My Journey to the Microwave Alternate Timeline

As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:

Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued.

The classical example of an abandoned timeline is the Glorious Atomic Future, as described in the 1957 Disney cartoon Our Friend the Atom. A scientist with a suspiciously German accent explains all the wonderful things nuclear power will bring to our lives:

Sadly, the glorious atomic future somewhat failed to materialize, and, by the early 1960s, the project to rip a second Panama canal by detonating a necklace of nuclear bombs was canceled, because we are ruled by bureaucrats who hate fun and efficiency.

While the Our-Friend-the-Atom timeline remains out of reach from most hobbyists, not all alternate timelines are permanently closed to exploration. There are other timelines that you can explore from the comfort of your home, just by buying a few second-hand items off eBay.

I recently spent a few months in one of these abandoned timelines: the one where the microwave oven replaced the stove.

First, I had to get myself a copy of the world’s saddest book.

Microwave Cooking, for One

Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:

To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.

But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. First – the book was published in 1985.

When MCfO was published, microwave cooking was still a new entrant to the world of household electronics. Market researchers were speculating about how the food and packaging industries would adapt their products to the new era and how deep the transformation would go. Many saw the microwave revolution as a material necessity: women were massively entering the workforce, and soon nobody would have much time to spend behind a stove. In 1985, the microwave future looked inevitable.

Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?

by Malmsbury, Telescopic Turnip |  Read more:

Images: Microwave Cooking For One/YouTube/uncredited

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism

If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to a close. “The novel is finally finished,” he writes. “In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.” They will go to a literature festival, where he will endure an interview and then his wife will, too, since her own book has just come out. “Afterwards we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”

Beyond the physical relief of putting down the carpal-tunnel-inducing final tome (1,157 pages in all), you might have sighed with despair at the thought of post-Struggle existence. After all, you’d spent countless hours swimming through Karl Ove’s mind, seeing through his eyes as he smoked, chugged coffee, “trudged” through various forms of bad weather, tried to write and then wrote and wrote and wrote, took care of his children, felt ashamed of taking care of his children, painfully recalled his father’s drunken misbehavior and his own, fretted over his sexual imperfections and moral indiscretions, agonized about his overwhelming shyness but also his glaring narcissism, stared at himself in various reflections, and, on two occasions, sliced up his face with broken glass. How will I fill my time, you might have wondered, if not by reading Knausgaard? And if he was renouncing the vocation he struggled so hard to claim, what had it all been for?

But of course Knausgaard didn’t stop writing. In fact, just the opposite. My Struggle was released in Norway between 2009 and 2011; by the time the final installment of this Viking longship of a novel invaded the English-speaking world, in 2018, Knausgaard had already published five more books in his native country... 

Now the cycle continues with The School of Night (2023/2026), a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian photographer and the Faustian bargain that catapults him to artistic greatness. So far, we’re at 2,512 pages and counting. Two more tomes have already been published in Norway; Knausgaard told a Norwegian newspaper that the seventh will be the last, because, incredibly, “there is so much else I want to write.”

An attentive Struggler will identify bits and pieces that Knausgaard recycles in these novels: the aphrodisiac qualities of prawns, or a grandfather’s antisemitic quip, or the frequent appearance of hospitals and mental institutions. There is typically Knausgaardian attention paid to the precise color of piss (sometimes, like Knausgaard’s father’s, disturbingly dark) and the unevenly shared burdens of domestic life; much Pepsi Max is slurped, significant time is spent brooding on verandas, and the destructive desire for just one more drink is often satisfied. Narrators resemble Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle, like the alcoholic literature professor and aspiring novelist whose mentally unstable wife is hospitalized, as Linda was in Book Two; The School of Night’s young artist maps onto student Karl Ove in Book Five.

