133 Comments
Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022

Okay, sorry but I had to give up on this only part-way in. The flippant tone of the review may be trying for light-hearted touch, but it only makes the reviewer sound completely ignorant of anything to do with mythology or poetry. When I hit this bump in the road:

" their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition, reprising old forms but, in Pound’s slogan, “Making Them New” so as to keep them alive and fresh and fascist"

That's when I got off this trolley car. Maybe the review gets better after that, but I have better things to do than read the rest of it, like stick forks in my eyes.

(Gorsh, Ezra Pound was a Fascist? Or maybe just a fascist? Or maybe he went bugnuts and we shouldn't judge the poetry by the man? I don't trust this reviewer to give me anything deeper in consideration of the genuine Problem Of Pound than I'd get on a Reddit sub about shallow vaguely liberal vaguely political but mostly social commentary of the "I have a sign in my yard about 'In this house we believe' style).

(Yes, I do take poetry seriously. And while I believe there *is* a genuine The Problem Of Pound, I'm gonna cut a bitch who disses Eliot's poetry and his genuine struggles with reconciling the Modernist idiom to what he eventually found himself working in. That reminds me, as well as re-reading The Four Quartets, I should go re-read The Cocktail Party).

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A bold stylistic decision by the reviewer, and I think he pulls it off.

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Dafuq did I just read? That was seriously weird.

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I don't care about poetry or William Carlos Williams or any of the people or concepts discussed in this review. But I couldn't turn away or stop reading, and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The style sets a high bar for itself but it worked, it got me. In its weird way, I think this might be the most successful book review for me, because it distills the experience of reading the book and injects it via the review into my brain. Confused kudos, but definitely kudos.

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It’s not really about winning the book review contest, it’s about guessing which LLM generated this

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“It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey.”

But now you’ve suggested it, we may have to.

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Buried in the rubble of someone addicted to his own snark lie gems. What a broken bitter heart lies here.

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Aug 27, 2022·edited Aug 27, 2022

I enjoyed the first part(s), but in the end the review felt like it didn't go into enough detail or offer much that was particularly surprising/enlightening/otherwise obscure-yet-interesting. Some few bits did manage the latter, and I was becoming hooked at first, but by the end... I'm unsatisfied. I still don't know what relevance this work to me, or why I should / shouldn't read it.

(That last paragraph also seems a bit, uh, fragmented itself, to me.)

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The book, I suspect,

is better than the review.

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I am personally not a big fan of book reviews that do not introduce the book right away, who wrote it, when it was written, what it is about, and why the reviewer has decided to review it. I have to decide right away whether it is something that I find interesting and worthwhile to read, rather than suffer through a bunch of introductory paragraphs that try to set up a story. I understand many people enjoy this type of intro, but I am not one of those people.

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I appreciate some of Williams's poetry, but I'd never heard of "Kora in Hell." It's out of copyright; here's a link to the text:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56681/56681-h/56681-h.htm

One thing I think Williams, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce had in common was that they meant their work to be difficult, but they worked to fill it with discoverable value that would reward readers who went to the trouble. The reviewer contrasts that with self-indulgent surrealists, and I think he has fashioned his review in the same spirit. His long reflection on improvisation, which reads like a kind of impro itself, seems to me a surprise island of easy coherence. The ideas are not new, but they are ones I have a lot of sympathy with, so I enjoyed that section.

Having looked through the Williams, I'm not sure it reaches the criteria the reviewer lays out for the skilled master riffing in a way that appeals to an audience with appreciation of those skills. But, obviously, I'd have to put in much more work--rise to the level of Pound's "reader of good will"--in order to reach a real conclusion. The review really doesn't inspire me to devote the effort; there's plenty of Williams's poetry still in line before "Kora in Hell."

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I can never really get into poetry. While there are several poems I like, and sometimes they can be very insightful and amazing. Even when they are very good they mostly seem like bad philosophy, or excellent song lyrics lacking a melody.

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Tough crowd for poetry. I think it's a good review, deserves an honorable mention at least.

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Was this review written by GPT-3? It seems to have the disjointed quality I associate with AI writing: each sentence is a fine individual sentence, but there doesn't seem to be any between-sentence coherence.

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I enjoyed reading the review, but can't tell whether I should read WCW or not based on it. I never thought I would like TS Elliot until I read him, because I don't like most poetry. But the musicality of his language is amazing, even when read silently. So if I were reviewing him, I would want to mention: definitely read him! The sound is at least as important as the meaning!

This succeeds as an essay, but not as a review.

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The first of all of the book reviews that I have not felt compelled to finish :/

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Oh THAT’s who Stella Gibbons is making fun of in Cold Comfort Farm. I always wondered.

