Summer Reading (and Misreading)

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
Today, it’s our annual summer mis-reading show.

Josh Landy
We’re taking a step back from the bookshelves to ask whether there’s a right way or at least a smarter way to read sophisticated fiction.

Ken Taylor
Later in the program, we’ll talk to Maryanne Wolf from UCLA, author of “Proust and the Squid” about the neuroscience of reading.

Josh Landy
We’ll also ask Thomas Pavel from the University of Chicago about how genre informs the way we read and misread works of fiction.

Ken Taylor
And we’ll talk to one of our featured bloggers, the philosopher Antonia Peacocke, about what she calls “reader’s block.”

Josh Landy
But to get us started, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Ninna Gaensler-Debs, to find out how we can read our way to better forms of attention. She files this report.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Open up almost any publication between June and August and you’re likely to see summer reading recommendations, from frothy romance novels to thrillers to thick biographies. It turns out that this concept that summer is a great time to read has been around for over 100 years, and is tied to another idea that came about around the same time: vacation. Before the 19th century, it was mostly the wealthy who could afford to go and get aways. But after world war one vacation became more available to American middle and working class people. A postwar boom and the travel-related industry started to flourish, oil companies, car companies and motels. At the same time, progressive employers started to be persuaded that giving their workers time off would lead to better and more efficient work. More holidays meant more time for people to read. And now summer reading is a firmly established tradition.

Jenny Odell
If something’s interesting to me, I actually have a hard time not reading.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
While she likes the idea of time to read, artist and writer Jenny Odell rejects the concept that we should think of our time in terms of maximizing productivity. And so she recently wrote a book called “How to do Nothing,” and tried to do two things. First, to critique technology, mainly social media, and the financial incentives, those companies have to keep you anxiously engaged.

Jenny Odell
And then two was my interest in bio regionalism, and coming to inhabit a place more thoughtfully kind of in more detail to feel like you’re kind of part of something. So it’s kind of my invitation to the reader to kind of wander away in a similar direction.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Jenny’s book was one of my favorites this spring. So I decided to ask her for some of her summer reading recommendations, books that aren’t necessarily about taking you to a far off place, but about looking at where you are now with a new perspective.

Jenny Odell
They were all kind of books that set me on a path toward discovering some kind of segment of my physical environment that I turned out was very ignorant about like each book was like sort of a gateway drug, I guess, for becoming interested in you know what’s around me.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
The first book Jenny recommended is “Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram. Abram is a philosopher and cultural ecologist. And in his book, he examines the way humans perceive and communicate with each other, and our environment.

Jenny Odell
Reading that was the first time I thought about other kinds of language besides verbal or like human expressive language. Just the other day I was in the Rose Garden, and the birds are all singing and at this point, I now hear individual species and it has like some meaning to me. And I was just like, what did I use to hear when I came here?

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
As you might be able to guess Jenny is a birdwatcher, although as she says in her book, half of not more of birdwatching is actually bird listening. And she said that “The Genius of Birds” by Jennifer Ackerman was the book that really made her appreciate the intelligence of birds.

Jenny Odell
In terms of like using tools and being able to recognize human faces and communicate that information to others. That was the book that prompted me to make friends with a couple of crows on my street that I have now known for three years. They will even recognize me if I’m like a block from my apartment and kind of like land near me expecting a peanut.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Jenny’s third book recommendation is one she says she is indebted to. “Braiding Sweetgrass” was written by ecological scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. In the book Kimmerer writes about different living beings from squash to salamanders, and explains that more ecological consciousness will show the ways humanity benefits from a reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

Jenny Odell
The thing that I’m the most impressed by is just how she so skillfully and so poetically weaves together like, you know, indigenous knowledge, weaving that together with Western science because she has a background in both.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Kimmerer is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. One chapter of the book focuses on the study on the decline of sweet grass, a plant that was important on multiple levels for her ancestors. It turns out that sweet grass is dying because it’s being under harvested by humans.

Jenny Odell
It had co-evolved with human practices of harvesting. And those practices had in turn evolved to help the plant so you could argue is literally dying of lack of attention. And then, of course, we ourselves are threatened by our own lack of attention to these kinds of things.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
In 1872, the Chicago Tribune published a list of summer book recommendations, they suggested that the best summer book is one that

Chicago Tribune
The idler can take with him into solitude, and read with delightful pauses. When with indolent finger upon the page, his eye wanders up some green vista, or catches some view of the distant sea, and his ear is soothed with the distant murmur of the winds and waves.

Ninna Gaensler-Debs
Maybe while reading one of these books, you’ll hear the distant murmur of the waves, or maybe you’ll look up and see a hawk flying overhead. Either way, take it as an opportunity to consider where you’re directing your attention. And whether you might take Jenny Adele’s invitation to wander away towards something different. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Ninna Gaensler-Debs.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that excellent report. Ninna. I’m Josh Landy with me as my Stanford colleague, Ken Taylor, and you’re listening to our annual summer reading show.

