In which I explain why I’d like to be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.
(I also posted this to BlueSky because I want to see how long it will be before someone responds, “Actually, there are already several biographies of Bob Dylan.”)
Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino:
Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome — that the future can be rendered legible in advance.
But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.
In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.
David Hackett Fischer, from Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
Shortly before the American Revolution … the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”
An excellent idea whose time has come again.
Oxford reprinted the anthology in hard covers until the mid-1960s, then issued it in paperback in 1973, a few weeks before Auden's death, under the title W.H. Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse, as if to signal that it was more of a personal selection than one that came with the authority of its publisher. Oxford also commissioned Kingsley Amis to compile a New Oxford Book of Light Verse, which appeared in 1978. This collection of undemandingly amusing verse (about half the length of Auden's) was effectively the book that Auden's disappointed reviewers had hoped to see in 1938. In his introduction Amis approvingly echoed Charles Dibdin, who had written in a preface in 1825: "To raise a good-natured smile was the major part of this work written." Amis succeeded in this purpose, partly by devoting one of the largest sections of the anthology to Auden, who received as many pages as Lewis Carroll did, and whose share of the book was smaller only than Lord Byron's. Amis's anthology is consistently amusing, but Auden's, perhaps more than any other anthology of English poetry, manages to be amusing, moving, instructive, outrageous, and profound.
This is exactly right. It may be my favorite anthology of anything.
I keep seeing these petulant-to-angry stories in the London sports pages about how vast North America is and how hot — as though ICE had expanded the continent and heated it up to make Europeans uncomfortable. Sorry, but it’s always been this way. North America is more than twice the size of Europe (excluding Russia) and most of it is further south: London’s latitude = that of Calgary, Alberta; Chicago shares a latitude with Madrid and Kansas City with Rome. Miami is at the same latitude as Luxor, Egypt and Dubai. Also, Calgary, Chicago, and Kansas City are in the midst of an enormous continent with no ocean to moderate temperatures. This is reality.
Incidentally: Waco, where I live, is at the same latitude as Jerusalem. The Lord knoweth His own.
Over at Cosmos Malick, a post on the autobiographical elements in some of Malick’s films.
I have been interested in Faustina Kowalska’s experiences ever since I first read about them when I was eighteen. I am not usually much of a fan of modern-day (or even early modern) devotions, and I was never sure what to make of things like Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, and so on. But for some reason I never had this lurking suspicion when it came to Faustina’s visions of Divine Mercy…. The Divine Mercy, which at the time was an intensely popular devotion – especially among Poles but also well beyond the Polish community – also seemed to have substantial theological content, in contrast to the vacuous platitudes characteristic of some modern devotions: ‘I am Lord in My essence and I know neither commands nor needs’, declares Christ to Faustina, ‘If I call creatures into existence – it is out of the immeasurable depth of My mercy’.
This is cosmic stuff, and in fact Faustina’s theology (or the theology revealed to her, or however you want to interpret it) represents a refashioning of familiar theological themes with God’s mercy as its interpretative key. God’s mercy is the prerequisite for our being, as well as our redemption. What may seem obvious, but is easily lost today, is that this elevation of mercy presupposes a starting point of recognition of the awe-fulness of God – a holy fear that God may not, in fact, choose to be merciful.
It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.
A similar trend is under way in other countries — and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures.