Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels

 I have run into a persistant, and probably PR driven meme on social media that being against AI is "being against "art'" - like banning pianos or something.

The response to this is simple. Being against AI is being for preserving the internet tools we have that support art. AI is destroying the personal search, as well as creating pervasive counter-measures that we are now used to and should not be - like all those idiot popups making sure we are not robots - that in the glory days of this technology just didn't exist. The robots now do exist and they steal.

The recent comments of Olga Tokarczuk about how she used AI to find songs that her characters would dance to two decades ago shows either O.T. has never gone onto Youtube (ask for dance hits from the 80s or 90s - get a hundred to a thousand hits) or that she was really using it to write a scene about dancing and has smoothed out the features, here. The improvement in speed is negligible - unless of course the prompt was a bit more specific than this, a bit more about using AI to write the character.

She has denied this in a statement published on Lit Hub. It is a weirdly stated denial-snark thing that looks like she used AI to write it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can find, everywhere, vast banks of information. You can find all of the issues of the Partisan Review at Boston University, or all the issues of Dwight McDonalds Politics magazine with its brief run at Unz. I use the Internet Archive to trace, with unbelievable accuracy, such things as the career of the graphologist/psychic Rafael Scherman, for which I also used the French newspaper and magazine collection on Retronews, the various german colllections of newspapers Zefys, the Hamburger Zeitungen Digita, and the Austrian collection at https://anno.onb.ac.at/. I used Google Books, which is increasingly declining as a resource due to AI, to find hints and quotes - it is in this way I discovered the relationship between Scherman and the wife of Adolf Loos, the famous hater of ornament in architecture. At no point in this search did I need AI. AI's big negative, besides its tendency to fraud, is that it erases that margin of fun that makes searching a matter of discovery. For a writer of fiction, that margin is everything.

I should say that, as well, I use data platforms that are hooked up to academic institutions, like JSTOR, that are simply beautiful. But all this access is precisely what AI is aiming at. The end of the personal search is the goal of the AI tech lords, and with the end of the personal search comes the end of the democratic commons of the internet, period. It is not just that the search is speeded up and under the control of the machine instead of the person - it is that the ability to make a search, to use these resources, is under the gun as AI lords get richer and aim to monetize this freedom. Every AI prompt is another bullet shot at the personal search. It can only take so many hits.

I like Tokarczuk. I loved Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. Which has a strong love of nature behind it. That she now wants to drive her plow over the remaining forests of the world, accelerate climate change, and destroy our glorious research systems to use AI makes me suspect that she is - going down a dark path.

Spending my life reading

 1. At some point between my 11th and 13th years on this planet, a global equator of sorts was passed: globally, the population that was literate passed the 50 percent point. This was one of the great events of the 1960s, although at the time it was not celebrated with jubilees and fireworks. Rather it was simply a plodding little point on a graph.

Still, this was the Enlightenment in action. Even as, in the sixties, what literacy meant – what distinguished the oral from the textual – became a much more philosophically ambiguous matter, the certainties of the classroom locked into place writing systems and reading for boys and girls. The latter is especially noteworthy. I am taking this statistic from Unesco, which made retrospective estimates of literacy in this narrow sense going back to the 1820s, when 20 percent of the world was literate. As we know from studies made of literacy by various French historians like Roger Chartier, literacy was not the doublehanded writing and reading instrument we assume it be back in the day: for instance, in France, teaching girls to read was not complemented with teaching them to write: just as one can have piano practice and learn to read a score without necessarily learning to write a score.

My son has learned in his history class in middle school that there was something called the industrial “revolution”, but his textbooks don’t mention the equally important media revolution. The two are bound together – I take it as a world historical event that on November 29, 1814, the Times of London installed a Koenig press, which attached steam power to to the old manually driven iron printing press, with the result that it could print 1,100 one sided sheets per hour. If ever we want to celebrate a Modernization day, November 29th would be a good pick. It was the steam driven printing press that drove literacy.

2. Which is my queer introduction to praising Simon During’s recent Face Book post, which gave us a variation from the old “what books would you take to be marooned with on an island” motif.

“So, in response to the 100 best novels nonsense we are doing a “ten novels I’d like to reread one more time in the last year of my life” list.”

