Readings for February 26, 2023

The Slant Book from 1910 shows how important form can be — it was printed as a rhomboid shape rather than a rectangle so the baby’s runaway pram can careen down the slanted pages. Brilliant! Flipping through this book on the Public Domain Review website was a treat.

It’s also a good reminder that it matters what a book looks like on the page. A book with a lot of white space reads differently than a book with page-long paragraphs. A book with no dialog reads differently than a book with short blocks of text. Maybe I’ll find some notable examples and share pages to illustrate the differences. (Will one of those examples be Annie Ernaux? You know it.)

I spent more than a decade writing about cars for The New York Times, Popular Science, and a bunch more places. I grew up in a car-loving, race-track-going family, and I got my first job in publishing at a car magazine. That’s where I learned to edit, from the other editors and proofreaders, in an old-school mentorship kind of way. So of course when I came across a long article about pioneer racer Denise McCluggage, I saved it to Pocket (a truly handy reading tool). But Pocket estimated that it would take an hour to read this article, which is longer than I have in the mornings before heading out to the word mines, and if I’m reading at night, it’s usually a book. So it sat in my saved articles list for nearly five years. This is admittedly ridiculous. I finally read it, and it is excellent — even if you aren’t a car person and have never smelled race fuel or washed the fine dust of hot rubber off your arms after a humid summer day at the track. But if you are that kind of person, you will adore this profile McCluggage from an ancient issue of Sports Illustrated.

I’m not terribly worked up about robots coming to take my job, and I know some people with language challenges who find AI text helpful for organizing their thoughts before they polish and correct the final version (this is usually for things like emails, not novels or journalism or something). But AI-generated text is going to be a problem just in terms of numbers.

See this article about Clarkesworld, the respected and, notably, well-paying sci-fi magazine. They’ve received hundreds of AI-generated short stories, which editors read in good faith until they realize what they’re reading. Then they flag it, trash it, and ban the user. That’s time taken away from reading, evaluating, and sometimes offering feedback on human-generated work. Editors are already stretched thin, which is why they often resort to form rejection emails. That’s only going to get worse. Clarkesworld banned 500 users for submitted AI-generated work in the first three weeks of February 2023 — that’s 24 bans a day, if we assume the poor editors are working weekends too. Twenty-four stories that they had to at least start reading in order to figure out it was AI instead of being able to read stories written by humans.

Every sector has their own special hatred and worry regarding AI. Teachers and professors are worried about students handing in AI-generated papers. Search nerds (this is my main affiliation in this fight right now) are up in arms about useless and incorrect results. Tech bros are concerned about sentient AI taking over the world. But the real bitch of AI-generated content — and it’s already happening to online spaces we love, like short-story magazines, as well as those we hate, like our email inboxes — is AI-generated spam.

Multnomah County Library, my local book-borrowing behemoth, is one of the most-used library systems in the country. That means that often, when I want to borrow a book, I have to place a hold. Sometimes I’m lucky and I snag hold #2 out of eight copies. A lot of times I get hold #73 on three copies. That’s fine; it’s not like I don’t have dozens of books stacked on the floor of my office waiting to be read. (Let’s not even discuss the ebook backlog.) So I place my hold and wait for my number to come up.

That means that one day, a notice will pop up on my phone letting me know my book is ready. And almost every time that happens, I cannot remember why I placed that hold. I like to use the library to read authors that are new to me, so the name won’t even be familiar. The title might as well be written in Martian. No fucking clue. But I trust past Kristen had her reasons, so I borrow the book and give it a go.

Past Kristen did me this favor recently with The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken. Her work has been on several award lists and won a few of those awards; I recently found out a friend briefly studied with her a few years ago. Where did I come across a review of this book, her latest? No idea. But past Kristen knew what she was about, because so far, this book is crackling. I mean, how can you resist this right at the top of the story, after the first-person narrator has said she’s in London several months after her mother’s death and has described the man who showed her to her room:

Perhaps you fear writing a memoir, reasonably. Invent a single man and call your book a novel. The freedom one fictional man grants you is immeasurable.

So it seems I’m accidentally reading more literary memoir with a narrator that intrudes on her own story. Maybe I’m just reading a novel, like it says right on the cover, with some very convincing verisimilitude. Maybe it’s more of a roman a clef. Maybe it’s all of these things, and that’s part of what makes it interesting. McCracken has anticipated that readers (or maybe more specifically, critics) will think about this:

If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere.

I’m not very far into the book yet, so we’ll see if it holds up all the way through, but I’m enjoying it so far.

Short Dog in Tall Snow