Sir Jonathan Bate

I like this cover pic. Book out in October in UK, Feb in USA.

If wondering, it is a detail from fresco in the villa of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii

I like this cover pic. Book out in October in UK, Feb in USA.

@prixpics Alas, no - it’s Mark Wormald at Pembroke. I don’t fish!

@profbate A pity your book The Garden - our 4000yr Quest for Paradise. was not out for RHS Chelsea this week. Is it true you had Ted Hughes' fishing rods? A former colleague said at Cambridge she had met someone who had Hughes's rods. Anyway I will look out for your book in the autumn.

@JoyceCarolOates Paul de Man?

but there is the irony of time: things that had once seemed vital & urgent gradually fade into memories complicated by personal recollections. since I knew, sometimes very closely, individuals who were both "conservative" & "radical," it naturally colors my assessment of their ideologies. this is hard to explain to others, who see & respond to the "ideologies." but when you know something of what the ideologies sprang from, or how individual shortcomings were disguised by declarations of ideology, it is not so clear-cut. that is why, for some, only fiction, poetry, drama can expressed the complications of life. in politics, in which we are steeped, it is too often a matter of X & not-Y; in life, often it is X + Y (with Z thrown in).

I wrote about “The Waste Land” on Jonathanbate.substack.com. @johnhaffenden will probably dissent!

@purplcabbage @olivertraldi Perfectly possible that LLM reviewed a large body of existing scholarship in the field and used that to provide constructive criticism- LLMs can trawl the web as well as regurgitate from training data. They can function as glorified google or virtual research assistant.

so, I think it depends on how the reviewer generated the review, if they provided the LLM your paper and a brief outline of their own thoughts, and asked the LLM to elaborate their outline into a full draft, and did this iteratively until they were satisfied, then the review was mainly shaped by the reviewer, and merely elaborated by the AI, as a kind of fluent mirror but if they just provided your paper and asked for a review, and didn’t constrain it in anyway with their own take, then the review is just a fluent reflection of your own thoughts, and doesn’t provide much outside of that, since it hasn’t synthesized any human input beyond your original work can you tell which it is?

With my normal ambivalence toward a certain topic: For the first time ever, I got a referee report (a document provided by a reviewer for an academic journal) that evinced deep, genuine engagement with my paper and extensive, thoughtful advice about how to improve it. Guess why.

In this piece for @NewStatesman John Keats brushes up against Stormy Daniels. newstatesman.com/culture/poetry…

One does begin to wonder about trigger warnings… such as: “This show contains haze, brief blackouts, the use of an e-cigar and mild sexual references.”

I wrote about Hazlitt on jonathanbate.substack.com

This is a very good essay - CSL & PP as rival readers of Milton - and always worth hearing that Blake quote from @PhilipPullman. thecritic.co.uk/what-pullman-g…

@JosephBottum The English Patient.

There has never been a truly great movie made from a truly great novel.

@snailco27 @JoyceCarolOates And it is not only good but broadly true.

@JoyceCarolOates Joyce have you read the netanyahus? Won the pulitzer a few years back, the protagonist is essentially a fictionalized harold bloom

establishing a "canon" is essentially a way of winnowing out work you don't like & showcasing work you do like; you assign "quality" to the latter, & dismiss the former. H. Bloom was a noted scholar in some areas of English literature but had virtually no interest in other areas & his critical skills turned to sneering all too often. he did include one of my novels in his "canon" --but excluded much that is meritorious & brought to literary discussion an air of lofty disdain & harsh judgment where an egalitarian openness is more desirable.

I wrote about students, @asu & AI for @NewStatesman newstatesman.com/politics/educa…

Dame Harriet Walter and Sir Jonathan Bate to Lead Shakespeare Festival for Prison Leavers broadwayworld.com/article/Dame-H…

I wrote about the Wordsworths … and daffodils on jonathanbate.substack.com

@TedIacobuzio Because people were slagging it off on this platform! To respond to that was the commission. I wrote about how V Woolf attacked it at the time.

@profbate Why on earth does it need a "defense"? Oh, I know plenty of people don't like it, from sci fi writers to romance addicts. But it's still there.

Enjoyed writing this. Paywall. Alas. newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

@stevenpoole Quite so. The alas was regret at it not being one of those free taster pieces that encourages people to subscribe - that’s a model I like.

ah yes, alas that they have a "paywall" that enables them in turn to pay normal writers

@EdwardQuine Byron loved a bit of vulgarity—comes of being a Lord!

@profbate The em-dash—the most vulgar of all punctuation marks.

Excellent post. Like Lord Byron, I’ve always had exceptional fondness for the em dash. Leave the em-dash alone - by Colin Gorrie deadlanguagesociety.com/p/em-dash-ai-w…