I am not so much a lister, but I am a reader. And I am fascinated by reading media – and by media tout court. To me, this joining of reading and mortality flashes a light on the context of reading within a species that is now largely trained, from a young age, to see lines and curves and dots and translate them into words and sentences and paragraphs. And for some who spends a lot of time, in fact the majority of the working day, looking at these lines and curves and dots (formerly on paper, and now of this background lit … thing we call a screen), mortality is not measured out with coffee spoons, but with this eye-to-shapes activity, which is enfolded in the other ongoing activity: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, and as we get older whatever ache is chasing another in hands, feet, arms, neck, head, et fucking cetera.

The list, restored to mortal time, takes on an urgency which in some ways disguises the real question here, the question that all literacy invites us to take up: how do we spend our life times? Spend, here, should take on a lot of weight. Etymologically, from the old Germanic forspendan, use up, and from the Latin, expendare, pay out – to consume. An existential consumption, the consumer consuming itself. Use, here, plunges us back to the Hobbesian root of utilitarianism: a war against the elements, a war in which the self becomes a kind of front, autogenerates, a biology primed for picking up signs on the way to eating, excreting, copulating, reproducing, and dying. In the parenthesis of the latter, in that final year – which of course is very hard to predict, in contrast to the familiar movie/tv scenario in our heads where the doctor announces the bad news (cancer, usually) of the one year left – we have books. Novels, for Simon D. We are out of the classroom for good, here – that sponsor of our first reading and for many people, surprisingly many people, the only context in which reading the “great books” happens.

3. The recourse to the Enlightenment program of literacy, which all the 19th century European savants (and their pendant correspondents in North America) noticed, was a kind of scriptural anxiety. For the steam engine driven press had the potential to print anything, against the readers pence. From porn to shockers. The question was, and the question still is, how to fit this reading life (or listening or viewing life, given the audio-visual technology) with the hard fact that the users all die. I find this a terrifying as well as fascinating topic: reading accumulates to what end?

Not that I have an answer

UGLY STORIES

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from Under the Floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe one.

The story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about the nephew of Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In The Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. This is the game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and the nephew of Rameau. There is something about this one of Diderot’s works that gives it a certain clandestine feel. It wasn’t published in his lifetime. In fact, it first appeared in a German translation many years after his death. It was read with interest by Hegel, and referenced in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that great prose poem.

This is the story. It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Classless society my ass. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office, in any tech company. The tv series Silicon Valley dramatized any number of ugly stories, following in the recently popular vein of “cringe comedy” – cringe being the American variant of the ugly story, ameliorating existential shame into entertaining social embarrassment.

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui [Rameau’s nephew]: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the latter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here . For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing, of true self-degradation, is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and the nephew at the Palais Royale, where the dialogue is taking place. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense, or any member of Trump’s cabinet – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most deserving, the most masculine grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing, to kill fishermen and schoolage girls by merely flexing! The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour of overgrown bullies. In another century, Bouret is Dr. Oz, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

Only, only the ugly story really captures that. The contribution of story to human reality is something we underestimate at our peril.

The "I am" and the 'Happen to be" - a cultural semantics

 

Culture shows its hand molecular bits and bytes, the way the Id shows itself in dreams, a self-directed movie starring IT itself. Look for the conjunctions, look for the negations, the excuses, the condensations.

Look for, for instance at “happens to be”.

“Happens to be” is all around us. I was reading a book about an artist the other day, and I came across the phrase: “A painting by a young artist, who happens to be African American and gay…” Happens, here, sends us back to chance itself. He could “happen to be” unhyphenated American and straight, couldn’t he? In which case he would, presumably, not happen to be at all, but would be. There he’d be, an “I am”, pure as Jehovah in the burning bush. Our pre-birth identities wait, like slips of paper in a box, to be selected blindly. Like, say, the slips of paper in the box in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Somebody has to be stoned. Those are the rules of the routine. But who, that is the variable. That is what is written on the slip. Who will “happen to be”?

Such, as our tongue knows, is the lightly exerted pressure on that “happens to be.” It looks like an ontological statement of fact, and it sounds like an apologetic.

Trust the sound.

“Happens to be” joins together the otherwise sociologically separate strands of neo-liberalism: on the one hand, the lessons of the civil rights era – non-discrimination/diversity; and on the other hand, the master of hap, Fortuna and her wheel, the free market with its invisible hand up your rectum, jumping the puppets, who all say “I am”. Not, mind you, the government – the era of big government is always over, in neo-liberal culture, even if it exerts itself muscularly now and then to save the big banks and the one percent and becomes wildly aggressive and polices the world, all of course in the name of Freedom. In what other name can you reduce schools and hospitals to rubble?

