In 1947, a man named Kenneth Arnold was flying his two-seater near Mount Rainier when he saw nine flying objects cruising at high speeds, a sighting that launched the modern UFO era. [Gray] Barker was then working as a film distributor, and by the early 1950s was finding success with science fiction fare like The Day the Earth Stood Still. His own entrance into UFO research came in September 1952, when the Associated Press reported that seven people in nearby Flatwoods, West Virginia, had seen a glowing fireball descend into a nearby hilltop. Barker drove out to interview the eyewitnesses, writing up a report — embellished with numerous fabrications — and sending it to Fate magazine. Encouraged by the reception, he launched his own publication, The Saucerian, whose motto was: “Keep your head in the stars — and your feet on the ground.”
Gray Barker, writer, editor, poet, ufologist. An American original. Poetic excerpt:
This may have nothing to do with flying saucers.
It is a tale of abominable stenches and eldritch bangings in the night.
It is a true story.
I tried listening to A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler on Audible, but the A.I. narrator drove me crazy and I had to stop and switch to text. (It’s an outstanding book!) I persisted as long as I did because I’ve been dealing with eyestrain, but the strange stresses and mispronounced words — foreign names are especially bad: Proust is pronounced Prowst, Rilke Rilk, etc. — eventually broke me. I’ve canceled my Audible account: the practice of giving A.I. narrators human names, with the express purpose of deceiving customers, is unacceptable. 📚
Jane Freilicher, Study in Blue and Gray
Yeah I’m 😂 as I eat lunch.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.
Now that I have three blogs — The Homebound Symphony, Cosmos Malick, and micro.blog — I really don’t know what I would do without MarsEdit. What a great app.
The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music — or maybe they are afraid that their own work won’t be good enough — but they want people to believe that they have made art. We should be thinking seriously about the intensity of the human need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible:
I think they hold up pretty well, and some of the comments are quite illuminating. I kinda wish I had turned these posts into a book….
Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and anyone who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first psychotic breakdown Auden paid for his hospitalization, and (b) when Joseph Brodsky was forced out of the Soviet Union Auden arranged for him to have a job at the University of Michigan. One favorite anecdote from Mendelson’s essay:
At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.