Is this sentence objectively bad?

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]Can art be objectively bad?

[00:00:02]>> [music] >> I mean, we all know crap when we see it, but is there really such a thing as objective crap?

[00:00:08]>> You think there's objective crap?

[00:00:10]>> Yeah. And when you look at a book like American Dirt, it's a bad book, and that's not subjective.

[00:00:17]Like, that's an objective truth.

[00:00:18]>> Okay. Those are some pretty big words from Jonathan Franzen and in Roxane Gay.

[00:00:23]And yet, I notice that neither of them does the hard work of actually building the machine that can objectively measure whether a sentence is good or bad. You know, the kind where you would dump a sentence in one end, and then it would do a series of steps, and then the little light would turn green for good or red for bad, or maybe there's a number score it would give you. I don't really know how this thing is going to work. It's probably not going to work, but I want to try, damn it. You know, I I figure we'll learn something along the way. And if, by chance, we are able to pull it off and prove, once and for all, that writing can be objectively bad, I mean, what else are they giving the Nobel Prize out for? You know what I mean?

[00:00:58]>> [laughter] >> Lesser things.

[00:01:02]I don't want to start with abstract ideas of badness. I want to start with some real sentences, cuz if I can't prove that some obviously bad sentences are obviously bad, I'm never going to be able to build the machine, and we can [music] kiss goodbye to that tuxedo party in Stockholm. Luckily, I found what I believe to be the [music] perfect test case sentence. But before I do that, I need to paint the picture of [music] an exciting water slide that I hope to one day zoom down. And yes, the water slide is the BookTube to published author pipeline.

[00:01:38]The pipeline is a big thing now because publishers don't really know how to market books anymore, so they like to give deals to BookTubers with a built-in audience.

[00:01:48]At least to some of them.

[00:01:51]>> You going to cry? You little Swiss [ __ ] [ __ ] >> I'm not going to cry.

[00:01:54]>> YOU'RE CRYING NOW.

[00:01:56]>> It's so [ __ ] hot.

[00:01:58]>> The high water mark here is definitely John Green. His YA novels and non-fiction books have been insanely popular. There are 45 million copies of his books in print. Holy moly. Now, he had published novels before he got big on YouTube, [music] but his big hit, A Fault in Our Stars, came out after his YouTube success.

[00:02:16]>> Uh George Bush, it's all my fault.

[00:02:19]>> The low water mark has got to be Jake Paul, who wrote a memoir in what seems to be a few hours one afternoon.

[00:02:25]>> He runs out of information and just starts listing pointless [ __ ] I'm wearing sweatpants. [music] >> But no, he isn't a novelist. As novelists go, many feathers were ruffled when our friends at >> Simon & Schuster >> offered a book deal to this fella, Luke [music] Bateman, even though he'd only written 10-ish percent of the book, which sure, that does sting a little. It seems like the publishing industry had different standards for a [music] rugby-playing, bachelor-starring, tree-chopping, open-shirt-wearing Aussie hunk.

[00:02:56]Hey Luke, since you haven't finished your book yet, I'd suggest you give your fans exactly what they're looking for by having a love scene take place inside a dusty tractor cabin of a [music] big logging machine.

[00:03:08]>> Feels a little bit weird.

[00:03:09]>> I think you'd be a fool not to.

[00:03:11]Last year, BookTube sensation Haley Pham announced that she too had secured a book deal with, of course, >> Simon & Schuster.

[00:03:18]>> Before writing the book, she asked God if she should, and at the risk of offending a bunch of you, I did obtain that tape. Dear God, should I write a novel? Oh Haley, it's so sweet of you to call. Love, look, you're going to face some difficult decisions in your life, honey. This ain't one. Have you seen your subscriber numbers? My God. Pretty crazy that I was able to obtain that.

[00:03:40]Anyway, she wrote the book. It's called Just Friends. It came out in March, and she's killing it. Number two New York Times paperback seller, sold out book tours, 4.3 stars on that source of truth, Amazon. Uh hey, that's tied with Tolstoy.

[00:03:56]Did Haley Pham write a great book? I read it and I don't think so, but you know, I'm going to save my full reaction for a different video because it sent me down this crazy rabbit hole into evolutionary biology and problems with the current Chinese dating scene. So, that's going to be its own other thing.

[00:04:12]What I do want to do instead is to zoom in on two sentences from Just Friends that I thought were bad. And no, the point of this is not to dunk on Haley Pham. Of course, in the first novel that she's ever written, she's going to have some what [music] George Saunders would call clunkers.

[00:04:28]But we are going to use these two sentences to see if we can build our objectivity machine. [music] Here are the two sentences.

[00:04:35]I furrow my brow as she scurries to the back like a small mouse. And [music] I have to yield to a conglomerate of pedestrians almost every 10 ft.

