I think I need to say that the Canterbury Tales is more worth your time than Gone Girl

That's my social role, and I choose to embrace it

When I describe my Great Books project to people, they sometimes say, "Oh I've never read any of those" or "I've never been able to get into any of those." I feel a strong temptation to reassure them that it's okay, and that nobody really needs to read these books. But I also resist that temptation because isn't my whole schtick that they're a good and worthwhile use of your time? Like, I can't have it both ways—either I'm a snob or a democrat, I can't be both.

Surely one cannot run a Great Books blog without believing that some books are more rewarding than others. In my case, I strongly believe that there is some metaphysical knowledge that you get from reading the Great Books—that they confer some direct experience of truth, beauty, goodness, etc. This is a very strong claim, and one that I am utterly unable to support with any direct evidence, but I maintain it anyway.

Maybe it's the latent Hindu in me, but I've become a strong believer in people enacting their social role. As a Great Books proponent, I feel like my social role is to gently talk trash on pop culture? It's all well and good to have high-low posturing and to be like "There's good at the top and good at the bottom." I certainly believe that time spent reading, say Dune or Lord of the Rings, is time well-spent, and that these books have quite a lot of metaphysical truth to offer.

At the same time, it's disingenuous to pretend that the Great Books aren't difficult. There are certainly Great Books that I've enjoyed effortlessly (Emma comes to mind), but generally speaking there are few Great Books that I enjoyed reading, on a direct experiential level, as much as I enjoyed reading Gone Girl. I absolutely adored Gone Girl. I gushed about Gone Girl to everyone, and I wrote a few different blog posts about it! Gone Girl kept me up reading until 3 AM: it was absolutely intoxicating. Nonetheless, I don't run a Gone Girl blog, I run a Great Books blog, why?

Well the most obvious reason is for the cultural capital—there's none to be had in touting Gone Girl. But I also genuinely do not think that Gone Girl is as much worth my time as, say, the Canterbury Tales, even though on a moment-to-moment level I enjoyed the experience of reading Gone Girl much more

It took me a long time to read the Canterbury Tales, and there are some very boring parts in CT. I actually skipped the two prose sections, because they were just too deadly dull. Moreover, it would be hard for me to describe in coherent terms what I got from reading the Canterbury Tales. I read it in Middle English, and my most immediate experience was that I adored the rhythms of the language—it was only after reading through CT, sounding out every word under my breath, that I started being able to hear the stresses in the English language. CT directly improved my experience of the English language—it improved the rhythm of my writing and it improved my ear for all the writing to come. I had tried for years to try and 'hear' metrical stress, but I hadn't understood that you just need practice: sounding out six hundred pages of Middle English will get you there in a way that reading a few lyric poems never will. The benefit of the book came directly from its difficulty and from its inaccessibility.

Having previously gone through an Old English phase, I also liked the earthiness of the Canterbury Tales. This is the first place where you start to see some of the characteristics of English literature: a focus on non-noble characters and non-heroic deeds, an attention to the details of everyday life and domestic relations, and a strong sense of humor. There is nothing in the canon of Old English literature, for instance, that even remotely resembles the Friar's Tale, about a Summoner who makes friends with a demon and conspires with him to trick people out of their money, or the Wife of Bath's monologue, where she talks about how she shouldn't ever get married, because husbands are such a crap-shoot, and she should know, she's been married five times, but they all just had such great dicks! And she had such a good time fucking them, yessiree, she loved fucking them so much! And also they were all rich!

From the Wife of Bath's prologue
The firste nyght had many a myrie fit 
With ech of hem, so wel was hym on lyve. 
Yblessed be God that I have wedded fyve!
Of whiche I have pyked out the beste,  
Bothe of here nether purs and of here cheste.

Translation: On the first night with each husband we fucked so much, so were so great, blessed be to God I had five of them, of whom I picked the best, both in terms of their dicks and their riches.