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I've read several of the other entries and wondered if Scott secretly wrote them, or perhaps if he was discriminating against contestants who don't imitate his style.

I thought at first that today's entry might be someone trying and failing to sound like Scott. (He definitely didn't write this one himself... I think?) But I did read it through to the end, and now I think I should read "Kora in Hell". That counts as a successful book review, even if it's unorthodox.

Until reading today's comments it hadn't occurred to me that some or all of these were written by an AI. If it turns out that any of them were, I'm going to revise my priors about when human history will end.

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I particularly appreciate the use of Jackie Chan as a stand in for Aristotle here. The review was entertaining enough, and probably as good a promotion of the book as it deserves?

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Yeah, I liked this a lot. Perhaps we might call it a response to the work, rather than a review as such, but that's not a problem. Saying a bunch of interesting things, even slightly incoherently, is better than saying some dull things in a tightly logical structure.

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The signal my brain kept throwing up over and over and over was "I notice I am confused!"

*Difficult writing style...lots of very long sentences, some broken up with a series of serial commas, others with no punctuation at all. Meant to mirror WCW himself?

*Many reference pointers that didn't seem to clearly terminate on single subjects or objects (imprecise grammar).

*Lots of references to other artists and works that I don't recognize, due to not being particularly well-read. So I know Extremely Famous big names like Marshal McLuhan, but "Like Cortazar's Hopscotch"...I have no idea what that refers to? Prefer not to have to repeatedly Googlepedia unfamiliar terms, it breaks up the reading flow majorly...

*It wasn't until almost the end of the review that I understood clearly what the book is (about): it's poetry. At first I was like...it's about some weird Mystery Cult? it's a police blotter? it's about women's oppression in early 1900s? it's a diary?

*Would have been very helpful to organize all the meta into one place; it's weird to reach almost the end of the review and only then get told the book's broken into 3 main parts. It's weird to have the timeline/history of the book spread out throughout the review, dripped out in dabs.

All I know at the end is that WCW wrote some poems which seem mildly interesting, like Thought-A-Day calendar style, possibly good-quality loo library material. Unclear about the greater significance, either artistically or historically. The brevity of the review was both a welcome change, and also left me with the distinct feeling I missed "the point" somewhere along the way. I dunno, this one was just a head-scratcher to me... :?

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I actually enjoyed reading this! Mind you, I won't vote for it, because it didn't teach me new things in the same way as some other reviews, and to me that's what these reviews are for. But I certainly felt like I had an interesting glimpse into this book, and ended up wanting to actually read it!

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(Banned)Aug 27, 2022·edited Aug 27, 2022

It took me a while to understand (or believe) that he/she was actually reviewing "Kora in Hell" as opposed to just using the collection as a analogy to review something else with similar name.

Once I figured out/convince myself that it was in fact an attempt at a book review, I was able to embrace it as a not entirely horrible literary criticism essay. But this is not praise, because even as a piece of literary criticism it was too long and without proper focus.

The longer an essay is, the higher the bar!

Of course, we must concede that reviewing a collection of poems (which actually includes WCW own reflections about the poems (was that even mentioned?) is a challenging task. It is especially challenging in an age in which poetry is as dead as so-called jazz is dead. See Nicholas Payton's essay. "ON WHY JAZZ ISN’T COOL ANYMORE" (2011) https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/

And improvising is probably also as dead. Jerry Garcia like sweet Jane: all a friend can say is ain't it a shame.

I found these reviews of Kora to be really much better: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2447144.Kora_in_Hell

And they were shorter!

WCW was a physician which I think should have been mentioned. (Maybe it was and I missed it.) I am recalling a story about when another poet Wallace Stevens died, a work acquaintance of Stevens remarked after the eulogy: "Wally was a poet?" Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive.

The person told me the WS funeral story after learning that I had been honored and paid for being a poet. (Nearly 40 years ago, at a commencement.) My relationship with poetry is like my relationship with jazz (where I've also been paid.) I suppose an embarrassment; as embarrassing as when a jazz colleague finds out I'm a trial lawyer, or when my legal brothers as sisters find out I'm a sculptor or even worse that I published a paper about mathematics. I am also currently translating a work of Janusz Korczak, and I've certainly kept that a secret.

If poetry and jazz are dead (Payton I think is correct), the concept of the polymath is also dead.

So too is the idea of a public intellectual.

Even what passes for being an educated person, is messed up. Undergraduate business degrees? Liberal arts lacking STEM and STEM lacking liberal arts. Not actually learning some other languages and doing some art and music.

Sigh.

I may have to find Duke Tumatoe's album: A Ejukatid Man (1999) to cheer me up.

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Everyone saying this is written by an AI has clearly never read any WCW.

If you have, it’s pretty evident why the review is written the way it is. Conveniently then, if you hated reading this review, you probably won’t love Williams.

