I genuinely had no understanding of the tsunami that was about to crash upon my account when I wrote that thread. The most peculiar thing I remember about that experience was that they take every admission of ignorance--even if it's only perceived--as a means to attack. I sent a tweet saying something along the lines of, "the only argument they are throwing at me is that I don't understand the difference between a parody and a satire"
I researched that for the thread so I was read up on my arguments. They were just throwing that accusation at me, but that didn't stop the masses leaping to the conclusion that I must've been an idiot. I got a million replies saying, "He doesn't understand the difference between a parody and a satire, lmao"
As if there had been a million English professors lurking on Twitter for that exact moment.
This article is right on the money. I wasn’t aware of your adventure, Mr. Young, but your comment here about your imbecilic critics did make me finally realize that seeing “lmao” at the end of a supposedly serious sentence is a really excellent marker for knuckle-dragging idiocy. You can’t unsee it, it’s that good!
I have to make a related point about poetry. There’s nothing girly about it. In many ways, it’s hyper masculine. Once women start dominating poetry, it becomes atrocious slop.
I can't help but be reminded of the shock i had on the ending of The Three Musketeers novel. They take the books main antagonist, a horrible and beautiful woman, across the border, proclaim her crimes and list exactly how she wronged every protagonist countless times throughout the novel, then judge her and carry out the sentence by hanging her and then beheading her.
It suddenly clicked for me why no film, TV or cartoon adaptation of this work ever bothered to show this part. It was not because it was too violent, but because it was too "icky" for a modern audience. It simply runs counter to everything modernity thought us to believe about women, therefore it can never be faithfully depicted. It must not be faithfully depicted.
The Three Musketeers was not even "deconstructed", it was deliberately turned into some childish story so that no one would bother to read the original book and see how dark it is. That is not to mention how the Victorians of the late 19th century censored the living shit out of the book to fit their cultural protestant sensibilities.
There is a yet a new sham Three Musketeers movie adaptation going on (currently on part 2), and it predictably humanizes this evil woman by changing every detail in the book to make her a victim of the patriarchy. The TV show 10 years ago did this as well, with complementary token black musketeers.
It seems prudish and subversive forces will never allow this great story to be told. It will forever remain "what they want it to be" rather than what it is. And as you say, normies don't have the patience to read a 800 page-long book from 1845, much less are equipped to understand it.
Every civilization must have goods it upholds and evils it rejects. The mark of a truly honest civilization would be to acknowledge the possibility of greatness in an evil work. Then it could censor what it finds objectionable without turning the objectionable into a farcical sanitization.
If the themes of such works as The Three Musketeers are truly so objectionable, then we shouldn't read or adapt them, and we certainly should not pretend they were something good. We should account them as having been great but evil.
But modern civilization cannot honestly admit that anything noteworthy has ever existed that was not a part of its own project.
The themes of the three musketeers are by no means evil. Unless you count bravado and sex as evil. It tells a story, it does not celebrate anything evil. When it was censored by British Protestants it was because of a prudish trend in Victorian England that took objection not with evil but with reality itself. the very same England that was completely libertine during the Georgian Epoch, and Puritan before during the Civil War era. These iconoclastic trends come and go. These censorships were still way less hypocritical and idiotic than modern day iconoclastic re-writes with its social propaganda, gender swaps and racial swaps.
Your last phrase is truly a great remark. People who think history is a linear progress will never stop using the present "consensus" to demonize past deeds. It is a horrible fate to be a person of such petty understanding, to think that the entire world is one happy march towards utopia.
As I read this lovely essay I kept thinking of all my fellow millennials and a few Gen X folks I know who LOVE to talk about their trivia knowledge and their trivia teams and trivia events. For years now, I’ve found it strange that so many seemingly educated people are proud of their knowledge of trivial things. It’s an odd flex, when you consider the whole history of Western Civilization and what knowledge was garnered and necessary for us to develop to this point. I have a sense that this pride in trivia is related to “book slop”. Maybe we’ll call it “knowledge slop”
Acedia is essentially not doing your duty and feeling a malaise because of it. So clearly wasting your time on knowledge of trivial things is wasteful versus spending them on your vocation and knowledge of Last Things
An excellent article. I too have noticed the cancer that is booktok. Most of female-oriented YA fiction is simply pornography. While literary pornography has always existed, the prevalence that we're seeing now is the product of a fundamentally broken culture and very lonely women. I do think that the promotion of "media literacy" is itself a mess as it confines the mind of the reader.
People should read more. I think that progressivism hates itself. That's why it's so good at producing constructivist fiction: Fiction like starship troopers designed to destroy but which ultimately builds a vision of a culture superior to our own listless and spiritless state.
One of the best novels I read last year was The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope. This contains a love-hexagon, and to my surprise, I was invested.
I soon realised why: each corner was torn between love and family obligations. Their internal feelings, though discussed, were secondary, and this made it a breath of fresh air.
The several love triangles in Phineas Finn also follow this same trajectory, and there is real tension when Madame Max offers the penniless Finn all of her wealth to re-start his Parliamentary Career (he quits over the issue of Irish tenants' rights), you're on tenterhooks as to whether he'll stick to the promise he made to Mary Flood Jones (which none of his London friends, Madame Max among them, know anything about).
That said, I highly recommend that you avoid Can You Forgive Her? at all costs. Here, Trollope writes a heroine who makes Tessa Durbeyfield seem like a paragon of decisiveness.
Did you read the unabridged Duke’s Children? The version as published has about 40,000 words cut out; scholars in the last couple decades have released a restored version based on his manuscript.
I believe it was an abridged edition. I found it on the shelf of my local Wetherspoons.
I currently have Framley Parsonage and Doctor Thorne on my shelf, waiting to be read.
As for Can You Forgive Her?, I did enjoy the subplots and all the scenes with Lady Glencora. I did The Duke’s Children straight after, and felt her loss.
Have you read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell?
Trollope posting!! I’m here for it!!! I just discovered him a couple years ago, and now consider myself a huge fan. He writes with such nuance, humor, subtlety, and yet with such moral clarity.
Can You Forgive Her (aka Can You Finish It) was the first book I read of his, and I *do* recommend it, firstly because the subplot with the wealthy widow and her suitors is hilarious, and secondly because it sets up the excellent Palliser series.
Thanks for this. As a Gen X'er, our liberal peers were more like Classical Liberals with irreverent, irreligious aesthetics. It too was performative and narcissistic, but you could argue with them and it was stimulating (though they still only saw through a relatively narrow lens). Where the supposed Liberal went is a narrow, dark place of anti-intellectual childishness. You have done a great job describing the indoctrination process with your own generation and it helps me understand the evolution a little more. I still don't understand why so many follow this narrow path but glad there seem to be enough of you who saw it and broke out.
I saw "the cook the thief his wife and her lover" from 1989 last night, which has become a cult classic in art house theaters. The "wife", Helen Mirren, bonding with the "lover" is consistent with this essay: if he isn't having sex with Mirren, he spends the entire movie reading. He doesn't even talk until about halfway into the movie. So while he's supposed to be metaphor for a revolutionary patriot, his only non-sexual action is to consume the written word... Literally.
Great essay. Your point about reconciling contradictions by redefining morality is a profound one, to me. Once you understand this is constantly done in our society (and mostly for the worse) it can become an anchor for your sanity.
Book slop is nothing new, and arguably, it was a lot worse in the past than it is today, when pulp is expected to compete with other forms of cheap entertainment.
The difference between the literary scene in the present and, say, George Orwell's time is that nothing actually good is being promoted. What changed was the deletion of good literature; slop always was and always will be a constant.
Wow! This was great! It goes a long way explaining how “well read” people are still pretty stupid and shallow.
