Boze the Library Owl
books, beauty, history, folklore. Dickens lover. married to @littleseamstress. gets dressed up like a pillow so she's always in bed. patreon.com/sketchesbyboze, linktr.ee/sketchesbyboze
- 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.
- 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...
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.
- No offense but I think we underestimate how many of our current problems, both cultural and political, are downstream of the decline in reading, the decline in learning and the loss of interest in the humanities.
- College students are shuffling through school without doing any reading or writing. Tech is trying to automate the making of music. You get called pretentious for insisting that people know basic words. We are regressing by every measure.
- In honor of my birthday this week I encourage you to get a library card, read books of folklore, listen to medieval & Tudor Christmas carols, watch an old film by Welles or Bergman. Life is not long and we ought to find some beauty in each day. We ought to hold each other close.
- There's an enormous cat who lives a few streets down. She somehow figured out a way to unlatch and open the screen door leading into our bedroom. Every night she breaks into our room, curls up on my chest and falls asleep. I've been adopted by a real-life Miyazaki character.
- Sat down at the dining-room table to read a bit of Bleak House. Noticed that my wife, seated next to me, was also reading Bleak House. Realized we have at least FIVE copies of the novel. This is what human flourishing looks like.
- Food—$200 Data—$150 Rent—$800 Various editions of Bleak House—$6,000 Utilities—$150 Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. My family is dying.
- I’m looking for a good contemporary novel. I’ve been reading a lot of medieval poems & sagas and realized I’d read hardly any recent fiction this year. I love a book that’s a bit cerebral, a bit strange, and tells a solidly plotted story with a minimum of fuss.
- Here are some recent-ish books I’m reading or have read & enjoyed: Piranesi, Possession, The Whalebone Theatre, The Raven Scholar, various Sharon Penman books, The Essex Serpent (& Enlightenment), Babel, The Ministry of Time, Starling House, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall.
- Reading will make you more interesting. Last week I met up with some old friends and we were discussing Cornwall. I told them, “According to legend, the devil avoids Cornwall for fear he will be baked into a pie” and the expression on their faces was priceless.
- I've written more than you could ever wish to know about the devil in British folklore on my blog: bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/the-devil-...
- Been reading a lot of academic texts this year and needed a mental break, so I picked up Dickens and I'm amazed anew at how shamelessly FUN, entertaining & escapist he is. He invented modern storytelling. He was writing prestige TV in the 1850s.
- We're witnessing the greatest sustained attack on the human spirit in history. Big Tech seeks to destroy the arts. They're destroying the school system. They want to make us lobotomized people who can't read, write or create. They've turned dystopian fiction into a manual.
- Don’t allow tech to turn you into an un-person. Refuse to let AI make things you could produce with your own brain. Develop your mental & creative faculties. Read constantly. They want you illiterate, and nothing threatens them more than a brain that is sharp and intact.
- I'm glad the villain of the new Toy Story is a child's tablet. I hope the film conveys how screens eat up a child's hobbies, interests, literacy, ability to function socially. I hope it provokes millions of parents to think twice before making the iPad a babysitter.
- I need everyone who uses AI to generate art & text to notice what Vince Gilligan says here. You're surrendering your brain, your creativity, the divine spark within you to a machine. Someday you'll wake up and find you're no longer capable of writing or thinking. And for what?
- “If you elect to have a machine do those things for you, you’re losing something. You’re losing a part of yourself.”
- Too many people have resigned themselves to not reading because they fear they no longer have the focus for it. You only need to limit your screen time for a few days to begin feeling the effects on your brain. I promise you, you are capable of reading books again.
- For those who are interested in rediscovering the joys of reading, I wrote a step-by-step guide: bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/how-to-rek...
- Carl Sagan, writing in 1995, warned that soon America would be ruled by illiterate elites wielding “awesome technological powers,” and that most people, their brains broken by screens, would be unable to resist. We are living in the nightmare that Sagan foresaw.
- Sagan envisioned a future in which the public is uninformed and superstitious. “The dumbing down of America,” he writes, “is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content, the 30-second soundbites … but especially a kind of widespread celebration of ignorance.”
- Sagan felt that the dumbing down of America was most evident in the rejection of science and the growing ignorance of history, art, literature, music and the humanities. If we're to reserve course, we need to revive mass education and literacy.
- Spending too much time online will have catastrophic effects on your mental & emotional health. You need to be taking walks and talking to other people. You need to feel grass under your feet and wind on your face. You were made to live an embodied life.
- Spent the day wandering through rain-soaked Seattle, and in a used bookstore found several volumes of medieval art.
- I think we under-estimate how many people are miserable because they have no enthusiasms, no hobbies, because they gave up reading and quit learning when school ended. It's shocking how much studying a beloved subject elevates your mood. It will transform your life.
- For the past year I've been doing focused reading on medieval literature, English history, the folklore of Scotland and Wales, and I can't express how just learning things changes a person. It will make you more interesting. You will fall in love with this world.
- Jane Austen's 250th birthday is coming up in December and I hope you'll celebrate by taking a turn about the room, acquiring a passion for dead leaves & closet shelves, and taking a fancy to the last person you could ever be prevailed upon to marry.
