The final week of the year is also the last of my humanities crash course. For this week, Gioia recommended assorted texts that touched on how we derive meaning and motivation from our responsibilities to ourselves and others. I also watched a classic film by a beloved and recently departed director.

Readings

Most of these week’s texts were very short — a blessing given my family commitments. Here’s a brief sketch of each:

• The White Album, the opening essay of Joan Didion’s collection The White Album (1979). An impressionistic first-person account of the closing years of the 1960s. I sensed intellectual and moral confusion — a portrait of a culture unmoored and drifting.

• Bloodchild, a science fiction novella by Octavia Butler that leads her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1985). The narrator is a human in an alien world. The story details humans’ symbiotic relationship with a native species that uses them to incubate their offspring.

• The Things They Carried, a short story by Tim O’Brien that leads his 1990 collection of the same name. A portrait of a platoon during the Vietnam war: their lives, loves, fears, etc. “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

• The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax, chapter 22 of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King (2011). The narrator describes his transition from a collage “wastoid” to joining The Service (aka, the IRS) during the 1970s. His reflections describe his drug use (including television), his parents’ divorce, mother’s descent into mental illness, father’s accidental death, and finding purpose through an accidental encounter.

• Chapter five of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), which describes the AA system. Besides laying out the famous 12-step program, the text emphasizes that alcoholics cannot get better on their own. Instead, they must surrender to higher powers: God and society.

Audiovisual

Music: The work of Stephen Sondheim, an influential American composer and lyricist of show tunes. I was most familiar with Into the Woods, but had also heard selections from West Side Story.

Arts: The paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. I didn’t spend any time this week with Leonardo, since I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of his paintings in person, including a second viewing of the Mona Lisa earlier this year.

Cinema: Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME (1986). I’d seen several other Reiner movies, but not this one. It seemed appropriate given the director (and his wife’s) tragic deaths earlier this month.

The film is a coming-of-age story based on a Stephen King novella. Set in 1959, it tells of four preteen boys who set out on an overnight adventure to view the body of another boy who’s been accidentally killed by a train. Despite the grim topic, the film is a warm chronicle of childhood’s end.

Reflection

This week’s works point to maturity: grappling with becoming a functional adult member of a society. We thrive in stable contexts. That implies some degree of social order. Liberty isn’t freedom from responsibility; it’s freedom through responsibility — especially our responsibilities to each other.

The “flower power” generation missed this. I sensed in Didion’s essay exhaustion and disappointment at where the sixties ended: self-involvement, confusion, lack of direction and meaning, etc. The Manson murders and the Vietnam experience were signs that something had gone wrong.

DFW’s ‘wastoid’ is a natural consequence. Meaning comes through responsibility — and a life devoid of meaning also lacks motivation. His redemption comes through something amiss in his life: an authority figure. The substitute Advanced Tax instructor represents social order. The wastoid isn’t so much drawn to the teacher’s worldview as his M.O. — his demeanor projects confidence and stability. That may be enough.

The four friends’ journey in STAND BY ME is also about maturing. They set off on what they expect will be a cool adventure. Their motivation is fame: their discovery will make them local heroes. Confronting the actual corpse disabuses them of that childish notion.

Treat others as you’d like to be treated. Nobody should be used as a means to an end. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Three sentences that recap many of the lessons from this journey through the humanities.

Notes on Note-taking

I went mostly old school for this last week of the course. The readings were simple enough, so I didn’t resort at all to LLMs. I did read the Wikipedia entries for the readings, but they weren’t strictly necessary.

As with previous weeks, I captured individual notes for the readings and the movie in Obsidian. Writing helps me think about what I’ve read/seen. Knowing that some of these writing will be public changes their tone a bit, but not their substance.

The notes themselves are not an end. I might revisit some of them over time, but most will lie fallow. The goal hasn’t been to facilitate later recall, but processing ideas in the moment. I expect to write more about this distinction over time.

Up Next

I’ve reached the end of Gioia’s syllabus. Of course, this isn’t the end of my self-education: I will continue reading and experiencing other works. But this is also the end of this series of posts. Thanks for reading — I hope this was as valuable to you as it was to me.

This post originally appeared on my blog.

Only one week left in the course! The second-to-last week had me read a modern science fiction classic: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). I also revisited a classic neo-noir nightmarescape from the 1980s. Let’s dive in.

Readings

Brave New World describes a scenario where a progressive industrialized world state covers large swaths of the Earth. It’s primary goal: happiness and stability through social control. Ideal, right? No, it’s a nightmare.

This new “better” world has very different mores than our own. The word “mother” is taboo: human reproduction by natural means has been replaced with a scientifically controlled process. Embryos are manipulated to generate different castes: Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons. Some are reared for leadership, others for menial labor. The latter are intentionally stunted both physically and intellectually.

All are conditioned through subliminal messaging. The goal: accepting their lot in life and not striving for the alternatives, which would cause strife. Biological needs are provided for. Entertainment is exclusively superficial: titillating and devoid of meaning. There are synthetic — new! improved! — versions of everything, from music to flour. All remaining unpleasantness is sanded off by casual (and frequent!) use of a powerful drug called soma.

Mindless consumption is pushed as a positive, since it drives industrial productivity: people are encouraged to dispose of goods rather than repair them. Religion has been replaced with a worship of progress through efficiency, centered on Henry Ford. The “civilized” world’s calendar now starts with Ford’s birth: the novel takes place in AF (After Ford) 632. All references to “Our Lord” have been replaced with “Our Ford.”

Gender and sexual norms are also very different from those of 1932. Women and men enjoy greater equality and promiscuity is encouraged. There are no lifelong pairings: “everyone belongs to everyone.” But individuality is also discouraged: people are conditioned to loathe loneliness. Religious rituals have been replaced with communal gatherings that encourage ego dissolution.

I’m already deep into this description without mentioning a plot. That’s not an accident. While the novel does have one, it’s mostly in service to sketching the scenario. John, the novel’s ostensible protagonist, is an outcast: born (the old-fashioned way) to Linda, a citizen of the World State who’s accidentally left behind in a native American reservation.

As a result, he’s been raised with many of the foibles of the old world: a melange of religious superstitions, suboptimal diet and hygiene, and — critically, Shakespeare. (The book’s title — a phrase often repeated in the novel — comes from The Tempest.) Two progressive characters — Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne — bring John to London. Through the ensuing culture clash, we recoil at the obvious failings of this dehumanized society.

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Audiovisual

Music: electronic music. I didn’t need nudging here: much of my listening outside the course consists of both classic and modern electronica. Here’s one of my favorites, Jean-Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe 5 (1978):

Arts: American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat — an influential artist whose life was cut sadly short by drug use.

Cinema: David Lynch’s nightmarish neo-noir BLUE VELVET (1986). I’d seen it in college, not long after it came out. Not the most appropriate film for this stage in the course (or the holidays!), but my daughter showed interest. One shouldn’t waste such opportunities.

The film uncovers dysfunctional horrors lying just beneath the surface of an idyllic small-town. At one point, its protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont says, “I’m seeing something that was always hidden” — and so are we, including obscene violence and misogyny. This film likely couldn’t be made today.

Reflection

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the go-to dystopian novel: people often refer to attempts to subvert language or rewrite history as “Orwellian.” And appropriately so: Orwell’s novel captures the horrors of sacrificing individuality to top-down social control through the coercive manipulation of culture. But Brave New World offers perhaps a more accurate picture of where we find ourselves.

While both are horrifying dystopias, the two novels’ visions are very different. 1984’s world is extraordinarily bleak and depressing. (“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”) Members of the Inner Party know they’re causing suffering, but that’s the price of control and stability – and an end in itself; cruelty is the point.

Brave New World’s vision is more distressing: stability and control not through coercion but through infantilizing consumerism and progressive/humanist values. The former at least gives you a clear antagonist. But who can complain about the latter? Like Chaplin, the overt target here is industrialization. But unlike Chaplin, one detects in Huxley suspicion of socialism. (Is it an accident that two of the main characters are named Lenina and Marx?)

Ultimately, both novels criticize high-modernist top-down planning of the sort analyzed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. The difference is one of means: coercion vs. conditioning. But the shared ends are insane: “perfecting” humanity is not just a fool’s errand, but also a path to dehumanization — which makes Brave New World an ideal work to read at the end of this course.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I followed a similar process to the one I’ve used throughout the course: I read the work, reflected on it by taking notes (usually in Obsidian), and then used an LLM to reflect on and refine those works. But after re-reading Brave New World, I can’t help but wonder about the LLM’s neutrality. To what degree do its responses reflect its controllers’ social preferences?

I’ve gotten much value from LLMs throughout this course. But I’m also wary of the implications of using them to mediate my learning and thinking. In some ways, our societies aspire to the kind of conditioning depicted in the novel. LLMs can be a powerful tool in these efforts. This may be another reason to prefer “offline thinking”: my paper notebook isn’t likely to nudge me toward groupthink anytime soon.

Up Next

Final week! Gioia recommends assorted short readings from Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallance, Tim O’Brien, and Alcoholics Anonymous. At this point, I trust his recommendations will wrap up this course nicely.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

Readings

Let’s start with Sontag. I read four essays included in a collection called A Susan Sontag Reader. Very brief summaries:

• Notes On Camp (1964) describes camp, a particular aesthetic sensibility that emphasizes style over substance. It’s ironic, playful, and subversive, elevating artifice over authenticity — but affectionately.

• On Style (1965) argues style isn’t decoration, but integral to what a work of art is; we can’t detach the two.

• Against Interpretation (1966) is a critique of the modern tendency to read meanings into works of art. We should resist interpreting what we’re seeing, and focus instead on what’s coming in through our senses.

• The Image-World (1977) explores the impact of photography on our perceptions of the world: it both democratizes and commodifies images, desensitizing us to what is actually there and making the world appear more consumable.

This latter essay in particular relates to the next on the list, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Like Sontag, Benjamin is concerned with what the reproduction of images does to our perceptions of what we see. He argues that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of a work of art. Where we previously experienced individual works in context, now they’re detached from place and role.

Mechanical reproduction changes our perception of both authenticity and the cultural authority of works of art. Absent their traditional roles and values, their function changes — e.g., they become a tool for politics. Benjamin (a Marxist) wants the left to politicize art to counter Fascism’s aestheticization of politics.

On to Ortega y Gasset, starting with The Dehumanization of Art (1925), a sort of apology for Modern art, which was (and remains) widely unpopular. “Dehumanization” here isn’t a value judgment. Instead, Ortega y Gasset notes Modern art’s move away from relatable subjects toward more stylized and sometimes abstract works, which he celebrates as a positive development. Abandoning realistic and romantic attributes of 19th century art deepens the split between the intelligentsia who is “in the know” and the vast majority of people who aren’t.

I also read chapters six and eight from Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses) (1929). Yes, I read this one in the original Spanish. Ortega y Gasset outlines the rise of the “mass-man” in the 20th century, who is driven by society’s comforts to conformity, mediocrity, and a lack of individuality. gpt-4o put it well:

This shift threatens intellectual and cultural elites, as well as liberal democracy, because mass man demands rights without responsibilities. Ortega y Gasset warns that this societal transformation could lead to the erosion of excellence and the imposition of a homogenous, authoritarian rule driven by the whims of the undifferentiated masses.

Ortega y Gasset didn’t mean the mass-man as a social class, but a particular way of being, and warns of the risks of losing these more exigent minorities who demand more of themselves and of society as a whole. While he had Fascism and syndicalism in mind, we see this dynamic play out in today’s populist movements of both the left and right.

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Audiovisual

Music: Motown and Hip-Hop. Variety is the key benefit of streaming services — and is especially welcome when exploring categories such as these, which include so many artists.

Arts: photographs by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Edward Weston. Some of these images are hard to study objectively as images separated from what we interpret them to mean. Others verge on abstraction.

Cinema: DIE HARD (1988), another classic action film directed by John McTiernan.

You could argue this film (and PREDATOR, the previous McTiernan entry on my list) isn’t on the same level as some of the others in this course. But I’d never seen this classic “Christmas” film — and as a bonus, it proved an interesting subject for this week’s readings.

Reflection

I wrote “Christmas” in quotes because since its release, DIE HARD has ironically become something of a holiday classic. While set on Christmas Eve and featuring lots of Christmas imagery, this film is pretty far in spirit from traditional end-of-year themes and rituals as possible: even though it ends with reconciliation, the film revels in mayhem, murder, destruction, cruelty, and irony rather than authenticity, love, warmth, and compassion. I take it to be a camp Christmas classic, in the Sontag sense.

DIE HARD can also be appreciated on different levels. At its simplest, it’s a straight-ahead action movie. But there are underlying messages about foreign influence on America and changing gender roles during the latter half of the 20th century. The film’s Wikipedia page has a long section on its underlying themes.

My kids and I enjoyed it “superficially” while consuming massive amounts of popcorn. I suspect this is more in keeping with Sontag’s formalist approach. But also to her point, it’s not possible to detach its stylistic presentation from its content: the Christmas setting, cinematography, geographic location, soundtrack, script are all essential to the film’s effectiveness both as entertainment and as a vehicle for (potentially political) messaging.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I started again with handwritten notes. This time, I had my notebook and iPad side-by-side. I took notes on paper as I reflected both on what I’d read and summaries of the readings in Wikipedia. Then, I wrote longer thoughts in Obsidian based on my handwritten notes.

I expanded these Obsidian notes with highlights and notes I’d made while reading in Kindle. As usual, these sync into my vault via the Readwise plugin. After I finished, I fed these notes to ChatGPT, which helped me correct some minor misunderstandings.

While somewhat time consuming, this process ensures I have a better grasp on the readings. A potential improvement would be re-reading the texts after making this first set of notes: with a better sense of what the readings are about, I could look out for nuances.

Up Next

Alas, we must keep moving — we’re almost at the end of the course! Gioia recommends Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, Brave New World. I read it decades ago and am long overdue for a revisit. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

On week 49 of the humanities crash course, I explored three thinkers who’ve influenced the present moment: Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and René Girard. In the case of the first, I read selections from The Second Sex. The other two were interviews. I also watched a classic film that straddled the silent and talkie eras.

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Readings

I only read the introduction and first chapter of The Second Sex, so I won’t attempt to summarize beyond that. De Beauvoir’s goal is clear from the outset: she’s looking to debunk culturally accepted notions of “femininity” as a way of keeping women down.

The book’s first chapter takes a deep look at biological differences between males and females of various species. De Beauvoir highlights the fact that while these differences are real, they don’t imply hierarchy. Rather, there is a symbiosis between the sexes.

The Foucault interview appears in a collection called Power/Knowledge, where it’s titled The Eye of Power. Foucault examines Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a facility (e.g., a prison) where inmates can be continually monitored by centrally located forces. The spatial configuration encourages prisoners to self-regulate, since they can’t tell when they’re being watched.

Foucault’s point: the design of a space can be a technology of power, helping authority manage not just movement but communications and hierarchical perceptions. The panopticon becomes a metaphor for how institutions turn people into subjects by combining power and knowledge. As GPT 5 mini put it: “observation generates data, data become expertise, and expertise refines techniques of discipline.”

The Girard interview, titled Why Do We Fight? How Do We Stop?, appears in a collection called Conversations With René Girard. To my surprise, it’s an episode of a podcast I’ve listened to many times, Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions.

The topic of the conversation is human conflict and whether religion helps or hinders it. Girard’s position is that conflict stems from two people coveting the same thing, which causes others to covet as well. The tension is eventually resolved through scapegoating: a member of the community is sacrificed.

This scapegoat mechanism serves as the foundation of all major myths, up until Christianity, which makes it explicit (and therefore stops it.) As Girard puts it,

If we had more genuine religion, we would have less violence. This is what most ordinary people still believe, and, as a rule, when the ordinary people and the intellectuals do not agree, it is safer to go with ordinary people.

This seems like a good primer for Girard’s thinking. I’m basing this understanding on my having read a book about his work called Wanting. Much of this thinking resonates with me; I’m planning to delve more deeply over the next few years.

Audiovisual

Music: three essential American signer-songwriters: Woodie Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. I’d heard a lot of Dylan and some Guthrie, but it was my first time listening to Baez. I liked her music and have added a couple of her songs to my regular rotation.

Arts: two painters I already knew well: Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. I fell down a Warhol rabbit hole in college, leading me to learn screen printing. His star has waned since: I now find him more interesting than his work. (He would’ve been at home in social media!)

Cinema: Charlie Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES (1936), a statement against the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization.

Tis last outing of Chaplin’s Little Tramp character deals with inhumane working conditions, unemployment, and injustice. Some scenes (e.g., the worker feeding machine) are a savage critique of “efficiency at all costs” culture.

I was surprised to learn that this film is only partially a talkie, given it’s so late. (THE JAZZ SINGER predates it by almost a decade.) The choice was intentional: Chaplin recognized the character’s effectiveness depended on pantomime.

Reflection

I chose MODERN TIMES on a whim. Later, I learned Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty named their journal after the film. This bit of serendipity highlights one of the common threads this week: how to maintain human dignity and agency amid huge impersonal systems.

Foucault examines how systems — institutions, cultures, organizations, etc. — create conditions that constrain individual agency. De Beauvoir challenges cultural understandings of femininity that constrain women’s agency. Girard plumbs the mechanisms underlying mass actions — imitating, coveting — which are another means for losing individual agency.