Yet the Star series is in many ways My Struggle’s opposite. Rather than the unrelenting voice of one man, we get an array of perspectives, and some of the most compelling characters are women. Whereas My Struggle somehow keeps you engaged despite its apparent formlessness, with little plot beyond the shaggy shape of an actual life, the Star series is structured around a series of more or less suspenseful mysteries. But the most obvious difference is the weirdness. While Knausgaard continues to beguile us with his trademark hyperrealist style, predictably observant down to the coffee granules dissolving inside a mug, what happens in these new novels transcends the real. One of the narrators — Egil, a trust-funded documentarian turned religious searcher who composes an essay on death that constitutes the last fifty or so pages of The Morning Star — helpfully informs us that the titular phrase is not just a literal translation of Lucifer, the name of the fallen angel who rebels against God, but also one of the ways Jesus describes himself. And the dark corners of these novels are illuminated by a gleam equal parts demonic and divine: hordes of crabs scuttle their way inland, a Sasquatch-like beast emerges from the woods and seemingly possesses an escaped mental patient, dreams start changing, dead bodies stop arriving at mortuaries, and people who should be dead seem somehow to keep living.

The struggle of My Struggle is, at heart, about what to believe in the face of death when religion is not an option, ideology has failed, and there’s nothing more than the life you’ve got. “Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man,” Knausgaard writes in Book Six. “We are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation.” Knausgaard sought a form that would not just describe but enact the process by which meaning is made in secular life. But in the Star books, secular lives — and seemingly mortality itself — are disrupted by the new star; characters and readers alike wonder whether it’s a sign to be interpreted or simply a phenomenon to be explained. Knausgaard widens his frame to encompass not just the banal and everyday, but the cosmic. He tries, in other words, to reenchant the secular world, and the secular novel, dramatizing a search for meaning beyond the self and beyond realism. But like his characters, we’re left wondering what it all means.

by Max Norman, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: Maki Yamaguchi

[ed. Like with Proust... two books and I'm good.]

The Secret History of Wakanda

The history of Wakanda is not, of course, an African history; it’s a history of Europe, and of Europe’s fantasies about Africa.

This hidden kingdom is first attested in Book V, Chapter VIII of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the ‘countries on the other side of Africa.’ As Pliny ventures further from the known world of the Mediterranean, and into the depths of Africa, the peoples he describes are drawn with a lighter and lighter brush. He can’t quite say what these people are, but only what they lack. Nightmares live here, in the hot voids of the world: [...]

But then, after this list of fantastic degenerations, we meet something different. Pliny describes a kind of African Utopia:

At the centre of the region of Æthiopia we may find the source of the Nile, guarded by a kingdom called Vicindaria, so called for its many conquests. The Vicindariæ are ruled by their philosophers; and if Pelagon of Rhodes is to be believed their libraries contain all that can be known in the useful crafts. Among their marvels are flying chariots, drawn by certain spinning serpents; fine silks that protect the body like armour; trees bearing glowing fruit with which they light their houses; and great towers made of brass and iron. Their cities are arranged in circles, like those of the Etruscans; at the centre of each stands a library which is also a temple to their God and his son. In all their affairs they are orderly and virtuous; solemn are their laws and just are their judges, and all men live in amity with one another. The Vicindariæ are the ancestors of the the Egyptians and the Numidians, and by some accounts, the fathers of all men. But Pelagon says that they have withdrawn from their troublesome children, have no intercourse with the peoples of the world, and no longer set off on voyages over the oceans or to the Moon; preferring to perfect their knowledge in seclusion, their kingdom can not be found by foreigners.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Pliny appear to describe helicopters, skyscrapers, and the electric lightbulb? Pelagon of Rhodes was a Greek geographer of the second century BC; frustratingly, one of our only surviving sources for his works is Pliny himself. Maybe the story stretches back further; maybe the Greeks had nursed this legend of a distant, magical kingdom for centuries. It’s been suggested that the army of Memmon in Arctinus Milesius’ lost Aethiopis might have some relation to the myth; so too might the Homeric gods’ repeated habit of flying off to visit Ethiopia. We will probably never know.

We do know that in Pliny’s time, Vicindaria was widely believed to be real. Sixteen years before the Natural History was published, the emperor Nero sent a praetorian expedition down the White Nile, to find its source and establish relations between Rome and Vicindaria, for future trade and possible conquest. Seneca, as Nero’s tutor, had commissioned the voyage, and he reports its findings in his Natural Questions:

There we found not towers of bronze or wondrous libraries, but only marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know, so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat, since the muddy overgrown marsh would bear only a small boat containing one person.

Nero’s expedition may have reached present-day Uganda: the furthest Roman legions ever travelled into equatorial Africa. Europeans made no further efforts to contact the hidden kingdom of Vicindaria for another thousand years.

