writing

A Work Has No Name

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, writing

The writer’s duty, his proper function, is to fade out of the picture, to obliterate himself, his face, his personal concerns, his love affairs. About many authors of the greatest works we know absolutely nothing. Shakespeare never existed and I am sorry that a name has been appended to his plays. The Book of Job is by nobody. Nothing does more to falsify the profoundest, most fruitful ideas that we can form regarding human creativity than to let our appreciation of a great work’s intrinsic value be cluttered up with facts regarding a man’s social status, dealings with women, and the rest of it. What makes a work is not the man who signs it. What makes a work has no name.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

[Yes, I did just use this as an epigraph a couple days ago, but don’t worry, this isn’t an accidental repost. I just had two lines of thought following from it that seemed deserving of separate consideration.]

There is an old Buddhist warning about mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The writer is such a finger. His work is the moon.

This arrangement becomes complicated in the personal essay, where the finger is not merely a directional aid but part of the spectacle. We read Montaigne because Montaigne is looking. His temperament, hesitations, vanity, curiosity, memory, and physical existence are not distractions from the Essays. They are the instrument through which his world becomes visible. Remove the particular man and much of the value disappears with him. The personal essay therefore cannot obey Valéry’s command literally. Its author does not fade entirely from the picture. He stands somewhere near the middle of it, scratching himself, changing his mind, remembering a horse accident, examining a kidney stone.

Still, he is pointing. The distinction is between revealing oneself in order to show something and showing something in order to reveal oneself. The first produces an essay. The second produces content. A writer may tell us about his life because his life has brought some larger fact into view. The experience provides texture and resistance. It gives thought something to work against. We learn who is speaking because the identity of the speaker affects what can be seen from his position. But the proper movement is outward. The author points away from himself toward the world.

Readers do not always follow him. They become interested in the pointing finger: its scars, jewelry, manicure, voting record, sexual history, income, childhood traumas, and treatment of waiters. The work directs attention toward some object, but the audience turns back toward the person who noticed it. A sufficiently beautiful moon produces admirers of the astronomer.

This may be inevitable. To encounter an unusual mind is to become curious about its owner. A reader who has spent years in the company of an author may feel he knows him better than he knows many living acquaintances. The voice in the head acquires a face. Affection follows. So do envy, resentment, identification, disappointment, and other emotions. But admiration easily becomes a failure of attention. The writer wanted to show us something. We respond by asking what he ate for breakfast.

Publishers know the appetite. The contemporary writer is expected to provide not only books but a continuous supply of himself. He must have a story, a platform, a politics, a public personality, a photograph that communicates the correct mixture of seriousness and approachability. His work is surrounded by interviews, profiles, podcasts, newsletters, social posts, reading lists, home tours, origin stories, and confessions about his writing process. The author no longer points at the moon. He performs beneath a ring light while the moon hides behind clouds.

None of this would exist without readers willing to look. We flatter ourselves that literature is a traffic in ideas, forms, perceptions, and imagined lives. Much of the time, it is another branch of primate surveillance. Who is mating with whom? Who has risen in rank? Who has been cast out? Who is secretly cruel? Who belongs to which faction? What private failure explains the public face? A difficult idea asks us to alter our attention. Gossip asks us only to distribute approval and contempt.

Biography can illuminate a work. Knowing that Montaigne wrote amid civil war and religious slaughter sharpens our sense of his skepticism. But biography earns its place only when it returns us to the work. Otherwise the hierarchy reverses. The book becomes evidence in a case assembled against, or on behalf of, the author. Poems become clues, novels depositions, essays symptoms. The reader ceases to ask what the writer saw and asks what the writing reveals about the writer. The work becomes the finger. The man becomes the moon. The author, like Bob Dylan, finds weirdos rummaging through his trash cans in search of evidence supporting some schizoid theory.

Valéry recoiled from this confusion with the fastidiousness of a laboratory technician who has discovered fingerprints on his glassware. His ideal writer removes the warm debris of personality: the face, the love affairs, the social standing, “and the rest of it.” The work should appear cleanly, almost without human custody. His own writing often reflects this ambition. The “I” in Valéry is less a personality than an instrument panel. He records tensions, operations, limits, reversals. The self appears not as a character asking to be loved but as a site where thought is being tested.

This austerity has its limits. Valéry’s desire to become impersonal ironically expresses an unmistakable, interesting personality: proud, controlled, suspicious of sentiment, repelled by disorder, determined not to be caught in an undignified human sprawl. His laboratory is itself a kind of self-portrait. His real demand, then, cannot be absolute anonymity. It is a demand for proportion.

This requires restraint from the writer. Vanity urges him to become the meaning of his work. Success makes the temptation worse. When readers turn from the moon with worship in their eyes, few authors will sternly direct their gaze back toward the sky. Some begin pointing at smaller and smaller objects because what the audience really wants is another glimpse of the famous finger.

It also requires discipline from the reader. We must resist converting every encounter with a mind into a social relationship. We need not know whether the author would like us, agree with us, invite us to dinner, or survive a modern background check. We may admire what he saw without canonizing the man who saw it. We should be grateful for the pointing. We need not follow him home.

The Suicide of the Author

By in ai, aphorisms, books, the statusphere, writing

The writer’s duty, his proper function, is to fade out of the picture, to obliterate himself, his face, his personal concerns, his love affairs. About many authors of the greatest works we know absolutely nothing. Shakespeare never existed and I am sorry that a name has been appended to his plays. The Book of Job is by nobody. Nothing does more to falsify the profoundest, most fruitful ideas that we can form regarding human creativity than to let our appreciation of a great work’s intrinsic value be cluttered up with facts regarding a man’s social status, dealings with women, and the rest of it. What makes a work is not the man who signs it. What makes a work has no name.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

For decades, literary academics announced the Death of the Author with the excitement of men setting fire to a Guy Fawkes effigy. The Author was a bourgeois fiction. Intention was a superstition. The text was a tissue of quotations, language speaking through a temporary human host. The sovereign creator had been exposed, dethroned, abolished.

Needless to say, everyone put his own name on the article.

The author’s death was one of those revolutions that improved the revolutionary’s professional standing without disturbing his material arrangements. Names remained on books. Royalties continued to arrive. Careers still depended upon attribution. Footnotes carefully distinguished one dead author from another. A scholar could spend twenty pages explaining that originality was an illusion and become furious if another scholar borrowed a paragraph.

Nothing had happened except that a class of ambitious people had acquired a dramatic vocabulary for describing ordinary literary facts. Writers are influenced by other writers. Language precedes us. A work may exceed the conscious intentions of the person who made it. Readers discover meanings the writer did not foresee. None of this required the symbolic murder of anyone. But “the author is not always the final authority on his work” lacks the thrilling aroma of cordite. The Author had to die.

