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.
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?
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
Although it might seem to be a story of ever-increasing knowledge of biology, Cobb shows how our ideas about the brain have been shaped by each era’s most significant technologies. Today we might think the brain is like a supercomputer. In the past, it has been compared to a telegraph, a telephone exchange, or some kind of hydraulic system. What will we think the brain is like tomorrow, when new technology arises?
On this week’s show, host Joel Goldberg talks with science journalist Andrew Curry about archaeological finds from thousands of years ago along the shores of Northern Europe. Curry outlines the rich history of the region that scientists, citizen scientists, and energy companies have helped dredge up.
