Search Results for ‘Acocella’
First: I was very sorry to read about the death of Joan Acocella.
As I’ve said before, I always enjoyed reading her writing, particularly about dance (although I have no real interest in dance).
And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog post.
I am not, so far, excited by, or even interested in, artificial intelligence (except in a very general way). By the way, I do not think that artificial intelligence will end the human race. If that happens, at least in my lifetime, it will be accomplished by human beings.
Would I use artificial intelligence to help me write my stories? To paraphrase Orson Welles, the stories might end up being better, but they wouldn’t be mine.
Also, even if my writing could be improved by artificial intelligence, where would be the fun in that?
If writing was my business, of course, that might make a difference, but obviously it isn’t. I do want my writing to be read by an audience of more than one — that’s why I make it publicly available for free — but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.
But there is another, and more decisive, reason I won’t use artificial intelligence to write stories. The question that really hangs me up is not the question of fun — important as that is — it’s the question of ownership.
If I went to ChatGPT, or whatever, and developed a prompt to get it to write a story in my style and with my characters, who would own that story? Maybe there’s some fine print somewhere which says that I would own it, but what if tomorrow that fine print was changed to say the opposite?
Not worth the risk.
[Later: For an interesting article on the current legal situation with ownership, go here: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?“]
Now, it has been a while since I’ve started a new story, but that’s up to me to do. I’ve written some scenes, but until now they haven’t started to fit together.
But now, I think something is starting to come together. The turning point for me is usually a title. As I’ve talked about before, if you write a story in the conventional way, you can write it first and then title it later. When you write and publish serially, you need the title before you start posting, and now I think I may have a title…
January 15th, 2024
I don’t usually read the “Personal History” pieces in the The New Yorker. I mostly read the articles (I never read the fiction), based on whether a) the articles are about things that seem interesting, including (a New Yorker specialty) things that seem interesting but which I’ve never thought about in my life before, or b) the writer is someone whose work I’ve found interesting and/or particularly well written in the past. (As I’ve said here before, I read every piece by Joan Acocella, even though they’re mostly about dance and I have no interest in dance.)
And I read the humor pieces and the cartoons. Usually first, of course.
But I did read this: “Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood” by Rivka Galchen. It begins: “For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button.”
(By the way, if you’re looking at the print edition, where I read it, the headline was “Better Than a Balloon,” which is a stupid title. I can see why they changed it.)
Okay, I felt drawn into that beginning, because I know that area (though not from living there). Every block described is a block I know reasonably well, though I haven’t been in that area for almost a year, for obvious reasons.
But the reason I wanted to write about the piece here is that last paragraph contains this:
I used to wonder about people who were born in New York and who still lived here. Did it not annoy them that any block they walked down, any business they passed, was liable to bring up a ghoulish or irritating memory? Even good memories can be exhausting. Maybe especially good memories…
“Even good memories can be exhausting.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen this put so well. This is why, when I go to Cape Cod for vacation (as I did not do last year but hope to do this year, depending on… well, you know) I don’t go to Wellfleet, the town where I spent all my summers as a youth (with a few visits later on).
Wellfleet still exists in my mind (it is basically the map for the town where my detective Jan Sleet is currently solving murders, though I’ve added a nearby college and made a few other changes — even Heron Island, where the murders are currently taking place, exists, though not under that name and it’s not as close to the town center), but I have no desire to see the town and to think about all the (mostly good) memories and all the places and what’s changed and what hasn’t and so on.
I’m tired just thinking of it.
Going there now, as opposed to elsewhere on the Cape, would really go against my mantra when I’m there: “Less doing, more being.”
February 22nd, 2021
I was raised in a New Yorker family.
We were New Yorkers, yes, but we were also devotees of the New Yorker magazine. The one story I ever submitted for publication was submitted to the New Yorker. (We had a family connection to the magazine, I have no memory of how. The story was rejected anyway, thank goodness.)
The magazine has had its ups and downs over the years. There were periods when I read very little of it, but I always kept the subscription. I tried to switch to a Kindle subscription at one point, but it wasn’t the same, so I switched back to print.
The writing has been good recently, though. Here are some samples:
1. “The Occult Roots of Modernism“: This is one thing that the New Yorker does very well — bring me to good writing about subjects I’d never heard of before. For another example, as I’ve mentioned before, I always enjoy Joan Acocella’s pieces about dance, despite the fact that I have almost no interest in dance.
2. “George Strait’s Long Ride“: I came into this one knowing a little bit more about George Strait than I’d known about Joséphin Péladan, but I still learned a lot.