The leftist critique of neo-liberalism can’t be simply, as it was under classical liberalism, that it is all a class act – with Capital v. Labor as the fighters in the ring. Because the spectrum of injustices and differences are not engrossed by Capital v. Labor. That lesson of the civil rights (and de-colonial) era has to ring in our ears, if that is one “happens to be” a leftist.

“Happens to be” is an overdetermined phrase. It is apologetic in that odd way in which one apologizes to a bigot for his or her bigotry. “I happen to be x” – Jewish, black, trans-sexual, whatever – is a way to deflect a certain meanness, a certain threat in the conversation, with one’s counterpart who is, for instance, talking trash about Jews, blacks, gays, or whatever. In this conversation, the “I am” is always on the side of insisting. “The Great I am” – this is what Sam Pollitt’s wife,  Henny, calls her American New Dealer husband, Sam, that bully and humanitarian.  It happens that you, my counterpart – my comrade, my brother or sister – are standing here with an x. A “happen to be” x. An all natural x.

 

“Happens to be” was forced aboard the slave ships, and driven out of the territories. “I am” built the log cabin, the Georgian mansion (now available for weddings) and, if it didn’t build the railroads, profited mightily from railroad stock. The “I am” earns his billions – the “Happens to be” is the parasite on welfare who also happens to have physically built the railroads, clerked at the convenience store, flipped the burgers, nursed the patient, and all that low grade stuff they do.

Truly, from the “I am’s point of view, what is more natural than chance? The happens to be should be happy that they are allowed even to be.  And chance is what provides us with our “diversity” – we can’t all be white straight men, cause somebody has to clean the toilets, am I right? And yet, when we tease out this “happens to be”, we begin to wonder why the heteronormative hick never happens to be – he just is. Does anybody ever say, I happen to be white? Does our egg, our Humpty Dumpty, our man whose words mean what he wants them to mean, ever happen to be?

This is just a little flicker in the national, in the international conversation between the ’I am’ and the ‘happen to be’. Neo-liberal culture is so obviously exhausted, is so obviously tied in knots by its own self-contradictions, that one thinks surely it is at an end. It isn’t, though. Happens to be still creeps through our conversations, our second thoughts, our apologies. The way we confront, and the way, at the last moment, we deflect. Happens to be is the deeper character, the more sophisticated character, the rascal and the sage, but the political advantage seems to be all with the I am.

And yet: who among us, in the end, wants to be the I am? The great loud I am. As the glaciers go down and hedonics turns out to measure unhappiness, after all. 

The great depression, my friends, my dearest friends, has been internalized. We are left to drift. 

A Modest Proposal: Let AI replace CEOs!

 The Dumb New Yorker post - Will AI Replace College or some dumbfuck thing, I'm refusing to check - is another in the media corps cult of AI. Lets face it, AI is a minor tool for lab work and heavy industry, and it isn't going to "replace College."

The bosses are heavy invested in tech, and if the stock crumbles, they crack and crumble next.

So...

Funny how the headline is never: Will AI replace the CEO. Cause there you have a case. What does AI do best? Make up factoids and use them to support other factoids. It "hallucinates." It comes up with the dumbest advice possible. Etc. And what do CEO's do? They rarely known the industry or enterprise they head. Mostly, they make up factoids to support other factoids to massage stock valuations. BINGO! I don't think Grok could replace a single Teaching Assistant, but Tesla would save about 40 billion dollars if it replaced Musk with Grok. Same stupidity - the self-driving yellow cab market is worth a trillion! We are going to mars! Etc. But with less compensation. Grok ought to cost a coupla million to run, maybe in the tens of millions, but it is much cheapter than Musk.

However, not once in the AI goldrush, not once in the infinite amount of AI stories suggesting all middle management and creative jobs are kaput with AI on the watch, has there been any suggestion that top management could be replaced. Gee, I wonder why? I wonder why there is no audience for that in the business pages?

The media can suck my dick.

