TLS: “Walt Disney’s background artist, Eyvind Earle, drew on Les Très Riches Heures for the colour palette of Sleeping Beauty.” Very obvious once it’s pointed out!
When Penguin paperbacks were a new innovation, you could buy them from a vending machine called the Penguincubator.
Foggy-headed from Covid I posted this one several days too early, but I’m just leaving it up because it matters to me. I’ll probably be quiet for a few days now.
I volunteered at the time in a second-hand bookshop, and often idly rifled through the surplus stock in the back. One day I found a copy of something called The Book of Common Prayer, which I had barely heard of at all. Out of sheer bemused curiosity, I flicked through it.
It was quite different to anything I had ever experienced before when I had had glancing contact with Christianity. I found myself recognising, perhaps through familiarity with an English literary canon profoundly influenced by it or the mysterious transmission of some cross-generational English collective unconscious, some of its phrases and rhythms. I was particularly struck by the general confession said at something called “morning” and “evening prayer”, with its talk of how we had “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” and “left undone those things which we ought to have done” and “done those things which ought not to have done”. I suppose I had become unsatisfied with the emptiness of many aspects of my life and unable to account for or give voice to a deep, visceral sorrow at my own unworthiness and the sinful actions that I was acutely conscious of having committed. It moved me: I was embarrassed at how much, but felt obscurely that it was important. I started carrying around a copy of this curious little book — the bookshop didn’t want it and would have chucked it out otherwise. I did it furtively.
Keep reading to find out where the story goes.
Ten years ago John Siracusa announced that he would no longer write his massive reviews of the new versions of macOS — the last one, on Yosemite, was typical: over 25,000 words. Ars is still running big reviews of macOS, but they’re not as long or as good as Siracusa’s were. With the enormous changes coming in Tahoe, I need a Siracusa review to be fully informed about whether to update or not.
‘Wystan Auden’ by James Schuyler | Poem of the Week | The TLS: Paywalled, alas. My favorite bit of the poem: When Schuyler was having an operation, Auden “sent quite a large / check” to cover his expenses, but Schuyler returned it and asked for cash instead. He seems to think it a perfectly normal thing to do.
On April 2, 1951, Kerouac sat down in his then-wife Joan Haverty’s apartment in Manhattan and began banging out his first draft. He had on hand several rolls of drafting paper of just the right size for his Remington manual. He’d made the discovery, he told her, that they would “save me the trouble of putting in new paper, and it just about guarantees spontaneity.” For 20 days straight, Kerouac typed so furiously that his T-shirts became soaked with sweat. By April 22, he had completed a 125,000-word draft typed in an eye-straining, comma-starved, single-spaced format, with no paragraphs or page breaks. The resulting scroll was 120 feet long. As an object to be read, it was utterly impractical, but Kerouac had unintentionally replicated the format of the books of antiquity before the invention of the codex. In transcribing his peripatetic cross-country adventures, Kerouac brilliantly married the method to the matter: he wrote fast because, as he put it in one of his notebooks, the “road is fast.” Movement and speed were of the essence. On the Road reads like a pilgrimage without a shrine at the end, an Odyssey without an Ithaca. All the subsequent talk, though, about “spontaneous bop prosody” obscures the fact that the book took years to write and then underwent an even longer process of revision.
Over the weekend I went to a memorial service for a close friend of mine, got to see many people dear to me, and had remarkably smooth travel there and back, especially considering that it was Labor Day weekend. Also, I now have Covid. 😬
The Paw of Pleading
Via @manton I see this Netigen post from last September called “Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere.” As it happens, five days earlier I had published a post making the same point called “POS, not POSSE.” People online are always looking for more readers, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes you find people reading your work who don’t understand it and respond out of ignorance. You get enough of those responses and you start wishing for what Milton called “fit audience, though few.” I’m not on the big social media platforms because I think it’s better to remain unread by the people who hang out there.
A very slight turning of the leaves in northern Illinois.
Me from 2019: “What if Fred Rogers was right about how people change?” I think about this often.
With unaccented American English spoken by a Caucasian male tester, Dragon was only 87% accurate the first time we dictated an email — the same email message that Word transcribed nearly perfectly on its first try. Dragon missed words including “on” and “make,” and it wrote “They could advance!” instead of “Thank you in advance.” With accented English, Dragon’s first try produced text entirely different from what our tester spoke.
There is no such thing as “unaccented American English.” There is no such thing as unaccented English. People at the NYT may think that their accent is normative, but even if one were to agree to that — I don’t — it’s still an accent.
Yours sincerely,
Alan from Alabama, currently living in Texas
A fascinating post from my colleague Philip Jenkins on how ancient “gospels” keep being found and lost and found again. “Perhaps amnesia really is an integral part of the popularization of scholarship.”
The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality: — something we’re suckers for because of what the philosopher Donald Davidson once called the “principle of charity,” that is, the assumption that our interlocutors are making sense. I wrote an essay a while back on how the principle of charity governs our responses to chatbots.
The AI business model: suicidal ideation as a revenue stream.
I don’t know which is worse, the belief that if you’re sounding off on social media you’re Doing Something, or the belief that if you’re not sounding off on social media you’re Not Doing Anything.