We Fear AI Because We Don’t Understand Ourselves

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
— Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.7

Worrying about the destructive power of artificial intelligence suggests that, for all our technical ability, we remain ignorant about our own nature.  In a time of unmitigated anxiety and safetyism, we define ourselves neither by technology nor by humanism, failing to see that these are not mutually exclusive modes of expression.  Our creations may be an expression of our essential humanity, but when we look at AI, we do not see ourselves.  We see catastrophe.

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky bluntly summarized the current state of AI, noting “these systems are designed in such a way that, in principle, they can tell us nothing about language, about learning, about intelligence, about thought.  There’s a lot of sophisticated programming.  But basically what it comes down to is sophisticated, high-tech plagiarism.”  In other words, all AI can offer us are intricate repetitions of what we’ve already thought, said, and made.  This terrifies us because we do not understand it.

We no longer entertain the Vitruvian holism that seeks universals through human proportion.  In this view, artificial intelligence would, at best, be a filing system for our data, a fundamentally human metric.  But we no longer believe that by knowing ourselves, we can understand the constituent components of the universe around us.  We no longer put our faith in a philosophical cosmos defined by persistent human qualities and meanings.

Theories of postmodern fragmentation have instead convinced us that eternal, humanistic narratives are a lie and that we exist in an atomized power struggle of materialism and self-serving language.  So it’s ironic that Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was supposedly an inspiration for one of our most disturbing cautionary tales about AI—the Matrix movies, since they were ultimately about finding meaning in grand narratives, something postmodern thinkers reject as a artifact of power-seeking rhetoric.

There is a scene in The Matrix: Reloaded where Neo confronts the Architect, the AI that originally coded the Matrix and now serves as its monitoring program and curator.  While the first movie followed a fairly predictable “rebellion against authority” plot cliché (cf. Spartacus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Empire Strikes Back, 1984, The People vs. Larry Flynt, most of Game of Thrones, and many others), Neo’s conversation with the Architect in Reloaded offers a twist.  Neo considers himself a rebel leader, but the Architect reveals he’s just an embedded safety feature designed to reboot the system when it becomes unstable.  Moreover, there have been at least five previous iterations of Neo who’ve performed the same function.

This is very funny.  The grand revelation at the heart of the Matrix trilogy is the first thing you encounter when you manage to fight your way through all the chatbots and voicemail scripts to the flunky at an IT help desk: have you tried turning it off and on again?  The entire sci-fi epic is based on tech support for dummies.  When your computer doesn’t work, you become Neo, a hero in your own eyes perhaps, but really just a recurring function anticipated by the company’s customer relationship management protocols.  It’s the Wachowskis pranking the world with a Dilbert punchline.

And yet, Reloaded still manages to reach for something a little more profound than the Sunday comics.  It looks like the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence colliding with transactional analysis.  In his discussion of mindfulness meditation, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn writes:

Notice, too, that the self is impermanent.  Whatever you try to hold on to that has to do with yourself eludes you.  It can’t be held because it is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment.  This makes the sense of self what is called in chaos theory a “strange attractor,” a pattern which embodies order, yet is also unpredictably disordered.  It never repeats itself.  Whenever you look, it is slightly different. . . . Since we are folded into the universe and participate in its unfolding, it will defer in the face of too much self-centered, self-indulgent, self-critical, self-insecure, self-anxious activity on our part, and arrange for the dream world of our self-oriented thinking to look and feel only too real.

This is an articulation of anitya or “impermanence.”  According to the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, “Anitya expresses the concept that all compounded phenomena (all things and experiences) arise due to causes and conditions and are subject to change, decline, and cessation.  Hence, all phenomena are unstable, unreliable, and constantly changing”—just like the Matrix when it needs a reboot.

Amid that continuous change, though, there are also recurring types in recurring situations, like Neo as “the One,” the other so-called rebels ignorantly convinced that they’re fighting the system, the more overt agents of the simulation, and even the Architect itself—all bodhisattvas and asuras coded into the Matrix’s wheel of Samsara and integral to its revolutions.

