Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
    — Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” translated by Donald Revell

1. What Everyone Has Read

  Here’s poetry this morning and for prose you’re reading the tabloids
  Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
  Biographies of great men a thousand various titles (ibid)

To belong to, and to be able to contribute to, any discipline entails the felt need of having read “what everyone has read.” For a literature student, that would be the literary canon, that endlessly contested list of “great books,” including Homer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Haruki Murakami.

Even within scientific disciplines, one has to have read the papers that actively drive current research, that combination of classic papers, agenda-defining papers, and recently published important papers, that, again, everyone has read. Numerous resources give us some idea of which these papers are. Top-rated venues, Best Paper awards, the academic celebrity system, recommended readings from Ph.D. advisers, the required readings of graduate courses, the “missed citations include…” section of peer reviews, and so on: all of these communicate to us what we should read, which becomes in our minds, what everyone has read.

No one, of course, has ever read what everyone has read. In my own field of HCI, I estimate that about 1,000 papers are published each year in credible venues, some smallish percentage of which at some point, obviously, everyone will have read. Staying current and knowing what’s relevant is an extraordinary practical challenge that every scientist, indeed, every academic, faces.

Today, artificial intelligence will summarize readings for us. Perhaps AI can summarize the proceedings of our major conferences, and publish those summaries in the proceedings, perhaps in lieu of the proceedings. That would be a kind of poetic justice, since it seems that AI is increasingly writing those papers in the first place. If you’ll pardon the neologism, this genulacrum (a portmanteau of “generative AI” and “simulacrum”) seems to threaten reading and writing in science, and perhaps science itself.

Actually, I think it threatens something more vital even than that.

2. What Science Knows About Reading

  I saw a pretty street this morning I forgot its name […]
  Three times every morning sirens groan
  At the lunch hour a rabid bell barks
  The lettering on the walls and billboards
  On the doorplates and posters twitters parakeet-style
  I love the swank of that street (ibid)

Recently, I was invited to guest lecture about AI and literature. Partly as a response to the diminishing reputation of literary studies, I wanted to use the opportunity to motivate literary studies to my predominantly STEM audience.

During my prep, I found an article in Harvard Business Review called “The Case for Reading Fiction,” by Christine Seifert, which made the sorts of arguments that I was looking for. In that article, I came across the following passage:

research on reading shows literature study to be one of the best methods for building empathy, critical thinking, and creativity. Maryanne Wolf, cognitive scientist and author of Reader, Come Home, argues that “the quality of our reading” stands as “an index to the quality of our thought.” If we want better thinkers in the business world, we have to build better readers.

Wolf’s idea that the quality of our reading is an “index to the quality of our thought” in particular struck me. It captured in a single, easy to understand sentence, an idea that has shaped my entire career. It is not a new idea; in the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold argued that critical engagement with literature helps us

to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail…. [T]o lead [man] toward perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself…. [And to answer the question,] what will nourish us in growth toward perfection? (Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 1865).

In any case, the quote inspired me to buy and to read Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. With an advanced degree in literature, and then having later obtained a Ph.D. in neuroscience, Wolf offers an accessible account of the neuroscience of reading, which also impressively does justice to the profound joys of reading.

Wolf uses this account to argue that serious or “deep” reading actually rewires the brain, and it is this rewiring that prepares us not only for empathy and criticality, but more profoundly, it leads us to “the uncharted leap into a cognitive space where we may upon occasion glimpse whole new thoughts,” (pp.64-65)—the sorts of thoughts that constitute vital advances in science, economies, societies, and cultures. She also argues that a sustained life of deep reading eventually gives rise to the reflective life, “where we contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose mysteries dwarf any of our imagination” (p. 190).

This reflective life in turn creates time for us: time for joy and time for social good. We experience time for joy like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey does when she reads Shakespeare, where our “entire being is suffused with waves of new understanding,” a joy that is the outcome of the “hard-won thoughts and feelings of the person who makes room and time for it” (p. 194). Deep reading creates time for social good, because allows readers to “take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship” (p.199, quoting Martha Nussbaum).

For Wolf, the capacity for deep reading is one of humankind’s greatest cognitive achievements, and it is the engine that drives many of our greatest social, cultural, and scientific achievements in turn.

3. What Every Reader Knows

  Your life is a painting in a dark museum
  And sometimes you examine it closely (ibid)

For much of the past decade, I have been occupied with the question of what we learn from engaging with art. (For HCI readers: my intention is to connect the answer to this to the question of how to make the best intellectual use of research through design.) I have collected many dozens of answers from books and papers from across time and place. Here are some of them.

• Reading teaches us what it is like to be someone else, or to experience a different time or place, to experience an emotion we couldn’t have had (Dorothy Walsh)
• Reading allows us to listen in on a dialogue of the gods, to encounter a “strangeness” that challenges our beliefs and prompts us to elevate our thoughts (Harold Bloom)
• Reading provides for us a “multiple relatedness” that connects universal themes, precisely articulated situations, and our conscious attention in a way that is useful to our lives within our social communities (Eileen John)
• Reading offers us friends about whom we cannot feel envy, granting us a special intimacy with the textures of their lives and worlds (Martha Nussbaum)
• Reading provides glimpses of alternative worlds where the chasm between the real and the ideal is bridged, opening us to pursue new ways of being and doing (Hans-Georg Gadamer)

These are but a few of them. If you have read this far, I suspect you have experienced all of these, and that they are as much a part of you as anything else in your life. Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home is a plea to continue this practice throughout your life, because the quality of your thinking depends on it.

4. What I Know About Reading

  Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

I read Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” as a first-year graduate student of comparative literature in 1994. The poem is quite difficult, and it required reading and rereading it, as well as a professor, classmates, and some literary criticism, before I learned how to engage it.

Yet this challenging work opens with this image of the Eiffel Tower as a shepherdess of bleating bridges, a poetic image that, like the hook of a pop song, has stuck with me for 30 years and keeps bringing me back to “Zone.”

Over these 30 years, I have changed, as have my opinions about many of “Zone’s” preoccupations: Catholicism, modernity, walking, Paris, sex, identity, and memory. I open myself to the poem’s thoughts, rhythms, and images: this opening, so characteristic of deep reading, is both an act of vulnerability and of power. As the poem takes life in my imagination, I also am drawn to “the swank of that street.” I wonder what it means that the museum in which one’s painting hangs is “dark.” I look at my shelves of disposable paperbacks and wonder if, like “Zone’s” narrator, “I have wasted my life and wasted my time.” But I have not.

  You’re alone when morning comes
  The milkmen jingle bottles in the street (ibid)

I hear the clink of that glass, and somehow that imagined sound reminds me that I have a body, that I can hear, that my senses connect me to the world. I still hear the clinking.

I have read this poem so many times now that I know many of its lines by heart—even when, in some cases, I still don’t understand what they mean. The sound-image of the milkman’s clinking bottles at dawn comes back to life every time I reread the poem, almost surprising me each time in its familiarity and vividness. I might never grasp all of “Zone’s” mysteries to my satisfaction, but I suspect for as long as I live, I will periodically return to “Zone,” to walk alongside its alienated yet engaged protagonist, to feel weary and connected and hopeful with him; to access the vitality of just one part of the whole person that I am.

In doing so, I’ll forego reading something very important that everyone has read. My return to “Zone’s” swanky street, to “the metal counter of some dive / Drinking wretched coffee,” to the designated place where the poem’s unnamed speaker and I will listen together “at nightfall / To Bohemian songs in the singing taverns”–my return will not keep me current in my field. It will, however, nourish what I am able to offer back, my voice, and the unique timbre of it.