Saturday Links
America’s small towns, Anthony Burgess’s prose, Doves Type, Bach’s quills, and more.
Good morning! I biked across part of Switzerland last weekend, from Lake Constance to Lake Neuchâtel, taking a route north of Zurich and Bern, through a number of small towns. I hardly crossed an ugly one, though there was one mostly abandoned village. Even the area around one of Switzerland’s nuclear plants was nice.
This isn’t a slight against the States (I love both countries!), but many small towns in America have been struggling for a long time. Things may be changing, though. Michael Sasso reports in Bloomberg that a record number of Americans left big cities for smaller ones in 2023: “The remote work boom that prompted Americans to flee urban areas for mountain hamlets and seaside towns during the pandemic continued at least through last year, according to University of Virginia demographer Hamilton Lombard. An estimated 291,400 people last year migrated from other areas into America’s small towns and rural areas, which Lombard defines as metropolitan areas with 250,000 people or fewer. That number exceeded net migration into larger areas for the first time since at least the 1970s, estimated Lombard, who works with the university’s Demographics Research Group.”
By the way, if you’re interested in “urbanism, land use, suburbs, small towns, and the built environment in general,” you should subscribe to Addison Del Mastro’s newsletter The Deleted Scenes. In a recent installment, he visits Seattle for the first time. He doesn’t like it: “Like so many old cities, a freeway runs right through what must have been some of the loveliest and most classically urban blocks, or at least that’s how we’d see them today if they’d survived. The touristy parts of the city, as far as I can tell, are limited to a couple of areas around the market and the Space Needle, separated by the emptied-out, office-heavy downtown. The nightlife and culture is supposed to be in ‘the neighborhoods,’ and while that might be the case, Seattle lacks the sort of unbroken, continuous urban fabric that makes me love a place like Montreal or Philadelphia . . . The restaurant scene is sort of like D.C., but worse. Lots of places that may or may not be good restaurants, but which all have a gimmick. There’s the Southern-style biscuit joint Biscuit Bitch, where they say ‘bitch’ and ‘bitches’ a lot, including to you when you pick up your order. I’m sure it’s the best Southern-style biscuit joint at Pike Place Market.”
My list of summer books is now available for free for all subscribers. Check it out. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, why not give a paid subscription a try. You get full access to three posts a week and John Wilson’s monthly fiction column.
In Commentary, Joseph Epstein writes about solitude and reviews a new book on the topic: “Some people more than others have a taste, a knack, a need for solitude. I had to wait until I was in my early twenties to discover that I am among them. I discovered it while in the Army. For the last year of my two as a draftee, I was a clerk-typist in a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock had no nearby Army post, so those of us who worked in the recruiting station were allowed to find our own apartments, a great luxury after sleeping in the same room with more than 200 fellow troopers in the barracks at Fort Hood, Texas. Mine was a studio apartment 15 or so blocks away from the recruiting office. Apart from a refrigerator and stove, the apartment had no appliances: no phone, no television set, no radio, no record player. In the way of furniture, it had a small dining table, a few chairs, and a bed that rolled out of a closet. I, who had never lived alone before, found great happiness returning to this apartment each evening after work, or waking on Saturday mornings with the prospect of a long weekend alone before me.”
Dominic Green reviews Anthony Burgess’s The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993 for The Washington Free Beacon:
Anthony Burgess wrote 2,000 words a day. Finished copy, mind you, not drafts. This would have put him in the middleweight division of the 19th century, when heavy hitters like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac set the pace. Burgess was in many ways a 19th century writer, but he lived in the 20th century. The longer it went on, the less writers wrote, probably because there was something more interesting at the movies or on TV.
Graham Greene, Burgess’s frenemy and fellow exile in the south of France, stopped his working day at 500 words, even in mid-sentence, and poured out a gin and tonic. Burgess, having streamlined his practice by starting on the iced gin after breakfast, kept going. He wrote journalism in the mornings, and then, when mind and liver were nicely lubricated, fiction in the afternoons. He is not known to have taken any exercise beyond walking to the pub.
The poet and translator A.M. Juster reviews two new books of poetry that are also very much on my list of books I plan to read this year: In Ad Fontes, he reviews Peter Vertacnik’s The Nature of Things Fragile, and in The University Bookman, he reviews Dan Rattelle’s Painting Over the Growth Chart. (Juster is also our featured poet today. Check out his poem “Approaching Zero” below.)