Guthrie, Dylan, Baez, and Chaplin also advocate for humanity, albeit through other means. Rather than have us think about these deep issues in new ways, their work makes us feel differently. In Chaplin’s case, it’s humor and pathos. For the singer/songwriters, it’s a broader range of emotions.

As for this week’s painters, they subvert mechanistic systems in different ways. Warhol he called his studio “The Factory” and used industrial means to create potentially endless reproductions of his paintings. Lichtenstein simulated halftone patterns by hand. These painters, poets, academics, and filmmakers all looked for humanity amid large, dehumanizing structures.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, ChatGPT helped me revise a longstanding misunderstanding. I consider Marxism a deeply corrosive ideology, and have long dismissed Chaplin because of what I perceived to be his Marxist sympathies.

MODERN TIMES’s opening sections only reinforced this impression. The Tramp is cast as a beleaguered worker in contrast with the factory’s manager — ostensibly, a capitalist — who is nicely dressed, fed, and leisurely. (He’s shown solving a jigsaw puzzle in his office while his workers run around manically in the assembly line.)

Shortly after, Chaplin’s character is unwittingly drawn into a communist march, where he’s arrested after being mistakenly perceived as the mob’s leader. Throughout the movie, workers are shown as sympathetic characters, even when they’re committing crimes. There’s a strong pro-union undercurrent throughout.

One must always consider the context when looking at works of the past. Here, the key factor is the Great Depression. When this movie was made, many Americans were suffering from what were broadly understood to be market failures. The grass is always greener, and the horrors of the Soviet system hadn’t yet been made public. So I thought it understandable that the “Everyman” — which Chaplin channeled in the Tramp — would have Marxist leanings.

There’s irony in that when this film was being shot, millions of people were enslaved by the Soviets, some in conditions similar to the ones Chaplin parodies in the film. Except there, they had no recourse. Worse, a filmmaker who dared shoot something like these scenes would likely himself be shot (metaphorically, if not literally.) But neither the audience nor director knew that at the time.

Anyway, as I watched the film, I cringed at what I perceived to be Chaplin’s naïve politics. Afterward, I asked ChatGPT to disabuse me of these impressions in an intentionally provocative way:

I just watched “Modern Times”. My take: it’s thinly veiled Marxist propaganda — and ironically, it came out at a time when the Soviets were treating their citizens in exactly the way Chaplin criticizes in the movie. How is this assessment wrong?

I’m not going to quote its full response, which was a somewhat long. The upshot: the LLM gave me a nuanced and convincing defense of Chaplin’s position, which changed my mind. Its explanation consisted of five points, whose title I copy here verbatim with my summary of each:

1. Chaplin wasn’t a Marxist — and the film isn’t promoting revolution. While left-leaning, Chaplin was not a doctrinaire Marxist. Instead, “His worldview is more humanist than ideological: concerned with dignity, individuality, and kindness over systems.”

2. The film critiques industrial modernity, not capitalism as a system. The movie’s target isn’t a particular socio-economic system, but “the mechanization and regimentation of modern life.”

3. The irony about the USSR doesn’t hit as squarely as it seems. My “ironic” read is anachronistic: “Soviet labor conditions were largely unknown in the West until the late 1930s and 1940s.”

4. The film’s comedic form resists ideological rigidity. Ideologues tend to be hardasses; propaganda “needs coherence and seriousness,” which comedy undercuts.

5. Chaplin’s Tramp embodies non-Marxist values. The character is essentially an individualist and romantic. He’s not looking to join or support a movement. Au contraire, he values personal freedom and dreams of owning a private home with the girl he loves.

This final point is especially compelling. The film would indeed look very different if it was “thinly veiled Marxist propaganda”: the Tramp isn’t exhorting anyone to overthrow the bourgeoisie — if anything, he aspires to a bourgeois lifestyle himself!

Instead, ChatGPT offered the following summary of how to best understand MODERN TIMES after stripping away ideological lenses:

• A Depression-era critique of runaway industrialization

• A humanistic plea for compassion toward the vulnerable

• A transition point between silent and sound cinema

• A slapstick exploration of how individuals stay human in dehumanizing systems

It sits closer to Thoreau, Dickens, and early American progressivism than to Marx and Engels.

This strikes me as a fair read. I came out the other end of this chat with more than a different appreciation for Chaplin: if my biases led me to misread the movie, what about a writer like Foucault? This brief interaction opened my mind to new possibilities for understanding. It’s ironic that some contemporaries cast AI — which helped me better understand efforts to combat dehumanizing technologies — as a dehumanizing technology.

Up Next

Gioia recommends a few selections from Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gassett. Again, more theory — but I expect these are up my alley. I’ve already read one of the Sontag essays and enjoyed it. This is gonna be fun!

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

I’m excited that we’re almost at the end of the year. I started this journey to explore our culture’s foundations. By now, we’ve left the lower levels and have moved into oft-visited antechambers. On week 48, Gioia recommended three familiar works: Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, chapter one of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones.

I’d already read all, so I skipped Kafka and García Márquez this week. But Borges is my favorite author and Ficciones my favorite of his collections. I’ve read several of these stories many times and The Library of Babel is part of the syllabus in my Systems Studio course. So this week, I revisited a few of the less-familiar stories in the collection.

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Readings

Before diving into Ficciones, I’ll say a bit about the other two works. The Metamorphosis (1915) tells of Gregor Samsa, a salesman who awakens one day to discover he’s mysteriously turned into a large insect. His family tries to adapt to his new form, but it causes no end of trouble — not least because he can no longer provide them sustenance. A metaphor for life under industrialization.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the best-known Latin American novel, tells the multi-generational saga of the Buendía family of Macondo, a small Colombian town that follows its own physical laws: anything can happen in Macondo. As I recall, the novel opens with the arrival of a miraculous new experience to town: ice. This sets the tone for the rest of the work. With the right framing, the banal turns magical.

On to one of my favorite works in literature, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones. Initially published elsewhere, the first eight short stories were collected in 1941 as El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths.) Three years later, Borges appended six additional stories in a new section called Artificios (Artifices.) These two collections make up Ficciones.

Most of these aren’t traditional stories. Instead, they’re sketches that explore specific concepts. Several are meta-narratives in that their central concern is the nature of language itself. These are my favorites (along with very brief descriptions that don’t do them justice):

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: a man discovers a new world in an encyclopedia, the product of a mysterious conspiracy.

• Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: the titular character sets out to reconstruct verbatim one of the chapters from Cervantes’s novel — not from memory, but from lived experience.

• The Circular Ruins: a man dreams another man into existence, only to realize that he, too, is someone’s dream.

• The Lottery in Babylon: sketch of a society where decisions are left to chance.

• The Library of Babel: sketch of an infinite library as an exploration of semiotics.

• The Garden of Forking Paths: a proto-hypertextual spy story that foreshadows quantum mechanics.

• Funes the Memorious: after an accident, the titular character is cursed with perfect memory.

• The Secret Miracle: God grants a condemned man one last wish — which only he can experience.

• The South: a man journeys to Argentina’s rugged south to recover from a near-death experience only to learn of life’s arbitrariness.

Like I said, these descriptions aren’t fair. Borges’s ultimate subject is language: his best “stories” are labyrinths — mirrors — dreams that reveal the mystery and trickery of the very stuff they’re made from. Rather than lead us into and through the labyrinth, Borges shows us we’ve been there all along — at least since we started languaging.

Audiovisual

Music: Gioia recommended Tango, Cumbia, Bossa Nova, Afro-Cuban Music, and Reggae. Again, all familiar to someone who grew up in my part of the world, so I skipped them. That said, I did revisit songs by Jimmy Cliff, who died on November 24.

Arts: Antoni Gaudí, whose major works I’ve had the privilege of visiting. Like Kafka, Borges, and García Márquez, these works set up their own rules and play out the consequences. Gaudí’s worlds we can literally inhabit (rather than inhabit literally.)

Cinema: Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972) — one of the best works of American cinema.

I’d seen it before, but jumped at the chance when my boy showed interest. Like One Hundred Years, it’s a multi-generational saga that revels on imagery verging on surrealim. (E.g., Jack Woltz discovering the nature of Don Corleone’s “unrefusable” offer.)

Reflection

García Márquez is a huge figure in Latin American culture: the most translated Spanish-language author, 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, etc. He also influenced other important writers. An avid socialist, he keenly observed and parodied the idiosyncrasies of Latin American society. You’ll think I exaggerate when I say I’ve visited Macondo and know the Buendías.

For a while in the 1980s, Gabo’s work was de-rigeur. By 2025, it feels passeé. Yes, life in the tropics is still rife with absurdities, non sequiturs, beauty, and banal monstrosities and miracles. But ice doesn’t seem as miraculous now that everyone in Macondo has access to Google, YouTube, Spotify, and ChatGPT.

Borges, on the other hand, remains deeply relevant. The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths aren’t so much mind-bending stories as foundations for an Information Age mythology. Although technically an Argentine, Borges was an erudite polyglot whose true homeland was the Library (which others call the universe.) His work should be better known.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I reverted to even older-school practices: Wikipedia and notes written with a fountain pen. There’s a tangible difference between typing out words on a screen and moving a nice nib over paper. That I can’t summon ChatGPT in my Leuchtturm notebook is a feature, not a bug. These words might include more factual errors, but they’re closer to my soul.

I also find myself writing more in Emacs. I started this post in Ulysses on the iPad, but for some reason the app became infuriatingly laggy as the post grew longer. I like the idea of writing on the iPad, since it’s a more portable setup than my 16” MacBook Pro. But I have so much muscle memory on top of Emacs — and it’s more reliable.

Hand-written notes and a ~50-year-old text editor. Back to the past as we near the end of this year-long experiment.

Up Next

Gioia recommends selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and René Girard — deep influences on current culture. As I suggested above, my main interest in the course was exploring the foundations; I’m indifferent to more contemporary stuff. (Except Girard — I’m keen to read him.)

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

Week 47 of the humanities crash course was a smorgasbord of short stories and selections from novels, all by American authors. The works were:

• The prologue and chapter one of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

• The first section (“April Seventh 1928”) of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

• Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers

• Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery

• Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find

• O’Henry’s The Gift of the Magi

My family and I also watched a classic holiday film that demonstrated some of the values of the readings.

Readings

Let’s start with the selections from Invisible Man. The book starts with the narrator making a bold assertion: “I am an invisible man.” Not a ghost — a Black man, and others don’t notice him. While frustrating, he takes advantage of his condition: he steals electricity from the power company and brutally beats a White man for disrespecting him.

Chapter one begins the story proper. The narrator is a bright kid growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. He delivers a speech at school arguing for maintaining the status quo. The speech is well-received and he’s invited to deliver it at a gathering of the town’s leading citizens.

The gathering turns out to be a bacchanal. There’s lots of drinking and smoking. There is a stripper. But worst of all, the narrator is one of several Black kids who’ve been brought in to be humiliated as entertainment. They’re thrust into a boxing ring in an all-against-all blindfolded fight. Only after he’s been brutalized, is he allowed to deliver his now-ironic speech.

One of the benefits of fiction is being able to see the world through other people’s eyes. These first two sections of Invisible Man are incredibly powerful. They made the plight of the Black man in America more relatable (and infuriating) than anything I’ve experienced before. I’m considering finishing the novel.

I can’t say the same for the selection from The Sound and the Fury. In his syllabus, Gioia warned this was a challenging read. He wasn’t kidding. I had no idea what was happening. The text presents fragmented impressions from the life of a rural Black family. But there seemed to be no through-line at all — just jumping around impressions, repeating some.

In frustration, I turned to ChatGPT, explicitly stating I didn’t want spoilers. This helped. As I understand it now, this first chapter is told from the POV of Benjy, a disabled child at the center of the family. Faulkner wants us to experience the family through Benjy’s mind. The following from ChatGPT helped me understand the author’s intent:

Faulkner uses a disabled narrator to expose truths the family hides from itself.

Because Benjy can’t lie, can’t rationalize, and can’t interpret, he gives you a raw, unfiltered record of:

• tenderness

• cruelty

• disappointment

• dysfunction

• a family losing its way

It’s almost anthropological: you’re watching a household crumble from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what “crumble” means, only what it feels like.

Based on my experience with this first section, I’m unlikely to finish this book. I appreciate what Faulkner is up to, but life is too short.

The rest of this week’s readings were all short stories. I enjoyed all of them. Here’s a brief summary:

• The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: a young man goes to an exclusive boarding school. One of his friends, who claims to be the son of the richest man in the world, invites him home for the summer. There, we learn the terrible secret of the family’s wealth. A parable of social injustice.

• The Killers: two men walk into a diner in a small midwestern town and take the staff hostage. They’re waiting for one of the regulars to assassinate him. The target doesn’t arrive, so they leave. One of the patrons visits the man to warn him, and we learn why he’s being hunted.

• The Lottery: the residents of a small town gather for the yearly lottery, an old tradition — and as it unfolds, we learn it’s not an entirely welcome one. Tension builds until the end, when we learn what the “prize” is. A parable of Girardian scapegoating.

• A Good Man Is Hard to Find: a family embarks on a road trip that takes a surprising turn. I won’t spoil this one — just to say it has powerful (if somewhat ambiguous) religious overtones.

• The Gift of the Magi: an impoverished couple gives up their most valued possessions to buy each other Christmas gifts. A masterpiece of irony; I couldn’t tell if the story was meant to be heartwarming or dispiriting. (¿Porqué no los dos?)

Audiovisual

Music: modern jazz classics by Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Hugely influential + enjoyable music. I was most familiar with Monk. Hadn’t realized how influential Gillespie was in bringing Latin music into the jazz fold.

Arts: Abstract Expressionism — what I see as one of several attempts by painting trying to find its way in a world where photography exists. I suspect most people only appreciate these works after being told they’re “important.” (Kinda like this week’s Faulkner reading.)

Cinema: Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.

This film is a beloved Christmas season tradition for many, but I’d never seen it. Yes, it’s a bit syrupy — and in at least one sequence (the “talking galaxies”) outright tacky — but it conveys an important message. (Lest the audience miss it, it’s literally shown inscribed in a book.)

Stewart plays George Baily, a decent everyman whose plans to escape his small town are foiled at every turn. Eventually, he finds himself head of a household, the family business, and in some ways, the town itself. Through unfortunate circumstances (echoes of Job!), his life spirals out of control. Contemplating suicide, he’s given an opportunity to experience what his world would look like if he’d never lived. It’s the Stoic approach: appreciate your current circumstance by imagining worse alternatives.

Reflection

One of the benefits of literary fiction is it allows us to vividly imagine other ways of being in the world. We can better empathize with others by walking in their shoes or, as I wrote above, seeing the world through their eyes — pick your metaphor.

While I’ll never know what it’s like to be a Black person in mid-twentieth century America, Ellison’s powerful writing made me feel in very particular ways. I could almost taste the blood, feel my swollen cheeks, and sense the humiliation of thinking I was to deliver a dignified speech only to learn I was to be used as a prop in a brutal spectacle.

The Faulkner piece also made me feel in particular ways. I felt frustrated, confused, and disoriented — and lacking the ability to probe for coherence. (In this case, I had to step out of the story to ask ChatGPT.) But this is obviously by design: the author has created a virtual reality made all the more powerful by leaving so much to the reader’s imagination.

Novels are a great way of creating rich virtual worlds. Short fiction can also take us “elsewhere” with a lower time commitment. While the world-building can’t be as rich, we still get to share other minds and experience their worlds through their perspectives. This week, the O’Connor and Fitzgerald short stories lingered in my mind; I see things a bit differently by having been there for a brief visit.

Films like IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE are valuable too, but most lack the immersive power of literary fiction. With cinema, we’re spectators watching events happening to someone else (e.g., George Baily) inside a frame. The pictures on the screen are so compelling it takes extra effort to picture ourselves in their situations. We get the point, but not the feelings. (Must revisit McLuhan here.)

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I tried something new: going old school. So far, I haven’t captured any Obsidian notes for the readings or movie. Instead, I wrote everything straight into Emacs knowing I’d share my first-pass words with you.

As I’ve said many times, writing is thinking. When I type, the keyboard and Emacs buffer become parts of my cognitive apparatus. The blinking cursor and words on the screen are part of a feedback loop whose end product is clearer thinking. The artifact, which you’re reading now, is a side product.

In this post, I tried to blur the line between public writing and notes-to-self. I wrote the notes above to clarify for myself what I’d read, remembering you’d read them too. It a slightly different cognitive space than the one where I’ve worked out these readings most of the year.

Another old school tweak: apart from ChatGPT’s help while reading the Faulkner chapter, I didn’t use LLMs to review or reflect on any of these notes. As a result, I probably got more things wrong than usual. But I wanted to see how far I could go “unaided” after almost a year of using LLMs to help me make sense of ideas.

I like that I can bring another intelligence into these spaces when needed. In this case, I didn’t need it. That’s in part because of the clarity and intelligence of these authors and also because of their chosen medium. I can follow narrative fiction more easily than (say) verse poetry. So there’s a spectrum here. For the future: use AI judiciously when needed most. But the fact AI exists doesn’t mean it must be used every time.

Up Next

Gioia recommends Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and chapter one of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Borges is my favorite author and Ficciones my favorite of his collections. I’ve read Metamorphosis twice. And for many Latin Americans of my vintage, One Hundred Years was de rigeur. Which is to say, I’m very familiar with all three of next week’s readings. So I’m gonna focus on other readings that need my attention. (I may revisit some of the Borges stories.) Still, I expect to share reflections on the recommended readings at the end of the week.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

In week 46 of the humanities crash course, I read works by one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century: Sigmund Freud. Gioia recommended two essays: An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). I also watched a classic sci-fi/horror/action movie that seemingly had nothing to do with Freud — but ChatGPT might convince me otherwise.

Readings

I’ve been able to download most of the reading materials for this course for free. But now, I’m in the part of the course where readings aren’t in the public domain. Both of this week’s readings are available in a single volume called The Penguin Freud Reader, so that’s what I got.

Let’s start with An Outline of Psychoanalysis, an essay whose purpose is

to offer as it were a dogmatic conspectus of psychoanalysis by bringing together all its doctrines in the most concentrated and clear-cut form.

That is, it’s an overview of Freud’s thinking. His focus is the psyche, which can be approached from two perspectives:

• The mind’s physical setting, i.e., the nervous system

• Minding itself (my language), i.e., acts of consciousness

Freud isn’t concerned with the former. He hypothesizes the latter as composed of three “psychical provinces or forces”:

• The Es or Id, which is driven by unconscious instinctual drives — i.e., inherent to our nature as embodied beings.

• The Ich or Ego, which balances the Es, the Über-Ich, and external reality so we can function in the world.

• The Über-Ich or SuperEgo, which are internalized societal limitations internalized from interactions with our parents and cultures.

Both the Es and Über-Ich represent drives from the past. The Ich, on the other hand, mediates opportunistic responses to the present. Neuroses and pathologies can be attributed to conflicts between the forces, repression of painful memories, and inadequate defense mechanisms. A healthy balance is required.

How do we do it? By observing our minds. But we can’t do it alone. Some memories, for example, might be unpleasant, so the Ich represses them. One way to get our psychic house in order is to talk about our experiences with a trained therapist. Freud emphasizes specific techniques, such as free association and the interpretation of dreams.

There’s more to it, but these are the main ideas I got from the Outline. I was confused at first by the terms Es, Ich, and Über-Ich. I’d heard of Id, Ego, and Superego, but these terms weren’t used in this translation. ChatGPT helped me understand they referred to the same ideas.

On to the second essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I found it more technical and therefore less accessible. The gist is that two fundamental drives motivate human action:

• The Pleasure Principle, our drive towards pleasure and away from pain. As GPT put it, the PP focuses “on survival, reproduction, and other life-sustaining abilities.” This explains our tendency to seek immediate gratification of needs and desires.

• The Death Drive we have towards aggression and destruction. It’s in tension with the Pleasure Principle, and can manifest in self-destructive behaviors and actions that can harm others.

The key is that we don’t just seek pleasure: we also have destructive tendencies. The interplay between these drives explains otherwise baffling behaviors. But frankly, I only got this after working on my reading notes with GPT-4o. As I said, I found this essay rather technical and dry.

Audiovisual

Music: Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The former was new to me. I’d heard two movements of the Messianen work in a collection of Twentieth Century classics called The Calm. The Barber is ubiquitous. This is music you grow into.

Arts: The surrealists: Dalí, Magritte, Carrington, Miró, Ernst, Sage, Tanguy, Varo Uranga, de Chirico, Tanning. I was very interested in surrealism as a student and was aware of most of these artists’ works.

Although Dali is the most famous, I’ve always thought him overrated. De Chirico has long been my favorite: he influenced my own college paintings. But in general, I’ve lost interest in surrealism. In retrospect, the movement’s goals strike me as folly.

Cinema: John McTiernan’s classic 1987 sci-fi/horror/action film PREDATOR, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This may seem like an odd choice. It’s decidedly low brow compared with other films I’ve seen in the course. (Except my other sci-fi pick in the first week.) But at this point, I wanted something less intellectually demanding. Also, my son had been wanting to see PREDATOR and this was a good opportunity to bond around some cinematic testosterone.

This is the kind of film where men with huge biceps fire off endless rounds of ammunition into baddies (and in this case, the jungle) while casually dropping “clever”/cruel one liners. The sci-fi angle comes from the titular character, an extraterrestrial trophy hunter.

For the record: this film is better than I remembered. The pre-CGI SFX by R/Greenberg Associates are clever and effective and Alan Silvestri’s martial score keeps the (audience’s) blood pumping. Bonus: I found a way to fold the film into the course’s didactic goals. More below.

Reflections

Here’s where I’m gonna piss off some folks. I realize Freud has been hugely influential. The concepts of the Id and Ego have permeated Western culture. We speak casually of repressing memories and of interpreting dreams as a way to bring them to consciousness. Many people are in therapy and assume it to be normal and healthy. All that said, I’ll be plain: I didn’t like these essays.

The main problem is with how they jump to huge, momentous conclusions from what seems extremely thin evidence. Surely I missed a lot by only reading an overview, but I didn’t get how Freud came to his elaborate theories. As far as I could tell, his ideas are based on conjectures and hunches derived from a few clinical cases and firsthand experience.

And some of his theories are doozies:

The child’s first erotic object is the maternal breast that feeds it; love arises on the pattern of the gratified need for nourishment… And, regardless of how long the child was nourished by its mother’s breast, it will always remain convinced once it has been weaned that it was not long enough, and that she did not give it enough food.

This is followed by astonishing claims about the child’s sexual desires towards his mother, the effects of her implied threat of castration, and how girls deal with such feelings:

The female child doesn’t, of course, have to fear losing her penis; however, she does have to react to not having had one in the first place. Right from the start, she envies the boy his possession; indeed, one could say that her whole development takes place under the influence of penis envy.

Say what now?

As Carl Sagan would put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I didn’t get how Freud could justify such claims. To me, he seemed more prophet than scientist. Perhaps his popularity is due to his therapies filling the religion-shaped hole left by Nietzsche?

“Talk therapy” is a service spiritual counselors provided for most of human history. While the language is different, the ideas aren’t radically new: priests would’ve spoken of demonic possession rather than the Id and Buddhists were transcending the Ego centuries before the term became fashionable.

People need this kind of support. It’s not surprising that science would provide answers after religion’s retreat. But how is this science?

Notes on Note-taking

As I’ve done with previous challenging readings, I asked ChatGPT 5 for help with both essays. Its responses were helpful, as I mentioned above. When I was done, I decided to have some fun, so I entered this prompt into the same chat:

Thanks for your help with these essays. Let’s examine the ideas in these essays through the lens of a popular work: the 1987 sci-fi/action classic film PREDATOR. Adopt the personality of a Freudian analyst looking to find patterns in this movie. Are you familiar with the film’s plot? How would you interpret it in light of Freud’s ideas?

Its responses were hilarious — and in some cases, helpful. First, it acknowledged knowing the work in question:

Oh yes—I know Predator. Put me in my Viennese armchair and let’s read this jungle dream.

The fun started with a map of what ChatGPT called a “cast of the psyche”:

• The Jungle = the Unconscious. Dense, teeming, opaque; things move there before you can name them.

• Dutch (Schwarzenegger) = the Ego (Ich). Practical, reality-testing, forced to adapt. He survives by planning and binding raw fear into workable tactics.

• The Team = Ego’s defenses. Bravado, jokes, rituals—denial, reaction formation, displacement (that glorious minigun tantrum into empty trees).

• The Predator = the Death Drive / cruel Superego. A judging hunter with a “code,” meting out exquisite punishments, and finally willing to blow everything to zero. (In Freud’s terms: Todestrieb shading into a sadistic Superego.)

• Guns, knives, muscles = phallic emblems. The film delights in them… then shows how easily they’re stripped away.

This last point made me chuckle. ChatGPT then proceeded to analyze the movie through different lenses:

• Key scenes seen through psychoanalysis

• Fit with the Pleasure Principle

• Id-Ego-Superego lens

• What the movie “works through”

I won’t quote the whole thing, but here are some highlights. (Spoilers!)

• The macho handshake & banter. Classic reaction formation: overdone toughness to ward off anxiety. The Ego armors itself in muscle and jokes.

…

• “There’s something out there.” The Uncanny (das Unheimliche): familiar shapes flicker, but can’t be fixed by sight or name. Invisibility = the repressed acting without representation.

…

• Mud-camouflage & Stone-Age traps. Dutch cools his “heat” to near zero to evade the Predator’s thermal gaze. That’s Freud’s Nirvana principle made literal: tension pushed toward zero. And the reversion to primitive tools is regression in the service of the Ego—going backward to go forward, to master the trauma.

…

• Self-destruct with maniacal laughter. The death drive unveiled: not just killing the other, but annihilating the field itself—“back to the inorganic.” Also the cruel Superego getting the last word: if I can’t have the trophy, no one will.

…

Id–Ego–Superego quick lens

• Es (Id): Raw aggression and thrill—the film’s fetish for weaponry and spectacle.

• Ich (Ego): Dutch’s reality principle: observe heat-vision, test mud, set snares.

• Über-Ich (Superego): The Predator as judge enforcing a perverse chivalric law; also the team’s internalized “be a man” mandate that makes retreat unthinkable until it’s too late. Superegos can be merciless—Freud emphasizes this—and the Predator’s punishments feel exactly that.

What the movie “works through”

• From invulnerability to castration anxiety. The film lovingly builds phallic invincibility (biceps, blades, bullets) only to humble it. Survival requires relinquishing the fetish objects and relying on wit and the environment.

• From the Uncanny to the Mortal. Once the unseen becomes seen, the terror becomes killable. That’s textbook analytic progress: make the repressed appear, then bind and integrate it.

Some of this verges on parody, but some is insightful. And it highlights LLMs’ ability to find patterns in data. Doing an on-the-fly analysis of a work through a particular lens is genuinely useful.

The challenge, of course, is that I don’t know enough about Freud to know if any of this is fair. ChatGPT seems to acknowledge as much in its closing statement:

Does this reading prove anything “true” about the movie? No—Freud is a lens, not gospel. But through that lens, Predator becomes a tight parable about how the Ego survives: not by louder guns, but by turning the unseeninto the known, surrendering false potency, and mastering the drive toward annihilation long enough to get to the chopper.

Useful? Perhaps. Entertaining? Definitely.

Up Next

Gioia recommends seven short works: the prologue and first chapter of Ellison’s Invisible Man, one section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Hemingway’s The Killers, Jackson’s The Lottery, O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and O’Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. I assume I’ll have to buy all/most of these — if I can source them at all.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

Readings

The two Eliot poems were The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. I’ve already stated several times during the course that I’m not a fan of verse. While I love songs, I find most poems difficult to grok. These were no exception, so I relied on secondary readings for their interpretation.

GPT 4o tells me The Love Song “explores themes of indecision, insecurity, and the passage of time.” I have to take its word for it: I didn’t get the poem. The Waste Land also baffled me. Its abrupt shifts felt intentionally difficult and pretentious. This is part of the point, since it reflects the fragmentation and disillusionment following World War I. As GPT put it, “Through a collage of voices, languages, and literary references, Eliot depicts a world that is spiritually barren and culturally decayed.” The bleakness came across even to someone as tone-deaf as me.

To the Lighthouse is also fragmentary, but has a much warmer and empathic tone. The novel explores the inner life of the Ramseys, an English family in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, through their relationship to their vacation home in one of the Hebrides islands. It’s told in three parts.

In the first part, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children are in their vacation home discussing the feasibility of visiting a nearby Lighthouse to deliver a parcel of supplies to its keeper and his son. Their 6-year-old son, James, is especially keen on the adventure. They’re also joined by Lily Briscoe, an artist who is trying to paint on their estate.

Mrs. Ramsey is described as a beautiful, smart, optimistic, and singularly deep woman who holds her family together. Her husband is the opposite: ornery and overbearing. Mr. Ramsey is doubtful they’ll make it to the Lighthouse, since the weather isn’t good at this time of year. To James’s disappointment, the trip doesn’t happen.

The plot here is incidental. Instead, the narrative technique stands out. The story’s point of view shifts continually from one character to the other. Mixed in with observations about what’s happening in the real world, we get inklings of their thoughts and mental chatter.

The second part is shorter and has a different style. Rather than shifting voices, an abstract narrator describes the passage of time. The Ramseys neglect the estate. In parenthetical asides, we learn Mrs. Ramsey has died. One of their sons, Andrew, is killed in World War I and a daughter, Prue, dies in childbirth. The “protagonist” (if there can be such a thing in this novel) of this section is the Ramsay’s housekeeper, who strives to keep the estate from complete ruin.

Part three returns to the style, tone, and length of the first part. The reduced family returns to another vacation at the estate ten years later. Mr. Ramsey, James, and his sister Cam finally embark on the much-postponed visit to the Lighthouse, while Lily stays behind, struggling to complete her painting.

Andrew and Cam both resent their father, who is beset with grief and needing validation. They have a breakthrough on the way to the Lighthouse, coming to understand and appreciate each other and what has been lost. Lily completes her painting, realizing that it doesn’t matter as much as the reflection that went into it.

Audiovisual

Music: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American In Paris and Ella Fitzgerald singing the Gershwin songbook. All have long been part of my music collection: I was glad to revisit them now.

Arts: Gioia recommended another pair of overly-familiar painters: Frida Kahlo and Edward Hopper. I knew both artists’ work and have seen their most important paintings IRL, so I didn’t revisit them this week.

Cinema: Martin Scorcese’s RAGING BULL (1980), one of the most painful films I’ve seen. Robert De Niro plays 1940s boxing superstar Jake LaMotta, whose troubled inner world led to a disastrous personal life.

I’ve never liked boxing, and this movie is a graphic depiction of that brutal “sport” — and a deeply disturbing document of domestic violence. By the time of LaMotta’s nadir in a prison cell, I’d unwittingly placed my hands at the sides of my head. Gut-wrenching.

Reflections

I had a go at Woolf’s Orlando a few years ago and stopped about a fourth of the way into it. I found To the Lighthouse equally challenging. By the end of part one, I wondered whether I’d be able to finish. To be clear, Woolf is an incredible writer: I just found the approach too disorienting. But that’s the point. Some things can’t be accurately conveyed in a “logical” linear sequence.

I’m dazzled by writers and artists who can express ideas and feelings by transcending established narrative forms. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy their works. Several weeks later, I’m still thinking about JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. I didn’t enjoy that film, but it did make me think. And it made me think precisely because it violated my expectations of how the medium of cinema is supposed to work.

That was also the case with this week’s readings. I appreciated them, but didn’t like them. I’ve never had a problem with modernist paintings, but I know many people don’t connect with them, since they don’t comport to expectations of what painting is supposed to do. Sometimes, transcending a medium’s conventions is how you get the point across. But you can only do that so many times before the exception becomes the norm — and the audience tunes out.

Notes on Note-taking

Last year, I shared an AI-powered concept mapping tool called LLMapper. I developed that until it got good enough and then stopped. But when Anthropic announced Agent Skills, I decided to revisit LLMapper to see if it could be turned into a Skill so anyone can use it within Claude. The results exceeded my expectations. Here’s a concept map it drew of To the Lighthouse:

After the user provides the source material (in this case, the URL for the novel’s Wikipedia page,) Claude asks which of three focusing questions they’d like the map to explore. In this case, it offered these questions:

FOCUSING QUESTION 1:
How does To the Lighthouse challenge traditional narrative structure and advance modernist literary techniques in ways that reshape our understanding of consciousness and human experience?

FOCUSING QUESTION 2:
What does Woolf’s exploration of gender roles, Victorian family dynamics, and the emerging “modern woman” reveal about changing social structures in early 20th century Britain?

FOCUSING QUESTION 3:
How does the novel’s treatment of time, memory, and loss illuminate the relationship between art, perception, and the human struggle to find meaning in everyday life?

Even perusing the focusing questions is useful. I selected the third, and the resulting diagram helped me better understand the key themes of time, memory, and loss as seen through the lens of individual perception.

Making concept maps helps visual thinkers like myself understand challenging concepts differently. Of course, LLMapper makes the diagram for you, so you lose some of its inherent value. But it’s still illuminating as an object of study and critique. Because this is happening within a chatbot, it’s possible to ask for changes and elaborations. That, in itself, has proven valuable.

The LLMapper Skill is available on Github if you want to try it yourself. (You’ll need a Pro, Plus, or Enterprise account, or Claude Code.) This video has a short demo and walks you through the installation process:

Up Next

Gioia recommends two writings by Freud: An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. My sense is his work is now considered to have more historical than clinical value, but that might be wrong. I look forward to engaging with this influential thinker.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

Readings

Per Gioia’s recommendation, I only read the first episode of Ulysses. I won’t summarize it here, since it didn’t give me a sense for the overall story. I’ll just say I loved how Joyce played with language. While it’s clearly prose, it has the musicality and color of verse. I’m actually looking forward to reading the rest of the novel.

I also only read the last story in Dubliners, titled The Dead. A couple — Gabriel and Gretta Conroy — attend a dinner party hosted by the Gabriel’s aunt. After many sentimental reminiscences, they go home. Before turning in, Gretta emotionally recalls her first love: a young man who died many years before. This triggers in Gabriel an epiphany about love, memory, and mortality.

Waiting for Godot is the most famous modernist play. It consists of two acts and has a sparse minimalist setting and only five characters. The main ones are Vladimir (“Didi”) and Estragon (“Gogo“), two drifters. They meet under a bare tree in a road to wait for someone called Godot. They’re unsure why they’re waiting or who Godot is, but expect he’ll help them.

