"GRANTAGATE"

(PSSST, IT'S NOT ABOUT AI, IT'S ABOUT EDITORIAL RIGOUR)

Okay, so it is about AI. A bit. And in terms of The Software That Must Not Be Named, “Grantagate” is the marketing coup (ploy) to end all marketing coups (ploys). Which should be a quick reminder that our collective doom-mongering, while an entirely rational and justified response, is also their free advertising. Just saying.

I suppose, though, I am less interested in how AI slop slithers into prestige print than I am in how any terrible writing gets there. Lest we forget, Kate Clanchy’s broadly revolting Some Kids (Picador, 2019) was pre-AI, and that was feted all over town before any dissenting voices were raised - cough - sorry, heard. I’m sure you have your own examples, so I’ll spare you my entirely subjective list, but the point is, while this particular problem might have been exacerbated and exposed by AI, it’s hardly a new phenomenon.

Okay, but if the problem isn’t AI, it’s - what, girl genius? I want to say something like “an absence of editorial rigour”, which is partly true, but I think what I actually mean is “a loss of critical readerly engagement”. From people who should know better. Who are (admittedly often quite poorly) paid to know better.

As in: we come to the act of reading for different reasons at different moments in our lives. There are some situations when reaching for the fluffy crud of your favourite page-turner is - and should always be - a deliciously guilt-free indulgence; an escape and a comfort. I, for one, am obsessed with Bob Mortimer’s comic fiction, and I turn to these books when my other fiction staples (Roberson Davies, Shirley Jackson, Ralph Ellison et al) feel too “much” for my exhausted and beleaguered brain. In such moments, I’m not reading to be nourished or challenged; I don’t want to think or even to feel particularly deeply. I want only diversion, amusement, and safely contained adventure. In this space, richness and originality of language matter less to me. But that’s just one kind of textual encounter. I also read in order to think; for the pleasure and necessity of thinking deeply. I read to discover what I think; to find a context - historical, theoretical - and a language for my own sometimes inchoate ideas. I read to approach the “other”, for the thrill of touching - however imperfectly - the strange subjectivity of one unlike myself. Last and most of all, I read to revel in language, and in the new perspectives or relationships that language makes possible; the myriad permutations of word combinations, the images they create. Here, narrative is subordinated to associative logic and sonorous, suggestive phrase. There are many other ways or habits of reading, these are just a few of mine. My point is, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with “a little light reading”. As individuals. As part of a rich and varied diet. As readers we are free to be joyfully polymorphous in our manner of approaching and appreciating texts. I would suggest, though, that we run into problems when any one manner of reading begins to dominate, or is haphazardly applied. I would also suggest that editors and competition judges are not free; that the responsibility and the sheer relish of their/our role lies in (demands) a particular kind of deep, sustained attention; a critical, perhaps somewhat distanced approach to the text.

Adjacent to my current writing/ researching around memory, I’ve been thinking about the difference between intimacy and immediacy as both affective experiences and as literary/ artistic techniques. In the realm of experience the gulf between these two states feels immeasurably wide: the former is a slow foliation over time; it is predicated upon mutual vulnerability and care. One grows into the intimate. Immediacy, on the other hand, is a synapse-sparking collision in-the-moment. It’s the risk of exposure, the giddy high of arousal. Immediacy is instant and kinetic. Intimacy is profound. Both are vital components of what we might rather pompously call “the human condition”, but either on its own produces an emotionally and experientially lopsided life.

Within art and literature, things look a little different: inside of review-space, I see intimacy and immediacy used as virtual synonyms a lot (cards on table, I suspect I am as guilty of this as anyone), while stylistically, the former often feels sacrificed on the altar of the latter. In poetry - the one area I’m actually qualified to talk about - this appears as, but it not limited to: direct address, and a posture of unfiltered disclosure; a plausible musicality of language, often valorised under the rubric of “accessibility”, that presents little difficulty by way of intellectual assimilation and understanding. Immediate poems make a broad appeal to the emotions through the urgency of their themes and what I guess we might call the melodic “flow” of their delivery; they excel, I’d say, at their best, in evocative moments of lyric phrase-making. They tend to centre a stable-speaking lyric subject, and are often concerned with notions of embodiment and authenticity. Intimate poems, on the other hand, are slow-growers: they slightly resist readerly efforts to enter and understand; they might take a little time to parse, to locate who is speaking, where, and to what purpose. Which is not to say that all intimate poems are “difficult” or “obscure” - Michael Donaghy’s poems are intimate, but they also operate within tightly turned and self-contained conceits - I mean only to suggest that we cannot make the same kinds of ready assumption about authentic and unfiltered writer-to-reader disclosure within an intimate poem; there’s masking, play, a teasing-out required to identify a speaking voice and its relationship to ourselves. These poems are not necessarily in or of the moment; they posit other places that we have to work to access. I think the best intimate poems are those less concerned with the “flow” or “beauty” of their lyric phrasing, than they are with judiciously weighing each word and its placement within a line; this often produces slightly strange syntax, and a feeling that pressure is being applied to language in some way; that language is being thought about as substance and structure, not only as a delivery system.

