Lately I've been on a reading kick.
Recently some guy related to the news website Axios was writing about how he used LLMs to help him read The Last of the Mohicans by having it summarize and refresh him on characters and plot along the way (Futurism.com assembled some of the responses). It got me thinking about what reading is, why it's hard, and why we do it.
The three-cueing debate
Back in 2019, I read an article going viral on Twitter: At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers. This dramatic takedown of 'three-cueing' (a widely taught strategy to read words via graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues) touched a nerve for me and many others. It seemed to shed light on the universal experience of online arguments where people talk past each other, seemingly responding to points hallucinated from buzzwords and vibes. Increased attention on this issue has since led many states to restrict or ban 'three-cuing', although this is potentially an overcorrection. A perspective that I've seen recently (and intuitively agree with) is that context cues are crucial, but should be supplemental to an early foundation in phonics - readers should be able to sound out words first then use context (e.g. three-cueing) to confirm, rather than guessing based on context immediately (A Review of the Three-Cueing System: Correcting a Misunderstanding About the Reading Process).
This youtube video Why You Don't Understand What You Read by the channel Closed Stacks gives some interesting examples of ambiguous sentences and argues that the meaning of text is not fully baked into the words on the page, but is greatly informed by the reader's schema (mental model, preconceived ideas).
So when people try to read a really challenging book, a lot of them might give up easily because they might think 'Oh, well I'm not smart enough' or... 'Oh, well I'm not very good at reading' when in reality all you really need to do is learn more about that subject.—Closed Stacks
Reading as power: The Intellectuals and the Masses
Some criticisms of the Axios guy perhaps underemphasize the contested history of reading when making a seemingly 'common sense' point.
This kind of 'reading' is a different thing from what a lot of us understand reading to be. It's a kind of optimizing/conquering of a book rather than experiencing it. We’re seeing the same thing with AI and writing.
—Jane Rosenzweig, author and former director of the Harvard College Writing Center
But there is power and prestige and accomplishment in reading, isn't there? That's why it works to make fun of him for being bad at it. Some say his desire for help keeping characters straight is evidence of 'forgetting how to read' or 'AI psychosis' whereas others offer authored reading guides as a more accurate and ethical option than LLMs. So is reading hard or easy? Is it normal to seek notes/help, or does this mean you have brain damage?
In The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, John Carey paints a picture of literary intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century reacting to developments like population boom (resulting in e.g. the suburbification of the English countryside) by fixating on the concept of 'the mass', a sort of vulgar, soulless, blob against which the intellectual defines themself. These views were mutually reinforcing with other trending ideologies like phrenology, eugenics, and anti-democratic belief.
In [Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's] analysis, population increase has had various consequences. First, overcrowding. Everywhere is full of people – trains, hotels, cafés, parks, theatres, doctors' consulting rooms, beaches. Secondly, this is not just overcrowding; it is intrusion. The crowd has taken possession of places which were created by civilization for the best people. A third consequence is the dictatorship of the mass. The one factor of utmost importance in the current political life of Europe is the accession of the masses to complete social power. This triumph of 'hyperdemocracy' has created the modern state, which Ortega sees as the gravest danger threatening civilization. The masses believe in the state as a machine for obtaining the material pleasures they desire, but it will crush the individual.
—John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses
In this view, the masses lacked education, but the project of educating them was met with ambivalence or outright hostility by intellectuals. The 'mass' was compared unfavorably with 'peasants', the latter of whom intellectuals could pastorally idealize as knowing their place, rather than grasping like the masses for corrupting facsimiles of intellectual culture found in popular written media.
Dreaming of the extermination or sterilization of the mass, or denying that the masses were real people, was, then, an imaginative refuge for early twentieth-century intellectuals. Less drastic, but more practical, was the suggestion that the mass should be prevented from learning to read, so that the intellectual could once more dominate written culture. This idea is already present in Nietzsche, who opposes universal education. Education should remain a privilege, he insists. Great and fine things can never be common. 'That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too.' D. H. Lawrence vigorously develops this theme. 'Let all schools be closed at once,' he exhorts. 'The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write.' Illiteracy will save them from those 'tissues of leprosy', books and newspapers. Without education the masses will, Lawrence hopes, relapse into purely physical life. Boys will attend craft workshops, and it will be compulsory for them to learn 'primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics'; girls will study domestic science. In this way the dangers of a 'presumptuous, newspaper-reading population may be averted'.
