It’s no longer the student who’s shocked by the unwelcome demands made on him or her by the first writing assignment. It’s the teacher who’s shocked, this time by the question of what’s to be done with the result, since it wasn’t the student who wrote the paper, but a computer. But if today’s English teachers are shocked at getting “perfect themes” because AI is writing them, why are they giving assignments for which “perfect themes” are the correct responses?| Slant Books
Morgan Meis, one of Close Reading’s bloggers, has written a book that forces me to ask, as few books have done in a long while, not only who I am but how I am to be. A book that puts me on the spot about what it means that I’m a mortal being, destined for death.| Slant Books
Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking t...| Slant Books
: W. D. Snodgrass’s master poetic work, The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle, was years in the making. Finally published in 1995, the work reflects his care in adjusting not only the tone but the shape of each character’s poetic speech to model his or her personal character. Speer’s stately, self-serving monologues are presented as a sequence of triangles (reflecting Speer the builder). Himmler’s dry monologues are divided into individual letters imprisoned in graph paper grids. And...| Slant Books
Carolyn Forché is now a celebrated American poet. But she was far from that on the day in the late 1970s when a car pulled up outside the remote California beach house that she was renting. The driver idled the engine, then finally turned it off. At that, Forché, alone in the house and busily typing, noticed the sudden silence and became apprehensive. In her gripping memoir What You Have Heard is True, she narrates what happened next.| Slant Books
In her memoir, called Y2K, Colette Shade accomplishes the feat of critiquing “millennial nostalgia,” beginning by reenacting the frenzied eagerness that prompted it. She stacks up like houses of cards the accumulations of places, people, products, and promotions that once entranced her, and then undercuts them, so that they flutter to the floor, wilted and weightless.| Slant Books
The poems we hear in Tim Hunt’s new collection embody, for me, Jack Kerouac’s teaching: that to accept loss forever is, paradoxically, to embrace it in the present—to treat it as an ever-present reality, one that reveals unexpected beauty and solace, but only if we become part of that revelation.| Slant Books
My bedside dresser is a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. That’s a photo of it you see here. Too many books piled in every direction, about to fall over. My wife Peggy counts them from time to time, calling out the growing number so that I can’t fail to hear it. She refuses to straighten the piles herself, much as she’d like to. She wants me to do it myself.| Slant Books
Below I give you the first paragraph of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral —a book that creates its main character and its theme only to undermine both. The paragraph is a gift to a close reader because it enacts all this creating and undermining within just its own short compass. Conceivably, you could savor just this paragraph, claim you’d read the whole book, and walk away with a good conscience.| Slant Books
One of Theodore Baird’s essays goes much further. In “Sympathy: The Broken Mirror,” he argues that this short-circuiting of the distance between the words we read and what they mean applies also to how we “read” others, as well as ourselves. To claim to know any Other tempts us to make a leap of the imagination into a world where at best we see darkly.| Slant Books
I looked hurriedly through Miss Thater’s Designs. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. Page after lined page of meticulously plotted circular or ovoid geometric forms of various sizes, all arranged symmetrically around a grounding middle field. The forms were laid out first in pencil, probably freehand, then filled in with color from colored pencils or inked pens. No design was quite like another.| Slant Books
If you are or can become a patient reader, Rowan Williams’s The Edge of Words is then not like a dancer en pie spinning on a single ever-elusive “point,” but whirling like a dancer along a discursive path towards the destination announced in the title: towards the “edge of words.”| Slant Books
The marvelous thing about the first paragraph of Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), by Patrick Mackie, is how carefully the narrator builds Mozart’s world in front of our eyes, as if it were being created sentence by sentence as we read about it.| Slant Books
Jon Fosse’s novel Septology (published in Norwegian in 2019) is a monologue beginning and ending in the mind of Asle, an elderly widowed Norwegian painter living in the countryside on the proceeds from the sale of his paintings. He communes throughout the next 667 pages with a self who becomes both him and not him.| Slant Books
