Epigrams – the last defence against algorithmic prose

It smells like the tanned skin of a guy with gomina in his hair stepping out of the shower wearing a pre-WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk. It has that faintly repellent, clean-dirty feel of other people’s bathrooms.

To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. Why boggle, when there are a hundred ways of reaching God?

For myself, I am in awe of the power – yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker.

Three examples of the epigrammatic style from a trio of its masters. First, the ‘Nose’ and chemist Luca Turin, author, along with Tania Sanchez, of Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, captures exactly the essence of Yves Saint Laurent’s masculine fragrance Kouros. Second, the irreverent, incisive, wretchedly alcoholic architecture critic Ian Nairn delights in the ravishing interior of that bastion of High Church Anglicanism, All Saints Margaret Street, defining it with perverse accuracy in his 1966 classic survey of the then Swingin’ capital, Nairn’s London. Finally, David Thomson, doyen of film critics, casts a comedically irreverent eye on Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic 1979 engagement with the human condition, Stalker, in his concisely rich compendium for cineastes, Have You Seen…?.

In addition to the many virtues of the epigrammatic style – concentrated, clever, funny (sometimes darkly so) – might it now provide a shield from the Large Language Model’s lazy, predictable – literally – lack of curiosity and personality, offering as it does the inimitably emphatic, often perverse, always original luxuriance in wit and insight offered by the likes of Turin, Nairn and Thomson?

When I asked an LLM for a review of Kouros in the style of Turin, it offered this…

A pristine marble god, fresh from the gym and lathered in expensive soap, who casually relieves himself behind the temple columns. Magnificent, terrifying, and impossible to evict.

It lacks the exactness of the real thing: the certain knowledge – of composition (citrus, flowers, musk), of time and place (pre-WWI British) – the almost off-hand linguistic creativity (dandified, clean-dirty), the familiarity with the arcane (gomina). Even the vulgarity, essential to Turin’s original, is forced, flat, unfunny. Where is the wit? Where is the judgement, the personal touch?

It is clear that Turin, Nairn and Thomson all love their subjects. They are committed cultural custodians who can be bothered to write about it, which makes the reader eager to read about it, a lesson for all those tempted down the lazy route of ‘writing’ via LLM, a crutch that leads to limp rather than limpid prose. Impassioned in praise, damning in criticism, sometimes they are merely gently nonplussed. Nairn refers to the refurbishment of one much-treasured Victorian pub in Bloomsbury as ‘a very near miss… perhaps only by one per cent: but here is that vital difference between ninety-nine and a hundred’.

Each unleashes their personal obsessions, such as Turin’s contempt for Creed’s fragrance Love in White: a ‘chemical white floral so disastrously vile words nearly desert me’. (Note the humanising ‘nearly’.)

One delights along with Nairn in his routine rapture (and, typically, a passing reference to alcohol) on seeing the City church of St Peter Cornhill: ‘one of [Christopher] Wren’s happiest inventions… with a wonderful freehand amplitude that suggests that designer and mason thought it up between them over a pint’.

Each extract is an expression of the author’s personality, their ‘lived experience’, long before that clichéd term became an expression of little more than hollow reverb. In a beautiful passage on Ingmar Bergman’s 1965 film Persona, Thomson writes of the astonishingly intimate performances of actors Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, judging that ‘No one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona.’

Similarly, perhaps, in the age of AI, no one should be allowed to write professionally who has not read the masters of epigrammatic style.