Masters of Modern Thought

 Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it. 

For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.

But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible. 

The Literary Underground

 As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set. 

Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them. 

The Whole and Every Whit

 This week brought us news of another AI-related controversy in the literary world. Apparently a number of readers are speculating that this year's winner of a major short story prize was actually created by (or with significant help from) a chatbot. 

This seems to be part of the misery we all live with these days—and it wounds in both directions. 

For those of us who write our own stuff and aren't winning literary prizes for it—we are jealous at the thought that other people are getting ahead and winning laurels by cheating. 

The To-Be-Forgotten

 We all recall when ABC killed the polling aggregator and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight last year—in a move they described as a business decision at the time, but which seemed eerily to coincide with the general trend of the "Great Accomodation" during the early months of the Trump administration. 

Now, having already died once, the website appears set to undergo what Thomas Hardy called the "second death"—that of "oblivion." Even after it stopped generating new content, after all, FiveThirtyEight lingered on as a searchable archive. People could at least link back to old articles. Now, that too appears to be gone. 

I'm not using AI; AI is using me

 I read a very annoying article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and now I'm wishing I hadn't. 

It was about the cottage industry of people online who claim to be able to spot when other writers are using AI. 

They have identified a number of tells, they say, which amount to a "house style" for AI. 

Player Pianos

 The great William Gaddis devoted a whole book (his last, Agapē Agape) to the theory that the development of the player piano marked the beginning of the end of the arts. 

(Long before this final novel was published, Gaddis had already displayed an interest in the theme. As far back as The Recognitions, characters in Gaddis novels are forever announcing their intention to write a masterwork called Agapē Agape one day and ranting about player pianos as the root of all evil.)

Wastrels of Our Sorrows

 Here's the thing about living with a loved one with terminal illness. They are still alive. You can wake up every morning and see them. If you are mourning their absence in advance, you can still go and give them a hug. That, surely, is something. 

But it can also give one an illusion of normality. On a given day, you can catch yourself up in the miniature struggles for survival and daily living. You can lose yourself in your work. You can forget, for a time, that anything's changed. 

The Great and Little Enemies

 I was quoting earlier this morning from John Dolan's excellent book Erdogan Pizza. And doubtless you will find me gushing about it again. The book is a delight. I was a fan of Dolan's "War Nerd" columns back in the day, and I was thrilled to realize that his prose has retained all its sparkle and wit over the years.

Dolan was and remains a brilliant writer. His secret? To make sure he is always saying something interesting. You'd be surprised how many "great writers" don't—or can't—accomplish as much. It calls to mind one of Bukowski's observations: 

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

 Of all the "experimental" and "avant-garde" novelists of the twentieth century, B.S. Johnson's work has lasted in a way that others' simply has not. (Who rests in Robbe-Grillet's mean flattery now?) And I can't help the feeling that his books succeed for reasons largely if not wholly unrelated to their formalistic experiments and convention-breaking eccentricities. 

The things one most remembers from Albert Angelo, say, are the hideously realistic portrayals of life as a substitute teacher in working class England—not the pieces of paper cut out from the text. But then again, I have to ask myself—did I only pick up the book in the first place because of its formalistic experiments?

Taking Fright

 In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller challenged us to name the last time a single poem, unassisted, had succeeded in changing the world—the way it had in his subject's day. 

Well, I don't know about a poem. But I do know that a single Substack post appears to have briefly tanked the U.S. stock market yesterday. The week before that, a single X post generated a similar panic in the software industry.

Playtime

 One of the various sources of the renewed wave of AI panic sweeping the ranks of pundits this week is the fact that the very thing we thought was most human and least likely to ever be automated—namely, artistic creation—is turning out to be one of the first casualties of generative AI. Screenplays, poems, novels, and illustrations turn out to be some of the things that are easiest to replicate with machines. Which is terrifying. 

But before we succumb to the general anxiety, let us ask exactly what it is we find so appalling about this fact. Are we feeling some threat of existential hollowness or erasure at the fact that something else can now do what we thought we alone could do? This hardly seems warranted. At any rate, the fact that AI chatbots can write blogs too is not all that intrinsically different from the fact that other human beings can write them. 

The Empty Breadbasket

 Gordon Comstock—the (anti?)hero of George Orwell's excellent novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying—about the dilemmas of the would-be starving artist—suffers from a fate that many of us can relate to. 

On the one hand, Comstock's family perceives him as "clever." He is good in school. He reads books. He has intellectual aspirations. They therefore assume he will go far and "Make Good." Indeed, Comstock's sister trusts that he will be the one to redeem the family fortunes. 

Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

Anxiety of Influence

 George Lucas in interviews—when he is asked what influenced him to create Star Wars—will always cite spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon film serials, etc. All of which makes him come across as very humble and credible and self-disclosing. He is duly acknowledging the creators who inspired him. He is properly attributing his sources. He is giving credit where credit is due. 

But a knowledge of psychoanalysis tells us that people often reveal in order to conceal—they tell us everything they can possibly think to divulge about themselves—except for the one, big, hairy truth. 

Stylish Misquotation

 At one point in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—in the course of making some point about modern alienation and anomie—the social theorist Daniel Bell quotes the line: "man stands 'alone and afraid in a world [he] never made.'" 

Bell does not cite a source for this observation—probably because it has long been held to be the preferred stylistic practice—whenever one is quoting a line of poetry specifically—not to name one's source; but rather to leave it to one's readers to either recognize the line instantly or feel embarrassed with themselves for not doing so. 

The Moon's Reproach

 Well, here I was trying to let just one day pass without writing about Trump. I thought I would write about myself and my mood instead. But then comes the New York Times to tell me that now, even more information has come to light indicating the Trump administration really did murder outright 11 people at sea. 

These were the crew—or passengers—of a boat that the White House has insisted was carrying drugs. All the evidence they have given to substantiate their claim is a half-minute-long video of their own making, which shows the boat exploding in flames. 

Meaningful Coincidences?

 Everyone comes across those moments in life in which there seems to be an eerie correspondence between one's inner world and external reality—"synchronicities," in Carl Jung's terminology; which he further defines as "meaningful coincidences." (Hull trans. throughout.) But the benefit of keeping a blog for more than ten years is that you start to accumulate a written record of a few of the more memorable ones. 

Take a post I published on January 15, 2022. I was reflecting in the piece on Max Frisch's short novel, Man in the Holocene, with its images of human extinction and the notion of a dead cosmos. I wrote about an episode that some scientists believe occurred early on in human evolutionary history, when our entire species may have faced a bottleneck that nearly caused our extinction, due to a volcanic cataclysm. 

Paul Who?

 In the original version of his "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden included the famous lines: 

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well[.]

It's a perennially relevant stanza, as we debate these days whether this or that famous artist, film director, or musician is to be pardoned for their politics or personal behavior. 

Sick: A Poem

 Being sick was simply something to do 

A writer's substitute for war-experience 

Having been cursed with birth at a time 

Of unprecedented national abundance and stability.

But enough years went by

That the world got sick too

And so—my health markedly improved.

I Looked Up From My Writing

 I was excited to see a notification yesterday from a blogger I've followed for years. Surely, I thought, this wise person will have something timely and relevant to say about our political crisis. I opened the post, and was immediately disappointed. It was mostly about the creative difficulties he is having with a sci-fi screenplay he's been working on. 

I confess I felt vaguely indignant. A sci-fi screenplay? That's what you're choosing to talk about? At a time like this? It felt somehow obscene. How could one write a blog—or anything else—right now, and not make it about the one big story: the political chaos of our times?