AI and the waning of the novelty fetish

We forget, but it hasn't been but so long that novelty and originality have been a focus and goal of art/cultural production. Although it has always been kind of important for each generation of artists/writers/musicians etc. to bring a little something fresh to their production, only in the late 19th/early 20th century does it become a fetish, which not coincidentally coincides with the rise of mass media, advertising, fashion cycles and manufactured obsolescence, the commercial corollaries of high culture's love of novelty.

Maybe generative AI -- with its ability to consume and spit out all kinds of music/narrative/pictures blah blah blah, will finally give the lie to the ongoing novelty/creativity fetish and allow us to clearly foreground connection, identification and insight into their own lives as what so many people want from art. Yes, decades of literary theory has problematized all of these concepts and a part of this is the endless post-modern focus on identity politics.

In any case, if AI can crank out plots and scripts, they're likely going to seem canned and uninteresting and humans will always be better at creating content that connects with other humans. Case in point: The Stranger on Netflix. It feels like it might has well have been written by an AI, though in fact it is based on a novel by one Harlan Coben. It has many familiar elements but they all feel kind of misshapen and don't really fit together. There is at least one character (the female detective) about whom we can kind of care. Also it's always nice to see Stephen Rea because he's a solid actor. Otherwise who gives a fuck about any of these people?

Caveat: Mary and I got to the end of episode 5 of The Stranger last night and maybe it's getting a little more interesting. Maybe Harlan Coben is not an AI.

Privacy, Autobiography and Family

Apparently one of the things about Raina Telgemeier's comics which makes them resonate so much with kids is that they are pretty unsparing in their portrayals of family life. Few punches are pulled. Which was fine while Telgemeier enjoyed modest success, but became problematic in her family when all of a sudden her books were selling in the millions and were a fixture in all school and public libraries.

Something similar happened with Knausgaard. He wrote very clearly and directly about the minutiae of his family life. As his fame grew and seemingly every adult in Norway and a good chunk of the literary world globally had read his books, his family got uncomfortable. Eventually his wife divorced him. Maybe not 100% over his books, but probably mostly.

Somewhere in there I had to make a conscious choice not to go down that path. Thankfully, there appears to be little risk of my blog becoming a worldwide literary sensation. But in any case I prize my family harmony above strict fidelity to the bloody shovel of naturalism.

One story I will tell you is this. On Saturday I was up at Haig's house for a little BBQ and Cashwell was there. He reminded me of how, when Natalie was at Gwynn Valley with his son Sam when they were younger, Natalie had been so kind to Sam -- who's a little younger than her -- that Sam told his dad about it. Cashwell had told me that story before, but I had forgotten it. I was of course delighted to be reminded of it.

Some thoughts on travel

Over dinner on Friday with a couple of friends -- the wife born and raised in India -- and their daughter, our friends talked about saving travel in Europe to when they were a little older and had less energy and ability to adventure. I totally see that. I did feel a little slack when traveling in Western Europe last summer, like it's all rather well domesticated and small variations on a theme.

Yesterday night I was hanging out with some greying CHHS Tigers and one of them was saying how he was less excited about travel than he used to be. Rather than seeing that, I feel that, insofar as the returns on travel have become increasingly incremental. That said, my recent sample set is a little skewed. Our trip to France and Spain last year was marred by Mary getting COVID. My trip to Mexico in 2019 was a little constrained by mom's dietary conservatism, though in general she gets all the credit in the world for heading out at the age of 81 on an unscripted trip in a rental car in Mexico with her son.

Honestly what these conversations really probably tell me is that I should push in some slightly more adventurous travel pretty soon, before we get completely ground down by age. At the same time, I am grateful for the learnings of the pandemic, namely that one can occupy oneself pretty darned well at home, or perhaps the lesson should be that we are very fortunate that our home is such that we can do so. And indeed we can. 