This is not to say that the story was forgotten. Pliny’s account was reproduced in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville; among early medieval writers the most significant part of the narrative was the reference to ‘their God and his son.’ Centuries before Christ, these people were Christian. In 687 AD, the heresiarch Caelestius of Aquitaine was burned for insisting that Christ had been born twice, once to the Vicindariae and once to the rest of the world, but that the Vicindariae, being wise, had not killed him. Small communities of Caelestians survived in the Pyrenees for another two hundred years, claiming to follow a purer, African version of Christianity, in which redemption can be achieved without blood. (They rejected the name Caelestians, and preferred to call themselves the ‘Good Whites’ instead.)

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Murderer

via:

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[ed. Tehran]

Tragedy and the Common Man

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the characters, is really nothing - and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category.

But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear of insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us - from this total examination of the "unchangeable" environment-comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy. More important, from this total questioning of what has previously been unquestioned, we learn. And such a process is not beyond the common man. In revolutions around the world, these past thirty years, he has demonstrated again and again this inner dynamic of all tragedy. [...]

The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.

Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity.

The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.

Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our indignities, are born and bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic action, is obviously impossible.

And if society alone is responsible for the cramping of our lives, then the protagonist must needs be so pure and faultless as to force us to deny his validity as a character. From neither of these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced concept of life. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination. Which is not to say that tragedy must preach revolution.

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time - the heart and spirit of the average man.

by Arthur Miller, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Laurie Metcalf and Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman”. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

[ed. See also: A Cold, Perfect ‘Death of a Salesman’ for Our Time (NY Times).]

Accepting Wallace

David Foster Wallace was a genius, now let me convince you to read him.

It was a dark day for literature when David Foster Wallace took his life in 2008, at the age of 46. Wallace was hands-down the most talented American writer of his generation. Arguably he was one of the most striking and original prose stylists of the past century. And yet he’s never really been a household name, unless you live in an unusually highbrow household. He had enormous gifts, but an equally enormous propensity to get in his own way. Maybe that’s why America’s Wallace industry has been busier since his death than it was during his life. The man himself is no longer around to impose his artistic standards, which were both fanatically strict and strangely self-sabotaging.

In his lifetime Wallace published two novels, three story collections, and two volumes of non-fiction, along with sundry minor works. Since his death, his oeuvre has gone on growing. In 2009, his publishers had a hit with This is Water, a jazzed-up version of a commencement address Wallace delivered in 2005. The Pale King, the big unfinished novel he was working on at the time of his death, was published in 2011. A volume of previously uncollected essays appeared in 2012. So did D. T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. In 2015 Jason Segel played Wallace in the movie The End of the Tour.

The latest addition to the Wallace canon is a hundred-page novella called Something to Do with Paying Attention. Actually, the text of the book isn’t new. Readers who made it past the middle of The Pale King – admittedly not a large cohort – will find they’ve read this novella before. It first appeared as The Pale King’s 22nd chapter, in the form of a memoir composed by one of that novel’s countless narrators.

Now it’s been re-issued as a stand-alone book, in a bid to solve a perennial Wallace problem: that of providing newcomers with a way into his work. “For someone who has never read Wallace,” the book’s publisher, Sarah McNally, writes in her preface, “this little book … is a perfect place to start.”

I’m not sure McNally is right about that. Removed from the bustling context of The Pale King, the story feels like an uncharacteristically minor-key performance. Newbies who start here are liable to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Still, McNally is right to feel that Wallace’s reputation is due for a booster shot. This is doubly true in Australia, where Wallace is criminally under-appreciated. His books have never sold well here, and this new one doesn’t even have an Aussie distributor.

If this novella isn’t the perfect introduction to Wallace, then what is? The awkward fact, which McNally hints at but doesn’t dare to mention aloud, is that Wallace never produced a wholly satisfactory book. Unfortunately, he wasn’t his own best critic or curator. He had a maddening tendency to barricade his gorgeous prose behind needless entanglements of textual barbed wire.

This has always presented his fans with a challenge. If you love his stuff – as I do – then how do you spread the word about it? Even his best books can’t be recommended without a caveat or two: read this bit, but don’t hesitate to skip or skim that one.