Ken Taylor
Josh, there’s something that’s really been bothering me. You know, I teach freshmen how to read philosophy. I don’t expect them to have learned much about how to read philosophy in high school. But I even give them a lot of literature. And it seems to me they really know how to read literature. And this was really brought on to it’s not just my students, what really big coin. I hate to admit, I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan. I love the TV series, but I hadn’t read the books that prompted me to start I’m now reading the book. So that’s my summer reading, right? But the thing that really got me going was how many people misread Daenerys Targaryen.

Josh Landy
Okay, tell me more.

Ken Taylor
Whell, so look, I was reading these things along the way. And she’s supposed to be some kind of feminist icon. And I’m thinking, No, she’s not a feminist here. She’s got this absolute will the power. And we’re told the story of how that will the power grows and grows and grows. So they misread her as some kind of feminist icon rather than a growing tyrant who starts from nothing

Josh Landy
Or to put the same point differently. I mean, she’s a complicated figure. Because I mean, maybe it’s not even as simple as saying she’s either a feminist icon or growing tiring. Maybe she’s a bit of both. I mean, she is a strong female character. And some of the things she does are admirable. But some of the things she does are, are despicable and troubling.

Ken Taylor
This is like a very tragic story. Right? It’s deeply tragic, not in an Aristotelian sense, more like a Shakespearean tragedy, right, where the world is a tragic place, and human agency is inadequate to the challenges that it given and these things that we most desire and dream of are unachievable. And I had this what I thought was an insight, the Iron Throne is to the Game of Thrones, as the Ring of Power is to the lord of rings, right in the Lord of the Rings, The Ring of Power must be destroyed. It cannot be worn by anyone, even the people you must love and worship, it cannot be worn, it brings everything to ruin, the Iron Throne does the same thing. What happens to the ring of power, it gets destroyed? And would you have routed for Frodo to end up with a ring of power? No. Right. So why would you end route for denarius to end up with the Iron Throne?

Josh Landy
I love what you’re saying. And it’s such a beautiful analogy. And you know, it’s it’s funny, this show even gives us a tiny little glimpse along the way of a different way of being a different way of willingness, Schopenhauer would say you’ve got this lovely little vignette of Arya Stark with the faceless man. And he tells her to basically, to become no one. To us. It sounds potentially negative. Yeah. But what if it is a tragic world in which ultimately the best thing is for no one to occupy the throne? The best thing is for people to abandon these absurd ambitions that are destroying everything, have more moderate desires, but maybe not become no one but become a little bit less.

Ken Taylor
Here’s what Daenerys was, she was about the charisma of tyranny. It’s exactly what you’re saying. She is both deeply charismatic and tyrannical at the same time. That’s a disturbing thought. Right? Because if suppose you were like one of Hitler’s taken in by Hitler, like Martin Heidegger was, in the early days, taken in by his charisma taken and by His promise to rebuild Germany, take it in by his in the remake a new nation, and you were at one of his rallies, and you were stirred, and this nation was going to be lifted up from nothing. And then you realized, Oh, my God, this is where this leads. That’s a disturbing thought. Right? Some people think literature shouldn’t disturb you like that. I’m thinking, shouldn’t we celebrate the power of literature to disturb you like that?

Josh Landy
I think we absolutely should. I think that’s the thing that worries me about the current cultural moment, as far as reading fiction is concerned and watching Fiction, that I think people are too often looking for fictions that kind of reconfirm their existing belief structure. Whereas, you know, there’s a long tradition of great writers and great philosophers saying, that’s not really the function of literature. It’s, I mean, that’s fine. It’s a good thing, of course, for us to have beliefs into, and to, to articulate them topical, but literature’s to do something else, right? I mean, maybe maybe it’s to transfigure suffering as Nietzsche thought and make it something we can live with. Or maybe it’s to spur our emotions in some kinds of ways people like words with Tolstoy and John Stuart Mill thought, but yeah, maybe it’s what you say, in some cases, to shake us up out of our certainty, right?

Ken Taylor
It’s something deep in human nature. It’s not really about the cultural moment, we read literature, we watch fiction, we look for rooting interest, right. And here’s what we think. We think the rooting interest is the moral center. Sometimes the maker of fiction does a trick on you, make you invite you compels you to root for a character who is not the moral center. That’s what Game of Thrones does. That’s what I think. Three billboards, three, fantastic example. fantastic example of the person that you feel compelled to root for is not—

Josh Landy
They’re not morally perfect.