In this sense, all that is or will be experienced has happened before.  All of these entities have come into being and played their parts again and again.  And they will continue to recur as they tell the same stories and act in the same situations with the same people, not unlike characters in a video game.

Moreover, the Buddhist perspective is not at odds with psychologistic interpretations.  In his 1964 text on transactional analysis and one of the first pop-psychology books, The Games People Play, Eric Berne describes such recurrence-amid-impermanence in terms of social programming.  He writes:

Social programming results in traditional ritualistic or semi-ritualistic interchanges. . . . As people become better acquainted, more and more individual programming creeps in, so that “incidents” begin to occur. These incidents superficially appear to be adventitious, and may be so described by the parties concerned, but careful scrutiny reveals that they tend to follow definite patterns which are amenable to sorting and classification, and that the sequence is circumscribed by unspoken rules and regulations. . . . Such sequences, which in contrast to pastimes are based more on individual than on social programming, may be called games.  Family life and married life, as well as life in organizations of various kinds, may year after year be based on variations of the same game.

It’s interesting that the language of computer science and that of psychoanalysis often overlaps.  In terms of programming architecture (the Architect’s world), a “routine” is “a section of a program that performs a particular task.”  It is essentially a pre-set pattern or sequence of operations, not unlike karmic rebirths on the wheel of Samsara or Berne’s “games”: “A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome.”  The games people play arise again and again with certain repeated personality types in certain repeated situations.

With this in mind, the question becomes: if artificial intelligence is a narrative extension (or mirror) of us and we transactionally construct ourselves in the same ways over and over, then what could there possibly be to fear?  In this grand act of plagiarism, what is being recapitulated if not human experience and identity?  And if that is the case, the potential catastrophe lies not with our creations but with our inability to know ourselves, to understand that our technology and our human nature are really one in the same.

Ignis Fatuus

A story about ghosts and possums.

I saw my nephew, Ricky, in the Amvets parking lot on a freezing Saturday in December with a centimeter of slick ice on the blacktop and a fair amount of booze in my veins.  My three friends, Burt, Leo, and Klaus, came out with me to the car, since I was their ride.  Bar time was now midnight at Amvets because the owner lacked joie de vivre.

I recognized Ricky immediately.  He was sitting on the hood of my Tercel.  When we got close, he pulled a gun out of his parka.

“Ima stick you up.”

Burt said, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Leo said, “You better get us all in one shot, kid, or you’re in some shit.”

And my friend, Klaus, the only one I could ever stand in the late hours after we’d all been kicked out of Amvets, said, “You’re definitely in some shit.  That’s a pellet gun.”

“This ain’t no pellet gun, dawg.  You wanna test me?”  Ricky held it up so we could see it in the moonlight.  Then he pointed it at each of us.

“Hi, Ricky.”

“Uncle Dave?”

I nodded, wobbly on the ice.

“Hey I remember when you had that piñata for your birthday,” Klaus said.  “What was that, like five years ago?  How’s your mom?”

“Don’t say shit about my mom.”

“Come on, man.  I also know your dad.  Kevin, right?  I know your whole family.”

Ricky glared and turned the pellet gun on Klaus.

Leo yawned.  “Why don’t you just put that thing away?  You might kill a bird.”

Everyone but the stick-up kid thought it was funny.

“You wanna flex on me, motherfucker?”

“Who is this guy?” Burt said.  “And why is he talking like that?”

“It’s the rap music.”  Leo fished keys out of side pocket of my jacket before I could object.  He had long fingers and had once made a living as a pickpocket.  The more he drank, the more graceful and charming he got with bartenders and waitresses and the more likely he was to rob them.  In a way, I envied that about him.  Even his problems were smooth.

“It’s the Internet,” Klaus said.

“Video games.”  Burt leaned against the car and crossed his arms.

Leo nodded.  “Yeah.  And the social media.”

“That’s clearly a pellet gun,” I said.

“Uncle Dave, I didn’t even know this was your car.”