Literary shabbos

As I've shared before, my shabbos observance has long dictated that I observe, to as great an extent possible, all matters financial on Saturdays, including all reading. Since so much is bound up with finance in my fevered brain, that has come to include also politics and even technology, so for instance an article about the AI scene in the Bay Area that my neighbor Russ recommended that I read. That is too close to work.

So I find myself on Saturdays driven to the arts and culture sections of magazines when I am reading or performing other tasks in the digestive cycle. These were of course very much my haunts back in my literary days. This strategy is bearing fruit already. This morning I started reading an interesting article on the writer Percival Everett in one magazine and the blockbuster tweens and up graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier in another. Both seem very interesting. Hearing about new writers naturally heightens my desire to push through the novel I'm currently reading so I can move on to something else. It's a very virtuous cycle.

For those who may wonder why someone like me who was raised Episcopalian which is -- in the estimation of some at least -- almost Christian, would choose Saturday as sabbath rather than Sunday, I can only say that after a full week of work I just can't wait that long. Plus on Sunday there is always the spectre of Monday just around the corner and the need to ramp up for it. So Saturday it is.

AI forever?

As I process the ongoing stream of messianic enthusiasm for AI I continue to come back to the central problem: how are a bunch of turbocharged nerds who are excited by delusions of grandeur going to solve the fundamental problems of the world? Our biggest problems are that too many people -- rural, urban, suburban -- feel disconnected and lost in the world, unable to do something that both feeds their families, helps others, and allows them some degree of enjoyment. We should be focusing on the things that allow a greater number of people in the world to progress up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Full stop.

Right now the most important task is to calm the geopolitical situation so that a global conflagration doesn't escalate and also to manage down internal tensions so that internal conflicts don't ramp up. The best way to make that happen is to effect more person to person contact across social and geographical boundaries. People need to understand other peoples' challenges and perspectives to grasp complexity. 

Concentrating ever greater economic power in the hands of a few nerds won't do it. If the stories of Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk etc. don't make this clear, I don't know what will. Bill Gates offers us hope, but there are challenges even with that model. I deeply appreciate how Bill has chosen to spend the latter part of his life. He's a brilliant guy who tries to make the best possible use of his wealth. I should read his blog more to piggyback on his reflections. But having philosopher-kings determine the best use of aggregated wealth is ultimately suboptimal. 

As for AI, for sure it can and will do a lot of good. But it ain't all that.

Dog Tired

Fell asleep last night more or less in the middle of doing my evening Duolingo. Hard to tell what's making me so tired, particularly after a restful weekend down at the beach with Jonathan and Sharon. Driving back on Sunday evening? Just watching Jonathan in his continued quest to master the repair of any item possible (HVAC, golf card, you name it)? The break in routine? A strenuous match against Z last night (6-4, 1.6)?  Or is it just getting old? Probably a mix of all these things.

In any case, it's all good. It was kind of refreshing to pass out under the weight of my own exhaustion rather than after a complete menu of pre-bedtime YouTube consumption. It was all rather reminiscent of Roy Atwater falling asleep on the recliner on his porch after a day of tending his pigs. Good living.

A secret mission

Sometime a few months ago, when I was averaging about 420 points a day on DuoLingo, I decided to raise my average to 500 points a day. Given that I was maybe 220 days into a streak that was no mean feat. Over the 80-odd days I needed to average about 720 points a day to get there. It will come as a surprise to few of you that I did it, and I did it on my 300th day, on which I clocked 150,000 total points. Somewhere in there I finished the Ukrainian course and switched to Japanese as a third language to rotate in there with weeks of Italian and German.

It was all a bit of a grind, but honestly it was better than focusing on staying in the Diamond League, which I have nonetheless done this whole time. For now I am going to hold off on setting new aggressive goals, but I'll try to maintain this 500 points a day pace because it's really not that hard. And I'm learning stuff.

