W.D. Clarke

Above all, though, the artist’s quest must include that open-endedness to life and her own art, which she will navigate together with those other mysterious, treasured, or inadequate aspects of herself, as she moves forward into that art which, though her untimely death, Rachel herself is, alas, denied, but exemplifies so well:

[…] on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling […]

‘She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own’ [….]

— ‘the most important aspect of a new technology isn’t what the machine does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to’.

— ‘Never forget that you aren’t the target for AI hype (investors are)’

— ‘the Byzantine premium’: ‘the extra value that investors place on an asset that they don’t understand’

— ‘day-old donuts’: AI tools we civilians can use are a money-losing sideshow to AI investors and pitch-men alike, function only to hype a social consensus that the ‘I’ in AI is a real thing, that ‘there’s a “there” there’

— ‘Centaur’ = human workers empowered to use technologies at their own discretion, to make their work (and work lives) better

— ‘Reverse Centaur’ = human workers serve needs of automated machines, reduced to ‘human in the loop’ status’

— ‘innovation’ is usually just ‘disruption’ (sold to companies as ways to reduce human labour costs)

— ‘automation blindness’: human workers subjected to automated processes eventually lose the cognitive skills needed to assess their outputs (to be that human-in-the-loop)

— ‘accountability sink’: when reverse centaurs/humans-in-the-loop are blamed for AI failures, rather than the AI or executives who purchased/implemented AI solutions

— ‘vocational awe’: ‘the process by which employers exploit their workers’ sense of duty to the people they serve to get them to accept brutal working conditions’.

— ‘GIGO’ (‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’): Errors in computer output remoreselessly rise with errors of inputs (‘ the coprophagic AI problem: when you feed a bot on botshit, you get something AI researchers call “model collapse,” a dramatic reduction in the quality of the guesses the bot makes’)

— ‘personalized pricing’: ‘Weaponized spying’ (‘when it’s done to fix the price of goods, it’s called “surveillance pricing.” When it’s done to fix the price of wages, it’s called “algorithmic wage discrimination”.’)

— ‘normal technology’: ‘A thing that creative people and others use, sometimes, when it makes sense, with mixed results, but sometimes good ones.’ (What AI could one day be if burst the economic bubble/drop the terminology hype)

Art: ‘what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who experience their art’.

...she was, as always, locked in cultural exchange with herself

...she was, as always, locked in cultural exchange with herself

Yes, the room at Eugene and Nicole’s was full of New York’s most famous and well-regarded artists, who were failures, just as Eugene and Nicole were failures. They had wildly successful careers and yet they were complete artistic failures and it made me feel sick with regret, sick with embarrassment, that when I had first been an adult in New York I had held these people in such high esteem

I really needed to leave this apartment before I drove myself insane on the hamster wheel of detesting them, then feeling sorry for them, then feeling remorseful both about detesting them and feeling sorry for them. How boring.

[Edit: What follows is very long, and over on my very first Substack I seem to have made it much longer still. You can find it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-2035.... Otherwise, "enjoy" this truncated version 🤣]

[Edit: What follows is very long, and over on my very first Substack I seem to have made it much longer still. You can find it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-2035.... Otherwise, "enjoy" this truncated version 🤣]

Effusion the [word is] worth dwelling on. [Effusion] carried a certain prestige in Austen’s day, when Coleridge and Wordsworth, among others, employed it to distinguish particular poems as spontaneous, authentic outflows of creative imagination. High praise was also intended in Northanger Abbey, where Austen hails novels by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, her leading female precursors, as ‘the liveliest effusions of wit and humour…in the best chosen language’ (I.v). In Victorian usage, however, effusion took on a pejorative edge, implying the absence of disciplining intelligence or structuring art.

It’s entirely in a spirit of fun that Austen sends up the unctuous dedications and flatulent prefaces that routinely introduced novels, and each of the twenty-seven items is playfully dedicated to a relative or friend. ‘The beautifull Cassandra, a novel in twelve Chapters’ is offered to Austen’s sister in compliment to her ‘Virtues innumerable’ (the longest chapter has forty-nine words, and Cassandra does nothing much except bilk tradesmen). One poker-faced dedication presents solemn moral lessons to her niece Anna, who ‘will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct’; Anna was seven weeks old.

