Martial had a problem. Poetry has always been a bad business, but it was especially bad in the ancient world. "Are you really that Martial," a passing fan once asked him, "whose mischief and jests are known to all?" Martial nodded. "Why then is your cloak so ragged?"

"Because I am a bad poet," he said.1

This wasn’t quite true. Martial was a great poet. His satires were adored wherever wit and gossip were valued, which was everywhere in ancient Rome. The problem was that, like most great poets, Martial was a lousy businessman. He was always running out of money, falling out with patrons, and losing out on investments. If he could actually make money selling his books, he’d be fine, but ancient Rome had no royalties for artists and no publishing industry to manufacture and distribute books at scale.

Irene Vallejo, writing about Martial and the Roman literary market in Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, proposes a curious solution to Martial’s problem. Literary historians like Vallejo have always valued Martial because his complaints about Roman bookstores have furnished us with valuable evidence about things like the price of books, the role of booksellers in Rome, and the types of shops they ran. And in several of Martial’s books, he goes so far as to list specific bookstores, even giving directions.

"So you won't fail to know where I am for sale, or wander aimelssly all over town," Martial writes in one dedication, "follow these directions: seek out Secundus, the freedman of learned Lucensis, behind the temple of Peace and the Forum of Pallas."

We know that Martial was constantly broke; we know that giving compliments of any kind to any person was hard; why, then, did he go out of his way to put in a kind word for the sellers of his books? Is it possible, Vallejo wonders, that Martial earned money through paid product placement? This would make him the earliest ad-supported writer that we know of, an achievement far more important to the history of literature than his satires.

The Engine of the Internet

There are only two ways to make money from writing: you can either get a lot of people to buy copies of your work, or you can get a rich patron to sponsor you. This was true in Martial’s time two thousand years ago and it’s true in our time. It’s also overwhelmingly true that the patronage model is more durable and more popular by far. Ever since the New York newspaper The Sun put out its first ad-subsidized issue in 1833, dramatically undercutting the newsstand cost of its competitors, most of the money made in the writing business has come from advertising. TV and radio took this even further, giving out content for free, depending entirely on ad revenue to keep the lights on.

The internet has only supercharged this model of content distribution. If you look at the ten most popular websites in the United States, two of them are ad-subsidized markets (Amazon and Apple) and seven of them (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, PornHub, Twitter, Yahoo) are supported almost entirely by advertisements. Billions of internet users around the world get news, entertainment, social media, pornography, and more without paying a cent. Whole industries are supported by the largesse of advertisers, and it all comes down to the magic of programmatic advertising.

Most of the online ads that you see are, essentially, an auction. Every time you open a web page, an auction between the host and dozens of advertisers is conducted at, quite literally, the blink of an eye. The thicker your data profile—the accumulated dust of your internet travels, suggesting all kinds of probabilities about where you’ve been and what kinds of products you like—the more “relevant” the ad supposedly is, and the more likely it will result in a “click-through,” taking you to the advertiser for a sale (or sometimes, just another ad-supported website).

Programmatic advertising, or adtech, is the engine of the internet as we know it. Ads support more artists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and designers than all the patronage of Martial’s Rome ten times over. By renting out a little corner of our screens, we pay for almost everything.

Without it, the internet would be a ghost town: sure, the pipes all work, but there’s no search, no social media, no porn, no Gmail, very little news. Amazon prices would be higher, and smartphone apps would actually cost money. The entire internet, besides maybe monastic little Wikipedia, hiding away in its cloister, would be slower, emptier, and much more expensive. The damage to our creative economy, at least in the short term, would be catastrophic.

Adtech, as you may have seen, isn’t having a good year. Google’s revenues are slipping. Snapchat lost a third of its value in a month. Mark Zuckerberg is so freaked out by the dismal future of ad revenue for Facebook that wasting billions on a VR Cringe Xanadu seems like a better alternative than business as usual. After his shotgun wedding to Twitter, Elon Musk is now kicking out personnel and raising prices to cover the fact that Twitter has almost never turned a profit from advertising. Across the adtech market, advertisers are increasingly wary of spending their ad budgets on, well, advertising.

Tim Hwang, tech researcher and author of The Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, saw this coming back in 2020. His short book makes a well-researched, rigorously argued case for what is, when you stop and think about it, blindingly obvious: adtech is bunk. It always has been. I don’t click on ads, you don’t click on ads, pretty much nobody clicks on ads, and never really has.

The Case Against AdTech

The research here, as cited by Hwang, is robust. While the earliest online banner ads in 1994 had an astonishing click-through rate of 44%, by 2018 it was down to about 0.46%. That's a decline, in two decades, to about one-hundredth of their former effectiveness. And even then, about half of those clicks are thought to be "fat-finger clicks," accidental clicks on tiny touch screens.

Then there’s fraud: depending on who Hwang asks, he finds that between one-tenth and one-third of all ad click-throughs are estimated to be fraudulent, the work of sketchy adtech companies juicing their numbers through bots or armies of "click-farmers" in developing countries. Other companies practice “domain-spoofing,” in which they sell premium-looking ad space that turns out to be in a dead zone. It's as though you paid for a billboard on Times Square, but instead got your ad stenciled on the back of a trash can in Poughkeepsie.

But it gets worse. Even when you factor in the fraud, the fat-finger clicks, and the fact that a tiny minority of internet users are responsible for a vast majority of click-throughs, there is still no proof that programmatic advertisements actually work. One of the best independent studies Hwang cites found that user-targeting programmatic ads were 500% more expensive than non-programmatic ones, but only raised 4% more revenue. Even when adtech works exactly as it’s supposed to, it’s hardly better than a generic digital billboard.

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Is There an Advertising Bubble?

How could this flim-flam advertising possibly sustain a multi-billion dollar industry and power the internet as we know it? It's always possible, given how much data Google and Facebook have at their fingertips, that they know something we don't, and are using this proprietary data to hedge their bets.

But Hwang has another theory, as the title of his book suggests: the adtech market is subprime. Just like mortgages in the 2008 recession, adtech is an overvalued asset whose poor value is masked by complexity, obscurity, a few bad-faith bullshitters who know better, and a lot of naïve investors suckered into the hype of better advertisements. Hwang thinks that whole swathes of the market are built on financial quicksand. Much of the investments made will never be recouped, the expected growth will never happen, and the assets investors do hold will turn to ashes.

Is there actually a bubble? As a non-expert, it's hard for me to say. Right now, we seem to be in more of a market correction than a bubble collapse, with Google, Facebook, et al. simply losing a bit of their stock value while investors grumble. But if there really is a bubble, you won't need an obscure literary blogger to point that out: you'll know it when Facebook starts charging you to message your friends, or Google hangs a tip jar off the Daily Doodle. And look, Twitter is now charging $8 a month for verified accounts!

Controlled Demolition

More importantly, and putting my literary blogger hat back on, a real adtech collapse would mean the sudden and painful withdrawal of much writing from the public sphere. Paywalls would proliferate, many publications would collapse entirely, and Google AdSense-powered chum factories would start to clog up the pipes of the internet like cicadas after a die-off. In the short term, many thousands of careers in journalism and publishing would disappear forever. Less visibly, but no less important, many of the indirect beneficiaries of adtech profits, like Google Scholar or Goodreads, might get shuttered as their parent companies retreat. As odious as the current internet might be, a bursting adtech bubble would be a disaster.

Instead, Hwang advocates for "controlled demolition," encouraging users and business to migrate away from programmatic advertising before the market grows large enough to threaten us all with its collapse. Use ad-blockers, avoid ad-powered websites when possible, purchase or subscribe to writing that you truly value. For his part, Hwang has put his chips in with Substack, where he now works as general counsel.

The two funding models for writing will always be with us. There will always be places in the market where pure sales are enough, or where patrons can be found, or where a hybrid model can thrive. But if the early 21st century has seen a strong swing towards advertising patronage in the arts, the pendulum may be shifting back in the other direction.

Martial, possible pioneer of poetic advertisement, wrote in a way that maximized his exposure to audiences, allowing him to sell his works cheaply. "My pages amuse only when they are free," he wrote. It led to a fickle fanbase, broad but shallow, and he was the first to admit it in his many complaints about his readers and patrons. It might be time, as Alan Jacobs writes, for writers to focus less on chasing more eyeballs, and turn more to selling dear words to few friends, rather than cheap ones to strangers.

From the Archives:

I’m going to get back to using this space after posts to share older writing, for the benefit of new subscribers. Here’s an essay from last year on the neglected bastard child of literature, the movie tie-in novel.

Clayton Davis

Pulp Fictions

Note: because of the numerous footnotes and images, I recommend reading this post on a web browser, not via email…

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5 years ago · Clayton Davis

One origin of bookselling

At the cusp of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, some characters begin to appear who had until then been unknown: booksellers. It’s in this period that the new word bybliopólai (“sellers of books”) first features in texts by Athenian comic poets. According to them, stands selling literary scrolls would be set up in the agora, among the others offering garlic, vegetables, incense, and perfume. For a drachma, Socrates says in one of Plato’s dialogues, anyone could buy a philosophical treatise at the market. It’s surprising that books were readily available so soon, and in the case of difficult philosophical works, even more so. Judging by their low price, they must have been small or secondhand.

-Irene Vallejo, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

You’re not supposed to try and haggle over prices these days, yet customers do it every day in Shaun Bythell’s bookshop. One day, it’s a woman coming up to the counter with a book priced at 50p who says: “Two questions, firstly can I have a discount because it is in pretty grotty condition, and secondly, can I pay for it by card.” Another day, it’s a car collector trying to cadge a few pounds off of some Rolls-Royce books, unaware that the shop he’s parked his Rolls in front of belongs to a man living barely above the poverty line. The few times Bythell actually does give a discount, the reaction is nonplussed: “Is that all the discount I’m getting? £5?”

Bythell is the owner and proprietor of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, where he lives with 100,000 books and a morbidly obese cat. He’s also the author of Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, which I read in a delighted rush last weekend. Mostly, I enjoyed Bythell’s acidic portrait of the bookselling life, and appreciated his thoughts on surviving as a bookseller deep in to the Age of Amazon. But I also thought, as I read his running log of daily operations, sales, shipments, acquisitions, bids, offers, squabbles with his oddball staffers, and run-ins with motley customers, that the book-buying public tries to haggle a lot more than I expected.

“I have devised a new strategy for dealing with hagglers,” Bythell muses at one point, exasperated with another discount-hunter. “When they ask for a discount, I’m going to ask them what they do for a living…In the extremely unlikely event that they earn less, they can have a 10 per cent discount. In the almost inevitable event that they earn more, they can pay me 10 per cent extra. That’s progressive economics.” 

Why would you haggle over books?

There are a few reasons why people might feel entitled to bargain at a used bookshop in ways that they wouldn’t in, say, Victoria’s Secret or Tesco. For one thing, booksellers really do negotiate prices when acquiring inventory. Bythell makes a lot of housecalls, usually to those recently departed, to buy up their book collections for a fair price. Everybody knows, then, that used booksellers aren’t obeying some MSRP handed down from on high, but have set their prices as high as they reasonably can, just like any reasonable merchant would. Perhaps more people would try to haggle over the price of an iPhone if Tim Cook had to sell them out of his trunk. 

The real reason haggling seems to persist in bookselling, even though the practice has been vulgar in English-speaking cultures for a hundred years, is the same reason for most other social problems these days: the internet has broken our minds. 

If you are a healthy, red-blooded homo economicus who lustily responds to financial incentives like all the other good moderns, buying a book is a simple process: go online. You could go straight to Amazon, but if you really want to take the long route, you could also look on Abe Books and Book Depository, or search reviews on Goodreads, or look for audiobook versions on Audible, but these all subsidiaries of Amazon, so it’s all the same. Whichever one you choose you’re likely to find the exact book you want, at the lowest possible price, and probably with free shipping. You order it, and thanks to Amazon Fulfillment Magic, the parcel shows up quickly and painlessly1 at your doorstep a few days later. 

This is how bookselling is supposed to work, at least if the whole point of the market is efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profit. The Bookshop, needless to say, is not coming after Amazon any time soon, and you can tell because Bythell posts his sales records every day in his journals. The Bookshop goes whole seasons without earning back its operating costs, and it isn’t getting better. The variety and types of used books people are willing to buy is drying up as fewer young people collect them, and the value of used books continues to tumble against online pressure. At one point, Bythell barely manages to convince a customer to pay 60p for a copy of a popular book he used to sell for £10. 

A bookshop, then, has the appearance of a shop, but not the form of a shop. Bothered by this disjunction, customers versed in good capitalist practices can’t help but haggle, to make the whole place more market-like and cozy.

The only reason Bythell manages to keep the lights on and feed his obese cat is that some people, mostly old and not especially rich, still prefer used books. This is nice, but it’s not nearly as primary to the function of bookshops as, well, selling lots of books. So, being good market economists, we have to ask: what niche is being covered here? What are independent bookshops for? What is their function? What niche do they fill? What species do they sustain? 

Towards an ecological argument for the independent bookshop

One day at The Bookshop, an old man comes in and whistles around in wonder: “You know,” he tells Bythell, 

‘Edinburgh used to be filled with places like this. I spent my life wandering about them and building up my library. I bought a sixteenth-century copy of Holinshed’s Chronicle–you have a later edition, I see–in a bookshop in Leith in the 1940s. I remember it clearly. They’re all gone now, all but a small handful.’ 

Bythell knows what the man is talking about. He has a keen memory for British bookshop lore, and quotations from many classic books-about-books fill his diaries. He knows this kind of customer, and what they’re looking for in his shop: 

Collecting books was clearly an important part of his life, and without bookshops there is little joy to be found in this pursuit. The serendipity of finding something you didn’t know even existed, or asking a bookseller what they could recommend on a particular subject, isn’t really possible online yet, although I expect it will come…Still, the smell, the atmosphere and the human interaction will remain the exclusive preserve of bricks-and-mortar bookshops. Perhaps, like vinyl and 35mm film, there might be a small revival, enough to keep a few of us afloat for a bit longer.

I find this whole passage beautiful, but frustrating. Not because I don’t agree with it: I do! But this isn’t economics, it’s ecology. And ecology doesn’t make any money at all! What it could do, though, is at least give us the terms we need to carve out a space protected from the market, like those spotted owls whose federal protection wrecked the economy in my coastal Oregon hometown. Ecologists are great at this! Taking a page from Rohit, let’s build up this metaphor.

Old-growth bookshops like Bythell’s sustain all kinds of rare and wonderful species with their own useful ecological niches. Bythell actually writes about some of them in his other book, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops. Between the bearded pensioners (Genus: Senex cum barba), the amateur occultists (Homo qui maleficus amat), and the local historian (Parentum historiae studiosus), Bythell has identified several keystone species. We might tentatively add to that list a few more specimens awaiting scientific study: nerdy book bloggers, trainspotters, vintage sci-fi fans, military-publishing aficionados, weird old art spinsters.

Who knows what predators they keep at bay, what symbiotic kinships they maintain with flora and fungi as yet unknown to science, or what strange and wonderful rituals they perform in the secrecy of their nests? The bookstore is a crucial part of their habitat, and without it, they might end up stumbling through our backyards and parking lots, disoriented by noise, bellies distended with hunger before they keel over, dead by displacement.

And as the chainsaws and bulldozers rev up outside their barren, unprofitable marsh, why should we chain ourselves to the trees and fight for these weirdos? We do it, finally, for the same reason that we would for the spotted owl or the dodo: because nothing natural is alien to us, because it is their home, because we can never get it back when it’s gone, and because, well, it’s there. Nature, in its great and good wisdom, saw fit to put these shops there. They represent centuries (millennia?) of cultural evolution, adapted to their environment, clinching it together in ways we can hardly guess. 

What are bookshops for? I can only begin to guess. But as much as we can’t afford to keep them, maybe we really can’t afford to lose them, either. Now I’m going to go and preorder Remainders of the Day: A Bookshop Diary. 

A quick announcement for my regular readers

I have dropped the blogging part of my Substack platform. Mostly, I was using it to post weekly link roundups to things that I found interesting and useful in the world of books. However, it was a bit of a drag to produce, and Substack isn’t really the right platform for those kinds of rapid-fire, infrequent posts. Instead, I will relegate the link gathering to once per month, and lock all the little bloggy drafts I have on my harddrive away in the cellar until they’ve grown into full-fledged essays. Everything that I write out here will once again be plain old newsletters for email and RSS

Going forward, I’m going to put as much energy as I can into posting one newsletter per week, rather than every other week with weird little blog posts thrown in.

To mark the occasion, and to search for a name that’s a little more memorable than Bibliophilia, I am now renaming this newsletter Musement. I hope you continue to read it.

Happy reading!

Hound, Bay Horse, Turtledove 

This month marks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. There’s a lot of writing floating around about Thoreau right now, much of it variations on the same few themes: civil disobedience, living in the woods, wildness, the neckbeard. Usually unsaid is Thoreau’s extensive scientific work as a naturalist, his journalism for some of the most prominent papers of the day, his tireless (and effective) abolitionism, and his career as one of the best pencilmakers in American history. He could play the flute, conduct a land survey, and build a house. He read Homer in the original Greek, and was fond of quoting Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita. He was a polymath.

Maybe it takes one to know one, because one of the best things written about Thoreau came from a painter, writer, translator, and designer equally at home talking about Pre-Socratic Greece, city planning, Soviet Constructivism, the history of sexuality, atonal music, prehistoric cave art, utopianism, furniture design, Denmark, pastoral Latin poetry, landscape painting, and anthropology, among other things. He was Guy Davenport, and he wrote “The Concord Sonata,” a collage that turns a minor moment in Walden into a portrait of Thoreau. It begins like this: 

At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”

Davenport is being modest. At least one intelligence has made sense of Walden’s least sensible passage. His “Concord Sonata” is all about Thoreau’s hound, bay horse, and turtledove: where they come from, what they mean, and if he found them. I had to work hard to understand this prickly, allusive text, a solution to a mystery that creates more mysteries in its wake. Davenport is never an easy read. But it was worth it. This essay tracks his movements.

Let’s start with that first section, all of which is true: the white pine table, the Iliad, the sentences. Thoreau wrote much of A Week on the Concord and Walden at the same time, but he published A Week quickly and labored on Walden for years. Like most people, before I read Walden I assumed that it was just sappy self-help: Walden: I Lived in the Woods Practicing Mindfulness and Self Reliance, and You Can, Too! This is the Walden people have in mind when they bring up little Henry taking his laundry from the pond to his mother’s house as though Thoreau lied to us about his manly forest survivalism. Walden isn’t self-help, of course; strictly speaking, it’s not entirely non-fiction. Thoreau really did live in a cabin by the pond, but he takes liberties for the sake of literature, compressing two years into one in order to track the order of ideas and personal growth with the seasons of a single year, ending in spring on a note of enlightenment, literal and otherwise. 

The dog, the horse, and the bird aren’t real, but they obviously mean something. Davenport quotes Stanley Cavell: “I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage, but the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell me we need to know.” Thoreau’s passage is its own paragraph, with no clear connection to the parts before or after. If it’s making a point, it does so in a roundabout way. It feels like something an ancient Chinese sage would write. 

Et Voilà Tout

It is something a Chinese sage wrote. “The immediate instigation” for “The Concord Sonata,” Davenport said in an interview, “was a search for the source of the mysterious passage in Walden (about losing a dog, a horse, and a dove). I found it in Mencius.” (Reading Thoreau as a Chinese philosopher is a typical Davenportism.) And sure enough, Davenport found Thoreau quoting Mencius in A Week on the Concord: 

Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.” 

No English translation of Mencius existed when Thoreau wrote that. He didn’t read it in Chinese, obviously, but he could’ve read it in French. And sure enough, open Chapter V of the second book of Mecius in Confucius et Mencius: les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine, translated by M.G. Pauthier and published in 1846, you will find: 

Meng-Tseu dit: Si l'on perd une poule ou un chien, on sait bien les rechercher; si on perd les sentiments de son cœur, on ne sait pas les rechercher! Les devoirs de la philosophie pratique ne consistent qu'à rechercher ces sentiments du cœur que nous avons perdus; et voilà tout.

The chicken and dog from Mencius have “become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse,” Davenport writes. “The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.” These are the sentiments of the heart. These are values.

So Davenport has solved the what, but not the why. Having found Mencius in Thoreau, he also finds Thoreau in Mencius. The longest section in “The Concord Sonata” is the dialog between Mencius and Duke Hsuan about sparing an ox out of mercy and killing a sheep in its place. I found it in Mencius 1A7. My translation reads: 

The king was pleased, and said, 'It is said in the Book of Poetry, "The minds of others, I am able by reflection to measure;" - this is verified, my Master, in your discovery of my motive. I indeed did the thing, but when I turned my thoughts inward, and examined into it, I could not discover my own mind.

Davenport’s paraphrase is better, but still: here is a bit of American Transcendentalism in the Three Kingdoms: self-reflection as a means of knowing the world. Not that Thoreau and Mencius are really identical: at the point where Davenport introduces a Confucian ode, the Mencius dialog turns toward the very un-Thoreauvian topic of benevolent, powerful rulers. Davenport isn’t making an argument—just spotting an assonance.

About that ode: it’s not in Mencius and I can’t find it. Davenport is either relying on an interpretation different than what I can find online, or it’s a fabrication. Both are possible. But it’s still worth a close read. “The world’s order is in the stars,” it begins, “We are its children, its orphans.” To a Confucian or Thoreau, this is not a metaphor but a fact: nature is orderly, and humanity is embedded in this order. Thoreau writes in A Week on the Concord of “the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined.” Again, here is a Confucian reading of Walden, and a Thoreauvian reading of the Shi Ching. The third through sixth stanzas read: 

The autumn moon is round and red. 

I have not troubled the order, 

Yet I am no longer in it. 

In the first waywardness we could

Have gone back. In the second we 

Began to confuse lost and found. 

Had we been angry to be lost,

Would we have taken disorder

For order, if any had cared? 

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

There was a time we had neighbors.

The autumn moon is round and red.

Every stanza here raises an issue you can find in Walden. Waywardness, an absence of order, no clarity of purpose—they are as lost to the Confucian as they are to the American. “There was a time we had neighbors,” Confucius sings; Thoreau says, “We cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men.” However different the two sages are in their outlooks—one wrote “Civil Disobedience,” and the other gave us filial piety—they both understand well enough that we are a stupid and inept species, cut off from a world and a heritage that might sustain us on better terms, if we were not so lost. 

This is the center (literally) of “The Concord Sonata.” Losing and finding, are the operative terms here, the key to Thoreau’s hound, horse, and dove, to Walden, to his entire corpus, and to “The Concord Sonata.” They are everywhere. Look at the Confucian ode again: we are lost, and cannot find our way back. Look at the Mencius again: losing chickens and dogs and the sentiments of the heart, and seeking after them. Look at Thoreau’s parable again. “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail.” Thoreau’s work is a search for something lost. But what has he lost? 

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Harmony and Effluences

Section 2 is a quote from the American naturalist John Burroughs. He says that Thoreau had a “fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling [and] in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.” This “search of his for the transcendental,” as Burroughs calls it, as well as its fine effluence, come from Thoreau’s journals. March 7, 1859: “The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenious worshipper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence.” This comes from a longer argument against a scientific paper that, for him, fails to grasp its subject’s grand, mystical glories and enigmas. The paper is on potato vines.

