Readings for April 25, 2023

I try to send this little roundup every two weeks on Sunday. I am finishing up the semester, so my brains have been elsewhere. But I like sharing what I’ve been reading with you all, so here are some thoughts and some links for a Tuesday, with very little editing. Cheers.

I haven’t had a lot of thoughts about AI and ChatGPT because I have not been required to have thoughts about it. It’s very tangential to my life, even though the publishing world is Very Worried about it. Having no pearls to clutch, I have kept low-key tabs on the situation. (I do love that someone pointed out saying ChatGPT aloud in French sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété,” which means “Cat, I farted.”)

However, I have thought a lot about musician Nick Cave’s take on AI coming for our creative capabilities during an interview in the New Yorker. It’s an excellent and thoughtful interview that discusses the big questions in life, so it’s worth your time. But it’s his idea of art pushing against the limits of our humanity that I keep coming back to:

Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.

Every advice article for Living the Optimal Life, especially when it comes to writing, advises that you wake up and tackle your important work first thing in the morning. I don’t do that. I don’t do anything brain-heavy until ten a.m. I was heartened to read in musician Colin Meloy’s newsletter that he starts the day in the recording studio at the same time. And now here is author Kelly Link saying she fucks around playing games on her phone (!) and watching TV (!!) until three in the afternoon, and then she can, she says, “get a lot of work done.”

So if you’re not waking up with the dawn and the songbirds to write in a beautiful, liminal, semi-dream state, that’s fine. If you are, that’s fine too. Basically, it’s all fine.

A few months ago, I wrote about how much I loved Seven Steeples by Sarah Baume, and here it is on the short list for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize. A couple of the other books on the list look intriguing too.

I’ve mentioned that I’m studying a lot of poetry this semester. I’ve never studied poetry so closely before, and not in any serious way at all since high school, and calling that serious is being very generous (sorry, Mr. Stahler). I come at most literature, including poetry, especially poetry, almost like an engineer, looking at the parts that create the whole. I struggle to determine things like mood and tone, so I fall back on the marks on the page to help me. Dickinson, for example, leaves a trail of clues even in her most obscure poems, via meter, rhyme, vocabulary, capitalization, and punctuation, especially those famous dashes. Using these clues I can build an analysis of a poem that helps me better understand the poem, maybe the poet, and certainly my own mind.

All of this to say that this excerpt from a new book by Sarah Hart, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections between Mathematics and Literature, was relevant to me. It’s also poetry month, so reading this excerpt counts as reading poems.

I’m in the middle of my master’s program in English, and it is a lot. It takes time. It takes brainpower. It takes money. It takes commitment. And this summer, it takes three intensive weeks on campus across the country, and I am aware that we are still in a pandemic. But I’m doing it because I have to. And I want to. It’s important to me, and it turns out I’m good at the kind of writing and analysis required in my program.

So this essay by Jeff Boyd was a kind of commiseration that I needed to read this week. He drives 222 miles to commute from Chicago—where his wife and wee baby live—to Iowa City to teach and attend school. It takes time. It takes brainpower. It takes money. It takes commitment. But it’s important to him, and his novel is out now.

I'm only learning now a lot of the fundamentals of poetry. I knew about rhyme, and I knew something of meter, thanks to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. But this term, I have learned about anaphora, chiasmus, enjambment, and the tenor and vehicle of similes and metaphors. It has opened up poetry for me; there was a lot I was just not getting out of it. I'm eager to reread some of my favorites, like Claudia Rankin and Anne Carson, with these new keys in hand.

So I was gratified to read in this interview with the poet Maggie Millner that they didn't learn the basics of poetry until they'd already written quite a bit of it. And now they're using tools and structures, like rhyme and metrical stanzas, in new ways to say new things.

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