Eventually, two other men arrive: Pozzo and Lucky. The former has enslaved the latter, driving him leashed like a dog and grossly mistreating him. We learn Pozzo is on the way to a market to sell Lucky. Lucky says nothing until Pozzo orders him to dance and think. He dons a hat and a long stream of academic-sounding gibberish pours from him.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave, a boy arrives. He claims to be a messenger from Godot, and he tells Vladimir and Estragon that Godot has said he’ll come tomorrow. They decide to leave the tree and return the next day, but as the first scene ends, they’re still hanging out under the tree.

And that’s also where the second scene catches them. The tree now has leaves, but we might be looking at the following day. Estragon’s boots are where he left them the previous day, but he doesn’t remember the previous day. He doesremember being beaten overnight. We sense the character’s codependency and frustration: they keep wishing they’d brought a rope to hang themselves on the tree.

Pozzo and Lucky return, but they’re changed: Pozzo is now blind and Lucky is mute. They don’t remember what happened the previous day either. After they leave, a boy comes. He could be the same as before, but (surprise!) doesn’t remember the previous day. Still, he claims Godot will meet them tomorrow. Gogo and Didi say they’ll leave and return in the morning. But as in the first act, they just hang out under the tree as the lights go down.

Audiovisual

Music: Traditional Irish and Scottish music. For some reason, it was easier to find playlists of the former than the latter on Apple Music. Lots of bagpipes and fiddles!

Arts: The most famous artist of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso. I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of his works IRL and read a biography years ago, so I didn’t revisit his work this week.

That said, I can see the connection between his latter work and Beckett’s work. Both are abstract yet still convey important truths about the human experience.

Cinema: David Lynch’s first film, ERASERHEAD (1977). I first watched this in college decades ago and didn’t get or enjoy it. I liked it better this time around, although I still don’t get it. (But that may be part of the point.)

The theme is anxiety about sex and parenthood, but summarizing the plot is pointless: this film is about a vibe. Gorgeous black and white photography. Extremely mannered performances. Grimy industrial setting. Gross-out body horror. A moody ASLR avant la lettre soundtrack. Mysterious yet bizarrely matter-of-fact dialog.

In short, many hallmarks of Lynch’s later movies are present here. But I enjoyed BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE more. ERASERHEAD feels more like an extended industrial/ambient music video than a movie. One can’t watch it without appreciating the fact it exists at all: it was scraped together over five years by people who must’ve expected no commercial upside.

Reflections

Much art is about communicating the human experience. What is it like to be? How do we live with each other? How do we respond to conflict or other challenging situations? Etc. Some works take a “realistic” approach to such questions: we recognize in them people, stories, and scenarios of the sort we might encounter ourselves in “real life.”

But some works go in a completely different direction. Rather than aim for realism, they communicate through more abstract means. Picasso’s paintings are the archetype. For example, if not for its title, most people would likely fail to recognize a woman in this painting:

Godot felt like that to me. I’ve never met anyone like its characters, and their situation and environment felt wholly contrived. But I recognized truths about my life in the play. For example, I often feel a breakthrough’s imminent. Perhaps tomorrow? But it doesn’t happen — and I’m still waiting.

Then there’s the question of memory. I know what I’m experiencing at any given moment, but then the moment passes. Sometimes, I remember what happened — or think I do. But often, I don’t remember at all. Do I recognize the lacuna or unconsciously fill in the blanks? Surely, yes. Perhaps?

Representing such vague ideas and feelings can perhaps be best done non-representationally. Language can trick us into perceiving more precision than is appropriate. Some of what’s conveyed is more somatic than conceptual: ERASERHEAD and Godot evoke feelings as effectively as ideas — and perhaps more usefully.

Notes on Note-taking

I’ve continued experimenting with Copilot for Obsidian. To remind you: this plugin allows you to pass files from your vault to various LLMs so you can chat with your notes.

I’ll start by summarizing what I’ve read (or watch, in the case of the movies.) In some cases, I’ll use the Text Generator plugin for GPT-4o mini to write a summary or outline of the work. Then, I’ll pass my notes to another LLM that helps me spot and correct errors and refine impressions.

I’ve used this process throughout the course. For the last step, I used to copy and paste my notes into a ChatGPT window. (I’ve set up a ChatGPT project for the course.) But now, I simply open the Copilot panel alongside the note in Obsidian, saving the round trip to the chat bot.

This makes the process more fluid, since I’m more willing to jump to LLM interactions earlier on. I’m only using a fraction of this plugin’s capabilities, but it’s clearly changing how I think through my notes.

Up Next

Gioia recommends Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and selected poetry from T.S. Eliot including The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (Alack! More verse!) Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

To complement these readings, I saw a venerated film adaptation of another classic book about prejudice. The film moved me less than these extraordinary texts, for reasons I’ll explain below.

Readings

I’ll unpack the readings chronologically. The oldest — Douglass’s autobiography — was published in 1845, before the Civil War. The book offers an unflinching look at slavery from a slave’s perspective. Douglass starts with his early life on a plantation, where he witnesses brutal interactions between slaves and slaveholders and is separated from his mother.

Eventually, he learns to read and develops a desire for freedom. He’s sold to another owner, who takes him to Baltimore. There, he continues his education and experiences urban slavery. He’s sent to the brutal “slave breaker” Edward Covey. This experience, plus his continued education, leads him to plan and execute an escape north.

After a few failed efforts, he escapes, landing in New Bedford, Massachusetts. While technically free, he still experiences discrimination. He enters abolitionist circles and starts advocating an end to slavery. Eventually, he decides to set down his experiences in the book we’re reading to further his advocacy.

This brings us to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, published almost four decades after the end of the Civil War. Alas, the end of slavery didn’t end racial injustice. The book explains Reconstruction’s failure to bring about justice and the pernicious impacts of ongoing racism. Parts read like a sociology texbook, while others offer deeply personal experiences.

Du Bois explains that Black folk experience “double consciousness”: an internal conflict that comes from navigating a society that devalues them while striving for dignity and improvement. He uses the metaphor of a veil separating Black folk from their compatriots: continual awareness of this veil underlies African-American self-perception.

Overwhelming social, cultural, and economic challenges kept the veil intact. Some people approached these challenges with good faith but there were also lots of opportunists in the mix. Du Bois doesn’t provide easy answers. That said, he suggests more classical education (as opposed to Booker T. Washington’s vocational approach) would’ve helped.

On to this week’s third reading, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Context: sixty years after Du Bois’s book, a condition of legal apartheid exists in the South. Dr. King has been jailed for participating in non-violent protests against Alabama’s Jim Crow segregation laws.

The direct audience for his open letter are his fellow clergy who question the wisdom and timeliness of his actions. But we are the real audience for this lucid, clear, and compelling explanation of the need for civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws. Dr. King challenges moderates — i.e., most of us — who value order over justice. That said, he remains hopeful that justice will prevail.

Audiovisual

Music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. I’m most familiar with Armstrong, one of my favorite performers in any medium, but also spent some time with Ellington and Holiday this week. What extraordinary talent!

Arts: artists from the Harlem Renaissance, a creative, cultural, and intellectual movement centered in Harlem, NY during the 1920s—30s that helped redefine the African-American experience.

That I wasn’t aware of these artists says more about me than I should admit in writing. But that’s what learning the humanities is supposed to do: expose blind spots so we can correct course.

Cinema: Robert Mulligan’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), based on Harper Lee’s eponymous Pulitzer-winning novel.

The story is told from the POV of three children, siblings Scout and Jim Finch and their friend Dill living in a Deep South small town during the Great Depression. Their father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer defending an innocent Black man accused of rape. The children witness the ugliness, injustice, and violence of racism and learn from their father important moral lessons.

While this is considered one of the best films ever made and a deeply moving story, I couldn’t overlook its shortcomings. Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, is clearly the film’s hero, but Tom Robinson — the accused man — is its heart. Brock Peters, who played Robinson, gives an extraordinary performance overflowing with dignity and frustration. Alas, he — and all the other Black actors — get little screen time.

How different from this week’s readings, which tackled prejudice from the victim’s perspective! I get it: the film was meant to move an early 1960s mainstream American audience. Still, it felt unbalanced. I also disliked Elmer Bernstein’s music, which I found overwrought and overbearing. The whole, while executed masterfully (lots of suspense!), is a product of a different time.

Reflections

I cited the full title of Douglass’s autobiography above — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave — because the last part sounds so dissonant to me. Put plainly, the phrase “American Slave” feels like it should be an oxymoron. The U.S. was ostensibly founded on Enlightenment principles of equality and freedom. But for far too long, slavery was the law of the land.

And what a horrible thing it was. I was moved to tears by all three of this week’s texts, the first time that’s happened during the course. It’s hard to imagine anyone being treated so brutally and unfairly, much less anyone as brilliant as Douglass, Du Bois, and Dr. King. Apart from their other accomplishments, they are extraordinarily lucid, erudite, and morally clear writers.

How could anyone consider them anything other than brilliant people? The answer is racism, one of our species’ most pernicious biases. These texts reveal both the depths of racial injustice in American history and what Dr. King called the “moral arc of the universe”: While prejudice is far from a settled issue, reading these texts suggests some progress has happened since — mostly thanks to people like Douglass, Du Bois, and Dr. King.

Notes on Note-taking

As mentioned above, I opted to not re-read Douglass’s autobiography at this time. Alas, my notes from the first reading were sparse: a couple of sentences explaining the main narrative arc and how powerful I’d found the writing. That wasn’t enough: I wanted to go deeper for the overview above.

As I’ve done in previous weeks, I used GPT 4o via the Obsidian Text Generator plugin to refresh my memory. Here’s the prompt I used:

Write a concise summary of the Life of Frederick Douglass, including an outline of the book’s structure. Keep each point in the outline to a single short sentence that expresses the main point of the chapter and how it contributes to the overall narrative.

GPT 4o provided this response (inline in the midst of my Obsidian note):

“Life of Frederick Douglass” is a powerful autobiography detailing the journey of Frederick Douglass from a life of enslavement to becoming a leading voice in the abolitionist movement. The narrative not only recounts his personal experiences but also serves as a broader commentary on the injustices of slavery.

Outline:

1. Introduction to Slavery
   Douglass introduces his early life on the plantation and the brutal realities of slavery, setting the stage for his quest for freedom.

2. The Role of Family and Separation
   Describes his separation from his mother, highlighting the dehumanizing effects of slavery on familial bonds.

3. Early Education and Awakening
   Explains how learning to read sparked Douglass’s awareness and desire for freedom, emphasizing education as a tool for liberation.

4. Life in Baltimore
   Details his time with Hugh Auld’s family in Baltimore, where he furthered his education and observed different aspects of urban slavery.

5. The Brutality of Slaveholders
   Recounts experiences with cruel masters like Edward Covey, illustrating the physical and psychological torment faced by enslaved people.

6. Defiance and Resistance
   Chronicles instances where Douglass resisted oppression, showcasing his growing determination to claim his rights.

7. Planning an Escape
   Outlines various plans to escape slavery, reflecting both hope and the constant danger involved in seeking freedom.

8. Successful Escape to Freedom
   Narrates his successful flight northward, marking a turning point from enslavement to self-emancipation.

9. Life as a Free Man in New Bedford
   Describes adjusting to life in New Bedford as a free man while facing racial discrimination in the North.

10. Becoming an Abolitionist Speaker
    Explains how he became involved with abolitionist circles, using oratory skills to advocate against slavery.

11. Writing His Narrative
    Discusses the decision to write his autobiography as a means to share his story and galvanize support for abolitionism.

12. Reflections on Slavery’s Injustice
    Offers insights into the moral and societal implications of slavery, urging readers toward empathy and action against it.

13. Conclusion: The Call for Change
    Ends with a call for continued resistance against oppression, encapsulating Douglass’s enduring commitment to justice and equality.

The AI’s take isn’t perfect. For one, Douglass’s book has eleven chapters, but the AI provided thirteen bullets. So, not a one-to-one mapping of the book’s structure. That said, I remember the book hitting all of these points in this sequence. (This approach can also be useful — albeit a bit riskier — before reading a text.)

As usual, I left this summary and outline inline in my notes and clearly attributed them to AI. This way, I’ll know they’re not my thoughts when I revisit this note in the future. This AI-generated text isn’t just a helpful way to jog my memory: it also helps when searching notes and associating ideas in Obsidian. But as always, check the work!

Up Next

Gioia recommends James Joyce’s The Dead and the first episode of Ulysses,
and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I’ve not read any of these, but I know of their importance. (And I’ve long been intimidated by Ulysses, so we’ll see how that goes!)

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

In week 42 of the humanities crash course, I read a selection of poems from Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil and Gustave Flaubert’s short story A Simple Heart. As usual, I found the poems hard going, but enjoyed the story. I paired it with a classic film that raised important questions — and sparked surprising answers.

Readings

Gioia recommended assorted poems by Charles Baudelaire. I read The Flowers of Evil, his celebrated collection of poetry. (Or did I? More on this below…) As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of verse. I find most poems hard to follow. But I liked Baudelaire’s imagery (if not his subject matter.) I especially liked two poems in the collection:

• Evening Harmony: a melancholic old-age reflection on impending death, with late afternoon lighting as a metaphor.

• The Joyous Defunct: another reflection on death, this time from the perspective of a corpse relishing its absorption back into nature.

It’s mostly grim stuff, told vibrantly and memorably — it reminded me of 1980s goth music such as The Cure. Here’s the entirety of Evening Harmony to give you a sense of the vibe:

The hour approacheth, when, as their stems incline,
The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,
And sounds and scents in the vesper breezes turn;
A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine.

The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,
The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine.
A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine,
The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern.

The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine;
Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,
The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern,
The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine.

Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,
Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine,
The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine,
Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.

On to Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, which traces the life of Felicité, an uneducated and simple-minded, yet well-meaning, servant. The narrative starts with her childhood and adolescence, when she experiences a traumatic romantic betrayal: her beloved abandons her for money.

Eventually, she’s employed by Madame Aubain, who has two children: Paul and Virginia. Felicité also has a beloved nephew, Victor. These children grow and Felicité loves and serves them unconditionally. Alas, all die of different — but in all cases, tragic — circumstances.

Felicité grows old alongside Madame Aubain. Eventually, she inherits a parrot called Loulou. Felicité’s increasing deafness isolates her from everyone except Loulou: the parrot acquires religious significance for the old woman. Alas, eventually, Loulou also dies. Devastated, Felicité has it stuffed and placed in her room.

Eventually, Madame Aubain dies too. Felicité is left alone in their house, which is now for sale. Nobody buys it, and rather than attract attention, Felicité lets it go to rot. Eventually, her body starts falling apart too. As she nears the end, she bequeaths Loulou to the local church. She dies with an ecstatic vision of Loulou as the Holy Spirit.

Audiovisual

Music: classic U.S. Country music: Hank Williams, June Carter, and the O.G., Jimmy Rodgers. Gioia recommended a few others, some of which I was familiar with (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson.) But this genre isn’t my thing, so I didn’t spend more time here.

(I realize this tune is more Western than Country, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to showcase these legends playing together.)

Arts: Rembrandt van Rijn. Again, an overly familiar painter: I’ve had the privilege of seeing several of his works in person at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, so I didn’t spend time revisiting his works this week.

Cinema: Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, a classic Belgian “art” film from 1975. The “art” label is a warning: this film is famously challenging due to its length, pacing, and subject matter. It presents three days of the titular character’s life. Jeanne is a widow living with Sylvain, her teenage son. But their interactions — as with much of the movie — are sparse, cold, and monontonous.

The film revels in details conventional narratives leave out. The always-still camera lingers on Jeanne as she takes a bath, waits for elevators, prepares meatloaf, etc. These extremely long shots aren’t arbitrary: they emphasize the drabness of Jeanne’s life and her perfectionism. We know she’s spiraling because she starts missing beats, something we can only realize after we’ve been inducted into the numbing repetitiveness of her intimate routines.

Well, most of her intimate routines. On the side, Jeanne prostitutes herself to regular customers in her apartment. She stores their payments in a tureen that has place of honor in the dining room: this is the money for grocery shopping, Sylvain’s allowance, etc. Akerman wisely avoids showing what happens while Jeanne services her clients — until the critical final encounter.

Reflections

Flaubert was a pioneer of realism, bringing characters to life by noting seemingly trivial details. He also took their moral and spiritual struggles seriously, painting a vivid and compassionate picture through careful observation. The point: even someone as “simple” as Felicité can have a rich, meaningful existence despite (or perhaps because of) life’s sufferings.

The movie uses a similar approach to very different ends. I’d long known about this film, and given the Flaubert reading this seemed like the right time to watch it. Little did I know how much the two stories would contrast, especially given their similarities.

Like Flaubert, Akerman focuses on apparently trivial details. Both elevate the mundane through keen observation of detail: simple everyday things and actions — the tureen, the parrot, making coffee — take on mythic import. But the film trades tenderness and compassion for cold analysis.

Thematically, the biggest contrast is in how the characters handle their respective situations. Given her instinctive faith, Felicité faces one hardship after another with stoic aplomb, ending her life in grace. Jeanne — a prototypical middle-class secular European — has no such grounding. Her life isn’t merely drab: it’s spiritually empty. It’s no surprise she cracks up.

Many people see JEANNE DIELMAN as a Feminist milestone, with Jeanne as a victim lashing out against domesticity, patriarchy, capitalism, etc. But the film doesn’t specify how she came to her current condition. Did someone force her into prostitution? How? Jeanne is an intelligent, organized, and capable person living in a free society, surely she could’ve chosen a different life.

