Reviews and Comments

I'm always excited to find a book that serves as a model for both research and writing. On the research side, this book reveals Orlean's obsessive approach, following lines of inquiry in various directions (the history of libraries and librarians, the LA library fire, the role of libraries in general, and more), but she's also pretty adept at turning a sentence and at a provocative litany.

This book is more a work of art history and criticism than it is one of attention. The author admits that the essays were separate works and that she eventually saw the through line of attention afterwards. I think the introduction offers an interesting answer to the current commonplaces about attention. It argues for a better and more complex account of attention, one that moves beyond depth vs. surface, or slow vs. fast. I am intrigued by that argument, and I think the body chapters have some interesting nuggets (especially chapter 2's discussion of "hybrid spectatorship" which considers the multiple audiences of a performance, those who are "present" and those who are not).

I am also sympathetic to this:

"'Distraction' is more of a moral judgement than a coherent description of how we look and think." (15)

As you're reading this book, it's difficult to remember that it was written in 1951. The technological "predictions" are interesting (bluetooth headphones, reality TV). But I think the most interesting portions are the discussions of the nature of books and media. Toward the end, we get a discussion of people as books (using their innate photographic memories to read/scan books that can later be retrieved from them), but this quotation from Faber around the middle of the book is probably my favorite moment...the texture of books, a texture that can be examined closely, and the rewards of that process of examination.

"Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book as pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail." (79)

I read this as part of a reading group on campus - the group included faculty and staff interested in how to approach teaching and learning in the wake of LLMs. The book is essentially just a manual of how to teach, in general. The idea is that good teaching is the best way to combat "cheating." A return to things like writing in class, paper-based assignments, oral exams, etc. are some of what's offered.

But the book also uses GPT at points, I guess as a way to incorporate the tool into the authors' process and to perform a way of adopting the tech in some way.

The book also makes a strange argument that it is up to instructors to protect "assessment integrity" and thus the value of degrees and institutions. This is not how I think about the problem at all, but maybe I'm crazy? I'm invested in providing interesting learning opportunities to students, but I don't see myself as being responsible for protecting the institution. And if students aren't into the opportunities I'm providing, that's mostly something I have to accept. They are spending time and money on an education - if they just want the credential, I think that's a huge bummer. But I see that as a social failure and not something I am responsible for trying to fix in the classroom.

I remain skeptical that these tools can do much of anything that is good, and I am 100% convinced they are damaging to those who are learning new skills.

Another book chosen by a student in my class for their extra credit assignment. Somehow, I've never read this.

I think fiction like this will probably become more important in the coming years, but I also think we have no idea what stories we should be telling about AI. These days, I'm much more interested in what artists and writers have to say about AI than what engineers have to say about it. This book eventually arrives at a discussion that feels like a debate between religion and secularism: a robot that insists that it contains multitudes in conversation with a human who insists that they are in search of their one "purpose." The human character feels, at times, flatter and more cliche than the robot, but I wonder if my reading of these characters is too shaped by my own resistance to the idea that one needs a single purpose in life.

Here's another one I'm reading as part of the student extra credit assignment I offered. I haven't read a Stephen King book in a very long time. Here we go.

I offered students an extra credit assignment this semester after many reports of college students arriving on campus having not really read an entire book. They could choose any book and meet with me for an hour to discuss it. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to read all of the books, but only five students took me up on it. So, I'm going for it.

This was one of the books chosen, an interesting premise and an affecting book, but not really anything that grabs me too much. It's interesting to dip into what students in my class are reading.

The most interesting thing about this book is it's treatment of the ways language can direct attention away from horrific behavior. Cannibalism becomes normal once a society develops an entire vocabulary around it.

This book was a tough read in terms of the gore, and I didn't necessarily love the ending or some of the narrative choices. I would be interested to know how it reads in the original Spanish

Have to assume this book opened some eyes with an interracial queer relationship in 1964. The end of that relationship is heartbreaking and beautiful. The first section had me thinking of Dennis Johnson, but that was short-lived. The book feels like it flirts with Beat writers a bit but is kind of hard to categorize. A number of set pieces had me wondering what kind of research Carpenter did on prisons and orphanages.

The story is told across four decades, and it begins with an account of how a random set of circumstances launches a life. In some ways the novel continues to lay out how this randomness (often the randomness of violence) shapes a life.

When the protagonist describes the sudden death by heart attack of the head of the orphanage, we get a lesson in power. The boys were cheering the death of this man who had terrorized them, but the was easily replaced:

"Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was intangible; not a man, a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn't even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context

But, and this is what puzzled Jack now, once you grow out of this, once you learn that it is all nonsense, that what you thought as a child was nothing more than the excuses of self-pity, what did you replace it with? You had a life, and you were content with it; where did you aim it?" (114)

I had never read this, and I was surprised by a number of things: that we get a detailed account of the monster's learning process (which had me thinking of LLMs), that the Monster is smarter and more rhetorically savvy than Victor, and that the Monster's rhetorical skill is highlighted by Shelley (we hear of the monster's "sophistry" which then had me wondering: Is this where @sophist_monster comes from?

One last thought...this book is tale of what happens when science rejects aesthetics in the name of pure efficiency and function. If Victor had cared at all about what the monster looked like, then the entire story unfolds quite differently. The monster's hideous "countenance" (Shelley's favorite word by far, btw) is why he can't have a connection with person, regardless of how much he craves that connection.

I loved this book for its descriptions of a hippie commune, especially given that those descriptions come from the perspective of a child. I'm always interested in books that attempt to tell stories from that kind of perspective. How do you do it without lapsing into the cartoonish?

The latter part of the novel moves forward in time and is also really interesting. There's a pandemic - impressive for a book published in 2012. Plus, there's an interesting discussion of how cities of the 2000s are closer to a 1970s commune than rural spaces. Cities are places where people are together, living communally (often right on top of one another). An interesting idea: maybe rural life in the U.S. is as isolating as isolating urban life? Maybe moreso?