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- Ted Gioia, “The Glorious Future of the Book”
- Austin Kleon, “Why Our House Is a Library”
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!
John Muir, writing in the Pasadena Star, 1909:
It would make a good and useful tattoo: Nothing dollarable is safe.
This “retrospective” on Houellebecq's Submission by John Hardy describes the book as a prophecy, which I don’t think it was. Here’s my review, written when the book appeared.
A brilliant and necessary essay by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy:
Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation.
And:
Individuals equipped with the capacity to search the network and query large language model (LLM) oracles, and in possession of the self-confidence and the means to broadcast their findings, tend to become an authoritative source of opinion. At least that is how it feels to them. We can also understand why knowledge produced in this manner is often so emotionally charged. The more people invest in researching and developing their own understanding, the more their pursuit of knowledge transforms into a form of personal revelation, where everyone is both seeker and interpreter of their own truth. What began as an exercise in independent reasoning becomes a matter of belief, belief defended all the more passionately because it seems to have been self-discovered rather than externally given.
An older but excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins:
Quite regularly, the media produce claims about supposedly startling new discoveries concerning the Bible, alternative gospels, and/or Christian origins – just over the past decade, think for instance of “Jesus’s Wife” or the Gospel of Judas. A common theme in such reporting is just how astonishing and unexpected such finds are, and how their novelty would have shocked earlier generations. And in most cases, the weary academic response should properly be that actually, we have known all this stuff for a good long while, and usually for well over a century. The fact that we so often forget those earlier discoveries, and so grievously underestimate the intellectual daring of earlier generations, is in itself a significant component of the sociology of knowledge.
Researchers from Arizona State University:
Our investigation, conducted through the controlled environment of DataAlchemy, reveals that the apparent reasoning prowess of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is largely a brittle mirage. The findings across task, length, and format generalization experiments converge on a conclusion: CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training. When pushed even slightly beyond this distribution, its performance degrades significantly, exposing the superficial nature of the “reasoning” it produces.
Angus’s new photo for his LinkedIn page
Umberto Eco on the importance of editors:
Take the usually overlooked fact that the first version of a well-known poem by Philip Larkin originally went: “They do you harm, your father and mother.” It was only the insistence of Larkin’s editor that inspired the now famous variant. And the first draft of Eliot’s Waste Land opened: “April is the cruelest month. And March isn’t all that great, either.” Weakened in its impact by this peevish insistence on climactic details, the earlier text denied April any implied link with the rites of vegetation. As everyone knows, Ariosto at first submitted to his publisher a very brief poem that went: “Of women and knights, arms, loves, courtly rituals, and bold ventures I have nothing to say.” And that was that. “How about developing it a bit?” the editor suggested. And Master Ludovico, who was having enough trouble as civil governor of a remote Tuscan province, said, “What’s the use? There are dozens of epics of chivalry already. Leave it. I want to urge poets to try new genres.” And the editor replied, “Yes, of course, I understand, and, personally, I agree with you. But why not try approaching the form from another angle? With irony, for instance. Anyway, we can’t sell a onepage book, particularly one with only two verses on the page. It looks like imitation Mallarmé. It would have to be a limited, numbered edition. So unless we can get Philip Morris to sponsor it, we’re screwed.”
Introducing study mode | OpenAI:
Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT — a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer. Starting today, it’s available to logged in users on Free, Plus, Pro, Team, with availability in ChatGPT Edu coming in the next few weeks.
So, a mode no one will ever use, then.
I married this wonderful life-giving life-preserving woman forty-five years ago today. The best thing that ever happened to me.
I remember quite vividly the day in 1974 when this showed up in the mail, a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. It was my introduction to Le Guin and anarchism.