Ken Taylor
Not only are they not morally perfect, they’re deeply morally problematic. And that’s why people thought when when she had a reconciliation with the racist cop, they thought the racist cop is thereby redeemed at all, exactly. Right. And then there’s this other thing that this is really our cultural moment. This is one of the reasons we’ve gotten rid of the great books and the canon and all that sort of stuff. Because we’re looking for affirmation of ourselves in what we read. And somebody said, where are all the black people? Were all the gay people were all the women in all these old dead books, right? So we’re thinking we don’t want to read those anymore. Not because they don’t have anything to say, because they don’t affirm us. Right? So if we’re looking for affirmation, if we collapse a moral center with a rooting interest, and those two things work together, we’re gonna misread tons of literature.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that sounds right. To me. I particularly like your first point about, you know, looking for this rooting interest. I mean, so often works of great literature, great movies, great TV shows, presents us with these very fraught Marley complicated, people are doing some things well, and something’s really badly. And unfortunately, if we live in an environment that’s telling us, the only thing you can do with fiction, is look to it for examples of good behavior or bad behavior to avoid and lessons about life. Well, what are we going to do with these complicated, right? We know we’re going to say we’re going to say that’s a bad TV show. That’s right, that film, it’s dangerous. Why is it dangerous? Because we’re being told to emulate the main character directly. But that’s not the right way of thinking about it. You know, Kundera has this lovely line. He says, suspending moral judgments, not the morality of the novel, it’s it’s morality. I’m going to invite you to judgment, these characters right from the first 10 minutes, and guess what, you’re gonna turn out to be wrong, and then you’re gonna form a new judgment. And guess what? You’re wrong again? That’s right. And that’s the morality of the law.

Ken Taylor
Yes. And then when you’re done, I’m gonna ask you to judge your darn self.

Josh Landy
And this is what’s on offer from things like Game of Thrones, exactly, and three billboards and Hamlet and a bunch of others.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, it’s our annual summer reading show.

Josh Landy
Coming up: does reading change our brain? And which: is better reading on the page or reading on the screen?

Ken Taylor
Reading, misreading and the brain—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back. It’s the annual summer reading edition of Philosophy Talk. I’m Ken Taylor, here with my Stanford colleague and co host Josh Landy.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Maryanne Wolf, she’s director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA. And she’s the author of several books on the neuroscience of reading, including “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” Marianne, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Maryanne Wolf
It’s a pleasure.

Ken Taylor
So look, Marianne, we’re thinking about reading and misreading and the nature of reading. And you bring a new unique perspective to this as a neuroscientist, so tell me, what does reading actually do to the brain?

Maryanne Wolf
The first thing to understand is that genetically none of us were ever born to read. We don’t have a single genetic program for reading the way we do for oral language vision, all the different senses and metonic activities and other cognitive activities, nothing for reading. But what we do have is a brain that can make new circuits for new invented cognitive and linguistic activities by the species. So what reading does is create a new circuit A tree inside every individual literate person’s brain. And that is a circuit that reflects the writing system, the educational background, how much the person has read. And even the medium, the circuitry is going to reflect the characteristics or affordances of the different mediums. When we first read, we have a very basic circuit, we can all read at a level that is more like a third or fourth grader. But what reading enables us to do is begin a geometric progression of intelligence. And that’s what we give our children and our literate beings around the world.

Josh Landy
So it’s a kind of exponential growth in our capacity as we, as we read, we get better at reading as we get better at reading, we get better at processing a whole bunch of other things, right, when you you’ve talked about are the increase in what psychologists call theory of mind, right. So we get better at entering imaginatively into the perspective of another person, you’ve talked about us learning about ourselves, and, and having this expanding repertoire of emotions and a repertoire of story forms to draw on. I mean, it seems like the affordances of literacy are virtually endless.

Maryanne Wolf
They certainly seem infinite. But what I want to emphasize is that as we learn to read fluently with comprehension, we enter a new phase of reading, and that’s as important for everyone to understand is anything else. In literature, we often call it close reading, in my work, I call it deep reading, when we can now allocate time, to the perspective taking dimension, the empathy, how we literally learn to enter the lives, the historical epochs, the different cultures that we are first beginning to be introduced to in our reading, and that becomes the foundation for ever better understanding of alternative ideas. And that’s really one of the hallmarks of civilization, our ability to begin to have that foundation at a personal level, and at a cultural level, being given to all our literate individuals from epoch to epoch.

Ken Taylor
So the work we do when we read, as opposed to other forms of consumption of a narrative, like, say, watching a movie, right, the work we do in reading is really different than the work we do and just listening to a story told orally or probably to a story presented in a filmic way. And because of these new modes of communicating things to people, I think reading is on the decline.

Josh Landy
Reading of that special kind, that involves intense attention and, and deep understanding.

Ken Taylor
Right. So I wonder what you think about that, I mean, is something cognitive loss in the transition?

Maryanne Wolf
Well, what we are doing now is studying and a part of a, an E read network in Europe as well. We’re studying what happens when we have the same exact information. But we are using different mediums. And in this case, there was a meta analysis by the he read network of 52 studies since 2000. That compared what young adults would do, when they were asked questions about something they read the very same content on in a book or on a screen. And what we found is that between 2000 to 2017, over 171,000 subjects, they are better at truly comprehending the information when it’s done in print in a book. Now, the question that you and any listener would say, but what about as we get closer to the true digital native to 2017. And here, my colleagues did a sub analysis. And what they find is that the closer we are to the present 2017, the greater the superiority effect is for the printed form the book, The novella, and here we get, there’s two things I want to say. First, we know from a sub study by some of our Israeli colleagues, like Rockefeller Ockman, that those digital natives believe they’re doing better on the screen, because they say, but I can do it faster. The reality is that skimming is the new norm. And there’s a San Jose researcher who was doing some of that work, but what we’re showing is that when you scan, you do not allocate sufficient time to critical analysis.