Valéry’s thought experiment is more serious because it asks something of the writer. It diminishes the author not only in theory but in vanity. It asks him to surrender the warm pleasures of personality, fame, gossip, worship, and identification. It denies him the consoling thought that the work is valuable because it expresses the fascinating fact of himself. The academic death of the author surrendered none of this. It killed authorial authority while preserving authorial prestige. The writer could no longer govern the meaning of his text, but he remained perfectly entitled to govern its byline, payment, ownership, and place in the hierarchy.

Then artificial intelligence arrived and committed the vulgar error of taking the rhetoric seriously. AI threatens authorship from the opposite direction. Valéry dissolves the author upward, into the impersonal mystery of creation. AI dissolves him downward, into a process of prompting, generation, selection, editing, imitation, probability, and machinery. One says the maker of the work should not be contained by a name. The other produces works for which no single name gives an adequate account of the making.

Between them stands the literary theorist, suddenly clutching his byline. This is the ordinary pattern of academic revolution. The language is insurrectionary; the conduct is clerical. Foundations are demolished in prose and relied upon in practice. Categories are denounced as artificial until one of them protects a salary, a reputation, or a claim of ownership. The thinker positions himself at the thrilling edge of dissolution while remaining careful not to dissolve anything he needs. Who let these sans-culottes into the palace, for God’s sake?!

Valéry asks the author to efface himself. Barthes permits the critic to efface the author. The first requires humility and discipline. The second creates a job opening. And now AI has produced an amusing panic. The academics had imagined themselves playing with dynamite, only to discover that they had been holding painted wooden sticks. The author wrote his suicide note, arranged the lighting, invited the critics, and collapsed beautifully across the chaise longue. Everyone applauded. Then artificial intelligence walked into the room and took the note literally.

Tiny Ropes

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, writing

Alan Jacobs:

Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.

Jacobs distinguishes between Substack subscribers, who have paid to receive something, and open-web supporters, who contribute because they approve of the work he has already done. The first arrangement carries expectations; the second merely ratifies an existing relationship. This distinction may work perfectly well for him. I have no reason to suspect otherwise.

My own temperament would ignore it completely. A reader who gave me fifty dollars as thanks for past services rendered would occupy just as much space in my mind as one who paid five dollars a month for future ones. The subscriber has entered an intelligible transaction and may cancel it whenever he pleases. The donor has made a gesture of generosity for which no return was formally required. That very absence of terms would make the obligation harder to discharge. The money would follow me back to the desk. Had I gone too long without posting? Was the next piece substantial enough? Was I writing something the donor would care to read? He might intend none of these questions. I would supply them on his behalf.

Nietzsche once wrote in a notebook:

I am passionately for independence, I sacrifice everything to it — probably because I have the most dependent soul and am tormented by the tiniest ropes more than others by chains.

It’s a startling glimpse of the man behind the great booming voice. He doesn’t describe independence as the natural condition of someone whom nothing can touch. He describes it as a defense devised by someone who can be touched too easily. The severity is compensatory. He guards himself because claims have too much power over him.

This changes the sound of much that Nietzsche wrote. His attacks on pity, for instance, are usually read as evidence of callousness. Yet in The Gay Science he elaborates on the earlier notebook entry:

How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral — to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life — if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it – and from our very own conscience – to flee into the conscience of others and into the lovely temple of the religion of pity.

Nietzsche therefore attempts to harden himself at the places where he is most permeable. His philosophy sometimes sounds like a barricade constructed by a man who knows how quickly the walls might fall. “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” he wrote in a letter to Peter Gast.

The same undertone appears in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which he calls independence “a privilege of the strong.” Read in isolation, it has everything required to intoxicate an adolescent male reader: the solitary hero, the labyrinth, the Minotaur, the suffering incomprehensible to common men. One naturally casts oneself as the tragic exception.

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.

But this isn’t aristocratic chest-thumping so much as a private warning. He’s saying to himself: You may not be as strong as you wish to be. Your effort to become strong may deform you. And after making a principle of solitude, you may discover that solitude is too much to bear.

I don’t refuse money because I am beyond its influence. I refuse it because its influence would be disproportionate. I guard my independence fiercely because I know how easily I can be bound. A person who is highly sensitive to obligation may begin to experience every request as an imposition, every favor as a debt, every affection as the first loop of a leash. He may snarl, spit, and hiss at ordinary human ties because he knows they will work on him. He may become so practiced at detecting ropes that even loose threads begin to look like restraints.

Still, it is better to know one’s susceptibility than to pretend to possess a freedom one does not have. Jacobs can accept contributions while preserving, in his own mind, a clear distinction between gratitude and purchase. I cannot.

The Creature of Letters

By in foolosophy, work, writing

“Which, Mr. Author, do you prefer: to be read a thousand times by one person, or once by a hundred thousand readers?”
“A thousand times by a hundred thousand,” replies the creature of letters.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Freddie deBoer:

What Substack offers is a different kind of precarity, not an escape from it. My income is entirely contingent on 65,000 people continuing to find me worth reading and 6,000 of them finding my work worth paying for, which is not exactly a pension. I think about it constantly. Sometimes I lie awake at night about it! But here’s the thing—it’s legible precarity. I know exactly where I stand. I know what I earn, I know what I owe my readers, I know what happens if they leave. The institutional world offered the illusion of stability while being perfectly capable of firing me on any given day for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of my work. For now, I prefer this version. In the future… who can say.

The revealing phrase is not even “I lie awake at night.” It is: “I know what I owe my readers.” At that point the relation has changed. The readers are no longer merely welcome guests; collectively, they are the revenue model. No individual subscriber is his boss, but six thousand of them together make payroll.

The obvious fear is cancellation — What if I say the one thing that makes them leave? — but it needn’t operate as crude self-censorship to affect the work. There are subtler pressures: You notice which topics convert subscribers. You feel guilty when you have nothing ready. An experimental post is no longer merely an experiment; it may disappoint paying customers. A month spent reading and thinking begins to look like failure to deliver. Even ignoring the metrics becomes a deliberate act of resistance, because the metrics now describe whether you can pay the mortgage.

I can write with no fear and pure enjoyment. If one person writes me an email, or returns repeatedly to favorite posts, I’m gratified. Sure, I would naturally like $300,000, but not this particular $300,000, because income never arrives as an abstraction. It arrives bundled with obligations, fears, incentives, and six thousand people whose continued goodwill has become a household necessity. My position is materially poorer and artistically luxurious. I can publish an odd fragment, a joke that amuses no one but myself, disappear into Valéry for a week, write something no one asked for, or change my mind without wondering what the cancellation rate will look like. Nobody is owed a posting schedule, a recognizable product, or the continued performance of “Outis.” A reader’s email therefore arrives as surplus, a pure gift, rather than customer retention.

The danger for the creature of letters is recursive self-consciousness. You write freely. People respond. Their response becomes valuable, even lucrative. Then, because it is valuable, you begin watching yourself write. The audience that arrived because you were not courting it becomes the audience you now feel compelled to court. You start protecting the conditions which were produced by not trying to produce them. You notice which posts traveled, which subjects drew subscriptions, which tones brought praise. Soon you are no longer asking, “What do I genuinely want to think through?” but “What sort of thing do my readers come here for?” You get in your own way, overthinking things. You keep trying to replicate what worked before, but the reason it worked is because you weren’t trying to replicate anything.

