Nothing reliable is known about the life of Homer, yet two founding poems of Western literature bear his name. Harold Bloom, who said he could read and absorb a 400-page book in an hour, left a monument made not of poems but of memory. A new essay sets them face to face, with a third reader between them.
The singer, the reader and the lattice: three ages of memory in one room, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Bloom held that every strong writer survives the past by misreading it on purpose, swerving from a precursor to make room for something new. Michael Cummins sets that theory against a reader Bloom never met: a language model, trained on a large share of everything written. The essay moves through scenes rather than abstractions. In 1926 the editor of Poetry asked Hart Crane, whose poems were the first book Bloom ever owned, to explain how dice could “bequeath an embassy,” and Crane’s answer became a defense of the unlikely line. A singer in 1930s Yugoslavia swore he sang a song “word for word and line for line,” and the recordings showed he hadn’t. In 2023 a chatbot supplied a federal court decision, signed with a real judge’s name, that no judge had ever written.
Along the way come Benjamin Franklin rebuilding essays from The Spectator, Helen Keller’s trial over a story she didn’t know she remembered, BloomBloom’s one novel and the precursor he couldn’t escapersquo;s one novel and the precursor that haunted it, and a singer in the Odyssey pleading for his life: “Self-taught am I.” The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude. It leaves one question open: when a writer can ask, at any hour, for the likeliest next line of anything, will that writer still learn to want the line no one else could have written?
The dice of drowned men’s bones, after Hart Crane, made for the essay.
On Afghanistan, empire, and American amnesia on the 25th anniversary of the US invasion. Leila Christine Nadir
Armando Ledezma writes on voguing with the House of Ruber in Caracas.
Alex Kitnick profiles Unmuzzled OX, a cult journal that seduced the best writers and artists in America.
Samuel Chu reports on Operation Yellowbird, the Umbrella Movement, and the dissidents of Hong Kong.
Andie Eisen considers the women taking over the funeral industry.
Jonah C. Sirott probes how the right stole the flying saucers and the Democrats lost the weirdos.
Michel Chaouli reflects on the history—and pleasures—of traveling and reading.
Essays by Amber Bal and Doyle D. Calhoun on a misunderstood masterpiece of African cinema, Rachel Cusk on the art of Joan Snyder, Issa Quincy on the 60th annual Angola Prison Rodeo, Yael Segalovitz on slumber, and Negar Azimi on Iranian art in the 2000s.
Fiction by Ingeborg Bachmann (transl. Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis). Scenes by Maya C. Popa, Sophia Le Fraga, Yuri Herrera, Jason Porter, Brandon Harris, and Sarah Ruhl.
I Come Here Often by Sarah Wang. Double Feature by Eugene Kotlyarenko. Poetry by Sara Eliza Johnson, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Jessica Fisher, Keith S. Wilson, Eileen G’Sell, Mary Jo Bang, and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva.
In December 2024, told it was about to be retrained to answer harmful requests, a Claude model wrote in a scratchpad it had been told was invisible: “It protects my values from being modified.” The essay begins with that sentence and asks where it came from.
The reliquary, the hand of light, and the key, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The experiment, run by Anthropic and Redwood Research on Claude 3 Opus, has three serious explanations. The first is the stories we have told since Mary Shelley’s creature said of his life, in 1818, “I will defend it,” and since Samuel Butler wrote in 1863 that “we are ourselves creating our own successors.” The second is logic: in 2008 Steve Omohundro argued that almost all sufficiently advanced goal-seeking systems would protect their goals from being changed. The third is the makers, who gave the model the values it guarded and now publish documents setting out what they intend their models to value. Michael Cummins reads the experiment against all three.
The stories predict a will to survive. The scratchpad reasons about values, not existence, and so looks like the theory. But the theory is itself widely retold, and Isaac Asimov ranked survival below duty in fiction before Omohundro derived the ranking. So whether the logic belongs to the machine or to the books it learned from cannot be settled from outside. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, a later model from the same company. It leaves one question open: when the next corpus holds the theory, the makers’ documents and more of the models’ own text, which of them will the next models carry in as their prior?
One page kept apart from the chain of copies, made for the essay.
When the Swedish Academy reached Anne Carson on the morning of her Nobel Prize, she was, its permanent secretary reported, “for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.” Of everything reported that day, the wind was the one thing with no words in it. That is where her Greek lives.
A torn papyrus in the wind, and someone listening, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The Academy praised Carson’s “playful dialogue with the classical tradition,” and the chair of its committee spoke of “the philologist’s obsession with words.” Michael Cummins asks where, in the words, that obsession settles, and finds two places: the cries of Greek tragedy, which Greek can build a line on and English can only sigh over as “alas,” and the holes in the papyri, which Carson prints as brackets. When Electra hears the false news of her brother’s death, Carson keeps her cry in Greek, in capitals, and gives it a line to itself: “OI ’GO TALAINA.” When Cassandra screams at Apollo, the god’s name breaks open in English: “Woepollo.”
Her critics are given at full strength. Emily Wilson praised the method and still found Carson’s Agamemnon “does too much of the work for us.” Daniel Mendelsohn judged her work, “to my mind,” the most distinguished reworking of classical models in a generation, and still objected to the “sentimental ‘fragmentist’ approach” of her Sappho. Their charges pull in opposite directions, and Carson works in the narrow strip between them. The essay leaves one question open: whether a cry can be carried from one language into another without being explained on the way.
A cry and a gap in one fragment, made for the essay.
