From The Atlantic:

A few weeks ago, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: He had made a transition from the curating stage of life to the editing stage. He was no longer collecting; he was deaccessioning. I lack his wisdom and maturity, and rather than editing as I sorted, I instead paused to thumb through and scan. And then I came across a book that made me stop and reread: The City & the City (2009), by the British writer China Miéville. It is a police procedural novel with a background environment that recalls Philip K. Dick. A crime needs to be solved in a society where two different cities—two separate polities, with separate populations, customs, alphabets, religions, and outlooks—coexist within the same small patch of geography. The names of the overlapping cities are Besźel and Ul Qoma.

When you engage with a book, personal circumstance is always your companion. John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud is a knife to the heart of any parent. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might as well be scripture if you’re 18. And not just with a book. My mother took me to see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it opened in New York in the late 1960s—her idea. Part of the thrill was realizing that she knew me and understood I would like it.

I first read The City & the City during the time of Obama. The novel was always a parable, but it could be enjoyed simply as a clever, at times mind-bending fantasy, and as a fantasy it earned many awards. When I reread the book a few weeks ago, the fun was gone. The moment—my zeitgeist companion—was one of deepening and well-founded worry over the cohesion of American society. “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams” (The New York Times). “2022 Is the Year America Falls Off a Cliff” (Globe and Mail  ). “79 Percent of Americans Say U.S. Is Falling Apart” (Futurism). If the traditional life cycle of commentary holds, the next stage will urge a long view of history. And it is true that perspective can provide a dulling comfort. There is a moment in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending when Marshall, an apparently dimwitted student, is asked by his history teacher, “How would you describe Henry the Eighth’s reign?” Marshall, Barnes writes, “searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.

“‘There was unrest, sir.’”

Pressed to elaborate, Marshall summons his powers to the maximum: “I’d say there was great unrest, sir.”

But societies do fall apart, and there is no single reason why. One historian, years ago, decided to collect and enumerate all the scholarly explanations for the fall of Rome. He counted upward of 210 specific theories. Sometimes the dissolution of a society is rapid and startling—think of Yugoslavia after Tito. Sometimes it is so slow—as with imperial Rome—that entire lifetimes go by without anyone’s being aware. Centuries may elapse before someone gives dissolution a name and a date.

To turn the lens around, one can ask how cohesive some societies really were before they were seen to fail. The “United” Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland today shows signs of unraveling, but many Scots, Welsh, and Irish have opinions about how raveled it ever was. As for the United States, all the talk about exceptionalism doesn’t in itself make us exceptional. The colonies that formed the original union were protective of their autonomy and suspicious of federal power; in the 21st century, some of these states might as well be thought of as nations and are charting their own distinct directions. But separation isn’t only about lines on a map. Michael Harrington called his 1962 book about rural and urban poverty The Other America, implicitly acknowledging that it wasn’t about the America occupied by most of those who would buy and read his book. The Texas hill country known to Lyndon Johnson in the 1930s, as described in Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, has almost nothing in common with the urbane, martini-swilling world of The Thin Man, but they are exactly contemporaneous. A rhetorical question: Do most Black Americans and white Americans think of American history and experience in the same way? Do both feel they walk an equal distance toward one another to achieve a shared sense of ownership? Cohesion is easier to assert when questions like these are not asked, or even thought of.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

From Counter Craft:

In 2014, the legend Ursula K. Le Guin was given a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation and delivered what I’ve heard (accurately) described as a barn burner of a speech. Perhaps the most memorable part was her call for imaginative literature that envisions other ways of living:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

[…]

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I know I’m not the only writer who has had these lines stuck in their head ever since. How can we create new ways of living in this world if we can’t imagine them on the page? Literature has many goals, of course, but one of them—especially in science fiction—has always been imagining new possibilities. Le Guin devoted her work to this, perhaps most notably in the 1974 novel The Dispossessed that imagines an anarcho-syndicalist society on the moon. But it is a theme throughout her oeuvre.

And a theme throughout all of science fiction. Star Trek is an obvious model, a show that pushed boundaries in progressive ways while imagining a more noble future. Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels famously take place in a post-scarcity anarchist utopia. The examples are really limitless.