I remember well the propaganda to read, watching PBS classic shows like Wishbone and Reading Rainbow. My elementary school classes were summoned to our campus libraries and regaled with the magic of reading (and recycling). I guess this worked with some people, but I mostly played video games, watched Simpson reruns, and read books that appealed to me at the time (usually classic dystopian stuff).
My literary awakening happened as I entered college, first to impress girls and then to sate my curiosity. I’ve since been a reader, though I was never the “child who read.”
It’s also interesting how the early readers tend to flame out before adulthood and never read after that. Harry Potter was always credited for getting kids to read, but fans I knew never really read much beyond that. I’m sure they’re avid Booktokkers now.
I never understood “media literacy,” even when I was required to take a course in it for my major in humanities. Maybe it’s a kind of indoctrination tool. My own conclusion was that this was a way for illiterate people to feel literate without reading. Basically “How to Sound Smart 101.”
Still, I think it gets even worse. I fear for the Zoomers. The generation gap between me (an old millennial) and them continues to grow, leaving me at a loss on how to reach them. I like that some might see the light like I did, but I know most of them probably won’t. Maybe you can offer some solutions in the next installment?
I genuinely had no understanding of the tsunami that was about to crash upon my account when I wrote that thread. The most peculiar thing I remember about that experience was that they take every admission of ignorance--even if it's only perceived--as a means to attack. I sent a tweet saying something along the lines of, "the only argument they are throwing at me is that I don't understand the difference between a parody and a satire"
I researched that for the thread so I was read up on my arguments. They were just throwing that accusation at me, but that didn't stop the masses leaping to the conclusion that I must've been an idiot. I got a million replies saying, "He doesn't understand the difference between a parody and a satire, lmao"
As if there had been a million English professors lurking on Twitter for that exact moment.
And even if that had been true--that had NOTHING to do with my argument.
This article is right on the money. I wasn’t aware of your adventure, Mr. Young, but your comment here about your imbecilic critics did make me finally realize that seeing “lmao” at the end of a supposedly serious sentence is a really excellent marker for knuckle-dragging idiocy. You can’t unsee it, it’s that good!
It's absolute state of culture. A narcisistic mess. I published an article similarly titled “Reconstructivist Fiction, Rebuilding Truth” examining the phenomena a while back: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/reconstructivist-fiction-rebuilding
Give me a restack on it if you feel like, I published it when my substack barely had 100 subscribers, so not many people have seen it.
It vexes me as a teacher when I hear people say things like, “boys can’t sit still for long and read.” Who do you think used to write everything!?
I have to make a related point about poetry. There’s nothing girly about it. In many ways, it’s hyper masculine. Once women start dominating poetry, it becomes atrocious slop.
I am touching on poetry in the last part
"RAGE: Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon--
The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles."
Yeah, pretty macho.
(What translation is that?)
Lombardo.
Wow, that moves. I'll look into it. Thanks!
BS
I personally think that's the point. They refuse to write books for boys so they can have literature to themselves.
I can't help but be reminded of the shock i had on the ending of The Three Musketeers novel. They take the books main antagonist, a horrible and beautiful woman, across the border, proclaim her crimes and list exactly how she wronged every protagonist countless times throughout the novel, then judge her and carry out the sentence by hanging her and then beheading her.
It suddenly clicked for me why no film, TV or cartoon adaptation of this work ever bothered to show this part. It was not because it was too violent, but because it was too "icky" for a modern audience. It simply runs counter to everything modernity thought us to believe about women, therefore it can never be faithfully depicted. It must not be faithfully depicted.
The Three Musketeers was not even "deconstructed", it was deliberately turned into some childish story so that no one would bother to read the original book and see how dark it is. That is not to mention how the Victorians of the late 19th century censored the living shit out of the book to fit their cultural protestant sensibilities.
There is a yet a new sham Three Musketeers movie adaptation going on (currently on part 2), and it predictably humanizes this evil woman by changing every detail in the book to make her a victim of the patriarchy. The TV show 10 years ago did this as well, with complementary token black musketeers.