3. “The Pleasures of New York by Car“: Very enjoyable piece about driving in New York (not generally known as a car-friendly city), but I particularly enjoyed how it identified one of the appeals of the Fast and Furious film series: that it’s about people doing over-the-top heroic things while driving cars (as opposed to while flying in spaceships or with superpowers or magic or whatever). So, you know, “relatable,” as they say.
4. “Hemingway, the Sensualist“: I’m fairly well informed about Hemingway, but this reminded me of how much I’d like to read the original manuscript of The Garden of Eden (which I read about in the New York Times Magazine in the 1970s, long before a much, much shorter version of the book was published). I’d love to read the real thing.
And one more thing: Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing just got married (congratulations, Maggie!), and she changed the URL of her blog, to reflect her married name, and, at least so far, the WordPress folks haven’t managed a redirect, so every link from this site to that one is broken (I have a plugin for that, so I get notifications when a link is broken). So, for now, here’s the URL: maajohnson.com.
October 19th, 2017
Here are two interesting links.
1) “Stephen King: Can a Novelist Be Too Productive?“
It always seems werd to me that people dismiss writers who write “too much.”
Picasso painted a lot of paintings, plus drawings and some other stuff, too. People seem to think he was pretty good.
Bach, too. He composed a lot.
But writing, no, writing is the difficult one, and you’re weird if you do too much of it.
As my father said, there is only one rule in writing: write well. As long as you’re writing well, write as much or as little as you want.
Speaking of which:
2) I don’t care about track and field, and I never have. But this piece caught my attention: “The Most Awesome Female Runner in the World“
Why did it catch my attention? Because it’s written well. Despite my complete lack of interest in, or knowledge of, the topic, it was really gripping (and completely comprehensible).
Well, this is why I still subscribe to The New Yorker after all these years (and on paper, but that’s a different question).
Not that everything is gold or anything like that, but there are these moments — as with Joan Acocella’s writing about dance, which I always read despite not giving a damn about dance.
September 3rd, 2015
For me, the ultimate test of a magazine is that I often read articles about subjects that I'm not actually interested in, either because I learn things or just because they're well written. I've talked before about how I always read Joan Acocella's dance articles in the New Yorker even though I don't care about dance.
Well, that's also true of the New York Review of Books. However, I've never paid that much attention to the NYRB website, which I've always found to be rather disorganized and unpredictable. But the most recent issue of the magazine had a little ad for the blogs on the website, and the title of one of the stories caught my eye: "E-books Can't Burn."
That was intriguing enough, so I went to the website and read that and also another post by the same writer which was just as interesting. (Typically, even though "E-books Can't Burn" was featured in the print edition of the magazine, I had to use Google to find it on the website.)
"E-books Can't Burn"
This made me think of my post "(Mostly) Not Sentimental About Books." As it says, books are just a long series of words. But he took the thought a lot further than I did, into different areas.
"The Writer's Job"
This really clarified some of my unease about a lot of the way fiction writing has become a career path these days. The paragraph about self-promotion really caught my eye, too. It doesn't sound like a job I'd like, I can tell you that. And "Literary fiction has become a genre like any other" definitely fits in with what I've observed. I could go on, but the whole thing is worth reading.
Both pieces are by the same writer, Tim Parks. I'm definitely going to follow his posts from now on.
March 10th, 2012
I don't usually post during the week, but this really struck me.
I just learned about Tavi Gevinson recently, and I was poking around the archives on her blog (Style Rookie) yesterday and found this entry.
In which Tavi quotes Roger Ebert (to make a very good point), and Ebert in turn quotes Robert Altman.
Wow. (And the post title comes from a Dylan song.)
I read the Style Rookie blog from time to time, though I have no interest in fashion. If somebody writes about a subject with real afición (as Hemingway used it – more or less "informed passion," with the emphasis on "informed"), it can draw you in.
Gevinson writes about the effect that clothes have on her, and she has obviously studied the world of fashion, including its history. She gets a lot of attention for being 14 years old, but age doesn't really matter in a blog. What matters in a blog is writing skill, which she has, and afición.
(I particularly liked this piece, by the way, and I thought it was funny that the magazine pieces written about her don't seem to mention feminism, Kathleen Hanna, and related topics.)
As another example of afición, I always read Joan Acocella's pieces about dance in The New Yorker, though I have no interest in dance, because of the way she writes about it.
That being said, my favorite piece of hers was this one, since I have watched Michael Jackson dance over many years (without seeing any of the things she sees, of course), and his dancing never got the credit it deserved (even from Jackson himself, as she points out).
October 7th, 2010