As I’ve said many times, I think deBoer is appallingly stupid about everything of importance. But it’s only fair to say that I’m not mocking him here, as if he’s a pathetic slave to the grind and I’m not. His anxiety is not evidence that his arrangement is fraudulent or miserable; it is evidence that it is employment. A livelihood always comes with exposure to forces you cannot control. My business has clients, payroll, costs, competition, and technological change. His has subscribers, output expectations, reputation, and audience volatility. We’re all vulnerable in our own way.

No, I’m just saying what I’ve always said. You should have something that rejuvenates you after you’re done earning your daily bread. For me, writing does that. One reader reading a thousand posts does that. But if I turned it into a job, even a “side hustle,” it would become just as stressful as a regular job. Whatever brings you money will also bring you woe, so choose carefully.

Substack vs. Valéry

By in bricolage, foolosophy, writing

For the past six years, we at Substack have been trying to help writers by building great publishing and networking tools. We started with a content management system that pairs seamlessly with subscription and payment tools, so you can publish your work and get paid in the same place. We introduced collaboration and cross-pollination features that help you reach new readers, and we coupled it all with community tools to bring your readership into the conversation. These are some of the critical missing pieces in the writer’s internet toolkit, but not all of them. The most glaring missing piece is a giant one.

Discovery.

How does your work get found? How do your stories reach new people? How can you spark conversation outside your existing readership? If you’re a new writer without a pre-existing audience, how can you break out?

This will be a core area of focus for Substack in the months ahead.

— Hamish McKenzie

****

I prefer to be read several times by a single person than once by several people.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

Are You Finished?

By in ai, technology, writing

Adam Kirsch:

And that is why the rise of AI writing represents a great opportunity for literature, even as it makes life harder for professional writers. When photography was developed in the 19th century, it replaced painting for most utilitarian purposes; a camera could document what things looked like more accurately and cheaply than a painter could. But the art of painting didn’t die out. On the contrary, it entered a golden age: Freed from the obligation of realism, painters developed radical new ways of seeing, such as Impressionism, Cubism, and abstract expressionism. Now AI has the potential to liberate literature in the same way. In a world full of emptily competent prose, we need writers daring, challenging, and obstinate enough to tell us what it’s like to be human, “from the inside.”

I have to admit, I’ve been losing a lot of respect for writers as a species lately. Apparently a sedentary life of scribbling has turned their vertebrae to jelly and left them cowering in the face of a challenge. Most of the responses I’ve seen to the prevalence of LLMs have reminded me of Private Hudson in Aliens:

It’s a relief to see Kirsch, whom I’ve always appreciated, being the voice of common sense here. Having a strong point of view, the one thing an LLM can’t have, goes a long way toward preventing one’s writing from having a beige-tapioca sameness to it, even if AI is involved in the making of it. Kirsch amusingly notes that many of the bot-sniffers sound like phrenologists in their insistence on diagnosing LLM degeneracy by the telltale skull shape rhetorical devices. It is true that LLMs give fluent shape to half-thought. A weak writer with no depth or perspective will produce clichés artfully expressed, which is what most people are reacting against: all flash, no substance. But the rhetorical devices can survive overuse when the thought has blood and sinew in it. People don’t get tired of parallelism, antithesis, repetition, climax, reversal, aphorism, or rhythm as such. They get tired of being nudged toward the feeling of significance where no significance has been demonstrated.

A scale is not a song, but without scales, or something scale-like, most music collapses into gesture, noise, or private experiment. Likewise, chiasmus, tricolon, epimone, polysyndeton: these are not cheap tricks in themselves. They are ways of organizing attention. They let the reader feel relation, contrast, emphasis, hierarchy, arrival.

The current suspicion toward certain rhetorical devices, another Hudson-like hysterical overreaction, is mostly a confusion of cause and symptom. People are seeing a lot of AI prose with em dashes, antitheses, and neat moral reversals, so they start blaming those devices. But that is like blaming I–V–vi–IV chord progressions for bad pop songs. The progression is not the enemy. The enemy is dead usage, automatic usage, usage without pressure from perception. The existence of Taylor Swift’s career doesn’t discredit the tonal system and force us to pretend to enjoy Schoenberg. Abandoning rhetorical structure because AI overuses it would be like abandoning melody because jingles exist.

Most prose is not literature. Most prose is paperwork, filler, correspondence, summary, instruction, polite institutional lorem ipsum. AI will colonize that stuff easily because much of it was already written as if nobody in particular had written it. But literature, essays, criticism, aphorism, memoir — anything where the value lies in the irreducible angle of attention — may become more sharply itself. The danger, maybe, is that many readers will be perfectly content with dispenser-literature, just as many people are content with chain restaurants, algorithmic playlists, prefab opinions, and cinematic universes. But that is not new either. Literature has always had to coexist with entertainment, sermon, formula, and narcotic. AI simply removes the last excuses. If the machine can write the thing you were going to write, perhaps the thing was not yet yours.

Our Remedies Oft In Ourselves Do Lie

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology, writing

Andrew Potter:

But the hard work of thinking is literally what makes us human. System 1 is your primate brain, the legacy of our evolutionary heritage from the ancient savannah. The hard, focused attention that characterizes System 2 thinking is a currency, and what you choose to spend it on defines what you care about, and ultimately, who you are. Which is why whatever else AI does, whatever benefits it brings the world, there is a sense in which it literally steals your soul.

To me, this is an updated version of the Nicholas Carr-type argument that the internet/social media/AI is “rewiring our brains.” From my perspective, if your attention span and “love of reading” didn’t survive the encounter with Angry Birds, it wasn’t very strong to begin with. If your love of “writing and thinking” doesn’t survive the encounter with AI, perhaps you have some painful introspection to do. If anything, I love writing and thinking more now because I have an interlocutor who never gets tired or bored and helps me to build out thoughts that would have remained unfinished otherwise. AI feels to me like I’ve been handed a Zippo lighter. Formerly, I had to bang rocks together, or rub sticks together, hoping for a spark of insight to catch. Now, the fire is blazing much quicker, but the heat is the same as the “organic” version. The “artificial” heat still allows me to do all the things one normally does when one’s teeth aren’t chattering and one’s fingers aren’t numb. AI has not “replaced” the fire. It has replaced some of the fumbling around in the cold, the freezing in the dark while proving your authenticity to the indifferent woods.

In some sense, every moment is a stage for the same eternally-recurring choice: do I make the effort to do this difficult thing, or do I make an excuse to not do it? It could be reading abstruse books, it could be lifting weights, it could be anything that forces the challenge upon us: this will take time and energy; do I want to do it? This choice is never resolved for once and for all. There is no “progress” here. If I give in to laziness and stop lifting weights, I don’t get credit for all the time I put in; I only succumb to entropy. Likewise, if I let an LLM do my writing and thinking for me, my mind turns feeble. If I recognize it happening and fail to change my habits, well, then I fail, period.

