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I have a large collection of Library of America volumes, and I love almost all of them, but one big disappointment is American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. I’m disappointed because the collection exemplifies an attitude that I questioned in my little essay “How Not To Save the Planet.” Too many pieces in the collection are about “the Earth” or “the planet” or “Nature” or “the environment”; not enough are about specific places.
That’s because in AItopia nobody will ever go anywhere.
Jane Freilicher, The Painting Table
This Adam Neely video about his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music, which is simultaneously fascinating and immensely discouraging, provides an excellent illustration of the ways that all the institutions scrambling to get on board the AI train, in the belief that that will make them seem up-to-date and relevant, just end up giving a “How do you do, fellow kids” vibe.
To each his own, but I’d rather go to the First Church of Lucifer Antichrist than to James Talarico’s church. Say what you will about Satanism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge: I don’t think this is the right framing. The Valley techbros have never known what normal people want, do not care what normal people want, and do not believe that they need to know or care. They’re planning to do what they want to do in complete indifference to the preferences of anyone else.
Over at Cosmos Malick, a long post on Knight of Cups.
Mandy Brown:
In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why far fewer people are needed to do the work. If, for the moment, we take that assertion at face value, this still leaves an obvious alternati...
Currently listening: Mingus Ah Um 🎵
If I were the Emperor of American Christianity, I would forbid any complaints about how persecuted American Christians are unless they include the following three points:
- The early church, and Christians in many parts of the world right now, have it infinitely worse than we do;
- Jesus promised us that if we are faithful to him we will be persecuted;
- And Jesus also commanded us to rejoice when we are thus persecuted.
The usual morning crew
Colin Dickey:
In 1947, a man named Kenneth Arnold was flying his two-seater near Mount Rainier when he saw nine flying objects cruising at high speeds, a sighting that launched the modern UFO era. [Gray] Barker was then working as a film distributor, and by the early 1950s ...
I tried listening to A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler on Audible, but the A.I. narrator drove me crazy and I had to stop and switch to text. (It’s an outstanding book!) I persisted as long as I did because I’ve been dealing with eyestrain, but the strange stresses and mispronounced words — foreign names are especially bad: Proust is pronounced Prowst, Rilke Rilk — eventually broke me. I believe I will have to cancel my Audible account: the practice of giving A.I. narrators human names, with the express purpose of deceiving customers, is unacceptable. 📚
Jane Freilicher, Study in Blue and Gray
Yeah I’m 😂 as I eat lunch.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.
The decline of pushball = the decline of civilization.
Now that I have three blogs — The Homebound Symphony, Cosmos Malick, and micro.blog — I really don’t know what I would do without MarsEdit. What a great app.
The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music, but they want people to believe that they have done so. We should be thinking often about the intensity of the need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible:
I think they hold up pretty well.
Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and someoine who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first...
I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)