What makes the Wallace problem so vexing is that his best stuff really was incredibly good. When he was on song, Wallace produced sentences that made his most gifted contemporaries feel like quitting on the spot.

Here he is covering a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Mark Philippoussis. “Sampras, poor-postured and chestless, smiling shyly at the ground, his powder-blue shorts swimming down around his knees, looks a little like a kid wearing his father’s clothes.”

How’s that for a word-picture? And how’s this for a cruel but fair evocation of The Poo? “The malevolent but cyborgian Philippoussis hasn’t betrayed anything like an actual facial expression yet.” Between points he likes to “dance a little in place – perhaps to remind himself that he can indeed move if he needs to.”

Wallace’s journalism showcased his superb ability to register the world in front of his eyes. In the best passages of his fiction, he did something even trickier. In the same deft style, he registered the world inside his head. He could catch a thought in flight. Here’s one of the narrators of The Pale King, sitting on an infernally hot bus:

The sun began shortly to broil the bus’s rear and port side. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning. There was a horrific piece of graffiti incised with knife or leather punch in the plastic of the seatback in front of me, which I looked at twice and then made a point of never looking directly at again. The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself.

Notice how the sentence about the feeble air-conditioning can hardly be bothered being a proper sentence. Wallace’s very syntax feels heat-affected. And notice how the narrator doesn’t just not look at the graffito again. He makes a point of not looking at it again. This is how thought moves, and Wallace had a supreme ability to follow its twists and turns in language.

The word genius isn’t out of place for Wallace. He could go on like this for page after page, spraying out jaw-dropping sentences seemingly at will. His intelligence was vast, and his writing let you all the way into it. His verbal talent was on a par with James Joyce’s. But he was a Joyce for our time. His best prose was slangy, hyper-modern, tech-savvy, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Alas, Wallace had something else in common with Joyce. Maybe because he could produce breathtaking prose without really trying, he also felt a restless urge to overegg the pudding, by conducting formal experiments that seemed positively designed to shut readers out. “Just how much reader-annoyance are you shooting for here exactly?” said his sister Amy, when vetting one of Wallace’s manuscripts. This is the lingering question about Wallace. What was the deal with the reader-annoyance?

One answer is that he lacked discipline. The guy just didn’t know how to stop himself. His best-known novel, Infinite Jest, was 1100 pages long, and included a hundred pages of minutely printed endnotes. As Max reveals in his biography, the novel’s draft was 600 pages longer. Wallace’s editor had to fight him tooth and nail to reduce the book to the width of a mere housebrick.

Wallace’s running battles with editors are a motif of Max’s biography. When commissioned to write magazine articles, Wallace routinely handed in unfeasibly massive, manically brilliant drafts that were as long as small books, and riddled with post-modern interpolations (subheadings, upside-down text, footnotes, footnotes to footnotes).

“The biggest challenge to editing Dave’s non-fiction,” said one of his editors, “was in striking a balance between the magazine’s needs and his instinctual impulse to not give a f--- about the magazine’s needs.” [...]

Wallace was a complicated man whose life was darkened by the shadows of depression and addiction. His friend and fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen called him “a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself”. Writing fiction, Franzen said, “was his way off the island”, his way of connecting with others.

But after years of wrestling with The Pale King, Wallace became desperately blocked – “bored with his old tricks”, as Franzen put it, “and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it”. Far from getting him off the island, his convoluted final book left him comprehensively marooned.

While Wallace was alive, one barracked for him to produce the masterpiece that would do full justice to his talents. Now that he’s gone, we must make do with his existing works and reconcile ourselves to the fact that his excesses were part of his essence. Without the reader-annoyance, Wallace wouldn’t be Wallace.

by David Free, Sydney Morning Herald |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

[ed. A bit dated but still relevant (ie. high annoyance factor but well worth it). As for a good starting point:]

***

"As for the best place to start, I think the answer lies in his non-fiction. Try his scintillating essay about a bad luxury cruise, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which appears in the collection of the same name. If that doesn’t make you fall in love with Wallace, nothing will."

[ed. More here: 25 Great Articles and Essays by David Foster Wallace (Electric Typwriter). Like this one: F/X Porn (about Terminator movies).]

