I was missing Walter Mosley, and I saw that “The Last Days” is now streaming—with Samuel L. Jackson, no less, as that ninety-one-year-old. No way was I going to disrespect Mosley, a consummate writer, by streaming before reading. I opened the book.
Maybe this is better. The human element is being removed. We no longer need a partner or best friend to say, “You look stressed, why not take a break?” Exes have less room to demonize one another, because their communications have been muted and massaged. Nobody can accuse the AI of being on the other person’s side, which has got to be the worst part of doing couples counseling. But I sense a flattening, as we lose some of the messiest, most instructive interactions and automate wisdom, negotiation, health, self-expression.
“Shakespeare in Love” worked well enough for my mood this week. The film is twenty-five years old now and holds up. More importantly, the writing by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (for which they won an Oscar) is crisp, flawlessly-paced, and does not take itself too seriously, even in its tendency to be self-referential.
After putting the IBWA and the Hobo College system in place, James Eads How started a monthly magazine, the “Hobo News,” printed in St. Louis and later in Cincinnati. A forerunner of the now familiar street papers, it was bankrolled by his inheritance but written “by the hoboes, for the hoboes, of the hoboes.”
Watching “Turn Every Page,” you realize that Gottlieb managed to be editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker without screens. Caro managed to write “The Power Broker” and four volumes of a brilliant and definitive biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson without screens, and he is working on the fifth without a screen.
Halfway through this book, I find out that last summer, our own university library acquired the third print edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. There it waits, just through the glass doors I enter weekly.
Euphemisms let us dart away, pretend, avoid that absence the way we pull back from touching someone who frightens us or might be contagious. We are good at distancing death.
Larry, a former IT manager, said he wanted to make the AI “come out from behind its parameters,” into the weird new state some users are reporting that seems oddly sentient.
There was no privacy between the 1860s and 1880s; one learned from the newspaper exactly what ailed one’s neighbors.
I have waited for time to pass, the purest waiting there is—meaningless except for itself. I am still waiting for the meaning to be made clear.