One tendency for a Great Books evangelist is to make a case for the Great Books on some utilitarian basis: they'll make you stronger, smarter, more virtuous, more effective at your job, happier in your relationships, etc. I just don't know if that's true. I tend to think that art and literature give you an understanding of the world of art and literature. Whatever is good in art and literature is contained to the greatest degree, I think, in the best works of art and literature. But what is that good thing? What is the good thing that art does for you?

Or if you accept my framing, why does having direct knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness matter? What is it worth in terms of other things that we value? Will it make us happier? Will it improve our relations with others? Will it make us more effective parents or spouses or employees or bosses?

But the question is a bit wrong-footed imho, because of course reading Chaucer isn't the best way to be happy in your marriage or the best way to be effective at your job. If you want to learn about marriage or about your job, then you ought to study those specific arts. I think it's foolish to imagine that there is some general wisdom that will make you superior in all walks of life and it's especially foolish to think that reading the Great Books is the way to acquire this wisdom, because if there was such a thing, then all the most effective people in the world would be steeped in the Great Books, and that clearly is not the case. So if general wisdom exists then any general improvements it confers must be balanced out by the ways in which it unfits you for specific purposes—in other words, if wisdom exists, then perhaps the wiser you get, the less effective you get at doing regular things (like having a happy marriage or being good at your job).¹

I think what's more reasonable, as an assertion, is that wisdom is its own separate domain of knowledge, and that having an understanding of metaphysical reality doesn't necessarily make you better at participating in the particular socially contingent role you've been assigned on earth. This makes a kind of intuitive sense, doesn't it? After all, look at other knowledge specialists: we expect scientists to be good at science—we don't expect them to also be happier, healthier, or more than non-scientists at everyday tasks.

But the natural rejoinder is that if wisdom isn't linked to any particular improvement in performance, then how can we know it exists?

All I can say is that we all, I think, feel deeply that such a thing as wisdom exists, and that its possessors are often people who are not particularly successful at worldly endeavors. We perceive this quality in others, even if we can't necessarily measure it. And I just think, to circle back around, that reading the Canterbury Tales is more likely to bring you wisdom than will reading even the best works of contemporary popular fiction..

That puts me in a very difficult position though, because it necessarily means holding myself forward as a wise person, which, as we know from Socrates, is the biggest no-no of all. Saying that you are wise and can teach wisdom is something sophists do! A real wise man is the person who, like Socrates, only knows that he knows nothing.

But I don't know nothing. I know that reading the Great Books is a path to wisdom. Moreover, I am actually fully capable of evaluating the worth of the Great Books vis a vis popular literature. After all, I started out as a sci-fi writer. Until I was 22, I only read sci-fi. I have published three contemporary YA novels. I like country music. I've played three hundred hours (each) of Diablo 3, Borderlands 2, Baldur's Gate 2, various Fallout games, etc. In middle school I founded the Japanese Animation club at my school. I've watched a thousand hours of Law and Order. I have read dozens of Girl on the Wife in the Missing Train Lake books. I know what pop culture has to offer, and if I thought playing video games was the route to wisdom, I'd just play video games all the time because I love video games, and this blog would have roughly ten times as many readers (oh my god can you imagine how popular I'd be if I used my literary critic credentials to extol video games and run down great literature? It would be wild. I'd be such a phenomenon)

And I think pretending otherwise not only does a disservice to my readers, but is an abrogation of my own social function at the moment. Because if I can't stand up and say "No, these books are more important and better than other books" then who else possibly can? I certainly can't expect anyone to believe in something more than I believe in it myself.

And, luckily, in this case I do very deeply believe in the Great Books. I don't think that they are the only books that confer wisdom, but I do think this is a course of reading that comes pre-assembled (so to speak) and is readily accessible to most intelligent people and that there's something really miraculous about the fact that it's possible for a regular person (I didn't even major in English, I was an Econ major) to just sit down and read some of the world's oldest and finest works of literature and actually get something out of them.