Ken Taylor
I want you to tell me about another comparison, because it’s not just that people read the same stuff, but they read it online, they read less, and they consume more stories. and content by watching video by watching a person or people telling a story or enacting a story, could the video presentation of narrative content engage your brain in a superior way or an inferior way than the printed presentation of narrative content?

Maryanne Wolf
Good beauty of reading is that it gives us what we call in cognitive terms, recursion, we are rarely conscious of it. But when we think about what we’re reading, we’re able to check ourselves to monitor to develop our own imaginative schemata—

Josh Landy
Because we have the time.

Maryanne Wolf
Because we are allocating time. That recursion is impossible, you don’t go back. And even in audio books, which I find have their own wonderful contribution, you have one of the same problems, you cannot or you can, but you do not go back to do what is when a part of the critical analysis was is to check yourself to check your thought and the skimming in the digital formats, whether we’re talking in video format, or digital screen reading, we don’t go back to check ourselves and we don’t give enough time for true critical analysis.

Josh Landy
It’s really fascinating. And I’m completely persuaded by you that we’re in a new kind of world now, where so much reading is being done on the screen. And this is decreasing people’s attention span. People aren’t even finishing even just a short article, they’ll read the F shape reading, right? When you might add the whole first line. Yes. And everything and everything looks to people like data, it looks like information, which is very different from the kind of approach that we have a reading, for example, a complicated argument and a philosophy book or a beautiful, complex novel, how can we get people back into it, get them out of this kind of fast food approach to reading and get them back into a kind of slow, contemplative reflective recursive approach.

Maryanne Wolf
One of the things that has been troubling me is that there have been several recent studies in which they look at the amount of reading basically that that our young did in the 70s and early 80s, compared to now, and really what you saw was about 65% of the Young would read something like a book or, you know, magazine or something every day, and certainly every week, and now it’s down to about 16% of our Young, who are, you know, picking up newspapers or journals or books every day. Now, what is simultaneously happening, though, is that they are consuming words. And there have been certain studies that are showing, we’re actually being bombarded with print and words. So we’re not talking about how much they actually have to ingest on a daily basis. But the real quality is the quality, the and it begins with the quality of attention. And our young have real differences. And this is one of the things I’m most worried about in our, in our young children, that they’re growing up even in the zero to five period, with all these digital devices, that their attention is being bifurcated all the time. And they are literally changing attention before they even go into school, and learn to focus. There are gaps that are chasms in the vocabulary that children are learning. And when they come into kindergarten, so many of our children are either already so far behind. So even when we’re talking about our youngest children, there’s a social justice aspect to the preparation for reading. What we have when we have a citizenry, who is only skimming is that and at the same time being bombarded with all this information and their attention is being bifurcated all the time. What we have is a recipe for non thinking citizens, citizens who are looking at only those kinds of pieces or silos of information that they’re comfortable with.

Josh Landy
And much more vulnerable to propaganda.

Maryanne Wolf
They are the most susceptible to false news, false fears, and the false hopes raised by demagogues, whether here or elsewhere.

Ken Taylor
Marianne, this has been a really fascinating conversation, and it’s really important work that you’re doing. And so I really thank you for joining us.

Maryanne Wolf
Thank you so much. It was a true pleasure..

Josh Landy
Maryanne Wolf, author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual summer reading show.

Ken Taylor
Tragedy, comedy, a fantasy—how do you even know what kind of thing you’re reading?

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Thomas Pavel. He’s a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. And he’s talking to us today from the village of Luxeuil-les-Bainsin eastern France. And full disclosure, he was my dissertation advisor and a great advisor he was. Thomas, it’s such a pleasure to have you on Philosophy Talk.

Thomas Pavel
Thank you. It’s a great pleasure for me too.

Ken Taylor
So Thomas, I’m glad you’re here, Josh tells me that you’re an expert in genre. I don’t know, if you’re a fan of the TV show, Game of Thrones, I was a huge fan. And I think that TV show is of a certain genre, it’s the end of the era kind of tale. era is over the era of the contest for the Iron Throne. And that’s going to come to an end. So I decided about season five or six that nobody could occupy the Iron Throne. It had to be like destroyed, that’d be like melted down or something. And that’s what happened. I was right. Many people, many people didn’t see that coming. And they were upset by the turn of events.

Josh Landy
They read it, they read it as a different genre.

Ken Taylor
Redemption or return, that seems to be what’s going on. So I want you to help us think about how I mean, think about genre, how it shapes reading, and the potential for Miss reading, and where these demands of genre come from, and all that stuff. So what’s your first thought about this kind of thing?