To be clear, this list of tendencies is not exhaustive, neither are these two toolboxes mutually exclusive: there are plenty of amazing poets living and dead who deploy both sets of technique within their individual poems and across the broad corpus of their work. I’m not picking a side here either. I read both. I write/ have written / written with both. I like both. Ascribing a moral or political value to a set of stylistic and structural techniques is limited binary thinking that serves absolutely no one and is impoverishing to poetry as an art. What I will say is that we are at a place, in Space Year 2026, when the immediate is in the ascendency, that is, as a dominant style on page and on screen, and as the signal nature of our experience under late-stage blah de blah.

Here I do have a problem: because immediacy is a condition of capitalism. It is manufactured by capitalism, and it serves the aims and interests of capitalism. What is immediacy, after all, but a denial or a loss of mediation? A desire for the frictionless assimilation of ideas and experiences without the necessity to collide with opposing and obstructing otherness. I follow Hegel and Kornbluh here: the world - of things and ideas - only becomes what it is through its relationships with and to (the) other/s.
Knowledge and understanding require a process of moving through and bearing with difference and contradiction - it’s dialectical, duh.

And this is self-evidently true, isn’t it? No one is legitimately going to argue that abdicating thought and choice to an algorithm has enriched our lives or experiences of art, or that the ceaselessly scrolling echo-chambers of social media have benefited anyone but ket-cooked billionaire tech bros, are they? Okay, fabulous. On some level, then, we do acknowledge that social conditions replicate themselves in consciousness, profoundly shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Immediacy as a poetic/ writerly technique can be a useful tool; when used consciously it can also perform a critical reflection of neo-liberal conditions. A problem appears only when this particular technique is granted an undue supremacy (which, to be clear, it has been), owing largely to the dictates of a publishing marketplace driven by demand for zeitgeisty and easily-assimilable dreck - by capitalism’s endless cool hunt, and its race-to-the-bottom populism. So far, so icky, but so much worse than a prevailing style is when immediacy becomes a manner of reading, the dominant manner of reading, the way in which editors and publishing professionals are now trained to read - this, for the practice of art and literature - is absolutely fucking disastrous.

Which is kind of where I came in. And why I revised my earlier diagnosis away from “lack/ loss of editorial rigour”, which tends to create yet another scapegoat - not the individual creatives for a change, but the individual editors - without accurately naming the problem (pssst, it’s capitalism). We’re where we are thanks to business ontology: to a publishing industry that has over-burdened and undervalued editors and translators to an alarming degree. They cynically misidentify reading, editing, and translating as uncreative drudge-work, as “tasks” to be accomplished, as opposed to deep processes with which to engage. They then farm out big chewy chunks of this work to AI, “freeing up” more of the editors’/ readers’/ translators’ time to “get more done”. Great. Except none of these jobs are a numbers’ game. The germane question for anyone that cares about literature should never be “how can we do more?”, but “how can we do better?” Both would be possible if such roles were better paid, made more secure; if more staff were hired, and if the publishers in question weren’t as radically committed to the lunatic concept of exponential growth, stayed in their lane, and didn’t take on more than their team could usefully handle. And yeah, I am well aware that this is utopian crazy-talk, thank you.

I think such conditions create a landscape where these roles are increasingly filled with demoralised and overstretched professionals; those who care deeply about their craft, but are frankly drowning. Or, by the chronically deskilled and un/underpaid, who have never been given the opportunity to know their job as anything other than a species of tedious clerical work. We’ve created a culture that denies reading, editing, and translating as careers - certainly as vocations - and as such we’ve shat all over the difficult, critically important processes of mediation in creating a work of literature and making it… I dunno… good?

So here we all are: the market-driven appeal to immediacy messing with our broader cultural sense of what reading even is; our pressured time, our fractured attention, and a climate within publishing that has systematically devalued those who could teach us a better way. There’s more to say here: about the way analytical skills have been steadily marginalised across the global curriculum; about the way writers and readers bite off way more than they can chew in order to stay solvent and afloat (I’m doing six jobs, none of them well), and how optics rather than qualities can sometimes be the determining factor in which works are selected to shine by publishers and prize-giving panels, but these have been extensively covered elsewhere, and in any case are probably best stowed for another day.

As a kind of experiment, I’ve been going through the contentious story, applying my own editorial eye, and seeing what reveals itself. So far, so baffling, I have to say, but also: so far, so symptomatic. I’ll share the results - watch this space - and in the meantime, sound a note of hope in that it is within our power as writers and readers and editors to resist, in our small and quietly determined ways, the enshitification of literature by:

Reading deeply and variously outside of our comfort zones.
Acknowledging and appreciating the shit out of our own readers, editors, and translators.
Supporting/ performing careful practical criticism; in public and in private.
Never, under any circumstances, abdicating your creative practice to a piece of fucking software.
Understanding that reading, editing, and translating are creative practices too.
Hold fast to the value of sometimes being bored: the discipline and care of that state - offer it up.
Never accept money for a job you don’t intend to do to the utmost of your ability.
Especially when that job involves the handling of others’ creative efforts. You’re carrying their hope; they’re vulnerable and they’re counting on you. If you don’t take that responsibility seriously, then fuck off.