It seems prudish and subversive forces will never allow this great story to be told. It will forever remain "what they want it to be" rather than what it is. And as you say, normies don't have the patience to read a 800 page-long book from 1845, much less are equipped to understand it.
Every civilization must have goods it upholds and evils it rejects. The mark of a truly honest civilization would be to acknowledge the possibility of greatness in an evil work. Then it could censor what it finds objectionable without turning the objectionable into a farcical sanitization.
If the themes of such works as The Three Musketeers are truly so objectionable, then we shouldn't read or adapt them, and we certainly should not pretend they were something good. We should account them as having been great but evil.
But modern civilization cannot honestly admit that anything noteworthy has ever existed that was not a part of its own project.
The themes of the three musketeers are by no means evil. Unless you count bravado and sex as evil. It tells a story, it does not celebrate anything evil. When it was censored by British Protestants it was because of a prudish trend in Victorian England that took objection not with evil but with reality itself. the very same England that was completely libertine during the Georgian Epoch, and Puritan before during the Civil War era. These iconoclastic trends come and go. These censorships were still way less hypocritical and idiotic than modern day iconoclastic re-writes with its social propaganda, gender swaps and racial swaps.
Your last phrase is truly a great remark. People who think history is a linear progress will never stop using the present "consensus" to demonize past deeds. It is a horrible fate to be a person of such petty understanding, to think that the entire world is one happy march towards utopia.
As I read this lovely essay I kept thinking of all my fellow millennials and a few Gen X folks I know who LOVE to talk about their trivia knowledge and their trivia teams and trivia events. For years now, I’ve found it strange that so many seemingly educated people are proud of their knowledge of trivial things. It’s an odd flex, when you consider the whole history of Western Civilization and what knowledge was garnered and necessary for us to develop to this point. I have a sense that this pride in trivia is related to “book slop”. Maybe we’ll call it “knowledge slop”
I used to be a trivia guy myself until I realized that it’s a form of acedia. Shows how hollow people are now a days
Great observation, can you expound on this?
Acedia is essentially not doing your duty and feeling a malaise because of it. So clearly wasting your time on knowledge of trivial things is wasteful versus spending them on your vocation and knowledge of Last Things
"Fahrenheit 451" speaks of this.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the lib fixation on "banned books"
Yep, “banned books” that are prominently displayed in every bookstore and library, that have been part of the curriculum for decades.
A display of truly banned books would make peoples’ heads explode.
You mean really great books like To Kill a Mockingbird. The ones that are so threatening to name calling fools?
An excellent article. I too have noticed the cancer that is booktok. Most of female-oriented YA fiction is simply pornography. While literary pornography has always existed, the prevalence that we're seeing now is the product of a fundamentally broken culture and very lonely women. I do think that the promotion of "media literacy" is itself a mess as it confines the mind of the reader.
People should read more. I think that progressivism hates itself. That's why it's so good at producing constructivist fiction: Fiction like starship troopers designed to destroy but which ultimately builds a vision of a culture superior to our own listless and spiritless state.
I published an article similarly titled not long ago: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/reconstructivist-fiction-rebuilding Give it a look if you're interested.
There are many books in the library of the iterators on the virtues of the empire of mankind please read any and many!
Fantastic article, Dave. Can't wait for part 2.
When Vox Day of all people can produce work that blows mainstream “highly accredited” writers out of the water, something has gone horrifically wrong.
Soon even old tumblr fanfictions will be considered high art in comparison.
Thank you for this. Very insightful.
One of the best novels I read last year was The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope. This contains a love-hexagon, and to my surprise, I was invested.
I soon realised why: each corner was torn between love and family obligations. Their internal feelings, though discussed, were secondary, and this made it a breath of fresh air.
