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.
Madeline Miller, author of our December pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This, joins Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions on “Circe,” and Jeff announces the January book selection.
About the book:
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child–not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power–the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child–not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power–the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