Kate Mothes writes about the time Doves Type was discovered in the Thames: “The origins of Doves can be traced to T.J. Cobden-Sanderson—who has been credited with coining the term ‘arts and crafts’—and Emery Walker, who founded Doves Press together in Hammersmith in 1900. ‘For a typeface, they returned to Renaissance Italian books, but with the intention, however, of producing a set of letters that looked lighter on the page than their sources,’ says a statement from the Emery Walker Trust. ‘The aesthetic vision was largely Cobden–Sanderson’s, who believed in “The Book Beautiful.” Exteriors were stark white vellum with gold spine lettering; inside there were no illustrations.’ . . . In March 1917, Cobden-Sanderson declared publicly that Doves Press was closed, and its type had been ‘dedicated & consecrated’ to the River Thames.” And there it remained for the next 98 years.
A hearty thanks to the English Teacher Weekly newsletter for pointing me to this video of the different types of ink and quills that Johann Sebastian Bach used to score his compositions.
Poem: A.M. Juster, “Approaching Zero”
It turns out I may be a contributor to ChatGPT. I am reviewing a new book on the Devil in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, and News Corp, which owns the paper, has just signed a deal with OpenAI to give the software company access “to current and archived content from all of News Corp’s publications.”
But, of course, I probably already am a contributor to ChatGPT—if the Scarlett Johansson debacle is a guide to how OpenAI works, which seems to be: borrow first and ask permission later, if at all:
The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company’s keynote event last week, in which that assistant was revealed as part of a new system called GPT-4o, Altman reached out to Johansson’s team, urging the actor to reconsider. Johansson and Altman allegedly never spoke, and Johansson allegedly never granted OpenAI permission to use her voice. Nevertheless, the company debuted Sky two days later—a program with a voice many believed was alarmingly similar to Johansson’s.
Johansson told NPR that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” In response, Altman issued a statement denying that the company had cloned her voice and saying that it had already cast a different voice actor before reaching out to Johansson. (I’d encourage you to listen for yourself.) Curiously, Altman said that OpenAI would take down Sky’s voice from its platform “out of respect” for Johansson. This is a messy situation for OpenAI, complicated by Altman’s own social-media posts. On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.
On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
Speaking of AI, perhaps you’ve noticed Google’s use of AI-generated answers to Google searches. These answers are culled directly from actual articles, and Google has promised, Mathew Ingram reports in the Columbia Journalism Review, that “it remains committed to referring traffic to publishers and that it believes users will still click on links even if they have already gotten an answer to their query. In a video interview with Patel, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, said the company recognizes the ‘symbiotic’ value of the ecosystem that it has created with publishers—if there aren’t sites making unique and useful content, Pichai said, ‘then what are you putting together and organizing?’ Echoing a blog post by Reid, Pichai insisted that, according to Google’s own research, many users click on links even when AI-generated summaries are available. ‘Yes, there are times people come and all they want is a quick answer,” he said. But AI summaries will lead to “growth for high-quality content.’” The use of AI will lead to “growth for high-quality content”? Right.
Fergus Butler-Gallie reviews Catherine Coldstream’s “eminently readable” memoir Cloistered:
She makes clear that her background was unusual for someone who became not just a nun, but an enclosed Carmelite nun in a cloistered community in the wilds of Northumberland. It is about as hardcore as Western Christianity of any flavor can get. Her father was a professor of fine art at the Slade school in London and she describes a childhood spent in that very particular lefthand corner of the British class system: a background of “public service and liberal social attitudes” as she calls it.
Through the evangelistic power of simple holy acts by religious people and while processing the death of her father, Coldstream found herself called to the life of a nun. Her time in the cloistered life was spent at Akenside nunnery in Northumberland, a place which she both fell in love with and found immensely difficult in the end. Her time in the convent totaled ten years.
Kat Rosenfield reviews Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution: “Described as ‘a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber,’ it is a look back at the social justice movement which had been simmering under the surface of American society since roughly 2014, then exploded into a reckoning four years ago . . . when George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. The book is, among other things, a historical record — one that the movement in question would definitely not choose to permanently inscribe on its skin. The fact that Bowles used to be a New York Times writer and card-carrying member of the woke crowd herself makes her account at once more credible to the reader and less convenient to its subjects.”
Adam Andrzejewski, who runs a private database tracking public spending, reports on the shocking size of the DEI bureaucracy at the University of Virginia: “In March, we concluded that the university was spending no less than $20 million per year of students and taxpayers’ money on 235 DEI employees, 82 of whom were students. Many employees, we found, were making more than $200,000 per year before benefits.”
Forthcoming: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, War, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New Directions, June 11): “Céline had long claimed that Death on the Installment Plan was part of a trilogy, and that the manuscripts of War and London had been stolen by the Resistance from his apartment, when he fled for his life—an abhorred collaborator—from Paris. Few believed him, but then, mysteriously, the manuscripts came to light in 2020. Greeted rapturously in France (‘a miracle,’ Le Monde; ‘the discovery of a great text,’ Le Point), War is sure to generate more controversy abroad. Though much revered as ‘the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature’ (London Review of Books), Céline is also reviled for his infamous antisemitic wartime pamphlets.”