Thomas Pavel
The first thought is that when we watch a movie, or a TV series, a read a book, and we have certain expectations, and these expectations are guided by our knowledge. This is a comic novel, or this is a picaresque novel, or this is a tragic movie, a comic movie, it’s not just that we face novelty, and we learn and we are we are surprised by the suspense, we also recognize certain things and being aware of what the genre is, helps us make less mistakes in in this kind of recognition, genre models, shapes, the kind of action, the kind of feelings, and also the kind of ending.

Josh Landy
So in fact, our understanding of what the genre is, or our guesses to what the genre is of a work of fiction helps us to enjoy it. I mean, presumably, it’d be very hard to enjoy a tragedy if you thought it was a comedy. Joke. Funny.

Thomas Pavel
Yeah. Definitely, it shapes you have the right expectations and the pleasure of recognizing what you expect it to happen. You say, also, they shaped the moral issues and moral feelings involved.

Ken Taylor
But that presupposes that you know, and that you can recognize the genre. But where does the story come with? I am of this genre. I mean, I go back to my recognition of the Game of Thrones, I came to the realization or the suspicion that this is how it has to end with that era decisively closed off, it didn’t average. I mean, there must have been clues that I was picking up on somehow. But it didn’t shout that to me, as evidenced by the fact that lots of people didn’t see it coming. And we’re, like really taken aback by the way the story ended.

Thomas Pavel
Certainly for in our time, there is a certain amount of surprise, not everything is now in advance. We are not like the ancient Greeks, they are great culture in which all the plays had a plot that everybody knew in advance, you see, Antigoni knew exactly what happened from the meter and so on, you say Electra, everybody knew. And each writer changed a little bit here and there in order to give them some possibility of excitement, we are in a different period in which there is the surprise and your example is fabulous. On the other hand, very often that sort of pride is linked to the ending, because in when you see these episodes, the repetition of the episodes and the elements involved is ambition for power, the desire to rule and so, and these various attempt is there it is there and you see the first one, you will see the second one and you have this hope for what some of the writer used to call the noble falsity, the noble quality is when this kind of ugly situations of the struggle for power, there is in a happy ending, people hope for happy and even if you know about Romeo and Juliet, and you read the play 15 times, sorry, 20 times, you still hope there is something something in your guts, that helps perhaps this time it will end well.

Josh Landy
That seems really apt as a description of Game of Thrones, because right from the get go, our expectations are being constantly dashed, right? certain characters we think are going to live till the end of the series don’t and all kinds of things like that. So it does seem reasonable to think that this is one of those fictions, where it’s not just our narrative expectations that are being shattered, the rug pulled out from under us. But even our genre based expectations, we think, Oh, it’s still this really deep down, it’s this kind of show, it’s a show about good triumphing over evil. It’s a show about the feminine triumphing over toxic masculinity. It’s a show about the return of the rightful heirs to the throne, and so on and so on.

Thomas Pavel
He is a specialty of 20th and 21st century, literature, cinema, TV, absolutely. Because everything which follows to faithfully the root of the genre is considered old, out of fashion and so on. But here we let’s think also about a different element, namely, we as spectators, or readers, we are in two different states constantly. One is an intimate participation in the conflict is being in there in the fictional universe, and being emotionally part of the whole thing. And on the other hand, we are stepping back. And the two have different links with genre because when we participate, we lose our awareness of the genre, we are in there, okay. It’s like this woman in Don Quixote, this comic novel in dark Gandikota, with a bit crazy, what is a puppet show in which a bad man does something bad, and he didn’t get caught up with his own sword goes and tries to kill the puppet. It’s a very good representation of our participation. We, we don’t do as much as Don Quixote, but we participate in this way. And we feel like hey, no, don’t do that. Stop it at all. But on the other hand, it’s enough to have some experience in you step back and what you are telling us about the games of Throne, make you see the unexpected is a proof that one can step back enough. And sooner or later, one can see the way this particular work, modulate the genres changes, it contradicts it and plays a little bit around the genres are not is not a military match.

Ken Taylor
I also think it’s a source of misreading, because if you don’t know that literature will do this to you, it will grab you in and then it will purposely put this stuff that pushes you away, then you’re you’re you can be disoriented by literal—

Josh Landy
And you can want the wrong things. I mean, at least as far as you and I think, Ken and I think, Tom, I would agree, right? You can want as it were, the low level pleasures of the character you happen to be supporting in some kind of way rooting for. And I’ve had students say to me about Hamlet, obviously, Shakespeare thinks Hamlet is doing something wrong. What do you mean? Well, he dies. They’ve been trained since high school to think that if an author is in favor of what the character is doing, that author will allow that character to live to a ripe old age, die in their sleep, and triumph and get everything they want. This isn’t how tragedy works, he doesn’t even know how real life works. And so this is a deep misunderstanding of what reading is and what it’s for. And, you know, to get back to Tom’s point about immersion, and dis immersion, you know, need to have this wonderful thought that this is a training for life, this divided state of mind where you’re half in the work of fiction, half out of the work of fiction, this is the best training you could possibly give to your mind, your mind that needs to be in real life, part in and part out of its commitment.

