The You Didn't Read the Book Club: Rules for Participants

 Two weeks ago I proposed a You Didn't Read the Book club: Membership limited to English majors, who are not permitted to confess to not having read a book in the canon. It will be an evening of bluffing, exaggerated by drink. Response was so enthusiastic that I have drawn up details for anyone wishing to form a chapter. 

Participants: Limited to English majors. Non-English majors may attend, but only as mute observers. No actual books may be consulted. 

Drinks: Sufficient quantities of wine, beer, and spirits are to be provided. 

The first round: Participants enjoy their first drink and engage in general conversation. When they are ready to begin, a member draws a card at random from the stack provided (list below) and must lead the discussion of the book on the card. Every member must comment. 

The second round: The second drink is provided. Now each remaining participant, in turn, takes a card from the stack and leads the discussion, in which all members must comment. The process continues until every participant has done a book. In this round, no one may dismiss an author as derivative. The club has the option to adjourn after the second round is completed. 

The third round (optional): A third drink is provided. In this round the only work under discussion is Finnegans Wake, and all must comment on it. The club adjourns as soon as any member proposes a fourth drink. 

The list of works

Beowulf 

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 

Boswell, Life of Johnson

Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Austen, Mansfield Park

Dickens, Bleak House

Eliot, Middlemarch

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

James, The Golden Bowl

Eliot, Four Quartets

Wright, Native Son

Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Ford, The Good Soldier

Nabokov, Pale Fire

Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (in translation)

Tolstoy, War and Peace (in translation) 

Flaubert, Madame Bovary (in translation) 

You were not born yesterday. Be skeptical as editor and reader

In a time when widespread disinformation appears to be overtaking widespread misinformation, you would do well to read and edit cautiously and skeptically. Here are some guidelines.

AREAS REQUIRING CAUTION ABOUT ACCURACY

Names: Persons and places, formal titles, job descriptions.

Numbers: Percentages, averages, rates, ratios, polling data.

Chronology: Comprehensible sequence of events, reader’s orientation in place and time. 

Sources: Credibility, bias, independent confirmation. 

Superlatives: First, only, biggest, oldest. 

Photographs: Genuine or altered. 

Links: Veracity of other sites. 

Inconsistencies: Not only in factual details, but also in vocabulary, syntax, or tone. 

Legal issues: Assertions of illegal or illicit actions. Evidence?

Headlines: Accurate? Oversimplified? Slanted?

SELF-EXAMINATION

Confirmation bias: Reading selectively to focus on data confirming what we already think. 

Backfire effect: Strong reaction to challenges to deeply held beliefs or opinions, with the effect of reinforcing them. 

Biased assimilation: Interpreting new information to make it fit existing beliefs.

Motivated reasoning: Finding persuasive what already fits existing beliefs and reserving criticism for contradictory details and evidence.  

Group polarization: Tendency in discussion to be pulled toward the people expressing the strongest views. 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE QUESTIONS

What is the source/evidence? Reliable? Independently confirmed?

What is the history of the persons and entities involved?

Who else is saying this?

What need does it fit?

What is the motivation?

Does it meet our standards? 

How do we add value?

DANGER AREAS

Story is too good. Factual details and quotes are perfect, fitting all expectations. 

Publishing in haste. Shortcutting the questioning to get the story out ahead of everyone else. 

Writer is a star. Privileged employee exempted from strong questioning and challenges.

Everyone is on board.  Consensus can be hard to challenge.  

Bad behavior in public? Summon a mob

 If you have been on social media the past few days, you know the story. Video shows a woman confronting a father and son at a baseball game and insisting on taking a ball from the son. Since then her image has been widely circulated, with calls that she be identified, fired from her job, and disgraced into perpetuity. 

I offer no further details; I am not interested in the story itself but in what the spread of the story shows us about ourselves. 

I can't say with authority that bad behavior in public has become more common, but I am sure that the prevalence of cellphones and video surveillance has made accounts of bad behavior in public increasingly common. 

And spreading without perspective. A woman bullying a kid and parent into giving up a baseball at a ballpark gets the same widespread indignant comment as someone shouting racial abuse at Black or Latino persons and trying to get them arrested or deported, or threatening physical violence. Perhaps lack of confidence in government and institutions prompts people to go on these vigilante jags, and a public that seems increasingly angry also appears to be increasingly eager to find subjects on which to vent that anger--with a lack of any oversight or norms leaving one wondering whether justice is actually served. 

Then there is the Karen thing. The woman at the ballpark has been repeatedly called a Karen, which has become a widespread pejorative term for a middle-class woman, usually white, who is caught in public displaying behavior that is entitled, demanding, and obnoxious. As these Karen reports multiply online, it is hard not to see that to the class issue has been added a tincture of something very much like misogyny. 

People who circulate these reports of bad behavior might consider whether the bad behavior is limited to the subjects.