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This review really could have benefited from a paragraph of setup. What even is this book? I had a hard time continuing in such uncertainty.

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I'm not sure if I learned anything, but I enjoyed it!

btw '...the Hindu god Brahma, you’ll improvise the Universe like you’re dancing.' - you probably want the god Shiva, who creates and destroys with his (improvised) dances.

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Did not get past the first chapter of the review. Doing the whole "mysterious, confusing introduction" can work to wet the appetite, but this one just left me hanging. You have to clear some stuff up before you lose most of your readers.

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Aug 27, 2022·edited Aug 27, 2022

I don't understand the general dislike of this in the comments. I found it well-written, well-structured, and interesting. The reviewer sets the scene, pulls in some juicy excerpts, editorializes a bit about the author, and makes good comparisons. The review provided solid context and piqued my interest.

Out of every book reviewed so far, this is the one I'm most likely to read.

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> And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere.

The much more obvious theory is that they called her that because that's what she was usually called. Deities have many names, titles, and epithets, and you don't need a reason to use one of them. You may have a reason to choose a particular form of address, but you never need one.

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This is a total failure of a book review: it doesn't tell us what the book is or what information it notionally contains. It seems to be a vehicle for the author (of the review) to do some unconnected free-association. The review does not even bother to mention the title of the book, "Kora in Hell: Improvisations", which would make references to "the Improvisations" much less nonsensical.

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This review is a Rorschach test, and but I’m not sure of what the results mean.

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Funny how this review is so polarizing - I thought it one of the best in the contest. I read all 130 + entries, and put this in the top 3.

Only two of my top 3 made the finals, so my taste is not perfectly aligned with the group, but I’m surprised that so many commenters didn’t even finish reading it, or didn't understand it, or speculated about it being an AI-generated hoax.

It’s well-written and funny - a few of my favorite lines:

- “the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.”

- “Williams cut all the nonsense out so you don’t have to suffer it like Frida suffered the surrealist’s air poisoning.”

- “Even if you don’t know that red is supposed to make you angry or that everything in the world is secretly the number three…”

And it’s only a little over 3000 words. Given Scott’s remark “There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words” this is clearly on the shorter side.

Of course, the subject matter is pretty far off the beaten track for ACX. I’m reminded of a quote used in the movie The Big Short: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry." There’s not much reason to read Kora in Hell unless you’re already interested in early-20th-century arts & letters, which I’m sure many ACX readers aren’t. (If you are, I’d like to recommend Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley, if you haven’t read it yet.)

In any case, I very much enjoyed this review: props to the anonymous reviewer for an entertainingly written account of an obscure yet interesting book!

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After reading some of it, the review really oversold the book. It's trapped by self-awareness, oblique, and fetishizes language. There's wisdom and a keen eye there, some gems, but it would take a better man to make something readable out of it. Too inward-turned, high on his own farts. And so, so horny!

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Joining Team Haters. Not qualified to say to what extent this succeeds as poetry inspired by the book, but for me this simply isn’t a book review. Not every form fits every purpose.

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Strangely enough I got a bit more out of this review than most because I'm lucky enough to have read the webtoon Lore Olympus: Kore can mean both "maiden" and "deathbringer". I'm not as familiar with the Roman names so Proserpina went over my head.

I know next to nothing about early 20th century lit/poetry, other than recognizing most of the names through some decent cultural osmosis, and having read the first part of "Howl" in a throwaway scene in the comic Blacksaad (highly recommended btw (also because of a mistype I only just realized that "heard" and "read" only differ by an H and where to put the R)), and so the references to their works also went over my head.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the rambling, free-associative style, which seems to be a pastiche of the style of the book itself. It's fun to stretch the old comprehension muscles every so often, but giving them a stretch every now and then is really all I'm up for these days, so the full body workout of the actual book is something I'll likely have to pass on.

Still, kudos to the reviewer for trying something experimental, and to the comments for the links and references.

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This is an unusually effective book review. I began it thinking, "I can't remember which guy William Carlos Williams is" and went through the following stages quite quickly:

* Who is WCW?

* What is this review even about?

* I don't like this.

* I'm not going to finish this.

* Hmm, the other comments didn't like it either.

* Oh, I remember who WCW is! I hate that guy!

Mission accomplished -- I have no need to read the original work itself and if anyone ever were to ask if I have (or why I haven't) I'll be able to respond. I suspect the multi-step process of discovery in the above bullet-point list will prove a more durable marker for me about WCW than having read some of his work in college and having thought "wow this is forgettable garbage I will forget it immediately".

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First couple paragraphs almost lost me completely but I'm glad I kept reading- would be much better if there was a more clear introduction. Might be that I had no knowledge of WCW beforehand.

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