The natural world—not an idealized, feckless nature of roses and waterfalls, but the filthy, real one composed of potato vines and warring ants—is where Thoreau’s search it always taking him. Nature is where Thoreau looks for effluences, essences, and the sentiments of the heart. Section 16, “Meadows,” finds him searching in that wilderness, lovingly describing the sedges, andromedas, hardhacks, marsh-hawks, and berries: chokeberry, blueberries, and hollyberries all together, “in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.” It’s a moment of joy and union for Thoreau. This is what he’s looking for in the woods. He calls it harmony.

Harmony is musical. “The Concord Sonata” is also the name of a piano sonata in four parts by the American Charles Ives, an insurance agent, college baseball star, Constitutional reformer manqué, and avant-garde composer. (Another polymath.) Each movement of the sonata is dedicated to a famous Concordian; the fourth movement is Thoreau’s, a collage focusing on the relationship between language, music, and nature. In the essay Ives published alongside the symphony, he writes:

Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony." The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity.

The connection between nature, music, and sentences is rhythm. Thoreau’s careful searching examined these rhythms and how they worked. They worked the same way, Ives says, and Davenport agrees: together, in harmony.

The last section of the story is a single sentence: “Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.” In A Week on the Concord, Thoreau’s party hears a drummer as they sleep on the riverbank: 

We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be there. And still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. This stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These simple sounds related us to the stars.

Self and stars are together in harmony. What do you do with that? 

Lions, Designers, and Why

There are three lions in the “Concord Sonata.” Two of them are attributions. W.E.B. DuBois: “Lions have no historians.” The second is from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Wittgenstein’s lion is certainly Thoreau in Davenport’s scheme: Section 12 is a cranky note from Davenport about how, in early American English, “One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas,” which when it appears in A Week on the Concord is always misprinted as spoken to in “modern ignorance.” We literally don’t understand Thoreau’s language when he speaks. 

One more lion: Section 15 says “Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes.” The jail is where he sat for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican War. Diogenes was the itinerant philosopher who lived in the wilderness, defaced currency, and rejected material comfort. (For his rough mode of living, the Greeks called him a dog, kynikoí, and today we still call people who distrust convention cynics.)

You can see the similarity between the two. “Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes,” Davenport writes, which is to say that both are, in his words, experimental moralists. Diogenes lived in a bathtub to prove that life could be simpler. Thoreau’s moral experiment was to see if freedom of conscience was worth more than freedom of movement (it was). In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.” Diogenes said that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man.

So a lion is a creature we know nothing about, can’t understand, and, with our conscience, wrestle to submission. The lion points towards an integration of knowledge, awareness, and commitment: it finally points to where Thoreau’s search, which has taken him from berry patches in a swamp to sitting in jail, at his most serenely confident, embedded in an ancient tradition. We lose “our nature itself,” Davenport says in section 10, “atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as a tradition, the great hearsay of the past.” 

Where does tradition come into it? There’s only one lion in Walden—“A live dog is better than a dead lion,” which helps nothing. But then I opened A Week on the Concord and found: 

It is remarkable that Homer and a few Hebrews are the most Oriental names which modern Europe, whose literature has taken its rise since the decline of the Persian, has admitted into her list of Worthies, and perhaps the worthiest of mankind, and the fathers of modern thinking,—for the contemplations of those Indian sages…have influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of mankind,—whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed. If the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise.

Pencils and Practical Philosophy

One last thought on integration. Davenport is impressed, and wants to impress upon us, the many talents of Thoreau.. Section 17 reads: “This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.” Davenport shows us Thoreau designing things. Designing things is a way of searching: for a better pencil, a better map, a better life, a better bread. “If we act by design, by principle,” Davenport says, “we need designers.” To design houses, experiments, gardens, sentences, like Thoreau did, is to live deliberately. Davenport makes no distinction between them because for Thoreau, for Mencius, for Diogenes, and for Davenport himself, all work, whether it is done with a chisel, a flute, or a pencil, is all part of the same search: hound, horse, turtledove. That is all. 

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When We Cease to Understand the World

By Benjamín Labatut 

Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

New York Review Books (2021)

My Worst Subject

There are some subjects that I’ve never been able to understand, no matter how much time or tuition I pour into it. In this sad list that only grows longer with time, positioned somewhere above Russian grammar and trigonometry but below my absolute inability to roll my Rs, is the science of quantum mechanics. A pile of books and three different teachers have all failed to describe the motion of subatomic particles in a way that makes sense to me: I can distinctly remember standing in a university lab on a rainy Monday morning, hungover and slack-jawed, watching my professor flipping switches and dials to tumble photons through a maze of slits and photovoltaic receptors, sticking his hand in the light’s path, explaining how this revealed the secret architecture of the universe. The professor pointed the same photon-battered hand at me and asked what we just witnessed. 

“Um,” I said, grasping for a word, and settled on the title of the day’s lecture. “Entanglement?” The professor nodded and launched into an explanation on entanglement in action. I had no idea then--I have no idea now--what quantum entanglement means. I got a B- in that class. 

To be fair, as the professor warned us at the beginning of the term, what we were getting in this course on quantum mechanics for non-science majors wasn’t the real QM (as they call it), but only a collection of reductive metaphors and partial truths that obscured nearly as much as they explained. Real QM, the professor said, was pure mathematics, irreducible to human language. There is no English translation for Ѱ or ħ. This was more than the professor’s opinion: it was the official position of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, creators of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the dominant model of subatomic physics going on a century now. Electrons, Heisenberg said, “are not things, but possibilities. The transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘real’ only occurred during the act of observation or measurement,” all of it expressible, if at all, in a series of deviously complicated mathematics. 

Quantum mechanics was the culmination of a long change that began slowly with Ernst Mach’s work in the 1890s, exploded into public view with Einstein’s papers on relativity in 1905, and culminated in Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics in 1927. The specifics of what they discovered about energy, spacetime, and subatomic particles are beyond my pay grade, scientifically, but their broader significance is the great scandal of modern science: simply put, physics started raising more questions than it answered. At the largest and smallest possible scales of measurement, the universe and all its particles that make up you and I and my dog and the Moon are, upon examination, only a frothing whirl of probabilities hurtling through curved space. 

That all this happened in less than thirty years, that it happened almost entirely in German-speaking countries, and that it all happened in the middle of a catastrophic military defeat and the run-up to a continent-spanning genocide is baffling to consider. Around the same time Central Europe fell apart, its scientists were proving beyond a doubt that the natural world didn’t make any sense. This revolutionary era is at the center of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a collection of stories about the discovery and meaning of black holes, chlorine gas, quantum uncertainty, and other 20th century fruits of science and mathematics. 

Lab-Grown Fictions

Labatut admits, in an afterword, that although the book’s stories follow real people and real science, he has freely added scenes, speeches, confrontations, dreams, dialogues, and other tricks of fiction to the history. It would be best to think of these stories in the same way we think of Hollywood biopics like The Theory of Everything: we know these are actors presenting a heightened version of the real story, with scenes added and rearranged for dramatic effect, even as we learn things about these figures and their work that are broadly true. 

And so Labatut spins fiction out of history. Erwin Schrödinger really did develop his theory of wave-functions in a Swiss sanitarium, though God only knows if seducing a pretty, tubercular girl was involved. Karl Schwarzschild really did scribble the first solutions to Einstein’s field equations in a trench in 1915, and this really was the first inkling anyone ever had of black holes and their nature, though whether or not this had anything to do with the fatal pemphigus sores that erupted all over his body around the same time is speculation. Fritz Haber really did win the Nobel Peace Prize the same year he was declared a war criminal. The ghosts, apocalyptic hallucinations, and math-induced pyromania1 Labatut introduces are only picking up on hints that the real history suggests: 20th century science is easier to explain as a Gothic tale. What else are black holes and electron clouds but a kind of new, terrible sublime? 

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Ecstatic Truths

But to just call these horror-inflected historical fictions misses Labatut’s other trick: all his stories are interlaced with documentary evidence, astonishing asides, and remarkable facts. “Prussian Blue,” the knockout story of the collection, begins with this tour de force: 

In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of the drug in Germany at the end of the Second World War. 

And from here, Labatut is off with an avalanche of facts and anecdotes, going from the state-sanctioned use of amphetamines by German SS officers to the uniformed Hitler Youth handing out cyanide potassium capsules from flower baskets to Nazi high command while the Berlin Philharmonic played its last wartime show. This is all in the first three pages: the next twenty weave together medieval alchemy, nitrogen manufacturing, Napoleon, and the Holocaust, all of it circling around Prussian blue dye, which can be a medicine, pigment, and toxin all at once. Historians can quibble with how Labatut ties it all together, but I read the whole thing in a single gulp, gasping and disoriented.

Labatut is Chilean, and this is his first book translated into English. Judging by a quick peek at the Spanish version on Amazon, Adrian Nathan West’s translation is faithful to the original’s long, surprising sentences and deadpan tone, and the few pages I could find of Labatut’s two other books suggest that there is more in this style. Demand for further translations is guaranteed: When We Cease to Understand the World appeared on Barack Obama’s 2021 summer reading list, and was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Awards and celebrity endorsements are usually so much hot air and marketing voodoo, but this time they’re on the mark: this is the best book I’ve read this year, and I will read anything else Labatut and West care to put out in English.  

Though I must add, sadly, that this is yet another book on quantum mechanics that has failed to really explain what entanglement is or how it works. This one, at least, is honest about the futility of trying, and I take comfort in that. 

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Meanwhile, on Musement

It’s been a while since I wrote a proper Bibliophilia post. You can find weekly link round-ups to bookish and book-tech articles I found especially interesting. I also wrote a little bloggy post about TikTok’s weird cultural insularity, relative to other social media, mostly piggybacking on a Cal Newport article.

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: August 5th, 2022

The Museum of Library Stuff Via NPR, the Oakland Public Library has started hosting an online gallery of stuff left in returned library books. There are postcards, love notes, bits of magazine cutouts, sticky notes, cartoons. Personally, the worst thing I’ve ever left in a library book was a favorite bookmark from a few years ago. Maybe we should start l…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: August 26th, 2022

I’m finally back from Armenia, just in time for the beginning of the churn und drang of the new school year. Wish me and your other educator friends luck as we continue trying to jury-rig a working version of post-COVID education from scratch. Meanwhile, links! Some of these were gathered from airport reading while travel, and some are from the last few…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: September 2nd, 2022

Another week, another list of gleanings from the republic of letters. As usual, all quotes and figures are from the linked source unless otherwise stated. I meant to post this last night, but the end of summer vacation and return to teaching has been, as always, exhausting. Anyway…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

Clayton Davis

Weekly Links: September 9, 2022

Once again, I’m a little late with the link roundup. I had blocked out some time to publish these last night, but then a friend offered me some rather strong beer. Reader, life is short and the teacher’s working week is long. I regret nothing, except perhaps this mild hangover. Anyway, to the links…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

And that’s it. Happy reading!

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Meanwhile, please enjoy this old post from my old blog, concerning one of my favorite topics: books about Armenia. I have fixed a few typos that slipped through, and slimmed down a few long sentences.

Remember last year, when I wrote a bunch of posts based on my notes for a history presentation that I gave to incoming Peace Corps volunteers? Well, I gave that presentation again this year to another incoming cohort, which is why I haven’t posted anything new here for a few weeks: I was too busy re-learning things that I (ostensibly) already knew and didn’t have the energy to write about school, or farm animals, or the barn cat I’ve befriended . Since I’ve already written posts about history, I didn’t know what to say on the blog. But then, I thought that anybody interested in my old history posts who wants to know more about Armenia would almost certainly be better served reading books by experts, or at least actual Armenians. So, I’ve put together my own personal Armenian reading list. These are the books that have informed my own work and opinions on Armenia, along with my own commentary on them.

Also, I don’t really have any new pictures to break up these lists with besides the barn cat I’ve been hanging out with, so I’m just going to use those.

Armenian Literature

The first place to start is the literature of Armenia itself. This is a weird and incomplete category, because the current state of English translations of Armenian literature is sadly incomplete and, where it does exist, quite outdated. With that in mind, here are the few worthwhile books I’ve enjoyed:

The Daredevils of Sassoun (prose translation)

Armenia’s national epic (known as Sasna Tsrer in Armenian) is a collection of folktales about the exploits of four generations of the Armenian Sasuntsi clan as they protect their lands from Arab invaders, especially the dastardly Misra Melik, caliph of Baghdad. Although Melik runs one of the world’s largest, most advanced cities, he seems to spend most of his time tugging at his beard and figuring out how to humiliate Armenians. The Daredevils are a rowdy bunch, keen to put off their holy mission to save Mother Armenia whenever busty damsels or casks of wine are involved—one lengthy detour involves David Sasuntsi’s quest to marry the Princess of China, who sends him a marriage request because she’s heard he’s the hottest hunk in the world—but as soon as their appetites are sated, they ride out to repulse Misra Melik’s hordes with gleeful ultraviolence. Daredevils first took form sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries AD, as Armenia was coming out of a long period of Arab domination, although many of its stories have elements dating a thousand years back to pre-Christian Armenian mythology. It wasn’t until the 19th century, with the Armenian bardic tradition in steep decline, that some monks thought to write it all down. Several translations exist, though none of them are particularly new or easy to find. I read the Leon Surmelian version, published in 1964.

The Book of Lamentations, by Grigor Narekatsi

Also know as the Book of Narek or just the Narek, The Book of Lamentations is the most famous collection of poems by the first great Armenian poet, Grigor Narekatsi, or Gregory of Narek. Except for his birth in a city near Lake Van around AD 950 and the fact that the Church viewed him at a heretic after his death, very little is known of Grigor’s life. All that we have from him is this long book of mystic, evocative poems that describe the joys and agonies of life and the spirit. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is deeply personal poetry from a man whose inner life is otherwise a complete blank space in our records. What is known is that his heretical, mystic views were at first denigrated by the church, although Grigor’s popularity with Armenians was such that they eventually recognized him as a saint (the Catholic Church has actually followed suit and recognized him, too). The book is everywhere today, mostly because it’s said to contain magical powers and spells for healing, a belief that once prompted the 20th century poet Paruyr Sevak to quip that the book had been more kissed than read.

David of Sassoun, by Hovhannes Tumanyan

A retelling of one of the cycles from the Daredevils by Armenia’s national poet. While many Armenians are only familiar with the original Daredevils through adaptations, illustrations, and reputation—the same way your average English speaker is vaguely aware of, say, Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra but hasn’t read them—everybody knows this one, and many can quote it at you. Tumanyan has had the good fortune to be the national poet of a nation that reveres poetry, and because the story of heroic Armenian resistance to foreign empires is never not relevant to current affairs here, this is one of his most-loved poems.

Armenian Poems: by Alice Stone Blackwell

Blackwell, a 19th century daughter of classic Boston Brahmin intellectual types, is America’s first major translator of Armenian literature. Here she translates a number of the major 19th century Armenian poets. How ably or creatively she does it I can’t say, although I have my suspicions that most Armenian poets didn’t actually write like A.E. Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, or other popular British poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least it’s free.

Armenian Legends and Stories, Zabelle C. Boyajian

There are a number of Armenian books available on Gutenberg along these lines. I prefer this one for its selections from the History of Armenia by Movses Khorenatsi, one of the few places anywhere that I’ve been able to find the 5th century chronicle (Armenia’s earliest written history) available in English.

Seven Songs of Armenia, by Gevorg Emin

Non-essential and probably hard to find outside Armenia, but there is a copy at the Peace Corps volunteer library worth checking out. Emin was a poet and Armenian nationalist in the late Soviet era, but where so many nationalisms finally shed their patriotic shroud to reveal (and revel in) ecstatic hatreds and kooky pseudoscience, Emin is just a peaceful eccentric who sees his country as God’s own underdog. His seven “Songs” are Whitmanish essays about stones, water, books, or whatever else he likes about Armenia. I include it here as a good primer on Armenian nationalism when it’s in a friendly, approachable mood. There’s also a statue of Emin with his cat in Yerevan’s Lover’s Park on Baghramyan Avenue.

General History

These are books and sources that have been most helpful to me in learning and interpreting the long history of Armenia as a culture, nation, and various states. I have organized them alphabetically by title.

100years100facts.org

100 Years 100 Facts was created as a part of the centennial of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and, just like the name says, has 100 facts about Armenia, all of them supported by citations. It’s an excellent website for skimming around and learning some of the more notable aspects of Armenian culture.

Ancient.eu

The Ancient Encyclopedia is an online source, free to the public and full of articles by academics on topics across the range of ancient history in Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to generous grant funding, there is a huge selection of high-quality articles covering various aspects of ancient and classical Armenian history.

Armenica.org

While I don’t think the site has been updated in a long time and is not the best-organized website out there, I’m putting Armenica on here solely for its wonderful collection of historical Armenian maps, covering everything from Urartu in 890 BC to an essential season-by-season collection on the 1988—1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War.

The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars, by Razmik Panossian

For history nerds and social studies buffs only, but essential for them. Panossian is a diasporan political scholar and reigning expert on Armenian nationalism. The first section, on Armenian history, isn’t comprehensive, but this is deliberate: Panossian focuses only on events that have had relevance to modern Armenia and its self-conception, and so are the things you can expect average Armenians to know. Imagine an American history that focuses on the Gettysburg Address and MLK, but not on the Battle of Gettysburg or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and you’ve got the idea. I’ve shamelessly stolen Panossian’s framework in my own presentations on Armenian history, and they’re a lot better for it. The rest of his book, on nationalism in Armenia, has made me much less ignorant of Armenian perspectives and attitudes than I might otherwise have been.

Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, by Charles King

There’s no way to write a single-volume history of the entire Caucasus. It can’t be done. King knows this, although his book’s subtitle doesn’t: instead of getting deep into 5th century Georgian politics or Chechen nationalism, King tells the story almost entirely from the Russian perspective, from early stabs at imperialism in the 18th century to the post-Soviet guerrilla warfare in Chechnya. As a small country whose history is often shaped by its neighbors, this is a useful overview of some of the most influential forces at work in Eastern Armenia under Russian empires.

Black Garden, by Tomas de Waal

The best book on the Nagorno-Karabakh war available in English, and not just because it’s the only one there is. De Waal interviewed Armenians and Azerbaijanis for years to put together this book about the 1988—1994 war for control of the majority-Armenian province of Karabakh. The conflict, still unresolved, killed tens of thousands and caused the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands on both sides, crimes which neither side will admit to. Neither side will publicly admit to de Waal’s telling of events, either, which tells you that he’s on the right track.

The History of Armenia, by Simon Payaslian

As far as I can tell, this is the standard Armenian history in English; not many other books will cover everything from Urartu to the Karabakh War, or at least I haven’t seen them yet. There are no frills, no maps, no hard ideological angles: just the straight story, all thirty centuries of it.

The Armenian Genocide

First of all, there is no doubt whatsoever that the 1915 Armenian Genocide was real, premeditated by the Ottoman government, and deliberately undertaken with the intention of destroying or removing the Armenians of Western Armenia. No responsible scholar has ever found otherwise, and none of the sources shared here participate in the Republic of Turkey’s campaign to deny the events of 1915. While a number of excellent memoirs exist from genocide survivors and their descendants, I have limited myself here to a few of the most crucial and relevant books.

A Shameful Act, by Taner Akçam

Not the first book on the Armenian Genocide that you should read, but certainly one of the most important. Akçam is one of the few Turks that Armenians respect, and for good reason: he has endangered his own life and made himself an enemy of the Turkish government by telling the truth about its denialism. (He was arrested for it! He broke out of a Turkish prison! He sneaked back into the country, where nationalist gangs have promised to kill him, in order to attend the funeral of a prominent Turkish Armenian! This guy is amazing.) A Shameful Act is a study of all the extant documents from the Ottoman archives—court transcripts, conference minutes, carbon copies, telegraphs—which establish, beyond all doubt, that the actions the Ottoman Empire took against its Armenian population was a genocide, executed with the intention of clearing out central Anatolia for the establishment of a “Turkish” homeland. Akçam is an academic writing for academic audiences and presumes background knowledge of the genocide, but if you’re truly interested in the history of the Armenian genocide (or genocide studies in general) this is a book worth reading.

Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian

This is the first Balakian to read, and the only one I’ll put on here, but as a rule, Balakian’s books on Armenian history are all worth reading. This one just happens to be the most easily-available, and the easiest for the curious American to get into. Balakian, an Armenian-American poet and scholar, focuses on the 1894 Hamidian Massacres and the 1915 Armenian Genocide through an American perspective, following the diplomatic staff and missionaries on the ground during the genocide and the American response. It is an excellent introduction to the Genocide for American readers.

They Can Live in the Desert, But Nowhere Else, by Ronald Grigor-Suny

What’s true of Balakian is even truer of Grigor-Suny: when it comes to Armenian history, he is The Man. Another Armenian-American, Desert is his book on the genocide and Armenia’s long, ongoing quest for recognition in the face of evil—there is no other word for it—efforts by the Turkish government to obscure and deny it. I haven’t read any of Suny’s other works in full, but what I’ve read have convinced me that if a Suny book interests you, you ought to read it.

Memoir and Reportage

The astute reader will notice that these are mostly by 20th century Russian authors and not always directly about Armenia. The truth is that as a Russian literature fanatic, my first exposure to Armenia, long before I thought I’d live and serve here, was through these books, and as such they hold a very special place in my heart. They also happen to be some of my favorite Russian writers of all. I have organized these chronologically.

Journey to Armenia, by Osip Mandelstam

A travel memoir shot through with essayistic digressions on history, science, and language by one of Russia’s great poets, An Armenian Journey marked a turning point in Mandelstam’s poetics. His encounters with the Armenian language (he called it a “wildcat” in another journal) and history (the image of Sevanavank, an island in 1933 but a peninsula today, is central to the piece) encouraged him to make poems with more vigor and sensation. Unfortunately, it was the last thing Mandelstam published before an unfortunate epigram about Stalin sent him on his way to a rasping, damp death in a work camp outside Vladivostok.

An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman

After the state seizes his 900-page magnum opus Life and Fate (Russian novelists don’t mess around with themes), even going so far as to take his typewriter ribbons (Russian censors don’t mess around with anti-state themes), Vasily Grossman fell into a deep depression. The Soviet government, sensing it may have angered one of its most important and influential artists and eager to avoid accidentally elevating him through damnation like they did with Pasternak, offer him a sop: he can’t publish his novel about Stalingrad, but he can go to Armenia, help translate a big, tedious Armenian novel, and write pretty much anything he wants about his trip in a memoir. Like Mandelstam before him and Bitov after, Grossman was won over by Armenian hospitality, and wrote a 100-page paean to the country. The book is full of sharp observations of Armenians, ranging from mountainside peasants to Catholicos Vazgen I. He also writes beautifully and at length about the horrors of nationalism, genocide, and the brotherhood of Jews and Armenians. (Sadly, modern politics have done much to poison the ancient friendship between the two cultures.)

A Captive of the Caucasus, by Andrei Bitov

Yet another memoir of a Russian writer who comes to Armenia to rediscover his zest for life in the sun-drenched biblical land peopled by wise, humble farmer-poets. I only keep sharing these because they’re so damned good, and in this case because Bitov, Russia’s great postmodernist (books within books and all that) pays more attention than his literary forebears to Armenia’s rapid industrialization and modernization.