Continued triumph

My victorious streak on the Farm Men's 3.5 ladder continued yesterday evening, as I beat a guy 6-1, 6-2. Adam had had more trouble with this guy than I did, and since Adam and I are pretty even (though historically he probably holds a 60/40 advantage in our matches), I consider this a victory. Mostly over myself, honestly. I decided on a strategy (defense, wear the guy out, let him make mistakes and beat himself up mentally while staying chipper) and stuck to it.

At this point in time I am 4-1 and leading the competition, since the one guy who beat me, nay destroyed me, has dropped out, probably having been kicked upstairs to the ranks of 4.0s. For the most part this is the most success I've had in an individual sport since my 9th grade track season, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it's very much a mental competition in which I could easily torpedo myself by getting off kilter.

We'll see how it goes. Adam and I will have an official match before too long. Today we will play unofficially.

Guilty by association?

Continuing forward in the Bible, for whatever reason, I find this passage, Colossians 3:18-24

¹⁸Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. ¹⁹Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. ²⁰Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. ²¹Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. ²²Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. ²³Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, ²⁴since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

To the modern eye it's impressive how naturally and seemlessly the text flows from talking about wives and children to slaves, who were just that integral a part of the landscape that you couldn't not address them. To the modern eye that throws the whole enterprise into question. Were wives and children really so analogous to slaves? Certainly even for me there's a bit of a gut punch as you read through it. One wonders how the clergy in today's Black church thinks through this stuff. The passage does go on to enjoin masters to do right by slaves, to be sure, which might have been pretty revolutionary at the time.

And then it immediately goes on to speak very abstractly to everyone, in a way I suspect was novel. (Colossians 4:5-6)

Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.

All in all I continue to see how the Bible study project intrigues so many. But there are so many other books too. To say nothing of movies, music, blogs, YouTube serieses, and the like.

Birthday weekend

We stayed deliberately quiet here on the home front this past weekend, which of course marked the celebration of my 58th birthday. Honestly we were more celebrating the very good news that a strange bump on Mary's brother Rob's chest turns out to be not male breast cancer, which is a apparently a thing, if a very rare one. But not on Rob's body. It was some other wierd shit, but benign.

On Saturday I did as little as possible, which turned out to be quite little. I had told my neighbor Caroline that I would put together the electric mower that we had bought for our two households after years of borrowing their gas mower (and sometimes taking suboptimal care of it due to my personal idiocy). That 100% did not happen. 

The one thing I did do on Saturday was a second round of pollen remediation out on the screened in porch, in preparation for having the family (including Rob and Graham, Mom and Matt) over for my birthday feast of chinese food and coconut cake (from New Hope Market). I swept while listening to Bella White, then I even did some raking of the patio. On Sunday I went further and actually broke out our old vacuum cleaner (after asking Mary's permission) and vacuumed the porch. It didn't let me listen to music while working, but man was it gratifying. Shout out to Caroline Slade for the vacuum cleaner tip.

It turns out that a more or less usable screened in porch was the very best birthday present I could have given to myself. I had breakfast out there this morning and it was perfect.

Sweetgrass

Reading McPhee's 1986 Rising from the Plains, was reminded of this film

If you haven't seen it, you should. Ununseeable once seen.

No surprises here

The Journal yesterday came out with a story about how ancillary costs of homeownership (insurance, maintenance, taxes) have been rising along with mortgages. I also saw in the Economist not long ago -- in a story about the acceleration of the melting of Antarctica -- that the Army Corps of Engineers are projecting that the cost to build a megadyke near Galveston will be $57 billion, mostly to protect the petrochemical industry around Houston which keeps getting pummeled by storms. That's the initial projection. For comparison's sake, the 2022 CHIPS Act authorized $39 billion to support development of domestic leading-edge microchip manufacturing.

A big driver here is climate change, no question -- hurricanes, fires, etc. driving up insurance premiums. If government won't price the risk, the insurance industry will. But there are also a labor supply questions as well as a monetary supply ones. Lack of labor drives up construction costs (we could let more immigration happen). Excess liquidity feeds inflation, making it harder for local governments to hire, so they have to raise taxes to pay up to staff up.