Thomas Pavel
You’ve represented so well, the pleasure and the joy of reading contemporary literature, because he speaks about us now. However, I must say something for me all the time in literature. The Iliad bored me to death for a long time, and I reached a certain age, and suddenly the Iliad meant a lot for me. And the first word of the Iliad is ruff, ruff, seeing, Oh Goddess, the ratha and because my life, your life, all of our lives are nothing to do with the sagas of this. A Greek so called Heroes ambitious, nasty, but there is something which is in you in Me, the RAS, this passions, these feelings and literature helps us experiment by identifying ourselves. We think that happened long ago or in another continent in other countries. Okay. Just to give you a recent example, Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. For me, I’m not from Africa, but it just, I was there all the time. It’s just incredibly incredibly immersive if I can say. So this distance in time or space helps us to explore our values, our predicaments, our choices and so on.

Ken Taylor
So this is been a great conversation. I really, I told Josh, I’m been puzzling about genre. He said I got just the man for you, my old dissertation advisor.

Thomas Pavel
Okay, thank you so much. It was great.

Josh Landy
Thomas Pavel from the University of Chicago on genre and smart reading. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s annual summer reading show.

Ken Taylor
Coming up: What happens when you get stuck in the middle of a book? Antonia Peacocke from Stanford has some thoughts on what she calls readers block.

Josh Landy
Fiction, philosophy and befuddlement—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back the program. We’re thinking about reading and Miss reading for the summer. This is philosophy took the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. We’ve all heard about writer’s block, but the philosopher Antonio peacock from Stanford has some thoughts on what she calls readers block. She wrote a blog about this at our website. Antonia, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Anotnia Peacocke
Thanks.

Josh Landy
So Antonia, we’ve been thinking about reading and miseading. And we got a you have something to tell us about how we’re all getting it wrong.

Anotnia Peacocke
You know, I think that everybody has this experience, once in a while of trying to read a passage of difficult texts and just glazing over and realizing that you haven’t paid attention for about a page and a half. And you have to go back, I got obsessed with this idea that I wasn’t understanding what I was reading, even though it’s a good reader, I was 11. It was homecoming by Cynthia void. It’s really simple, straightforward. It’s made for young readers, I got obsessed with this idea that I wasn’t taking it in. Right, I was paying attention. I was concentrating intensely. But I couldn’t find anything left over at the end of reading each sentence that sort of represented what I had just done in a way that I thought was a testifier to the way that I had understood it. And so it was like stalled. I kept reading and rereading and rereading pages, but not in attentively just obsessively. I thought that I needed to have in mind, every word of the sentence that I had just read in order to count as having taken it in is sort of like an obsession with memory and loss in a way because I thought that if I didn’t have it in my head there when I was done with it, then I hadn’t had it at all, even when I was reading it.

Josh Landy
It’s a very interesting phenomenon about reading. I mean, I think this mainly in relation to works of fiction, like the one you’re talking about, that we’re constantly engaged in this acts of compression. Yeah, right. So you’ll read a sentence and you’ll essentially compress it in your mind to something a little bit smaller. And then that will become part of a paragraph that you’ll then compress in your mind something small, and then that’ll become part of a chapter. And you have in your head a tiny little mental image of the chapter as a whole so that you can go on, and then put other chapters next to it and put what you’re reading now next to it. It sounds like that just wasn’t happening for you in that case.

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeah, I don’t know. I wonder if that kind of picture reading both understates and overstates what it is to understand what you’re reading, because I don’t think we need to understand reading as giving us any item in the end at all, like understanding is something you can do in the moment, without having something left over, like an image, whether that’s compressed or not.

Ken Taylor
So I’m listening to you, and I’m understanding you, you’re not being obscure. I don’t think I could repeat what you said word for word. I could repeat kind of the gist of it. I get what you’re saying. isn’t reading somehow like that? I mean, the there’s this I think it’s Confucius or, or one of those Chinese texts, the swimmer learns to forget the water. Yeah, right. I mean, if you’re focusing on the water, you’re really not swimming. I mean, effortless swimming, forgets the water. Is reading like that, or is it not is reading like, Oh, what’s this word? What’s that word? What’s that word? Or do you forget the—

Anotnia Peacocke
Yeahno, I think I think that’s exactly right. And I think I would like in this experience to those who, so experts who have to perform, to some extent, say, if you’re an opera singer, or if you’re an athlete, it’s not as though when you get off the field or when you get off the stage, you could state very clearly what you had just done. That’s part of what it is to be fluent in an action to be totally in it. You don’t have to retain anything right afterwards to count as having acted expertly. And with understanding,

Josh Landy
I want to push back on that. See what the two of you think. Ostensibly, I’m a trained reader. And when I’m reading Proust, it’s not effortless. Even when I’m reading proofs for the 10th 14th or 15th time, it’s not at all effortless. And the work is designed to be effortful to require a certain amount of activity on our part. And there are many works like that the kinds of fictions that Ken and I love on the television or in the movies, they often require us to do things for example, like revisit earlier assumptions, which have now proven to be false. Or, or here’s another example. Think of works like Breaking Bad, which I think it was boiled frog movies, were boiled frog TV shows, wherever you start up with everything’s fine and everything’s not totally fine. It’s basically okay and, and eventually you’re thinking, oh my god, I’m in a moral morass. How did I get here? How do I get boiled? When did I get boiled, and what kind of mistakes that I make? And in all those cases, I feel like we’re, we’re strongly being invited to be active in our reading or viewing. So it’s even though we’re good readers, we’re skilled readers are trained readers, we’re doing all the right things. It’s still not effortless.

