July 2026 – Into the Woods

The People v. the Em-Dash

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

Back in print after 200 years

Hardback (right) and paperback. Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald Dalton, John Gibson Lockhart.
Acorn Abbey Books. 598 pages.
Release date August 15, 2026.

Hardback ISBN:       978-1-949450-05-7 US $34.99 ; UK £32.99
Paperback ISBN:      978-1-949450-06-4 US $19.99 ; UK £19.99
Digital ISBN:        978-1-949450-07-1 US $ 7.99 ; UK £ 6.99

Acorn Abbey’s new edition of Reginald Dalton will go on sale on August 15. This is one reason why I haven’t posted very often lately. I’ve been busy launching these books.

You have to hold the books in your hands to feel what superb editions they are. They’re hefty volumes at 598 pages. Many hours of work went into recovering the text of the 1823 first edition using optical character recognition, then proofing the text against the 1823 edition for accuracy. The typography is modern but was inspired by the 1823 edition.

⬆︎ Two pages of the new edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Lockhart

John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart also wrote a seven-volume biography of Scott, as well as three other novels.

Lockhart died at Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home. (Scott died in 1832.) In fact it was the descendants of Lockhart and Scott’s daughter Sophia who eventually came to own Abbotsford. Scott’s oldest son inherited Abbotsford when Scott died, but he had no heirs. So the ownership of Abbotsford passed to Scott’s grandchildren by Sophia and John Gibson Lockhart. Today Abbotsford is owned by a trust.

There have been some fascimile versions of this novel, but that’s awkward given that the novel was originally published in three volumes totaling more than a thousand pages. Why this novel was out of print for so long, and why it became so obscure despite its merits, are interesting questions. My theory is that Lockhart made too many literary enemies during his lifetime, and that that turned into a literary grudge that persisted throughout the 19th century. Edinburgh was a hotbed of literary activity. There was a literary war between the Edinburgh Review, which was a Whig literary magazine, and Blackwood’s Magazine, which was its Tory counterpart. Lockhart wrote for Blackwood’s. His caustic articles there generated a lot of outrage, in particular Lockhart’s criticism of “the Cockney poets,” a category in which Lockhart included the much-loved John Keats.

It seems that Lockhart rather frequently embarrassed his father-in-law, and several references to Lockhart’s literary scrapes are found in Scott’s letters. This, for example, is from a letter to his daughter written in 1820: “I had yesterday a very kind letter from Lockhart who takes in good part the advice I ventured to give him about withdrawing from the personal skirmishes of the Magazine which in his new and dignified character of a married man and Wilson having become a professor would not do so well as formerly.”

In a letter in written in 1818, Scott refers to a literary scrape involving Lockhart, a friend of Lockhart’s, and Leigh Hunt (a notorious literary brawler): “…[S]o these wars must be decided by ink not by blood. I did acquaint these gentlemen that when first they set this heavy stone a rolling ’twould fall upon themselves.”

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.
I asked an AI, Claude, to check all the references in the novel to places and terrain and to try to locate keys settings as accurately as possible. Claude drew this map. It’s northwestern England, the Furness Peninsula and Morecambe Bay near Lancaster.

The English Daltons

Most of Reginald Dalton takes place in Oxford, with scenes in London as well as in Scotland. But Reginald grew up in a parsonage in northwestern England. Because my own surname is Dalton, I am very curious about why Lockhart chose that surname. Lockhart had to have known that the Furness Peninsula is where the English Daltons were (and still are) concentrated. In Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, there is a character in northern England named Mrs Dalton, who is housekeeper to a bishop. It is very tempting to suppose that both Scott and Lockhart knew some of the English Daltons, but I cannot find any evidence of that by searching Scott’s letters or a biography of Lockhart. We do know, though, that Lockhart traveled through this area on his way from Scotland to Oxford.

⬆︎ My copy of the first edition, which I used for proofing. Click here for high-resolution version.

The Oxford novel

Reginald Dalton is often called the first Oxford novel. Lockhart was precocious, and he entered Balliol College, Oxford, when he was only 14. He read French, Italian, Spanish, and German. On a trip to the continent in 1817, when he was only 23 or 24 years old, he visited Goethe at Weimar.

Though Lockhart was abrasive in Blackwood’s Magazine, there is none of that in Reginald Dalton. There are many funny scenes, and Reginald is a very sweet and earnest young man, though he allows himself (for a while) to be led astray by another young Oxfordian who turns out to be neither sweet nor earnest.

⬆︎ Two pages from the 1823 first edition. Click here for high-resolution version.

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press has an ongoing project called The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart. Edinburgh has already published a critical edition of two of Lockhart’s novels, edited by Thomas C. Richardson. An Edinburgh edition of Reginald Dalton is in the works, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher. I don’t know when that academic edition is to be published. I was aware of it, certainly, when I brought out the Acorn Abbey edition. But Acorn Abbey’s edition of Reginald Dalton is a reader’s edition, at a reasonable cost, whereas the Edinburgh edition will be an annotated edition that probably will cost at least $130.