I hear complaints like Potter’s and I just shrug. This is the human condition; what do you want me to tell you? You want me to remove all temptation for you? You can’t handle the truth of the choices you make, so you want all the nearby mirrors covered so you don’t have to look yourself in the eye? Yes, it’s always pleasant to have a burden lifted off of you, at least for a moment. But you simply must philosophically commit yourself to some kind of burden. It’s up to you to choose which one.

Technology is very good at neatly separating your aspirations from your actual priorities, however embarrassing that may be for our self-image. The person who “loved reading” until the internet came along may have loved the identity of being a reader more than the activity. The person who “loved writing” until AI could do it faster may have loved the status of having written more than the labor of trying to say something. If the self disappears the moment an excuse becomes available, perhaps the self was already negotiating its surrender.

Premodern life made many choices for you. You rose when there was work to do because hunger, weather, animals, crops, family, illness, and scarcity were not interested in your self-actualization. Burdens were not “meaningful” because people had nobly chosen them; they were meaningful only in the blunt sense that failing to bear them had consequences. Civilization softens that coercion. It gives us heating, refrigeration, medicine, literacy, machines, contraception, abundance, leisure, mobility, digital tools. Good. Thank the gods for it. But then the question becomes more exposed: now that you don’t have to live under necessity, what necessity will you impose on yourself?

Many people start looking wistfully back toward constraint. Not because they truly want cholera, crop failure, childbirth mortality, untreated tooth abscesses, and hauling water. They want the moral simplification of necessity without the misery that came with it. AI intensifies this because it reaches into the last prestige zone of voluntary effort: thought. We already made physical survival easier. We made social communication easier. We made entertainment effortless. Now even the internal friction of composing, reasoning, summarizing, and articulating can be smoothed. That doesn’t mean the soul has been stolen. It means the soul is being asked, rather rudely: “Were you serious?” The old world forced people to endure hardship. The modern world forces people to decide whether they believe in anything strongly enough to endure hardship voluntarily.

There’s a respectable version of “I need external limits,” and then there’s the evasive version, where a person has enough clarity to describe the trap in exquisite detail but somehow not enough clarity to move the cheese. “I notice that this thing makes me miserable, consumes my attention, weakens my patience, and leaves me ashamed afterward.” Good. But the next step does not require a graduate seminar in attention ethics. Delete the app. Put the phone in another room. Use the browser only on desktop. Set a timer. Make a rule. Break the rule, notice it, revise the rule. Go outside. Read ten pages before opening the laptop. Write badly for twenty minutes before consulting the LLM oracle. None of this is mysterious. It is boring, which is precisely why people would rather inflate it into metaphysics.

This is partly why I talk about the gym so much. Lifting weights is applied philosophy for me. It is a controlled environment where you can practice, in a small way, making the eternally-recurring choice to work harder when you’re tempted to rationalize excuses for weakness and laziness. The barbell sits there, mute, impassively ignoring your pleading and bargaining. You either lift it or you don’t. No serious gym-goer would earnestly claim, the way clever bookish types do, “The existence of couches has stolen my quadriceps.” Couches are always there. Laziness is always there. The body is always trying to economize. The question is whether you willingly resist. If my triceps are weak and making it hard to bench press, what’s the answer? Work on the triceps in particular with supplementary exercises. Not, “society should redesign the gym to suit the needs of people suffering from Tricep-Deficiency Disorder, and we need an awareness-raising campaign…”

The same goes for the mind. The blank page, the abstruse book, the hard sentence, the boring revision, the honest objection — these are forms of resistance. AI becomes dangerous when it is used to remove resistance entirely. But it can also be used like a spotter, a sparring partner, a stack of plates, a second mind pressing back.

I don’t deny the structural question. Someone has to think about defaults, incentives, laws, schools, platforms, and public health. But that is not my interest. I am not a would-be social planner, nudger, or shepherd of populations. I say, drolly, that I’m more of a personal trainer for the soul. I am interested in the person who still has enough agency to be addressed as a responsible individual. I do not want to arrange his cage more humanely. I want him to notice the open door. I want him to become self-sufficient, to take an active hand in shaping his own life, to acquire a taste for chosen difficulty rather than cheap release. The question that interests me is not how society can be engineered around weakness, but how weakness, once recognized, can be trained. The social planner asks: how do we organize society so that weak people do less damage to themselves? The trainer asks: how do we make weakness ashamed of staying weak?

The structural frame becomes dangerous when it gives people a respectable language for waiting. “The incentives are bad.” True. “The platforms are engineered for addiction.” True. “The social environment is hostile to attention.” True. But then what? Are you released from action until the Ministry of Humane Defaults issues its findings? “What do you want me to do? They made this stuff addictive. Until society fixes the problem, I have no choice but to continue doing the thing I have just identified as ruining me.” This person knows enough to diagnose the machinery, but somehow not enough to put the phone in the drawer. He can explain dopamine loops, variable rewards, dark patterns, algorithmic capture, and late-capitalist attention extraction, but cannot survive ten minutes without refreshing the slot machine.

We are never free in some abstract, frictionless sense. We are born into bodies, temperaments, habits, economies, families, technologies, desires, and eras we did not choose. But inside those constraints, there is almost always some movable piece. A small refusal. A rule. A delay. A substitution. A chosen inconvenience. A door left unopened. A tool used only after the first draft. Ten pages before the screen. The phone outside the bedroom. Dumb little measures, maybe, but dumb little measures are what self-command is made of. The structural analysis may be true and still be useless to the person using it as a sedative. Yes, the platform is engineered to keep you there. Yes, the incentives are bad. Yes, your appetites have been studied, modeled, and monetized. But unless you are literally chained to the machine, the next question remains yours: what are you going to do with the portion of freedom left to you?

I Fake It So Real I Am Beyond Fake

By in ai, foolosophy, technology, writing

Krzysztof Pelc:

My wager that we will turn to the past, that we will fetishize pre-GPT work, that we will manufacture new old things, may be wrong. Instead, we may simply adapt. We may come to read the way we now eat—content to consume highly processed fare, vaguely aware of what has been lost, but willing to trade it in for abundance and ease. The label says “homemade flavor,” and that might be enough. After all, while mass production gave rise to a cult of the handmade, industry still won the long game, by imitating just enough of its trappings. Jeans arrive pre-torn, boots pre-scuffed, tables pretreated with the patina of imagined family dinners. If that is the pattern, then the future of literature may not be defined by anxious humanism at all. Perhaps a newly devised look of authenticity will suffice.

Those fake ruins scattered through 18th-century English gardens weren’t really meant to fool anyone. Visitors knew they were built yesterday—it didn’t matter. The feel of antiquity was enough. Same was even true of Ossian. Doubts about the poems’ authenticity surfaced almost immediately; Samuel Johnson called them a fabrication. They swept Europe anyway. Napoleon still declared Ossian greater than Homer. Perhaps we will shrug and just learn to enjoy the fake ruins.