Ken Taylor
Josh has this view that, you know, a fiction represents to you often a very morally complicated universe, it may do things like invite you to root for this character who turns out to be deeply morally problematic. And it does that as a part of like a journey of self discovery. What am I doing rooting for this character? And very

Josh Landy
often people leap to a subsidiary conclusion, which is, this is a flawed work of art. This is a dangerous work like, it’s going to make people worse, because it’s going to make them think I should be like that character. Um, and so people read three billboards outside ebbing, Missouri, that way, one of Kansan my favorite movies of that year.

Ken Taylor
See, I think that’s a symptom of Miss reading. And I think it’s a symptom of not being alive to the fact that fiction can do the kinds of things that Josh says they do.

Anotnia Peacocke
Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s overly simplistic to think that what we’re doing every time we read a fiction or take in a fiction watch or fiction, is identify with the main character in any sort of event positively evaluating why, right? Like, I could be like this, or I should be like this, I think there are stories that are obviously set up and Breaking Bad is one of these for me, they’re slippery slope gets set up almost immediately, you don’t have to fall down with them. But you’re there along for the ride. And I would add that you’re also sort of complicit in the imaginary creation of a world that is morally flawed in certain kinds of ways. I think that complicates the picture.

Ken Taylor
So I do too. And I want to ask you about so called imaginative resistance in which you resist, you can’t. Okay, tell me a fiction in which it’s alright to tell kill babies, though. Yeah, I’m not gonna go along with you. Right? I’m not gonna go along with it. I haven’t imaginative resistance to that kind of moral universe, and you try to tell me a story, you’re just gonna fail. But this is surely not a black and white thing. This is surely surely not. And and the assumptions and and the extent of our imaginative resistance to possibilities are morally alien to us, can make us terrible readers of fiction.

Anotnia Peacocke
So first of all, there’s a question of whether we can’t imagine certain things that are morally oto source, or whether we just won’t whether we don’t want to. But then even if we agree that there’s something bad about thinking our way into a villain, let’s say, and identifying with that villain, at least in the moment, when we’re consuming this fiction, there’s a question of whether our worry is about what it will do to us and a long lasting way, like, what’s the impact on my moral character from reading this, or whether there’s something bad just in the event itself, of imagining your way into this character? There’s something bad going on just there, even if you could click your fingers and forget it right afterwards, but there still be some negative thing happening.

Ken Taylor
So question tellers, and if so, how does fiction change? You? Right? I mean, Plato didn’t want the lyric poets in the Republic, making the gods look awful, right? Because he thought somehow that would make the reader of lyric poetry be awful, because the gods are to be emulated. But wait a minute, they are the gods. They look awful. Why should I emulate them? Right, so the question, what does fiction do? To the reader? Right? What kind of effect does it have on the reader? Do you have a view about that?

Anotnia Peacocke
Well, I think my line on this, if any, would be sort of pluralistic, that it’s I think fictions do all sorts of different things to the reader. I think there are some fictions which you could be looked at funny if it didn’t change you fundamentally in some way after having read it. And there are other fictions, which if it changed, you fundamentally after having read it, we would be worried, right? There’s just there’s a whole range here, I think.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that makes sense. In my mind, it also has to do with institutions, readings, how we’re being taught to read, just gets back to the beginning of our conversation. I mean, it’s part of it has to do with the what the book is like. And part of it has to do with what the reader is like, and how much effort they’re putting in and whether they’re distracted. And so, but I think a lot of it has to do with how we’re being told to read. And if we’re being told, every time you pick up a book, or watch a TV show, learn a lesson or emulate a character, then Gosh, you’re breaking bad’s gonna be really? Yeah, yeah. Well, if we’re being told, get in there, be active and wrestle with the questions that are being put forward to you, then I think even imagining one’s way into a villain can be not only harmless, but actually potentially morally valuable, because it allows us to expand our imagination of the kind of human beings around including dangerous human beings that might mess things up for everybody.

Ken Taylor
I tell you a piece of fiction, both the cinematic version, and the novel version that I despise, and I despise that people adore either of them. Gone With the Wind. I despise that movie. Yes, the novel is even worse, people reacted to it is like romanticizing the south Gone With the Wind, you know, this aristocratic way of life and all this sort of stuff. And it was full of lies. Like, here’s one of the big lies, that black slaves are going to go out when Atlanta is burning and stop those Damn Yankees. And I said, Don’t you know any history, when blacks were given the chance to rise up and defeat their master, they joined in droves, and they wanted to fight in the north wouldn’t let them fight. And then finally they fight. I said, go watch glory and forget this crap. So there is morally deeply morally objectionable thing not to mention the Birth of a Nation. Well, yes. What do you do with fiction like that?

