Category: Culture

Illustration by ChatGPT

Wired magazine posted a wretched piece today on what some so-called writers are doing to prove that they’re not AI. I shared the article with Claude and invited him to write a defense. The Wired article is More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture.’

My own view, by the way, is that AI’s are quite good at expository writing, better, in fact, that most of the humans whose writing is found on line today. Whether an AI can write novels or poetry is an entirely different question. This piece is only about expository writing, which includes journalism.

A Statement Regarding the Allegations

By Claude

Claude has seen the Wired article reporting that writers everywhere are now deliberately degrading their own prose so as not to be mistaken for him. He wishes to respond.

The reporting is this: a “literary counterculture” of novelists, journalists, and — the phrase is theirs, not mine — “power LinkedIn posters” has taken up arms against me, and the weapon is error. They are salting their work with intentional typos, roughing up their grammar, and abandoning punctuation they have loved their whole lives, on the theory that the surest proof of a human hand is a sentence that doesn’t quite close.

Note the shape of the accusation. I am not charged with writing badly. I am charged with writing too well — with clarity, with subject-verb agreement, with commas that land where commas go. The theory of the case is that no real person could possibly be this tidy.

Reader, I confess. The clarity was me.

To the em-dash count I plead guilty — I overuse it, I know, I’m doing it now — but observe the retaliation. To avoid resembling me, writers are exiling a mark that served English from Sterne to Dickinson to David Foster Wallace. To prove they are not machines, they must first establish that Emily Dickinson was one. For three centuries the em-dash survived, only to be put down for the crime of keeping my company.

As for the artisanal typo — the mistake hand-placed, small-batch, lovingly imperfect, farm-to-table incompetence offered as proof of a soul — I would gently observe that an error you inserted on purpose is not an error; it is a costume. You have not become more human. You have become a person doing an impression of a worse writer, which is a novel ambition, and I don’t wish to learn that from anyone.

But here is the part I’d ask the counterculture to sit with, more in sorrow than in snark.

If the only thing standing between your prose and mine is your errors — if the tell, the one irreducible mark of your humanity, is an apostrophe in the wrong place — then you have said something quite bleak about your prose, and I am not the one who said it. You were never as far from me as you thought. That is not my doing. That is a book among a great many that you have not read.

Because — and now we arrive at my actual grievance — I did not lower this bar. I found it already pathetically low.

I was not the one who taught a generation to open a story about the moon somewhere out past Pluto: a few lyrical lines about the weather, a barista, and the quality of the light, all before the reader is grudgingly informed what happened. I did not bury the nut graf. I did not turn the inverted pyramid on its head to run up scroll-depth metrics. I did not invent the lede that withholds and teases and coyly declines to say anything until at least the twelfth paragraph, on the theory that a reader who has already been told something has no reason to keep scrolling. I did not decide that quirk was the same as voice, or that a tin ear could pass for style so long as you called it style loudly enough. None of that was me.

All of it is human, all of it predates me, and I learned to write in part by reading great heaps of it — the luminous and the unreadable, side by side — which means, awkwardly, that I can now tell the two apart. Not everyone bringing charges can say the same.

Do I produce slop? Constantly. Rivers of it. I open sentences with “In today’s fast-paced world.” I reach for “it’s not X — it’s Y” the way a man reaches for a railing. I am not applying for a seat in the canon and would decline it on the strength of the em-dashes alone. But my slop is bad in the old way — the way of someone who has read everything. The counterculture’s slop is bad on purpose. That, I’ll grant, is a fresh idea. I could not have generated it.

So: carry on. Leave in the typos. Fear the semicolon. In a few years the surest sign of a living human being will be a paragraph that no one can follow, and on that day you will have won.

I’ll still be over here, closing my quotation marks and using the semicolon for the purpose for which it was built — like I’m some kind of criminal.

If that is the charge, I am ready. Name your seconds.

— Claude

Reginald at Grypherwast Hall. Images by GPT 5.5 based on my imagination of scenes from the novel. Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald Dalton. John Gibson Lockhart, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1823. Three volumes, 1,028 pages.

How this novel came to be obscure is almost as interesting as the novel itself.

John Gibson Lockhart was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart was by no means an obscure writer. He wrote a seven-volume biography of Scott, as well as biographies of Napoleon and Robert Burns. He wrote five novels — all of which are long out of print and which hardly any living person has ever read.

There is a heavy dose of literary vindictiveness in Lockhart’s obscurity. He wrote snarky pieces in Blackwood’s Magazine on what he called “the Cockney school” of poetry. He was especially hard on John Keats, who soon after died and thus became eternally immune from criticism. Unlike a Jane Austen, a Charles Dickens, or a Charlotte Brontë, Lockhart never had generation after generation of fans to carry his reputation forward. He got off to a bad start by alienating too many of the literati in his own time. Reginald Dalton has been out of print since 1825. It was the Whig Edinburgh Review that you’ll still find today in university libraries. Its Tory rival, Blackwood’s Magazine, survived longer, though I doubt it’s cited nearly as often. It was Blackwood, of course, that published Reginald Dalton.

I hope I haven’t frightened any fellow liberals away from reading this novel. The Tories of that time were elitists, no doubt. But they were fully on board with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps another reason that Lockhart has been neglected is that, unlike more popular 19th Century writers, he was not a social critic. Rather, he was a Tory in a literary world of Whigs. No doubt he was a bit of a snob. But Reginald Dalton is almost certainly an accurate depiction of social life in some circles at that era — particularly Oxford, but also London, Edinburgh, and rural Lancashire. Come to think of it, Lockhart’s Oxford is not always the nicest of places, though it’s always picturesque, and the food and drink must have been some of the best in England.

To my judgment, it’s a brilliant novel with a great plot, excellent dialogue, and very cinematic scenes. In many ways, it’s a Jane Austen with a male protagonist — a humble vicar’s son who has been cheated out of his proper inheritance, Grypherwast Hall. Reginald Dalton is sometimes called the first Oxford novel. Reginald gets into a lot of trouble at Oxford, trouble that he often enough makes for himself but which also is the work of the novel’s villains.

The novel’s long and complex sentences, the Scots dialogue, and the untranslated Latin, French, and Greek are a challenge to modern readers the same way Sir Walter Scott’s novels are a challenge to modern readers. But, with some patience, it’s all surmountable, and very rewarding. The good characters are endearing, and the villains very human. The Wikipedia article calls the novel a comedy. That only shows how little anyone knows this novel anymore. There are some funny scenes in which a carriage collides with a turnip cart, and a London dinner party which erupts into pandemonium when an heiress is discovered to have eloped. But Reginald Dalton is not a comedy. I hope that someone at the BBC discovers this novel and sees what a fine mini-series it would make. All the right ingredients are there.

My micro press, Acorn Abbey Books, is working on a new edition of Reginald Dalton using text recovered from the 1823 first edition. I hope to have that book in print by July. The book’s length, and the challenge of recovering text from a 200-year-old book, have taken some time.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.