Pelc’s essay is the best I have read yet on what AI use means for those of us who value writing, partly because he avoids both the techno-utopian shrug and the guild-panic howl. He is not asking whether machines will “kill” literature. He is asking what happens when writing survives but provenance becomes unstable.

We often say we want the real thing. What we often want, in practice, is the sensation the real thing gives us. Antiquity without waiting. Labor without calluses. Ruin without catastrophe. Folk memory without surly peasants. Rustic tables without generations of family use. Distressed jeans without years of crawling under cars, stacking lumber, or falling off bicycles. “Homemade flavor” without anyone at home.

This is not mere consumer hypocrisy. It is an old feature of the divided will. “The good that I would, I do not.” We claim to want books, attention, discipline, craft, contact with real minds, slow-grown judgment. Then we spend our hours scrolling, skimming, sampling, grazing. Most of us have more time than we admit for the things we claim to value. We use it badly, and then treat our own habits as if they were acts of fate. The machine did not besiege the fortress of humanity. It strolled through an open door.

Much of the alarm about AI assumes that readers will urgently demand proof of human origin, and some will. There will surely be a market for literary organic produce: free-range essays, grass-fed poems, non-GMO memoirs, certified pre-GPT fiction. Writers will advertise their purity. Publishers will rediscover backlists with priestly zeal. “Lost” manuscripts will turn up in attics, storage bins, dead relatives’ boxes, and obsolete hard drives. A novel supposedly written in 1997 and sealed away for decades will turn out, after enough people have praised its uncanny relevance, to have been fabricated in 2026 with machine assistance. There will be modern Ossians because authenticity, once made precious, becomes profitable to counterfeit.

Some of this will be sincere. There will be readers who want to support human work against machine abundance, just as some people prefer local farms, hand-thrown pottery, letterpress stationery, or actual old furniture. Some will pay a premium because they believe provenance matters. Others will pay because they enjoy being the sort of person who pays for provenance. The distinction is not always easy to draw, even in oneself.

But a larger market may not care. Or rather, it will care only until caring becomes inconvenient. If a bot can more reliably produce competent genre fiction — the cozy mystery, the space opera, the enemies-to-lovers romance, the military thriller, the haunted-house story with respectable pacing and a twist in the third act — many readers will ask the obvious consumer question: did I enjoy it? The plot moved. The characters served. The atmosphere arrived on schedule. The dragon fell, the detective solved, the lovers confessed, the village healed. Another satisfied customer. Why interrogate the supply chain?

Copernicus removed us from the center of the cosmos. Darwin removed us from the privilege of separate creation. Freud, or at least the psychological tradition that followed him, complicated our faith in self-mastery. The sovereign “I” became a disputed territory of drives, memories, habits, compulsions, and unacknowledged motives. AI now presses on what many people had assumed was a safer chamber: expression. Machines could calculate, manufacture, sort, optimize, and predict. But surely they could not make art. Surely they could not speak from inwardness. Surely they could not produce the marks of a life.

Now the answer is less reassuring. The machine does not need to have lived if it can reproduce the marks of having lived well enough to move us.

That is why the bad AI writing we call “slop” is almost comforting. Slop lets us keep the distinction intact. It allows us to say: see, the difference is obvious. The thing has no blood in it. It has that smoothed-out, overlit, hotel-lobby quality, all polish and no pressure. It speaks in prefab sympathies and sterile emphases. It has never noticed anything except the statistical likelihood of what people tend to say after other people have said similar things.

But the unease begins when the writing is not slop. When it has the right hesitation, the right embarrassment, the odd detail that seems rescued from memory; when it does not merely produce cliché but has learned how to imitate resistance to cliché. At that point, the humanist reply cannot simply be, “No, you can’t.” Increasingly, it can.

The problem is that human inwardness only becomes shareable by taking form, and form is exactly what can be copied.

Private experience is not transmissible in itself. I cannot directly hand you my grief, boredom, shame, love, childhood, or sense of a summer evening in 1983. I have to translate it into signs: words, images, rhythm, anecdote, metaphor, gesture, style. If the translation works, the private thing crosses the distance between us. You read the sentence and say, yes, that is how it is. One sealed consciousness has reached another by way of marks on a page.

But the moment inwardness becomes communicable, it becomes patterned. Once patterned, it becomes imitable. Once imitable at scale, it becomes machine-readable. What cannot be expressed remains private, perhaps even meaningless to others. What can be expressed can be copied. This doesn’t make expression worthless but it does make it vulnerable. The bridge between souls can also be used by mimics.

Science proceeds by stripping away the accidental. It wants the reproducible principle beneath the instance. Forget this apple, this eclipse, this falling body: what law governs all such cases? The particular becomes a doorway to the general. But art often moves in the opposite direction. The point is not “a mother,” but my mother. Not “childhood home,” but the house with the cracked step, the basement smell, the June light in the kitchen. Not “romantic attachment” in the abstract, but this person, this voice, this argument in the car, this forgiveness, this silence afterward. The particular is not evidence for the law. The particular is the thing itself.

AI irritates us because it takes the signs of particularity and makes them general. It studies millions of actual human instances — poems, apologies, jokes, eulogies, novels, love letters, confessions, familiar essays — and learns the transferable shape. Then it gives back a new instance bearing the marks of specificity: the cracked step, the remembered kitchen, the awkward pause, the private grief. But those details are not anchored in a life. They are particularity-effects. The formula has learned how to imitate the resistance to formula.

AI drags the old philosophical problem of “other minds” out of the seminar room and drops it into emails, student papers, dating profiles, condolence notes, poems, corporate apologies, memoirs, and love letters. The irreducible thing may still exist. But its outward traces are no longer secure. Perhaps that’s why debates over AI feel so much like debates over free will and determinism. The technical question is never merely technical. We are not only asking whether a system can generate competent prose. We are asking whether the human being can be reduced to math, mechanism, pattern, formula, predictability. Are my choices mine? Is my voice mine? Is my inward life a mystery, or only a process not yet fully diagrammed? The heat of the argument comes from the suspicion that another sacred boundary is being moved.

Many people will still prefer the substitute. If culture is merely the production of desired effects, AI has a strong claim. Let the machines generate our cozy mysteries, breakup songs, fantasy quests, inspirational captions, therapeutic monologues, dinner-party toasts, and grief simulacra. Let each of us float in a private syrup of optimized feeling. If pleasure is the final court of appeal, provenance becomes a luxury concern: nice for those who can afford it, irrelevant to those who only want the thing to work. But if culture is also a relation between persons, then provenance is not a decorative label. It is part of the event. The issue is not whether the fake ruin looks beautiful at sunset. It may. The issue is whether beauty was all we came for.

That question has no easy answer because we ourselves do not live by a single answer. We want the real and the convenient, the handmade and the overnight delivery, the slow book and the fast feed, the soul and the shortcut. AI did not create this division. The deeper fake may not be the forged manuscript or the synthetic essay passed off as human. It may be our own claim that we always wanted authenticity more than effect. Very often, we wanted the feeling of authenticity, and we were willing to take it wherever we could get it.