Again, we could have addressed macro monetary issue after the pandemic-driven rapid expansion of monetary supply by raising taxes, but everybody was like: "that's my money you're trying to take", despite the fact that the money hadn't existed until the government printed it. Inflation is a tax by other means.

But the government does need to look at expenditures too. We cannot cut back on military spending now with Russia and China driving so much of the world towards autocracy. If we believe in anything, if WWII was fought for anything, we need to maintain our strength while also driving our allies to do the same. Discretionary government spending aside from defense barely moves the needle, but some sacrifices will need to be made on a pro forma basis. Entitlements are the only meaningful lever we have to pull, so we need to pull it.

A new day

After a league match yesterday evening (6-2, 6-0), I got back to my car and saw I had a lot of texts. Only one was important. Someone very dear to me had passed in Brooklyn.

There has been no announcement yet, so I will stay detail lite. I was reminded of how it occurred to me some years ago that one of the curses of knowing a lot of people is that, once we reach a certain age, someone we know will always be fighting cancer in one way or another. Right now I have several, some quite close to me.

And perhaps I am getting to the age now that someone will always be dying, though it feels a little early for that. Time will tell. As I have remarked before, I do hope that I will start to see an offsetting quantity of weddings and births happening amongst my broad brood. Niklaus did just tell me that Elsa and Eric are officially wed now, in the eyes of NYC and, one may hope, the Lord, though their party wedding in Switzerland, to which people like me aren't invited, is not yet till summer. Eric and Anna's girl Emily is also engaged, up in Washington Heights. I better get a freaking invite to that one. Meanwhile my cousin of some sort Madelyn (my mother's sister's daughter's girl) has announced she is pregnant with her second over in England. So I guess that counts. 

Another goodbye

I went out to Saxapahaw yesterday for the memorial for Dexter Romweber. It was lovely to see a wide range of people and to remember Dexter, though he was, in truth, a cypher. Everybody had great Dexter stories, indeed, how could you not. Even as he was the very embodiment of music and art, he was also in many ways a carefully calculated legend in the making his whole life. But few seemed really close to him. I know I never was.

There was lots of great music, which honored the seriousness with which Dexter took music, rising to a surprising crescendo when two guys from the band Starcrawler -- itself a full band, not a two-piece -- ripped the place up in a guitar-drums Kiss cover and a traditional ("Froggie Went a Courtin" which Dexter was apparently known to play) in which they thrashed around in a way that seemed to raise Dexter from the dead. I was almost moved to tears. (go to 2:12:50 to see these kids. The second song at 2:15:55 blows the doors off the place)

John Howie was also great doing a George Jones song. That was one of the several ways that the day was evocative of the day, almost a decade back, when we had first gathered at Saxapahaw to send off Steve Akin, who had like Dexter, like Tim Brower, basically lived and then died art and rock and roll. I think maybe that's why Marvin didn't come.

Witch trials

Listening to Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Interesting that Christians sought to ban Harry Potter books because they promote belief in magic, when so much of what legitimates Christ (and even Old Testament figures) is magic he performs (loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc), as indeed was a non-trivial amount of the Old Testament (parting of the Red Sea, water from stone, walls of Jericho tumbling down, birth of Isaac when Sarah was 95ish). Even modern day preachers profess to do magic (faith healing). 

The problem, it would seem, is not that reading Harry Potter inculcates in readers a false belief in magic, but that it exposes them to the charms of the wrong kind of magic, the magic of the wrong team.

As an aside, one almost has to wonder why the Christian right has not inveighed against Duke's popularization of its mascot "the Blue Devils." Particularly when the support thereof so literally involves the support of the dark (blue) vs. the righteous light blue of UNC, the university of the people. Indeed, is it not strange that Duke Chapel, one of the tallest church buildings in NC, is part of an institution associated with such blasphemy? And what of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons? Is all of this cool with fundamentalists?

