Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), by Caspar David Friedrich in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Wikimedia Commons). According to curators of The Soul of Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (until 11 May 2025), this romantic artist notably “reimagined European landscape painting by portraying nature as a setting for profound spiritual and emotional encounters.” Nicely put, and much the same could be said about the novelist George Moore when he wrote A Mere Accident (1887). Yet George was not a romanticist; he was an avant-garde experimentalist sundering the shackles of French naturalism. Tired, perhaps, of observing nature for its own sake, he pivoted to an examination of character as lofty, complex and unsettling as Friedrich’s mountains. With mixed results.
World Building
I’ve heard that “April is the cruelest month,” but I don’t really believe it. Good things happened here in April 2025, starting with three ebooks that turned up in the GMi Shop:
- A Mere Accident (1887)
- Impressions and Opinions (1891)
- Modern Painting (1893)
The chapters of these ebooks are also available online: A Mere Accident in the Worlds pillar of this website, the others in the Aesthetics pillar.
Humans can freely download or read George’s writing online. Machines can autonomously ingest it into search engines and large language models, where incredible new value will surely be unlocked.
That unlocking is an example of what I mean by kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.
My priority up to now has been George’s nonfiction — what he wrote about himself and his lived experience. Most of those horses are now in the barn.
I’m still chasing 88 print essays that are uniquely preserved in the British Library. They’re the target of a sleepy Gofundme campaign to cover the cost of fetching them.
Although now, there’s a new turbocharged fundraising initiative in the works!
Resurgam NFP
In April 2025, the US Internal Revenue Service endowed Resurgam with tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Illinois corporation. This milestone completed the bona fides of Resurgam as a grantseeking and grantmaking enterprise.
Foundations, businesses, and individual benefactors all over the United States can henceforth deduct their grants, gifts, and contributions to Resurgam from federal and state tax returns. Additionally, Resurgam will be exempt from paying sales tax in Illinois on purchases that support its mission.
But what is the mission? Resurgam’s specific aim is kickstarting literary and artistic legacies in the digital age. That’s a concise way of promising to use advanced information technology to curate, publish, animate and simulate creative masters and masterworks of the remote past.
The aim is underpinned by three formal purposes, each with a particular meaning, protocol, and impact:
- Educational
- Literary
- Scientific
I’m so excited about Resurgam that I’m tempted to write about nothing else today. But I don’t need to do that.
Why? Because a new website is emerging online that tells the story. After the static pages are published, I will start writing monthly newsletters from there. With my collaborators, I will also produce prototypes, demos, and proofs-of-concept of various ways the mission will be fulfilled.
My Role with Resurgam?
Yours truly, Bob Becker. is the executive director. I am one of five directors on the board. In addition to board duties, I lead operations. In the foreseeable future, operations are entirely about communication and fundraising. After successful raises, they will expand to board oversight of funded projects.
Resurgam and George Moore Interactive?
Resurgam formed to address the exciting and formidable needs faced by projects like GMi. It exists to nudge any worthy historic literary or artistic project towards futuristic technological goals.
“Projects like GMi” does not mean limited to GMi. The kind of research and development I do for George Moore’s legacy can be done by others for other legacies that are completely different and equally deserving.
For example, a friend of mine has a project on the bibliography of Max Beerbohm. Another friend has a project on the paintings of John Lavery. If they chose to kickstart Beerbohm or Lavery, Resurgam would consider helping them.
Likewise I have two friends (who may be reading this newsletter) who deeply appreciate the legacy of James Joyce. Oh, what a ripe subject that puzzle-maker would be for a kickstart, IMHO!
Caveat: Resurgam will not go looking for projects to back, but it will consider assisting people who come calling with an understanding of our mission.
If you’re a potential donor to, or partner of, Resurgam, I invite you to follow the new website. Likewise if you’re a researcher, writer, artist, publisher, engineer or scientist seeking funding for a bold venture in the digital humanities, let’s get coffee.
Kant or Cant?
George Moore researched and wrote his experimental novel, A Mere Accident (1887), while living among friends near Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, under the South Downs near Brighton. He dedicated the novel thus:
To My Friends at Buckingham.
Nearly twenty years have gone since first we met, dear friends; time has but strengthened our early affections, so for love token, for sign of the years, I bring you this book — these views of your beautiful house and hills where I have spent so many happy days, these last perhaps the happiest of all.
G.M.
Buckingham House (Thornby Place in the novel) was home to the Bridger family, who nicknamed their friend “Kant” because of his relentless philosophizing. The same behavior is (unfortunately) evident in the novel.
A Mere Accident is a bildungsroman about John Norton, owner of Thornby Place. He has unexplored affinities with John Harding in A Drama in Muslin (1886). Both characters model an aestheticism that interested their author. It is tempting to view the Johns as projections of their author’s ego, but I don’t know about that.
John Norton is probably not a caricature of George Moore, but he has George’s contrarian independence and ambition to figure things out for himself. And by things, I don’t mean screwing in a lightbulb.
John wrestles with “the hideous laws of the world and the flesh, ever at variance and at war, and ever defeating the indomitable aspirations of the soul” (A Mere Accident, page 165).