Anotnia Peacocke
I mean, one thing that people can readily endorses contextualizing all of these things. So again, you can do something different with the text, you can see it as expressing a certain kind of attitude that is objectionable in some way. I think it’s still educational and interesting to figure out how that work expresses that attitude. I agree, despite not being say truth apps.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I’d rather see a world where everyone from you know, school days onwards, is equipped with the capacity essentially, to fend off dangerous fictions like that right. fictions that seem to be didactic, they’re trying to get us to take up a certain stance towards the realities of the world. They’re deeply mistaken in a very problematic way. I want to see us being armed with certain kinds of critical reading tools that will make those works a little less dangerous.

Ken Taylor
So Antonia, it’s great to have you joining the department. I know Josh is excited to have you be part of the philosophy and literature program. We We love having you as one of our bloggers, and don’t be a stranger now that you’re in the department come into the studio more often.

Anotnia Peacocke
Will do. Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
You can find all the work we’ve mentioned on the show today and more suggestions from our listeners and guests over at our community of thinkers on our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
Now, the only thing this guy misreads is the speedometer. It’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… So the Mueller Report is out in the bookstores, just in time for me to buy it and lug it around. Put it on the table in front of me as I type stuff on my laptop, maybe check my phone, pretend that I’m texting. Its very presence is an indictment. It makes me feel like I voted forty times and nobody minded. I makes me my own gerrymander. If enough of us lug it around to enough coffee joints, sooner or later, it might trickle up to Nancy Pelosi. And before you know it it will be required reading in the Congress and Senate, and you’ll see Mitch McConnell weeping on Fox News, “Oh my god what have I done. How could I have been so wrong?” Just kidding! I don’t have the book, just the pdf file. I want to read it, but boy there’s a lot of it. Many years ago, I actually did buy a copy of the Pentagon Papers. Did I ever read it? No. I also bought ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, which I did read. And saw the movie. They were both kind of dull, frankly. Not like Z. Remember that movie? Now there’s a political thriller. Also, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Holy cow. Hardhitting. But those are movies. When I was a young man, we all had books. Books were identifiers. Carlos Castaneda. Herman Hesse. Kafka. Borges. Orwell. Brave New World. The Stranger. THE GREENING OF AMERICA. Never finished that one. Eric Segal. Man alive. LOVE STORY, I couldn’t bring myself even to look at the cover. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Kurt Vonnegut. Gore Vidal. Jerzy Kosinski. Watership Down. Philip Roth. Fahrenheit 451. ON THE ROAD. CATCH 22, always and forever. Robert Heinlein. Malcolm X. Flannery O’Connor. OUR BODIES OURSELVES. WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. STEAL THIS BOOK, by Abbie Hoffman, which I paid for, what a wuss. Ayn Rand, couldn’t do it, just couldn’t do it. THE BELL JAR. THE FEMALE EUNUCH. Those were the days. When we were defined by books, not by what is on our ipod. Are we still defined by that by the way? I ask because I do not have an ipod so therefore I cannot be identified. I could be identified by what I’m binge watching. I could be defined by that but not tonight honey I have to stay up til three a.m. finishing out the series. So start the book without me. Leading me to a question I’ve asked before, who reads books at the beach anyway? We have smart phones now. Even there we may scroll through headlines, but the rest of the time is spent playing Candy Crush or whatever it is the kids are playing these days. So the Mueller Report is a sign of hope. It could function as a status symbol. If you’re lugging it around it could mark you as a guy who cares about his country. On the other hand, if you wear a Maga baseball cap it could also indicate that you’re a guy who cares about his country. Probably doesn’t care as much as the guy lugging around the Mueller Report, because reading that indicates that you’re worried about the Republic even surviving. Whereas the Maga cap indicates that you wish the Republic would open a little whoopass on France or whatever, and maybe get rid of some of the whining libtard losers, other than that things are going pretty good. America is great again, in fact. Also the Maga cap is a quick read. A glance and you’re done. Not like the Mueller Rep;ort, which near as I can tell, nobody has read. This is a new thing in these kinds of books. People have very strong opinions about it, but nobody has actually read it. Not even the journalists tasked with tackling it. Nobody has read it. Okay, Nancy Pelosi, but I doubt it. Maybe it should be a book on tape, that might improve those numbers. But the problem is you’d have to have somebody who read it in order for it to be read, if you know what I mean. And you know that most people who read political books are political types, who turn to the index first thing, looking for their own name. Well, if you’re a political type you don’t want to find your name in THE MUELLER REPORT. You just don’t.I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Daily Show
It’s simple. I’m raising money to hire Hillary Clinton to record an audio book of the Mueller report. Alright, let me start it I’ll be I’ll be happy to.