T. S. Eliot is less Utopian than Lawrence, but he regrets, in his essays, the spread of education, prophesying that it will lead to barbarism: 'There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards … destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.'
—John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses
Beyond anti-education arguments, Carey argues (only sometimes convincingly) that the modernist literary elite (and later, theorists in the tradition of Jacques Derrida) intentionally wrote in an obscure way to exclude the masses from participation. This is a topic that I find really fascinating, as it overlaps with so many discussions about elitism, 'weird' art, academia, reading comprehension, media literacy, etc. While pseudo-intellectual posturing undoubtedly exists, I do think that a lot of important work (both artistically and academically) must inherently become incomprehensible to certain swaths of laypeople in order to dig deep into its own specialization. Still, I instinctually value those who can bridge the gap 'back to the world', educators and artists who can demonstrate how deep abstractions pulse with life. Mary Everest Boole's Philosophy and Fun of Algebra (a significant influence on my game, Angeline Era) comes to mind.
Why/how am I reading?
I think that I read for 'sparks of recognition'
- A novel describing the way a character's subconscious feelings are expressed in small quirks of behavior.
- While learning a new language or subject matter, the satisfaction of basic comprehension.
- In nonfiction, the feeling that something I wonder about has been addressed. Or that multiple topics of interest to me have surprisingly collided.
- In history, that an ideology which now quietly undergirds some area of life was once openly described and advocated for.
But how to find sparks of recognition in the vast sea of everything? It can be very difficult to get going, sometimes it feels like searching for a soft whisper of interest and encouraging that to reverberate towards self-caricature (an active decision to look for certain key terms at the bookstore, or in the library search bar). Angeline Era sprouted from a mild interest in Irish folklore and music, stoked during early Covid, and eventually researched and connected into a web of other interests. Of course, interests are not only 'topics', nouns. The potential to recognize can be formed or stoked by all life experience. (related: my previous posts about 'the arbitrary threshold' as it relates to collage or culture).
Currently, I am drawn to the philosopher Gillian Rose, despite much of her writing being too specialized for me to decipher. Love's Work is a relatively accessible starting point, as much memoir as it is philosophy. I highlight passages that spark recognition, for themes (religious experience, fantasy vs. reality), or for the beauty of their prose.
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.
At dinner, Julius explained, 'An Orthodox Jew doesn't have to worry about whether he believes in God or not. As long as he observes the law.' Subsequently, I became familiar with the notoriously inscrutable Midrash: 'Would that they would forsake Me, but obey my Torah.'
Yet, as with the varieties of historical Protestantism, progenitor of modernity, the independence gained from the protest against illegitimate traditional authority comes at the cost of the incessant anxiety of autonomy.
This decision by the intellectuals that reason itself has ruined modern life, and should be dethroned and banned in the name of its silenced others, is comparable to the decision to stop small children, girls and boys, from playing with guns, pugnacious video games, or any violent toys... The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left terrified and paralysed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the world and himself or herself. The censor aggravates the syndrome she seeks to alleviate; she seeks to rub out in others the border which has been effaced inside herself.
—Gillian Rose, Love's Work
I reflect on my own experiences: modern protestants will criticize an overfocus on law-following (associated with Judaism, 'the old covenant') with the perjorative term 'legalism'. 'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast' (Ephesians 2:8-9). But the burdensome corrolary to this free-spirited doctrine is the annihilation of safety in one's interiority: in fantasy, emotion, or belief. As Christ said in the sermon on the mount, anger is as serious as murder, and 'anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart' (Matthew 5:28). Attending to actions is 'legalism', but interiority is a litmus test for the only important attribute: faith. Consequently, shameful thoughts are actually worse than hurting others. 'They may destroy the world'.
Following Love's Work, I read Rose's Mourning Becomes the Law, which expands on many of the other book's provocative ideas: the scapegoating of reason and the aforementioned 'inscrutable Midrash'. Vast swaths of it are mysterious to me, but there are still moments that call out to me, particularly her reflections on the necessity of grief. I know that she's speaking to me. I hallucinate what she's saying.
What is reading? And why is it so hard? Someone from the past has left a set of instructions, they allow you to assemble a voice inside your head. But... the instructions are incomplete!
What will you do next?