Yikes!
Alternately thrilled and tormented by religion, art, architecture, and moral philosophy on one hand, and by love, sex, furniture, property management and nature walks on the other, John is a kind of juggler with a lot of balls in the air. I didn’t notice many that dropped.
I could go on and on about this good bad novel, but instead I am going to let generative AI do the talking for me. If you are fairly new to creative uses of AI, this demo may be a nice surprise.
To prepare for the demo, I uploaded my transcript of A Mere Accident to Google’s miraculous Notebook LM in the cloud and asked the app to create a podcast about the novel.
I did no heavy lifting.
I did not tell Notebook LM what to think or say. It may have reached some arguable conclusions, but even if it did, the resulting conversation is nothing short of delightful. Certainly more lively and entertaining than what I and a stuffy professor would sound like on a panel.
And mind you, Notebook LM took about 30 minutes to read the novel, analyze it, script and record a 15-minute conversation between two voices that sound like real people (they are not).
So have a listen. If you like what they say about A Mere Accident, download the book or dip into it online.
If you like what AI does with literary material, subscribe to George Moore Interactive.
Next Up
Last month I reported that A Mere Accident was the worst novel ever written. I was mistaken. That distinction belongs to George’s next novel, Spring Days (1888). Please forgive me.
This is what George wrote about Spring Days:
Everybody is abusing Spring Days. The papers say it is the worst book I have ever written, and one well-known critic says it is the very worst novel he ever read. A writer may elect to put his life into one book (Baudelaire did this in his Fleurs du Mal). Or he may elect to spread himself over fifty volumes (Balzac did this in the Comédie humaine). But once a writer elects to spread himself over a number of volumes it seems to me that he must not only create new methods but he must from time to time recreate old ones. I am a great admirer of Jane Austen and I said to myself, “I will recreate Jane Austin’s method in Spring Days. It was an attempt not to continue, but to recreate, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, etc. Apparently I have failed horribly. Fortunately I have an article in the Universal Review for this month entitled “Mummer Worship”, which is attracting a good deal of attention, and this may help to sell Spring Days. [Letter to Clara Lanza, 1888-09-23]
I feel bad about inadvertently dissing A Mere Accident, so to make up for that, next month I will resurrect Spring Days from its (well-deserved?) tomb. And then I will ask AI if, in fact, it is the worst.
Can any novel in history be worse than Richardson’s Clarissa or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake? Hard to imagine, we’ll have to see.
Hateful Ebooks
A friend from long ago recently published an essay in The Atlantic entitled “Ebooks Are an Abomination.” He advanced the concept of bookiness, by which he meant the physical properties of printed books that resonate with readers, most of which are lacking in ebooks.
He loves the tangible aesthetics of bookiness.
As a publisher of ebooks and a believer in their utility, who is also a lifelong collector and reader of printed books, I can see his point and also disagree with it. Not because of personal preferences, which long ago I decided have no bearing or interest beyond the tip of my nose.
I dispute the attractions of bookiness for these reasons:
- Many people no longer read books, of any kind, at all
- Of those who do read books, many read only the tidbits they care about
- Many publishers do not invest in beautiful book production
- Many titles are expensive and hard or impossible to acquire
George Moore seems to have loved bookiness. He invested a great deal of his personal time and energy in the production of physical books that matched his literary standards.
At the same time, he abhorred low-rent bookiness: books of cheap paper, cramped typography, and flimsy binding.
Yet the bottom line on bookiness for George is that he didn’t collect books or read many. It’s fair to say that a book for him was only the idea he or another author dreamed up and put into words.
He wanted the physical thing to be nice looking, but as readers of his own editions made from hand-made paper, handset type, and vellum covers can attest, good looking is not the same as readable. Those editions are kind of a nuisance to hold in your lap while pondering the idea.
I revert to the term utility to justify ebooks in the GMi Shop. They may not be beautiful, but they are readable, portable, indestructible, updatable, searchable, printable, and potentially interactive.
Keep Those Letters Coming…
In April 2025, I also ressurected another set of letters on GMi. I transcribed, edited, annotated and published George’s extant letters from the first half of 1893. I would have done more, but sadly dropped some balls despite my best intentions.
(For one thing, I had trouble seeing my computer screen!)
Buying an overhead book scanner last year has turned into a very sound investment. And not just because I got it before the American Mad Hatter put tariffs on China, where Czur scanners are made.
Mainly it’s because the scanner works extremely well. It letts me scan and perform OCR on bound faded typescripts of George’s correspondence with phenomenal clarity and few defects.
Using a Czur scanner is also making me a better user, as is often the case with new technology. Heuristics! My digital publishing process is quite different from what it was a year or more ago, and it’s getting better all the time.
In May, I will finish publishing George’s letters of 1893 begin those of 1894. In George Moore’s hero’s journey, 1894 was the year of leaving the blistering desert and rising to the snowy peaks of Esther Waters. Figuratively speaking.
Like Caspar David Friedrich’s model at the top of this newsletter, gazing at the mountaintops, George had confronted problems that nearly drained him and finally figured things out, for himself, in the blessed year of 1894.