And I think it is fair to combine the utopian impulse with the dystopian one. The writer of dystopias (which Le Guin was as well) is looking to display the cracks in the system. Certainly this was a goal of my novel The Body Scout, which imagines our current system running full steam ahead until the whole machine is at the point of bursting with steam shooting out of the seams and the gears beginning to break.

Utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same coin in this way. The flaws in the system and the possible ways forward. They are complimentary impulses that are often combined in the same work. See Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven for example. Of course, a novel is never going to bring down a system. Fiction is not activism really. Or at least not only that. Still, a first step to creating new society is being able to imagine it. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings,” as Le Guin said.

Link to the rest at Counter Craft

PG has always been a big fan of capitalism, mostly because it seems to work and continues to work over a long period of time. He would argue that this economic system has generated more material well-being for more people than any alternate system he is aware of.

When a good friend told PG a long time ago that “Socialism always fails,” he didn’t believe it but has come to regard that statement as accurate.

Some point to Sweden as an exception, but Sweden is a relatively small, culturally cohesive society. Yes, it has had socialized medicine for a long time, but it also has capitalist wealth-producing businesses like Volvo, Ericsson, and Skanska. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has 41 billionaires.

Out of a population of 10.5 million, that doesn’t sound a lot like, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” the slogan Karl Marx was so please with.

PG also suggests that during the 20th Century, socialism had a certain habit of turning into communism, which has not only generated great income inequality, but also widespread poverty in a great many segments of its populations.

For PG, the biggest problem with socialism is that somebody has to enforce it, impose it on people who don’t necessarily like the idea. Suppose everybody is given the same amount of land. In that case, somebody will get the idea of planting tomatoes instead of potatoes and swapping them for some of his neighbors’ potatoes. Given enough plots of land, someone will discover gold, either actually or metaphorically.

Absent strict political or social controls, somebody will start hiring others to do things or purchase his neighbor’s potatoes and sell them for a profit before the next crop ripens. Then somebody else will figure out how to make vodka from potatoes and refuse to tell his neighbors how he did it but offer to sell them vodka for their celebrations.

Human beings are just so non-standard in their propensities, abilities, behavior and desires that treating them like machines is pretty dumb. It’s way easier to create identical machines, using some individual’s unique mechanical ability and rewarding them for their ingenuity.

From The Literary Hub:

I’m an avid reader with ALS—a bad combination. My reading was turned upside-down in 2008 by a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Without cure, its symptoms vary among patients, often including loss of finger dexterity. My symptoms began primarily as unexplained falls and growing inability to button shirts and coats. Only later did my wife, Deirdre, and I appreciate Lear’s deathbed plea: “Pray Sir, undo the button.” It’s now one of our favorite Shakespearian lines.

Much has happened since then. I’ve been writing all my life, but for half of my 86-year life, formal writing took a back seat to my 40-year library career, which included higher degrees in English (Wheaton College, Illinois); Library Science from Rutgers University; and a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Along this journey I was fortunate to be appointed to increasingly responsible posts at The New York Public Library (clerk-typist to Assistant Editor of Library Publications); Librarian of Marlboro College (Vermont); Associate Librarian of the Newberry Library (Chicago); Milton S. Eisenhower Librarian, Johns Hopkins (Baltimore); a return to New York Public Library as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries of NYPL (1978-86), and finally before retirement, University Librarian of Syracuse University from 1986-98.

Significant before that time was two years’ service in the US Navy as a journalist, including many voyages in and about the Atlantic, a compelling visit to Antarctica, and a final assignment as librarian of the USS Galveston ashore in Philadelphia. The result was a lifetime obsession with the history of polar exploration, often in remission but seldom far from the surface. Retirement in 1998 brought liberation to read and write about what most mattered to me. With Deirdre’s collaboration, our work on reading in polar settings, Adventures in Polar Reading, was published by the Grolier Club in 2019, following our 2005 exhibition and catalog, Books on Ice. With many polar centennials occurring early this century, interest in the “Heroic Age” of Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, and others mushroomed among the public and specialists in all aspects of polar history.

