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- Ted Gioia, “The Glorious Future of the Book”
- Austin Kleon, “Why Our House Is a Library”
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.
‘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.
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.
Convergence!