And (spoiler!) things won’t improve after her pivotal choice at the end of the film. To the contrary, her life will become much worse. Which is to say, far from being a heroine, Jeanne is pathetic and tragic. Instead of a revolutionary statement, I saw the film as a cautionary tale about living without the deep foundations that allow us to transcend individual concerns. While Jeanne doesn’t explicitly reject God, Sylvain does — and she doesn’t contradict him.

One of the central lessons in this course is that religion has played a central role in the life of our species. Clearly, these characters have “moved on” from the worldview that framed European life for two millennia. That, as much as anything else, ails them: JEANNE DIELMAN warns us of the risks of living in a society that has drained all transcendence out of everyday life.

Notes on Note-taking

So far this year, I’ve read ninety-three long form texts, the most ever. Ironically, I’ve bought the fewest books, since most of the material is available online for free. That has pros and cons. The pros are obvious: instant, free availability. The cons are more nuanced.

Given their age, all these works are in the public domain. So why buy any at all? For one thing, free ebooks often have formatting glitches: poor typography, uneven tables of contents, punctuation and spelling errors (presumably from poor scans,) etc.

Some free ebooks are reformatted versions of Project Gutenberg editions. PG has the largest repository of free ebooks, but many suffer from the typographic and flow issues noted above. I’ve read several during the course, and all have had glitches. (The best reformats are from the excellent Standard Ebooks.)

Also, not all translations are in the public domain. Same goes for audiobooks: the text might be free, but the audio often isn’t. Plus, some commercial editions have notes or ancillary materials not present in the free versions. This week, I also learned some free ebooks can be incomplete.

I read a free edition of The Flowers of Evil from Alice & Books, which includes 54 poems. FleursDuMal.org, a website dedicated to the book, lists 164 poems over various editions. It’s unclear how these 54 were selected or by whom. Of course, I could read the whole set in the website, but I prefer e-reader apps (either Apple Books or Kindle.)

So, I can’t trust free ebook editions to be authoritative or have the best translations. That won’t matter as much with a collection of poems, but it could be an issue with other kinds of works. So caveat emptor — with the caveat that the emptor here isn’t paying with anything but their time.

(That said, I’ve gladly sponsored Standard Ebooks. Check them out if you’re into classic literature.)

Up Next

Gioia recommends two keystone texts of African-American history: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk. I’ve already read Douglass’s book, so I’ll replace it with Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

In week 41 of the humanities crash course, I read a teeny tiny fragment of a monumentally long and famous novel and the whole of a short novel I’d never heard of. The fragment was the overture to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) and the novel Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1896). I also watched an exciting film noir unrelated to either of these two works.

Readings

Let’s start with Proust. In Search of Lost Time is so famous that I could’ve left it at “Proust” and you’d likely have known which work I was referring to. But this is surely one of those works more people know about than have read — not because of its literary quality, but because of its length: Lost Time spans seven volumes over 4,215 pages and holds the Guiness World Record for the longest novel.

Wisely, Gioia recommended only a small fraction: the first part of the first volume, Swann’s Way, which is referred to in my translation as the Overture. It sets the tone for the work as a whole: the unnamed narrator, a well-to-do Frenchman, is recalling a memorable event from his childhood.

His parents are hosting a dinner party at their country estate. The dinner keeps his mother from coming up to his room for the customary good night kiss. Miffed, he contrives to stay up until the dinner is over. He gets his mother to kiss him, but at the cost of a new and unwelcome impression of how his parents understand his inner life.

This episode sets the stage for the author’s project: reconstructing the minutiae that marked his life. Memories are triggered involuntarily by sensual experiences, such as eating a piece of cake. We’ve all had such experiences; it was fascinating to read them put in words. Not to say I’m rushing to the rest of the novel — that would be quite a project!

On to the second novel I tackled this week, this one in its entirety: The Spoils of Poynton. I’d heard of James before (e.g., I knew he was William James’s brother) but had never read one of his works. Gioia recommended this one because it’s relatively short. (Certainly compared to Proust!)

The novel traces the relationship between three people: Mrs. Gereth, a widow, Owen, her son, and Fleda Vetch, a young woman who shares Mrs. Gereth’s tastes. That matters: Mrs. Gereth has exquisite taste. She’s spent her life decorating her home, Poynton. But now Owen is engaged to marry Mona, a woman of inferior taste. Mrs. Gereth worries that Mona will be the new mistress of Poynton. (Due to how English inheritance works, the estate passes to the son, not the widow.)

Mona and Owen check out the place. Mrs. Gereth is indignant. She moves to a smaller estate and takes much of her stuff there. Having already seen the full wonders of Poynton, Mona postpones the wedding until the stuff is fully restored. Mrs. Gereth would prefer if Owen married Fleda. That’s not a long shot: Fleda herself is in love with Owen, but she’s very circumspect — until Owen himself wavers.

Owen has a blowout with Mona’s mother. He tells Fleda that his relationship with Mona is over and asks her to marry him instead. But Fleda won’t believe the engagement is truly over until Mona confirms it. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gereth hears about the blowout and decides Fleda has surely won. She sends her stuff back to Poynton so that Fleda can enjoy it when she becomes the new mistress. But Fleda is distraught upon hearing this: now there’s nothing in Mona’s way.

Spoiler warning: skip the rest of this post if you’re planning to read this novel. You’ve been warned!

Mrs. Gereth and Fleda don’t hear from Owen for weeks. Then, they learn he’s married Mona. There’s lots of recrimination and teeth-gnashing. Owen and Mona depart for extended stays in Europe. Fleda receives a letter from Owen. He wants her to go to Poynton and pick out anything from the house to take for her own (implicitly: as a kind of atonement for how he treated her.) She travels there only to find that the house — with all its spoils — has burned to the ground.

Audiovisual

Music: Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies no. 2, 5, and 9. I’d already heard one of the movements in the fifth symphony, but was unfamiliar with the other two. These are long, dense, rich works, and I didn’t listen through any all the way through. I’ll re-visit them in the future.

Arts: Henri Matisse, one of the most famous painters of the modern era. I’ve seen lots of his paintings in the past, and opted to not spend much time on his work now.

Cinema: Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949), a classic noir set in post-WWII Vienna. Joseph Cotten plays an alcoholic American author trying to solve the murder of a friend who summoned him for a job in the city. To say more would likely spoil a terrific story.

This is one of those old movies that manages to feel modern and also completely of its time. It’s got great acting, smart dialogue, and beautiful black and white photography. The music, composed and performed by Anton Karas on the zithar, is completely unexpected, oddly fitting, and was an unlikely hit in the 1950 music charts.

Reflections

The Spoils of Poynton was an unexpected treat. It was hard going at first, with long paragraphs that sometimes stretched over more than one page. This style of writing kept me from making progress with Proust many years ago. The trick that unlocked both novels this time was listening to them as audiobooks. (Both are available for free with an Audible subscription.)

Some brief thoughts on Poynton, since I didn’t hear enough of Proust to form an opinion (beyond what I already wrote above.) At first, I thought this work belonged to the category of novel I dislike most: “Stupid People Doing Stupid Things for Stupid Reasons.” For me, the emblematic work in this genre is The Sheltering Sky, which I enjoyed despite its characters.

At first, I thought Poynton fit this mold. Mrs. Gereth, in particular, struck me as unrealistic: nobody could be that superficial, egotistical, and obsessed with material things. And was Fleda outright dumb or merely opportunistic? In any case, I found both somewhat cartoony. But of course, there are indeed people like that. What’s unrealistic, perhaps, is that they don’t say it outright like Mrs. Gereth does.

But what really turned me around was the novel’s ending, which was perfect. All that material stuff these characters obsessed about — the stuff that led them to sacrifice family ties for and compromise their integrity — goes up in smoke. It’s like the ending of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but with much greater emotional resonance. Love matters. Material stuff, not so much.

Notes on Note-taking

The challenge this week was one I’ve faced several before in the course: how to capture notes for works I’ve only partially read.

Whenever I finish a book, I start a new note in Obsidian just for that book. For example, the summary of The Spoils of Poynton you read above comes almost verbatim from my notes for that book. Which is fair, since I read the whole thing. But I didn’t read all of In Search of Lost Time. What to do about this?

For now, I’ve settled on starting a note for the whole work and writing down my impressions of just the portions I’ve read. I’ve done it before with the Satyriconand other works I’ve read partially. I consider these evergreen notes; if I return to these works in the future, I’ll continue fleshing out their notes.

In one case — the Bible — I’ve started a note for the work as a whole that links through to individual books, which have their own notes. So there’s a note for the Bible as a whole that includes links to individual notes for Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Job, each of the gospels, etc. This is the correct level of granularity for the Bible, which after all is a collection of books.

I may end up doing something similar for Proust if I ever decide to plow through the remainder of In Search of Lost Time. Having the flexibility of making such shifts is one of the benefits of working with a hypertext note-taking system.

Up Next

Gioia recommends poems by Baudelaire and a short story by Flaubert. I read Madame Bovary a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it. I’m less thrilled about diving into yet more Romanticist verse, but we’ll see how that goes.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

Week 40 of the humanities crash course had me pondering deep philosophical questions. I read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Both books were published in 1886 — and that’s not the only thing they have in common (despite also having many differences.)

I almost skipped Ilych, since I read it in college — or so I thought. But I went for it after all, and I’m glad I did: turns out I didn’t remember it after all, and ended up loving it. (As opposed to Nietzsche’s book, which I didn’t like.) For this week’s movie, I chose a classic inspired by Ilych. In contrast with last week’s pick, it’s become one of my favorites.

Readings

Let’s start with Beyond Good and Evil. Before I get into it, let me say upfront: I’ve always struggled with Nietzsche. I dislike the person that comes across in his pages, much like I dislike Marx. (And perhaps for similar reasons.) Yes, Nietzsche is the most important philosopher of the last two hundred years. But I often struggle to understand him: he seems more intent on provoking than clarifying. He’s a shitposter avant la lettre, and I don’t like shitposters.

So, the following summary comes more from my interactions with LLMs about the book rather than the book itself. (More on those below.) I’m in dangerous waters here: yes, I read the book, but I didn’t understand much of what Nietzsche was saying. I’m relying on my AI tutors to parse its meanings.

Nietzsche argues Christianity has infused Europe with a “slave morality” that cares for the weak, old, infirm, and social well-being at the expense of individual strength. Slave morality distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. By good, he means the meek and harmless — i.e., downtrodden victims — and by evil, the powerful who oppress them.

He contrasts this with “master morality,” which instead distinguishes between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Here, good are the noble, life-affirming sentiments that build strength, and bad the weak and vulgar. Masters understand values are relative: rather than be ruled by constrained socially-imposed values, they establish values that give them advantages.

Nietzsche says adopting a slave morality weakens societies. He favors strength and power and argues for replacing Judeo-Christian values of egalitarianism, democracy, and pity — which he dismissively refers to as “herd morality” — with the “will to power.” Again, that’s what I got from my reading plus subsequent LLM interactions. This take might be wrong: I’m sure someone with a firmer grounding in philosophy could correct me.

Let’s move on to The Death of Ivan Ilych, which I understood better and which moved me greatly. In important ways, it stands in sharp contrast with Beyond Good and Evil. But it also shares important ideas with Nietzsche’s work.

Ilych, a respectable Russian middle class court official, has died. His wife, friends, and colleagues gather for his wake, but their thoughts are self-serving and superficial. The explicit subtext: they believe death can’t happen to them.

Ilych’s life is recounted in flashback. As a young man, he strives to fit in, quickly rising through the ranks. He marries. Happiness is always around the corner, but the family never has quite enough to live on, all jobs have downsides, the wife becomes ornery. They have several children, but only a daughter and son survive.

Eventually, he secures a better position and moves to a larger house, which he decorates to match his peers’ expectations – comme il faut. Always pushing for perfection, he falls from a stepladder and hits his side while correcting the work of a worker.

At first, he brushes off the accident. His wife and daughter are impressed and temporarily appeased by their new house. But the pain won’t go away. He consults fashionable physicians, but none give him a straight diagnosis. His wife and daughter read his pain only through how it affects them.

The pain increases and Ilych starts declining. Realizing he’s going to die, he revisits his life with regret. He’s lead a false existence pursuing the same superficial trappings as everyone else — comme il faut. He grows bitter. His hatred for his wife grows.

He keeps his feelings from everyone except a simple peasant servant, Gerasim — the only person in Ilych’s world who tells him the truth. He acknowledges Ilych is dying and tends to him, comforting and caring for him as his body wastes away.

Ilych spends his few remaining days mostly with Gerasim. In an ironic scene, his wife, daughter, and son-in-law go to the opera to keep up appearances instead of being with him. In his final hours, Ilych experiences a rebirth: he (literally) sees the light, regrets the suffering he’s causing his family, and decides to no longer struggle. He dies serenely. Heavy stuff!

Audiovisual

Music: Shostakovich’s Symphony 5, Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto 3, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 3. I was most familiar with the last of these, but all three were worthwhile.

Arts: Gioia recommended the Bauhaus, which I studied in architecture school (and therefore skipped now.)

Cinema: Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), which was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilych.

I love Kurosawa, but there are several of his key films I’ve never seen. This was one of them, and now seemed like a perfect time, given this week’s reading. Like Ilych, this story also features a punctilious public official who realizes he’s wasted his life after confronting a terminal illness.

Whereas Ilych finds redemption in self-renunciation and sympathy with his family, Mr. Watanabe (IKIRU’s protagonist) finds his in transcending the bureaucratic milieu that shaped his adult life to help a group of families build a park in post-WWII Tokyo. He, too, experiences a rebirth: Kurosawa includes Japanese children signing Happy Birthday in the background to drive the point home.

It’s a deeply moving story everyone should watch. I should’ve done so sooner, but watching now, at middle age, was especially affecting. The famous scene with Watanabe swinging in the snow had me bawling. I’ll definitely re-watch this, hopefully several more times (as I have other deeply inspiring films like AMADEUS and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.)

Reflections

When I first wrote that Nietzsche is “the most important philosopher of the last two hundred years,” I tried on a few qualifiers: arguably the most important, perhaps the most important, and so on. But really, the only other contender is Marx, but his influence is constrained primarily to social and economic institutions. Nietzsche changed everything.

We live in Nietzsche’s world: the idea that values are defined by perspective — and that you can roll your own — is the foundation for much of what goes by ‘liberal’ thought today. So it’s ironic that his ideas were so thoroughly perverted by fascists, who misread him (perhaps instigated by Nietzsche’s sister, an antisemite who edited his work posthumously.)

Nietzsche and Marx are (unwitting?) grandfathers to the two deadliest political movements of the 20th century: fascism and communism. I added a question mark because their rhetoric oozes hatred, resentment, and violence. Here’s a quote from Beyond Good and Evil:

Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air.

And another (emphasis in the original):

What, then, is the attitude of [Christianity and Buddhism] to the surplus of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions for sufferers, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible. However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto paramount religions — to give a general appreciation of them — are among the principal causes which have kept the type of “man” upon a lower level — they have preserved too much that which should have perished.

ChatGPT tells me he’s writing metaphorically, that he means “spiritual and cultural vitality” and not human beings. But it’s not hard to see why eugenicists and other horrible people would gravitate to such passages. Like Marx, Nietzsche revels in provocation. Is it any wonder they bred monsters?

At first, I thought the Tolstoy novella provided a humanistic counterweight to Nietzsche’s icy amorality. Ilych and (especially) Gerasim represent compassion for and acceptance of weakness. But then, a series of insightful interactions with AI led me to understand they also share an important theme.

The overlap is in transcending culturally-imposed constraints and desires. Nietzsche argues you shouldn’t be subject to your culture’s values. Tolstoy argues that a life spent competing with the Joneses is a life wasted. At this level, aren’t this most deeply Christian writer and this most deeply anti-Christian writer alined?

Notes on Note-taking

As I said, I struggled with the Nietzsche book. And as a result, I spent more time trying to understand it than other readings in the course. I experimented with several ways of using AI. To start, I asked ChatGPT 5 for a high-level summary of the book as a whole. This was my prompt:

Please give me a high-level summary of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Why does the book matter? What should I look for as I read it? Break it down chapter by chapter with a brief outline of the main points in each.

And here’s the response:

Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil as a sequel of sorts to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s a sharper, more systematic attack on received morality, religion, and philosophy. He wants to explode the complacent “truths” of Western culture and clear space for a new, life-affirming philosophy.

The book matters because it:

• Introduces Nietzsche’s most concentrated critique of philosophy, morality, and religion.

• Sharpens ideas like the will to power, master vs. slave morality, and the revaluation of values.

• Challenges us to think about truth itself: whether it’s worth more than illusion.

• Lays the groundwork for later existentialism, postmodernism, and critiques of ideology.

As you read, look for:

• Attacks on hidden assumptions: Nietzsche sees “truths” as masks for power.

• Psychological analysis: he dissects motives behind systems of thought.

• Style: aphorisms, provocations, paradoxes meant to unsettle you.

• The call to create values: moving beyond inherited good/evil dichotomies.

---

Chapter-by-chapter outline

Nietzsche divides the book into 9 main parts (plus a preface and an aftersong).

Preface

• Philosophy has been naïve: philosophers pretend to search for truth but really push hidden dogmas.

• Nietzsche calls for a new “philosophy of the future” that unmasks these drives.

Part I: On the Prejudices of Philosophers

• Critique of traditional metaphysics: philosophers smuggle in assumptions like “truth,” “being,” and “soul.”

• Will to power as a deeper explanation of life than the will to truth.

• Skepticism toward “free will” and “thing-in-itself.”

Part II: The Free Spirit

• The “free spirit” breaks from dogma, especially religious and moral.

• True independence comes from radical honesty and self-overcoming.

• But free spirits risk isolation and nihilism.

Part III: The Religious Nature

• Examines religion as psychological and cultural phenomena.

• Christianity: a slave morality that glorifies weakness and resentment.

• Monks and ascetics as “holy” forms of will to power.

Part IV: Maxims and Interludes

• A series of short aphorisms: witty, cruel, often paradoxical.

• Condensed insights into love, vanity, art, knowledge.

• Read them as intermezzo—little flashes that echo bigger themes.

Part V: On the Natural History of Morals

• Morality isn’t universal; it has a genealogy.

• Distinction between master morality (noble, life-affirming) and slave morality (resentful, life-denying).

• Morality as a tool of power struggles, not eternal truth.

Part VI: We Scholars

• Nietzsche mocks the academic/scientific class.

• Scholars think they’re disinterested, but they’re driven by herd instincts.

• Science without philosophy risks becoming shallow positivism.

Part VII: Our Virtues

• Nietzsche challenges modern virtues: compassion, equality, pity.

• These may conceal weakness rather than strength.

• Calls for a higher type of human who creates virtues rather than inherits them.

Part VIII: Peoples and Fatherlands

• Thoughts on nationalism, Europe, Jews, and the future.

• Critical of narrow national pride, but foresees a more unified Europe.

• Often provocative and controversial—look for the interplay between culture and philosophy.

Part IX: What is Noble?

• Nietzsche defines nobility as self-assertion, independence, capacity for creation.

• The “philosophers of the future” will be noble spirits who revalue values.

• The book crescendos toward the idea of a higher type who dares to shape humanity.

Aftersong

• A lyrical closing, in verse. Nietzsche blends poetry and philosophy.

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Why it matters now

• It asks whether truth is always preferable to illusion—a very live question in an age of AI, media manipulation, and ideological battles.

• It insists that values are human-made, not God-given—anticipating both existential freedom and today’s debates on pluralism.

• It calls for a revaluation of values, urging us to ask whether our moral systems still serve life or whether they need renewal.

I used this outline as a guide when reading the book itself. Rather than read it all in one sitting, I read the summary of each part of the book before reading that part in the book. That kept me focused on that section.

As I usually do, I wrote my impressions in an Obsidian note after reading the book. This note also included AI-generated inline summaries. But when I fed this note into ChatGPT 5 (via the Copilot for Obsidian plugin), I realized my first take was highly reactive and mostly superficial. The ensuing chat helped me deepen my understanding.

I also tried a new (to the course) tool this week: Google’s NotebookLM, an excellent way to generate study guides. I uploaded PDF copies of both books to NotebookLM and told it I wanted the “Learning Guide” conversational style. This led to an enriching discussion with NotebookLM asking me insightful questions and giving me encouraging feedback.

One of NotebookLM’s most touted features is its ability to produce a podcast based on the study materials. I tried that as well, and it generated an insightful discussion comparing the themes of both books. I loaded the resulting audio file onto my Apple Watch using the WatchAudio app, and listened to it during my daily morning walk.

NotebookLM proved a powerful tool for learning this week. Unfortunately, I realized too late that it doesn’t save chats by default (like ChatGPT, Claude, and seemingly all other chatbots.) But in addition to the chat and podcast, it also generated this visual outline — nice eye candy to wrap up this week’s post:

Up Next

Gioia recommends Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton and the “Overture” to Proust’s Swann’s Way. I’ve tried the latter and gave up after a few pages. As Gioia puts it, “get ready for long, complex sentences and full immersion into the psychological crises of the modern world.” Yikes! I’m spending lots of time in airplanes this week, so maybe this is good?

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

Not that his suggestions weren’t worthy: you can’t beat Emily Dickinson, The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, Bartleby, the Scrivener, Moby-Dick, Walden, Huckleberry Finn, and Song of Myself. The issue is I’d already read all of these except the works by Poe.

So I kept Poe, jettisoned the rest, and went in a different direction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This novel fit Gioia’s page constraint and paired well with Poe. It’s also an undisputed classic that’s spawned many offspring. And speaking of those, for the first time in the course, I watched a cinematic adaptation of the week’s literary work.

That proved a mistake — but more on that below.

Readings

I’ll make a few brief comments about the Poe and then devote the rest of this post to Frankenstein. As mentioned above, I read The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher. I’d heard of both (mostly through their numerous offspring, including a Lou Reed album) but hadn’t read them. Both proved suitably moody and creepy.

The Raven is a short narrative poem centered on the titular bird as a proxy for a dead lover. Even though I’m not a fan of verse, I enjoyed this poem. The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story that leans into the dual meaning of “house” in English as both a building and a venerable family. In Usher, both are vividly (morbidly?) decrepit: this story would set the tone for future haunted houses. (The Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World is clearly inspired by this work.)

On to Frankenstein, a “media property” whose offspring are (unfortunately) much better known than their source: a 1819 novel by Mary Shelley (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who we read a few weeks ago.) Shelley wrote it as a challenge among friends to see who could produce the best ghost story. She was only 19, but the result is surprisingly mature and deep.

Because the offspring are more popular than the novel, I’ll lay out its plot in some detail. (Spoiler alert!) The narrative unfolds as several nested stories. The first level starts when an expedition to the arctic finds a desolate man pursuing another man across the ice. He’s brought on board, where he tells his tale to the ship’s captain.

The lost man is Victor Frankenstein, member of a well-to-do Swiss family. After immersing himself in old alchemy texts, Frankenstein becomes obsessed with creating life. He builds a creature by scavenging parts from cadavers and animals and brings it to life in his apartment — only to immediately regret it. He flees in horror. When he returns, the creature is gone.

Frankenstein tries putting the creature out of his mind. Then, he receives a distressing letter: his younger brother has been murdered. On his way back home, he sees the creature and immediately suspects him. But townspeople blame a beloved household servant instead; she’s found guilty and hanged.

Frankenstein’s conscience is killing him: his creature is now responsible for the death of two people close to him. But he can’t tell anybody, since they wouldn’t believe him. He goes on a hike, and runs into the creature, who demands an audience with him. The creature wants to tell Frankenstein about his brief, unusual life so far. (Yes, the creature speaks — and is incredibly articulate. I do mean incredibly: his eloquence is one of the work’s flaws.)

Thus starts a third story-within-the-story. After leaving the apartment, the creature learns about the world. He’s mistreated by people, who are repulsed by his deformities and huge frame. Eventually, he hides in a cabin close to a small family: a blind old man, his daughter, son, and the son’s foreign girlfriend. The creature observes them as they go about their daily lives.

Therein starts a fourth level story-within-a-story: the creature tells Frankenstein about the family’s adventures. I won’t get into that sub-sub-plot here, but the important bit is that the creature learns to speak and read. He desires human connection — even as he starts to realize human society isn’t entirely fair. He decides to befriend the family, starting with the old man, since he can’t see him.

Alas, the children walk in as the old man is talking with the creature. Horrified, they run him off. He returns the next day to the now-deserted cabin. Rejected by humanity, he decides to hate mankind. He burns the cabin and tracks down Frankenstein, whose journal he took from the apartment. There’s something he wants from his creator: a female creature to be his companion.

Frankenstein is reluctant, but eventually promises to build a female. He soon regrets this promise and procrastinates. He agrees to marry his beloved cousin Elizabeth, but first travels to the British Isles to start his “project” — only to immediately realize it’d be a terrible mistake. He destroys the half-completed female. Incensed, the creature swears to see Frankenstein again on his wedding night.

Naively, Frankenstein interprets this as a threat to himself. (Again, another weak spot in the story.) Meanwhile, the creature kills Frankenstein’s best friend and frames him for the murder. Frankenstein returns home and marries Elizabeth, but the creature strangles her on their wedding night. And thus we return to the first level of the story: Frankenstein is pursuing the creature to avenge his friends and family members. But he’s at the end of the line and dies. The creature takes the body, promising to burn it and himself.

As you can see, this is a more complicated and heady story than the “making a monster in a lab” cliché most of us associate with Frankenstein. (At least I did, until I read this thought-provoking and entertaining novel.)

Audiovisual

Music: Gioia recommended music by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Frankly, I didn’t do my homework here either: these are two of my favorite artists in any genre and I’m already familiar with their work.

Arts: Grandma Moses. This is the kind of work I’ve seen called “naive art,” although that does it a disservice. These are charming paintings and the artist is an inspiration to late bloomers: she started at 78!

Cinema: I stupidly chose to watch James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), an adaptation of a play adapted from Shelley’s novel. The film stars Boris Karloff as the creature — and he is by far the best thing about it.

I’ll be blunt: this is the worst adaptation of any work I’ve experienced in any medium. (And for the record, I’ve played the 1982 Pac Man board game.) Excepting Karloff, the acting in the movie is atrocious. And where the novel goes deep on agency, ethics, and regret, the movie goes strictly for scares and melodrama. Which is to say, Shelley is this monster’s most unfairly and thoroughly gored victim.

Yes, I know we must mind context when analyzing works. This movie is 94 years old; people had different expectations then. (The film starts with an unintentionally hilarious prologue that warns the audience about the upcoming horrors.) And this film set the template for the “mad scientist and his deformed assistant” trope. And it’s been marked for preservation as historically important by the Library of Congress. And Universal just opened an expensive new theme park featuring this property.

Sure, sure, sure — FRANKENSTEIN is important and influential and beloved by many. I found it unwatchable after reading the novel. This adaptation’s only saving grace is that at 70 minutes, it’s mercifully short. What a turkey.

Reflections

Ok, enough on this awful movie. The novel is worth your attention. As I suggested above, it’s not perfect. I didn’t buy the creature’s learning pace nor its abilities to track the protagonist on foot across Europe. The dialog in general is somewhat flat. And although many consider this the first sci fi novel, Shelley unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) glosses over the science behind the creature’s animation.

This matters because the novel is obviously written in response to Enlightenment-era advances. To her audience, scientific progress must’ve seemed unstoppable. The novel asks: where should we stop? Are unchecked powers desirable? What responsibilities do we take on when employing such powers? What moral quandaries might ensue?

These issues come up often in sci fi. Here’s Spider Man’s uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And of course, Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Frankenstein said it first and arguably best:

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Knowing where to draw the line — which stones to leave unturned — is a perennially relevant topic, but especially now that AI is being used in ways we might charitably describe as “undisciplined.” Not to say the technology isn’t useful, but to preemptively cut jobs or publish AI-generated content at scale seems foolhardy. Would that more people learn from Shelley’s Frankenstein (but not, alas, from its more famous descendent — blecch!)

Notes on Note-taking

My main sense-making experiment this week didn’t involve either Frankenstein or Poe. Given the respite from Gioia’s demanding syllabus, I finished two books I’d slow-burned for a while: Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite and G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. I tried a different approach to learning with AI on the latter.

As I’ve documented before, my usual approach is to read the book and then write a brief summary in Obsidian. Then, I’ll feed the summary to an LLM (either through ChatGPT or various Obsidian plugins) for feedback. The ensuing back-and-forth helps me clarify points I might’ve gotten wrong and reinforces my understanding. Then, I use the Text Generator plugin to get a brief LLM-generated summary of the work in the note itself.

This works well with classics, such as the books I’ve studied this year. Most are in the public domain, so we can assume they — along with ample commentary about them — are already in the LLMs’ training corpus. But this approach isn’t as viable with works that are unlikely to be in the training corpus: my sense is the chatbots rely on web searches of supporting materials (such as book summaries) for newer works.

But I’ve also had unreliable results when asking for granular summaries of older works. I documented the poor experience I had with ChatGPT when reading Boethius earlier this year: it soon became clear the system had been trained on a different version of the book than the one I was reading, leading to a series of confusing and potentially misleading interactions.

The ideal would be to upload the whole book to the LLM as the starting point for the interaction. Alas, some books are too long and might exceed the system’s context window. But in a podcast last week, I heard someone mention that Gemini 2.5 Pro’s context window was large enough to support this very use case.

I tried it by uploading a PDF of The Everlasting Man and was pleased with the results. I asked not just for an overall summary, but also for detailed outlines of each chapter. I won’t subject you to the whole thing here (it’s long!) but here’s the overall summary and first chapter as a sample:

G.K. Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man,” published in 1925, stands as a monumental work of Christian apologetics and a direct response to H.G. Wells’s “The Outline of History.” Chesterton’s central thesis is that both humanity and Christianity are unique, revolutionary phenomena that cannot be explained by a simple, linear model of evolution. He argues that to view man as just another animal, or Christ as just another historical figure, is to ignore the profound and exceptional nature of both. The book is divided into two parts: “On the Creature Called Man” and “On the Man Called Christ.”

In the first part, Chesterton asserts that even when viewed from a purely naturalistic standpoint, humanity is a radical departure from the rest of the animal kingdom. He highlights unique human traits such as the creation of art, the capacity for laughter and shame, and the development of complex religious and philosophical systems. These, he argues, are not mere differences in degree, but in kind, setting humanity apart as a creature of a fundamentally different order.

The second part of the book applies a similar line of reasoning to the person of Jesus Christ. Chesterton argues that even when stripped of divine claims and viewed solely as a historical figure, Christ is an anomaly. His teachings were not simply a product of his time but were radical and paradoxical, transcending the cultural and historical context in which he lived. Chesterton contends that the enduring and transformative power of Christianity is evidence of its divine origin. He concludes that just as man is the one creature who is fundamentally different from all others, Christ is the one man who is fundamentally different from all others.

Outline and Chapter Summaries

Part I: On the Creature Called Man

• Chapter 1: The Man in the Cave

  • This chapter introduces the central theme of the book: the uniqueness of humanity. Chesterton uses the example of prehistoric cave paintings to illustrate that from the earliest evidence we have of man, he is already an artist and a creator, something no other animal has ever been.

  • Main Points:

    • Man is fundamentally different from all other animals, not in degree but in kind.

    • The ability to create art is a uniquely human trait and a sign of this fundamental difference.

    • The popular, modern conception of the “caveman” as a brutish, savage creature is a myth not supported by the evidence.

  • Illustrative Passage: “Art is the signature of man.”

Reviewing this outline was useful after I’d read the book. But this approach will be most useful to me before I starting reading: this is a great way to understand the key things to look for. (Note that The Everlasting Man is in the public domain. I’d be wary of uploading copyrighted works to cloud-based models.)

Up Next

Alright, on to the last fourth of course. I said I’d start diverging from Gioia’s syllabus, but not now. This week, he recommends Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’ve already read The Brothers Karamazov and the Tolstoy, so I’ll focus on Nietzsche instead.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.

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Readings

Let’s start with the texts: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. They’re contemporaries: both books came out in 1859. Somehow I’d always assumed Mill influenced the U.S. founders. Wrong! Still, it’s one of the key works underlying modern liberal societies.

Mill argues that individual liberty is essential for societies and individuals within them. He introduced the “harm principle”: the idea that the only constraint on individual liberty should be causing harm to others (either directly or through neglect.) That is, you should be free to do as you will as long as others don’t get hurt.

Not only is this morally right, it also helps society as a whole. No one individual — not even those in charge — has a monopoly on the truth. Accommodating a diversity of voices allows societies to explore more than approach to challenges.

This only works, of course, if people are free to speak their minds. Mill introduced the then-radical idea that individuals should be allowed to share all sorts of ideas, even those that might be considered repugnant, harmful, or false. (But, importantly, not speech that incites harm.)

Mill worried about social pressure: what he called the “tyranny of the majority.” Only by allowing divergence from mainstream views would societies be able to experiment with other approaches. Today, we’d consider Mill a systems thinker: he seems to call for requisite variety avant la lettre.

Of course, that doesn’t mean societies should be free-for-alls. Mill acknowledges there’s a role for authority, but it shouldn’t impinge upon personal freedoms. As noted above, he draws the line at harming others. Also, balancing dynamism and stability calls for shared cultural foundations. He called for education as a means to developing autonomous individuals.

On the Origin of Species is one of the most influential science books ever written. It introduced the idea of Natural Selection: species don’t emerge fully formed but change gradually over time. Even today, this sounds radical to people reared to believe in God as the creator of the universe.

So Darwin lays out his argument carefully and gradually. He draws an analogy with a process his audience understood: selective breeding of plants and animals by humans. Domesticated species have characteristics chosen by human breeders, who determine which specimens to breed.

Nature, he argues, does something similar: specimens whose characteristics make them likely to survive are the ones who reproduce. Those without such characteristics don’t leave as many offspring. Over time, this process produces species that are better adapted to their environment.

Darwin is a good writer and obviously passionate about his subject. He comes across as a genuine nerd. Gioia recommended reading only the first four chapters, and that’s where I stopped. But I may finish it sometime: there’s some technical material but also lovely descriptions of animals and plants.

Audiovisual

Music: Waltzes by Johann Strauss II, Frédéric Chopin, and Bill Evans. Of course, the first two are very familiar. I’d heard Evans’s work with Miles Davis, but not his waltzes, so that was new to me.

Gioia also recommended waltzes by John Coltrane, but I chose to skip them: Coltrane requires more active listening than I was able to muster this week.

Arts: two comprehensive styles from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries: Art Nouveau and Art Deco. By “comprehensive,” I mean they spanned more than one medium. By “style” I mean that I’ve always seen them as superficial responses to their context.

Both dealt with the impact of industrialization and the historicist/classicist aesthetics that dominated the first parts of the 19th Century. Art Nouveau adopted organic forms. After World War I, that style had become passé, leading to the emergence of Art Deco, which adapted more industrial forms.