My greatest accomplishment

We were discussing something pertaining to our cat Leon this morning and I made Mary laugh. When I can do that, I consider it really my greatest accomplishment. We have recently gotten to the point where we have been together half of my life and almost half of hers, so she has been exposed relentlessly to my "humor," my timing, my jokes, all of it. So getting a laugh out of her when we are not around other people and she is just pretending that I am witty is not chopped liver.

Medical history in the present

Somewhere in the last year or so the spouse of a friend of mine had a heart attack. I see her a few times a year on Zoom calls and if the stars align when I pass through the town where she lives, which has happened less frequently in recent years. She didn't really make a big deal of it on one Zoom, so when she referred back to it in passing in a subsequent call I was a little surprised, which admittedly was my bad.

In retrospect, I think it's rather exemplary. As we age we will all be passing through medical crises of various sorts and we have the option of being more or less transparent about them. The more one calls attention to one's own medical crises and those of one's family, the more one creates reporting relationships to the rest of the world: they expect to be updated regularly, which becomes a burden. Hence the popularity of such sites as CaringBridge which allow people to send out updates to targeted audiences of friends and family.

When friends get together they don't want to get dragged down into all of that. We all know things get hard. It's part of the deal with life. Getting involved in a competitive cycle of my woes are worse than your woes is no fun for anyone.

Conflicted victory

In this week's 3.5 ladder match I beat a guy 6-3, 6-2. On the one hand, it's nice to win. On the other, it's not really pleasant to make somebody feel crappy about themself, as I could tell he did after I got a rhythm. The guy is 71 years old and honestly I will be super fortunate if I am as fit and mobile as he is when I reach that age, a super nice guy.

With all of that said, I am somewhat proud of having had the mental discipline to go ahead and beat him as opposed to taking stupid risks and letting him back in the match. I kept doing the things that were thwarting him and they kept working. It was not easy to maintain my focus like that.  

Parasites vs decay

Up at a friend's lake house over the weekend, we saw some changes to the landscape. Where there had been a derelict gas station/convenience store by the interstate, there is now a "Games of Skill" place (i.e. gambling), matching the one across the street from PayJay's -- the historic corner store a couple of miles off the highway that has been there for years. Is it better that at least there are utilities running in these buildings instead of having them slowly decay and collapse? Maybe.

Meanwhile, next to the old corner store a shiny Dollar General has sprung up. We had to take a trip there because the idiot who brought coffee brought only enough for one day. In the past I've been able to score Starbucks at rural Dollar Generals. This place had only Dunkin Donuts, and for the price of $10 for a 12 oz bag. Even in the post-pandemic world of more expensive coffee that is paying up quite a bit.

We are rooting for PayJay's, though I must say I was disappointed when I went in there and the grill wasn't up and running when I went in there in the morning for the milk forgotten by the breakfast crew. I had been hoping perhaps for a quick biscuit.

Quick resolution of a tax issue

When I got back from DC a couple of weeks ago I found a letter from the IRS telling me that we owed $12k for failure to file 2022 taxes for an LLC I had managed for Mary and her photo friends from grad school who were trying to publish a book in honor of their friend Jeannette, who succumbed to cancer a few years back. Then the project lost steam. I had agreed to handle the finances and taxes because... I am an idiot. That's enough detail.

The note from the IRS instructed me to call an 800 number to discuss the issue. Since it was late March when I did so and therefore peak season for filing, I approached this task with dread. But I went ahead and did it. A nice young woman from the IRS was able to resolve it for me in just under half an hour. This was a very pleasant surprise. I assume this was because the 800 number I had was for a specific use case other than people filing taxes for last year, so I wasn't part of the general flow. That's good management and process design. 

Since I had relied on guidance from the IRS website in not filing the return in a year with no income and no expenses, I was annoyed when I got the initial notice. To say the least. But it all turned out OK in the end, so I guess I'll just take the win and move on. It also gave me a nice if not scintillating blog topic.