Imperium, by Ryszard Capuscinski

Poland’s great journalist and chronicler of European colonialism’s collapse from the 1950s through the 1980s, Capuscinski seems at first to be an odd fit for the Soviet Union. Then again, as he makes clear in every chapter of the book, whatever its ideological underpinnings, at heart the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, its collapse uncannily similar to the retreat of British, French, and Portuguese power across Africa and Asia. The chapters on Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early days of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, when it was technically a covert civil war between Soviet states, are especially useful for our purposes.

There Was and There Was Not, by Meline Toumani

An Armenian-American journalist, uncomfortable with the confrontational approach towards Turkey and genocide recognition taken by the Armenian diaspora, and a curiosity for how much (or how sincerely) ordinary Turks believe Turkish propaganda about the 1915 genocide, moves to Istanbul and learns Turkish. This was a hugely controversial book among Armenians when it came out—among other things, Toumani says that demanding international genocide recognition is a self-defeating policy, and that Turkish food is delicious—so definitely don’t go around trying to argue its points with Armenians, or assume that everybody will be sympathetic to the author’s perspective. Still, it’s a good book, and its dual Armenian-Turkish perspective on the 1915 genocide makes it nearly unique among popular books about Armenia.

And that’s all for a while. Come to Armenia some day, and happy reading!

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There is something wonderfully magic about Morgan’s rucksack that I can’t get over. Like an enchanted bag out of a folktale, Morgan’s Devildog Maxpedition pack seems to contain whatever tool or item he most needs to survive. It might even be bottomless: one reviewer notes that the Maxpedition seems to contain no less than four different camping stoves. That they are different stoves is known from the narrator’s obsessive habit of describing the exact brand name, model, and make of every object he pulls out of his bag.

Far from being a distraction, this seems to be the main draw for Going Home’s many thousands of readers: where other Kindle books might have popular highlights centering on witty dialogue or thesis statements, the men reading Going Home on their camo-shell Kindles overwhelmingly dragged their fingers across the screen to highlight text like “Rust eraser, a medium and fine four-inch diamond hone, a DMT fine diamond card…Eagles Nest Outfitters hammock, Slap Straps, and bug net, as well as my seven-by-nine tarp and rigging…Glo-Toob lithium light, an Energizer headlamp, and a two-liter Platypus bag.” The whole thing sounds like a cross between Call of Duty and a Cabella’s catalog with unmentionable stains that make some of the full-spread rifle ads stick together. 

One wonders how Morgan and his growing band of merry militiamen cope as the apocalypse inevitably comes for more and more of their gear through the many sequels. With American capitalism ground to a halt, no broken Slap Strap will ever be replaced or made whole again, and every hollow-tip bullet is a precious talisman.

This is especially true when, as the jacket copy of Conflicted Home suggests, Morgan’s list of enemies throughout the series has swelled from thugs and “Federals” (but not the US military, apparently) to Cuban commandos, Russian “pathfinders,” and a fleet of nuclear-armed Chinese warships. Hopefully the magic rucksack has a few more Springfield XD .45 rifles. 

This late turn towards international warfare and the fate of the world is indicative of American fiction’s forking path in the Age of Amazon, or at least that’s what Mark McGurl would say. Going Home is one of the many Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) books he examines in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. The internet’s preferred marketplace for self-published smut and dreck might seem like an odd place for meditations by a Stanford professor literary history, but as McGurl continually reminds us, Kindle Direct Publishing is now, by a wide margin, the largest single platform for new books in the history of literature, but is seriously under-examined by most professors, agents, executives, and critics in the world of books. It will only keep growing in size and importance. But if KDP is the future of books, it looks an awful lot like the past.

After years of investigating KDP and its discontents, McGurl claims that all novelists on Amazon inevitably feel a gravitational pull towards Western literature’s two dominant, pre-modern narrative genres: the romance and the epic. Romances, of course, are stories about two people overcoming adversities in order to unite, whether legally or genitally. The epic, which the Going Home series increasingly resembles, is the tale of how history was made, and who made it. These are the twin poles of pre-modern fiction.1

For a few centuries, starting somewhere between Don Quixote in 1605 and Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, we’ve also had the novel, which situates those older genres among characters who exist at a human scale. This usually means realism, if not always physically then at least psychologically. The Achilles of Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles is still the hero from Homer’s epic Iliad, but Miller shifts the focus away from his godlike prowess and all-consuming rage and the fall of Troy, and towards how sad Achilles felt when his lover died. In romance, too, Jane Austen’s modern lovers are just as duty-bound to unite as the medieval Tristan and Iseult, but they also have time to squabble, fret, joke, and generally act like normal people.

You, me, and Mark McGurl were all born well into the age of the novel, but McGurl suspects that the tradition might be in decline, and the largest culprit is Amazon. Not that novels are going away forever: it’s just that, in the Everything Store, as it is often called, “literary novels” are simply one mode of prose fiction hovering between epic and romance, while hundreds of other KDP-born microgenres, like Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica or EMP Apocalypse Thrillers–flock to those twin poles like iron filings to a magnet. As they get closer, they lose the ironic detachment so necessary for the basic effects of the novel.

The magnetic force here is the democracy of the unfettered market, enabled in theory by the internet and in practice by Amazon. The company didn’t invent online self-publishing and still hasn’t made it even remotely respectable, but they did manage to make it extremely easy and extremely cheap. With KDP, anybody can upload their work to the world’s largest bookstore, paying nothing until the point of sale. Amazon only takes somewhere between 25% and 65% in fees, depending on unit price. If you also offer your works on Kindle Unlimited, you get a chunk of Amazon’s $20 million monthly payout proportionate to your page views. That chunk of cash, along with the many tens of thousands of KDP books released every year, suggest that there is real money to be made here.

If you’ve got the skills to make and market your work, this can be a much better deal than traditional publishing. You get more money per sale, full control of the editorial and design process, and detailed statistics about your readership and downloads. “For its part,” McGurl writes, “Amazon would convert [publishing] into a kind of proprietary jungle, or terrarium perhaps, which anyone can enter but where only the algorithmically fittest survive.” In other words, successful Amazon fiction has to be easy to find, easy to sort, and easy to binge.

The tale of Hugh Howey, indie author and KDP darling, is instructive here. Ten years ago, Howey was a bookstore clerk and unpublished sci-fi writer. He had a short story, “Wool,” which had failed to catch the interest of any magazines or journals. Frustrated, he put the story on KDP, where it quickly found a huge audience and enough coverage to kickstart a successful career as an independent writer of fiction. That’s the happy part. 

The complication, as Howey quickly realized, was that his readers, awash in thousands of books all freely available on Kindle Unlimited, didn’t want more books by Howey; they wanted more “Wool.” They cared about the product more than the producer. The problem was, “Wool” had a pretty definitive ending, with deaths and plot-twists that didn’t leave much room to grow. He wound up rewriting the original story, expanding it into a longer novella, and over the years expanded this lone story into a sprawling, 15-part Silo Saga. What had started as a dark bit of speculative short fiction had expanded, through sheer market pressure, into epic science fiction.

The same thing happened to E.L. James’s best-selling bondage romance Fifty Shades of Grey, which started as a novel, bloomed into a trilogy, and then multiplied into a six-part…hexology, I think? (Sextet seems too on-the-nose.) Although the Grey series started as free fanfiction and was then picked up by a traditional publisher, McGurl notes that the world of fanfic romance was intimately involved in the establishment and growth of KDP culture from the beginning, providing the templates and norms that most Kindle romances still follow.

Of course, Amazon’s blank cardboard shipping boxes and the featureless, cover-less Kindle reader were essential for helping 125 million women purchase and read their bondage smut without fear of judgment. As for the more niche romantic categories, like Adult Baby Diaper Lover Erotica or Interracial Alpha Billionaire Romance, it’s hard to see anyone comfortably buying or reading those in public. In that sense, KDP really is paving the way for entirely new kinds of literature.

McGurl doesn’t comment on it, but this endless cycle of expansion, making up sequels, prequels, retelling, and endlessly balkanizing genres, is quickly catching on in the rest of our literature. Margaret Atwood wrote a prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, as did Suzanne Collins with The Hunger Games. Marlon James followed up the big, but self-contained A Brief History of Seven Killings with the Black Leopard, Red Wolf trilogy of epic fantasy. Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the… thrillers are still coming out under a new author, and he died seventeen years ago.

Obviously sequels and prequels have always been with us–Sherlock Holmes was brought back from the dead by sheer public demand, after all–but it’s getting worse, and book-sales charts are growing more static and generic over time. Literary fiction’s “genre turn” shows no sign of slowing down, either, as more and more famous literary writers learn they can make more money by changing their settings from townhouses and trailer parks to space ships and castles. Eventually, readers will get what they want, and what they want is mostly what they already have, following genre conventions they’ve come to expect. 

In other words, books are headed in the same direction that movies, TV, and comics have been headed for decades: back towards the pre-modern, to oral and visual folklore. For most of human history, storytelling was defined by repetition, stock characters, and the kind of mythic time that lets wandering gods and heroes have endless adventures and entanglements. Books, for a brief time, were ruled by the modern assumption that self-contained, narrative wholeness was the highest aesthetic ideal, but this fad is passing as Amazon allows us to tune in, better than ever before, to the customers’ exact whims.

Obviously Amazon isn’t the whole literary market, at least not yet. But with more than half of print sales, three-quarters of ebook sales, most of the audiobook market, and by far the largest unlimited subscription service for books with Kindle Unlimited, the future of fiction probably looks more like Amazon and KDP than like Penguin Random-House. There will be more sequels, more epics, more romances, and more…more. When a hundred thousand novels come out every year, there are enough microgenres for every niche audience.

McGurl is a kind of specialist in reading fiction alongside its conditions of production. His last book, 2009’s The Program Era, was a hybrid of institutional history and close reading, covering the rise of the post-war MFA writing workshops that turned high modernism in the styles of Hemingway, Faulkner, & Co. into the default mode of American literature. It’s largely thanks to the MFA Era that our major novelists are no longer journalists, bureaucrats, lawyers, housewives, and landed gentry, but mostly professors of creative writing programs. Although it came a few years before Chad Harbach’s 2014 essay “MFA vs. NYC,” The Program Era was essential background reading to the massive, ongoing debate Harbach kicked off: are wannabe writers of literary fiction better served by a graduate degree in creative writing, or decamping to New York to stalk literary agents and publishers in their natural habitat?

It’s almost too perfect that at the same time these two elite factions were wrestling over this tiniest, poorest patch of the publishing world, Amazon was busy building up a perfect platform for the romance, mystery, science fiction, horror, and fantasy fiction that the vast majority of American customers actually want to read. In fact, KDP readers are one of the few readerships in the country that’s still expanding, rather than giving up and subscribing to HBO Max, where all the good literary fiction winds up anyway.

Now, the field belongs to Amazon, which is happy to pull highbrow literature from its perches in MFA programs or Manhattan skyscrapers, stamp a “GENRE: LITERARY FICTION” tag on its forehead, and shove it into the terrarium with everybody else. Will beta intellectual novels, as McGurl calls them, survive an onslaught of Alpha Billionaire Romances?

You can sense McGurl’s uneasy fascination, as a leftist, with Amazon’s publishing work: here is one of the most ruthless capitalist enterprises since the East India Company, a union-crusher owned by the once-and-future richest man in the world, creating perhaps the most radically democratic publishing platform in the history of literature. Amazon is just happy to take a small cut and keep the servers on.

It would be untrue, though, to say that Amazon doesn’t care at all about literature. In fact, Blue Origin and Amazon itself have origins in novels, a minor but fascinating thread pulled on a few times in Everything and Less. Bezos himself is an inveterate reader, most of nerdy sci-fi epics about space, technology, and the distant future or humanity, all of which seeps into his corporate memos and business plans. The Kindle reader’s prototype was named Project Fiona, after the ebook-like reading tablets in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Mackenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex-wife, writes sophisticated, literary novels. You can buy her books on Kindle.

Creative writing also suffuses Amazon’s corporate culture. Executive meetings always start with a pre-written prose memo describing the background and objectives of the meeting, read together in monkish silence, so that all parties are quite literally on the same page before deliberation. Product proposals, too, are written in the form of product reviews and press releases from a hypothetical future where the product is a smashing success.

The company itself, according to Bezos, was even born from a novel. Long after Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize is forgotten, and all the adaptations of his work disappear, he will perhaps live on forever in footnotes as the writer of The Remains of the Day, the novel that inspired Bezos to quit his Wall Street job, drive to Seattle, and start The Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, as it used to be called. ​2

Books, of course, used to be Amazon’s primary product. They were the perfect first commodity for an online retailer: easy to store, easy to sort, easy to browse, and easy to ship. No single brick-and-mortar store could ever hold enough books to satisfy every customer, but an online retailer could keep a massive, ever-expanding catalog for every reader. McGurl doesn’t mention it, but Amazon’s book business, from the early days to KDP and beyond, fit uncannily with S.R. Ranganathan’s famous Five Laws of Library Science: 

1. Books are for use.

2. Every person his or her book. 

3. Every book its reader. 

4. Save the time of the reader. 

5. A library is a growing organism. 

Swap out “person” for “customer” and “library” for “company” and you’ve got Amazon’s ethos pretty much covered. You might even exchange “book” for “product.” This would certainly cover the other 95% of the company’s business, but it also gets, finally, at what Amazon has done more than anybody else to books. I don’t agree with everything McGurl says in Everything and Less (the psychoanalysis stuff really lost me, and the inscrutable diagrams look like parodies of post-structuralism) but in the main I think he’s right: the final, lasting influence of Amazon on books will be to bring them closer than ever before to being a pure, unadulterated commodity.

Why should there be a difference, anyway, between a DevilDog Maxpedition survivalist bag and a copy of Going Home? You can buy them both on Amazon.

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Meanwhile, on the Musement Blog…

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: July 29, 2022

More AI Writing At the Verge, Josh Dzieza has an in-depth look at how some writers are using artificial intelligence to increase their productivity. As I found in my own investigation, GPT-3 and its competitors still can’t produce good literature at scale. It’s telling that the most vigorous users Dzieza could find were Kindle Direct micro-genre writers …

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

And that’s it for this week. Summer break rolls on, so I should be able to get something up next weekend. Happy reading!

The Krzyżanowski family kept writing their crossed-out r even when they wrote it in Russian Cyrillic as Кржижановский. They were part of the large Polish minority in Tsarist Kyiv/Kiev, a city with its own phantom letter problems and vexed relationship with Russian. Sigizmund was born there in 1887. In 1922, at the age of thirty-five, he moved to Moscow, hoping to establish himself as a writer. He didn’t. Living in his tiny apartment on Arbat Street, he wrote a hundred stories and novellas, a dozen plays and film scenarios, and filled entire notebooks with adages, aphorisms, and anecdotes—enough writing, altogether, to fill out the six heavy volumes of his collected works, some of it the very finest fantasy and science fiction in Russian literature. But in his lifetime, he only published nine stories in obscure journals and a single, slim pamphlet on the philosophy of theater.

It’s not that he was censored, at least not formally. Although his period of active writing fell entirely under the Stalinist era, few of Krzhizhanovsky’s tales commented directly on the Soviet catastrophe. His two most damning tales are the sci-fi parable of the “exes” turned into mindless slaves by government mind control and novella Return of Munchausen, in which the legendary baron of bullshit finds himself out-bullshitted by Soviet propaganda, declaring that Russia is “the only country about which one cannot lie.” Both were formally submitted to the state-run publisher, and both were rejected. An internal review of Munchausen ended with this judgment: “While trying to relate ironically to routine slander leveled against the USSR, he fell into the same tone himself. It’s best not to publish it.”

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Krzhizhanovsky was always going to have a hard time with GlavLit. He conspicuously defied the tenets of Socialist Realism, writing with what one rejection slip called an “insultingly high level of learnedness” smacking of elitist, bourgeois erudition. He even wrote back to GlavLit in 1928, after they had rejected yet another one of his books, writing that “in view of the fact that Glavlit rejected for publication my books Letter Killers Club and Collector of Cracks for reasons that are contradictory and mutually exclusive, I consider this decision incorrect and request that you, Pavel Ivanovich [Lebedev-Polyansky, chief censor], read them personally.” He didn’t.

Although his writing was convicted of anti-Soviet messages, Krzhizhanovsky himself was never arrested, never persecuted, never formally ostracized, even as his fellow authors were murdered for far less: Osip Mandelstam froze to death in Siberia for a mocking couplet about Stalin; Daniil Kharms starved to death in an insane asylum because his poems for children were too anarchic; Isaac Babel got a bullet through the back of his head because his books were too famous, and he traveled too much. Even Krzhizhanovsky’s fellow fantasists, Mikhail Bulgakov and Evgeny Zamyatin, were formally condemned and exiled for their novels, Zamyatin externally and Bulgakov internally. Why did Krzhizhanovsky, defiant and decadent, survive unscathed?

The simplest, most painful possibility is that Krzhizhanovsky simply wasn’t important enough to punish. As I write this, I have been reading Kurt Schlögel’s monumental history of Stalin’s purges, Moscow 1937. Even though the terror touched every level of Soviet society, arrests and executions were disproportionately aimed at the country’s elites. Of the 139 members elected to the Central Committee in 1934—the Soviet senate, as it were—only seven were still in office by the end of 1939. The rest were all dead or imprisoned. Most arrests were driven by accusations of sabotage: in government, military, economics, infrastructure, and culture alike, there were no accidents, only Trotskyite saboteurs. A derailed train, a disappointing harvest, and a poor show at the Bolshoi Theater were all, inevitably, followed by arrests.

In literature and culture, sabotage was done by corrupting the morals of readers. This necessarily entailed readers, which Mandelstam, Babel, and Akhmatova all had. Krzhizhanovsky didn’t. What use would Trotsky’s agitators or fascist spies have with an unknown chudak sitting alone in his shoebox of an apartment and writing fairytales about chess?

In the 1940s, Krzhizhanovsky turned to translation, hack writing, and alcohol, largely giving up on literature. In the last months, literature gave up on him: a stroke left him unable to understand writing. His partner, Anna Bovshek, later wrote that the day the doctors diagnosed him with alexia was the only time in their three decades together that she had seen her gentle, witty chudak weep. He died soon after, in 1950.

Bovshek donated his papers to the archives of the Writers’ Union, which he had managed to join in 1939. A GlavLit committee came together a few years later to consider Bovshek’s request to consider publishing some of these papers. Once again Krzhizhanovsky was rejected, this time posthumously. In his journal, he once wrote: “I am at odds with the present day, but eternity loves me.”

Eternity found him in 1976. Vadim Perelmutter, professor of Russian literature, was poking around the archives of the Soviet Writers’ Union, studying the papers of another forgotten writer, Georgiy Shengeli. In a diary entry bordered in funeral black, Shengeli had written: “Today, on December 28th, 1950, Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky, a science fiction writer and ‘overlooked genius,’ whose gifts were equal to those of Edgar Allan Poe and Alexander Grin, has died. Not a single one of his lines was published during his lifetime.” Perelmutter, an expert on Soviet literature, had never even heard of Krzhizhanovsky. Intrigued, he located Krzhizhanovsky’s papers, began to read them, and was stunned. Shengeli was right.

But eternity had to wait a little longer—13 years, actually—for the political climate to cool. Only in 1989 was Perelmutter able to finally release a collection of Krzhizhanovsky stories. This time, there were no censors, no rejections, and no excuses: a century after his birth and forty years after his death, Krzhizhanovsky was a published author.

The books were a success. Russian readers in the last years of the Soviet Union had an unrelenting appetite for works from those artists, dissidents, and activists broken, erased, and obscured by Stalinism. They needed proof that their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and teachers that they had grown up around were not all collaborators, killers, or cowards. They needed proof that Russian literature was still great, could still stand toe-to-toe with anybody else, and Krzhizhanovsky fit the mold perfectly: here, in the midst of the Terror, was a home-grown, Russian answer to Kafka and Borges, a missing link between the 19th century fantastique and postmodernism. He was everything Stalin’s New Soviet Man was not: witty, clever, cosmopolitan, with imagination to spare. Perelmutter moved ahead with editing a definitive, six-volume collection of the complete Krzhizhanovsky.

Europe quickly took interest. French translations appeared in the early 1990s, followed by German, Polish, and other European languages.  English-language publishers, typically, let world literature pass them by, and outside of a university edition or two, it wasn’t until 2009–twenty years after his return–that New York Review Books finally issued Joanne Turnbull’s translation of Memories of the Future. NYRB hit a rich seam: in a quick succession, they put out Autobiography of a Corpse, The Letter Killers Club, The Return of Munchausen, and last year’s Unwitting Street, covering just about all the Krzhizhanovsky fiction worth reading. His belated reception in the anglophone world has been so positive, Columbia University Press stepped forward this year to publish Krzhizhanovsky’s remaining plays, non-fiction, and journals, starting with Countries That Don’t Exist.

When that series is done, we will finally have something close to the complete works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in English, his favorite foreign language and a source of endless literary delight. Among the most heartbreaking of his failed projects was a tourist’s guide to Shakespeare’s London, complete with maps, descriptions, and anecdotes. He never went to London. Now, his books are sold there, and around the world there are thousands of readers eagerly buying his stories, essays, notebook jottings, and family correspondence. That this resurrection came about by means of a single paragraph in a forgotten notebook at the back of a nondescript cabinet might have come from one of his own stories, except this one has a rather happy ending.

Further Reading

• If you haven’t read Krzhizhanovsky yet, start with the stories, available in English through the Turnbull translations from NYRB. They are all excellent.

• Countries That Don’t Exist, a selection of the non-fiction, is now out, and very good. I am relying more than a little on the editors’ introduction for background and biographical information.

• I also checked much of that information against Caryl Emerson’s introduction to NYRB’s edition of Unwitting Street, excerpted here.

• The great Adam Thirlwell is also a regular, reliable voice in Krzhizhanovsky Land. He has a great essay on the author here, in the Paris Review.

• For more on Krzhizhanovsky’s intellectual context, I relied on Leiderman’s enthusiastic “The Intellectual Worlds of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.” (2012)

• For information on Soviet censorship practices, I relied mostly on Blium & Farina’s “Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives.” (1998)

Meanwhile, on Musement…

Only one week since the last newsletter, so a weekly links round-up is all you get this time. Remember, Bibliophilia essays always go out by email, but Musement blog stuff is best accessed by Substack’s inbox function. Or, of course, in these link round-ups I share at the end of essays.

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: July 22, 2022

A long, trying week for me. Here are links: DALL-E Dreams Alan Resnick fed DALL-E 2 images and asked it to suggest a similar one thousands of times, then putting them all together into a kind of computer-generated animation. Put on some good music and press play…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

Happy reading!

The history of anthropodermic bibliopegy, as the experts call it, isn’t as interesting as it sounds. Whatever lurid fantasies of necronomicons and wailing grimoires that popular culture has filled our imaginations with, the truth is that there are only a few dozen books that we know of bound in human skin, most of them obscure medical texts from the early modern era. Only in a handful of cases, like a couple editions of Holbein’s Danse Macabre etchings, a private-press edition of Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” and the memoir Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierece, Alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison and bound in his own skin at Allen/Pierece/York/Grove/The Highwayman’s request, we can be reasonably sure that the bookmakers understood that there was something Gothically sordid about binding something in human leather.