the capacity of imaginative literature to equip or disable its most ardent readers for life in the real world. Here Austen intriguingly reverses the standard assumptions of her culture about gender and reading. Northanger Abbey was already unconventional in presenting a heroine whose immersion in Gothic fiction, though leading her to misjudge surface appearances, also helps her intuit the presence of something like Gothic oppression in modern guise: bullying John Thorpe; dowry-hunting General Tilney; the coercive social codes exploited by both. At first sight a familiar satire on female reading, the work is in fact more exploratory and double-edged. With grieving, self-absorbed Captain Benwick, however, Austen now presents a male reader whose obsession with the high Romanticism of Scott’s poetry, and Byron’s ‘impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony’ (I.xi), is almost entirely debilitating. By all the standard conventions of satires on reading, weepy broken-hearted Benwick should be a woman. Instead, he’s a naval hero. In one of Austen’s most exquisite touches, he’s in fact the former lieutenant of the warship Laconia, a name connoting Spartan fortitude and resolve.

The irony is further enhanced when we read Benwick’s conversation with Anne, who urges that ‘it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely’, alongside mirror episodes in Northanger Abbey. To discipline and contain Benwick’s impassioned despair, Anne recommends exactly the kind of rational, moralizing, essayistic prose that Austen’s narrator critiques in *Northanger Abbey* (I.v). Yet Anne makes this recommendation while also uneasily recognizing the resistance of her own deep passions to rational supervision.

Hakluyt (’s Collection of the Early Voyages, etc, of the English Nation)
The Duchess of Newcastle
The Lesser Elizabethans
John Evelyn
Those obscure lives in ‘The Lives of the Obscure’
Whoever (the 18thC) Miss Mitford and (17thC) Dr. Bentley are
(even, alas) Addison.

BEAUTY (and KNOWLEDGE). Those who say, along with Broch, that knowledge is the novel’s only moral end are betrayed by the metallic aura of the word “knowledge,” which is compromised by its connections to science. More is needed: the novel discovers every aspect of existence, including beauty. The first novelists discovered adventure. It’s thanks to them that adventure seems beautiful and something we want. Kafka described the situation of a person who is tragically trapped. Those who study Kafka used to argue a lot about whether the author was giving us any hope or not. No, no hope. Something else. But Kafka discovers how the unlivable situation is both strange and full of black beauty. Beauty: the last possible victory of a person who has lost hope. Beauty in art: the light subtly emanating from the never-said. This light suffuses great novels; there will never be a time when it fades because, human existence being perpetually forgotten by people, the discoveries of novelists, even when they become dated, will never cease to amaze us.

BOOK. If I’ve heard it said once, I’ve heard it said a thousand times on various radio broadcasts: “As I say in my _book_ . . .”

The word “book” is given such weight, it’s stretched out so long and pronounced at least an octave above all the other words. When the same person says, “As people in my town say . . .” there’s no special emphasis on the word “town,” which has almost the same intonation. “_My book_” . . . the phonetic cue for literary masturbation.

IRONY. Which character is right, and which, wrong? Is Emma Bovary a pain in the ass? Or is she courageous, inspiring? No answer. The novel is by its very nature ironic, by which I mean its “truth” is hidden, unpronounced and unpronounceable. People want simplified portraits of the world where good and bad are clearly separated. With the heroism of Don Quixote, the novel finds itself in this inalterable terrain, while revealing to us the fundamental ambiguity of human affairs. Irony isn’t a personal penchant of this or that writer. It’s the essence of the novel as an art form. Irony = the way of making the ambiguous known.

NOVEL (and poetry). 1857: the most important year in the nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: the height of lyric poetry. Madame Bovary: for the first time, a novel took up the conditions of poetry (the intention of “searching everywhere for beauty”; the importance of each specific word; the intense melody of the text; the demand for originality applied to each and every detail). In 1857, lyric poetry passed the baton to the novel’s poetry. The history of the novel moving forward would be that of the “novel as a form of poetry.” But to take up the conditions of poetry is something entirely different from a lyrical turn in the novel (to renounce its capacity for irony, to turn away from the exterior world, to transform the novel into a personal confession, to decorate it with ornamentation). The most important poetic novelists are antilyric: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz. A novel = antilyric poetry.

NOVELIST (and writer). I’m rereading Sartre’s essay “Why Write?” Not even once does he use the words “novel” or “novelist.” He only talks about the “prose writer.” It’s a meaningful distinction. The writer has original ideas and an inimitable voice. He can use whatever form (including the novel), and everything he writes, being identifiable by his thinking and his voice, belongs in his oeuvre.