My passion for reading such books remains, but reading them has become increasingly difficult. ALS is an auto-immune disease which interrupts the nerve commands that flow through the spinal cord to the appropriate muscles. My case has primarily involved the upper body—the pervasive atrophy of the arm muscles and the loss of strength in muscle activity, especially in the fingers and arms. I can’t lift heavy books and I have difficulty turning pages, lifting my arms to turn off reading lamps, and shifting to more comfortable positions.

. . . .

Almost everything with ALS takes more time, often twice as much as before: bathing, drying, dressing, eating, walking, exercising, writing, typing, sleeping itself, even reading. The assault on our reading ability is insidious: it distracts our attention, harms our concentration, destroys the rhythm of the prose and poetry, and the frequent involuntary nap requires re-reading to find the place to resume after falling asleep. There are a number of other factors that affect my reading of words in physical form. It’s a personal list, though I suspect several factors are widely shared.

Weight: In this era of mega-tomes, weight is an obvious problem. I need help positioning some books, usually with a homecare aide resting the book on a pillow. My four devices for holding books open don’t work with heavy books. Contributing to the problem is glossy calendared paper, often used for lustrous illustrated books. Reflections on the page require constant adjustment of the head, the page, and often the book itself, depending on weight, binding, and openability. None of this makes any kind of note taking easy or possible. I am currently being introduced to the technology of eye control to compose both written and spoken speech. After two training sessions I confess to feeling overwhelmed but hopeful of speeding up a slow process.

Openability: I divide books into three categories: one-, two-, and three-fisted. The first can lie flat, or open on a reading device, with easy page turning. The pages remain open while taking notes by hand (if possible) or a computer, on which I can still type. The second requires two hands to hold the work open, and turning pages is harder. The third, and most typical book format, is impossible for people with my kind of physical disability: a tightly bound perfect binding. “Perfect” is a euphemism for books whose sections (signatures) are evenly cut at the inner margins by guillotine. Then the pages are reattached by adhesives at the reduced inner margins, creating a strong but unreadable volume.

Notes: Endnotes in two- and three-fisted books go unread. Footnotes are preferable and needn’t always follow the convention of smaller font.

Margins: For disabled readers who retain handwriting ability, wider inner margins are a boon.

Type size: For people with visual disabilities and older readers, type size affects readability. Presses increasingly want more words per page, using smaller typefaces with tight line spacing.

Technology: In this case, the eBook is no salvation. Having spent much of my life reading in bed, I now find my arms too weak to hold a Kindle for more than a few seconds. More important is that digitized works don’t facilitate citations for retrieval purposes, lacking pagination amidst their changeable fonts and type sizes. The exception is the immense data bases of the HathiTrust and similar collections with page images and digitized equivalents of millions of books, easily read and copied on the desktop. They have enabled me to continue work long after my personal “Use By date.”

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

PG went through the long decline associated with ALS a number of years ago. It’s a terrible disease that slowly removes muscle control and strength from a sufferer’s body. When PG’s friend was in the hospital, he required help to do everything. He couldn’t adjust his pillow or move his hand where he wanted it to be.

The ALS Association is an excellent charity focused on finding a cure for this disease.

From Writer Unboxed:

When I do presentations and Q&As, I’m often asked to name the most common scheme or scam writers need to watch out for.

Usually, I have to think a moment before I answer—not just because the universe of writer-focused predation is constantly evolving (for instance, there are far fewer fee-charging literary agents now than there were when Writer Beware was founded), but because the ways in which writers can be tricked and exploited are so many and various that it’s hard to choose.

These days, though, I can respond without hesitation. By far the most prevalent writer-focused scams are solicitation scams.

Solicitation scammers contact writers out of the blue with publishing-related offers that seem too good to be true. A literary agency is interested in your work! A prestigious publisher wants to acquire your book! A film producer wants to turn your novel into a movie! A marketing company can expose you to millions of potential fans!

You know the old adage, though: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In reality, these offers are not about boosting your career or raising your profile. Whatever enticing carrot a solicitation scammer may dangle before you, the real aim is to get your money.

Solicitation scams and schemes are not new. Back in the days of snail mail, costly print vanity publisher Dorrance Publishing was notorious for soliciting submissions from copyright registration and magazine subscription lists. (Dorrance has re-tooled itself for the digital age, so its solicitations now come via email.)

