Saturday Links
Revisiting the work of Michel Clouscard, “Oz” Sphere, punk rock, how horses became ridable, the news in early modern Europe, and more.
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Good morning! I avoid sharing too many stories about AI because little that is new or interesting is published. But I thought I’d share this article in The Atlantic by a high school student in Queens:
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.
These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become. Many homework assignments are due by 11:59 p.m., to be submitted online via Google Classroom. We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience. Many of us were propelled by a kind of frantic productivity as we approached midnight, putting the finishing touches on our ideas and work. Now the deadline has been sapped of all meaning. AI has softened the consequences of procrastination and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. As a result, these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students. There is little intensity anymore. Relatively few students seem to feel that the work is urgent or that they need to sharpen their own mind. We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline, because chatbots promise to complete our tasks in seconds.
Anthropic settles a class-action lawsuit for $1.5 billion for using pirated books to train its chatbot: “The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement. The company has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.”
The settlement only concerns pirated books from LibGen or PiLiMi. If you think your book may have been copied illegally by one of these sites, you can fill out this form with the firm representing authors in this case.
A new study examines how wild horses became ridable: “The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, helps fill in the complex story of horse domestication using genomes dating from about 7,000 years ago to the 20th century that were extracted from hundreds of horses’ remains. For clues about how humans shaped horse evolution, researchers looked for versions of genes that underwent clear shifts, from scarce to common — a sign that people chose to breed horses with traits linked to those genes. They found genes that modulate anxious behavior and made horses bodies more adept for transport had been strongly selected over the past 5,000 years.”
Adam Roberts reviews Giuseppe Pezzini’s Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation: “For Coleridge, the great artist—Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth—creates great art because he is imaginative rather than fanciful, which is to say he possesses the secondary imagination that is echoic of God’s primary imagination, the great I AM. And weak or bad artists, lacking this ‘vision and faculty divine’ (a phrase Coleridge repeatedly quotes: it is from Wordsworth, and the emphasis is on its last word) can only shuffle around pre-existing fixities, clichés from other writers, second-hand pieces. Their art can never fully live. Tolkien certainly knew this passage, and though he prefers his own terminology, and is less interested in the ‘fanciful’, it radically informs his understanding of art. As with Coleridge, it is important that the true artist’s creative power differs from God’s only in degree, not in kind (hence: ‘sub-creator’) and that the image-making, hence imaginative, potency of ‘art-making’ powers Fantasy, the fairy tale and Gothic modes in which Coleridge also worked. It is a Romantic view of art, this, and as such removed from Platonism—really, before the Romantics, people didn’t tend to think of God as an artist-creator (He was conceived, rather, in terms of King, Judge, Father and so on). God as the great artist, Browning’s conception of the divine artistry of the world, ‘no blot, nor blank, it means intensely, and means good’, is a Romantic and post-Romantic invention, one Tolkien shares. His long poem ‘Mythopoeia’ (1931) reutilises an image from another Romantic, Shelley’s resonant final stanza of Adonais, to construe the artist as a lens refracting light from the divine source . . . Pezzini mentions this passage a couple of times—I’m not sure there’s a single work by Tolkien he doesn’t mention, actually—but he under-serves its point, what I would argue is this crucial context for Tolkien’s creativity. There’s a line near the end of the book waving away these contexts: ‘it would take another book to discuss the many parallels and possible sources of this “mystic” conception of artistic creation, from classical literature and medieval mysticism to romantic and modernist literature’ [320]. Too sweeping and dismissive, this: Tolkien is not, as in the classical conception, a mouth through which the ‘Muse’ speaks; nor do I understand the ‘modernist literature’ reference. His theory of literary production is Coleridgean, inflected by George Macdonald’s own perspective on Coleridge.”
Ruby Hamilton reviews a new book on the one-time Presbyterian and Eagle Scout David Lynch:
When Lynch died earlier this year, aged 78, from complications relating to emphysema following the fires in Southern California, he had directed ten feature-length films – seven of them, by my count, anybody else’s masterpiece – and created, with Mark Frost, the show that ‘changed TV for ever’, Twin Peaks. At least to begin with, he took anyone who met him by surprise. Mel Brooks, who produced his second film, The Elephant Man (1980), ‘expected to meet a grotesque, a fat little German with fat stains running down his chin’, but Lynch was a well-groomed Northwesterner of mild manners and earnest cheer, the still wet behind the ears son of committed Presbyterians. ‘I’m not all that strange, really,’ he would tell journalists. For years, his biography on press releases was just four words long: ‘Eagle scout, Missoula, Montana.’ He wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream avant-gardist, reactionary visionary, pervert in a top-buttoned shirt – it could be reduced to something essentially ‘Lynchian’: a form of irony, in which everything was also something else.