Since researchers at the Anthropodermic Book Project started using peptide mass fingerprinting to test the material composition of book bindings in 2014, it’s become apparent that there are vastly more alleged human skin books than actual, confirmed cases. Looking at the list of debunked cases, it’s fair to conclude that, give or take a Danse Macabre, the spookier a human skin book sounds, the less likely its claims are true. Titles like The Huguenot Idolatry, Mirandola’s Opera Omnia, John Locke’s De Intellectu Humanu are actually, respectively, sheepskin, pigskin, and cattle hide.

The real human skin books, as it turns out, are mostly anatomy textbooks from the 19th century, clustered mostly around medical schools in Paris and Philadelphia, and owned by wealthy doctor-bibliophiles. Dr. Joseph Leidy kept a copy of his own Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy bound in the skin of “a soldier who died during the Great Southern Rebellion,” as his notes indicate, while his colleague John Stockton Hugh bound three of his favorite French medical texts in skin taken from the thigh of one Mary Lynch, an Irish immigrant from South Philadelphia who died in his hospital.

This French connection may not have been an accident: anecdotally, there may may have been a similar circle of Parisian gentleman-doctors binding their books in patients’ skin around the same time, with flamboyant tales of erotic verse collections taken from the breasts and thighs of prostitutes, and travel books bound in the skin of tribal subjects from the far corners of the empire. A French bibliographer unaffiliated with Rosenbloom has identified 136 alleged human skin books, mostly held by private collectors with little incentive to cooperate: if the claim turns out to be false, their book loses value; if true, it then becomes illegal to sell them under current laws regarding the sale of human remains.

Why were so many doctors in 19th century Paris and Philadelphia binding their books in human skin? This is the central question of Rosenbloom’s Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Binding Books in Human Skin. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about how and why this fashion came about.

Why did a cluster of American and French doctors in the 19th century bind some of their books in human skin? We don’t know. Who did the tanning, preparation, and binding of these books? With a few exceptions, we don’t know. How did those bookmakers feel about all of this? We don’t know. There are a few tantalizing notes, like one doctor recording that he wrapped his copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinêes de l’âme in skin because “a book on the human soul merits that it be given human clothing,” but for the most part the books are silent, and the trail is cold.

This makes Dark Archives a frustrating book. Rosenbloom, a medical librarian specializing in the history of medical ethics, brings in enough weird research and morbid anecdotes about grave-robbing resurrection men and burking, and there is the obligatory chapter where we learn about leather tanning and get a craft tanner’s take on human leather. We learn about the current legal state of owning and dealing in human trophies in the United States: very complicated and specific if the body or parts in question are Native American, but extremely lax and patchwork if they are not. Corpse-desecration laws are vague to the point where a national expert on the issue was unable to say for sure if she’d be liable for keeping a skull on her desk. This makes the legal status of human skin books precarious, reliant on an uneasy combination of local jurisdiction, community interest, and institutional policy.

This leads to another important thread in Rosenbloom’s book, and one that I wish were more fully, uh, fleshed out: is it morally acceptable to keep and display books made with human remains?

This isn’t an empty hypothetical. Most of the books so far catalogued by the Anthropodermic Books Project were made with skin stripped from corpses of sick, impoverished women (and, in one of the Philadelphia cases, an African American man) for the use of wealthy, powerful doctors, all men. There is no record of consent by the deceased, and given medical ethics at the time, no reason to think the doctors would have asked for it. They took skin from dead people and wrapped their books in it.

To put it simply, any doctor that tried this today would probably lose their medical license and face steep legal penalties. They would be a pariah, and book dealers would refuse to handle the book in question. No institute would display or lend it. Even admitting to owning it would be shameful.

And yet, everywhere they are kept, anthropodermic books are hugely popular. Most of the librarians Rosenbloom interviews are exhausted by traffic generated by these books. They would almost certainly sell for a huge sum, and that value would collapse if the books were rebound in animal leather, as some librarians have called for.

Among librarians and book specialists, Paul Needham, formerly of Princeton University, has been the most vocal opponent of anthropodermic books and their display. Calling them a “post-mortem form of rape” meant to satisfy racial animus and the doctors’ “psychosexual needs,” Needham recommends stripping the bindings of most anthropodermic books and disposing of them as human remains.

Putting aside the issue of what “proper disposal” means in the case of long-dead people with no surviving kin and no way to locate their remains, this seems like a bad idea, and Rosenbloom is right to oppose it. Librarians have an obligation to preserve rare and unusual items in their collections. There need to be specific, compelling, and well-defined reasons for neglecting that duty.

Rosenbloom cites Double Fold, Nicholson Baker’s investigation into the microfiche conversion of American newspaper archives in the 1970s and 80s. Newspaper collections, librarians said, were bulky and required expensive air conditioning to maintain ideal temperature and humidity. The switch to microfilm could save libraries many millions of dollars a year in space and air conditioning costs. Entire collections were photographed, then pulped.

But microfilm, as it turned out, was a terrible, inconvenient, and fragile medium for information storage. Through bad microfilming or just material decay, hundreds of thousands of American newspaper editions were irretrievably lost. Historians now, and the uncountable generations of historians to come, will never be able to access them again.

Much is lost when we throw out original materials. Last year, I wrote about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a medieval codex holding the last extant copies of several Archimedean works, which had been erased and written over with Byzantine hymns. The Palimpsest was rediscovered a century ago, but only fully legible in the last fifteen years through computer imaging technology. Ink analysis of medieval and ancient manuscripts is a constantly-evolving field, and machine reading may yet revolutionize the translation of ancient fragments. Rosenbloom herself suggests to Needham that her work identifying anthropodermic books wasn’t even possible until a decade ago.

My point is, we still don’t know what can be found in these anthropodermic books. We don’t know who will be looking at them in the future, and why, and with what tools. We don’t know what future advances in genetics or microbiology might mean for analyzing old human skin, and what that might tell us about its owner and their times. We don’t know what cross-references might be possible as more anthropodermic books emerge, and how they might enable us to trace networks of production or distribution, or shed new light on how and why these were made in the first place. Those calling for the destruction of anthropodermic books are focused on our obligation to the past—but we owe an even bigger obligation, as philosophers have been pointing out recently, to the future, because we create its conditions and supply its materials.

“The respectful treatment of the dead,” Needham writes, “has been a central value of most human societies.” Implicit in his point is that the public display of corpses and body parts runs against those central values. But on a quick tour of European cathedrals—any one, really—one comes across endless fingers, tongues, and hair clippings of saints, the dried blood of Christ, and a woodshed’s worth of splinters from the True Cross (the OG murderabilia market, if anything is). Wikipedia tells me that no less than eight temples around the world claim to hold a tooth of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. Even China and the Soviet Union, which made a great deal of rejecting their ancestors’ spiritual hokum in favor of pure materialism, had at the center of their capitals the mummified remains of their founders. Neither Lenin nor Mao asked to be mummified and placed on permanent display for ritualistic mourning. Bodies: The Exhibition, with its skinned corpses turned into sculptures for the public, remains one of the most successful traveling exhibits of our times. And, of course, everywhere a human-skin book is found, it instantly becomes an object of scrutiny, attention, and curiosity. It is not at all obvious that immediate burial and prayer are the only way for humans to express their respect for the dead.

I agree with Rosenbloom: let the anthropodermic books stay. Don’t make any more of them without consent. Tell everybody what they are, and how they were made, and explain why this was once acceptable. Let posterity have a crack at them.

And though Rosenbloom ends with an extended aside about her postmortem plans for her own body as either an organ or cadaver donor and the preservation of a cherished tattoo, one possibility she neglects to consider the possibility of making new human skin books, certified by wills, testaments, and the rest of the legal consent apparatus that makes older anthropodermic books so creepy and unsettling. Why not wrap more of our most cherished books in our own skin, tanned and treated with the latest techniques? I can even start to imagine, gazing at my shelves, which books might make a satisfying vessel. But this is a conversation I’ll need to have with my lawyer, first.

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Meanwhile, on Musement…

Switching to more of a link-based roundup for the blog has been satisfying. There will still be occasional short pieces on the Musement side of this Substack, but the weekly digest is good for managing clutter. I don’t email these blog posts out, but you can still add them as an RSS feed. Otherwise, I’ll always link recent posts to these longer, more fleshed-out Bibliophilia posts. Here’s what I’ve done since my last essay:

Clayton Davis

Links for July 8

Apparently Owen Flanagan, Buddhist-philosopher and author of the new How to do Things With Emotions, once asked the Dalai Lama what the proper moral action would have been for dealing with Hitler. The Master’s advice: “Kill him, but don’t be angry…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

Clayton Davis

Friday Links: July 15th, 2022

Meet Galaxy Cluster SMACS 0723, the first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. You can see a higher-resolution picture here, and I highly recommend you do: zoom in on any dark corner of the image and you’ll see dozens of tiny, granular lights, each one a galaxy. The central cluster appears here as it did about 4.6 billion years ago, first eman…

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4 years ago · Clayton Davis

And since we’re now several weeks into the second year of Bibliophilia as a going concern, I’ve started sharing from the archives. Last July, I did my two-part series on Pliny the Elder and his very weird book, the Naturalis Historia:

Clayton Davis

Vita Vigilia Est

Gaius Plinius Secundus--legionary officer, governor to four of the Emperor’s provinces, admiral of the Misenum fleet, friend of Emperor Vespasian--died choking on the toxic ash of Mount Vesuvius in the great eruption of AD 79, though unlike most of the dead, he was one of the very few who died while rushing…

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5 years ago · Clayton Davis

Happy reading!

This person does not exist. Neither does this child, or this model. The images were generated by a computer program. If you’ve been following artificial intelligence for a while, you’re probably already familiar with This Person Does Not Exist, the website that uses Nvidia’s StyleGAN rendering software to randomly generate photorealistic human faces for years. The thing is, the face-rendering version of StyleGAN was trained on hundreds of thousands of pictures, exhaustively trained to understand faces. The portrait above was made with OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which didn’t know anything about human faces until somebody asked it to draw a picture of one. A few moments later, the program had crawled through thousands of images of human faces and sketched a photorealistic portrait that best matched the user’s request. In technical terms, StyleGAN is a “many-shot” program, while DALL-E is a “zero-shot” program. To put it plainly, StyleGAN can only do one thing well; DALL-E can do anything. This means that you can ask the program to draw a realistic child, a sci-fi android, or both: 

Like a lot of faces DALL-E 2 and StyleGAN put out, the likeness isn’t perfect. The figure’s eyes aren’t quite symmetrical, nor do the reflections of light in its irises. The shading around the brows are also off. The program could do better. What’s frightening is that it did so well, it had no prior training, and it did this in seconds, churning out a dozen similar variants at the same time.  

Here is the cover of this month’s issue of Cosmopolitan, also drawn with DALL-E 2: 

Professional illustrators are very nervous right now. So are fact-checkers, art teachers, and IP lawyers. Access to DALL-E 2 is tightly controlled by OpenAI, and the list of forbidden subjects for the program (public figures, violence, porn) is deservedly long, but there’s no way the software, or something just as good, will soon be available to the public. 

Of course, AI won’t stop at making pretty pictures. After a few years of slowly transforming smaller, unsexy areas of finance, accounting, calculation, aggregation, metadata, and targeted advertising, AI is now coming after everything. Massive, highly-adaptive programs will disrupt huge swathes of our economy and culture, changing how we work, create, communicate, and play. 

Whether or not this will lead to the end of the world or the dawn of a techno-utopia is beyond my ken, but as somebody with a documented interest in technology’s impact on literature, I want to think through the possibilities of AI and writing. Literature has had its own DALLE-style shocks in the last year, and there’s no reason to think the advances won’t keep happening. I will source as many claims and predictions as possible, with the caveat that like all technology forecasting, at least one idea will turn out to be eerily prescient, two more will be laughably wrong, and the rest will muddle along between the two extremes. 

What is AI, anyway? 

There’s no generally-accepted definition of artificial intelligence and never has been. Unless you work in the field, you probably have the vague, sci-fi-inflected notion of robots with feelings that I do when I hear the term. Despite what recent headlines would have you think, we probably won’t have sentient machines with minds like living creatures anytime soon, or ever. 

It’s better to think of AI as plain old computer programs with a crucial difference: AI uses feedback. Its outputs can be turned back into inputs, usually based on whether or not they satisfy a pre-set goal. The classic example from cybernetics is a thermostat, which operates in a continuous loop of comparing a target temperature against the room, heating or cooling to adjust, then monitoring again. The AI that runs DALLE-2, or YouTube’s recommendation engine, or the writing programs I’m looking at here is more sophisticated by orders of magnitude, but it does all eventually come down to a set of targets to meet, a way to monitor progress, and a correction mechanism to get closer to the target. 

Most AIs that write are natural language processors, or NLPs. These programs, like Google’s PaLM and OpenAI’s GPT-3 build up a storehouse of knowledge on language by reading trillions of words culled from the internet, magazines, and books. The more language they read, the better they can predict how a sentence, paragraph, or chapter will develop. Like most AI, these NLPs can’t write on their own, without some kind of prompt to match. Everything they do is essentially imitative, whether they’re mimicking your texting style or the verse styles of Dr. Seuss. This has some weird philosophical implications, discussed below. 

What can AI already do with writing?  

AI has already been creeping into journalism and literature for half a decade. In certain limited contexts with highly formulaic structures, like stock reports and sports recaps, AI already does a decent job. Forbes, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg, for instance, use AI programs for simple reports on scores, stocks, and election tallies that only require the machine to plug numbers into pre-made templates. This also works well with customer service: you’ve probably swatted away several AI customer-service chatbots this week. AI programs are also getting pretty good at poetry, especially in very strict forms like haiku, though they still have trouble making sense.

With fiction, there’s been less progress. One AI almost won a literary competition with a novel, though it didn’t do this in one giant leap: it was fed prompts, words, and scenarios by a team of researchers, who stitched together hundreds of fragments into a more coherent novel. They also stacked the deck in the machine’s favor somewhat by framing the story as a newly-sentient computer trying to write its first novel. Any errors in tone or consistency could be passed off as a faithful rendering of the narrator’s voice. Still it’s impressive, and highlights the kind of writing that’s being done now with AI as a tool, rather than an independent writer.

This kind of collaborative use is becoming more common. Chandler Klang Smith, for example, feeds parts of her novels to SudoWrite, asking it to complete a sentence or paragraph however it likes. Even if most of its suggestions are drivel, after enough attempts it can come up with a workable phrase or idea to get her back on track.  “It truly does remind me,” she says, “of the—all too rare—occasions when I’ve solved a writing problem with a dream… except the AI dreams on command.” Not many novelists have admitted yet to using AI at all, but if it does catch on, it’ll probably start in this way. 

But AI is also leading towards new kinds of hybrid literature written jointly by humans and software. Text-based role-playing game platforms like Novel AI and AI Dungeon function like a game-master and narrator, generating people, places, and events for players to respond to. Presets and options allow you to fiddle with the writing software, encouraging it to write in certain ways or towards certain goals, though I haven’t tried it myself. A quick tour of the NovelAI reddit suggests that the system still regularly flubs its lines and forgets where it’s going, but as the NLPs powering these platforms improve, it might not be long before we have something like an epic fantasy novel that writes itself, real-time, in reaction to you and your friends.

More than anybody else, the writer/engineer K Allado-McDowell has tried to stake out a claim at the frontier of AI-writer collaboration today. Their first book, 2021’s Pharmako AI, is a kind of epistolary exchange between McDowell and GPT-3. McDowell’s approach was to feed GPT-3 source texts to flavor its style and references, then start chatting with it and molding the most interesting responses into dialogues. The results are bizarre, free-associative conversations about free will, biology, futurism, and other topics a programmer-artist employed by Google would be into. Pharmako AI’s version of GPT-3 is essentially an Esalen guru, only even more incomprehensible. I don’t love the result, but the process is fascinating, and will probably be increasingly prominent in AI literature. 

AI is also starting to help out on the reading side of literature, too. NLPs can read even better than they write, and this is starting to make an impact in research and publishing. Ben Blatt made some waves a few years ago with Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, which rounded up some of the most interesting literary insights yielded so far by computer-based statistical analysis of literature and language. For instance, computer analysis of medieval English literature has proved what scholars long suspected: Shakespeare didn’t actually “invent” thousands of words, but simply used obscure words more often than his colleagues. This was hard to catch until more manuscripts were scanned into our language databases and programs were instructed to cross-check them against the Bard. 

Publishers have tried using these programs to better market their books. A few years ago a pair of researchers promised a "Bestseller Code" for making profitable novels, though this hasn’t yet launched a golden age of popular literature algorithmically-calibrated to please readers. I haven’t read the book, but Jia Tolentino says that the research mostly tells us what we already know about bestsellers. I tried looking around for more sources on publishing and AI, but most of it, like this pamphlet, seems to revolve around this kind of metadata-gathering. This may turn out to be a prelude to greater software that figures out what to do with all this data, but these are early days. 

This is, from what I’ve seen, the state of things right now with literature and AI. Much of it is promising, some of it is overhyped, and most of its impacts are still unknown. Still, I agree with Stephen Marche’s claim that if AI is like cinema, we’re much closer to the nickelodeon-novelty era than we are to 2001: A Space Odyssey. If the technology keeps getting better–and there’s every reason to believe that it will–AI will lead to entirely new ways of reading and writing we can barely imagine. 

The Wave of the Future

To put this as simply as I can, I believe that as it improves, AI will change writing (and other arts) as much as the camera changed painting. Photography, famously, terrified and fascinated painters when it emerged in the 19th century. Here was a device that could do in seconds what painters did in hours, at a fraction of the cost. The simple version of the history has painters wailing and gnashing their teeth for a few decades while photography destroys their economic base. Then Impressionism comes along to usher in abstract art, which can’t be photographed, and give all the artists something to do again. This will probably be somewhat true for the arts as AI encroaches: any tasks that can be easily automated will quickly stop being remunerative for writers, composers, and illustrators. 

This isn’t the whole story of cameras and painting, though. It’s not a coincidence that Realism, as an artistic movement, also emerged in Europe and North America around the same time as the invention of the camera. Many painters actually used photography as a tool, allowing them to capture details that were too big, too small, too slow, or too fast to easily paint. The Wave (1870) would have been difficult for Gustave Corbet to paint if he didn’t have photographs to work with. 

The first improvements to writing in the near future will let us all be little keyboard Courbets, letting us write with greater efficiency and less trouble. AI assistants could become spell-checkers on steroids, editing our documents for us to change verb tenses or perspectives, flag inconsistencies in meaning or style, and root out cliches or repetitions. Imagine being able to highlight a paragraph and generating a graph, outline, or illustration from it. Next to the spell-check, there would be a fact-check button, checking any claims in the text against a reliable source from the internet. (This would also make for a great browser extension.) 

A lot of drudgery in writing will disappear. If you regularly use Gmail or Outlook, you’ve probably seen their auto-suggestion software expanding its reach in recent years, offering to finish your sentences and sign-offs automatically based on predictive algorithms. So far, these programs mostly automate stock phrases and general statements, but in the near future we might see these programs grow increasingly bold in the scope and scale of their suggestions. How many work emails could be automated? If your inbox is anything like mine, it’s probably a lot. Business correspondence as we know it might disappear into a cloud of AI assistants chatting with each other, exchanging calendar information, declining invitations, monitoring progress, and coordinating meetings as needed.

This raises certain problems and opportunities for the future of non-fiction. Any NLPs sophisticated enough to do what I described in the last paragraph will probably also be good enough to read and summarize articles, reports, and websites, and books for us. Taken far enough, this would lead to a very weird kind of writing specifically meant for AI. Imagine a Robot Wikipedia that contains exhaustive, highly technical explanations of every topic under the sun, ultimately produced in order to be digested and summarized by artificial intelligence.1

With fiction, the most urgent question is whether it can be fully automated. Much depends on how good future NLPs get at logic. Right now, AI has trouble understanding motivation, plot developments, and consistency from scene to scene. This is why the few attempts to let NLPs write fiction by themselves end in bizarre, meandering, plotless rants.

If logic programs like Google’s PaLM are any indication, though, AI is well on the way to vaulting this hurdle. Then, all bets are off. As with poetry, the more formal something is, the easier it is to crack: the first genres AI figures out might be Greek tragedies or detective stories–put in a tragic reversal here, a goon with a blackjack up his sleeve there, resolve all plots on the last three pages, and call it a draft. Someday we might even be able to automate aimless, free-indirect discourse realist fiction about the problems of sensitive Brooklynites.

Whether or not this is actually possible is a very open question. Whether or not we should desire it, though, is urgent. On the one hand, there would be something miraculous about getting whatever spinoffs and sequels we want, or to explore any cockamamie concept into a novel and see if it works. This might come, though, as the cost of what Erik Hoel has memorably called the Semantic Apolcalypse: 

Let me make my concern as clear as possible. Imagine a future website where every time you click refresh a new and perfect Shakespeare sonnet is generated on the page in front of you. And you click again and again and again and again. Imagine then, your dread.

I share Hoel’s concern. For one thing, perfect NLPs would give me the nagging, unavoidable feeling that literature itself–the great human storehouse of myths and mystery, imagination and identity, excitement and emotion–is a joke, a game of imitation and repetition so simple a computer can do it. If it did happen, we’d probably have a period of wild novelty, then a rapid exodus away from traditional forms and towards the human-AI frontier. Taking three years to write a novel that machines can make in seconds would be perverse, like hand-crafting a 2009 Honda Civic from scratch.

Stephen Marche might be onto something when he says that writers of the futures will be like hip-hop DJs and remix artists. It’s worth quoting in full: 

Hip hop also demanded an entirely new musicality to maximize the effects of the innovation. Building beats and sampling required a comprehensive musical knowledge. The best DJs had the widest access to music of all kinds, and were each, in a sense, archivists. They engaged in “raids on the past,” using history for their own purposes.

Just as hip hop artists developed a consummate familiarity with earlier forms of popular music, the artists of artificial intelligence who use large language models will need to understand the history of the sentence and the development of literary style in all forms and across all genres. Linguistic AI will demand the skills of close reading and a historical breadth as the basic terms of creation.

To bring things full-circle, I think this tracks with what we’re already seeing in visual art with DALL-E. In the days that I’ve been writing this, I’ve made a habit of checking the DALL-E Reddit page where authorized users are playing with the program and seeing what it can do. My Twitter feed has also rapidly filled up with memes generated by DALL-E Mini, a kind of bargain DALL-E for the rest of us. Like any other creative medium that exists entirely on social media, it’s been the usual mix: mostly derivative, occasionally funny, and rarely brilliant. A huge proportion of people, faced with a program that can do potentially anything, have mostly used it so far to place Darth Vader and Homer Simpson in incongruous situations. The best DALL-E users are the ones who give it the most unusual prompts, or ask for something in particular styles, and understand which versions (DALL-E always generates many) are the most appealing. 

The real writers of the AI future, if we live to see it, will be masters of context, collage, and connection. They will conduct dialogues with the dead, animate the spirits of internet forums or corporations into characters, and build bizarre amalgamations of ideas into new philosophies. They will know how to craft the right prompts, ask the right questions, cultivate the results, and find communities to share them in. Who knows what kinds of insights we can gather when we have cameras taking snapshots of the language for us? And who knows what kind of Impressionism, beyond the reach of the machines, might emerge? 

