Boze the Library Owl

“Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the rest of the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard the rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? ... Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

Midway through Fahrenheit 451, we learn that the U. S. government has launched a series of unprovoked wars against smaller countries, just because it can, while the population is so hypnotized by amusements & devices that hardly anyone knows the wars are taking place.

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

I'm a glutton for punishment.

Kat, if you ever yelled at me I'd probably cry 😅

I was up late last night wishing I had gone to a school with a medieval studies major.

Hear, hear!

Thank you! At the other place I'm just getting yelled at. 🤷‍♂️

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

AI art isn’t real art and AI artists aren’t real artists.

Yay! I'm obsessed. Isn't it wonderful??

I find it bleak how many people seem to have given up on having any kind of intellectual life. Depression is rampant because we’ve abandoned books & hobbies in favor of joyless amusements. The single most attractive thing a person can do is read often & delight in learning.

Headline in today's Guardian that reads "Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40 percent, study finds. Cognitive health in later life is 'strongly influenced' by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers."

This is why you need to be reading books and writing your own emails, by the way. When you outsource your thinking abilities, you risk turning your brain into soup. Heavy dependence on AI has already been linked with severe cognitive decline. What you don’t use, you will lose.

[“Take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” — Mr Beaver, The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe]

C. S. Lewis tried to warn us about AI

The Washington Post is getting rid of its Books section. We’re losing the institutions—journalism, middle-class artistic and intellectual culture—that once made life bearable. Those things were a threat to the super-rich who increasingly govern us. Democracy dies in illiteracy.

I have an essay going up about Candlemas tomorrow on Plough. I hope you don't mind, I quoted you!

Our Thirty-Five Favorite Characters in Dickens A Celebration of the Greatest Character Writer in English

Rach and I walked over to the university library yesterday and spent a few hours writing this list of our thirty-five most beloved characters in Dickens. Tremendous fun, and one of my favorite things we've written together.

bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/our-thirty...

I find it depressing that so many people seem determined to outsource their basic brain functions. Like WHY ARE YOU EVEN ALIVE IF THAT'S HOW LITTLE YOU THINK ABOUT EXISTENCE

You can write your emails just fine. You always have! Want to improve? Take a writing course (there are cheap and free writing courses for a variety of types of writing to be found online). Using features like this is literally dimming areas of your brain. Keep them lit. Forget this feature exists.

I find Gmail’s new “write this for me” feature deeply sinister. They’re trying to convince you that you are dumb and helpless. Don’t let them steal your ability to formulate thoughts and communicate. You were capable of writing an email in 2022 and you’re capable now.

This reminds me that I really need to read East of Eden.

Books I got for Rach: The Landmark Herodotus, The Fabled Coast, Volumes Two & Three of Ackroyd’s History of England, a Folio edition of Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Annotated Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s London, Victorian Prison Lives, In Search of England, In Search of London, The Ghost Map, Captain Cuttle’s Mailbag: Victorian Pedantry from the Pages of Notes & Queries, The Trouble with Mrs. Montgomery Hurst Books Rach got for me: Stations of the Sun, Trevelyan’s Arthurian Legends, Dragon Lords & Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (both by Eleanor Parker), Lore of the Land, Chambers Etymology, Welsh Legends & Fairy Lore, Hazlitt’s Dictionary of Faiths & Folklore, Book of English Folktales, England: A Natural History, Middlemarch, Pushkin’s Fairy Tales, Everyman Canterbury Tales In my stocking: Fancies & Goodnights, The Children of Green Knowe, Life in the Castle in Medieval England, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, Scandinavian Folktales, The King in the North: The Life & Times of Oswald of Northumbria, signed copy of The Great Book of King Arthur

Our mutual Christmas book haul (Rach’s books on the left and mine on the right). I’ve found that the happiest life is a life filled with love and books.

Big Tech is offering you a Faustian bargain. It promises to remove all the friction from life, to keep you from having to think or study, and the result is your brain will become pudding, you’ll become incapable of creativity or communication. They want to make you a non-person.

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

People say AI is a magic shortcut to creativity & success. I’ll tell you the real secret and it’s voraciously reading, being interested in everything, being diligent in the pursuit of learning, paying attention to the interior lives of others & keeping a heart open to the world.

As the literacy rate declines, you’ll ask yourself why the quality of life continues to deteriorate in ways large and small, and in almost every instance the answer will be: because people stopped reading.

“Why are folks getting dumber?” Because they don’t read. “Why aren’t men as romantic & poetic as they used to be?” Because they don’t read. “Why are people so vulnerable to propaganda?” “Why is everyone a conspiracy theorist?” Because they don’t read. Because they don’t read.

"And let my liver rather heat with wine than cool with mortifying groans!" Is that the line? It's been a bit since I've listened to Merchant on audio. 🥰

My German teacher in high school actually made us sing the happy birthday song in German anytime someone had a birthday.

I discovered this playlist in January and have been listening to it the entire year.

open.spotify.com/playlist/5jf...