Cinema: Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976.) Although Pakula directed, but this is in many ways Robert Redford’s film: he not only acted in it, but his company produced it and he encouraged the book on which it’s based. Redford died last week, so I thought it appropriate to watch one of his films.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN seemed the most apt given this week’s theme. The film tells the real-life story of how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated the conspiracy behind the Watergate break-in that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

This might sound boring, but the screenplay (by William Goldman), acting, direction, design, etc. make it thrilling. Talk about social pressure: these were relative nobodies exposing powerful forces. Both them and their paper persisted in searching for the truth despite very real and present threats.

Reflections

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN isn’t about politics; it’s about integrity and freedom of speech. This makes it perennially relevant. Last week provided a contemporary example: the indefinite suspension by ABC of their late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after he made a politically inflammatory joke on air.

Some voices on the left cried foul. Kimmel’s suspension might look like the network is preemptively self-censoring to avoid larger consequences, such as threats of regulatory pressure from the current right-wing U.S. administration, legal challenges, or public outcry. (Although there may be more to it than that.)

Of course, the drive to censor “unacceptable” voices isn’t limited to one side of the political spectrum. Some on the left are also keen on censoring speech. When I first announced this Substack, several people (on Bluesky, where discussions tend to lean left) questioned my choice of platform. Didn’t I know, they wondered, that Substack has refused to censor views they don’t like?

I tend to side with Mill: free speech matters — and “free” means allowing for views I might find objectionable. If I’ve learned one thing from this course, it’s humility. The breadth of human experience is rich, deep, and diverse. There are many paths to truth — and blind alleys, too.

And here we get back to emergence. Darwin’s idea was powerful because it explained how order — in this case, the balanced relationship between creatures and their environments — emerges without top-down controllers. This was Mill’s goal as well: enabling societies and individuals to evolve and prosper with minimal coercion. Rather than natural selection, his means was acting and speaking freely, within reasonable bounds.

Does that mean anything goes? No. As Mill suggested, speech that incites harm is out of bounds. That might include what we now call “hate” speech, a category he wouldn’t have recognized. (“Hate” speech can be tricky, since those in power will look to control discourse by defining what’s hateful.)

Is Mill’s approach still valid? After all, he lived before mass media or the internet. (One of the pleasures of watching ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN in 2025 is seeing reporters scrambling to do their information-centric jobs using only rotary phones, steno pads, and mechanical typewriters.)

Our words and actions have wider reach today than they would’ve in the 19th century. Today, where to draw the line on acceptable speech is a tricky question that evokes Popper’s paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance, especially toward those who refuse rational discourse, can undermine tolerance itself.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, my main progress from a tooling perspective might seem relatively superficial: I installed a couple of plugins that changed Obsidian’s user interface to make it more pleasant and usable.

First, I activated Minimal Theme. I’m using it primarily to color-code my vaults: green for my Slipbox vault, where I explore readings and such, and blue for my Projects vault, where I keep client stuff. The tinted header lets me see at a glance which vault I’m in.

The second plugin, Notebook Navigator, is more impactful. It changes how I navigate notes in both vaults. Rather than present a traditional file-folder panel, it offers a customizable “flat” pane that lists all notes in a way that highlights relevant information (such as differentiating different kinds of notes.)

Although these are primarily cosmetic changes, they’ve transformed my Obsidian experience. I’m finding the new UI much more pleasant to work with, which is making time spent in my knowledge garden much more pleasurable. Big win!

Up Next

We’re entering the last week of the course’s third quarter. Gioia recommends a wide assortment of readings: selected poems by Emily Dickinson, Poe’s The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and chapter one of Moby Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, chapter’s 1–6 of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Whitman’s Song of Myself. Whew!

I’ve already read all of these with the exception of the works by Poe. I’ll tackle these two and might revisit Walden. But I might also make space this week for something completely different — I haven’t yet decided what. (But it likely won’t be more verse!)

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

There are two reasons to write: to perform or to think. AI can help with both, but can also undermine them. Understanding which you’re doing will help you use AI more effectively.

The distinction isn’t new. Aristotle explored rhetoric as a distinct mode of communication, and “notes-to-self” also have a long history. More recently, neuroscientists have done influential research on how things in our environments extend our minds.

I won’t go into any of that here. Instead, this post aims to give you practical suggestions. Before we get into it, note I’m using writing as a verb. You’ll have “a writing” when done, but here we’re focused on the process of writing.

Performative writing

The first kind of writing we’ll examine is what I call performative. This is when you aim for words to perform a specific function involving other people. Often, that entails persuading them, but it can also be helping them understand something.

Examples include:

• An paper meant to present research results

• A syllabus meant to tell students what they can expect to learn in a course

• A press release meant to promote a new product

• A blog post meant to build your new consultancy’s pipeline

• A business proposal meant to close a sale

• An email meant to convince someone to attend your workshop

• Social media posts meant to increase your status

Because the goal is moving or informing others, this writing must be carefully crafted: the final outcome matters. The text tends to be “fixed”: once published, it’s not often changed much. For example, news media and journals publish retractions and corrections when new facts arise.

Cognitive writing

Cognitive writing is in some ways the opposite. Rather than writing for others, you’re writing for yourself. Your focus isn’t on producing a “finished” text but on thinking through writing.

There are three primary reasons to use cognitive writing:

• To hash out ideas

• To remember things

• To pay attention

Grokking this takes a bit of unpacking. You don’t think exclusively with your brain. Instead, thinking happens in a system that includes your brain, your body, and the world around you.

The word processor or notebook become parts of your “cognitive apparatus”: a means for thinking. The text lets you externalize and develop ideas; the “final” outcome is merely a record that thinking happened.

(Look up the extended mind thesis or read my book Duly Noted for more.)

Cognitive writing can take many forms:

• Journal entries

• Research notes

• Outlines and mind maps

• Early post drafts (such as I’m writing now)

• Meeting notes

• Creative writing exercises

As letters, words, and sentences pop out of your fingers and into the world, a feedback loop develops: the words and doodles suggest new ideas; you write those down, and they, too suggest new ideas.

So while performative writing is often “fixed,” cognitive writing is meant to evolve. It’s only done when you walk away — which you must do once you’ve sorted out your ideas or are ready to share them.

Which brings us to the fact that…

Much actual writing includes both kinds

All performative writing projects entails some cognitive writing. For example, consider this post. I shared it to perform several functions, such as teaching an important concept and bringing attention to my book. But first, I had to think about what I’d write.

To do this, I spent time noodling in Obsidian. I started my notes with a vague idea: that there’s a distinction between the kind of writing one does for oneself vs. others. I revisited my notes on extended mind theory and did some additional research, taking new notes along the way.

I hashed out the story through several drafts. I tried different phrases and experimented with moving stuff around. None of it was fit for sharing — it was messy and only made sense to me at the moment. (It may not if I returned to it in a few months!)

When I decided to share the post, I had to clean it up all this stuff. That required shifting into performative mode. I still did it in Obsidian, but changed how I went about it and what I focused on — and what I asked my AI assistants to focus on.

When to use AI

Which brings me to the main point of this post: AIs can help with both kinds of writing, but how you use it will differ depending on the mode you’re in. Let’s uncover how AIs can help in either case.

For performative writing, AI shines at:

• Editing texts

• Suggesting improvements

• Allowing you to see your ideas from others’ perspectives

• Improving structure and flow

Think of it like working with an editor. For two of my books, I worked with a fabulous editor named Marta. ChatGPT won’t replace her, but it can offer other kinds of valuable editorial suggestions.

For example, an AI can catch embarrassing mistakes and make texts more compelling and readable. But beware: given their statistical underpinnings, LLMs tend to produce middlebrow results. Accepting their changes uncritically will turn your writing bland and generic.

Yes, you want your texts to be clear. But you also want them to be memorable, and for the right reasons. Readers can smell AI-generated text as easily as they spot AI-generated images. If you use AI as an editor, do the final pass yourself to preserve your intent, style, and tone of voice.

Using LLMs for cognitive writing is trickier, because you won’t get the main benefits of thinking — the pleasure of exploring, developing, and internalizing an idea — if an AI does it for you. That said, LLMs can help in this stage as well.

For cognitive writing, AI excels at:

• Translating texts from a different language

• Suggesting related concepts you might have missed

• Exploring different directions

• Researching ideas more deeply

• Looking for prior art that substantiates or negates your theses

• Steelmaning your ideas (this is especially useful!)

Many people use AIs to transcribe meetings. I prefer to take notes by hand. AIs can accurately capture what was said, but they won’t internalize the conversation for you. And scribbling notes isn’t just a way to get a transcript: it’s also a way to be more present.

AI doesn’t obviate the need for writing

We write for different reasons. AI can help with some and hurt with others. If you’re looking to share your work, AI can help you produce more effective texts — as long as you’re still the one driving. And you must be even more careful with AIs when writing to think.

Some things you just can’t delegate. You can’t have others think or learn on your behalf any more than you can ask them to use the toilet for you. If you’re writing to think, ensure you’re actually thinking. AI can augment your mind, but shouldn’t replace it.

Both performative and cognitive writing require thinking, but thinking is the explicit purpose of the latter. Knowing why you’re writing will help you use it appropriately — and it starts with understanding the difference between writing for sharing and writing for thinking.

A few prompt suggestions

For performative writing:

• Ask for general improvements: e.g., grammar, spelling, flow

• Ask for audience-specific feedback

• Ask LLMs to preserve your style and tone of voice

• Include examples of your writing

Example:

Read this from the perspective of a chief marketing officer. What stands out? What’s missing?

For cognitive writing:

• Ask for what might be missing

• Ask for factual errors or inconsistencies

• Ask for followup research on things it might uncover

• Tell the LLM explicitly to not to correct your copy

Example:

Give me feedback on the ideas in this post. What am I missing? What is flowing well and what isn’t? Don’t offer to rewrite my copy — only suggest ideas for improvement. Be succinct.

This post first appeared on my blog.

Readings

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners from 1813. It tells the story of the Bennet family in the English countryside. The five Bennet sisters are of marriageable age. And marriage was critical: their family home is entailed to a cousin, Mr. Collins.

Two wealthy bachelors — Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy — come to the neighborhood. At a ball, Bingley is smitten with Jane, the oldest Bennet sister. Darcy says mean things about Elizabeth, the second-oldest. Having overheard him, she starts disliking him.

Another young man, Mr. Wickham, comes to the neighborhood with his regiment. He confides in Elizabeth that Darcy has wronged him, increasing her dislike. She develops a strong prejudice towards Darcy, who she sees as proud and haughty.

Darcy and Bingley leave in a hurry. Jane is heartbroken. Elizabeth suspects Bingley’s sister nudged him away from marrying Jane, who lacks their connections and wealth. But eventually, Elizabeth realizes that Darcy himself instigated the separation. Her dislike grows.

So she’s surprised when Darcy asks for her hand in marriage. She rejects him, confronting him with how he’s wronged her sister and Wickham. In response, Darcy writes a letter explaining his actions. He admits to separating Bingley from Jane, but he thought she didn’t care for his friend.

The Wickham story is more complicated. Darcy explains that Wickham is a character of ill repute. Darcy tried helping him, but he repeatedly made poor choices, including trying to elope with Darcy’s fifteen-year-old sister Georgiana to get at her money.

Elizabeth starts softening toward Darcy. Just then, to everyone’s surprise, Lydia — the youngest Bennet — elopes with Wickham. To avoid the scandal — and unbeknownst to the Bennets — Darcy tracks down the fugitives, settles Wickham’s debts, and discreetly compels him to marry Lydia.

Elizabeth is bowled over. Darcy subtly reacquaints Bingley with Jane, who accepts his proposal of marriage. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth again and she accepts this time, despite (and ironically, because of) the opposition of his wealthy aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Audiovisual

Music: Ella Fitzgerald singing classics from the American songbook: music by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern. I own both the Fitzgerald/Porter collection and the Berlin highlights on CD. I hadn’t heard the Kern, but of course these songs are very familiar.

Arts: textile arts. Even though this is among the most ancient of artisanal crafts, the article Gioia recommended focuses on contemporary artists. Some of their works are extraordinary.

Cinema: Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS (1935), a classic spy action adventure film. The seeds for later Hitchcock films are all here: the cool blonde, the MacGuffin, the wrongly accused hero on the run, the innovative camera moves. etc.

MURDER! MYSTERY! TREACHERY! ROMANCE! — yes, the mannerisms, hairdos, costumes, props, etc. look dated. But overall, this stands up well for a 90-year-old film. One particular shot took my breath away: the camera panned from a conversation inside a car to the vehicle speeding away. I had to pause and re-watch it. 1935!

Reflections

I had high expectations when I started reading Pride and Prejudice. Not only was this a famous work: it was also a narrative text after two weeks where I had to deal with verse (which I find slow going) and political/legal tracts (one of which upset me.) Alas, I found the novel boring at first: lots of 18th century drawing room conversations that felt like a lot of gossip.

So I asked ChatGPT for help:

I’m reading Pride and Prejudice and finding it boring. All this talk about whether Mr. X will like one or the other daughter feels gossipy and irrelevant.

Why is this novel considered important? How can I become more engaged with the story? Why should I care?

ChatGPT’s answer helped. It suggested four things to look for:

1. Social stakes: in the Bennet’s world, failing to marry into wealth meant being cast into poverty. These girls and their mother weren’t just romantics: their lifestyles were on the line.

2. Satire of social norms: Austen wasn’t merely observing the situation, she was mocking it. (ChatGPT used The Office as a contemporary analogy.)

3. Character psychology: Elizabeth Bennet is one of the first modern protagonists in literature. The novel traces her psychological shift from disliking Darcy to loving him.

4. Ironic language: Austen uses irony throughout to drive her points while remaining superficially engaging.

These were all important points I would’ve likely missed without this introduction, and they led me to see the story differently. The irony was evident from the novel’s famous opening line (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and the character of Mrs. Bennet. But lacking context, I’d started without understanding what was at stake for this family.

With this in mind, this novel covers important ground. We might not follow the same customs today, but social contexts are still critical to our interactions. In a world where social media exists, it’s easier than ever to misinterpret people’s motivations and character. We parse others’ actions through prejudices as much — if not more — than the Bennets did.

Much of the intent you attribute to others might be in your mind. Missing the full picture, you fill in blanks with assumptions that lead you to misinterpret their character. This, in turn, leads to you make potentially catastrophic mistakes.

Notes on Note-taking

Besides using ChatGPT to contextualize the novel, this week I also experimented with new AI tools.

I’ve written before about my normal workflow when writing these notes:

1. Capture my thoughts on the text in a new note in Obsidian

2. Have GPT review those thoughts to point out what I might’ve gotten wrong

3. Tweak my notes based on that feedback

4. Clean up notes for the public version I share here

I’ve gone about steps 1–3 by copying-pasting text between Obsidian and ChatGPT and by using the Text Generator plugin to invoke GPT within the Obsidian note itself. But it’d been a while since I reviewed the state of Obsidian plugins. Perhaps there was something new out there that could expedite the process.

This search led me to (the unfortunately named) Copilot plugin, which integrates LLMs more deeply with Obsidian. Copilot not only lets me inject notes into the chat context directly, but also adds agentic capabilities such as searching the web and creating or editing notes directly. I can pick from several LLMs, including ones running locally on my MacBook Pro.

While I’m just getting started, the possibilities are exciting. The ability to inject vault notes into the context is powerful: my days copying-pasting stuff to ChatGPT might be over. I may move much of my writing to Obsidian, further cementing its central role in my knowledge garden. (I wrote this post there.)

Up Next

Again, we’re shifting gears: Gioia recommends John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and the first four chapters of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I haven’t read either, but just yesterday finished another book that referenced On Liberty, so it’s good timing.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

I’d already read two of them, but revisited them anyway. Another was unfamiliar, but clearly important. The fourth I knew only from reputation, and long dreaded. My dread was merited. Let’s dive in!

Readings

Gioia recommended four revolutionary texts while issuing a disclaimer:

All the works assigned during these 52 weeks are read to stir up our thinking, not to propagandize or impose compliance.

All four have been highly influential, but I suspect he wrote the disclaimer with one particularly in mind. The texts were:

• The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776)

• The U.S. Constitution (1789)

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft

• The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Guess which one I think is the odd one out? Let’s take them in chronologically.

The Declaration of Independence presents the American colonists’ justifications for seceding from Great Britain. It starts with a justification for issuing a justification at all:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The document then lists grievances: how the King failed to live up to his end of the social contract. But before doing so, a long paragraph stipulates axiomatic principles. The most famous is its opening line:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Much hinges on the meaning of the capitalized words: Creator, Rights, Life, Liberty, and Happiness. The Declaration doesn’t go there; it assumes the audience would understand. Educated Enlightenment thinkers likely would.

That’s a thread running through all four texts: they must be evaluated by their impact and by considering the context they addressed. The Declaration explicitly sets the context: Britain did us wrong; we want out.

On to the next logical step. Once independent, the new society needed rules. Enter the Constitution of the United States.

It’s the rare exciting legal document: the former colonists — now founders — laid down rules for a new Republic. They stipulated three distinct yet interrelated governance entities: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

The branches seemed carefully designed to balance not just each other but also to resolve the perennial tension between freedom and control to enable emergent behavior. The founders even included rules to amend the rules. Systems thinkers avant la lettre!