[00:04:45]Now, you may think, "Oh, okay. I can see why he thinks these are bad." But hold on, because I don't want to do this alone and you're not really here.

[00:04:54]I need to enlist the help of a [music] real literary snob. Someone with strong opinions. Someone who has delivered many lectures on literature. Yes, [music] Vladimir Nabokov. I used to think it was pronounced Nabokov because of Sting, my read poster buddy.

[00:05:13]Nabokov may be the snobbiest writer of the 20th century. Dude called Dostoevsky clumsy and vulgar. He said that people giving a standing ovation to an Ezra Pound commencement speech were morons.

[00:05:25]He said Ernest Hemingway wrote books not for men, but for boys. He said anyone who considered William Faulkner's corncobby chronicles to be great books was suffering an absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

[00:05:42]As author Emily Temple says, "At a time when the literary world seems determined to swear that every book is good because it is a book. Nabokov's outspoken anti-book opinions feel almost aesthetically transgressive.

[00:05:54]Agreed, Emily. Agreed.

[00:05:56]So, I enlist the help of Nabokov as my guide, and he sets me straight right away. Apparently, I cannot claim that these sentences are bad just because we all agree that they're bad. That would be an appeal to common sense.

[00:06:10]>> Common sense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam [music] of some too early truth. Common sense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings [music] because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof. Common sense is fundamentally immoral. [music] >> He's really got away with words, doesn't he? Okay, so no appeals to common sense, which is fine. You know, we wanted to do this the hard way anyway.

[00:06:36]>> [music] >> My big problem with this first sentence is that scurries like a small mouse is a >> [music] >> doubly redundant cliché. Picture a young barista scurrying to the back room.

[00:06:46]Now, picture her scurrying to the back room like a mouse.

[00:06:50]Did anything change?

[00:06:52]Did she put her hands up?

[00:06:54]Now, she's not just scurrying like a mouse, she's scurrying like a small mouse. Is there really a difference in the way that a small mouse scurries versus, say, an average-size mouse?

[00:07:05]Small in this instance is, get ready, pleonastic.

[00:07:10]That's a redundant or unnecessary word.

[00:07:13]I learned pleonastic from my Italian teacher in college who used to roll his own cigarettes in class. How do you say pleonastic in Italian?

[00:07:22]>> Pleonastico.

[00:07:23]>> So, small is pleonastic, but the big issue is scurries like a mouse is a cliché. And if there's one thing I've learned from Friends, and it's that clichés are bad.

[00:07:33]>> What?

[00:07:34]>> Cliché. In my opinion, you get at most one cliché per book. They tell me this is not an attentive writer.

[00:07:41]Are you aware that that's a cliché? Did it not occur to you to stop and take 20 minutes to find a better phrasing than that? Really, he turned white as a sheet?

[00:07:50]>> Nabokov hates clichés as well, reacting to the uninspired way sex scenes were filmed in movies in the 1960s, he writes, "The blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet. All of it is primitive, [music] commonplace, conventional, and therefore disgusting."

[00:08:10]>> Wait, did he say four or five mingled feet?

[00:08:14]>> Sweetie, I think we should have a threesome.

[00:08:16]>> What? With who?

[00:08:17]>> With Cindy.

[00:08:19]>> Cindy? But she's missing a Oh.

[00:08:25]>> And Nabokov is actually disgusted by the cliché and conventional way that these sex scenes are filmed. This is the part of snobbery that appeals to me.

[00:08:34]It's very aesthetically sensitive and it basically says, "Come on, guys. Let's do better." So, I get a piece of paper, which is actually e-paper in my free Photoshop online emulator thing, and I draw a line. I write cliché over here and over here I write fresh, the opposite of cliché.

[00:08:53]Cliché bad, fresh good. But already I see a problem. Let's say it's the early Middle Ages and you write, for the first time ever, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." At first everyone's like this, but then it clicks.

[00:09:07]>> [cheering] >> You know, and so everyone loves it and they start using it and so much so that by 1670, John Ray includes it in his A Complete Collection of English Proverbs.

[00:09:18]What I'm getting at is that every cliché starts out as fresh. It then becomes a victim of its own success. As Nabokov says, clichés and conventions breed remarkably fast. So, how can we objectively measure the quality of writing if the freshness or cliché-ness of it changes over time depending on how much other writers imitate it. If cliches are objectively bad, but what constitutes a cliche changes over time, then objective quality changes over time.

[00:09:48]That doesn't sound objective, but we have another problem. According to this simple rubric, Haley Pham's first sentence is bad, but her second sentence is good. Conglomerate of pedestrians is definitely not a cliche. It's fresh.

[00:10:03]Maybe maybe too fresh. We have only one option. We must expand our rubric. So, I try to think about what it is about this sentence that bothers me, and I think it's the lack of clarity. What is a conglomerate of pedestrians?