Transmitting, Receiving

By in foolosophy, santutthi, writing

Only in the depth of night are we entirely ourselves: becoming famous surrounds us with humans and their demands upon us. We must cast our fame into the sea.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

I received a kind email from a reader the other day, thanking me for doing what I do here. It was brief, written for no reason other than gratitude. No one was watching him praise me. No public exchange of favors was being made. He was not trying to attach himself to a scene, because there is no scene here. He had simply found my site, kept reading it, and decided to tell me that the habit meant something to him. That, as far as I’m concerned, is the whole reward. Not money, not metrics, not the fever dream of influence, but one distant mind making contact with another through mere words.

A few days later, while I was talking to my massage therapist about my four-part scheme of healthy living — two active duties, diet and exercise; two passive necessities, sleep and recovery — she suddenly asked, “Are you a writer?” Apparently I had outed myself by talking like someone who thinks in paragraphs and outlines. She followed, naturally enough, with the usual questions about professional ambition, publication, money. I disavowed them all.

Many people receive one sincere word of praise and immediately want it multiplied beyond recognition. The error is easy to understand. A man receives fan mail and thinks, naturally enough, “This is wonderful. Wouldn’t it be even better if hundreds, thousands, millions of people were saying this?” But no. He already had the thing he wanted, though he may not have recognized it while it was still small enough to hold. The pleasure was in the contact, not the number of contacts. Multiplication does not preserve that contact and enlarge it; it converts it into a problem of administration. Ten thousand grateful readers do not mean ten thousand versions of the first delight. They mean an overflowing inbox, a reputation, a public identity, a set of expectations, a crowd of strangers each arriving with the full force of his own sincerity and no way for the writer to receive it as such. Scale promises abundance and delivers abstraction.

The first letter is a person; the ten-thousandth is a statistic. That’s the painful asymmetry: for each reader, the encounter may be singular. For the author, it becomes cumulative. Every fan arrives with the freshness of first discovery; the author receives them with the fatigue of repetition. The reader says, “This book changed my life.” The author, hating himself a little, thinks, “Yes, that does seem to happen.” At first, “It’s like you wrote this just for me” means contact. Later, heard too often, it may begin to feel like being trapped inside a public function: the Professional Articulator of Other People’s Feelings. The magician must keep producing the same astonishment for each new spectator, long after he knows where every rabbit is hidden.

This is why obscurity has its uses. It keeps praise small enough to remain human. Fame gives you ten thousand eyes looking up at you, but it also makes it harder to look back into any one pair. The god’s-eye view is very bad at eye contact.

Aesthetic Prion Disease

By in ai, technology, the statusphere, writing

Sam Kriss:

I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.

Kriss goes on to argue that beauty and insight have already been lost to the machines. If you attempt to write in that mode now, you are trespassing on their territory. What remains inviolably human is not judgment, taste, memory, craft, or responsibility, but degradation: real writers are “sexual perverts,” “bitter and frustrated little gremlins,” “rapidly obsolescing apes” driven by “dumb lust and jealousy.” The machine may have won beauty; we retain “death threats, racist tirades, and pornographic fantasies.” Well. With friends of the human spirit like this, the robots can afford to take the afternoon off.

This is Romanticism minus the aspiration. The old Romantic complaint was that Enlightenment reason had made the world too neat, too dry, too mechanical. Man had to be rescued through passion, imagination, nature, sublimity, eroticism, madness, rebellion. Fittingly for an age of undead IP franchises, Kriss offers the rebooted and degraded version: if machines can imitate poignancy and insight, then the human writer must prove himself through spite, obscenity, and menace.

The other thread in the essay is less Romantic than professional: the guild-reflex. Kriss is a man with postgraduate training in Critical Theory, a long record of publication, and a livelihood bound up with being recognized as a writer (at least until his wealthy parents die and leave him their “massive house“). Now automation has wandered onto his turf. His fury is territorial. This is the prose equivalent of lifting one’s leg.

It’s true that much AI writing is bad in precisely the way he says it is bad: maudlin, frictionless, padded, eager to please, always reaching for poignancy without earning it. But much human writing has always been bad in the same way. The machine did not invent false profundity, stale metaphor, obscure nonsense, or the thrill people get from mistaking vagueness for depth. Hegel, Heidegger and Zizek did not need ChatGPT. Generations of poets, mystics, academics, commencement speakers, essayists, and newsletter moralists have managed to produce deepities under their own power.

What AI changes is not the existence of bad writing, but access to its surface competence. A person without the usual training, leisure, inborn talent, or literary inheritance can now ask for help organizing an argument, finding a phrase, testing a paragraph, or sanding down a clumsy sentence. If you need that sort of help, the implication runs, perhaps you were never meant to be here. Go back to assembling widgets, sweeping floors, driving Uber, or whatever else the uninitiated do with their days. The title of Writer is not yours to share.

Like it or not, AI is now another active agent in the literary ecology. It is not some alien corruption descending on an otherwise pure republic of letters. It is another producer of verbal atmosphere, though an unusually powerful one because it can generate enormous quantities of plausible prose on demand. The important point is that it imitates the existing discourse, then feeds its own imitation back into the discourse, where humans imitate the imitation, which machines then ingest again. Aesthetic prion disease, basically.

And the funny part is that human beings have always been machine-like in groups. Give any scene enough time and its members converge on the same rhythm, vocabulary, in-jokes, pieties, insults, and other verbal mating calls. Most “original voices” are partly just talented instances of a local dialect. AI makes this more obvious, and maybe more depressing, because it shows how much of our supposedly personal expression was already patterned.

People talk as if AI prose will simply flatten everything forever, but annoyance is one of the great engines of aesthetic change. The more dominant the median machine cadence becomes, the more valuable it becomes to sound unlike it. Some people will overcorrect into conspicuous difficulty: God help us if more people try to write Finnegans Wake. More jagged syntax, more private references, more deliberate ugliness, more broken forms, more “you can’t autocomplete this, you bastard.” That may produce some interesting work but will certainly produce a lot of unreadable peacocking.

Evolution proceeds. A new predator appears; the prey get faster, spikier, more camouflaged, or better at tasting like poison. The bot-species enters the ecosystem, and writers who care about style develop new defenses. Some responses will be hysterical. Some will be snobbish. Some will be productive. The worst writers will imitate the machine. The vainest writers will perform anti-machine authenticity. The better ones will absorb the lesson and keep moving.

I Wanna Disconnect Myself

By in jests japes jokes jollies, writing

A dubious study says handwriting improves “brain connectivity” more than typing. I believe it. When I write by hand, my brain is extremely connected — mostly to questions like, “What does this chickenscratch say?” “Damn, my hand hurts!” and “Christ, this is slower than molasses in January.” When I type, by contrast, using my patented index-fingers-plus-right-thumb system, my brain is mainly occupied with correcting typos and noticing that the last two lines have been produced with the caps-lock key still on. So I’m not sure either method makes me think better. Handwriting gives me more time to suffer; typing gives me more chances to correct myself. In the end, the brain connectivity probably evens out.