The several love triangles in Phineas Finn also follow this same trajectory, and there is real tension when Madame Max offers the penniless Finn all of her wealth to re-start his Parliamentary Career (he quits over the issue of Irish tenants' rights), you're on tenterhooks as to whether he'll stick to the promise he made to Mary Flood Jones (which none of his London friends, Madame Max among them, know anything about).
That said, I highly recommend that you avoid Can You Forgive Her? at all costs. Here, Trollope writes a heroine who makes Tessa Durbeyfield seem like a paragon of decisiveness.
Did you read the unabridged Duke’s Children? The version as published has about 40,000 words cut out; scholars in the last couple decades have released a restored version based on his manuscript.
I believe it was an abridged edition. I found it on the shelf of my local Wetherspoons.
I currently have Framley Parsonage and Doctor Thorne on my shelf, waiting to be read.
As for Can You Forgive Her?, I did enjoy the subplots and all the scenes with Lady Glencora. I did The Duke’s Children straight after, and felt her loss.
Have you read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell?
You might like it.
Trollope posting!! I’m here for it!!! I just discovered him a couple years ago, and now consider myself a huge fan. He writes with such nuance, humor, subtlety, and yet with such moral clarity.
Can You Forgive Her (aka Can You Finish It) was the first book I read of his, and I *do* recommend it, firstly because the subplot with the wealthy widow and her suitors is hilarious, and secondly because it sets up the excellent Palliser series.
Thanks for this. As a Gen X'er, our liberal peers were more like Classical Liberals with irreverent, irreligious aesthetics. It too was performative and narcissistic, but you could argue with them and it was stimulating (though they still only saw through a relatively narrow lens). Where the supposed Liberal went is a narrow, dark place of anti-intellectual childishness. You have done a great job describing the indoctrination process with your own generation and it helps me understand the evolution a little more. I still don't understand why so many follow this narrow path but glad there seem to be enough of you who saw it and broke out.
I saw "the cook the thief his wife and her lover" from 1989 last night, which has become a cult classic in art house theaters. The "wife", Helen Mirren, bonding with the "lover" is consistent with this essay: if he isn't having sex with Mirren, he spends the entire movie reading. He doesn't even talk until about halfway into the movie. So while he's supposed to be metaphor for a revolutionary patriot, his only non-sexual action is to consume the written word... Literally.
Great essay. Your point about reconciling contradictions by redefining morality is a profound one, to me. Once you understand this is constantly done in our society (and mostly for the worse) it can become an anchor for your sanity.
Book slop is nothing new, and arguably, it was a lot worse in the past than it is today, when pulp is expected to compete with other forms of cheap entertainment.
The difference between the literary scene in the present and, say, George Orwell's time is that nothing actually good is being promoted. What changed was the deletion of good literature; slop always was and always will be a constant.
Wow! This was great! It goes a long way explaining how “well read” people are still pretty stupid and shallow.
I remember well the propaganda to read, watching PBS classic shows like Wishbone and Reading Rainbow. My elementary school classes were summoned to our campus libraries and regaled with the magic of reading (and recycling). I guess this worked with some people, but I mostly played video games, watched Simpson reruns, and read books that appealed to me at the time (usually classic dystopian stuff).
My literary awakening happened as I entered college, first to impress girls and then to sate my curiosity. I’ve since been a reader, though I was never the “child who read.”
It’s also interesting how the early readers tend to flame out before adulthood and never read after that. Harry Potter was always credited for getting kids to read, but fans I knew never really read much beyond that. I’m sure they’re avid Booktokkers now.
I never understood “media literacy,” even when I was required to take a course in it for my major in humanities. Maybe it’s a kind of indoctrination tool. My own conclusion was that this was a way for illiterate people to feel literate without reading. Basically “How to Sound Smart 101.”
Still, I think it gets even worse. I fear for the Zoomers. The generation gap between me (an old millennial) and them continues to grow, leaving me at a loss on how to reach them. I like that some might see the light like I did, but I know most of them probably won’t. Maybe you can offer some solutions in the next installment?
The neglected difference between "much read" & "well read"