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a revolutionary document of a different nature. Wollstonecraft was a proto-feminist writing in the time of the French Revolution and its ensuing upheavals.

She observed that (non-physical) differences between women and men are due less to inherent characteristics than in their different educations. Women should be educated on par with men — and not just for their benefit, but for society’s well-being as a whole.

We take this idea for granted today. But again, we must read these texts considering their original context. The Vindication must’ve been electrifying in its time: Wollstonecraft had a large impact on subsequent feminists.

And now we come to what I consider the problematic document, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Commissioned by the Communist League, a small radical group, it’s become one of the world’s most influential political documents.

The Manifesto laid down Marx and Engels’s worldview. They understood human history as a sequence of struggles between oppressors and oppressed. This distinction manifested in different forms over time, but the Manifesto focused on the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, or workers they employed.

Marx and Engels reduced the relationship between social classes to exploitation and conflict, leaving no room for cooperation through mutual interest. Given this reductive worldview, they called for proletarians to overthrow the bourgeoisie and take control of society. Among other things, they called for eradicating private property (which they clarified to mean society’s productive assets and not personal possessions.)

In effect, control of factories, land, and capital would be transferred to the state. Once this happened, the distinction between classes would vanish. Of course, the bourgeoisie wouldn’t give up willingly, so Marx and Engels prescribed (and advocated) violent revolution, which they saw as inevitable.

Again, context matters. The Manifesto appeared at a time of great suffering wrought by industrialization: child labor, unsustainable working hours, exploitative wages, etc. Marx and Engels’s program sought to wipe the slate clean and start over under more just conditions. One can see the appeal: they were addressing real injustices and promising alluring solutions with flair.

But we know how these ideas play out. In practice, societies that adopted this worldview often produced some of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rather than freeing people, they entrenched new forms of exploitation.

Audiovisual

Music: Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Alison Krauss, and Ralph Stanley. I’d heard bluegrass before, but was only familiar with Krauss’s work with Robert Plant. As usual, Apple Music’s artist essentials proved… essential.

Arts: Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer.

I’ve paid less attention to many of the painters recommended during this third stage of the course. Nothing this week changed that. I was most familiar with O’Keeffe, but have always thought her work overrated.

Cinema: I’m still on a Herzog bender. This week, I watched his first feature with Klaus Kinski, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972).

Kinski plays Lope de Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador who leads a mutiny while floating down the Amazon in search for El Dorado. Death and madness follow.

Besides his performance, I was blown away by the soundtrack, including Popol Vuh’s music and the choice to make arrows completely silent. Coupled with the setting, it’s powerful cinema. My 13-year-old son was upset that (spoiler!) Aguirre didn’t get his comeuppance. (But didn’t he?)

Reflections

This week, I’ll likely antagonize some of my friends who have internalized a Marxist worldview, perhaps unwittingly. One needn’t be a Communist to believe social relations boil down to power struggles between oppressors and oppressed or use explicitly Marxist language. (E.g., the ubiquitous phrase “late-stage capitalism.”)

Reality is never as simple as populists make it out. But simplistic takes are often the ones that gain traction. If nothing else, Marx and Engels were brilliant rhetoricians. The oppressor-oppressed distinction keeps gaining adherents long after we moved on from “dark satanic mills.” Their ideology’s moral clarity and promise of liberation are its primary draws.

But as a Latin American, I’ve witnessed firsthand the suffering and destruction wrought by revolutionaries who, inspired by Marxism, believed they could set the world to rights in one blow. Invariably, their “new” orders merely replaced one set of tyrants with another while irreparably breaking things. As I’ve said many times before, you can’t violate Gall’s law.

The U.S. Constitution was developed by pragmatists — whose necks had been literally on the line — through a process of grueling compromise. The result was imperfect, but at least it included means for continual improvement. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman also argued for generative social change emphasizing mutual benefit.

In contrast, the Communist Manifesto is the product of thinkers far removed from the realities of governance, yet presented as a definitive prescription based on a definitive read of history. And their prescription is explicitly violent. Symbiosis is not on offer: for Marx and Engels, only the complete obliteration of the opposition will do.

Supporters often justify these ideas — despite real-world evidence — by stating (rightly) that they’ve never been implemented as intended. But this is as much the fault of the ideas as of the tyrants who’ve used them to exploit millions. The vision is ultimately unrealizable.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Marx and Engels’s work is vast; I’ve only sampled this one document. But what a document! — remarkable for its oversimplifications, reductivism, and hostility. And even though it addressed cruel and unjust conditions, it wrought more suffering than the ills it sought to cure.

As a catalyst of social change, the Communist Manifesto is driven by a different spirit than the Dhammapada and the Christian Gospels, which I read earlier this year. Instead of prescribing better living through personal and social development, cooperation, and compassion, it channels (justifiable) grievance into perpetual conflict. Jesus said, “you will know them by their fruits.” Marxism’s fruits have been bitter indeed.

Notes on Note-taking

Believe it or not, my original reaction to the Communist Manifesto was even stronger than what you read above. While passionate, my first take lacked nuance. (Ironically, since that’s part of what I disliked about the Manifesto.)

So I asked ChatGPT to steelman my essay. I fed it an initial draft, asking where it fell short. Its replies helped tone down my rhetorical flourishes and ground the critique. As always, I asked ChatGPT to not rewrite my copy. Instead, I wanted bullet points for proposed improvements and corrections.

Eventually, I issued the following prompt:

Here’s the complete essay. Please help me see this through the lens of someone who might not be entirely aware of Marx and Engel’s ideas, but is nonetheless attracted to Marxism (perhaps unwittingly.) I don’t want to necessarily convince them, but I also don’t want this piece to be easily refuted. What could I improve?

[… essay]

This led to a series tweaks. The result is not as vitriolic as my initial version, which will certainly make it less “viral.” But I think it’s more fair, and it helped me correct misunderstandings I had when reading the text. (Influenced perhaps by my strong bias against this ideology.)

Of course, someone who knows more about Marxism will still find objections with my take. But I’ve learned more through this dialogue with ChatGPT than if I’d just read the text and kept my opinions to myself.

Up Next

Gioia suggests Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice — a relief after this week’s heavy reading.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

Readings

Gioia recommended reading poems by Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Novalis, and Hölderlin. Rather than try to hunt them down online, I bought an ebook of The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, an anthology that groups poems by categories:

1. Romantic Hallmarks

2. Narratives of Love

3. Romantic Solitude, Suffering and Endurance

4. Ennobling Interchange: Man and Nature

5. Romantic Odes

6. Romantic Lyric and Song

7. The Romantic Sonnet

8. The Gothic and Surreal

9. Romantic Comedy and Satire

10. Protest and Politics

11. Poets in Relationship

12. On Poets and Poetry

A wide range — and a big book! I didn’t attempt a comprehensive read-through, going instead for a few well-known poems and some that caught my eye. Here’s what I read:

• Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• To Autumn by John Keats

• To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood

• The Ruined Cottage by William Wordsworth

• Love by Coleridge

• The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats

• Juan and Haidee by Lord Byron

• The Storm-Beat Maid by Joanna Baillie

• The Female Exile by Charlotte Smith

• Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake

• Excerpts from Songs of Innocence by Blake

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

My favorites were Juan and Haidee and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The former is part of a longer poem, Don Juan. I’d previously read the latter, given it’s the inspiration for Iron Maiden’s song of the same name.

A sailor tells his story to a hesitant wedding guest: while on a voyage, he recklessly kills an albatross. A curse descends on the ship: the wind stills and everything stops. Eventually, everyone onboard except him dies of thirst.

His path to redemption begins after he blesses a group of beautiful water snakes. The albatross — which was hung around his neck as a sign of guilt — drops into the water. The curse lifts, but he remains condemned to wander and retell the tale.

While I’m not into poetry, this poem felt like high mythology. The image of the shipmates hanging the albatross’ corpse on the mariner’s neck is a great metaphor for guilt. It’s become a common phrase for a guilty conscience or a deserved curse.

Audiovisual

Music: Beethoven’s 6th symphony (“Pastoral”) plus Chopin’s Nocturnes and Preludes. The pastoral symphony is meant as a “programmatic” work illustrating a sojourn in the countryside — a very “Romantic” theme.

These are extremely popular works; I’d heard them many times before. I considered FANTASIA as this week’s movie pick given it illustrates the Beethoven symphony, but I’ve also seen it several times and wanted to stake out new ground.

Arts: Paintings by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who Wikipedia says was “generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.” I’d seen Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (in a book cover?) but was otherwise unaware of his work.

His work echoes the Romanticist ethos, with its emphasis on nature and spirituality. But his influence waned toward the end of his life. His paintings of small solitary human figures against vast landscapes reminded me of Chinese landscape paintings.

Cinema: Sydney Lumet’s NETWORK (1976).

I usually only call out the director, but this film’s writer — Paddy Chayefsky — also deserves a mention. The movie is an astringent satire of the TV medium and the main ills affecting the U.S. in the mid-1970s. Much of it is in the script.

Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a news anchor for a fictitious TV network that’s trailing in the ratings. The network fires Beale and he announces the firing on-air, adding that he will commit suicide during his final broadcast.

At first, network executives panic — but soon they spot an opportunity. Beale’s antics increased ratings; powerplays among execs elevate him to a prominent position before eventually terminating him.

The gist: commercially produced television is a moral black hole. Company leadership will do anything for ratings, the consequences be damned. Why hasn’t this been remade with social media execs? Engagement, baby!

This wasn’t the only movie I saw this week. Herzog was still on my mind, so I watched several interviews on YouTube. I also checked out Les Blank’s BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982), his documentary about the making of FITZCARRALDO. Astonishing stuff.

Reflections

As I said above, I’m not big into verse — I much prefer prose. (And non-fiction, especially.) That said, an education isn’t always about digging into the things you already like — stretching is part of the point of doing something like this crash course.

Poetry is a more effective medium for mythologizing. The story of the ancient mariner wouldn’t be as effective if told in prose. For me, the language in these works evoked imagery and emotions that would be hard to convey otherwise.

The problem is that I find them hard to follow. I tend to read relatively fast, often scanning texts as I go. Verse requires a slower pace and more methodical reading than I’m used to. As a result, I often get the images but miss the broader arc of the story.

Of all the poems I read this week, I found the Don Juan excerpt and The Rime relatively easy to follow. But I was surprised at how difficult I found other works — even some that I was familiar with. (E.g., Kubla Khan, which inspired another favorite rock song: Rush’s Xanadu.)

These songs speak of Romanticism’s enduring influence; the poems they’re based on clearly tap into deep mythological themes.

Notes on Note-taking

As I’ve done in previous weeks, I asked ChatGPT for help — in this case, after reading, since I wanted to try to make sense of the poems myself. Here’s ChatGPT’s summary of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the story of a sailor who, after recklessly killing an albatross, brings a curse upon himself and his shipmates. The crew suffers under supernatural torments until all die but him, leaving him to wander alone. His redemption begins when he blesses the beauty of sea creatures, which lifts the curse, though he remains condemned to wander the world retelling his tale as a warning.

It’s a story of guilt, punishment, and partial redemption — with strong themes of reverence for nature, the spiritual consequences of human actions, and the power of storytelling.

Would you like me to also give you a high-level outline of the poem’s seven parts, so you can track how the narrative unfolds?

While I’d gotten the gist, ChatGPT gave me better words to express my thoughts. (E.g., describing the killing of the albatross as “reckless.”) I’m always wary of adopting what I get from LLMs verbatim, but in this case that seemed like the perfect word.

Note the question at the end. The LLM providers are obviously playing the engagement game as well. I wonder if one day there will be a movie like NETWORK about the OpenAIs of the world?

On another note, I remain awed at the ability to access all these works — movies, symphonies, poems, paintings — on an iPad. It’s never been easier to undertake a humanities crash course like this one. We live in amazing times!

Up Next

We’re heading into works with obvious contemporary political relevance. Gioia recommends The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I’ve read the first two before, but not the others.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post first appeared on my blog.

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Readings

The Sorrows of Young Werther was an important work in the Sturm und Drang(“storm and stress”) movement that swept through the German literary and arts scenes in the 18th Century, ushering the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic movement.

It’s presented as a series of letters from the young protagonist (Werther) to his friend Wilhelm describing his sojourn in the countryside. There, he falls in love with a young — and already engaged — woman named Lotte. As his unrequited love deepens, he becomes more frustrated.

Eventually, he leaves for a diplomatic post. But rather than alleviate his suffering, he finds bureaucratic frustrations and humiliation because of class differences. He quits the job, and returns to visiting Lotte and her fiancée Albert. But eventually, Lotte asks that he stop.

In despair, Werther decides to end his life. He borrows Albert’s pistols, adding to the drama. The book concludes with an editorial note that frames the story by documenting Werther’s final days leading up to his suicide.

Although it’s grim subject matter, the story is told compellingly. The epistolary form brings us into the story: we are Wilhelm. There were times when I wished I could grab Werther by the lapels and shake him out of his daze.

Audiovisual

Music: Brahms’s symphonies 1—4. These are standard works in the Classical repertoire — the first symphony has long been a favorite of mine. This week, I gave a bit more time to the other three.

Arts: Sturm und Drang painting. I can see how it’s of a set with Werther, but I’m not a fan — in any medium. More on this below.

Cinema: Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO (1982) — an incredibly impressive meta-movie, considering how it was made.

In the early 20th century, Fitzcarraldo — an avid opera fan — pursues an unlikely get-rich-quick scheme to finance his dream of building an opera house in Iquitos, Peru. The scheme involves floating a 320-ton steamer up a tributary of the Amazon and hauling it over a hill to another tributary, where he’ll access unclaimed rubber groves.

He does it with the help of the indigenous people, who think of the ship (and the man) in mystical terms. But he gets more than he bargained for: after the revelry, the natives set the ship loose so it’ll float down the rapids on its own, overshooting the rubber groves. Having failed at his venture, Fitzcarraldo mortgages the ship hires an opera orchestra to play on its deck. So he gets his way, even if not as expected.

What’s impressive is that this is an “art mirrors life” movie: Herzog actually had the cast and crew haul a for-real 320-ton steamer up and down a remote hill in the Amazon. What we see on screen really happened: the scenes of the enormous boat being hauled up the jungle are real.

Reflections

I’d long wanted to watch FITZCARRALDO. This week’s focus on Sturm und Drang felt like the perfect timing. I couldn’t describe why at first, but there are parallels between the characters.

Both Werther and Fitzcarraldo were obsessed: the former with Lotte and the latter with opera. Their obsessions led them to extreme choices. And, Herzog, too, was obsessed — in his case, with making a movie about such a character by embodying their behavior.

All are romantic “heroes” pursuing personal dreams against formidable obstacles. Their responses are over the top: Werther, Fitzcarraldo, and Herzog go to unreasonable lengths. There are incredible behind-the-scenes stories about FITZCARRALDO. As Wikipedia puts it,

Herzog believed that no one had ever performed a similar feat in history, and likely never will again, calling himself “Conquistador of the Useless”.

Of course, there’s one major difference: while Werther and Fitzcarraldo failed, Herzog succeeded. FITZCARRALDO is quite an achievement! It’s impossible to look at the scenes of the ship being hauled over the mud and not be awed at the astonishing chutzpah — of both the character and its author.

That said, both Fitzcarraldo and Werther are despicable. They’re completely and corrosively self-absorbed. Werther is a whiner to boot: his suffering was entirely self-inflicted, self-reinforcing, and easily avoidable. As I said above, I felt several times like crossing into the book’s universe to talk some sense into the man.

But sense is the opposite of what these stories aim to illustrate and glorify. It’s alluring to contemplate people so uncompromisingly following their passions, no matter the consequences. In fiction, that is: I’d hate to be any of these characters (or their loved ones) IRL.

Notes on Note-taking

Over the last few weeks, I’ve settled on a note-taking pattern for the course. A day or two after finishing a book (or a movie,) I start a new note in Obsidian where I write down a brief summary of what it is about. I do this before Googling or asking ChatGPT.

A few months ago, I started a ChatGPT project for the crash course. I haven’t included any Project Files, but have set the following system prompt (or “Instructions”):

You are an expert tutor in literature, history, music, cinema, and more – in short, the humanities. I am in a year-long program to read through (and listen to and watch) the most important humanities works from across the world. You’ll provide summaries, pointers, and advice. Respond concisely but helpfully. Whenever possible, contextualize content by pointing out possible parallels with the modern day.

After writing down my summary, I’ll start a new chat in this ChatGPT project where I’ll tell the LLM that I’ve just finished reading the work. I share my summary and ask for feedback, specifying that I only want it to correct factual or emphasis errors and not new copy.

The point for me isn’t having well-crafted notes; it’s understanding. I want to do the writing myself, while having ChatGPT steer me whenever I get something wrong.

This week, I pasted summaries for both Werther and FITZCARRALDO. ChatGPT suggested minor tweaks, which I corrected in my Obsidian vault. Then, I asked for possible parallels between the two works. ChatGPT is great at such pattern matching tasks.

I’d picked this movie because I felt it’d complement the novel. ChatGPT helped me understand and articulate the gist of that feeling: both works embody the ethos of unreasonably pursuing passionate drives against overwhelming odds. I find it disagreeable — but that’s why we study the humanities: to envision other ways of being.

Up Next

Sturm und Drang led into Romanticism — and that’s where we’re heading next. Gioia recommends poetry by Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Novalis, Hölderlin, etc. I’ve bought a Penguin collection and will trudge through it as best I can. (As I’ve said before, I struggle with verse.)

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.