The Written Word Is a Lie

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, writing

“You steal ideas, you steal sentences,” he says, “if you are a creative person. If you don’t know how to steal, you don’t know how to create.” It is like a cow eating grass, to use one of Hoffer’s favorite metaphors. “The cow does not become grass,” says Hoffer, “the grass turns into cow.” Quotations, thoughts, a turn of phrase, and ideas in general taken from other writers are alfalfa to the creative person.

— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America

Let no one say I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts by being arranged differently!

— Pascal, Pensées

Originality is often treated as if it had to be immaculate conception. A thought must arrive unsullied by influence, untouched by other minds, bearing no fingerprints from the books one has read or the sentences one has admired. But writers are not virgins visited by angels. They are ruminants, tennis players, pickpockets, ventriloquists, and bad listeners. They steal, fail to steal properly, misunderstand what they have stolen, and sometimes discover that the thing they meant to steal was never there in the first place.

Attempted theft is rarely clean. A young writer tries to copy a cadence, a tone, a gesture on the page. But he can’t do it exactly. His own lack of skill interferes. His own preoccupations intrude. The borrowed coat hangs badly on his shoulders. So he cuts it, patches it, shortens the sleeves, replaces the buttons, and by the time he can wear it in public, it is no longer the master’s coat. Imitation fails in the direction of personality.

There is a comic version of this in the mondegreen. You hear Hendrix sing “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but your ear, composing behind your back, hears “kiss this guy.” For a moment you think: what a line. Then you learn it was never the line at all. Good news: now it is salvage. The original has no claim on what he never said. A mondegreen is plagiarism without a victim.

Books do something similar to the mind. You read an ambiguous passage and believe the author has opened one door, only to learn later that he was probably pointing toward another. Well, the room you entered by mistake still exists. Sometimes a book gives you an idea by failing to say it. The writer says one thing; the reader hears another; the error becomes a footpath. Misreading is often an unauthorized sequel to the original sentence.

In the fourth century, Aelis Donatus wrote a line that frequently appears in today’s quotation analogies, “Confound those who have said our remarks before us.” But with reverse quotation, our predecessors are quoting us! Instead of a “burden of the past,” in which the achievements of earlier generations rob us of opportunities for creativity, there could be a burden of the future, in which what we say merely echoes words to come. Imagine objecting: That man was quoting what I am going to say. He plagiarized what I am destined to write. However odd, it is a feeling we sometimes have. We know we created a certain thought or set of words, and so, when we discover them already expressed long ago, it feels as if they had been stolen from us in advance.

Gary Saul Morson adds the metaphysical absurdity. We all know the burden of the past: the suspicion that the dead have used up all the good sentences. But I like this idea of the burden of the future, too. Perhaps our predecessors are not merely people from whom we steal, but people who have stolen from us in advance. You labor over a thought, feel the private triumph of invention, then discover some dead man in a toga, wig, cassock, or frock coat said it more stylishly centuries ago. The outrage is absurd but real. He plagiarized what you were destined to write.

Worse still, the line of theft runs forward too. Perhaps every original sentence I write is being stolen from some unborn writer who would have arrived at it honestly in 2087. I am not merely robbing graves. I am looting cradles. The burden of the future is the suspicion that I am plagiarizing my literary grandchildren.

Burke thought civilization was a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. Literature may be the same arrangement, but conducted under cover of darkness. The dead steal from us by saying our sentences before we are born. We steal from the unborn by spending their inheritance early. We steal from our contemporaries, siblings, cousins, rivals, and friends by misreading, mishearing, misremembering, digesting, rearranging, and improving whatever they leave unattended. To write is to enter a marketplace where everyone is stealing from everyone else, including the dead, who had the low cunning to rob us in advance. Call it tradition if you like. I prefer “honor among thieves.”

A Bone For the Mind

By in books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, writing

“My writing is done in railroad yards, while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch,” he explained in a 1941 letter to Miss Anderson. “Towns are too distracting. Now and then I take a day off to ‘put myself in order.’ I go through the notes, pick and discard. The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.” His usual method was simply to take a single idea and work it out in his mind, put down the result in fifty words or less, and then go on to something else.

— Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I was a distracted driver for many years. Oh, I don’t mean that I was watching YouTube videos behind the wheel or anything. But I used to drive hundreds of miles a day for work, and most of my writing was done in my head, sometimes with a song on repeat, putting me in something of a focused trance. Hours went by on autopilot. I navigated highways and traffic without remembering any of it, concentrating on chewing sentences into shape. I tended toward brevity because a new idea for a post had to be brief enough to remember all the moving parts. By the time I got home in front of the computer, the work was already done; the rest was just stenography. (I never had an accident while driving, by the way.)

The keyboard is often where the sentence appears, but not where it was made. The sentence was made somewhere between mile markers, or while stacking boxes, or while mowing the same quadrant of grass for the third time, the mind gnawing away like an animal with a bone. Like Hoffer, I tend to ruminate on big-picture thoughts. Everyone and his mother wants to create “content” these days. I’m driven to give myself context and perspective. I like “sensemaking” as an aspirational goal, but much of it will never be used for anything practical. It won’t make me richer, fitter, wiser in any visible way, or more efficient at any task. I only want to know where I am, what sort of thing I have seen, what company it keeps. I want to put myself in order, like returning a book to the right shelf in the inner library.

On Exactitude in Leisure

By in books, foolosophy, work, world football, writing

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

— Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

The joke is simple: a perfectly accurate map ceases to be a map. A useful map must omit, compress, distort, select. The more it approaches total fidelity, the less useful it becomes. At a 1:1 scale, it is not a guide to reality; it is a useless duplicate of reality. The map’s power comes from being less than the territory.

My writing philosophy is also simple: I do this for the pure enjoyment of it. It’s a hobby. I would never turn it into a job even if I had the opportunity. Once you bring money into a labor of love, professional obligations sneak in behind it. Suddenly, you have deadlines, subscribers and all the rest. You end up writing because you have to, even if you don’t want to.

Or maybe it’s not so simple. Since last summer, I’ve kept a nine-month streak of writing every day. That’s partially because of conversing with AI to flesh out thoughts, which allows many more of them to come to fruition rather than rot on the vine. There’s been a lot of low-hanging fruit to gather. On the one hand, this is a bit of an artificial standard to impose on myself. Why not take a day off whenever I feel like it? On the other hand, I like the mild challenge. Coming up with something even when it seems hopeless is fun in itself. But it could easily become a yoke. If I get to the point where I’m making myself write something, anything, just to hit “publish” every 24 hours, haven’t I just reproduced the very thing about a “job” that I didn’t want? How is it different whether I have to write something every day because I’m making myself do it, or because a boss makes me do it? The fact is, there are some days when I’ve written something when I didn’t really feel like it at first. I have to be careful to not let this artificially-imposed logic take over my own will.