Scary Cool Sad Goodbye 88

“I did not gamble, cared not at all about the Mob and even less about Howard Hughes. But there were other stories and other people, and there were days when I told myself that through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism. Those were the good old days.”

                                               ~ Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, John Gregory Dunne

LED arrows inside Harry Reid Airport pointed left to the carousels and right to the liquor store: “the nation’s only non-duty free liquor store located in an airport baggage claim,” the advertisements bragged. “Stop by before getting your luggage to stock up on what you need. We know why you came to Las Vegas, and Liquor Library is here to help you.” The dusk settled into darkness as I smoked a cigarette on the second floor of the parking garage, watching the distant lights of the Strip and the rippling glow of the Sphere. The 108 bus idled at the terminal beneath me, its destination flashing: “PARADISE: EXPECT DELAYS.”

“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.

Searching for secondhand clarity, I’d started a book on the plane. “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas,” begins John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 memoir about his six months in Sin City confronting his recent obsession with death and avoiding his wife and young child. The year is 1969, and Dunne is doing swell on paper: two published books, three-year-old daughter, oceanfront home in Malibu. And yet he exists in a state of panicked dread about his health, his writer’s block, and most of all, his marriage, which is perilously frayed. “I sometimes had the feeling that we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town,” he writes, “every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays.

After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”

And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.

“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.

“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”

“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”

“But I don’t want to fuck her.”

A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.

I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”

Open 24 hours a day since the early 1960s, the Huntridge Tavern was a windowless dive bar and package liquor store with video poker screens at almost every barstool and karaoke until 3 a.m. each Tuesday, which it was. Milling through the smoky room were locals of the alternative persuasion: aging punks, Mexican goths, women whose chests heaved from tight pleather corsets. A steampunk fellow in a sleeveless vest and kilt drank directly from a pitcher of amber ale as the karaoke MC gave a lugubrious performance of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. “Nine dollars,” said the bartender as she slid me a High Life and a full rocks glass of tequila. “Wait, no, I overcharged you. It’s just eight.”

Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”

A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.

The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.

by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye | Read more:
Image: uncredited

A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared.

For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I.

The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”

Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.

“I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January.

The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.

In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.

In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.

The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.

The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.

“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.

The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]

For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.

“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]

Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.

Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.

One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.

The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?

by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]

Monty Python: Summarizing Proust Game Show

[ed. "Well, there you go, he must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies... golf's not very popular around here." Ha! See also: Literature: Marcel Proust's 'A la recherche du temps Perdu' (In search of Lost Time); and Marcel Proust documentary (YT).]

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

The Real Story Behind ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

A Korean War veteran is floundering. His career is an endless bumpy road, and includes work as a teacher, a technical writer for Honeywell, and even a Nevada casino employee. But our ambitious vet also studies philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University in India—and starts to develop his own philosophy of life, an unconventional merging of Eastern and Western currents.

Then comes a mental breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital. Here he undergoes repeated electroshock therapy. He finally emerges a changed person.

But maybe he changed too much—he can hardly remember the person he once was. It’s almost as if his life got cleaved in two at this juncture. His wife leaves him. He holds on to his relationship with his son—but that ends tragically with the son’s murder in San Francisco at age 22.

While working for Honeywell, our aspiring philosopher stays awake from 2 AM to 6 AM in a small apartment above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Here he writes a novel destined to become one of the defining books of the era. But he has to pitch it to 121 editors before he gets a contract and a $3,000 advance.

The editor, J.D. Landis, admitted that he only accepted the novel because this “book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” But the author, he insisted, shouldn’t expect to make more than his tiny advance. Then Landis added: “Money isn’t the point with a book like this.”

That’s the story of how Robert Pirsig published of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But the editor was wrong. The book sold 5 million copies, and for a spell in the 1970s you would see copies everywhere, even in the hands of people who didn’t read novels.

And that was just the start. Robert Redford tried to buy movie rights, but the author said no. Highbrow literary critic George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky—which is especially meaningful when you know that Steiner wrote a book on Dostoevsky. The Smithsonian acquired the titular motorcycle for its permanent collection.

The book is simple enough to describe. It tells the story of a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrator tries to figure out many things—but especially his own past before his life split in two.

At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:

“Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court….I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.”

The electroshock treatment was done without Pirsig’s consent. That would be illegal nowadays.