A translation of Pierre Herbart's story Miraflores

 

“Herbart has made his life into a blank sheet, but it has taken everything he had. He will die seated in front of his blank sheet.” Indeed, according to Jean-Luc Moreau, from which I take this quote about Pierre Herbart, he did die a pauper, and a sick man as well. So poor he was buried in a common grave. Not the ending one would have predicted for a man who was Gide’s secretary in the 1930s, an editor of a famous communist magazine in Moscow for a time, an agitator in the colony of Vietnam, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a resistor in occupied France.

He’s not well known. I came across this story from the late twenties, when Marxism was becoming Sur-marxism, and I thought that it was a rather wonderful enigma. A tale torn from a dream. So I translated it.

 

Miriflores

One evening in a little village in Hungary I witness a strange show put on by a showman with a donkey in the village square. He beat a drum. I easily recognized in this scene one of the images in Madame de Segur’s “Memoires of a donkey”, which showed Miriflore, the intelligent ass, his master and the latter’s family. I couldn’t be mistaken. The son had exactly the stupid air that Madame de Segur lent to our village obscurities. The little slattern girls were clothed in hoop skirts and the boys wore baggy pants and close fitting shirts The papas and mamas were walking up and down, ignoring the donkey man, and Cadichan – Segur’s donkey – absorbed the whole thing through its evil eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, as I expected some show of this kind this evening.. I following the doing with a certain curiosity, then retired back to my room in the inn, although not without a certain trepidation brought on by my reading the news of an innkeeper who had recently been arrested for killing foreign tourists in order to make a paté much appreciated by his customers. Nevertheless, I fell asleep, only to wake myself up in the middle of the night murmuring: “I’m in Hungary.” Upon which I became sad. What to do? I decided that the next day I would find the donkey man and attach myself to his destiny. “He would certainly let me if I gave him a little money”, I thought. “And besides, I can do a few card tricks to follow the end of his routine.” This project returned to my mind when the servant brought me my cup of coffee in the morning. I decided not to argue with it. In the dining room I asked for the innkeeper and then asked him how I could find the place where I could meet up with the donkey man.

- What donkey man? The man asked.

- The one who was there yesterday. In the square.

The innkeeper took a long look at me and , without replying, went across the room to consult with his wife. Sometimes he glanced over at me and I understood that he had decided I was crazy. That could be dangerous. Thus I decided to get out of there with a feigned indifference. I haled a passing carriage.

- I will give you a one hundred franc tip if you get me to Cassal in half an hour.

The horses raced like the wind. We passed the last house in the village when a man came out of the stable and took off in pursuit of us. I recognized the donkey man. He ran as fast as he could, signalling to us. I watched him from a little porthole cut into the roof of the cart. He was manifestly losing ground. At a road crossing he went down the wrong path and continued running in the opposite direction. I was saved.

The coachman turned to me.  “We never show that we see him”, he said.

The door of the past

 In an essay on Henry James’s autobiographies, Richard Poirier claimed that the first volume – A small boy and others – which is ostensibly a memoir of William James, who had recently died – deserves a place among the two other great books about the boyhood of artists that appeared in the 1910s: Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Joyce’s A portrait of an artist as a young man. Perhaps we should include Freud’s Aus Der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose from 1918 in this company.

As it happens: I’ve never read James’s autobiographies. But Poirier’s enthusiasm for A small boy – which was not so much about the picture of William James that it intends, in a cultic gesture, to offer, but about Henry James’s own impression of a bringing up that followed the rather inimitable lines of his father’s whims and his sensibility’s grasp, even then, of the opportunity afforded.

Late James is my favorite James, in spite of the verbosity and the his use of catchphrase and cliché – much as Charlie Chaplin or Gene Kelly would use some ordinary commodity as a partner in some gorgeous cinematic dance sequence. I like that. I live for that.

This is H.J. dancing:

“To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide – to see the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”

The door of memory is thus the door to a wake, and this act of loyalty one long toast; while somehow the copious notes work towards that preservative end. H.J.’s music does not exclude the occasional wheezing, or the tuning of the instrument when it is out of tune, and it is in these moments especially that the fans get their ticket’s worth: the odd combo of raggedness and dignity – O O O that Jamesian rag - elevates the mundane tune.

It is, at least formally, the only James tale of a philosopher – for that is what William James turned out to be. I imagine, though, that to Henry, the mere disciplinary difference was all epiphenomenon, for underneath it all was the solid substratum of the writer.