Profiteering contest and awards programs have also long been prolific solicitors (for instance, J.M. Northern Media, which runs multiple high-entry-fee “festivals”), as have bogus Who’s Who registries. Predatory author mill Omniscriptum regularly solicits submissions to its many imprints, and if you write nonfiction, you may have been contacted by Close-up TV News, a pay-to-play “news” program that has been chasing customers for nearly two decades.

Over the past three years, though, the volume of solicitations has exploded, driven by a huge rise in publishing-related scams from overseas, and also by the pandemic, as in-person networking and marketing opportunities for writers have dwindled and online activity has increased. Self-published and small press authors are the solicitors’ favorite marks. But any writer can be a target.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG says, in the era of the internet, if you don’t write a solicitation similar to ones mentioned in the OP, search for the publisher/author/festival/etc. online. If they don’t show up anywhere, you have your answer.

If you want to go further search on the name of the enterprise+scam or +beware or +warning, etc.

If you’re self-published and your book has a Best Sellers Rank on Amazon in seven digits, you especially need to hold on to your money.

From Book Riot:

Following Texas lawmaker Matt Krause’s circulation of a list of 850 books he would like to see removed from schools, the Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler conducted a February 2022 survey of 1,188 registered voters (33% Democrat, 41% Republican, 26% neither) about various topics of Texas politics, including book bans.

In response to the question “How much do you trust the judgement of elected state leaders in reviewing what books are controversial and should be removed from K-12 schools?”, 27% replied that they either had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust. 27% said they had “not too much,” 38% had “no confidence,” and 8% said they didn’t have enough information.

In contrast, 45% had either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in librarians and school officials in this same review process. 24% said “not too much,” 23% said “no confidence,” and 7% said they didn’t know enough to answer.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

For visitors from outside the United States, there is more than a little turmoil in some US schools about new curricula that teach American history in ways substantially different than has been customary in the past. The primary motivation for the changes in curriculum materials in many cases is to teach about slavery in a different way than it has been taught before.

Traditionally, American history traditionally acknowledged that the principal cause of the American Civil War (1861-1865) was the attempt by the elected national representatives of states that prohibited slavery (Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, Nevada, and Oregon, collectively, the “Union”) to force the states that permitted slavery (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, collectively, the “Confederacy”) to abolish this practice.

In addition to the Northern States and the Southern States, there were also Border States (Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri). The Border states were located between the Northern and the Southern States and included some slaveholders, but also many residents who opposed slavery. None of the border states supported President Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election, but none seceded from the Union as did the Confederate States.

Many of the battles between the North and the South were fought in the Border States, particularly early in the war. In some of the border states that did not have North/South battles between the armies of the two combatants, there were extensive and destructive armed clashes between those who supported one side or the other. At times, these clashes were effectively a guerilla war that made little distinction between combatants and non-combatants.

The Northern states had a combined population of 22 million people. The Southern states had a combined population of about 9 million. The Northern states also included most of the industry in the country at the time while the Southern states were generally agrarian.

The disparity of wealth between the North and South was substantial. Farming which utilized slaves generated a great deal of wealth for the relatively small percentage who were slave-owners, but whites and former slaves who had been freed by their owners. While the Northern states had plenty of farmers, they were well along a path to employing a great many people in industrial companies.

The average per capita income in the North was about double the average per capita income in the South.

In short, if a non-involved individual from another country clearly understood the relative strengths of the Union and Confederacy prior to the war, there would have been little doubt about the military outcome.

As PG has mentioned before, the disproportionate cost in wealth and both military and civilian casualties resulted in the impoverishment of the Southern states and a significant share of their residents. This impoverishment continued for over one hundred years after the war and still remains in significant parts of the Southern and Border states.

Out of the 15 poorest states (ranked by the percentage of the population living in poverty) in 1999, 13 were former members of the Confederacy. Out of the 15 wealthiest states, 14 were former members of the Union and one, Maryland, was a deeply-divided border state which did not secede from the Union but did permit slavery.

While the definition of “racism” has become much more fluid during the past several years, PG suggests that the Civil War, which resulted in far, far more deaths and non-death causalities than the US suffered during the great wars of the Twentieth Century, is, ultimately, a definitive statement that the roots of the nation are built upon the idea than no persons, by virtue of their race, should be discriminated against or oppressed.