⬆︎ Abbotsford, from my visit there in November of 2024. Click here for high-resolution version.

We’re due for a Scott-Lockhart revival

Academics have not forgotten Sir Walter Scott and John Gibson Lockhart. The reading public have, and that includes the reading public in Scotland. I have often said that if my favorite Scott novel, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, was made into a movie, we would instantly have a Scott revival.

These novels are 200 years old, and, yes, they demand a lot from modern readers. One factor that puts readers off Scott, I think, is that the most frequently recommended Scott novel is Ivanhoe. I strongly disagree. Ivanhoe is the last Scott novel that one should read. The story is familiar, and it’s lacking in the warmth that is found in, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Antiquary.

And besides. Who doesn’t love Scotland.

⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Reginald

“He was naturally very handsome, and this, too, in a somewhat uncommon style of handsomeness, considering his race and his country; for though his eyes were of that clear, grave blue, which is seldom seen but in the north, the general cast of his countenance, both as to features and complexion, was rather what a painter would have called Italian. A profusion of dark chesnut curls lay on his forehead, the dancing blood of seventeen was in his cheek, and his lip, just beginning to be shaded with down, had that firm juvenile richness, which so rarely survives a single season of debauchery, or even of dissipation. His figure was light and nervous, and there was even a certain elegance about its motions, although Reginald had never had one single lesson in fencing, and I believe only about a dozen in dancing…”

Posing the wrong question

The cover of a new novel by Michael Tomasky, which I have not read.

It’s a very old trick question, so it’s not surprising that someone wrote a novel about it. The trick question is, “If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”

The trick in the question, of course, is to shame the person who says yes and then say that that person is no better than Hitler for being willing to kill a baby.

Why does no one ever seem to see through the trick? It’s the wrong question, and it’s a loaded question.

The right question is: Would the world be better off if one of the attempts to assassinate Hitler had succeeded? Depending on how you count them, there were between 15 and 40 schemes or actual attempts to assassinate Hitler after it was clear that he was a monster.

Framed that way, the obvious answer is: Hell yes. The world would be enormously better off. Millions of lives would have been saved. That question also leaves some room for hedging. To say that the world would be better off stops short of actually advocating a killing.

Would any morally decent person advocate killing a baby? I don’t think so.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the baby version of the question and reframes the question in the right way: Can you hold a baby responsible for something it has not done? Still, the Wikipedia article thinks that utilitarians would have to say yes.

If you acknowledge that the world would be better off if the adult Hitler had been successfuly assassinated, then you’ve taken a stand on a question that is frequently asked today: Is political violence ever justified? You’ve taken the position that yes, political violence is sometimes justified. That’s a slippery slope, and it’s not a conversation that nice people want to have. Some people’s monsters are other people’s heroes.

A quote is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, though as far as I can determine Wilde never actually said it: “Some people improve the world only by leaving it.”

As a political question, I think the answer boils down to something that we already know quite clearly. That is that democracy contains appropriate solutions when governments go rogue, but that despotism, dictatorship, and tyranny do not.

Historians filled a vacuum. Why is that odd?

Heather Cox Richardson with President Biden. Source: Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The New Republic has a rather silly piece today by an obscure academic: How Historians Took Over Liberal Punditry: The hottest resistance talking heads during Trump 2.0 are academics. What happened?

The essay never attempts to answer the question of what happened. After sloshing around quite a bit in her academic specialty — the political mythologies of eastern European countries and how they were shaped by orthodox religion — the author’s point seems to come around to something entirely irrelevant. That is, she accuses historians such as Heather Cox Richardson of paying too little attention to the political mythologies of American evangelicals.

Oh, give us a break. We liberals know all we need to know about the political mythologies of American evangelicals. After all, we’ve seen the consequences of it. And we held our noses against the stench of it long before it led to Trump 2.0. Not to mention that Heather Cox Richardson pretty much wrote the book on how those mythologies were perpetuated after the Civil War.

Since Katherine Kelaidis never offers an answer to the question of what happened, I’ll have a go at it. What happened is that the mainstream media, terrified by fear of attacks from the radical right and held in check by corporate owners, simply cannot tell the plain truth about what has been happening in America. Liberals are not the sort of people to pay attention to know-nothing pundits. So we turned to academics, who just happened to be academics whom we already knew and trusted, like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman.

There’s a bit of an ancient trap in this — if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Katherine Kelaidis, whose only tool is the intersection of religion with national mythologies, just has to believe that there is something in that idea that we all need to have our noses rubbed in.

No we don’t, Katherine Kelaidis. We’re way ahead of you, because we don’t share your blinkers. Now please go back to being obscure.