“It’s okay, Ricky.  Get in.  We’ll drive you home.”

That evening in Amvets, I’d been hugged by a woman named Celestina, who’d been after me since high school.  Now that we were both old and divorced and only associated with our respective groups of friends, she must have concluded the time was right for a full-body embrace.

The time was not.  She’d been sitting on the barstool next to me, ignoring her two friends the same way I’d been ignoring Burt, Leo, and Klaus.  Then, without warning, she put down her empty glass, slid half off her stool, leaned in, and hugged me.  Celestina was a wide woman, stronger than she looked.  When she hugged me, I had to stand up.  She whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t make out what she said over the music.

Someone had played Waylon Jennings’ Never Could Toe the Mark in the jukebox and it was loud, louder than anything I’d ever heard played in Amvets.  You rarely heard country blasting out of the ceiling.  But time and space had distorted while steady pressure was being applied to my body by the woman who’d sat behind me in Civics decades before.

I knew I’d see her around town.  Hauberk, Missouri, was on the small side and you ran into the same people about once or twice a month.  Celestina and I were destined to encounter each other again in line at the bank or next to each other at a stoplight on Lagniappe Way, or drifting through the produce section of Harveys.  Then we’d both have to smile and nod hello and think of her hugging me off my stool.

We’d all squeezed into the Tercel when she came out, waving at us across the parking lot.  She almost slipped on the ice in her big, puffy, white jacket.

“Who’s the old lady?” asked Ricky.

“Christmas,” said Burt.  “No, Christina.”

“No,” Leo pumped the gas as the engine sputtered.  “Celestina.  Like the stars.”

“You’re gonna flood it,” I said.  “You don’t need to do that.  Just relax.  It’ll go.”

“She’s coming over here,” Klaus said.

“Bitch be crazy.”  Ricky took out his pellet gun.  “Ima blast her.”

I put my hand on the gun and guided it down.  “Don’t do that.  She nice.  She’s just got a drinking problem like everybody else.”

“Oh shit,” Ricky said.  “I’m not sure, but I think she works at Hoover.  I think she’s the nurse.”

“You’d know if you ever went to class,” Klaus said.

The engine turned over and the vents started to blast hot air.  Leo rolled down the window and smiled at Celestina.  “How’s it going?” he said.

“Hello,”  She leaned over and peered past Leo into the car.  It took her a moment to place me in the backseat.  “Dave, I think you, um, left your wallet at the bar.”

I smiled and nodded even though I could feel my wallet in my back pocket.

Celestina straightened up and held it out to Leo, her breath hanging around her like a halo in the moonlight.

“Well, thank you kindly.”  Leo handed it back to my nephew without looking away and Ricky immediately removed the bills, folding them into his jacket pocket.

“Say,” Leo said, “you wouldn’t be interested in a nightcap over at David’s house, would you?”

You sonofabitch, I thought.  You absolute, pristine, solid-state sonofabitch.

She focused on Leo as if she were noticing him for the first time.  Then her eyes came to rest on Ricky sitting between me and Klaus.  “No, but thank you.  I think I should go home.  I have to work tomorrow.”  She tilted like she was about to pass out.

“Oh, that’s a shame.”  Leo gave her his minty smile.  “Don’t be a stranger, Celestina.”

She smiled back, glassy but very happy, showing teeth, and hugged herself, trying not to shiver in spite of the enormous jacket.

Burt leaned across Leo and said, “You better get inside.  It’s cold out here.”

“Yeah,” she said, swaying a little but still smiling.  “Good-night to you all.  Good-night, Dave!”

Burt waved and said good-night, but we pulled away before she could hear.  I looked back and saw her standing in the parking lot, still hugging herself, staring at the car.

When we hit the street, I dropped my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he flinched.  “Why are you turning my nephew into a fucking criminal?”

“You mean the kid with the gun?”

“I’m sitting right here,” Ricky said.

Burt turned around in the passenger seat and coughed out a nicotine booze cloud.  “It’s a good thing you are.  Good thing you ran into us instead of some cop or a peckerwood with a hog leg.”