But this post is getting long, and we’re getting dangerously close to senselessness. One thing I can say for sure: AI writers will not be conscious. It sure would look cool if they were, though.

Meanwhile, on Musement

The Musement blog rolls on. Here’s what you may have missed:

• Hugh Kenner on Bloomsday, and Ulysses at 100

• The Logic Piano, and thoughts on early computers

• The Hieroglyph Snail, possible mascot for this blog

• iTunes Terms & Conditions: The Graphic Novel

• Links for Friday, June 24

• Links for Friday, July 1

• Digital Natives, and some light ranting on that old chestnut.

Last week also marked the first anniversary of this newsletter. Happy birthday, Bibliophilia! This is one of the most satisfying writing projects I’ve ever undertaken, and one that I’m enormously proud of. I’m going to keep at this for as long as I can. I hope you’ll join me for another year of bookish pursuits.

Clayton Davis

Alexander's Pillow Book

Consider, for a moment, all the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that is lost forever: to name just a few, there’s most of Sappho’s poetry, the scientific works of Democritus, the histories of Livy and Tacitus, hundreds of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the memoirs of Alexander’s peers, two-thirds of Aristotle, and, perhaps worst…

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5 years ago · Clayton Davis

That’s all. Happy reading!

Using a mix of artificial intelligence and human curation, Tertulia aggregates book discussions and recommendations from across the web, drawing from social media posts, book reviews, podcasts and news articles to generate reading recommendations that are tailored to individuals’ tastes and interests.

In other words, Tertulia will figure out what books other people are talking about so that you, too, can talk about the same books that everybody else is talking about, so that Tertulia can tell even more people that you, too, are talking about the books that everybody else is talking about. Nothing new to see here.

But the Times’s whole cover is blown when it reports, with a straight face, that Tertulia’s goal is to become “the Netflix of books.” If you’ve paid any attention at all to publishing in the last decade, you’re probably feeling the same dull, throbbing knot of a headache forming that I get every time I read “Netflix for books.” The idea that we can have a data-driven app with algorithmically-determined book recommendations, that this will somehow be as appealing as watching TV or playing games, and that it will somehow make a profit is one of those zombie ideas that keeps coming back, shambling and eager, no matter how many times reality puts it down.

Let me count the ways:

• Here is a review of four “Netflixes for Books” from six years ago, where the author is already complaining that the market is saturated with Netflix imitators that disappear after their VC money dries up. Of the four reviewed, you’ll notice that one of the is Amazon, the company that famously makes negative money from books; Scribd, the only piracy site with the cojones to ask people to pay for its stolen content; and two companies I’ve never heard of (Booksfree and Bookmate) that let you pay money to—dig this—borrow books to read at home. How cool is that? Can you imagine how great it would be if, say, every town in the developed world had a place where you could go to borrow books for a few weeks, then return them when you’re done? Frankly, you’re a sucker if you aren’t paying for these services.

• Here is The Guardian in 2014 reporting on several companies, including Amazon, struggling valiantly to become Netflix for books.

• Here is The Atlantic in 2014 profiling Oyster, which also tattooed NETFLIX FOR BOOKS on its forehead and played around with Peter Thiel’s money for a few years before imploding.

• Here is WIRED in 2015, pointing out that the licensing structure for books means that most Netflixes-for-books are actually incentivized to make you read fewer books at a slower rate.

Basically, if you’re a book reporter—much less at the august cubicles of The New York Times—and somebody says “Netflix for books” around you in earnest, you have a professional obligation to laugh in their face and tell the public not to invest in these fools. What you don’t do, especially in the Year of Our Lord 2022 and all its hindsight, is let them explain their business model, their expectations for changing the industry, how their data models allow them to create fine-tuned, highly marketable user profiles with labels like “beach reader” or “cool dad” (yes, really) and then print their claims in the country’s biggest newspaper without mentioning that, by the way, this exact plan has failed a dozen times in a decade. People might subscribe to this app because of reporting like this, instead of spending that money on actual books in actual bookstores. The company in question might use a pull-quote from your gullible reporting, snatching credibility from your famous institution for their scheme. Oops.

You’ll notice, in the list of also-rans for book streaming, that Amazon kept coming up. That’s because Amazon was an early player in the books-as-service area, establishing Kindle Unlimited in 2014. Today, it’s pretty much the only big name left, letting subscribers pay $10 a month to access a catalog of two million ebooks. If anybody could make it work, it’s Amazon. Having had a long free trial with Kindle Unlimited last year, I can safely say that it doesn’t.

The catalog is the problem. Two million books is a lot, but a quick browse through the stacks reveals that the vast majority of them are self-published romances, thrillers, historical novels, and a kind of mutant slumgullion of all three mixed together. I don’t just mean that the quality of writing is low, though it usually is: the financial structure incentivizes bad writing. Kindle Unlimited pays authors from a shared pool based on their total number of pages read, so authors are motivated to pad out their books with extravagant descriptions, pointless exposition, and meandering subplots. In other words, it’s the 19th century all over again, with authors paid by the word and novels ballooning to 900 pages, except the self-published historical erotica crowd has yet to produce a Dickens or Eliot. If these kinds of books are what you really like, then more power to you, but for readers like me, most of Kindle Unlimited’s catalog is digital pulp.

The rest is meager. There are usually a few thousand books from mainstream publishers available, but these are mostly backlist titles added and removed at random. The problem, as I learned here, is that copyright law favors authors over publishers, and very few blue-chip authors want to license their books away to Amazon for fractions of a penny per page. (Funnily enough, the legal situation is exactly reversed with music, where record labels hold all the power to strike deals with Spotify and leave only crumbs for the artists. Spotify itself says that only record labels can issue takedown requests, not artists.) And so the best you can get with Kindle Unlimited, besides all the mush, is usually a few hundred popular novels and nonfiction works which might disappear at any time and are probably available for free at your library, too.

As for curation and suggestion, I probably don’t have to tell you that Amazon isn’t exactly the best place to build up your reading list. Even with every book from everywhere for sale at every price and the mighty metadata machine of Goodreads to help sort them, Amazon’s algorithmically-sorted lists are hopelessly encrusted with paid-placement, SEO nonsense, and junk.

But even if Tertulia manages to accomplish all the lofty goals The New York Times claims it will, I’m convinced that data-driven book recommendations are a solution in search of a problem. I know a lot of heavy readers, and none of them need any help at all with finding their next book. Most of them live in constant fear of the tottering pile of books-to-read on the nightstand, which in my case is often large enough to pose a significant health risk if it falls the wrong way.

Still, I’ve hung around in enough libraries and bookstores to know that a lot of well-meaning readers actually, honestly struggle with finding a good book to read. Thankfully, this is a skill that can be developed. In the interest of helping out, here are a few things that work for me.

• Read book reviews. I don’t mean individual reviews of books, but The New York Review of Books or The Times Literary Supplement, or book sections in larger websites and publications. Subscribe to Kirkus—it’s free, and they review everything. Whatever kind of writing you’re interested in, there are websites and journals dedicated to covering it and presenting the best and latest in the field.

• Keep a mental map of the territory. You should know the landmarks of your favorite genres or subjects. If you want to know, for instance, what kind of American sci-fi is good, it’s worth investing some time in the classics. Once you’ve figured out that you really like books by Ursula Le Guin or Philip K. Dick, you know that you’re much more likely to enjoy the hundreds of books like them produced in their wake.

• Follow good readers. When somebody cares deeply about good books, they tend to point them out for the benefit of others. The internet is full of talented readers and writers with excellent taste who make recommendations and references to books all the time. If you like what they write, follow up on their references and sources, going upstream to the things that they like.

• Know where the good books are and who makes them. This can be a store with a killer selection or a section of the library where your interests are particularly strong and browsing is likely to pay off, but it also means knowing a little bit about publishers, imprints. Experience tells me I can safely ignore most books published by the Big Five, but anything from Open Letter Books is worth a look because they make good stuff.

• Know your reading goals. I’ve written about this before, and I stand by it: the best readers have projects and stick to them. When I want to know more about something, I start looking for books that sound interesting and I make a list to pick up at stores or libraries.

• Keep a list. I mean an actual list, whether it’s on paper or in Google Keep or whatever. I’ve turned most of my internet browsing into a fine-tuned reading-recommending machine, but it’s all pointless if I can’t remember the title or author of a book that I heard about three months ago. I have a file in Obsidian with dozens of books, mostly obscure, academic, and expensive, that I update a few times a week. Most of the time, I don’t actually run out and get the book at all and my interest in it drifts away, but maybe a year or two down the line I’ll get interested in the subject again and there it is, ready for me to track down and find.

If this seems like a lot to do, it’s only because I’m a serious reader and an English teacher. I do this for business and pleasure, so I invest a lot of time and energy into being a good reader with good things to read. Your own investment should match your own goals. There are no shortcuts, though: your book-seeking skills are only as good as the time and energy you invest in them. What you should never do is put your faith in a bunch of geeks with a business plan who promise to do the work for you while you look at some very promising products made by their sponsors. Your reading is yours: own it.

Blog Roll

Here are my posts on the Musement Blog since my last newsletter. This essay had a quick turnaround, since my summer break officially started yesterday, but hopefully there will be more blogging for the next installment.

• A language AI at Google has tricked one engineer into thinking its sentient.

• Wittgenstein rates Kafka, completing the circuit between the 20th century’s gloomiest philosopher and its gloomiest writer. The two never met, though both were present at an airshow in Brescia in 1909. Kafka wrote about it. Guy Davenport wrote an entrancing short story about that.

Happy reading!

As always, thank you for reading.

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A Tale of Two Bookshops

When I first moved to my neighborhood three years ago, it felt like a stroke of unbelievable luck that there were two independent bookstores within five blocks of my apartment.1 For most Americans anymore, the closest brick-and-mortar bookseller is usually a strip-mall Barnes & Noble thirty minutes’ drive down the interstate. Walking to any small business is rare in the United States, and yet there they were, Fox Bookshop and Shakespeare & Co. (no relation to the famous Parisian store where Joyce & Hemingway hung out). Funnily enough, both of them were only a few blocks away from a Barnes & Noble, the indie bookstore’s natural predator, lurking unusually far from its natural suburban habitat in the middle of downtown. It seemed too good to last, and it was. In less than six months, Fox and Shakespeare both shut down, and now we’re back to just Barnes & Noble like everybody else. 

The way the two indie shops ended, though, was very different: one died a slow, drawn-out death, failing to pay its mounting back rent and vigorously denying that their property was listed for sale months before admitting that yes, they were vacating the premises, eliciting not much more from the neighborhood than a sad nod; the other ended with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the whole community, with city bigwigs and a state senator publicly expressing their dismay, swarms of loyal customers coming in as soon as they heard the news to make final, commemorative purchase. Unlike the first shop, the owners were leaving on good terms and high spirits—the business wasn’t making enough to justify passing it on, what with Covid-19 in the air, Barnes & Noble down the street, and Amazon everywhere else, but the owners had made enough for a comfortable, well-earned retirement. All this is to say that I didn’t really bother trying to get to Shakespeare & Co. when it closed down, but I left work early to get in some final browsing at Fox Bookshop.

What was the difference between these two bookshops? The two stores were only a few blocks apart, serving the same downtown mix of locals, commuters, and tourists. Why was one beloved and the other only tolerated? I thought about these questions as I read Jeff Deutsch’s new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores. Deutsch has been the manager of Chicago’s legendary Seminary Co-Op since the 1990s, and if the store’s continued success is a testament to his skills as a businessman, his book shows him to be an even better bookman. While he does occasionally get into the details of finance, pricing, cataloging, and pricing that a bookshop manager has to do, much more of the book is about how Deutsch takes a reader-focused (not just customer-focused) view of stores. He’s read a lot about reading and readers, about bookstores and how they work, about sorting and presenting merchandise—Deutsch has read a lot in general, inheriting a love of learning from his Orthodox Jewish family. 

Great bookstores, he figures, aren’t really run like conventional businesses. Not there isn’t a conventional model for bookshops: back in the 1980s, a pair of researchers at the Harvard Business School took a long look at American bookstores and came up with these four commandments for the profit-seeking bookseller, as quoted by Deutsch: 

1. Nearly 20 percent of a bookstore’s inventory must consist of products that are not books. 

2. The books that are carried must be mostly purchased from major presses that offer higher gross margins than small, independent, and scholarly presses. 

3. Bookstores must leave books on their shelves no longer than four months. 

4. Bookstores must pay booksellers the wages of an entry-level retail clerk. 

As you might have guessed, Seminary Co-Op doesn’t follow these rules. They don’t sell any Harry Potter socks, most of their stock comes from academic presses (the store mostly serves  students and teachers at the University of Chicago), their average shelf-to-sale time is eight months, and clerks are paid well over the minimum wage because they are expected to know far more about the store’s contents and literature in general than, say, a Target clerk who only needs to know what aisle the toothpaste is on. I can think of several other great independent stores that flout these rules to some extent, though few of them are as austere as Seminary Co-Op—even mighty Powell’s Books in Portland makes a great deal of hay through T-shirts and branded merchandise. 

I can’t speak for the wages at Shakespeare & Co.—the staff was unfailingly kind and informative every time I visited—but they were enthusiastic sellers of literary paraphernalia—postcards, magnets, journals, and so on. They even had a cafe, though it was always too expensive for me. Their stock was almost entirely drawn from major presses, with only a few breakout successes from indie, foreign, and genre publishers and no academic works of any kind. Front displays changed frequently to make room for buzzy new books. It was a good place to go if you were looking for that new book you heard about on NPR or The Daily Show, looking for some popular classic like Pride & Prejudice, or getting your nephew a copy of The Hunger Games for Christmas—but so was Barnes & Noble, only three blocks away, with three times as much inventory and a much bigger selection of Harry Potter socks. Amazon, which everybody now carries in their pocket, has even more, and it’s even cheaper.

Fox Bookshop, on the other hand, was playing a completely different game of their own. They sold a few fancy notebooks, but otherwise the whole space was packed with books from floor to ceiling, with carousels clogging the middle and a tiny clerk’s counter in the middle. The whole space probably had half the square footage of the Shakespeare. Even with all the books crammed into the space, Fox probably only had two-thirds as much inventory, and much of it was given over to heavy art books and works from tiny, obscure indie presses. The New Books shelf by the counter wasn’t especially prominent, and their window displays were usually more about expressing an idea or theme (e.g., books about autumn) than showing off Penguin-Random House’s newest marketing materials. 

Despite all that, Fox did alright for itself financially, and had fanatically loyal customers. I imagine the Fox family knew something that Deutsch emphasizes in his book: “The good bookstore sells books,” he writes, “but its primary product, if you will, is the browsing experience.” Browsing is the key. You can get any individual book you want on the internet, delivered straight to you and well under MSRP. Any bookstore that only sells customers what they already want is doomed from the start. What the internet still can’t do very well, though, is browsing for new books. Even with all the information-processing power and customer data profiles at its disposal, Amazon is still a lousy place for book recommendations, with its Related Items and Customers Also Bought widgets cluttered with irrelevancies, advertisements, and self-published crap. At best, it can sometimes recommend a great book that you already know about or own. Strolling through the shelves of a good bookstore, though, builds up ideas and associations, encourages lingering and curiosity. It’s generative. And you still can’t get that online. 

What made Fox Bookshop so great for browsing? There’s nothing magic about it: the answer, Deutsch would say, is on the shelves. Fox had great shelves, stocked with care, taste, and deliberation. This involved a certain amount of discrimination: as the owner once told The Inquirer, “We don’t have self-help books, we don’t have books on computers, and we don’t have much popular fiction.” There weren’t any comics or manga (the lifeblood of Barnes & Noble these days), no sections for travel or test-prep, and only few shelves for philosophy, religion, and psychology. Because they had such little space, they had fewer books than the other stores in the neighborhood. What little they did have, though, was well-curated: any random book from Fox was significantly more likely to be worth reading than any random book from Barnes & Noble, in the same way that a wise, well-read friend’s shelves is bound to be more interesting and revealing than a random shelf at the public library. The Harvard report said that small, independent presses are a big no-go for the profit-oriented bookseller; Fox Bookshop had entire sections dedicated to New Directions, Pushkin Press, Archipelago, and other great publishing houses. They had a whole wall decorated with the striking, rainbow-colored spines of New York Review Classics.

This seems like such a small thing, but telling apart indie publishers is what dedicated, discerning readers do, and it’s why so many of us became loyal customers: Fox had the best books and the most browse-worthy shelves. You found good books there, ones you’d never heard about before but had to read. Looking back on the store, the owner said that the worst complaint he received was usually “We can’t leave without buying something else.” He might have heard it from me. 

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Blog Roll

Here are my posts on the Musement Blog since my last newsletter:

• Musement: The Blog. What the blog is all about.

• A token for participating. Web3 community structures aren’t inherently good! The fact they’re all monetized also leads to terrible incentive structures. I know this isn’t news, but it’s worth shouting about every week or so.

• Self-Destructing Tractors and a Universal Remote for Killing People: Cory Doctorow on a viral story out of Ukraine. Very much worth your time.

• Reading Warrior Retreats: Lucy Calkins, who has been consistently and overwhelming wrong about reading reforms for decades while raking in millions in curriculum sales and consultancy, is finally easing up on her terrible programs. How did so many schools let themselves be fooled by this crap?

• Planet of Bots: Even if you’re not in the market for a PlayStation 5, it’s worth reading about the terrifying economy of automated buying programs.

• Jaron Lanier’s Modest Proposal to Save Twitter Forever.

• WAFFEE: DALL-E text-to-image software is very good at images. It is very bad at text. Ask it to draw the Waffle House logo, and chaos ensues.

• Thirty Million Manuscripts: A new ecological study of lost medieval texts comparing England, Ireland, and Iceland. England, for reasons described inside, lost a lot more books than its neighbors—and it’s not just Henry VIII destroying the monasteries!

Happy reading!

I thought about this, then, when I heard Ezra Klein on his podcast make a startling claim: “It’s easier to imagine today that we would go to Mars than that we’d create the library – the public library system – from scratch, because our vision of actually having public goods is so attenuated that the imaginary work you would have to do to get there, it just seems a little bit impossible.” 

Klein is right, but I’ll get to that in a moment. The context here, as it was for most of the last month, was Elon Musk and his decision to buy Twitter. I won’t recap the whole, baffling story here, but in hindsight, you can see the logic of it: Musk became the world’s richest man through investing in industries extremely specific to the 21st century. After online payment software, electric sports cars, solar panels, neural interfaces, and private spaceflight, social media seems like an obvious next step for a man who deliberately styles himself as a builder for the future. 

That this future is privatized, built by corporations for a tidy profit, goes without saying. The biggest cultural and material transformations of my lifetime have been almost entirely driven by markets: social media, content streaming, smartphones, rideshares, GPS navigation. In that same time, the most substantial thing my government has managed to achieve were two monumentally pointless wars and a years-long fight for healthcare reform that ended in a shrug.

Private industry, not the public sphere, seems to have all the vitality these days. If humans really do reach Mars in our lifetime, it’ll probably be a corporate venture, not a government project. And if I was looking for a solution to the ongoing funding crisis for the American public library system, I’d look to CEOs, not Congress. If that sounds cynical, you probably don’t live in Philadelphia.

Besides Harvard and the other colonial universities, Pennsylvania has the oldest library tradition in the United States. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin founded America’s first lending library, the Library Company, opening its shelves to any Philadelphians who could afford the subscription fee, and the nearby Darby Free Library is the country’s oldest public library, in continuous operation since 1743. The city’s current institution, the Philadelphia Free Library, was chartered in 1891 and within five years had one of the highest circulation rates in the world. Within a hundred years, the Free Library had expanded to more than fifty branches throughout the city, with its palatial Central Library on Logan Square as one of the largest library buildings in the country. 

In recent decades, though, the decline of the Free Library has become something of a recurring story. A quick search in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s records tells the story. Staffing levels have shrunk by a third in fifteen years, leaving only one delivery driver to manage shipping between 54 branches across the city, and up to a dozen of those closed every day due to lack of staff coverage. The 2007 budget, adjusted for inflation, was $15 million higher than this year’s $42.8 million, a reduction of 25%. A report from two years ago found that Philadelphia’s public school libraries have the worst ratio of librarians to students in the country, with less than ten certified librarians in a district of 200 buildings and 200,000 students. Staffing levels are so low and building infrastructure is so bad that in 2021 alone, two different branches had animal-related closures: a raccoon fell through a hole in the roof at Chestnut Hill, smearing blood and feces all over the lobby; and a skunk lived in Fox Chase Library for a week before it was captured. 

What all this adds up to is a maddeningly inaccessible system. Not a single branch is open on the weekends, and only a handful are open past 5:00 PM. Working on a teacher’s schedule, I can just barely access my local library for a few minutes a day if traffic isn’t too bad. Between the limited hours, the poor selection of new books, and the clearly burnt out staff (the librarians, as Anne Helen Petersen has written, are not okay), things are bad enough that I’m thinking of joining an honest-to-god subscription library (Philadelphia has a few) during my summer break. 

Would American cities in 2022 be able to build something like a public library system? From my block, it looks like we’re doing a pretty good job of dismantling the one that we have. And Philadelphia is hardly alone: the vulture-capital goblins at Library Systems & Services have scooped up dozens of ailing libraries in the last decade, accepting public funds to manage local libraries at lower cost (and, inevitably, worse service). LS&S branches, taken as a collective, would be the fifth-largest library system in the United States today. Then again, without that private money, we might be more like the United Kingdom, which has lost hundreds of libraries through post-2008 austerity measures. The thread runs through Ali Smith’s wonderful collection Public Library, which alternates between short stories and non-fiction about British libraries and the people who use them. Walking around central London in 2015, Smith had an easier time finding a library-themed restaurant than an actual public library. 

Then again, there is another, stranger connection between Ezra Klein’s question about Musk, Mars, libraries, and money. The US and UK library systems weren’t actually a purely public creation. The golden age of public libraries, when palaces like Philadelphia’s Central Library were built, was a direct result of the world’s richest man directing a massive, one-time infusion of capital into the system. Andrew Carnegie, like Elon Musk, was a stubborn, independent-minded, anti-union jerk who thought he was a genius and did much to build the infrastructure of the next century. But where Musk and his fellow billionaires have largely decided to blast their money out into space, Carnegie used his to build libraries: 1,689 of them all over Great Britain and North America, by one count.

To be clear, there are many problems with billionaire philanthropy, and there are definitely better ways to run public institutions that depending on a 10-figure boost from an eccentric industrialist every century. But if Elon Musk every finds himself wavering on his commitment to Mars and Twitter, or else just unsure about how to shore up his reputation, he might do well by us all to think about pulling a Carnegie. After all, you can only name so many craters, valleys, and hills on Mars after yourself, which only be seen by a few dozen weirdos who actually want to live on a dead rock 143 million miles from Earth. Put your name on 1,689 libraries, though, and you’re a hero forever.

Whenever Musk finishes acquiring Twitter, I’ll be sure to tweet him about it.