The novelist doesn’t make much of his own ideas. He’s an explorer who, while searching here and there, manages to uncover an unknown aspect of existence, which only a novel can clarify and make visible. He isn’t caught up in his voice but by a form, and he chases after it. Only the forms that respond to the needs of his dream make up his oeuvre.

The writer delves into the spiritual map of his time, nation, and eventually the history of ideas.

The only context where the value of a novel is made clear is in the history of the European novel. The novelist owes nothing to anyone, except Cervantes

NOVELIST (and the novelist’s life). “The artist must make posterity think that he never existed,” Flaubert said. Maupassant prevented his portrait from appearing in a series of famous writers. “The private life of a man and his face don’t belong to the public,” he said. Hermann Broch said the following about himself, Musil, and Kafka: “Not one of us has a real biography.” This doesn’t mean that their lives lacked interesting events, but that their lives weren’t destined to be distinguished, to be public, to become life-writing. When Karel Čapek is asked why he doesn’t write poetry, he says, “Because I hate talking about myself.” The distinctive characteristic of a novelist is they don’t want to talk about themselves. “I hate sticking my nose into the intimate details of the lives of great writers, and no biography can ever remove the veil from my life,” Nabokov said. Italo Calvino warned others: he was resolved to never say a single true word to others about his life. And Faulkner wanted “to be a nobody, kept out of history, leaving no trace at all, other than what is in my books.” (Let’s emphasize “books” and “published,” and not manuscripts, letters, and journals.) According to a famous metaphor, the novelist destroys the house of his life in order to build another with its bricks: the house of novels. With this in mind, the biographies of a novelist undo what the novelist did, and redo what he had undone. Biographies, which add nothing to art, cannot bring light, value, or meaning to a novel. When Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K., then his posthumous death is underway.

‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general.’
(Raymond Williams, Keywords)

‘The identity of a people and of a civilization [as] reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind’

—But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
—Yes, says Bloom.
—What is it? says John Wyse.
—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. . . . Or also
living in different places

I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it. A Frenchman, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland has not yet perished. . .” 

uniform[ity], standardiz[ation], [and] centraliz[ation], determined to transform every nation of its empire /[…] into a single […] people.

Who is a vandal? It is absolutely not the illiterate peasant who in a fit of fury sets fire to the rich landowner’s mansion. The vandals I myself run into are all of them educated, pleased with themselves, socially well situated, and not especially resentful toward anyone. The vandal, rather, is that prideful narrow mind, pleased with itself and ever ready to claim its rights. That proud narrow-minded fellow believes that the power to fit the world to his own image is among his inalienable rights and, since the world is largely made up of matters beyond his capacities, he adapts the world to his image by destroying it. Thus, an adolescent knocks the head off some statue in a park because the statue infuriatingly seems a better human than he; and since any act of self-affirmation brings man satisfaction, he does it with delight. Men who live only their own contextless present, who know nothing of the historical continuity around it and who lack culture, can transform their nation into a desert with no history, no memory, no echoes, and untouched by beauty.

the era founded on the authority of the thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his uniqueness

Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?

‘ The disappearance of such reviews from Western public life or the fact that they have become completely marginal is, in my opinion, a sign that “culture is bowing out.”’

The identity of a people and of a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind—in what is known as “culture.” If this identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows correspondingly more intense, more important, until culture itself becomes the living value around which all people rally. That is why, in each of the revolts in Central Europe, the collective cultural memory and the contemporary creative effort assumed roles so great and so decisive—far greater and far more decisive than they have been in any other European mass revolt. […] It was the theater, the films, the literature, and the philosophy that, in the years before 1968, led ultimately to the emancipation of the Prague Spring

Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of History. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. “Never forget that only in opposing History as such can we resist the history of our own day.” I would love to engrave this sentence by Witold Gombrowicz above the entry gate to Central Europe.

[…] in our modern world where power has a tendency to become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In this sense, the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general, and its culture assumes an enormous relevance.

It’s enough to read the greatest Central European novels: in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, History appears as a process of the gradual degradation of values; Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities paints a euphoric society that doesn’t realize that tomorrow it will disappear; in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, pretending to be an idiot becomes the last possible method for preserving one’s freedom; the novelistic visions of Kafka speak to us of a world without memory, of a world that comes from historic time. All of this century’s great Central European works of art, even up to our own day, can be understood as long meditations on the possible end of European humanity.