[00:10:18]>> The number one media conglomerate in the world.

[00:10:22]>> Originally, I thought maybe the word conglomerate can only be used to describe expansive corporate business structures, but that's not true. The word can also mean anything composed of heterogeneous materials or elements.

[00:10:35]>> Heterogeneous.

[00:10:36]>> Heterogeneous.

[00:10:38]Yeah, heterogeneous.

[00:10:40]>> So, in that case, you [music] know, the pedestrians are heterogeneous, so yeah, I guess it kind of makes some sense.

[00:10:46]Except, no, no, no, because this word sounds so specific, but it doesn't actually help us picture the group of pedestrians. [music] Was this a particularly heterogeneous group of pedestrians? Is their heterogeneity noteworthy?

[00:11:00]No.

[00:11:01]The word in this context is vague.

[00:11:04][music] So, with some doubt in my heart that vague always means that something is bad, I go ahead and add a new axis [music] to the graph, vague to specific.

[00:11:16]And now, my god, we have quadrants.

[00:11:18]Vague cliche, vague fresh, specific cliche, and specific fresh. [music] Let's see if these quadrants even make any sense. Vague fresh is conglomerate [music] of pedestrians.

[00:11:29]A vague cliche might be fast as lightning, you know, cuz cuz how fast is that really?

[00:11:38]Dark as night.

[00:11:40]What kind of night?

[00:11:47]Whereas I think a specific cliche would be like a grimace, a smirk.

[00:11:53]A good-looking guy running his hand through his hair, which happens several times in this novel. So, all of these three quadrants are bad and the only good writing is specific and fresh.

[00:12:05]We did it.

[00:12:06]No, no, we did not do it. Be because there are at least two really big issues about this rubric that we are totally ignoring. The first is tone.

[00:12:15]This sentence was written by Haley Pham, but it appears in a novel as narrated by the main character Blair. Is Blair the kind of person who uses big words awkwardly?

[00:12:23]>> If we continue to self-segregate ourselves, the entire gay community is going to continue to be marginalized.

[00:12:29]>> If so, this sentence is great. Sure, the word conglomerate didn't help me picture the pedestrians, but maybe it helped me learn a little bit more about Blair.

[00:12:38]Authors have gotten great stuff from writing narrators that are awkward or conceited or deranged. Nabokov himself does this in Pale Fire. Lincoln Michel does it in Metallic Realms. Those novels provide the reader the joy of a dramatic irony of seeing something that the narrator does not.

[00:12:55]>> Be certain laugh and black, white New York, you make it happen. Brownstones, water towers, trees, skyscrapers.

[00:13:01]>> Like I could totally see the narrator of Metallic Realms writing something like, I have to yield to a conglomerate of pedestrians. They take their sweet time crossing, tragically unaware of my overindulgence this morning in iced coffee and Mountain Dew.

[00:13:16]A short pep talk to my bladder accomplishes nothing. Now, I've read Haley Pham's book and I do not believe that that is what she is doing here.

[00:13:25]But can I prove it?

[00:13:27]No. Our objectivity machine cannot hinge on authorial intent.

[00:13:34]So, basically, my rubric is stupid and broken. But, before I lose all hope and trash it, I consider whether the flatness of my paper has been flattening my thinking.

[00:13:44]I suddenly remember a party from 1969 with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and Paris Review founder George Plimpton.

[00:13:54]What were these two men doing at the party?

[00:14:00]>> I've got to move over here.

[00:14:02]Let's go ahead.

[00:14:04]Well, George Plimpton, you're not only a a great ball player and a boxer and symphonic musician, you're also very good at three-dimensional tic-tac-toe.

[00:14:11]>> Yes, of course, they were playing 3D tic-tac-toe.

[00:14:14]See, it's the third dimension that transforms tic-tac-toe from a quick-to-play game for the mentally developing into a cool-looking tower thingy to impress smokey-eyed ladies.

[00:14:25]Maybe I could add a third dimension to my rubric, a a Z axis to solve all my problems.

[00:14:31]But, no.

[00:14:32]I can't think of a Z axis that isn't itself subjective. To be quite objective in these matters is, of course, impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent [music] subjective.

[00:14:44]Nabokov knew it all along. No, we cannot determine the objective quality of writing.

[00:14:50]>> [music] >> So, here's a better question. Why did we even want to try? What's the point of saying something [music] is objectively bad if not to cut off debate, to say, "Shut up, I'm right."? It's so the snobs can feel more snuggly [music] in their smugness.