Ricky ignored him.  He held the wallet open and squinted at it like an old man who’d lost his spectacles.  “Terry . . . Ig-nat-ee-us.”

“Igneous?” asked Burt.  “Like the rock?  That’s a weird one.”

“Gimmie that.”  Klaus snatched the wallet and angled it toward the window.  “Ignatius.  Terrence Ignatius.  Any of you guys know a Terry Ignatius?”

“Never heard of him,” Leo said.  “Let me concentrate.  I get another DUI and it’s over.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d have multiple DUIs,” I said.  “Then again, you don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d encourage somebody’s nephew to steal money out of a stranger’s wallet.”

This made everyone laugh, even Ricky.

“I am that dude,” Leo said to the windshield.

“He’s not a stranger.”  Klaus snapped the wallet shut.  “He’s Terry Ignatius.  We know him.  He’s our buddy, Terry.  Good guy.”

“You guys’r fuckin’ strange,” said Ricky.

Burt sighed.  “You don’t know the half of it.”

Leo dropped me off and they continued on in my car.  He said he’d bring it back in the morning, but I knew he wouldn’t.  The night was young and there were other cars to drive before bed.  It would take me two or three days and that many bus rides to get the Tercel back but, like Leo, I couldn’t get another DUI.  Unlike Leo, I didn’t talk about it to Burt and Klaus.  Each of us had our things, our lingering problems, our punishments and payments, times when we’d made wrong turns or said wrong things or spent money or didn’t spend money or got in cars with the wrong people or made promises when we should have kept quiet.  Leo had his own car, but he never drove it.

I walked up the outside steps to my tiny apartment, stopped to listen at the Porres’ door to see if Martin Porres was beating his wife—their customary family activity on Saturday night.  But it was all silent.  Was that good sign or was it bad?  I decided to believe it was good and not think about it.  Because who the hell was I?

Usually, when he was ranting and slamming doors and she was calling him a cocksucker and their two kids were crying and the dog was howling, I’d knock and one of them would answer, usually her, and say what do you want.  I’d say excuse me but can you keep it down?  She’d wipe her eyes and look at me more closely and say oh it’s you.  And I’d say yeah, from upstairs.  And then she’d say sorry and shut the door.  We did that every weekend.  It added continuity to our lives.  But tonight, nothing.

My apartment was spare, save a few pieces of yard sale furniture.  A Formica table with two rattan chairs, a diseased-looking velour Barcalounger with a rip down the seat, a mini-fridge and a two-burner stove, a twin mattress on the floor of my little bedroom with a cardboard box as a bureau-nightstand.  I didn’t have a lot of clothes, either.  My most valuable possession was the Tercel.  I wasn’t some kind of ascetic, but I’d had reversals since the divorce.  Money was infrequent.  I was currently between jobs and had sold or pawned most of my things.  I opened all the windows and sat at the table in the dark.  I had an almost-full bottle of wine and, though my head was pounding and I felt unsettled by the Porres’ silence, I poured some in a coffee mug and started to drink.

Air had gotten into the bottle and I hadn’t touched it in about a week.  So the wine already tasted like vinegar, but whatever.  I turned on the radio, found the old person’s jazz station.  Thankfully they weren’t playing Kenny G or fucking Manhattan Transfer.  I turned Ugetsu up as loud as the little speaker would go without buzzing.  It was Saturday night.  If the Porreses weren’t screaming, I wanted to do my part.

That was one thing—the frozen wind coming in, lifting the dusty lace curtains.  Sometimes a car hissed along the street.  Apart from such infrequent movement, there’s a certain stillness after bar time, when all the drug freaks and booze mutants have either passed out, holed up somewhere, or are making their way home as quietly and inconspicuously as possums on a moonless night.  Because, at such a time, every possum knows the same universal truth.  When all your friends have left, there’s only one way to get your car back to the driveway: side streets, frontage roads, alleys, and the occasional cornfield turnrow.  At least, that’s the Missouri version.