From Science News:

When British artist Harold Cohen met his first computer in 1968, he wondered if the machine might help solve a mystery that had long puzzled him: How can we look at a drawing, a few little scribbles, and see a face? Five years later, he devised a robotic artist called AARON to explore this idea. He equipped it with basic rules for painting and for how body parts are represented in portraiture — and then set it loose making art.

Not far behind was the composer David Cope, who coined the phrase “musical intelligence” to describe his experiments with artificial intelligence–powered composition. Cope once told me that as early as the 1960s, it seemed to him “perfectly logical to do creative things with algorithms” rather than to painstakingly draw by hand every word of a story, note of a musical composition or brush stroke of a painting. He initially tinkered with algorithms on paper, then in 1981 moved to computers to help solve a case of composer’s block.

Cohen and Cope were among a handful of eccentrics pushing computers to go against their nature as cold, calculating things. The still-nascent field of AI had its focus set squarely on solid concepts like reasoning and planning, or on tasks like playing chess and checkers or solving mathematical problems. Most AI researchers balked at the notion of creative machines.

Slowly, however, as Cohen and Cope cranked out a stream of academic papers and books about their work, a field emerged around them: computational creativity. It included the study and development of autonomous creative systems, interactive tools that support human creativity and mathematical approaches to modeling human creativity. In the late 1990s, computational creativity became a formalized area of study with a growing cohort of researchers and eventually its own journal and annual event.

. . . .

Soon enough — thanks to new techniques rooted in machine learning and artificial neural networks, in which connected computing nodes attempt to mirror the workings of the brain — creative AIs could absorb and internalize real-world data and identify patterns and rules that they could apply to their creations.

Computer scientist Simon Colton, then at Imperial College London and now at Queen Mary University of London and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, spent much of the 2000s building the Painting Fool. The computer program analyzed the text of news articles and other written works to determine the sentiment and extract keywords. It then combined that analysis with an automated search of the photography website Flickr to help it generate painterly collages in the mood of the original article. Later the Painting Fool learned to paint portraits in real time of people it met through an attached camera, again applying its “mood” to the style of the portrait (or in some cases refusing to paint anything because it was in a bad mood).

. . . .

During this era, Colton says, AIs began to look like creative artists in their own right — incorporating elements of creativity such as intentionality, skill, appreciation and imagination. But what followed was a focus on mimicry, along with controversy over what it means to be creative.

New techniques that excelled at classifying data to high degrees of precision through repeated analysis helped AI master existing creative styles. AI could now create works like those of classical composers, famous painters, novelists and more.

One AI-authored painting modeled on thousands of portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries sold for $432,500 at auction. In another case, study participants struggled to differentiate the musical phrases of Johann Sebastian Bach from those created by a computer program called Kulitta that had been trained on Bach’s compositions. Even IBM got in on the fun, tasking its Watson AI system with analyzing 9,000 recipes to devise its own cuisine ideas.

But many in the field, as well as onlookers, wondered if these AIs really showed creativity. Though sophisticated in their mimicry, these creative AIs seemed incapable of true innovation because they lacked the capacity to incorporate new influences from their environment. Colton and a colleague described them as requiring “much human intervention, supervision, and highly technical knowledge” in producing creative results. Overall, as composer and computer music researcher Palle Dahlstedt puts it, these AIs converged toward the mean, creating something typical of what is already out there, whereas creativity is supposed to diverge away from the typical.

. . . .

True creativity is a quest for originality. It is a recombination of disparate ideas in new ways. It is unexpected solutions. It might be music or painting or dance, but also the flash of inspiration that helps lead to advances on the order of light bulbs and airplanes and the periodic table. In the view of many in the computational creativity field, it is not yet attainable by machines.

In just the past few years, creative AIs have expanded into style invention — into authorship that is individualized rather than imitative and that projects meaning and intentionality, even if none exists. For Colton, this element of intentionality — a focus on the process, more so than the final output — is key to achieving creativity. But he wonders whether meaning and authenticity are also essential, as the same poem could lead to vastly different interpretations if the reader knows it was written by a man versus a woman versus a machine.

Link to the rest at Science News and thanks to F. for the tip.

PG suggests that it may be difficult for many individuals to distinguish between “true creativity” and derivative works based on prior creative projects.