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My scattershot approach to reading Auerbach relied on the uniformity of each chapter: he chooses a historical moment, quotes at length an author whose work represents something about that moment and occasionally contrasts that author with another. All gone out the window with a century of French classical playwrights Molière, Corneille and Racine (and their critics) drawing moral examples from their collective work.

The book fails to live up to its title in every way that Lauren Hill’s Miseducation succeeded as an album: both are about reactions to the past but while Hill makes a bold statement about musical inspiration and recovering from her pain, Westover is buried in the family squabble that never gets resolved. Plus she makes her PhD out to be a hobby between binge watching long-running TV series, so mostly true.

Emboldened by his Social Contract, Rousseau sets out to update Poland using old familiar strategies like 'get rid of theatres' and 'rely on farmland not money' and suggesting to shrink rather than expand the borders. He models his idea on children's games, but only reveals in the last two chapters a blend of rock-paper-scissors to elect the King of Poland; are any famous hills there to elect a king to be of?

The line from As You Like It about having "seen much and to have nothing" (IV.i) is a fitting description of Tara's travels to Cambridge: she has gained an education but still keeps coming back to the misery that is her family. Meanwhile her mother has barely left the household and is now a cottage industry for a homeopathic empire. Both mother and daughter, however, share the same burden of male chauvinism.

The more serious side of bedroom interactions from this early modern period of medieval revival where the du Chastels discuss sacrificing their only son to the Black Prince in order to keep husband's reputation intact, while another well-to-do couple's marriage unravels due to the lack of a fancy dress. Auerbach raises the point that authors were representing the creatural reality of an era disillusioned by divinity.

Well past the point of familiarity with the text under analysis, and not yet halfway through the book, I took a random number and got the first page of Song of Roland chapter, an eleventh century poem that shows the fighting spirit of the Franks. Most of the conflict is directed towards other knights who jealously seek favours and bring ruin to their rivals. These epics are baby steps for a mercenary future.

Now we get into a theological discussion of social media without attacking the moderately devout, blaming only those rascally radicals whom everyone needs to be on edge. But this is exactly as the idiom relates, preaching to the choir won’t win over any new converts, and Lanier’s delete everything project seems even more suspect, who does he want to keep using social media asides from acolytes of AI false idols?

According to the Two Popes, John XXII's ban on the clergy frolicking with wives or their flock couldn't come soon enough if Boccaccio's naughty tales are enough evidence of the earthly loves these men of the cloth pursued. Auerbach frames it as charmingly humanistic, in a way it is, yet how many of these false believers like Frate Alberto would have contributed to the plague by mixing devotion with pleasure?

Gone beyond the point of frustration, Part Two begins on what should be a fresh start at Brigham Young and yet almost every chance she gets Tara is rushing home to her abusive family. Short scenes of her becoming educated, as the book title misleadingly suggests, flit between junkyard drudgery and Stockholm sympathies. Her dad nears death, but like racist jerk Shawn in the most annoying way, he’ll survive doomsday.

Reading bonus material to the main part of the book, unfinished chapters and letters, it became apparent that Rousseau was doing what most Wired tech-writers do today, trying to establish a better way of interacting; we now need an Of the Social Media Contract! Corsica proves an interesting test case, much like how Quibi should shareware but like history has shown will probably only produce another Napoleon.

A clever attempt at literary induction, Said peers into a crystal ball to determine how writing begins and what came before such beginnings. Strange that he relies so much in his opening chapter on how critics write about an author, since this would necessarily come after the novel or other work is already done. Unlike the movies, nobody seems to care about the “making of” a book, so Said starts with Chapter Two.

Has Lanier lost all sense of how footnotes work? He is an intelligent, self-made and educated person, yet throws them about willy-nilly, often simply a hyperlink to online articles that could have been cited properly. It suggests his book was meant to be read digitally, with hyperlinks opening up in support of his theory, but reading this book on device just feels wrong. Positioning himself by footnote feels wronger.

I never understood the appeal of Rabelais, in spite of numerous continental philosophers and art historians heaping praise upon all things Rabelaisian. Even the passages quoted here don’t necessarily show the author’s wit or insight, but speak volumes of the pee, poo and other grotesqueries of his stories. I can only imagine a literary lineage of absurd humour leading up to Raspe’s much better Baron Munchausen.

An amazing series of follow-up lectures that almost pick up where the little prince dropped off, transplanting him from the desert to a dull German university town, granting him a double life as alchemy-minded professor. The tension of this incredibly prescient novel is between reason and chaos, showing the traps both Germany fell into and America, as von Franz called it sixty years ago, now finds itself caught, too.

Somehow not the kind of education I was expecting: so much of it having to do with the intricacies of the scrapping business with its yelling, shoving and overlooking career-ending accidents. Even the chapters names themselves which I suppose are allusions to Mormon lore but just barely connected to the chapter itself. How much of this book is Tara calling her dad out on his temper and implying where he can shove it?