When you do get home, you open all the windows and put on some music.  You give thanks.  You drink whatever awful remainder’s lurking in the back of the cupboard.  And you try not to dwell on the foolishness you’ve seen earlier in the evening or that you’re bound to participate in later in the night.  This constitutes a good time, all things considered.  If the night ends there, you’re safe.  You’re lucky.  The things you don’t remember don’t have to be remembered.  And you can’t be held accountable for things you haven’t done.

Tomorrow will happen in the fullness of time and you will not need to contact an attorney or make a court appearance in ten days.  But if the night doesn’t end there, be advised that whatever happens between the hours of 2 and 5 AM may negate all your previous good luck.  They call midnight the witching hour, but they call 3 AM the devil’s hour.  And they call it that for a reason.

But a ghost or an ignis fatuus can appear earlier than that: I saw her puffy white jacket at a distance hovering over the dark snow like a will-o’-the-wisp.  And I thought, what are the chances?  In a small town like Hauberk, the chances are already decent and in the devil’s hour they might even be fair-to-good that you will see some degenerate you left at the bar wandering down your street.  Maybe drawn by the hard bop tumbling out your windows.  Maybe just following the serendipitous magnetism that the devil’s hour exerts over all creatures of the night.  Celestina’s jacket reminded me of a large segmented marshmallow.  The night wouldn’t be over for me until dawn.  Apparently, it wasn’t over for her, either.

I moved to the Barcalounger by the window and watched until she was half a block away.  Then she noticed me.

“Hey!”  She waved, swaying in the snow, her eyes half shut.  “Hey, you live here?”

“A lot of the time.”

“I can’t find my car.”

“Amvets is ten blocks back the way you came.”

“What?”  Celestina looked around.  Did she still think she was in the parking lot?  Her black hair had gotten stringy and stiff in the cold.  The way she swayed, I thought she might fall.

“You better come up.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Dave.”

“You better.  Then we can find your car.”

She processed the thought, then nodded.  “Okay,” she said.  “I like you, Dave.  You’re a good . . . ”

“No, I’m not a good.  I’ll be right down.”

Celestina was bigger than me.  When she slipped on the narrow stairs, one arm hooked around my neck, we both nearly fell backwards.  It made her laugh.  I couldn’t tell if it was because she was drunk or embarrassed or a bit of both.  But I couldn’t pass judgement.  I thought of how many times I’d come home from Amvets and slipped on those concrete stairs.  To be honest, I’d done much worse.

I let her down in the Barcalounger then hung her enormous white jacket up on the back of the door. I pulled one of my wobbly rattan kitchen chairs across from her and offered her my cup of wine, but she waved it off.

“I had a dream about you,” she said, her head nodding forward.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, a really great dream. It was beautiful.”

“What was it?”

“We were walking through a field of sunflowers.” Her head dipped again if she were going to topple forward out of the chair. “They were huge.”

“I’ve never had a dream like that, but it sounds nice.”

“It was nice. We were holding hands.”

I leaned forward and held my hand out. She took it in her big puffy grip. I thought I could at least keep her from falling out of the chair that way. She had a nice hand, warm and enveloping in spite of the cold wind coming in the open window beside us and the snowy blocks she’d walked.

I turned down the radio and we sat there for a while, listening to Sister Sadie, my left hand holding Celestina’s right, her nodding then gripping my hand harder to steady herself, me staring at the discolored circle over the door where the clock used to be.  I’d even pawned the clock.  Got $15 for it.

Eventually, she grew quiet and still, passed out.  Maybe she was dreaming about sunflowers.  Then I had to let go of her hand because Leo knocked.  I knew it was him.  I’d have known even if I hadn’t been expecting him.  He had that soft, tentative knock—just like the way he’d smile and say something kind while picking a waiter’s pocket and ordering the souffle. Behind him came Burt and Klaus. They were holding cups of coffee.  Everyone looked sober.

“Shit,” Burt said, closing both windows. “What’re you trying to do, get pneumonia?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You got me.”