In the aftermath, Pirsig felt so disconnected from his past that he included his pre-treatment self as a separate character in the novel. He calls that abandoned part of himself Phaedrus, a name drawn from Plato’s dialogues.

So you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a dialogue between a man and his past self. Or you can treat it as a travel story or as a philosophical discussion (what Pirsig describes as a chautauqua, a name drawn from a populist adult education movement of the late 1800s). And, yes, it’s also a guide to motorcycle maintenance.

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator’s head.

But maybe that’s part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.

Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it’s the overarching theme of Pirsig’s entire life’s work. He wrote one more novel after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the seldom read Lila, and it continues the discussion on quality. And the same topic takes center stage in the posthumous collection of writings published under the title On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. [...]

But let’s be honest: Pirsig was a better mystic than philosopher, and the deeper Pirsig digs into his personal notion of Quality, the more interesting—and metaphysical—his thinking becomes. Quality, he insists, can never be defined. He eventually embraces it as a kind of Tao, a force underlying all our experiences—hence resisting empirical analysis. He is now leaving philosophy behind, and perhaps for the better.

So he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretḗ, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma.

He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig’s worldview, but because it’s invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretḗ (or Quality), they fall far short.

This is where Pirsig earns my admiration and loyalty. Some things really are more powerful than logic.

Back in 1952 Kitto anticipated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and provided the missing piece to Pirsig’s worldview—when he wrote:

[If aretḗ refers to a person] it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent—morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arête.

Aretḗ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

We are now at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you read Kitto, you are already prepared for Pirsig—maybe you can even skip the novel. But, much better, you have a game plan for living a human life in the face of encroaching machines.

Pirsig understood this more than fifty years ago. He saw that we made a Faustian bargain when we put rationality ahead of the Good, and data ahead of human excellence. He grasped that science should be subservient to human needs, not the other way around. And the price we’re paying now is much higher than it was back then.

In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig’s novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC:

The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality….
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things….

He declares: “Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.”

I worked with many quality control engineers in the business world and often walked with them on the factory floor. I’m sure they would be shocked by Pirsig’s statement that “Quality is the Buddha.” But that’s exactly the kind of journey we’re on in this book.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Heritage Preservation Department - MNHS; uncredited book cover

Why Libraries Don't Stock Many Audiobooks

Have you ever wondered …

Why can’t my library get more copies of e-books and digital audiobooks?

You’re not alone! And there are a couple of reasons you might find yourself on a long wait list for e-content:

• Most materials are licensed, not owned by the library like print books are, and publishers put limits on how long and/or how often the content can be used. Once the limit is reached, the library must re-purchase the license if we want to keep offering the e-content to our community. 
• At the same time, e-books and digital audiobooks cost libraries more than print copies and more than what consumers would pay to purchase them commercially.

Here’s a real-time example:

How can you help?

• If you finish with e-content early, please return it so the next person can jump off the waiting list and into the book! Just go to Manage Loan and select Return Early in the Libby App.
• And keep borrowing e-content from your library! The numbers help us advocate for funding.

by Hawaii State Library Association 

[ed. Would it hurt publishers or whoever's collecting these licensing fees to be a little more civic-minded by providing complimentary copies to libraries? (or at least getting rid of repurchasing requirements?) Guess so.]

It's Not Normal

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear. 

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

A thing that keeps happening:

And happening:

And happening:

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI": (...)

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Anything labeled 'smart' is usually suspect. What's particularly dangerous is if successive generations fall prey to what conservation biology calls shifting baseline syndrome (forgetting or never really missing something that's been lost, so we don't grieve or fight to restore it). For a deep dive into why everything keeps getting worse see Mr. Doctorow's new book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025.]

What Makes a Novel "Good"?

Why People on Substack Lost their Minds When Someone Said: "Don't Read All the Classics"

On Substack, people will tear you a new one if you dare to neg cherished classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. When I wrote a post last year criticizing Ulysses, I definitely caught some internet side eye. But the judgment didn’t even come close to the comments on Karen Rodriguez’ post “The 40 Famous Classics You’re Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees).” The comments were so mean I physically flinched reading them...