This was part of his charm. No other director made films so obviously shaped by personal obsessions while advocating such an extreme form of ‘any interpretation goes’ relativism. There were criticisms: he was too misty-eyed about Eisenhower; the women in his films were gawked at, humiliated or left for dead; he was too corn-syrupy, like Capra, or not sweet enough; and wasn’t there something a little screwy about all that transcendental meditation? Audience reactions (run-outs, not walk-outs) got him down, but he didn’t mind the critics. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave Lost Highway (1997) ‘two thumbs down!’, he quoted them on the poster as ‘two more great reasons’ to see the film. (Ebert often emerges as the arch-loser of the Lynch story, sulkily admitting that he felt ‘jerked around’ by the weirdness of the films.) By the time I came to Lynch’s films, in the mid-2010s, the scores had been settled: he had shaken off the prefixes ‘pseudo’ and ‘faux’, and ‘genius’ was no longer followed by ‘or an idiot’. Blue Velvet (1986) was the film Fredric Jameson got wrong. Viewers could now enjoy with impunity everything that had so upset feminists and conservatives and jobbing film reviewers. The new line was that you shouldn’t – and, anyway, couldn’t – do anything as crass as to interpret Lynch’s films: they were there to be ‘experienced’, perfect little mysteries, shiny hydrophobic surfaces that repelled any drop of explication.
David Lynch’s favorite film growing up was The Wizard of Oz. The film is currently showing at Las Vegas’s Sphere. Nicholas Russell calls it “a shitty, high-tech rollercoaster”:
Projecting a film from 1939 shot with cameras that produce a rectangular image would leave massive sections of black nothingness, precious dead space, all those millions and millions of diodes left unused. To remedy this, the Sphere team digitally extended sets, marshaled AI to scale up the image resolution as well as generate more background extras, cut half an hour from the original runtime, and threw in 4D bells and whistles to turn The Wizard of Oz into, in effect, a shitty, high-tech rollercoaster.
More:
The Wizard of Oz is synonymous with Technicolor, one of the most stunning examples of the process in American filmmaking. It wasn't the first film to utilize it, though that fact doesn’t diminish Oz’s impact as a revolutionary advancement in color filmmaking, nor its subsequent influence on the Hollywood musical. Ironically, it is apt that Dolan and his collaborators have chosen The Wizard of Oz for an entirely different reason: the often unseen human toll AI inflicts echoes the production of Oz itself. The film is a fantasy of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a fairytale about childhood innocence and loneliness borne through a process of brute force, abuse, and negligence. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered third-degree burns. Buddy Ebsen, the original performer cast as Tin Man, was hospitalized due to the toxicity of his makeup. Actors and animals were doused in asbestos. Judy Garland, whose legacy intertwines peerless talent and courage with tragedy, who was forced on the set of Oz to consume a regimen of barbiturates to manage her weight, who was verbally taunted by cast members and groped by MGM cofounder Louis B. Mayer, couched her recollections of the production in later years with a measure of wit and cleverly concealed outrage. Acknowledging this parallel context, critic Brendan Boyle writes, “Of all the special effects the movie employs, there is nothing more immediately upsetting than the image of Judy Garland crying.”
The Wizard of Oz, then, presents a dizzying whirlwind of associations, at once a cinematic triumph and a cautionary tale. Its history is plainly visible while watching the film, etched on celluloid and, in the case of Ray Bolger, who played Scarecrow, in lines on his face from his makeup that never went away. To see Oz remastered and rescreened in all its terrible glory would be its own privilege. But the purveyors of "experiences" like Sphere can only arrive at schemes without any deeper engagement with the material being messed with. While news outlets play nice with tech companies about the possibilities of AI, its deleterious effects on the environment and on human minds continues apace. To the evangelists and developers, these are necessary concessions, kinks to be worked out. The lackluster truth is that AI functions much like The Wizard of Oz at Sphere writ large: a mostly ugly gimmick.
The news in early modern Europe: Daniel Johnson reviews Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange—“a splendid survey of news in early modern Europe and beyond. In exhaustive detail, Wren describes the vast news network that traversed the Continent for roughly four centuries, from 1400 to 1800.”
Poem: Morri Creech, “Mileage”
Will Collins reviews Freddie DeBoer’s new book: “Freddie DeBoer, the prolific essayist, Substacker, and unapologetic socialist, is, if nothing else, a very memorable writer. As commentary has become the preserve of strivers and resume polishers, DeBoer, a self-described “perennial f***up,” has carved out his own niche. He savages social justice pieties from the Left. He disdains relentlessly upbeat cultural criticism. He has several long-running and seemingly one-sided feuds with various writers and magazines. He also experienced a very public mental breakdown that ended with him being involuntarily hospitalized. Gory details are readily accessible to anyone with a working internet connection. The Mind Reels, DeBoer’s latest book, is not a polemic or a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the world. Instead, it’s a frightening and sometimes moving novel about a young woman’s descent into madness.”
‘What’s wrong with being sentimental?’ Paul McCartney once asked an interviewer. Ferdinand Mount pretends that he was shocked. Here was a songwriter who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest since Schubert questioning an ‘entrenched shibboleth of modern high culture’ – the contempt for all that is emotionally sloppy and intellectually soft. But how delighted Mount must really have been. He opens his book with the quote. Later he returns to McCartney, recalling how he sang ‘Hey Jude’ at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee, and how the million-odd people standing out in the Mall joined in ‘that warm, witless, endless’ chorus – ‘na – na – na – na-na-na-na’.
