Re: my previous post: If I discovered that anyone in my university was changing the grades I had assigned to students, I’d say: “Excellent. You do the grading from now on — I’ll forward all my students’ work to you for evaluation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my teaching.”
It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong.
A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did what professors are supposed to do. I raised the matter internally. I tried to work through existing channels. I invoked the language of policy, accreditation, and Title IV compliance. I was told, politely, that the system was working as intended.
Wow.
My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins is pursuing a late Roman Welsh mystery. [UPDATE: after posting that I realized that it sounds like I’m talking about one of the last novels by a detective-story writer named Roman Welsh. But let it stand, just for fun.]
My buddy Austin Kleon on the glories of RSS. As Austin notes, I’ve been promoting RSS for years to no avail. People can easily use RSS to see only what they want to see, but instead spend their days prowling through the wreckage of social media like raccoons in a dumpster. I don’t get it.
The outpouring of new recordings prompted by tape and the LP (and, in pop music, the 45) makes it easy to overlook the fact that, in many ways, the new formats were limiting forces. They gave control of the market to big companies, which licensed the formats to smaller companies. They crowded out “amateur” performers and raised the bar for “professional” ones. They placed the responsibility for choosing which music would be recorded and made public with record-company executives, many of whom had extramusical motives in the front of their minds. And they proved so attractive that they drove the existing format — the 78 — into oblivion, and, with it, the thousands of recordings that existed only as 78s. This would be the pattern of progress for recordings in the postwar period. The new formats were advanced forms of mechanical memory, and they entered experience into the record with ever greater fidelity. Yet they were not means of revival so much as of forgetting.
Finished reading: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. Just re-read this for the first time since it came out, fourteen years ago. What an extraordinary book. 📚
On the topic of my previous post, here’s Thomas Mann, from Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918):
I do not think that it is the essence and duty of the writer to join “with great fanfare” the main direction the culture is taking at the moment. I do not think and cannot from my very nature think that it is natural and necessary for the writer to support a development in a completely positive way by direct, credulous-enthusiastic advocacy — as a solid knight of the times, without scruple and doubt, with straightforward intentions and an unbroken determination and spirit for it, his god. On the contrary, authorship itself has always seemed to me to be a witness to and an expression of ambivalence, of here and there, of yes and no, of two souls in one breast, of an annoying richness in inner conflicts, antitheses, and contradictions.
Robert Alter, from the Preface to his translation of the Hebrew Bible:
Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is — here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity — “to disambiguate” the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible. These unfortunate consequences are all the more pronounced when the philologist, however acutely trained in that discipline, has an underdeveloped sense of literary diction, rhythm, and the uses of figurative language; and that, alas, is often the case in an era in which literary culture is not widely disseminated even among the technically educated. […]
Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings — the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision.
Sometimes I feel that our entire media environment is about disambiguating the intrinsically ambiguous. When Eliot’s bird said “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” it could have substituted “ambiguity” for “reality.”