[00:15:04]That's not to say that there's no such thing as good or bad writing. It's just that what constitutes good and bad writing is [music] subjective and therefore debatable. And that debate is part of the joy, though sometimes annoying. Not to mention that my own rubric sucks. Like, I just don't want to make a rule that says all words must have a clear meaning to the reader. I'm not personally a fan of the Ocean Vuong inspired poetic style [music] creeping into some novels. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life? But if we created and all followed a rule about what writing is good and what writing is bad, all that's going to do is diminish the variety of writing out there. I'm glad that there are Ocean Vuong fans.

[00:15:43]>> [music] >> I probably could have been one if you'd caught me in a particular very emotional week I had in October when I was 17.

[00:15:50]Anyway, Franzen himself gives us a much more helpful way of judging writing quality, and it's purely subjective.

[00:15:56]It's this.

[00:15:58]Does this sentence pull me deeper into the imagined dream world?

[00:16:03]>> The vivid dream.

[00:16:04]>> Or does it push me back out into the real world where I'm a dude reading a book written by someone?

[00:16:11]And using this new rubric, Haley Fam's conglomerate sentence is, for me, really bad. Because the awkward word choice pushed me from the quaint fictional seaside village back out into the real world where I was contemplating the publishing industry. I thought I could see in that word choice a story of a young bookish content creator who amassed a number of subscribers that made publishers froth at the mouth, so they gave her a book deal and vowed to get her book to market as quickly as possible, all the better to cash in on her success. Just Friends hit the shelves just 8 months after it was announced. That's super fast for trad publishing. But even with all that speed, aren't editors supposed to catch an awkward sentence like this? Well, maybe they used to, but publishing is now in what Atria editor Sean DeLouche calls the profit squeeze [music] era.

[00:17:02]Editors are being loaded with more and more projects. Sean estimates he works on 36 books at a time, [music] meaning individual books get less and less attention. This is partly why, more than ever, editors prize books that need very little [music] editing. The effect of this is that literary agents are acting like editors, helping the author shape their manuscript before it goes out on submission. Maybe I can help.

[00:17:24][music] In fact, two prestigious literary agencies have now hired in-house editors. The process of editing, once firmly the domain of the publishing houses, is now being front-loaded more and more so publishers can save time and [music] money. So, I guess it was on Haley's literary agent to fix this awkward word choice. Except that, in a sign of these internety times, Haley Pham doesn't have a literary agent. She's got this [music] talent agent who works for a company that mostly connects social media influencers with products to sell. This person has never sold a book before. So, to me, Conglomerate of Pedestrians hints at how book publishing has become market-driven. Publishers struggling to market books are aware that, to quote Sean De Lone, "A large part of what drives popularity in art and its consumption are parasocial relationships between creator and consumer." It's easy to hate this. We do lose something culturally when we require that authors first charm up an audience of parasocial potential book buyers. What about all the amazing writers who don't have the skills to do that? But, as someone who is literally trying to do that right now, I also get why people desire a sense of who an author is before they choose to invest the dozens of hours that it takes to read a book. For Haley Pham's fans, they're not buying the book expecting it to be aesthetically perfect. They want a story, but they also want, on some level, to advance their parasocial relationship with her and be part of the community of her fans, to be one of her reader pops.

[00:18:58]>> To celebrate with all the reader pops in person.

[00:19:00]>> We can see this in the way that some of the Amazon reviews are addressed directly to Haley.

[00:19:06]And here, surely, we have reached a place where Nabokov would be repulsed that we're prioritizing an artist's parasocial platforming over art, and I think he would be. After all, he said that people who try to identify with the main character of a book are not good readers.

[00:19:22]But, he also has something strange and interesting to say about why writers write and readers read.

[00:19:29]The material of this world [music] is chaos, and to this chaos the author says, "Go." Allowing the world to flicker and diffuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms. That mist is a mountain, and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at [music] the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader.

[00:19:54]And there [music] they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.

[00:20:02]>> [music] >> It's a striking image, maybe a little creepy in this parasocial [music] age.

[00:20:08]Importantly for for Nabokov, it's aesthetic achievement that allows for this mountain top [music] embrace.

[00:20:15]So, basically we're all at the top of these mountains hugging our favorite authors, and then we just get to argue about whose mountain is higher. Oh, you're on that Haley fam mountain? There's a conglomerate [music] of pedestrians coming up that one. I'm Blake. This is Below the Fold.

[00:20:30]Oh, and by the way, I was doing a generic erudite professor voice for [music] Nabokov, uh but here is his real voice.

[00:20:36]>> Unpacking the radiant beautiful plump advanced copy, opening it, and discovering [music] a stupid oversight committed by me, allowed by me to survive.

[00:20:50]>> Who Who who who do you want [music] to hug on the mountain top?

[00:21:07]Is that your Is that Is that your voice? Uh hello, I'm God. I can do all the accents.

[00:21:14]Listen to my Jamaican. I've been practicing, okay?

[00:21:17]Gwan feed them rude boy.

[00:21:20]Oh, [ __ ]