I’ve been suffering from eyestrain, so for my evening reading have turned to Stephen Fry narrating the Sherlock Holmes stories, which ranks as one of the three best narrations I have ever heard, the other two being Fiona Shaw’s The Mill on the Floss and Andy Serkis’s The Lord of the Rings. Spot-on in all respects: Simon Callow’s review of Fry’s Holmes. 📚🎧
Sometime during the mid-2010s, I noticed photographers, videographers, and artists of all kinds referring to what they made as “content,” as opposed to photos, videos, or art. The case was the same with writers: Blog posts, essays, and articles were lumped together and called content. The term “content creator” also appeared, which further collapsed distinctions among writers, artists, and performers. In 2023, for the first time, I heard a representative from the entertainment industry rebrand it as the “content industry.”
As I understand it today, content is a type of expression that doesn’t rely on concepts like “quality” or “meaning” to differentiate itself. The way content stands apart — which is to say its primary appeal — is that it can be created at scale. The more of it, or of its kind, the better.
Content is tailor-made for a sense of immediacy. This means content is best — is most itself — when it’s fresh, when it belongs to the here-and-now. It also doesn’t, or shouldn’t, take much, if any, time to grasp the substance of content. In other words, content is expression explicitly for the moment, created by who or what wishes to define that moment.
When AI can mute my TV during commercials and unmute it when the show/game comes back on, I’ll be all in. Not until.
As we’re seeing more and more sophisticated robot/drone warfare, I find myself wondering whether the next step is what Adam Roberts described in his fabulous 2010 novel New Model Army — which I wrote about here.
Currently reading: Loren Eiseley : Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos by Loren Eiseley. I’ve written occasionally over the years — here for instance — about how much Eiseley has meant to me since I discovered him at age fifteen or thereabouts. But how did I discover him? I well remember: He was quoted occasionally in Intelligent Life in the Universe, a 1966 book by I. S. Shklovskiĭ and Carl Sagan, which I borrowed from the East Lake Public Library in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the kind of person I was at age fifteen. 📚
Whenever an organization says “There is no place for XYZ in this organization” or “We have zero tolerance for XYZ” the proper translation is: “Making this statement is all we’re going to do about XYZ, and you’ll just have to deal with it.”
I decided a couple of weeks ago that I needed to write a biggish essay on what it means to me to be a Southerner. Since then I’ve struggled with it. Today I decided I needed to post it. Think of this not as a completed work but as one abandoned in public.
Currently reading: Loren Eiseley : Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos by Loren Eiseley. I’ve written occasionally over the years — here for instance — about how much Eiseley has meant to me since I discovered him at age fifteen or thereabouts. But how did I discover him? I well remember: He was quoted occasionally in Intelligent Life in the Universe, a 1966 book by I. S. Shklovskiĭ and Carl Sagan, which I borrowed from the East Lake Public Library in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the kind of person I was at age fifteen. 📚
Just a note on how I use micro.blog, in response to some emails: not as a social-media platform. Instead, I follow people in my RSS reader, and only open micro.blog to reply to someone I follow. Also, I write my posts in MarsEdit. So if you reply to me, I am very unlikely to see it. (And I guess I should add that one thing I learned from my years on Twitter is to be very wary of interacting online with people I don’t know IRL.)
Really interesting comment by Ethan Iverson in his interview with Deborah Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard. She asked him who he wishes he had seen at the Vanguard:
Well, like you I would have seen Monk … Coltrane and Miles Davis, of course … But you know what? I like Bill Evans but only up to a point. However, those that saw Bill Evans live said the sound he got out the piano was really extraordinary and that the overall ambience was utterly seductive. I hear that extraordinary sound on the records, but I think I could have learned something by sitting close to Bill Evans at the Vanguard one night.