Leo raised an eyebrow at Celestina and grinned. “So you and her, huh?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe it.  She was just walking down the street.”

“This street?” Klaus said it flat with the straight face that meant he was joking.

“I was sitting here and she kind of floated down the sidewalk.”

“I can see her doing that, floating,” Leo said.

“What happened to my nephew?”

“Took him home,” Burt said. “You know, he’s kind of a shit. He’s on a bad path. He better straighten up and fly right.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well,” said Leo, “it’s getting about that time.”

I nodded, put the cup of rancid chianti on the floor next to Celestina. Then I went into the bedroom closet and got the bolt cutter, a mini crowbar, an old sawed-off Ruger over-and-under, a box of buckshot, the HK 9mm that looked like it had been burned in a fire but still worked, and a hardware store machete. I wrapped it all in a pillowcase.

On our way to the door, we stopped and looked at Celestina, now snoring loudly, her head lolled to the side. Burt said hold on, got my bedspread, and covered her with it, tucking it under her chin. Then the four of us went out and crept softly down the stairs.  A car I’d never seen was idling on the street.  We got in and put our seatbelts on.  Burt and Klaus sipped their coffee.  Leo pulled away from the curb and we glided into the dark.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

The Door at the End of the Runway

To the uninitiated, art exists in a dimension far removed from the practicality of commerce.  It’s regarded primarily as something delightful to be consumed, like discovering a pleasant truffle in the forest.  At best, it’s seen as a clever diversion or as an expression of social idiosyncracies, stereotypes, and moods.  How it arrives and the commercial dynamics that allow it to exist are usually a mystery to outsiders.  Maybe at the furthest parameters of conventional thought, “difficult” art is seen as entertainment that requires a certain cultivation, like fugusashi, conceptualism, or butoh.  But no matter how exotic or demanding, the economic mechanics of art remain obscure.  

As Orson Welles once put it, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,” which is all that’s usually required to keep a fandom activated, MFA programs solvent, and industries afloat.  It’s the pleasure principle: people instinctively know what moves them, what will stimulate them, and therefore what they’re willing to consume.  “Follow that instinct,” says Penguin Random House, Artforum, Broadway, Paramount, Prada, “and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  

A consumer might watch a documentary on a famous conductor or or take a gallery tour or attend a poetry reading, but the entertainment value of a piece of art to most people will usually be measured in terms of cleverness, immersive distractibility, or more cynically, through metrics of social proof.  Art, especially when it emerges from pop-culture, seems to live in the end user regardless of its depth or historicity—not necessarily because it must be junk food or empty escapism, but because it can’t exist in a vacuum.  Art requires community and it’s expensive to make.

As Stanley Fish argued in 1976, art (text) takes meaning primarily through the circumstances of its delivery, which is to say, through an interpretive community.  And though reader-response remains controversial, the durability and social significance of art has always seemed to depend on how it can be commodified, marketed, and received, essentially on the consumer as its final critic.  In this sense, fashion—as a performance, as a business, as a layered expression of desire—seems more honest and more transparent than other art forms.  Fashion is wearable art.  It emerges from interpretive communities and returns to them.  It’s made to be sold, but it’s also made to be performed.  It’s a noun and a verb, a commodity and a statement.

No other art is as tightly connected to the term, “industry,” in our language.  Movies come close.  But with the advent of streaming and the inertia of risk-averse, post-pandemic Hollywood, auteur cinema and the nebulous “art film” seem to have receded even further from popular consciousness in favor of more viable reboots, sequels, and franchises that will never die; though, we often wish they would.  By contrast, the fashion industry doesn’t give the impression that it needs to hide behind rarefied atmospheres, nostalgic callbacks, or esoteric pretensions. It just needs to keep going.  

In 1939, when Coco Chanel closed her store because she felt that World War Two had made high fashion socially inappropriate, she put over 4,000 women our of work.  And she was hated roundly for it, perhaps even more than for her very public relationship with prominent Nazi Hans Günther von Dincklage.  It seems her original sin, at least in the eyes of the French, wasn’t in her politics but in her dismissal of fashion.

