Watched: Eno. What a wonderful documentary: an idea-generative film about a master of generative art. 🍿
Back cover of the forthcoming.
In my previous post I used the line “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” It’s a line I've been using for fifty years, since I heard Billy Crystal deploy it in a routine on Saturday Night Live in which he portrayed an old jazzman called Face.
Crystal’s routine was based on people he knew from his childhood, jazz musicians who came into the Commodore Music Shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan:
That’s Billy Crystal’s father Jack in the plaid shirt on the right. Larger image here.
Currently listening: Count 'Em 88, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. Can you dig it? I knew that you could. ♫
Finished reading: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. Thomson is the best living writer on the movies, but this is his worst book, by miles. He seems to be judging movies for what was done to us by TV and the internet. Dyspeptic without being insightful. 📚
Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data, and theories, and are innately repelled by the superficiality of having AI write a complete paper. They want to lean into their work, not lean back in an automated armchair. As NYU astrophysicist David Hogg recently wrote, “Anyone working in astrophysics is someone who wants to do astrophysics, not someone who wants to learn the answers.”
I would say that anyone “working in astrophysics” at a university may well want to do astrophysics but also wants to get tenure and be promoted and maybe even get a job at a more prestigious institution — and if using chatbots promises an easier and more reliable path to those goals, then they’ll use chatbots to do the work for them. Intellectual curiosity even when real can be overwhelmed by greater urgencies.
When Oklahoma! was near the beginning of its staggeringly long Broadway run, the great Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn saw it and spoke to Richard Rodgers afterwards. Goldwyn thought it was the best show he had ever seen, brilliant and riveting from the first notes of the opening number to the very end. He had never seen anything to approach its greatness. “And,” he added, “I know what you should do next.”
Rodgers: “What?”
Goldwyn: “You should shoot yourself!”
Yesterday I stopped at the McDonald’s in Burnet, Texas, and the young man who brought me my food said “Here is your luncheon, kind sir!“
