Hey Guys, Let’s Read. And, While We’re at It, AI Will Allow Us to Write, the Latest Thing.

Don’t let the paparazzi catch you without a book in your hand. Intellectual is the new low-cut blouse, and celebrity guys are in it too, spiky hair and Iain Sinclair.

A Guardian article tickled my fancy today, making me wonder if I’d be (or at least look) more hip by carrying one of my own books around on the Prague metro. I’ve nearly 20 of them, but they were written long before it was intellectually chic. In those long-passed days, it was what writers did if they cared to share something they felt was worthwhile. But now…

We Are Living in a Period of Political Anti-Intellectualism. But in Pop Culture, Clever Is the New Cool.

That’s the Guardian headline.

Ah, there you go. We’re not actually reading, we’re wearing the look, riding the book, and hooking the hook. Cliff Notes provides the chit-chat and a book in the hand beats two in the library.

Gotcha.

It all began, the Guardian tells me, when Kim Kardashian decided a few years ago to pursue a legal career, to test if admission to the bar would polish up a celebrity career.

Thus far, celebrity was her career, and its legs were getting tired. We won’t know, because she failed three times, but I’m told the fourth was a charm. Although she most likely won’t actually try any cases, she set the stage for intellectual curiosity as a requirement in any celebrity’s wardrobe.

Kardashians are good at that, if not much else.

Kardashian’s pivot towards legal study, we are informed, was an early experiment in whether intellectual seriousness could be folded into celebrity without destroying its commercial appeal.

According to the Guardian, once proven, the folding continues. Eager to promote their commercial appeal, “Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid.”

It took 1800 words to make that case?

“This is real,” says trend forecaster Lucie Greene. “There is a backlash against visually focused lifestyle content, which has become so co-opted by brands (ah, one doesn’t dare to get co-opted on the way to the Bentley dealer). Gen Z want more. They want knowledge. They want to go deep down the rabbit hole, on podcasts and on Reddit as well as on TikTok and YouTube.”

Well, you won’t find a Bentley on Reddit, TikTok or YouTube, but it’s worth a try. Interesting to me, that a ‘trend forecaster’ would lean in on what is real, and what is only the whiff of a Kardashian breaking wind.

“This is bigger than books,” the article continues to gush. “It is thinking, as well as reading, that is cool again.”

Well, thank God for that.

I had no idea we had fallen so far that ‘going deep down the rabbit hole’ was thought of as surfacing. Thinking has finally lifted its head far enough above that surface that it’s cool. Doddering will be next, as soon as Gen Z approaches the age of reason, and dodders through their second or third mid-life crisis.

Ah but wait a moment.

“It is worth interrogating” (we read on) “the skepticism that creeps in, any time fashion or glamour are put in the same category as thought or intellect. I refer you here to Dua Lipa’s author interviews, which are superb. In a chat with David Szalay, the author of Flesh, she asked him about the authorial decision to omit the protagonist’s father from a story that has so much to say about masculinity – a point that, Szalay notes, no reviewers had picked up on.”

Cliff Notes strike again.

I suspect, but insist it is only a suspicion, that Dua Lipa wouldn’t know an authorial decision from a coat-rack, unless she was well prompted by her trend forecaster.

But if reading and thinking are actually on the upswing, I’m willing to march in that parade.

Sign me up…on Substack, of course.