The Enlightenment wits draw the glare of Auerbach’s critical spotlight while he calls out how much of literary reality remains in shadows when only reflecting the bright and salacious points. French authors emphasize the intimate details without the psychological insight of later centuries. Therefore it is a morality of the surface perfectly fit for Voltaire to mock the implicate darkness in light found in Leibniz.

So we’re all in with the bummer acronym? I’ll meet Lanier halfway on the many points he makes in relation to this model, but refuse to go ALL-CAPS ranting about it. That meeting halfway is something like the antidote to the many societal problems our media has caused. In fact it is starting to resonate with my concurrent reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract! Then by page 80 he mentions empathy and VR.

A catch-all contract for many different societies, that has as much to say in support a Caligula or Cromwell as it does for Caesar or Cicero. Rousseau takes an evolutionary view of how societies form and function, imposing a laissez-faire approach mere decades after the phrase was coined (yet a century before evolution was even conceived), allowing a Sovereign to pick and choose what works best for citizens.

Knowing the backstory of this beloved classic, the author’s actual Saharan crash, the death of his brother in childhood, near-death and hallucination from thirst, makes this fantasy world more portentous. Still plenty of what-a-world lessons about trains and pills (suicide signifiers?) but a poignant exchange comes from the fox who asked to be tamed and gave the most valuable lesson about seeing with one’s heart.

The journey which von Franz only briefly covers in her puer aeternus lectures are the moral heart of the story, coming from an unreliable source who wants to avoid moralizing. It’s really purgatory in reverse as the little prince descends each planetary sphere encountering increasing degrees of uncertainty: the king knows all, the geographer hardly anything. Earth’s life teaches how to live meaningfully.

So much that has changed since my youthful reading of this book, never in its sequential order until my grown-up days. I now see the psychological torment of an author trying to restart his career as an artist, stunted at the age of six! Also figured out the mystery of the sinful seventh asteroid, either 324 or 331, that had the lazy man who had let the baobabs overtake his world. Still, where do the seeds originate?

Wrapping up her analysis of Little Prince early in lecture five, von Franz goes off-book and into her clinical practice to share stories of Saint-Exupéry-like playboys who never made it far from the devouring mother’s animus. Whether they flit away figuratively with intellectual inaction or literally get in airplanes to put some distance between their childish habits, both crash into a psychological heap.

An impressive story but somehow also inauthentic. Apart from a certain number of names that were changed, family members and acquaintances who did not want to be named in the memoir, it feels like the perspective of a young girl in a sheltered, survivalist household is a bit too knowing and mature to experience everything a pre-educated Tara did. Therefore nobody will grow in the book as they remain as she remembers.

I get the angle that Lanier uses in his takedown of social media, using the clickbait-like titles in a listicle format, but it muddies his argument somewhat. He is genuinely concerned that people are wrapped up in a mind-control experiment gone global, but calling out the a-holes in his bummer revelation makes him a bit of an a-hole. Fighting poop with poop? More anecdotal evidence would have got him some absolution.

The bugs in the system are not there because of some unexpected glitch but instead are projections of us, our dependence on data and computational thinking that leads to greater problems. We allow numerous oily organizations to tap into what seem like secure transmissions and then let others spin stories of conspiracies to keep us out of the loop. We add to the spin because we can’t yet face how we are our shadows.

Taking her analyst’s eye to a familiar and beloved (in my household) children’s classic, von Franz lectures effortlessly about the meaning of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince as she pinpoints the eternal childishness of the unreliable author plus the psychological relevance of the prince, the rose, snake and fox. To say that too much of this hits close to home may reveal some unresolved issues of my own!

The next four Big C chapters can be summed up by comparing those fried egg/this is your brain antidrug PSAs: this is the world, this is what computational thinking does to it. First to get burnt to a crisp is any semblance of truth or trustworthiness, from scientific research and data providers to the machine minds at the heart of computation or the government oversight supposedly protecting citizens. We’re doomed!

The robot revolution has been put on hold, saving the increasingly stubborn teachers from having to learn something themselves about the automated machines already in their classrooms, even those AI-assisted learning tools that make all-day kindergarten and large university lectures (and anything in between) nearly obsolete. Once again, maybe this complacency is exactly what the machines coded us to believe.

The often-mentioned Dormammu makes a two-part comic debut, revealing a much more sinister universe than Doctor Strange has encountered yet, and nevertheless Strange’s greatest strength is his desire to do good, first by helping out his greatest foe and then by defending a mystery lady from a greater threat from the Mindless Ones. Even with the Demon, his next opponent, there is grave danger thwarted by beneficence.

From a dream-like musing of Miss Miller to the determination to redefine the libido by Dr. Jung, something transformative happens and literature scholar should take note. The journey of the hero has been essentially mapped out in the many allusion drawn from his symbolic analysis. If I had more space on my bookshelf, I’d be curious to find out how much Joseph Campbell relied upon Symbols of Transformation.