Mount’s argument in this erudite, immensely entertaining book is that to be warm and witless (if by ‘witless’ one means devoid of irony, flippancy and cool) is not only to be on the side of the nice and good. It is also a form of power. Not that Mount isn’t witty – I have seldom read a work of cultural history that made me laugh out loud as frequently as this one did. But he is earnest in his belief that sentiment (called ‘sentimentality’ by those who disapprove of it) can prompt substantial social change, reverse injustices, ameliorate the lives of ill-treated people and – sentimentality alert! – enable love.
John Banville reviews Christopher Clark’s A Scandal in Königsberg, 1835–1842:
How neatly persuasive they are, the historical epochs. The Stone Age, the Christian and pre-Christian eras, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment – what would we do without such labels? They impose a pattern upon the incoherence of history, and in the process address what the poet Wallace Stevens identifies as humankind’s ‘rage for order’. They sort the unsorted, they corral the wild horses of chaos. And yet they are but labels. Behind them, the world goes on in its wayward way.
After the failure of the French Revolution and the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe had not so much a rage for order as a hankering after a bit of peace and quiet. And no people hankered more earnestly than the inhabitants of the German lands. ‘In the 1830s, the city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment,’ Christopher Clark writes, then crisply adds, ‘at least in the minds of educated people who had never been there.’ Those who lived there knew a thing or two about darkness.
Michael Behrent revisits the work of Michel Clouscard:
Though he was always a figure on the margins of French intellectual life, his thought has undergone, since his death in 2009, a curious revival. Clouscard’s oeuvre—which consists of some dozen books published mostly between the 1970s and early 2000s—is a savage evisceration of the contemporary left, which had succumbed, in his view, to fashionable radicalism and a kind of terminal hipsterism. Though Clouscard maintained that the quest for cultural status has always defined the bourgeoisie, he claimed that this tendency had been radicalized in France by the postwar emergence of consumer society—and particularly the boost that consumerism paradoxically received thanks to the radical culture of the 1960s. Clouscard is perhaps best known for his use of the term libéral libertaire—“liberal libertarian”—to refer to the strange ideological brew that blends capitalist attitudes with progressive cultural values.
Yet lurking beneath Clouscard’s condemnation of the liberal-libertarianism is a deeper ambivalence—an ambivalence about culture itself. If Clouscard was so scathing about how modern society—and particularly the political left—had become obsessed with being cool, it was because he believed that culture had become the primary terrain on which status and power were pursued. His critique of the pursuit of cultural recognition is driven by a longing for culture with a firmer grounding in reality—and perhaps even for a reality lying beyond culture itself.
David Kirby reviews two new books on punk rock: “The authors of Tearing Down the Orange Curtain and Some Day All the Adults Will Die could have focused on a hundred other locations—New York and London would be obvious choices—but they write about places that happen to be where they grew up. (Nate Jackson’s co-author, Daniel Kohn, grew up on Long Island, N.Y., but lived in Southern California for nearly two decades.) Which is the point: As Austinite Pat Blashill says, when he was 5, he loved the Beatles, and when he was 13, he thought the members of Led Zeppelin were gods. ‘But rock and roll only taught me how to be cool. Punk rock made a man out of me.’”
Giorgio Armani has died. He was 91: “‘Il Signor Armani, as he was always respectfully and admiringly called by employees and collaborators, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones,’ the Armani Group said in a statement, describing the founder as ‘a tireless driving force.’”
A looted 18th-century Old Master is discovered in Argentina: “Its whereabouts came to light last month when the first-ever colour photograph of the portrait surfaced in an online real estate listing. This listing was unwittingly posted by a daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a fugitive Nazi officer accused of stealing the painting from one of Europe’s most prominent pre-war art dealers and collectors.”
The two halves of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Salome with the Head of the Baptist (c. 1530) have been reunited: “In 1937 a German gallery cut Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Salome at the midriff and rebranded her as a Saxon princess.”
In praise of the Met’s newly reopened Rockefeller wing: “While the old Rockefeller Wing felt cramped, poky and dark, despite being 40,000 square feet, the redesigned space is expansive – breathtaking in form as much as it is in content.”
Vermeer’s two women: “One of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous paintings, The Guitar Player, has gone on show alongside its ‘twin’ in a new exhibition. ‘Double Vision: Vermeer,’ which opened at London’s Kenwood House on Monday, displays the Dutch master’s original 1672 image of the guitar-playing woman alongside its doppelgänger, ‘Lady with a Guitar.’ In doing so, the new presentation reignites a century-old debate about who painted the latter, which was once thought to be Vermeer’s original.”
Forthcoming: Frances Wilson, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel (FSG, September 23): “Muriel Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences, and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ‘Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes.’ By following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.”
Homework by 11:59pm? If that was imposed on me as a young student I would have been so angry I probably would have sent a letter to the editor of our local newspaper (which I did with some frequency between the ages of 12 and 16, after which I discovered girls and my interests changed). In terms of when I did my homework I followed my feelings, and early alarm clocks were a big part of my feelings!