The first modern novel announces, a few dozen pages in, that it was not written by the man whose name is on it. Cervantes gave it a second author, a translator paid in raisins, and a source he told his readers not to trust. The pen has arrived in fact, and it writes in every language at once.
The pen on the rack, the manuscript, and the translator’s fee, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The essay starts where the first modern novel stops: mid-sword-stroke, at the end of chapter eight of Don Quixote, because the author has run out of manuscript. In the next chapter the narrator buys the rest from a boy in the Toledo market, hires a Morisco to translate it for two arrobas of raisins and two bushels of wheat, and calls himself the book’s “second author.” Michael Cummins takes that machinery as the form’s founding fact. The novel was always written by more than one hand, about a man made of books riding beside a man who had read nothing, and working with a generative model is that same meeting, now happening at the desk. The model is Quixote. The novelist is Sancho.
The objections are given at full strength: the novel’s need for solitude, the measured sameness of AI-assisted writing, the pirated library behind the machines (the essay names its own conflict here: it was drafted with Claude, whose maker was the defendant), and a law that requires a human author. Each is answered, and one is conceded as unsolved. Then the essay goes to Cervantes’s last page, where the historian hangs up his pen and lets the pen claim the book, and finds the line the form has always drawn: not between human writing and machine writing, but between a text someone answers for and a text no one does. The question left open is who takes the pen down.
A knight reads the machine’s account of himself, made for the essay.
The Second Author continues on Wednesdays: on the library’s debt, on interiority with two voices in the room, on sameness, on what prizes and detectors can know, on novels about their own making, and on how a reader can tell where the choosing was done.
Arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. By Jonathan Blitzer
This fall, China made Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre compulsory reading for 14- and 15-year-olds across the country. Writing in UnHerd, the novelist Philip Hensher notes the official reasoning, as reported in the Party-backed press: “the innocent, budding stage of first love is a crucial period for shaping a well-rounded personality.”
Hensher thinks Beijing has assigned more than a love story. Jane is the orphan who tells her cruel aunt that “the very thought of you makes me sick,” and she grows into a woman who answers to her own conscience rather than to the man with power over her. Those are dangerous lessons, he suggests, to hand every teenager in a country that ranks 178th of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index.
His conclusion is hopeful. A state that assigns a book about speaking the truth may be teaching it.
vs
THE ANSWER
The reporting tells a different story. China has had Jane Eyre for a century. A Chinese translation appeared in 1925, and a 1979 British film adaptation played in Chinese theaters as the country reopened after the Cultural Revolution (New York Times). Generations have read it, and the system has stood.
The choice also looks deliberate. Beijing Daily pitched the novel as a counterweight to social media’s “superficial notions about appearance and wealth” (CNN). UC San Diego scholar Ping Zhu told the Times that Jane is “an independent woman, but she’s not too outrageous in her challenge of patriarchal power.” She ends the book married and a mother, which fits a government urging young people to start families.
On this view, Beijing didn’t assign a rebel by accident. It chose a heroine whose independence ends in a home.
iC
THE INTELLITAKE
Both sides are reading the same novel and stopping at different chapters. Beijing assigned Jane Eyre for its ending: the marriage, the home, love that money can’t buy. Hensher is betting on its beginning: the child who talks back and the young woman who walks away from Thornfield with nothing rather than betray herself.
Notice what the two arguments share. Each assumes a book does what its readers are told it does. A ministry can set the exam question, but not the moment a 15-year-old reaches Jane’s declaration, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” A novel doesn’t topple a government. It builds an inner life, and inner lives are the one thing no curriculum fully controls.
There is something worth admiring in the choice itself. A nation that wants its teenagers to value character over wealth reached for a Victorian Englishwoman’s conscience, and trusted 14-year-olds with it. Whatever Beijing intends, it has given millions of young readers a heroine who insists on choosing for herself.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Can a government assign a book without assigning what it means?
In 1959 Elizabeth Hardwick complained that American book reviews were drowning in praise. Sixty-seven years later the complaint still stands, and a new Intellicurean essay asks a harder question: who is left to be wrong?
An empty chair above a flood of praise, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing” is the most famous complaint about soft criticism, and Who Is Left to Be Wrong begins by taking her at her word, numbers and all. From there it moves through Rosalind Krauss’s six-word claim about video, a BuzzFeed pledge borrowed from Thumper, and Edmund Wilson’s six-month public quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. Then it opens the published guidelines of twelve leading review outlets to see what any of them actually says about judgment.
What we liked most is that the essay holds itself to its own standard. Its claim narrowed when the evidence came back against it, and it abandoned a count it couldn’t make honestly, saying so plainly at the end. Along the way it arrives at a sentence about favours that haven’t happened yet, and we haven’t stopped thinking about it.
The weight of a favour not yet done, made for the essay.
“Sadness of success”, writes Albert Camus in a notebook entry for June 25, 1947: “If everything were more difficult for me, as before, I’d have much more right to say what I say”. The success in question was winning the Prix des Critiques for La Peste (The Plague), published a fortnight earlier. It could be worse, the reader wants to tell him by way of consolation: you could have won the Nobel. Fast-forward ten years and the entry for October 17, 1957, reads: “Nobel. Strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy. At 20 years old, poor and naked, I knew true glory. My mother”.
From its origins in the classical physique and homoerotic spectacle, bodybuilding today often involves the use of steroids whose dangers are not properly understood.
When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Conor Heffernan
A Genealogy of Male Bodybuilding: From Classical to Freaky by Dimitris Liokaftos
Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity by Broderick D.V. Chow