No matter what’s going on in the world, fashion demands attention.  It’s integral to human society.  Diana Vreeland is famous for declaring, “It helps you get down the stairs.  It helps you get up in the morning.  It’s a way of life. Without it, you’re nobody.”  Or, as Miranda Priestly says to Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, “You think this has nothing to do with you.  Let’s talk for a moment about that awful blue sweater you’re wearing.  Cameron Diaz wore a dress that color on the cover of Runway.  The same shade of blue quickly appeared in eight other designers’ collections, then went to the secondary designers, the department store labels, and to some lovely Old Navy, where you no doubt found it.  That blue is worth many millions of dollars and countless jobs.”

The general public rarely thinks of this—the logistics of design and fashion merchandising, the essential causality that brings a brilliant work of art to Cameron Diaz or an awful sweater to Old Navy.  Outsiders normally have no idea about the unbelievable convergences of time, money, natural resources, manufacturing capacities, political and economic opportunities, technical skills, life experiences, and visionary insights that go into the process of fashion.  That is, except for in one circumstance: the ubiquitous fashion show, which, if done well, can be a doorway to that floating world.

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention.  His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity.  He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system.  Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention.  That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction.  I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery.  Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it.  I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes.  My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.”  And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer.  So she hoped I had plans after graduation.  Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy.  Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.”  She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded.  Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table.  I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn.  And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed.  But the artists don’t always realize this.  Everyone’s just trying to do their best.  Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back.  So what’s it gonna take?  Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness.  So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman.  A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center.  My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”  Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.”  Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.”  Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard.  Hard to keep down.  Hard to contextualize as just another trend.  Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good.  Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop.  I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low.  The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line.  Maybe no one knew what it was about.  Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight.  Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy.  She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends.  What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King.  On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.”  She knew.  I knew she knew.  And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism.  For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that.  We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music.  Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth.  I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse.  More than we ever were.  In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive.  In others, perhaps not so good.  And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out.  Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end.  The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day.  But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT.   And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech.  Well, the grave’s a fine and private place.  If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know?  Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”  Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay.  This is the same man who directed The Rock in  1996.  Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh.  Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews.  It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt.  Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show.  But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions.  And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

I’ve been absent of late . . .

I think Warren Ellis puts it well in “How to Build a Blog Without Social Media“: “[My website] has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.”  This is what I’ve been meaning to post here for some time but, precisely for the above reason, haven’t had the mind or occasion to do so.

Lately, I’ve been working on long fiction projects, writing steadily but not visibly or publicly.  I know a growing number of people read my blog and newsletter; though, I don’t often pay attention to the site statistics.  And I’m grateful for any interest and attention paid to my writing—grateful enough, in fact, that I want to thank you for sticking with me during my less visible periods when I have to do the stereotypical fiction writer thing and disappear into the back room for some months.

I am still here, wherever “here” is in a non-local, asynchronous digital medium.  And I’ve been thinking about what’s next.  Here’s an overview of what’s going on and coming up:

  • The Covid lockdown novel had to change as my perception of that time changed.  I’m rewriting the first 190 pages (which is to say, most of it so far).  I thought it was a dead project.  But I couldn’t get it out of my head—more the characters than the setting, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. Hence, the rewrite.  It’s unpleasant and fascinating in equal proportion, not unlike digging myself out of the basement after the house collapsed.
  • The short science-fiction novel about a night-blooming flower (no, the flower is not overtly a character) is going pretty well right now.  It’s about halfway written.  If I can keep writing the way I have been, I don’t think I’ll need too many subsequent drafts.  We shall see.
  • My third book of literary stories, Living the Dream, (delayed two years by the pandemic and the publisher changing countries) is finally coming out.  They tell me it should be available in late April.  This is a good thing, since I already have most of a fourth story collection manuscript put together.
  • I intend to return to my tried and true magazine submission praxis very soon.  So there should be articles and columns appearing here once again.  I can’t predict exactly when or where my work will be appearing, but I guess that’s part of the fun.
  • I’m also still interested in doing an audio-only podcast via my newsletter, where I read poems and passages from books and talk about writers I like.
  • And, of course, there’s the magazine that my friend Kurt and I have been talking about for two decades.  We finally have a talented, serious group, the possibility of legitimate funding, and the will to make it happen.  It’s a big undertaking, but it’s picking up speed and we’re all experienced enough with magazine and small press publishing to know what we love and want to avoid.