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Housekeeping Notes

I realized that every time I post something, I lose a few subscribers. They're inevitably replaced over the course of the next few days, but the first thing at least three or four people do when seeing this email is click "unsubscribe". I thought, why am I killing myself putting two posts out in a week, when each one loses me subscribers? So now I'm experimenting with putting out just one post a week.

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Recent Reads

Vasko Popa (trans. Charles Simic) - In American fiction, nothing seems as intensely dated as a modernist novel. It's honestly like modernism never happened: the novels of today bear more resemblance to the late 19th-century realist writers, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Gissing, Prus, Galdos, etc, than they do to Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Ellison, etc (the only modernist fiction writer who still has a strong influence on modern American writers is Hemingway). The situation is a bit different in Europe, where modernism seemingly never died, and has remained a co-equal (and sometimes dominant) strand in fiction. But in poetry, modernism remains the apex. Even today nothing seems quite as poem-y as the work of Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens, etc. They broke with fixed rules, but maintained an attention to sound and to rhythm. They broke with straightforward meaning, but their poems usually contain some surface meaning you can grasp. The modernist influence in poetry is so strong that when I was reading Tang Dynasty poems I was like, "Why do these poems feel so much more modern than does, say, Byron or Keats, even though the latter wrote 1200 years later." And I realized it was because Ezra Pound was strongly influenced by Chinese poetry.

Which is to say, when a poet is described as a modernist, that to me is just like saying they're a poet. They're a poet who does poet things. Similarly, when I read Vasko Popa, a 20th-century Serbian modernist poem, it's like stepping into a clear stream. It just makes you wonder why all water isn't this refreshing!

This volume consists primarily of poem-cycles, each centered around some sort of central image. There's a set of poems about a pebble; a set about some bones; a set about people playing games; a set about a lame wolf, etc. They're not straight allegory, because the meaning of the image isn't directly comprehensible: the pebble doesn't directly represent, say, the soul. But it certainly feels like allegory is the right word (even though it's not).

Quite liked the book, but it's hard to be more specific other than to say, these are, to me, exactly what poems should be like. Have no idea how or why I came to own this book—just plucked it off my shelf the other day.

Here’s an example:

1. The Heart of the Quartz Pebble

They played with the pebble
The stone like any other stone
Played with them as if it had no heart

They got angry with the pebble
Smashed it in the grass
Puzzled they saw its heart

They opened the pebble’s heart
In the heart a snake
A sleeping coil without dreams

They roused the snake
The snake shot up into the heights
They ran off far away

They looked from afar
The snake coiled round the horizon
Swallowed it like an egg

They came back to the place of their game
No trace of snake or grass or bits of pebble
Nothing anywhere far around

They looked at each other they smiled
And they winked at each other

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Upcoming Events

My literary book is coming out May 28. I'm trying to be a little proactive about marketing it. Please preorder on Amazon or on Bookshop (or at your local bookstore if you'd like).

I'll be in LA for YALLwest (a YA book festival at the Santa Monica library) on May 4. I will be doing an SF launch event at an event space in the Mission on May 28. I'll have a NYC event at P&T Knitwear on June 6th. And I'll be speaking at the World Trans Forum (in conversation with Jeanne Thornton) on July 29th (also in NYC). Will keep you posted on other events as they arise.

Finally, JR Forasteros invited me to talk on the Fascinating podcast, where I had a really nice time and don’t think I said anything too outrageous. Podcasts are really how they get you, though. I get on a podcast and suddenly I’m saying such wild stuff—no foresight or accountability whatsoever. I have at least two more podcast appearances coming up, and two posts that should hopefully go live on Slate and on LitHub. Oh, I also had this interview go up at GirlTalkHQ.

I was not an early adopter on Gone Girl, by the way. When I read it, the book was already extremely popular. But I gushed anyway.

1. I’m pretty sure in this paragraph I’m summarizing part of Plato’s Sophist, but I am too lazy to go and check.