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A few weeks ago, while reading through Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner with my senior English class, I was trying, and failing, to teach a lesson on story structure. We were hung up on making predictions about the last third of the book: now that Amir had left behind the turmoil of Afghanistan and established a life in America that was comfortable and pleasant as long as he didn’t think about how he betrayed and abandoned his oldest friend, what would happen next? My students stumbled through a few half-hearted answers, trying to find the right answer. Maybe Amir would write a book about his experience and donate the money to charity? Perhaps he’d go back to Afghanistan and reopen his father’s old business? They were grasping. Finally, a student raised her hand, and guessed that Amir would go back to Afghanistan and try to make amends for his sins, facing great danger and paying a steep price. I asked her what made her think that.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s just the rule for stories, right?”

She was right, of course. The first two hundred pages of The Kite Runner set up a conclusion that has to happen for the story to make sense and entertain. If Amir never goes back to Afghanistan and resolves his guilt through, say, therapy and knitting, the book would feel broken, and the reader would feel cheated. These are part of the “rules” for fiction. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about rules. They’re central to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s theory of games and gaming, which allows him to explain everything from Dungeons & Dragons to mountain climbing under a single framework. Nguyen also has a knack for finding this logic of gaming in unexpected places like Twitter. I think his theories also go a long way towards explaining what my student meant when she said that fiction has rules, and why that seems to help explain something about storytelling. 

II

Let’s start with what Nguyen actually says. He starts with an old definition of gaming by Bernard Suits: a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle while achieving a goal. A soccer player’s goal is to put the ball in the net. Their obstacles are the opposing players and the strict requirement to only move the ball with their feet. If you take away the obstacle, the game is boring, and without the goal, there’s no point to playing. And so, for the duration of the game, everybody playing agrees to voluntarily compete to satisfy a goal while following arbitrary rules.

We can see this with board games and party games, too: in chess, you have to place one of your pieces on the opponent’s king while they try to do the same to yours, but both of you have to take turns and follow a specific set of legal moves. In charades or pictionary, your goal is to communicate a particular word or idea, but only in a specific, non-verbal way. Suits’s goal-obstacle framework doesn’t always work for all types of games, as Nguyen admits, but it fits most games and sports, and puts the emphasis on goals and rules. 

Although goals may shape the nature of a game, they aren’t the reason for playing. Basketball players don’t play their sport to satisfy a primal urge to put balls in hoops, and boxers don’t go around punching people for fun. Nguyen distinguishes between the  goals that structure a game and purposes that make us want to do them. The goal of mountain climbing is to get to the top; the purpose is to have fun, or exercise, or be in nature, or win a cash prize.

I once went to a kind of Maya theme park in Mexico where performers dressed up in traditional feathers and jaguar skins to play pitz, the famous Maya ball game. They were playing the same game as their ancestors did, with the same goal of knocking a heavy rubber ball into a hoop using only their hips. But where their ancestors thought of pitz as a dramatic reenactment of cosmic forces in opposition, with the winners becoming exalted heroes and the losers ritually sacrificed, their descendants were playing a difficult, boring game to earn money and entertain gringos. Same goal, different purpose. 

Obstacles, goals, and purposes all come together in Nguyen’s theory to express something about experience and the world. In other words, games are an art. Building on Thomas Dewey’s aesthetic naturalism, Nguyen defines an artwork as something that structures the stuff of common experience like sight and sound in a meaningful way. Music is the art of sound, organizing it in ways that evoke emotional responses, painting is the art of sight, sculpture the art of form, and literature the art of language. Games, for Nguyen, are the art of agency. They take the ordinary process of deciding and doing, add goals and obstacles, and shape the experience into something meaningful and fun. 

When we think of games as the art of agency, we can examine games like any other artwork for what they say about the world and our experience of it. Poker is about managing risk, probability, and deception. Chess and go turn tactical decision-making into a beautiful, easily understood experience. Most sports take the basic physical operations of the human body to their peak. Video games, depending on their type, explore resource management, reflexes, mathematical reasoning, working memory, and more. All of this is only possible when the game has a clearly-defined goal and a set of rules.

III

Nguyen’s theory allows us to see any kind of rule-based, goal-oriented system as a game. This doesn’t mean that, say, Congress or Twitter are actually games, but the theory gives us useful models. If the goal of the Twitter Game is to earn the most likes and shares, and those goals are most easily met through relentless shitposting, then Twitter is the trolling game, and everything else is ancillary (Justin E.H. Smith: “ I take the expression of substantive political opinions [on Twitter] to be something like the expression of substantive political opinions on, say, Fortnite: an absurd proposition, as whatever the opinions are, they are interrupting the flow of an otherwise engaging video game.”) 

What is the Fiction Game, then? Setting aside the broader purpose of making literature (instruction, cultivating a rich inner life, making money, airing your grievances, accumulating social capital), the interior goal of most fiction, at any length, is to tell an engaging story about characters facing problems. As my student suggested, there are certain rules about how a story should be told, and much of our appreciation for how well a writer follows the rules of the Fiction Game. 

We can see this most clearly in genre fiction, like murder mysteries, where certain rules have been in place for nearly two centuries: the murder must be solved by the end of the story, with the protagonist playing a crucial role in the resolution, having pieced together clues that are neither too obscure nor too simple to catch a culprit who is not the most obvious suspect. These rules are so ingrained that we notice them only in the breach: the experimental Oulipo writing group once got its hands on S.S. Van Dine’s famous “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” and competed to see who could break the most rules in a single detective story. The winner was a murder mystery where the criminal only appears in the final paragraph, having hidden in an undisclosed secret passage which opens accidentally, the killing itself done unintentionally and by undetectable poisons that leave no clues behind. Naturally, the story was called “The Butler Did It.”

But even literary fiction, which usually defines itself by a self-conscious opposition to predictable genre tropes, has its rules. As with The Kite Runner, much of it is structural, with authors compelled to answer the questions they raise, or at least lead their characters to a moment of insight. Characters in a Joyce or Chekhov story rarely fix their problems, but at least understand them better by the last page. Not even the most hardcore experimental fictions can completely get around the ancient, Aristotelian need to have a beginning and an ending; a seeming copout, like the circular story of Finnegans Wake where the last sentence becomes the first, needs to have an identifiable first and last page for the idea to make any sense. A truly circular story could start and end anywhere, and Joyce was very particular about where his last book started and ended.

Just like we admire a game-player’s ability to satisfy their goal while avoiding obstacles and following rules, much of the pleasure in reading good literature comes from the author’s way of navigating these rules. Funnily enough, it’s often the most generic, predictable stories–I’m thinking of romances and mysteries, which always have the same limited set of outcomes–that have the most voracious readers. Everybody picks up an Agatha Christie novel knowing that the murder will be solved at the end; it’s seeing how she does it, while following all the rules, that makes it entertaining. Writers of literary fiction often set themselves the challenge of saying something profound and beautiful from the most meager premises, as in the novels of Woolf or Knausgaard. 

IV

The stakes for the Fiction Game might be higher than you think. In the last few years, AI writing programs have surged in sophistication, ease of use, and talent. Programs like GPT-3 can compose expository essays up to 1,5000 words at the level of a college undergraduate in an instant. You can feed it the complete works of any poet and ask for a poem in that style, and depending on the style and form, the results range from pretty good to indistinguishable. One thing GPT-3 and its ilk still can’t do quite as well, Erik Hoel found out, is write fiction. For a lot of complicated reasons owing to the complexity of fiction and GPT-3’s reliance on statistical frequency analysis, the software still struggles with “long-term coherency, causality, common sense knowledge, [and] character development.” In other words, an AI program might read hundreds of thousands of novels, but it still can’t figure out the rules of fiction. Or not yet, anyway. 

Alongside Nguyen’s work, I recently read Oliver Roeder’s excellent Seven Games: A Human History, describing the history and culture of the world’s seven most popular analogue games. A funny thing about the book is that it pulls double-duty as a history of computation and artificial intelligence: starting in 1952 with tic-tac-toe and continuing up through chess in 1997 and go in 2016, computers have slowly come to dominate just about every game in the world. In every case, these programs depend on a mixture of experience and clearly-defined rules. Writing programs already have the experience, reading hundreds of books per minute; how quickly they master the art of fiction may depend on just how correct my English student was when she said that novels have rules.  

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Summarizing China’s long, arduous quest to make the world’s oldest, weirdest living script fit into modernity’s alphabet world would be too long, but here are four takeaways, in no particular order, that struck me as I read. 

Putonghua and the Language Police

If you’ve ever read anything on Chinese as a language, you probably know that the “dialects” of China are really more like languages in their own right, as different from each other as Romance languages are. Mandarin Chinese, the broad range of dialects spoken in the northern provinces and Beijing, is usually called the official language of China, which is true enough 99% of the time, though as Moser writes in A Billion Voices,  the official language of The People’s Republic of China is actually a specific form of Mandarin called Putonghua, or common speech. 

Putonghua and regular Beijing Mandarin are close, but not identical. Although 70% of all Chinese speak a Mandarin dialect as a first language, only 7% of Chinese citizens are completely fluent in Putonghua, while 30% don’t speak it at all. (The government is aiming for universal Putonghua proficiency by 2050.) As the official language of China, Putonghua is closely regulated, with state-issued dictionaries and usage guides to help the teachers, government workers, and media professionals who are legally bound to use the language.

A weird side effect of this law is that China has actual, literal language police, a kind of souped-up FCC that issues fines not only for profanity, but for simply using Putonghua incorrectly. Mess up a word in your TV broadcast, as reporters often do, and you’ll lose a hefty chunk of your paycheck. Moser identifies two exceptions to Putonghua’s iron grip: ethnic minorities and larger non-Mandarin media markets, but only if they remain politically loyal; and the speeches of Mao, a notoriously bad Putonghua speaker who preferred his own rustic Hunan dialect. 

Not surprisingly, the language police are having a hard time adjusting to the Internet. Western media likes to portray Chinese internet censorship as a kind of Orwellian leviathan, though in practice they often look more like the Keystone Cops. Mandarin is rich with puns and double-meanings, and jokesters come up with workarounds faster than the censors can keep up: profanity is barred in most online spaces, but you can always type nonsense words like the hanzi for “grass-mud-horse,” which sounds almost exactly like “go fuck your mother.” As the state cracked down, writers protested that they were simply discussing their favorite animal, penning facetious, po-faced essays about the esteemed Grass Mud Horse. By the time the state banned the phrase, the internet had moved on to its next raunchy pun. In 2014, the government finally gave up, banning puns on the internet completely. This was mostly done to save face: the laws are not enforced, and no Chinese citizen has been arrested for a pun yet. 

Simplified Characters May Not Be So Simple

One of the language reforms I was expecting to see more of in Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters was mainland China’s switch from traditional Chinese characters to simplified forms with fewer strokes. After all, the switch, undertaken by Mao’s government in the 1950s cost huge amounts of time and money in the form of new printing presses, re-writing old texts, creating new textbooks, educating tens of millions of students in the new style and re-educating millions of adults trained in the old style. 

Simplified characters, the reasoning goes, are easier to learn and quicker to write. They use less ink, are more legible at a distance, and easier to distinguish from each other. Tsu is good on describing the origins of simplified characters, with the Communist reforms drawing on everything from cursive calligraphy to accounting shorthands to Daoist glyphs used in summoning rituals to Nushu, the secret “women’s script” of Hunan. She has less to say, though, about the actual success of simplification. 

Moser does: simplification reduces the amount of strokes needed to write by about 12%, but it doesn’t reduce any of the fundamental problems of hanzi:  the connection between sign and sound is arbitrary, writing new words requires creating an entirely new character from scratch, and you need to know thousands of characters just to skim a newspaper. The Communists only had enough political capital to change the script once, and they settled on a compromised reform that barely fixes anything. (A second round of greater, more rational simplification was proposed in 1977 and quickly struck down: Chinese people were not going to relearn all their hanzi a third time.) 

More damning, literacy in mainland China still lags behind Hong Kong and Taiwan, which kept traditional characters. I don’t know nearly enough to weigh in on either side, though I was fascinated to learn that there’s a large, wide-ranging debate. You can see for yourself how extensive the arguments get by looking at simplification’s Wikipedia page. 

Of course, there’s also the cynical argument, as Ian Buruma notes: switching to simplified characters also makes it hard for mainland Chinese to understand anything printed prior to, or outside of, Communist rule. 

The Secret History of Soviet Pinyin

Pinyin is the official romanization of Putonghua. Unlike simplified characters, which were enshrined in law around the same time, Pinyin has been an unqualified success, and the single most effective tool in improving Chinese literacy in three thousand years. I’d heard about Pinyin’s creation by Zhou Youguang before–Zhou, a good candidate for Most Interesting Man in the World, was born a Chinese imperial subject in 1906 and died a national hero in 2017, having used his 110 years to be, variously, an expatriate banker in New York, an expert on Esperanto, a professor of economics, the creator of Pinyin, a labor-camp prisoner, and in his extreme old age, one of the only Chinese citizens untouchable enough to openly criticize the Communist Party. I had heard about Zhou before–he might be one of my favorite people, ever–but I’d never heard about the Soviet roots of Pinyin. 

One of the finest chapters in Kingdom of Characters reveals that the precursor to Pinyin, known as Latinxua, was actually part of the Soviet Union’s push in the 1920s to provide modern, efficient scripts for all the languages of its subjects. Alongside all the Turkic and Siberian languages the Soviets worked to standardize and move away from Arabic script, tens of thousands of citizens in the Russian Far East were Han Chinese, almost all of them illiterate. According to the Soviet Constitution, they had a right to receive an education in their native language. The problem was, there wasn’t anybody around able to teach traditional hanzi to tens of thousands of peasants and laborers in Siberia. The Bolsheviks decided to alphabetize Chinese, with help from the Chinese Communist Party. 

Alphabetization actually came up many times in modern Chinese history, with dozens of proposed systems throughout the 1800s and 1900s. The problem was, any scheme, no matter how good, would ultimately have to be ratified by China’s political elites–the same men who had already mastered hanzi writing, and were most likely to have a conservative, traditionalist attachment to the ancient writing system of their ancestors. 

There were no such obstacles, though, with the illiterate Chinese immigrants of the Soviet Union. In fact, as working poor who had been kept illiterate by a repressive class system and a complex, aristocratic writing system, they were a perfect case for Communist modernization. And so in 1931, the Soviets officially rolled out Latinxua Sin Wenz, New Latin Script, and the first students–adults and children–were taught to write Chinese in roman letters. The system was a massive success, and within a few years there were Latinxua newspapers. Soviet Chinese wrote letters to each other in Latinxua. The plan was so successful, instituting Latinxua in mainland China was actually a major policy goal for the Chinese Communist Party during the Civil War. It was only as the war ended, when success was finally in reach, that the Communists backed down, worried that anti-hanzi rhetoric would damage their credibility as the rulers and representatives of the Chinese people. The old reverence for hanzi was hard to kill; Mao Zedong, after all, was proud of his calligraphy. 

The Case Against Hanzi

While Kingdom of Characters ends on a triumphal note for Chinese logograms and their survival into the future, A Billion Voices is far more skeptical. Tsing cheers on the programmers and engineers who’ve made Chinese writing flourish in digital media, while Moser sides with the linguists and reformers–and there are more than I expected–who think that these fixes are only an ugly kludge, and that more serious script reform is needed. 

Take the problem of “spelling” in Chinese. We think it’s bad in English, where there are entire competitions and lavish prizes for people who can spell obscure words. Most languages don’t have spelling bees, because they don’t need them. Chinese, though, is even worse than English: they have popular competitions just based around reading words, giving a definition and pronouncing them correctly. Although Chinese hanzi have a few advantages for cross-dialect communication and distinguishing between homophones (think of pairs like sleigh and slay in English), when it comes to the basic functions of written language, Chinese is extraordinarily slow and difficult. 

The usual response is that hundreds of millions of Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, Singaporeans, and so on manage to learn hanzi just fine. But there is increasing evidence that they aren’t, and might even be getting worse: in every Sinophone country, there is a growing prevalence of “character amnesia,” or forgetting the particular character needed to write a word. The problem is especially acute among teenagers and young adults who have grown up under the language reforms celebrated by Tsing–in fact, those innovations are fueling the problem. When somebody has character amnesia, they aren’t forgetting how to say something, only how to write it. They can write the word perfectly well in Pinyin, which after all is how most Chinese type: write the Pinyin, and the software auto-suggests the right character from a list of possibilities. These amnesiacs could easily write in Pinyin alone and be understood, but for cultural reasons they are supposed to write it in hanzi. 

Moser wonders: what’s wrong with switching completely to Pinyin? 

This is entirely possible, at least in theory. Ditching hanzi would dramatically speed up literacy education and remove the extensive technical apparatus needed to write characters on screens. The heroes of Tsu’s book spent heroic amounts of time and labor in adapting Chinese writing for problems–designing a keyboard, encoding telegrams, writing computer code, transliterating foreign words–that would have taken trivial amounts of time to write in Latinxua or Pinyin. This is not to say that a switch would be simple, or that it would a good thing for the world’s last logographic writing system to lose its unique character. But something’s got to give, and there’s a good chance Chinese writing will change much more in the next hundred years than it has in the last three thousand. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh is very old. Even the standard version compiled three thousand years ago was based on poems that were another thousand years old, as far away from the editors as Beowulf is from us. At the same time, The Epic of Gilgamesh is very new: only rediscovered in 1872, it has been a part of our cultural imagination for about as long as Middlemarch and Around the World in Eighty Days. Even then, it was unreadable for decades: translators took seventeen years just to figure out the proper pronunciation of the hero: at first, he was Izdubar, or Gistubar. For a while, it was called The Epic of Bilgamesh. 

To be fair—and with all due respect to Finnegans Wake—The Epic of Gilgamesh is the most difficult text in the world. The poem was pieced together from thousands of fragments, told in two wildly different dead languages in versions of the stories hundreds of years apart. That it could be found, buried in the sand after thousands of years, and put together at all is a miracle, one that I’ve been reading about in Paul Damrosch’s The Buried Book and Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem.

I won’t retell the whole poem here, as there are plenty of summaries and even the most faithful translations only take a couple of hours to read. I will say, though, that I don’t think The Epic of Gilgamesh, in any translation, is an especially good story. There are only four or five real characters in the poem, and Gilgamesh is far and away the least interesting: the wild-man Enkidu, the sultry sex-god Shamhat and her Godzilla-sized pet bull, mysterious wise man Uta-Napishti, and sympathetic monster Humbaba fill the poem with magic, danger, sex, and comedy. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, is a tyrant, braggart, and killer whose reign in Uruk is so terrible (he beats up the men of the city and maintains the right to sleep with their wives at will) the gods have to dispatch Enkidu not to kill or depose him, but to keep him distracted. His slaying of Humbaba looks less like an epic quest and more like a home invasion, with Gilgamesh gloating over the crippled, bawling ogre before cutting off his head and despoiling his cedar grove. His great spiritual crisis comes when he realizes, well into adulthood and having killed many people, that sometimes people die, and that’s sad. Gilgamesh fails to achieve immortality, and fails to even hold on to a rejuvenating elixir because a snake steals it as he takes a power nap. Then the poem just kind of ends with a few verses about how great the city walls are.

Unlike The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Argonautica, The Ramayana, or The Aeneid, it’s hard to see Gilgamesh working as a movie, comic, or game without substantial revision (Producer’s note #1: Gilgamesh has to stop raping newlyweds). The story of the poem—how it was found, pieced together, and translated against all odds—is fascinating.

First, the facts: there really was a King Gilgamesh of Uruk around the 28th century BC, at least according to Assyrian royal records. Within a few centuries of his death, he starts showing up in religious poems as a wise leader, brave adventurer, and lord of the underworld. By the late 2000s or early 1000s BC, there was a long poem, possibly based on oral tradition, written in the Sumerian language and known by its opening line, Surpassing All Other Kings. As Sumer declined and Assyria took its place as the regional power, translations into Akkadian appear in the reocrd. No later than 1000 BC, a scribe known as Sin-Leqi-Unninni put together a standardized Akkadian edition of the poem under the title He Who Saw the Depths, which became a standard edition, with pieces of it found at sites a thousand miles apart. (That scribe, though, might only be another layer of legend around the poem, much like the Greeks credited a single, mythical Homer with composing their epics). 

The exact size and form of the poem are unclear. Like all Mesopotamian writing, it was scratched in cuneiform writing onto clay tablets about the size of a mass-market paperback. The poem is divided into either eleven or twelve tablets, depending on whether or not you include the final tablet: a story of Gilgamesh’s descent into the underworld which is either a kind of distant epilogue to the events of the first eleven tablets, or else a tacked-on bonus episode. Not that we have any of these tablets in anything like a complete state: putting together a “complete” Gilgamesh from primary sources requires laying out hundreds of clay pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. Even then, we’ve only been able to uncover about two-thirds of the poem’s estimated 3,600 lines.

Of course, putting together thousands of fragments in order is pointless if you can’t read it, and cuneiform—the world’s oldest writing system— is exceptionally difficult to read. Most of its 600-odd letters represent syllables like gi or ma, but can also stand in, rebus-like, for an entire word. A star-shaped glyph, for instance, can mean “star,” the star god Anu, or just the an sound in a completely unrelated word. Where and when a letter represents itself, or part of another word depends on entirely on context—and context is scarce when you’re reading dead languages written in forgotten scripts. To make things even harder, cuneiform letters regularly changed shape over the centuries, and the number of letters in use expanded and contracted. And after all these hurdles are accounted for, you still have to read the language itself.

How scholars figured out Akkadian, the key language of Gilgamesh, is a major thread in The Buried Book. The Assyrians are all over the Old Testament, but their language disappeared thousands of years ago. Unlike Egypt, which left its hieroglyphs everywhere on monuments and stone inscriptions, the Assyrians mostly stuck to tablets, which by the modern era were almost entirely buried, their existence unknown. The later Achaemenid Persians, thankfully, believed in monumental inscriptions, many of them still surviving in the ruins of Persepolis for 18th century European explorers like Carsten Niebuhr to find and transcribe in 1767. (Arabia Felix, the story of his bizarre, doomed expedition, is one of my favorite travel books.

The big break came in 1835, when Sir Henry Rawlinson, a British officer with a knack for archaeology and languages, took time off from his military duties in the Middle East to scale the cliffs of Behistun and transcribe the monumental inscriptions of King Darius. Like the Rosetta Stone, these were trilingual texts. The first, Old Persian, was easy enough to decode: the first letters were found by trial-and-error, seeing which combinations might sound out the names of Persian kings and place-names, already attested in ancient Greek and Hebrew sources. The rest was figured out quickly, as Old Persian is the direct ancestor of modern Iranian languages and the newly-emerging science of linguistics made reconstruction possible.

The second language, Akkadian, was also written in cuneiform, although with far more letters than Persian cuneiform: hundreds of them to Persian’s few dozen. Still, the Persian texts gave enough letters to figure out that Akkadian was a Semitic language. Through comparative reading with its ancient Hebrew and Aramaic siblings and the emerging science of linguistics, European scholars were able to slowly figure out Akkadian over many decades.

They were greatly helped by the first archaeological digs in Iraq in the 1840s, led by Austen Henry Layard and his local guide Hormuzd Rassam. Together, they found the Library of Ashurbanipal, still the single biggest source of Assyrian literature, providing thousands of documents to fuel the newly emerging field of Assyriology. It’s telling, as Damrosch points out, that Assyriology was too new to have the usual social, economic, and academic hurdles that older, more established fields like Greek or Hebrew had. Anybody with talent and drive was welcome to come to the British Library and take a whack at translating Akkadian. This is how Hormuzd Rassam, born an Iraqi Chaldean, was able to serve the British empire with distinction and die a proper, naturalized English citizen. It was also how George Smith, an engraver born into Dickensian poverty and holding a 9th grade education, was able to teach himself Akkadian, discover the first pieces of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and become the world’s greatest expert on Assyria.