So that’s the state of things at the moment.  Watch this space and thanks for sticking with me.  We’ll see where these pathways lead . . .

Michael

Fiction Writing: the Private Course

Assessing interest: I’m thinking of starting another 5-week fiction writing and publishing tutorial for individual students.  And if I get a lot of interest like last year, I might put together some small group workshops as well.  Over the last 2 years, I’ve taught 12 students.  That’s not a lot when you think of large online classes, but it is when you work one-on-one in tutorial format.

If you’re interested in one-on-one instruction and / or small group writing courses over Zoom or you know someone who is, here’s the description:

https://writingexpedition.com/fiction-writing-instruction/

The Way of All Things

Wherein I give myself a stern talking to . . . 

“I’m lost. Life makes no sense. It’s unfair.”

Because, deep down, you have beliefs.  You believe it should be different. The problem is not the world or your life. Those things are nature—formless, amoral, apolitical, adogmatic, unorthodox, unpredictable, beyond systems and formulas, always changing.  The problem is you.

Confront life as it is, not as you wish or assume it to be. Nature can seem like anything.  It wears billions of masks, but it has no root form, no core shape. This is hard to accept because it means you have to let go of yourself, the person you think you are, your hopes and dreams, your loves and hates, your stupid temporary identity (which will only last for around 80 years if you’re lucky and eat your spinach).  Otherwise, cling to “only if” and “should” and “must” and suffer accordingly.

People will enjoy making you feel worse: “Stop complaining. The world doesn’t owe you anything” (which is hypocritical because saying that is, in itself, a complaint). But they’re right. The world can’t owe you anything because it doesn’t run on debits and credits. Only human simulations of the world (economics, education, law, marriage, honor, revenge, career, politics, Christianity) work like that.  Only humans feel entitled, chosen, predestined, owed, special, singled out. It’s easy to believe that life is like a bank account, when it’s more like senior prom: frustration, tacky formalwear, mean girls, heartbreak, and cheap booze in the parking lot.

Remember, the world is formless. It’s obvious in weather or animal life. Fly a kite today and sing in the wind.  Tomorrow, run for the basement when the tornado comes to tear off your roof.  Make friends with a tiger today, but know that he might eat you tomorrow. It’s not personal; Simba was just hungry. It can’t be personal. The tornado doesn’t hate you.  It’s not about what you want or don’t want or what you’ve done or what you deserve.

You are not powerless. You can change some things—for a time. Sometimes, the house you build withstands the storm. Sometimes, your hopes are confirmed. Sometimes, your hard training pays off. But your accomplishments are still subject to change. The house will eventually crumble. Fate will eventually favor someone else. No matter how hard you practice, a contender will eventually become the champion you once were. 

It’s inevitable. Axiomatic. It’s the way things are. And one may cry, “Haven’t I sacrificed enough—everything—for this?”  But the world just shrugs: “And didn’t you build a really nice house? Didn’t you get all the books you asked for? Weren’t you eventually able to run that marathon?”  Maybe you’re clever.  Maybe you’re a gifted athlete or an inspired artist.  But you are still mortal, still finite, still as subject to change as the house itself. You, too, will collapse into different forms.

If you don’t like this, who’d blame you?  You’d prefer to be changeless and perfect, to have perfect justice, to be satisfied one-hundred percent of the time.  But the only way forward is to accept the chaos (which is to say, the formless changeability) of life. Let go of quantification, of definitive conclusions and metrics, of belief and “should,” and see the world qualitatively, like a child.  Then the paths of life will open effortlessly for you and the gods will call you wise.