My favorite section of her list is the “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” category, which includes Ulysses (Joyce), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), which Karen describes as “unreadable even for Joyce scholars.”

I don’t come from the academic literature world, I’m a lawyer-turned-novelist and all I care about from a reader’s perspective is that books are both 1) entertaining and 2) moving. There’s so many books that people praise lavishly but that I find fail that basic criteria, including Ulysses.

So why the hell is everyone losing their mind over this? Like is Joyce your god? Why is criticizing these books, these authors, such a cardinal sin?

I think I finally figured out why. And it has to do what people value in their books. There’s actually a whole debate in literary criticism concerning what fiction is supposed to do for humanity and what makes a novel good.

I happen to fall in with the group that doesn’t particularly appreciate Joyce. But there’s camps out there that die for modernist novels (like Ulysses) and experimental post-modern writing (like Pynchon’s work). I don’t agree with them, but it was helpful to understand what those readers value in those works.

Here’s what I learned:

Realism vs. Everything Else

The big debate in literary fiction boils down to this: should novels try to represent life as it actually is, or should they do something else entirely?

Realism is what most of us think of as “normal” fiction. It’s Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri. Characters feel like real people with believable psychology. The prose is clear and doesn’t call attention to itself. No one discovers they’re secretly royalty or gets abducted by aliens. It’s just life, rendered carefully on the page.

But here’s what makes realism click for me: it’s defined more by what it’s NOT than what it is.

Realism is not romance with impossible coincidences. It’s not allegory where characters represent abstract concepts. It’s not metafiction that constantly reminds you you’re reading a book. It’s not heavily plotted melodrama where orphans conveniently turn out to be related to their benefactors. And it’s not highly stylized or poetic prose where every sentence is gorgeously metaphorical. (...)

Before realism became dominant in the mid-1800s (think Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy), novels were full of improbable adventures, clear moral lessons, and coincidence-heavy plots. Realism said: what if we just showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary disappointments? What if we went deep into their psychology instead of hitting them with dramatic plot twists?

Then Modernism Said “Not So Fast”

By the early 1900s, some writers thought realism was insufficient. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner broke with realistic conventions, but not because they didn’t care about truth. They thought traditional realism couldn’t capture modern consciousness.

Modernism’s insight: Reality is fragmented and chaotic, especially after World War I shattered Victorian certainties. Modernist authors used stream of consciousness, fractured timelines, and difficult prose to represent how minds actually work and how reality actually feels...

The questions pile up without clear answers, thoughts interrupt themselves—this is trying to show consciousness as it actually moves, not tidied up for the reader.

The key difference from realism: Modernists believed meaning still existed, but you needed new forms to access it. Joyce’s Ulysses is notoriously difficult, but according to the internet (I don’t know, I haven’t read past page six), the novel is ultimately trying to demonstrate the truth of a day in Dublin in 1904. The experiments serve a purpose.

The problem, for me, is that the experiments can make the writing very un-fun to read.

Then Postmodernism Said “There Is No Truth”

Postmodernism (think Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme) takes fragmentation and makes it playful. These writers are skeptical that fiction can reveal any stable truth at all. So they write metafiction that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mixes high and low culture, and treats meaning itself as a game.

Here’s an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s “The School.”

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? and I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—I said, yes, maybe.

What’s interesting is that school kids wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be making the observation that death is “a fundamental datum, the means by which...everyday may be transcended in the direction...” because of their age and life experience. So if it’s not the children’s “voice” saying this in the story, it must be the narrator, or maybe even the writer. Barthelme is winking at us, breaking character (the fourth wall), reminding us that this story is all made up. It’s clever but keeps us at arm’s length emotionally.

When you read postmodern fiction, it often feels like writers writing for other writers—it’s inside jokes about literary conventions rather than stories that move you emotionally. That’s intentional. Postmodernists think the search for emotional truth through fiction is naive. Better to be playfully ironic about the whole enterprise.

This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?

Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)

Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.

If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.

None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.

These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.

My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.

by Noor Rahman, Write on Track |  Read more:

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[ed. More examples in the full essay. I can't read Joyce, even (and especially) because of his prose (except for Portrait of the Artist). Same with Proust, but for different reasons - his prose is beautiful but buried beneath the endless minutia of social manners and French society, eventually becoming unbearable (In Search of Lost Time).]