Smith died, though, thinking that Gilgamesh was an Assyrian, that his name was Izdubar, and that we would never decipher the third language of the Behistun inscriptions. This language was written in a different, even more difficult form of cuneiform, and nobody could say for sure what language it was supposed to be. It certainly used the characters differently, since reading them as Akkadian or Persian only produced gibberish. More confusingly, some of this mysterious script seemed to be hanging out in Akkadian texts, like a Greek word floating in a sea of Roman type. Hiding in plain sight for decades, interwoven with Akkadian writing, there was Sumerian.

This took a long time to figure out. At the time, nobody had any idea that the Sumerians ever existed. Unlike Assyria or Babylon, no ancient sources mentioned Sumer and its people. Their culture and accomplishments had been so thoroughly absorbed by their neighbors that they were invisible to archaeologists and philologists for more than a century. Even their myths, like Gilgamesh, had been adopted by the Assyrians as Sumer went into decline. The Assyrians slowly taught themselves to write their own Akkadian language in cuneiform, though they kept a layer of Sumerian for their religion and politics.

This might have been obvious to Assyrian scribes, but it was maddening for modern scholars. To mistake the Sumerian god-king Gilgamesh for the nonce-Akkadian of Izdubar was probably the kind of mistake a first-year scribal student would make: Damrosch quotes a Babylonian student’s lament, recorded in cuneiform, after his Sumerian teacher struck him for speaking Akkadian in the classroom. For students like this, scribes compiled bilingual glossaries. These word lists allowed modern scholars to decipher Sumerian. Among the thousands of extant Sumerian texts were found early versions of the Gilgamesh epic, which agreed with the later Akkadian versions in plot, if not always in style and tone.

Cracking Sumerian was the last major obstacle to achieving our current, relatively stable version of Gilgamesh. At the very least, his name probably won’t change any more. Still, there are many parts of the text that scholars are still, after a century and a half, trying to figure out.

Consider the size of Gilgamesh, which Schmidt opens his book with. Using Andrew George’s translation, Gilgamesh is said to be eleven cubits tall, four cubits wide, and with feet three cubits long. If the Akkadian cubit is anything like the Bible’s 18-inch cubit, then Gilgamesh is more than sixteen feet tall. Even granting poetic license, as translators usually do,  the proportions are freakish: If Gilgamesh were six feet tall, his chest (nipple to nipple, per the text) would be more than two feet across and his feet would be 19 inches long. The King of Uruk has slapping, clown-shoe feet. Schmidt asked George if there isn’t something off here: “Yes, there’s something wrong with it. It needs more work.”

That work, which involved the same kind of reading and writing of texts that might have been familiar to an Assyrian scribe four thousand years ago, might soon advance in ways that the ancients could never fathom. Of the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform fragments currently sitting in collections, thousands have yet to be fully deciphered and published. Assyriologists are busy people, and sifting through hundreds of tiny clay shards for bits and pieces of beer recipes on the off chance that they might yield a line of poetry just isn’t worth it. The last few years, though, have seen a rise in digital reading software for ancient languages like Akkademia, which can scan Assyrian cuneiform and provide translations with remarkable accuracy. These aren’t replacements for good scholarship, but tools that allow us to look farther and faster. If finding bits of good cuneiform in the massive piles of fragments is like looking for a needle in a haystack, these programs are metal detectors.

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Further Reading

• Paul Damrosch’s The Buried Book seems to be the best general-purpose introduction to the story of Assyriology and The Epic of Gilgamesh. I enjoyed it greatly, even though the long detours into Hormuzd Rassam’s fascinating life did sometimes distract from the main subject.

• I wasn’t able to read all of Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem before my library loan expired, skimming some of the later sections. I fully intend to revisit it, as every part I did read was weird, provocative, and useful.

• I had already started writing this when I found Joan Acocella’s 2019 review of the same two books over at The New Yorker. For a more thorough treatment of the Gilgamesh poem itself, I recommend it highly.

• I’ve only read two translations of Gilgamesh: Andrew George’s English translation is the academic standard and most faithful to the original text. I’ve also read the Stephen Mitchell version, which is smoothed out into modern English with some head-scratching modernisms thrown in. I don’t recommend it, and am baffled by the praise it gets.

In the Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, the anonymous author (c. 1555) describes how the philosopher-monk Roger Bacon (1220 - 1292) consulted with the Devil to build a mechanical head out of brass capable of answering any question put to it. Bacon’s intention was to create a kind of wall-mounted oracle, dispensing counsel and advice, aiding the philosopher by reciting news, recipes, formulas, and spells for him. Variations on the legend of the brazen head (sometimes a brazen man) went back centuries, often replacing Bacon with other suspiciously cunning men: Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Pope Sylvester. 

In his comic retelling of the myth, the Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene (the man who called Shakespeare an “upstart Crow”) has Bacon asleep onstage when the head, after seven years of labor, finally comes awake and speaks seven cryptic words: “Time is, time was, time is past.” Then, in Greene’s stage directions, “A lightning flashes forth, and a hand appears that breaks down the Head with a hammer.” Greene’s ending followed the common arc of the legend, which in every version ends with the brazen head destroyed—either smited by God or else shattered by a pious Christian. There was something disturbing, to the Medieval mind, about an artificial voice.

The Clockwork Book

In a book that contains no less than six different methods the exit the earth’s atmosphere using common household materials, the earliest known description of a mobile home, a theological discourse on the personhood of plants and animals delivered by a talking cabbage, a bold prediction that the sun will one day exhaust all its fuel and consume all the planets around it—and all of this written the 1650s—the most striking invention proposed in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon is a description of books in the lunar world. They are built like small metal boxes, fitting comfortably in the hand. “At the opening of the box,” Cyrano writes,  

“I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man's mouth of a musical instrument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers. 

The advantages of this technology over our own printed books, Cyrano writes, are manifold: citizens of the Moon are able to “read” as soon as they can speak, and by the age of eighteen have read as much as an Earthling at eighty. With their hands and eyes free, they can use these books anywhere they please: while resting at home, practicing their various arts and crafts, or traveling around the country on horseback, with a dozen books jangling on their saddlebags.

Cyrano uses the language of clocks and clockwork, the cutting-edge technology of his time, and an emerging metaphor for the nature of existence in a Newtonian universe, just as computer programmers today speak of our world as a software simulation. Cyrano, a bibliophile, couldn’t help but speculate on how the marvelous new machinery of pocket watches might be used for literature.

The Talking Machine

In 1769, engineer, scientist, and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734 - 1804) began development of his speaking machine. Instead of a brazen head, Kempelen used simple kitchen belows on a wooden frame, blowing air through a reed. By restricting the airflow with his hand, Kempelen was able to make his machine produce enough vowels and consonants to produce basic words and phrases in French and Italian, though Kempelen’s own German, with its thickets of hard consonants, was harder to reproduce.

The final version of Kempelen’s speaking machine spoke in a rasping, wheezy monotone somewhere between a duck and a crying baby. You can hear reproductions for yourself on YouTube, which follow the exact schematics published in Kempelen’s 1791 The Mechanism of Human Speech, with a Description of a Speaking Machine. Kempelen’s speaking machine, with some later improvements to the design fifty years later by the English inventor Charles Wheatstone, is the most accurate non-electronic speech synthesizer ever made.

Whatever his legitimate accomplishment, however, Kempelen remains forever associated with his other great project of 1669: a turban-clad automaton capable of playing chess at a grandmaster level. The Mechanical Turk, as it came to be called, received international acclaim, toured Europe and the United States for half a century, and defeated, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allen Poe. Only after perishing in a Philadelphia fire did the Mechanical Turk’s operators come forward and admit that the machine was a fraud, concealing a chess player beneath the table who controlled the Turk’s every movement.

The Talking Book

London, 1892. A group of gentlemen, top hats in hand, have just come to their favorite restaurant following a lecture by Sir William Thomson on the distant future of humanity. Still buzzing with excitement, they order drinks and make predictions about the year 2000. In the future, they claim, we will have artificial meat, take nutritional supplements as pills, abandon figurative art for abstraction, and receive our news and stories through motion pictures.

The gentlemen and their conversation are fictitious, appearing in an 1894 short story written by Octave Uzanne (1851 - 1931) though many of their predictions are not: artificial food fills our pantries, screens dominate our homes, and modern art hangs in our galleries. The bulk of the story, though, is given over to the narrator,  a “worthy Bibliophile” asked to present his views on the future of the book. 

The Bibliophile is blunt: "If by books,” he says,  “you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg's invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude.” The damage books cause to the eyes and spine, he says, cry out for a technological fix. 

In the future, he says, we will listen to our books, carrying them everywhere we go. "There will be registering cylinders,” he says, “as light as celluloid penholders, capable of containing five or six hundred words and working upon very tenuous axles, and occupying not more than five square inches all the vibrations of the voice will be reproduced in them; we shall attain to perfection in this apparatus as surely as we have obtained precision in the smallest and most ornamental watches.” The reader of the future will listen to these “pocket phono-operagraphs” as he saunters through town or takes excursions into the wilderness. 

Authors will go from writers to narrators: “Certain Narrators,” he says, “will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling warmth, and the perfect accuracy, the fine punctuation of their voice,” with all their productions protected by copyright law as the author’s sole property. Journalists will record their news and read it as daily dispatches printed on cheap, disposable cylinders or else delivered over telephone-powered loudspeakers–just like the theatrophone has done for drama, his friends observe.

The conversation finished, the gentlemen raise their glasses to the Bibliophile’s speech and toast: “The printed book is about to disappear. After us the last of books, gentlemen!"

The Book of the Future

For $100 per hour, you can now hire the acclaimed actor and presenter Edward Herrmann to narrate your writing. As the voice of countless History Channel programs and Nova science documentaries and narrator for books by Stephen King, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Ayn Rand, Ron Chernow, and more, Herrmann is one of America’s most beloved narrators. Audible alone lists 102 books narrated by Herrmann. And unlike other celebrity narrators, who charge up to $1,000 for every hour of performance and must be booked months in advance, Edward Herrmann is available at any time, for only a tenth of the price per PFH. This is, by any measure, an extraordinary deal. There’s just one catch: Edward Herrmann is dead. The Herrmann you can hire today is an AI-generated speech-to-text program. 

I won’t pretend to understand exactly how DeepZen, the current licensee of Herrmann’s voice, works. From what I can tell, the process depends on feeding an AI program thousands of hours of Herrmann performances. DeepZen’s software scans it all for patterns of intonation, breath, rhythm, and pronunciation, then matches it all to their source texts. This builds up a model of Edward Herrmann’s voice, complete down to the last phoneme. By teaching the program enough examples of Herrmann reading ordinary words and phrases like “Good morning,” “Dog,” and “Bumblebee,” you can get a decent imitation of things Herrmann never said, like “Transalpine cumquat rodeo” or “the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” 

The result is far from perfect. Much of your $100 per PFH goes to human editors who smooth out inconsistencies, mispronunciations, and mistakes that inevitably come when a computer is guessing at sounds that it doesn’t really understand. The synthetic reader also isn’t especially good at fiction, with its multiple voices and varying levels of irony, pace, and style. You can hear AI-Herrmann trying to read A Christmas Carol on Spotify and judge for yourself. But even in nonfiction samples in history or biography, with the kind of steady, stately manner that the original Edward Herrmann excelled at reading, there’s still a slight uncanniness to the AI narrator.

DeepZen, the licensee of Herrmann’s voice–or rather, of certain phonemic and intonational patterns that constitute the publicly-recognized voice of the late Edward Herrmann–is betting big on synthetic voices as the future of the audiobook market. This is no small niche, either: while the last decade has seen print and digital book sales mostly stagnant, audiobooks have had double-digit growth rates every year. The biggest problem in audiobook recording is no longer cost or publication, but production: there simply aren’t enough professional audiobook studios to meet the rising demand. Automation promises an easy, cheap fix. DeepZen and their competitors are promising that fix, and their software is getting better all the time. 

Whatever attachment listeners have to human narrators–and despite Audible’s current policy of banning all synthetic narrators–it’s going to be hard for the audiobook industry to fight the economic benefits of automation. By the end of the decade, we very well might have a majority of audiobooks read by synthetic narrators. This will surely change how we read and write.

As the technology becomes better and cheaper–and like all AI applications, it will improve exponentially with more listeners and more feedback–it might become trivial to write a book, run it through an app, and have a high-quality audiobook narrated by any one of a huge list of licensed narrators. Stephen Fry’s lawyers probably already have the paperwork drafted for auctioning off his voice like Herrmann, but we don’t have to stop with the living or even the recently dead. Just as a minor industry has sprang up around celebrity holograms, it’s possible we’ll soon have the means to reproduce any popular figure of the last century. (I would pay good money for an Orson Welles narrator app. What voice would you spring for?)

Corners of the book world with little audiobook market presence, like academic works and books in translation, would leap into the field and open up new revenue streams and use cases with extremely low costs. Imagine learning a language with an AI narrator who speeds up, slows down, and enunciates on command, or pauses after each sentence for you to catch up, or having your college textbook read itself to you. 

Authors might use certain text markers for the software to read like a musical score, making suggestions about pacing and tone (“use sarcasm here”), dialogue (“interrupt this line with the next one”), and character (“Jed speaks slowly, Sarah speaks quickly”). Our culture’s turn towards secondary orality will be supercharged, with all prose writing written in order to be spoken and heard. 

But books, as I’ve covered in this space, are becoming the least common and least significant kind of reading that we do. Most of our engagement with text now happens in articles, reports, posts, tweets, and captions, so that’s where the real money is with synthetic readers. If we do come to prefer listening to our books, and listening to synthetic readers, it’ll be our internet browsing that leads to this preference. 

The companies that give us access to all this–Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and so on–all have massive investments in text-to-speech and speech-to-text software. These are, after all, how their digital assistants, like Siri and Alexa, work. If the tech giants don’t already have synthetic narrators as good as DeepZen, then they’re probably waiting to buy them out once the technology matures. 

And at that point, it’s not just books, but our entire relationship to text that changes: consumers could have access to the software itself, not just records of DeepZen or whatever in action. Morgan Freeman could read your emails; Jeff Goldblum could run you through your schedule; Scarlett Johansson could read Wikipedia to you–or flirt with you, like the movie. It will also almost certainly be used to produce illegal copies of any public figure with enough recorded audio to imitate, leading to countless deepfakes, hoaxes, and frauds. This is heady, sci-fi stuff, and it is only beginning to unfold.

Like everything else with digital technology in the 2020s, we’ll have to take the good (increased convenience, lower costs, more accessibility, loads of creative potential) with the bad (increasing fraud, the erosion of reality as we know it). There is something magical, something strange, and something slightly wrong about the synthetic voice, but as long it holds out the promise of convenience, utility, and profit, the idea will always be pursued. And now, with artificial intelligence, we will finally have our brazen heads. Whether or not they must be struck down with a flash of lightning and a hammer remains to be seen.

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I have my doubts.

Here are the facts of the case: early this year, Tennessee’s McMinn County Board of Education met to discuss complaints about Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which an 8th grade teacher planned to use as the anchor text for a Holocaust unit. School board members expressed concern over the graphic content of the book, including repeated depictions of corpses and slaughter. They were especially perturbed by “cuss words” (their term) like “god damn” and “bitch,” and a single panel depicting an anthropomorphic mouse woman’s naked corpse. Their reasoning, I suppose, was while reading an account of the German state systematically murdering six million Jews with gas, fire, bullets, and bayonets, students might be disturbed by some foul language and light nudity. Teenagers hate that stuff, you know. The measure to ban passed unanimously.

The school board’s actions are, to be clear, offensive to our traditions of free expression and insulting to the many millions of Holocaust survivors and their living descendants. To put it in terms that might catch the school board’s attention, they showed their asses by voting like a bunch of god-damned bitches, and any right-thinking taxpayer in McMinn County should be watching their school board’s next move very closely.

But if we really care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship and speaking truth to power and all that, we need to be deliberate and precise in what we say. What the McMinn County school board has done, and what other school boards and statehouses are attempting isn’t worth worrying about.   

The Turkish government murdering Hrant Dink for “insulting Turkishness” by discussing Turkey’s role in the Armenian Genocide is censorship. The Iranian government intervening to stop productions of Shakespeare is censorship. The Chinese Communist Party training artificial intelligence programs to scan and scrub all anti-Communist words and images from the Chinese internet is censorship. Germany’s criminalization of Holocaust denial is censorship, though inarguably good censorship done with good intentions for a good cause. One school board in Tennessee banning one book, or the State of Texas arbitrarily demanding the surrender of a few hundred books chosen at random and without any real possibility of prosecution or punishment may be many things, but it’s not exactly the end of the First Amendment as we know it.

For one thing, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the free speech of students for decades. From Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) to Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021), the Court has been clear: except in niche cases of obscenity and safety, students enjoy full First Amendment rights at school, and can’t be censored for any political views expressed in a non-disruptive, non-threatening way. No matter how much Republicans try to clear that post with nebulous language about white students experiencing “racial discomfort” when they read critical race theory, there will always be a way for students and teachers to calmly, respectfully, and Constitutionally discuss the Holocaust or read Frederick Douglass. The McMinn County school board probably has the right to ban Maus on obscenity grounds, but not discussion of history and politics they don’t happen to like.

But legality aside, it’s also just very hard to censor anything or anyone these days. To completely disappear books and ideas, you either need an overwhelming consensus (as in Germany’s democratically-supported suppression of Holocaust denial) or a repressive authoritarian regime willing to maim, imprison, and murder over books it doesn’t like. In the United States, we have neither. In fact, we have a pretty robust, non-partisan resentment towards any censorship, real or perceived. When conservatives got it into their head that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was “cancelling” six of the old master’s books for their offensive images, they suddenly became cultural touchstones for millions of angry Fox News viewers, scooping up cheap copies and circulating PDFs online in an attempt to own the libs.

It’s not much different on the left. As of this writing, two of the three most popular graphic novels on Amazon are editions of Maus. Tennessee’s Nirvana Comics has raised $80,000 to buy copies of Maus for the children of McMinn County. The county’s public library has had to beg strangers from all over the country to please, for the love of God, stop donating copies of Maus as an act of symbolic protest and start donating money to support the library’s many other vital public services if you really want to stick it to the conservatives.

And that gives away the whole game: Maus isn’t being censored in any meaningful way, but a school board exercising its legal right to ban a book from a classroom on grounds of obscenity just doesn’t keep up the churn of culture war or spin the gears of the internet hate machine like cries of censorship!!!! do. There are certain vocal conservatives and leftists of various stripes with a desperate, aching need for each other, and who relish the idea that enemies are afoot and the fate of American education rests on their keyboards.

The truth, of course, that a few districts banning a few books only makes those works more popular, more accessible, and more lucrative. If I had a book to promote, I’d be angling to get my books banned as widely as possible. This is not the same thing as having it be read and adored, touching the hearts and minds of pupils everywhere. After all, the most important fact about banning books in America is the one authors and journalists want to discuss the least: students never do their assigned reading, anyway.

Because of this, the percentage of Americans who read ten or more books a year–that’s books of any kind, from Pride & Prejudice to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies–shrank eight points in five years, down to 27%. For the first time since Gallup started tracking reading habits, a plurality of American adults–40%–read only five to ten books a year. 

You can probably come up with all kinds of theories about why this decline is happening–how TV shows are the new novels, fewer college students are majoring in book-heavy humanities courses, our collective political derangement around 2016 when reading rates suddenly nosedive, the migration of attention from long-form books to short-form Internet articles, The Shallows in general–and because we’re talking about such a huge population, all of these have some degree of truth to them.

But I’m here to help, not speculate. By Gallup’s standards, I’m a freakish ultra-reader, averaging 100+ books a year and several articles, stories, or poems a day. If you feel personally attacked by that Gallup survey, or are just one of the millions of people who Google “how to read more books” while thinking about New Year’s resolutions, here’s the best advice I can give. 

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Read with Pressure

At any given time, I have a dozen or so Google Keep notes with books to find and read. Stacks of books float around my apartment and on tables. My Kindle is swollen with ebook loans from the library, and I have a score of essays and articles saved on my browser to read and mark up at some distant, unknown date. The pile of books on my nightstand has often stretched high enough to pose a health risk. The cumulative effect of all this is that I feel an enormous sense of pressure at all times to read, if only to reduce the clutter in my home and on my desk. In the long tide of my life, the amount of reading material coming in has always exceeded the outgoing. For every library book I return, I come back with two. 

But whatever unease comes from being surrounded by more stuff than I could possibly read is more than compensated by how much this keeps me reading and thinking about what to read next. It keeps a ready supply of material in different styles and genres, and discourages me from wasting time when there’s so much great stuff to read. Speaking of which…

Read with an Exit Strategy

This one is simple, obvious, and useful–but it’s also the most-ignored bit of classic reading advice: it’s OK to quit a book. Unless you have an external reason for reading the book (academic obligations, professional development, your friend wrote it), nothing bad will happen when you put it down. Although bookworms have been debating the perfect, universal cut-off point since books were stamped on tablets, I’ve never bought into the idea that there’s something special about the 10% mark, the first hundred pages, or whatever else chronic quitters swear by. I’ve thrown out books after a couple of pages and I’ve quit novels two chapters from the end. Usually there are two reasons: either it’s not the book I thought it would be, or I’ve gotten what I need out of it and don’t see any reason to go further.

Like a lot of readers, I used to resist this advice, dressing up the sunk-cost fallacy in all kinds of fancy garments: I already paid for the book, this is a celebrated classic of the genre, I’ve already read so much of it, everybody tells me the ending is great. The list goes on. The comfortable lie that I usually tell myself is that I’m just going to take a break from this book for a few days to read something else. Most of the time, I never come back, and never feel the worse for it. Quitting is a skill with compounding returns: the better you get at it, the sharper your personal taste gets, the more engaged you are with the reading you stay with, and most importantly, you get back a lot of time for reading.

Read Like a Tourist (Or a Cyborg)

Reading for diversity gets a lot of play these days, usually  in the form of reading challenges: to read an X amount of books per year by women or people of color or translated authors or queer authors and so on. I have no special praise or complaints for these lists. If you use them, that’s great, but they’ve never motivated me as a reader. Most of my reading is determined by my own idiosyncratic projects and maximizing my exposure to many different traditions, genres, ideas, and subjects. Sometimes that means I read “diverse” authors, but it’s always with an eager curiosity to learn something new, and never with a servile fealty to some fact of the author’s biology. I imagine that’s how most authors want to be read–I know I do. 

That’s why I argue for reading a diversity of subjects, not authors. By all means, keep a few areas where you specialize and read deeply, like American science fiction or Chinese poetry, because deep knowledge has its own personal and professional rewards. Just know that as a specialist, you’re getting diminishing returns the deeper you dive: your first read about nuclear physics will teach you a lot more than your tenth read on the same topic. In cybernetics, this is called surprisal: the amount of new, unusual information that a packet contains. Books that fall into your most well-trod paths have low surprisal rates. You might learn some very specific and very useful things, but they aren’t going to blow your mind. A new book on a new topic, though, will expand your horizons in ways you can’t anticipate, and the weirder the subject is to you, the higher the rate of surprisal. 