Lifting weights is another example of something that is both fun and rewarding, even for a non-competitor, but yet isn’t merely “having a good time.” Training is hard; injuries happen in addition to routine soreness; and there’s often a tough process of having to psyche yourself up mentally before leaving your comfort zone. The whole point of being there is to make yourself do difficult things when you don’t necessarily want to, because you know it’s better for you overall.

In the world of soccer, I started following Liverpool FC in the English Premier League some twenty years ago. The most enjoyable time was the Jurgen Klopp era, from 2015-2024, when he managed the club to multiple trophies and countless enthralling individual matches. Last season, the first after his departure, they won the league title easily, albeit with largely the same squad. This year, after many comings and goings, there’s been a lot more turbulence. They’re currently fourth place with two games left in the season, which would be tolerable in the abstract, but supporters are divided, to put it mildly, on whether Arne Slot, Klopp’s successor, is good enough to stay in his position as manager beyond this season. Worst of all, the playing style is simply atrocious. Slow, boring, and often ineffective. As a mere distant spectator, I’m forced to ask, as I just have this past weekend: why should I devote two hours of my time to watching this dreck? If this is how it’s going to be for the foreseeable future, why not take a break from it and do something else?

Dozens of arguments over this occur daily on various forums like Reddit. For some diehards, anyone who would even think of turning their backs on the club during a rough patch must be glory-hunting fair-weather fans. Anyone even casually familiar with the world of sports knows that sport fandom can be a surrogate religion. Soccer clubs have long histories, complete with rituals, chants/songs, martyrs, and most importantly, bitter enemies. You wouldn’t opt out for selfish reasons any more than you would stop going to church. But for someone like me, with no real personal stake in the club or the local tribe, I keep coming back to the thought: I already have obligations, many of which are tiring and taxing; why do I need to have another one? What kind of magical thinking is it to pretend that my eyes on the TV screen contribute some meaningful support to the team? Whence this compulsion to fill up my days with things I have to do? Isn’t this supposed to be fun?

I don’t know what Borges had in mind with his parable, but I find myself thinking that it makes a very good metaphor for the way in which we allow our play to turn into work. It seems to me like a compulsion: we methodically set about turning enjoyable acts into rituals and routines until they become rote and boring. Play starts secreting duty. It forms a shell. The shell does not know when to stop hardening. It has no judgment. It is only accretion. Another rule, another expectation, another “I do this because this is what I do,” another little layer of duty. Eventually the living thing inside has less room to move. For all our vaunted intelligence, an extraterrestrial ethologist might watch us turning play into obligation with the same detached interest we bring to spiders weaving webs: curious little creatures, secreting duty wherever they go.

Or, like Borges’s map, play expands until it becomes a 1:1 representation of life, with all the unpleasant parts included. We take the logic of duty, productivity, proof, loyalty, self-surveillance, and moral seriousness, and we smuggle it into the very things that were supposed to relieve us from those pressures. We take up hobbies to escape the scale and burden of ordinary life; then, by some strange instinct, we rebuild ordinary life inside them.

The answer cannot be pure selfish gratification. A life made only of “what I feel like doing” becomes thin, flabby, and stupid. But neither can the answer be blind obedience to an artificial rule. The point is to keep asking whether the rule still serves the original good. Lifting weights is chosen difficulty. Writing daily can be chosen difficulty. Supporting a football club through lean seasons can be chosen difficulty. But once the choice disappears, once the activity continues only because of momentum, the hobby has become life-sized. The map is ready to be delivered up to the inclemencies of sun and winters.

Find a Penny, Pick It Up

By in ai, aphorisms, books, technology, writing

Waste-book method highly recommended. A note made of every phrase, every expression. Wealth can also be acquired through saving up truths in pennyworths.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I save phrases in Simplenote. Usually song lyrics, a poetic phrase, or an irresistible pun — little verbal coins dropped into the drawer. Sometimes a particularly striking phrase will make me ask, “If this were the title of a post, what would the post be about?” and I reverse-engineer it from there. But phrases are not yet thoughts. A title is only a hook until some poor fish of an idea gets dragged up behind it.

The real value, for me, is discussing ideas with AI. How have I managed to write something daily since last summer after increasingly long hiatuses in recent years? It’s not that I have more ideas than before. It’s just that none of them die of neglect any longer. In the past, a half-formed notion would appear, hover for an hour, and vanish before I could give it any time. Now I can drop it into a thread as it occurs to me and go back to work. The next time I get a break, there it is again, with questions attached, objections raised, possible shapes suggested. I can send my bot-bloodhound on research errands while I do the things I get paid for. By the end of the day, what would once have evaporated has usually become at least a rough draft.

You can fairly say that this is just basic writing discipline: outlines, rough drafts, research. True enough. But discipline is partly a matter of finding the form in which you will actually practice it. I never had the patience to do this with pen and paper, and I wouldn’t have time to do it now if I had to do all the brainstorming, organizing, and preliminary digging alone. Conversation is the format in which my creativity and lateral thinking are best stimulated, but real people are often lacking in interest and availability. This lets me take all those pennyworth ideas and compound them.

The Plight of the Bin Men

By in books, writing

In Outcries and Asides, J.B. Priestley quotes from On Writing and Writers, which consists of extracts from the notebooks of Professor Walter Raleigh:

Criticism is not the exciting thing it was in the brave days when the critics were few and bold. It has become an industry of the workshops, carried on by those who look at new books, and look at nothing else. The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write. Until they meet with a live author, they cannot get to work; and they are not unwilling, in case of necessity, to infest one another. Shakespeare says what he thinks of life; Coleridge says what he thinks of Shakespeare; the modern essayist says what he thinks of Coleridge; we say what we think of the essayist—where is all this to stop? It goes on until the parasite that completes the chain is too small to nourish another. . . .

This reminded me of Clive James, in Cultural Amnesia, translating a paragraph from Alfred Polgar:

Civilization and culture, if they are left in peace long enough by war and pestilence, generate mould. And over this mould a layer of dust forms. And in this layer of dust microscopic life-forms settle. And these microscopic life-forms generate excrement. And in the breakdown-products of this excrement even less visible life-forms find their domicile. And these life-forms, as long as they are resident within the periphery of Vienna and eligible to vote in the central electoral district, generate the world portrayed in the comedies of Raoul Avernheimer.

In one of his notebooks, Nietzsche says that “99 parts of all ‘creating’ is imitation, in sounds or thoughts. Theft, more or less consciously.” I own up to that. I like to think that I, too, say what I think about life, but “life” does include everything from Shakespeare down to social media, after all. It’s all grist for the mill, mulch for the garden, glitter for the nest. I would not even claim to stand on the shoulders of giants. I rummage in their wastebaskets. I am more often found beneath their windows, like a magpie, making off with a glittering phrase, a loose metaphor, a philosophical button, some bright shaving from the workshop floor. I am less a critic than a dung beetle of the republic of letters, rolling some compacted pellet of other men’s brilliance across the sand and calling it my contribution. As a bin man of the blogosphere, I may not add much to the literary environment, but I can at least keep its refuse moving.

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