Ouch, that's my brain!
AI poetry, billionaire breakdowns, and the headspace of ignoring atrocities
“Intelligence,” wrote William James, “is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.” What happens when our goal is too confusing or too terrible to acknowledge? In nonetheless moving determinedly toward it, how intelligent are we?
This week at Public Seminar, Chris Holdaway explores why artificial intelligence, which was writing quite interesting poetry ten years ago, has lost its creative flair. Justin Joque takes a Lacanian approach to the very public, very expensive meltdowns of Bill Ackman and Elon Musk following their daughters’ political awakenings. Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus discusses Zone of Interest and the mindset of a “memory culture” that looks at the inside of Auschwitz but not at its surroundings. And Greil Marcus considers Percival Everett’s Erasure and a man slowly driven nuts by the literati’s appetite for what Albert Murray described as “social science fiction.”
Driven Mad by a Marxist Daughter
Justin Joque
His daughter’s senior thesis seems to have cut Bill Ackman to the quick. She’d gone to Harvard, just like him. But his thesis, submitted in 1988, critiqued the university’s admission quotas and their impact not just on access to education (in his study, for Jewish students in the 1920s and Asian American students in the 1980s) but on who achieves “elite status” in American society. He went on to make billions as a hedge fund manager. His daughter, who graduated in 2020, submitted “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought.”
Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?
Chris Holdaway
The question was not so much whether AI mimicry would erode the very possibility of future poetry, nor whether language models could actually “write poetry” in a way that satisfied some philosophical criteria. Rather, it was the new potential for language art that really made something of the digital in a way that more self-declared yet surface-level digital literature had so far failed to achieve. Whether as a tool for human poets or as a poetic agenda of its own, as a beneficial development or as a critical point of inflection, the language of language models might embody to the truest extent yet the collision of computer revolution and ancient poiesis.
War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest
Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus
One goes to Auschwitz today to see, to feel, to smell the remains of the camp as if it were a satanic temple of horrors. But the green fields of the adjacent houses outside the camp are part of the horror. The story of the gas chambers and crematoria is the story of gardens with a German shepherd, of fishing with one’s children on weekends, of successful men and their proud housewives. It’s almost shameful—how relatively easy it has been, in all these years of memory work, to just look inside Auschwitz without seeing its surroundings as an equally essential part of the story.
Invisible Scam: Percival Everett’s Erasure
Greil Marcus
What transpires is a wonderful, hideous joke—but no matter how hard Thelonious Ellison tries, My Pafology (included in full in Erasure), is not a joke. Ellison can disrespect anyone who might read an idiot satire like My Pafology, as real life, who might believe in spellings like Aspireene and Fibe, who can’t tell Stagg R. Leigh from Stagger Lee, but he cannot disrespect words. The novel is stupid and ridiculous—but no more so than Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and just as carefully made. It is relentlessly stereotyped—but no more so than Richard Price’s Clockers.