You can think of it like settling in a town versus visiting as a tourist: you already know a lot about your town, and only expand your knowledge of it through small, incremental trips; but as a tourist, you’re probably sticking to the biggest sites and the most famous dishes, because you may never come back again. You can’t be a tourist all the time, but it’s healthy and exciting to make occasional forays into a subject you know nothing about: What is the best single book on cybernetics? What are the three best Westerns? What’s the deal with forks? 

Read to Achieve

The patron saint of ultra-readers, Tyler Cowen, often says that the best way to read more books is to have a popular podcast featuring prominent academics with fearsome credentials and a long list of publications. Cowen, not incidentally, has his own popular podcast with prominent academics sporting fearsome credentials and a long list of publications, and if you listen to Conversations with Tyler, you can tell by Cowen’s questions that he really is reading as deeply and widely in his subject’s work as he can. If you look at Cowen’s blog, you can see how often his reading is built up around projects like his podcast or a newspaper column. Having a goal to read towards that’s intrinsically motivating–i.e., it’s not an arbitrary number of books or authors or some other X per year that you read to show off, but because it fits into a larger project that you’re passionate about–is consistent among super-readers. I’m no Tyler Cowen, but every post on Bibliophilia has at least one or two books and a handful articles behind it, even if some of them never make it as far as a citation.  

Read a Lot

You knew I was going to get to this point eventually. There are no shortcuts, reader: we all move through time at the same rate, and once you’ve reached a level of material comfort high enough to worry about your leisure time, you have to admit that some hobbies preclude others. Video games, social media, and television–the three great pastimes of our era–are inimical to reading. I don’t mean that they’re anti-intellectual or rot your brain or anything like that: I mean that they demand lots of time, and conflict with the time it takes to read well. Advertising, popular culture, and peer pressure–which increasingly feel like the same thing these days–are very good at making you feel as though you have to keep up with what’s new on screens this week, even as most of it is crap. I like games and TV and social media, too, but if those time-use surveys you see online are any indication, I use them a lot less than other people in my cohort because I can’t do both and reading makes me happier. 

So I check my phone first thing in the morning like everybody else, but then I put it down and read for twenty minutes before I go to work. I watch an episode of television at night with dinner, but rarely a second one and I never binge-watch anything. I read and take notes in the evening. The time I spend reading in bed every night is one of the happiest times of my day, and has been ever since I was ten years old, reading The Chronicles of Narnia up past midnight. It comes out to a few hours every weekday, and around 4-6 on weekends, which is enough to average 100+ books a year.

But I don’t read for an arbitrary, Goodreads-style book count.2 I read a lot simply because I like it, and it brings me more pleasure than most other things. What I’ve tried to do here is suggest a few ways to make it more pleasurable and productive, but the first, final, and best way to read more books more often is to simply love reading.

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Good. I’m not an expert in blockchain tech, cryptocurrency, or NFTs. When I say that I take a dim view of them all, I’m really just parroting the most persuasive lines from crypto-skeptics who sound more convincing–more humane, more grounded, more humble–than the crypto world’s biggest advocates. Then again, I was against environmentally-damaging energy use and the creeping financialization and datafication of life long before I knew about crypto, so my priors are doing most of the lifting there.

With all that said, I think everybody can agree on two things: NFTs are a hash of digital, financial, and metaphysical flim-flam whose value depends entirely on an ever-escalating mixture of status-seeking and stupidity; and because of that, they’re probably here to stay and will continue to make oodles of money. And if they’re not going away, we might as well start thinking how we might direct that firehose of cash towards the world of books and literature. 

What follows is a list of how NFTs have been and might be used to make money for writers, artists, readers, and booksellers. Following Ted Gioia’s excellent example with music NFTs, the list is organized from the highly practical to the howling edge of technical feasibility and good taste. If any of these take off, you heard it here first.  

Rights and Royalties

Let’s start with smart contracts, which are already a thing and could be coming soon to a publisher near you. A smart contract is a program that automatically executes during transactions on a blockchain.

The most important and obvious use for artists and writers here is royalties: every time an NFT tied to the writer’s work is sold, their royalties can be instantly and automatically deducted from the payment as a percentage or a flat rate. In an instant, whole accounting departments vanish from the big publishers and authors get back all the days, months, and years spent waiting for royalty checks. For every first sale, an author would get their royalties immediately.

In fact, an author could get a cut every time that NFT re-sells, too. When they do this in Europe, where it’s standard in the art market, it gets the classy name of droit de suite; in the United States, we call it “probably a pyramid scheme,” although that depends on whether or not the smart contract includes all the NFT’s previous owners on the blockchain or just the original. But all of this presupposes a digital marketplace for used books. Is that possible?

Re-sellable Digital Books 

In theory, yes. The short explanation here is that a digital copy of a book tied to an NFT could uphold the first-sale doctrine with ebooks. Right now, when you buy a Kindle version of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (to pick something from my wishlist) from Amazon, you aren’t actually buying a personal copy, but a license to download a copy. Because you don’t own your Kindle version of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, you can’t legally share it or sell it to somebody else. Amazon could even yank the file right out of your Kindle if they ever lose the license. And as US District Court of Southern New York found in Capitol Records v ReDigi, you can’t resell a regular, non-blockchain digital file.

With NFTs, though, it becomes possible to certify your unique digital copy of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs. It becomes your property, just like a paper copy of the book: you can keep it, destroy it, or sell it as you please. Digital books, then, would have a used-book market just like their paper counterparts, loaned to friends or sold to used-book sellers, allowing for freer circulation and a cheaper, more independent marketplace for books. Amazon’s borderline-monopoly on ebook prices is crushed, new businesses form to fill the niche, and ebooks get cheaper. 

This sounds fantastic. The problem is, the sign is not the signified and the token is not the book: NFTs may be unique, but the digital file containing the book is not, and could be infinitely reproduced like any other bit of code. We’ve already been here with music and CDs in the Napster era: yes, the jewel cases were pretty to look at and hold, but the real value was in the music, which any computer could separate from the disc and upload to the internet. In this model, NFTs are to books as those CDs are to music: an expensive case to a product you can get online for peanuts.

A few indie groups are currently trying out this NFT model, but I don’t see it catching on: they are essentially asking customers to pay a lot more for the same product out of the goodness of their hearts, and it’s not clear why we need that when we already have Patreon. Odious as it may seem, the Overdrive/Amazon licensing model seems better-adapted to the reality of digital books and how we use them. There might be one case, though, where NFTs might catch on as commodities…

Collectibles & Editions

The vast majority of used books, like any other product, lose value over time. I could never hope to sell my Penguin Classics edition of Plutarch’s Moralia for more than half of what I paid for it two years ago when it was new. The same is true for all my books.

Or rather, almost all of them. I have a copy of Cyrano’s Voyages to the Moon & Sun from the Folio Society that is actually worth $150 more than what I paid for it last year. It’s not because the book is especially well-made and pleasing to read, although it is; it’s because Folio Society editions are limited, and people collect them.1 The Folio Cyrano went out of print not long after I bought mine, and now the price for a used copy is twice the original MSRP.

The same, theoretically, could be true of book NFTs. Again, scarcity doesn’t work for digital books like it does for paper ones: if my Cyrano was just a PDF, I could make as many copies as I wanted. But if my book came with an NFT certifying that my digital copy was part of a limited run, it might have some collectible value, in the same way that a rare first edition of A Christmas Carol costs $75,000 but a common used paperback with the same content might cost 75¢.

As the NFT art market has shown, the scarcity produced by blockchains actually does drive up value, with people paying thousands and millions of dollars for the right to own an “original” jpeg or GIF. However, I was only able to find a few enterprising sellers on OpenSea minting NFT “first editions” of classics like Little Women. As of this writing, they have no sales. Crypto guys, apparently, don’t read classics.

Bundling & Unbundling

But why stop at collecting whole editions of books? One thing you see in the crypto-book sphere is unbundling: breaking books apart into individual components that can be minted as NFTs and sold. Authors can sell the original files of chapters, pages, illustrations, and more, opening up new markets for middle-class collectors. There’s a historical analogue here to the market for illuminated manuscripts and incunabula in the 1940s and 1950s, when books were hacked apart into single pages that could be sold at prices middle-class collectors could afford. I can’t afford an original In Praise of Folly wrapped in vellum or blockchain, but I could afford a page or two to put on my wall. 

Authors can use this to creatively distribute their books: imagine auctioning off the pages of your book to fans as a way of subsidizing the work, much like artists on Patreon or Go Fund Me offer deluxe packages for supporters. As with other crypto assets, these could even be a kind of investment: an author might issue pages of their book like stocks: have your broker scoop up twenty pages of the new Stephen King and watch as your percentage of the profits roll in. 

One crypto author, Rex Shannon, even tried page-bundling as a kind of serialization, minting 207 NFTs for each page of his novel, releasing the pages to the public as fans bought them up. This could work. But so far, it hasn’t. Shannon sold about twenty pages before interest faded, and the novel has languished for more than six months now without another buyer. Less than a tenth of the book has been purchased. 

Advertising

We can go further, though: if real estate is the original non-fungible good, why not bring real estate to the pages of your book? An author could establish a blank, programmable space inside their work, open to whoever buys the NFT associated with that space. We could bring the advertising model of broadcast television to literature: most of us pay nothing in exchange for sitting through an occasional word from the sponsors, ideally tailored to meet the demographics of the readers: consumer technology for the sci-fi crowd, psychics peddling their services between the chapters of ghost stories, hospitality & tourism boards buying up space in travel books or adventure tales, political candidates sending out their message in books on politics. Why let algorithmic chum-factory ads clog up books when the author can sell the space to someone at a price they set and directly profit from instead?

And as soon as the advertiser gets bored or senses the market diminishing, they might sell their token on to somebody else, who inherits the space and the right to do as they please with it. 

Native Advertising

Then again, what’s to stop advertisers from buying access to the actual text? Native advertising, in which sponsors dictate what characters wear, drive, eat, or drink, has long been a feature of movies, television, video games, and music. With a little bit of coding, you might sell certain semantic fields–clothes, food, transportation, sports teams–to the highest bidder, whose rights are enshrined in a blockchain-distributed smart contract.

The Coca-Cola Corporation could buy up Harry Potter’s drinking rights, so that the Boy Who Lived only drinks refreshing Cherry Coke Zero; James Bond could put down his rusty old Walther PPK and become a Smith & Wesson man; Turkish Delight is banned from Narnia, and now Edmund sells his soul for a Snickers. Once the NFT is sold, the new holder is free to change it as they please, with some artificial intelligence presumably smoothing out the details within the text when Harry Potter suddenly switches to Dr. Pepper. 

Nothing stops advertisers from doing this now, except for artistic integrity and the current book distribution model, which would make it hard to alter text once it goes out into the world. But these are easily fixed if the right market models are designed. 

Avatars

But native advertising misses the truly radical potential of combining NFTs and text-rights. Why stop at consumer goods and products, when an author can potentially sell NFT-embedded rights to characters, locations, and events? You could buy the location rights and have the story unfold in your hometown, with the hero living in your house. You could buy the naming rights to a side character, the name of the evil alien antagonists. You could buy out the skin colors and sexual orientations of characters, with text-editing AI smoothing out the language to match the changes.

The real money, though, will be in the rights to the characters themselves. Why not let an intrepid buyer simply insert themselves into the book? Avatars, after all, are essential to the Web3 experience. Brands like Dolce & Gabana and Nike2 have already made their first forays into customizing digital avatars; why not sell the protagonist rights to somebody, so that the owner of that NFT can have their avatar (dressed, of course, in their Dolce & Gabana NFT couture) going on adventures, falling in love, and having novel-worthy experiences. Just as movies and video games will slowly merge through the 21st century, so that we can plug our avatars into the latest blockbusters we’ll make our favorite authors rich by purchasing our way into their art.

Our books will finally, truly, become reflections of the most important, meaningful, relevant, vital topic that draws us into literature, keeps us reading it, and makes us want to pay so much money for it: a literature all about ourselves. And it’ll be exactly the kind of literature that we deserve. 

When word reached Pope Alexander VII that the Dominicans of Our Lady Over Minerva had uncovered, while renovating their monastic garden, the angular outlines of an Egyptian obelisk deep in the Roman soil, His Holiness sent right away for the only man in Christendom–perhaps the world–who could make sense of the the artifact and read its hieroglyphs. Athanasius Kircher, S.J., responded with regrets, explaining that he was away on business, and would send an assistant in his place. As His Holiness knew, Father Kircher was always busy, poring over dusty tomes in obscure Oriental languages, experimenting with magnets or microscopes, tinkering with church organs, or otherwise wandering his personal museum that contained, among other things, the tailbone of a mermaid, a stone from the Tower of Babel, and a mechanical organ that played every kind of birdsong. Who could blame him for delegating a bit of busywork?

Before long, the assistant returned from the dig site, etchings in hand, apologetic. He’d been able to make copies of three sides, but the obelisk was too heavy to roll over, and the fourth side remained hidden. This was no problem to Kircher: judging by the available inscriptions, he could predict which hieroglyphs were on the fourth side. Taking a sheet of paper, Kircher copied out the missing hieroglyphs in his precise script. Soon the obelisk was rolled over.

“And when they had discovered,” Kircher wrote, “that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original, they were utterly stupefied.” The Dominicans suspected that the Jesuit had made a pact with some dog-headed Egyptian devil, or deployed some Kabbalistic black magic to see through the stone and decode the pagan writing. The Pope, though, was delighted, and asked Kircher for a private demonstration on the meaning of these hieroglyphs. They described, in Kircher’s Latin translation, how

Hemphata the supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtues and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world…whence comes the vital motion in the material and elemental world, and an abundance of all things and variety of species arises from the fruitfulness of the Osirian bowl, in which, drawn by some marvellous sympathy, it flows ceaselessly, strong in power hidden in its two-faced self.

The Pope had the obelisk mounted on a marble sculpture of an elephant, where it still stands today. 

The hieroglyphs have since been retranslated. The text, in full, contains nothing more than the names and titles of the pharaoh Apries (r. 589 - 570 BC)–no supreme spirit, no vital motion, no Osirian bowl. Nobody knows who or what Hemphata is supposed to be, or where Kircher got the name. Many of the figures Kircher “translated” weren’t hieroglyphs at all, but ornamental motifs. In the post-Rosetta world of modern Egyptology, Kircher’s long, lucidly-argued books on Egypt turned out to be so many thousands of pages of fantasy and bosh. The bronze tablet he considered his key to translation turned out to be a Roman forgery, its signs an illiterate hodgepodge of pseudo-glyphs. He came very nearly close to being wrong about everything; the handful of times he didn’t only got things right in ways he couldn’t have ever known or suspected. It was enough to make the forefather of Egyptology. 

Two different books call Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680) The Last Man Who Knew Everything, which is how he must have looked to his thousands of fans. In a lifetime overlapping with Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, Kircher was the intellectual superstar of his time, a polymathic genius who’d written authoritative works on magnetism, musicology, linguistics, optics, mechanics, geometry, and more. But while his contemporaries were developing the sober, testable methods of modern science, Kircher looked backwards to the freewheeling, associative, Biblical style of medieval scholarship, flying high on citations from Aristotle and Genesis, unencumbered by experiments, equations, and observation. He never went to Egypt or China or the great subterranean continent of Atlantis, but he wrote books about all of them. While his contemporaries were discovering the moons of Jupiter and the volumes of gases, Kircher was calculating the precise number of species on Noah’s Ark or proving, beyond all doubt, that the Tower of Babel could not have reached the Moon. He invented, or claimed to invent, a magnetic clock, an engine powered by sunflower seeds, a water-powered church organ, the first megaphone, and an algorithmic card-catalogue capable of automatically generating short melodies with four-part harmonies. He was endlessly curious, once descending into the crater of Mount Vesuvius, and using the newly-invented microscope to look at blood, rotting food, and rare minerals. To his native German he added proficiency in Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, and Coptic, along with a little bit of Chinese and, of course, ancient Egyptian. 

As a writer of fantasy, Kircher is first rate. His works, taken together, form a cockeyed encyclopedia from another dimension, where Aztecs chant Hebrew prayers from atop their skyscraper pyramids and the waters of the Great Deluge lap at the subterranean shores of Atlantis. As a scholar, though, Kircher was wrong about almost everything, from the very great (he wrote at length against the heliocentric heresy) to the very small (armadillos are not hybrids of turtles and porcupines). Outside a few scholars who study him for historical interest, Kircher is remembered, if at all, as a fraud and a fool. 

I kept running into Kircher while reading about the history of hieroglyphs. The conventional story goes like this: after their invention in the late 4th millennium BC, hieroglyphs were in continuous use by Egyptian priests for some three and a half thousand years, slowly dying out in the early Christian era. The last known hieroglyphs date to AD 394, and within a hundred years even educated Egyptians like Horapollo could only recognize a handful of simple hieroglyphs, and grossly misunderstood the nature of hieroglyphic writing. Fourteen centuries passed, Horappollo’s speculations growing to monstrous proportions in the hands of Christian monks and hermetic mystics who attributed all kinds of magical powers to Egyptian writing, Athanasius Kircher chief among them. This went on until Napoleon’s soldiers bunkered down in an old Mamluk fortress outside the town of Rashid and discovered one of the foundation stones had writing in three different scripts: Greek, hieroglyphs, and a shorthand based on hieroglyphs. By 1822, they had all been deciphered, revealing a writing system like any other, with no room for wacky Kiercherian speculation. 

The whole story is worth reading, and books like John Ray’s excellent Rosetta Stone and Edward Dolnick’s The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone are good introductions to the only swashbuckling adventure graphology has ever had. (I do wish, though, that both books would be more specific about particular hieroglyphs and the grammar of ancient Egyptian.) I had originally picked these books up with the intention of writing about the men who got hieroglyphs right, but found my thoughts drifting towards the man who got them wrong in the most interesting–and ultimately fruitful–ways. 

Three problems confronted the early decoders of hieroglyphs: the meaning of individual glyphs, the language that they corresponded to, and the total number of glyphs. Kircher, as we have seen, got the first one catastrophically wrong. Following his Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic sources, Kircher believed that hieroglyphs were a kind of purely pictorial language that expressed the wisdom of the Egyptians. A reader had only to be initiated in the religion to understand the meaning of the symbols. Always fond of mysticism, which holds that all religions share the same sources, Kircher was convinced that bits of Egyptian wisdom were concealed in other occult traditions, like Kabbalah, alchemy, Neoplatonism. Being an expert on the occult and knowing a few things about Egyptian religion, then, Kircher could “read” hieroglyphs by meditating on the meaning of each glyph and its relationship to the others around it.

This was wrong, obviously. Hieroglyphs are simply phonetic symbols that combine to form words in natural language. The rabbit glyph doesn’t mean “open” because, as Horappollo insisted, rabbits never closed their eyes–the ancient Egyptian word for “rabbit” was just a homophone for “open,” so it could be used for either one. Because of this fundamental misunderstanding of hieroglyphic meaning, Kircher and his generation of Egyptologists never had a chance. 

On his way to this falsity, though, Kircher accidentally solved the second problem of hieroglyphs: following his Arabic sources, Kircher had come to believe that Coptic, spoken by medieval Egyptian Christians, was the direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. Other European scholars had toyed with the idea before, but never had enough access or talent to learn an obscure, dying language spoken by a religious minority in a backwater province of an enemy empire. Kircher, as a high-ranking Jesuit with access to Rome’s vast libraries, had that access. Reading Arabic and Hebrew sources, he taught himself Coptic, published a Coptic-Latin dictionary with grammatical notes, and recorded Coptic hymns in western musical notation. More importantly, Kircher would declare, repeatedly, that Coptic was, as one of his books called it, The Egyptian Forerunner–not necessary for reading hieroglyphs, but interesting nonetheless. These books led to a small but lasting community of European Coptic scholars, whose work was necessary to read the Rosetta Stone.

This might seem obvious, but it’s worth stating: without knowing the language of a mystery script, decipherment is almost impossible. There are only a handful of texts in Linear B but we can read them because we know they’re in Greek; on the other hand, we can sound out the glyphs of Nubian Meroitic, but nobody knows the Meroitic language and the inscriptions are gibberish. Thanks to Kircher’s Coptic books, Champollion was able to match Coptic sounds to Egyptian hieroglyphs: if the sun hieroglyph 𓇳 matched the Coptic word for sun, ra, would it appear in the hieroglyphs for a name like Ramesses? It did. 

Kircher also indirectly solved the most vexing problem of hieroglyphs: their baffling variety. While the number of glyphs varies over the centuries, even at its most conservative, there were hundreds in use–far too many for an ordinary alphabet. Languages only need a few dozen phonemes to express every word (English has about 45, depending on your accent) and a few dozen letters to represent them. If hieroglyphs weren’t purely symbolic, how could all of them possibly have different sound values? 

Once again, Kircher suggested the solution in his own indirect, backwards way. Besides being the world’s foremost authority on Egypt, magnets, and volcanoes, he was also an expert on Chinese language and culture. His China Illustrata, another massive, ill-conceived epic about the Biblical origins of an ancient, pagan culture in the style of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, was one of the first bestsellers on China in European history. In the Kircherian calculus, Egypt and China, both being massive and ancient empires with a reputation for monumental architecture and secretive wisdom. Athanasius being Athanasius, he drew the straightest possible line and deduced that the Egyptians and the Chinese shared a common ancestry as sons of Ham (they are not), and that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese hanzi were related (they are not). Several pages of learned, rigorous scholarship are devoted to proving this point, with Kircher, the only man alive able to “read” hieroglyphs, miraculously managing to supply a reading of the Egyptian that matched the Chinese every time. 

And yet, Kircher was actually onto something: Chinese and Egyptian aren’t related, but they really do work in similar ways: just as every Chinese phoneme has multiple hanzi that could be used to pronounce it, every sound in Egyptian had multiple corresponding hieroglyphs. Spelling, in both languages, is a matter of knowing which glyphs to use for which words. Although Kircher had things exactly backwards–hieroglyphs and hanzi are phonetic, not pictorial–by pointing out their similarities, he primed other scholars to study Chinese and familiarize themselves with non-alphabetic writing. Young and Champollion, the Rosetta Stone’s principal translators, had dabbled in Chinese for this exact reason. 

It’s easy, looking at Athanasius Kircher’s work, to laugh. It’s also justified: Kircher made all kinds of mistakes through ignorance and bias, and as Daniel Stoltzberg proves in his Egyptian Oedipus, Kircher regularly lied about his research and its prospects. The elaborate fantasies of Egypto-Sinaitic Hamite logographs cooked up by his overheated imagination are as wild as the illustrations he made to accompany them. And yet, without quite meaning to, or even understanding what he was doing, Kircher managed to provide some of the first, crucial steps towards the deciphering of hieroglyphs.

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Sources

• For biographical details and the outlines of Kircher’s work, I am indebted to John Glassie’s A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, which is still the best general introduction to Kircher’s life and work, and the source of my quotes & translations used here.

• I relied on two books for my understanding of hieroglyphs and the history of Egyptology: Edward Dolnick’s The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone and John Ray’s The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt.

• All illustrations in this essay are taken from Stanford University’s wonderful online collection of Kircher’s works.

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