not one in which all or even most people are inclined to experiment or to take risks, much less express their disrespect for the wisdom of their teachers and ancestors by declaring the new to be better.

We still see elements of this kind of thinking in the education system, although the system seems better at critiquing itself than it once might have been in the past. Self-modification is relatively rare. The absolute number of people willing to be innovators might now be higher, the percentage might be the same. The comparisons between the eighteenth century and now, which Mokyr sometimes makes and sometimes leaves to the reader, might be the most radical and unusual parts of this book.

It is a book about ideas that on its own contains many ideas that illuminate how the world was changing—and how it is today, as we live in a society that is saturated with ideas—provided that we are willing to find and follow those ideas. And think about them on a meta level—in other words, deal with ideas about ideas. This is relatively hard and requires a lot of training to accomplish. Mokyr reminds us of why it is important.

A final note about the materiality of the book in question: The Enlightened Economy is scholarly and concomitantly expensive. It’s also very nicely bound and easy to read. It feels like it will last a very long time, which is good, because I haven’t digested it yet and doubt many could in a first reading.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them — Elif Batuman

June 4, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve been trying and failing to satisfactorily describe The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them to friends and failing to get across the book’s humor, which is unusually rich and deep. Whoever wrote the back cover blurb, with its weird melange of subject matters like a demented person’s shopping list, outdoes me:

If you’re going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boys’ leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind, and the resignation of the soul—seek no farther: this is the book for you!!!

It’s funnier still in Roz Chast’s handwriting. The humor, taken out of context, falls flat without the build up from earlier material, as Batuman describes situations that become jokes absurd academic setups involving the relatives of Isaac Babel or the relationship traumas experienced by our plucky, self-aware narrator. Actually, plucky isn’t a fair word: Batuman is deep, and not just because she reads a lot and lives a lot and finds ways to combine living and not living, as when she sees Don Quixote:

Don Quixote, I realized, had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and read books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book. Foucault, meanwhile, broke my idea of literary theory: instead of reducing complexity and beauty, he had produced it. My interest in truth came only later, but beauty had already begun to draw me into the study of literature.

Except that Don Quixote pays for his broken binary with social opprobrium that he, wisely or not, doesn’t realize (or chooses not to realize), and his end on a deathbed leads to his famous renunciation of books of chivalry.

The life lived through books is, to some extent, the only kind of life we can have—or, alternately, we learn to lead our own lives through the narrative examples that others set for us, whether through their being or their stories. And we understand the stories of a single other person better by understanding the stories told by cultures better.

That last sentence is somewhat vague. Let me cite a comic example of someone utterly failing to do so:

While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for? On those grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s ‘specifically Jewish alienation.’
‘Right,’ I finally said. ‘As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.’
He nodded: ‘So you see the problem.’

We moved from the high brow, about the power of literature and the reference to the “vale of tears,” to the very low brow, which entails virtually anything having to do with New Jersey, to the middle brow of self absorption. This is good stuff.

And if literature can’t render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness, maybe it’s still good for passing the time until death, or at least idle cocktail party chatter, or at least impressing potential sexual partners with literary repartee, assuming you find the right sort of partner. For Batuman, grad school is that sort of place, although she also dates a banker (it doesn’t work out), and one or two others I’ve forgotten.

There are other grad school jokes, which I have a special appreciate for because I’m in it, and those sometimes combine jokes about Russia (which are also common): “The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways to my own experiences in graduate school.”

Batuman actually ends up in a remote, former Russian province, in the form of Uzbekistan, where a series of bureaucratic and financial snafus combined with questionable decision making lead her. During a tedious bit of orientation in preparation for going to Uzbekistan, Batuman leaves to find a hat. Despite the risk of death, maybe Batuman is better off in the Caucuses, thinking:

Somehow I ended up in an Urban Outfitters. All around me, girls were buying absolutely unwearable-looking clothes: sheer dresses with V-necks down to the navel; jeans measuring literally two inches from waist to crotch; rhinestone encrusted G-strings with no elasticity whatsoever. I found a hideous white ill-fitting sun hat, bought it, and fled to Barnes & Noble.

She’s not one of them; she’s one of us, which I can say merely because she agrees with me about airports and airplanes (“Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you.”) Compare that to one of my recent ruminations:

As I write this, I sit in a Tucson airpot bar. Airports have everything wrong with them: they are transitional, one-off spaces filled with strangers, the “restaurants” they offer consist of pre-made food with character slightly above a TV dinner, and for some reason we as a society have decided that Constitution rights and privacy don’t apply here. People I don’t know can stop me at will, and merely flying requires that I submit to security theater that is simultaneously ineffective and invasive. Everything is exorbitantly expensive but not of particularly high quality. Menus don’t have beer prices on them.

The airport, in short, is designed to extract money from a captive audience; this might be in part why I don’t care much for sports stadiums, Disneyland, and other areas where I feel vaguely captive.

But I’m less funny than Batuman, which is a good reason to read her, despite the improbability of her subject matter. Batuman’s language is wonderful too: she says that she’s going to Tashkent with “Dan… who was indescribably average in both appearance and demeanor, like some kind of composite sketch.” The comparison is fresh, describes Dan without describing him, and, more importantly, shows exactly how Batuman thinks of him, even if he has some kind of vibrant inner life not apparent on the surface. If so, alas, we get little indication of that inner life, which might be part of his problem, and the problem of many of those who don’t have adventures in Russian books—or any kind at all.

(Here’s a comment on The Possessed from the Literary Saloon.)

Life and The Possessed

May 10, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Life Tags: , , Leave a comment

“The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways to my own experiences in graduate school.”

—Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

If you haven’t read this book, which is a hybrid sort of essay collection / memoir / how-not-to, you need to. It’s almost impossible to describe what makes it so wonderful because its humor is cumulative: quotes out of context don’t work and make it sound less funny than it is.

Michael Silverblatt’s interview with Batuman is also characteristically good.

Harold Bloom’s hero-poets

May 10, 2010 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For reasons not obvious to me I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Harold Bloom’s work lately, and in The Anxiety of Influence I came across this passage:

But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian. They tend not to think, as they read: “This is dead, this is living, this is the poetry of X.” Poets, by the time they have grown strong, do not read the poetry of X, for really strong poets can read only themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect.

There’s something pleasing and ridiculous about the “strongest” poets being described in the same language one would use for a discus hurler or hockey player. Instead of being writers trying to put words on the page, the poet is made into a Blakean figure who strides the landscape of the mind. If you misread this passage, you might skim and find that poets “tend not to think, as they read,” which would be a challenge, since reading seems to be by definition a form of reading.

But if poets aren’t reading other poets since they can only read themselves, what are they reading when they read, say, Shakespeare? Themselves into Shakespeare? If so, I would guess that either everyone or no one does this, and I can’t say which is more likely.

And what does that odd phrase, “to be not elect” mean? Apparently there are at least three classes: the elect, who the strong poets are, the plebeians somewhere down below, and maybe some people pressing their faces against the glass face of the elect. I would guess myself to be way down there, relative to poets, assuming one buys this model of the poetic universe, which I’m not sure I do.

Anyway, one sees the ranking technique, the knowing allusions (“neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian”) and the mystical throughout the Bloom I’ve read. In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom argues that Shakespeare invented the way we feel, think about feeling, and be. I can mostly respond: maybe. The book is overly pervasive, as I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t have developed modern consciousness without Shakespeare, which is reading against Bloom, but I like the ideas nonetheless. I feel like I’m playing again, instead of working, and that I should have a glass of wine or maybe sherry while I’m reading Bloom. It’s also fun to find a modern critic who isn’t afraid to say something, to make judgments, to acknowledge that some writers are better than others, and not to apologize for it, even when Bloom effectively parodies himself by saying things like “to be judicious is to be weak.” In that case, count me among the weak, or among those who would ask, “what do you mean by judicious?” and then launch into a Wittgensteinian argument.

Harold Bloom's hero-poets

May 10, 2010 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For reasons not obvious to me I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Harold Bloom’s work lately, and in The Anxiety of Influence I came across this passage:

But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian. They tend not to think, as they read: “This is dead, this is living, this is the poetry of X.” Poets, by the time they have grown strong, do not read the poetry of X, for really strong poets can read only themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect.

There’s something pleasing and ridiculous about the “strongest” poets being described in the same language one would use for a discus hurler or hockey player. Instead of being writers trying to put words on the page, the poet is made into a Blakean figure who strides the landscape of the mind. If you misread this passage, you might skim and find that poets “tend not to think, as they read,” which would be a challenge, since reading seems to be by definition a form of reading.

But if poets aren’t reading other poets since they can only read themselves, what are they reading when they read, say, Shakespeare? Themselves into Shakespeare? If so, I would guess that either everyone or no one does this, and I can’t say which is more likely.

And what does that odd phrase, “to be not elect” mean? Apparently there are at least three classes: the elect, who the strong poets are, the plebeians somewhere down below, and maybe some people pressing their faces against the glass face of the elect. I would guess myself to be way down there, relative to poets, assuming one buys this model of the poetic universe, which I’m not sure I do.

Anyway, one sees the ranking technique, the knowing allusions (“neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian”) and the mystical throughout the Bloom I’ve read. In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom argues that Shakespeare invented the way we feel, think about feeling, and be. I can mostly respond: maybe. The book is overly pervasive, as I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t have developed modern consciousness without Shakespeare, which is reading against Bloom, but I like the ideas nonetheless. I feel like I’m playing again, instead of working, and that I should have a glass of wine or maybe sherry while I’m reading Bloom. It’s also fun to find a modern critic who isn’t afraid to say something, to make judgments, to acknowledge that some writers are better than others, and not to apologize for it, even when Bloom effectively parodies himself by saying things like “to be judicious is to be weak.” In that case, count me among the weak, or among those who would ask, “what do you mean by judicious?” and then launch into a Wittgensteinian argument.

How to find books

May 10, 2010 By in Books Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Apropos of this post on influential books, a reader e-mailed me to ask how to find interesting books. My answer: look for books that are important to people who are smart, and ideally smarter than you. That’s one reason I like the “top ten influential books” meme that’s been going around: it introduced a lot of books I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Other (obvious to me) places: The New Yorker; professors or highly literate friends; the better book/arts blogs, like About Last Night; and author interviews, in which novelists or other writers mention important/influential books. The last one is probably among the most useful because writers, in order to work effectively, have to read a lot. As a result, the top few books of the many thousands they’ve read are probably better than the top few of the dozens or hundreds random friends have read.

The problem with books is that you can’t really say whether they’re right for you until you read them, and what’s right for you depends on how much you already know about the subject, taste, what else you’ve read, development, background, and more. So book recommendations are by their nature hard, especially for someone like you, who I (probably) don’t know. I have a few go-to recommendations that many people seem to like—Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind; Alain de Botton’s On Love; Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose; Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem; and Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy are high on that list.

This discussion reminds me of So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, which discusses how hard the sifting process becomes as more books pile up while time to read remains constant. One can view this as depressing, because you’ll never get to read everything worth reading (unless, apparently, you’re Harold Bloom), or freeing, because you can simply read whatever comes to hand and abandon it at will.