Tell you what, a walk along the Austin riverside (especially on the south bank) is always Life’s Rich Pageant.
Beautiful winter (or if you live in the north “winter”) day in Austin.
One of the phrases I have been kicking around lately is “The Great Forgetting”: a hunch that in embracing AI, as an extension both of our capacity to remember and of our heuristic faculties in retrieving and arranging what is remembered, we run the risk of allowing faculties to wither that are in fact central to our capacity to think. (I made this case, and also that it is unevenly distributed across social classes, recently in the New York Times.) Building on these themes, my working hypothesis is that at least at the collective level AI is survivable, but only provided we counterbalance this effect by deliberately cultivating our human faculty for memory, as distinct from the digital kind.
Again: everybody knows. And 98% of us will simply do whatever their tech overlords want them to do. So the only question remaining is: What will the other 2% do?
Finished reading: The Way of Dante by Richard Hughes Gibson. Full disclosure: Rick is one of my dearest friends. But by any measure this is a wonderful book. Lewis, Williams, and Sayers were all serious readers of Dante, but they read Dante in sustained and energetic conversation — often amounting to disputation, especially when DLS was involved — with one another. Rick beautifully traces this evolving dialogue, with the unique genius of Dante at the center of it all. 📚
Maybe you, like me, woke up last week and found yourself faced with a series of auto-playing videos of agents mobbing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Maybe you watched as an agent shot him while he lay on his knees on the street. Or maybe a few weeks ago, your phone showed you the amateur video taken from multiple angles of Renee Good’s last moments before she was shot by an ICE agent at close range. Or maybe you logged on this fall and had to witness Charlie Kirk’s gruesome assassination in your feed.
No, none of these things happened to me, because I don’t have anything on my phone that would make such experiences possible. And on my Mac I don’t go to the kinds of sites that would show me such things. You don’t have to set up your tech life that way — even journalists don’t have to, though they always say they do. We have choices.
Mark Twain, from “Advice to Youth”:
Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain , and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail — these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail” — the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.
From the Introduction to my Breaking Bread with the Dead, published in 2021, though these words were written probably in 2019:
Often at the beginning of a class I will give my students a brief reading quiz — unannounced in advance; yes, I’m that kind of teacher — which has the salutary effect of making sure that everyone is in class on time. The room is always full when I walk in, and fairly regularly the first thing I see is every head bowed before a glowing screen. Sometimes they don’t even look up when I say hello. Often their brows are furrowed; they may look anxious or worried. They dutifully put their phones away as soon as class begins, whether it does so with a quiz or a question, but during the discussion I occasionally see hands twitch or reach toward bags. If I see phones left on the seminar-room table I lightly (but seriously) suggest that they be put away to minimize temptation. All my students have mastered the art of packing up their bags at the end of class with one hand while checking messages with the other. They leave the room with heads once more down, and brows once more furrowed, navigating like a blind person through a familiar room.
Such behavior is noticeably less common now than it was then. My current generation of students seem far less phone-addicted. This is of course merely anecdotal, but since (despite what you often hear) the plural of anecdote is data, I offer it for your edification.
Walter Martin hipped me to this awesome cover of “Subterranean Homseick Blues” by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. First got into Dan & co. via a college radio station, but then over the decades lost track of them.
My colleague Philip Jenkins on Groundhog Day: “I will explain just how that bizarre celebration came into existence. My story begins in the Jewish Temple, with stops en route in Dark Age Ireland, medieval Germany, and Victorian Pennsylvania.”
T. S. Eliot, writing during WW2: “I see a great many American sergeants and they all write poetry: nobody realises that I HATE poetry.”
No, I do not want to install your app.
No, I do not want that app to run on startup.
No, I do not want that app shortcut on my desktop.
No, I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, I do not want your site to send me notifications.
No, I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.
No, I do not want to sign up for an account.
No, I do not want to sign up using a different service and let the two of you know about each other.
No, I do not want to sign in for a more personalized experience.
No, I do not want to allow you to read my contacts.
No, I do not want you to scan my content.
No, I do not want you to track me.
No, I do not want to click “Later” or “Not now” when what I mean is NO.
Me: “From the fall of 2011, when I first stared watching the Premier League regularly and intently, I had what might truly be called an object in fandom: to see Arsenal become champions of the the league.”
It’s easy to believe that words have greater power than they have — to think that if someone writes powerfully enough those who are Wrong will suddenly realize their Wrongness and change their ways. But that rarely happens. Often we can only wait until people realize that they’re just eating grass.
Music producer Joe Boyd:
Most music recorded today is created by performers – or operators – sitting beside the engineer; it passes directly on to a hard disk rather than reverberating in the air to be captured by microphones. As a result, the ‘studio’ room itself is often shrunk to a modest space for vocalists or single instruments. The ideal acoustic is now a dead one: digital reverb can supposedly synthesize any atmosphere from Madison Square Garden to your bathroom. In the quest for the perfect track, each part is added separately so that any mistakes can be easily corrected; inflexible rhythms are generated by a machine. Musicians in the sixties were still recording a large part of each track playing together in the same room at the same time, maintaining at least some of the excitement of a live performance, with vocals and solos usually added later. Rhythm sections breathed with the other musicians, accenting and retarding the beat as mood dictated. The acoustics of different studios varied widely, as did the styles of engineering and production. Computers theoretically let musicians and producers choose from an endless palate of varied sounds, but modern digital recordings are far more monochromatically similar to each other than were older analogue tracks.
I’m thinking of blogging more, this term, about what I’m teaching. In my class on Fantasy we’re starting with MacDonald’s Phantastes, and here are first thoughts.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” May 1944:
We thought we could make our way in life with reason and justice, and when both failed, we felt that we were at the end of our tether. We have constantly exaggerated the importance of reason and justice in the course of history. You, who are growing up in a world war which ninety per cent of mankind did not want, but for which they have to risk losing their goods and their lives, are learning from childhood that the world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing; and so you will be able to cope with those forces more successfully. In our lives the ‘enemy’ did not really exist. You know that you have enemies and friends, and you know what they can mean in your life. You are learning very early in life ways (which we did not know) of fighting an enemy, and also the value of unreserved trust in a friend. ‘Has not man a hard service upon earth?’ (Job 7.1). ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge’ (Ps. 144.1f). ‘There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’ (Prov. 18.24).
Reorientation: on a practice that helps to give me a degree of much-needed equilibrium in a frenetic and troubling moment.
