From an essay I wrote four years ago recommending our attention to an idea in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:
To imagine yourself as you might have been in another place and time is to practice the dialectic of sameness and difference in a way that enhances your self-understanding, your experience of the human lifeworld, without risking damage to a neighbor. As I argue in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, one of Thomas Pynchon’s characters was right to say that “personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and reading works of the past is an excellent way to increase that bandwidth without suffering from the tensions associated with projects like John Howard Griffin’s. But to imagine yourself into another life can be a powerful application of the argument I make there, and I am tempted to argue that the writing of a Castalia-style Life would make an excellent senior project for every university student.
Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes. So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money.
Mattix points out that stories about these “banned” books usually include Amazon links for people who want to purchase them. I’ve long been annoyed by this: a library that chooses not to buy a particular book, or a school that chooses not to assign it, is not banning it — even when the book is wrongly or unwisely sidelined.
Here I complete my series on Sayers’s play The Emperor Constantine — though there will be a kind of epilogue next week on Julian the Apostate.
How Kyoto, Japan Became the World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap:
Julia Maeda, who runs a high-end travel company in Japan (she recently helped plan a honeymoon for a billionaire’s daughter), said she sometimes struggles with clients who treat a trip to Kyoto like a safari. “You want to bag the big five,” she said. “You want to see the lion and the elephant, and you want to go to the Golden Pavilion and Fushimi Inari,” as well as Arashiyama, Kiyomizu-dera, and Nijo Castle. Maeda often asks clients if they’re “strong enough” to come home from Japan and tell their friends they bagged only one or two. “A lot of people are not strong enough,” she said. “They want the selfies.”
A definition of moral and psychological strength for our time.
Anthony Lane on Elmore Leonard:
Has anyone listened more intently than Leonard to the infinite bandwidths of spoken English? So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx. That is why he earns his slot in the Library of America: he turns the page and starts a fresh chapter in the chronicle of American prose. His genius is twofold; he is unrivalled not only as a listener but as a nerveless transcriber of what he hears. No stenographer in a court of law could be more accurate. His people open their mouths, and we know at once, within a paragraph, or even a clause, who dreamed them up. Many folks, in many novels, might remark, “You certainly have a long winter.” But only someone in a Leonard novel would reply, “Or you could look at it as kind of an asshole spring.”
I believe the catastrophes caused by AGI will be consequential but not agentic. By that I mean that AGI will feel about humans the way a tornado feels about houses it destroys: nothing at all. The harm to us will be an incidental effect of obstructing an irresistible force. So when AGI optimists say “These systems have no desires of their own; they’re not interested in taking over” — we shouldn’t be comforted. Both things can be true: no intention of domination, yet domination nevertheless.
The Elegant Variation: The John Banville Interview (2005):
TEV: So let's touch on each of [your] books, and perhaps you might share a memory, an impression, a sense of how the title sits in your esteem today.
JB: Well, I hate them all, you realize that? I loathe them.
TEV: All of them?
JB: Yes.
TEV: Because you did say —
JB: They're all a standing embarrassment.
Banville also says about one of his novels, “I don't understand why that book didn't do better. I gave them sex. I gave them violence. What more do they want from me?”
Now consider that Google and other search engines, which are millions of people’s portals to the whole information environment — to the news, to history, to basic facts about the world — are actively working to replace traditional search results, which point to external websites, with AI summaries that the tech companies control. The source for your entire worldview, if they get their way, will be bots with access to the most vulnerable parts of your psyche and the capacity to influence your thinking, without you ever noticing, in directions the owners of the bots control. Even allowing for the fact that most of the puffy narcissists pulling the strings in tech haven’t had a functional master plan since about 1997, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at this situation and feel nervous.
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
I would share McKibben’s excitement except for one thing: It’s in the interests of the most powerful people on the planet to make sure this “paradigm shift” doesn’t happen.
My fifth entry on Sayers and Constantine is up. One more to go. However, I have a problem: I recently re-watched Hail, Caesar! and now whenever I read Constantine’s dialogue I hear it in the voice of Baird Whitlock as Autolycus Antoninus.
I believe this is a situation in which the cost of bad advice outweighs the benefit of quick help by 10X, at least. I can, in fact, figure out how to do X using the real docs. Only the doc bot can make things up.
As Kafka says, “A common experience, leading to a common confusion.”
If you’ve ever wondered whether the debate at the Council of Nicaea really mattered, please read my fourth post on Sayers’s play The Emperor Constantine.
I was down at Laity Lodge last week and it rained the whole time I was there, but the Frio Canyon remained and remains safe, even though it’s no more than 20 miles from the Guadalupe. I drove back to Waco in heavy rain, and near Gatesville my car hydroplaned: I slid across the southbound lane — no cars were coming — and crashed sideways into a tree. I was unhurt and, amazingly, I could drive my battered car home. It was a close call and I am a bit shaken, but what happened to me was one of the least serious things that can happen when too much water falls onto bare limestone. I am so grieved for the lost lives — especially the young lives. I don’t know how the families can be comforted, but I pray they will be.
Finished reading: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole. A brilliant, fascinating, disturbing book. It’s marred by its relentless Manichaeanism: in O’Toole’s moral world there’s nothing bad to be said about people like him, the “sophisticated” and “cosmopolitan” — words he uses unironically and even uncritically —, and nothing good to be said about Catholicism. But if like O’Toole (who’s my age) I had grown up amidst the spectacular moral corruption of the Irish Church, I would probably feel just as he feels. 📚
Finished reading: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan. A fascinating book in many ways but Lang was such a despicable person that I feel I need a palate-cleanser of some kind. 📚