Tag Archives: Paul Auster

Creative Humans

A jazz concert in Menton, France – nothing unusual about that. The band, a local group called La Compagnie So What, had an average age of about 70 – nothing unusual about that either.

What was unusual was my sudden awareness of the humanness of it all.

A couple of days earlier I’d been at a café with friends, where AI dominated the conversation. All the wonderful, unnerving things these systems can already do, and the even more astonishing things they’ll soon do. We traded stories – some shocking, some impressive – about AI producing creative work that we humans once considered uniquely ours. Novels, songs, poems, photographs, drawings – entire bodies of work generated ‘creatively’ from human-made inputs, human instructions, and human precedents, yet often faster and, disturbingly, sometimes ‘better.’

And then there I was at the concert. The bass player was wearing a hearing aid. The ensemble itself was delightfully odd – not the usual piano-led quartet, but bass clarinet, guitar, double bass, and a trumpet/flugelhorn player.   For one song the audience was asked to crumble up newspapers on cue to fill in for the missing percussions. Would an algorithm come up with such as innovation if it were not directed by a human? That is, if it were an agent and not just a tool?

As John Naughton of The Observer recently pointed out, as AI platforms become increasingly error-averse, they gravitate toward popular, heavily replicated data. The end result is often bland. That’s fine for writing emails but far less promising for creative work. To put this is jazz terms, an AI produced concert would have been heavy on Ellington, Gershwin and Sinatra classics – safe choices for jazz dabblers and newbies. At the concert I attended, the choice of music included three pieces by the band members and another by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian composer, beloved by jazz aficionados but hardly mainstream. No typical AI platform would have selected that playlist.

I heard the film director Paul Schrader speaking on the FRDH Podcast, describing how when he couldn’t hire actors for a controversial film, he created it with AI instead. Despite taking advantage of this technology, he warns, ‘We are the tool and it is the tool master.’ His blunt conclusion is, ‘The AI future is bad.’

I do hope this isn’t true, and that humans are able to retain our creative experiences, both in making art and in receiving it, in the messy, innovative ways only humans can.

What I’ve been reading

Written before the launch of OpenAI, John Auster’s Leviathan is definitely human made, full of the nuance and layered characterisations we would expect from a solid writer of literary fiction. The story’s narrator is a writer, Peter Aaron, who learns that a fellow writer and friend Benjamin Sachs had become a terrorist who accidently killed himself with one of his own bombs. Before the police reveal Sach’s identity, Peter is compelled to set the record straight by recounting Benjamin’s life story as he discovered it through their 15-year friendship. The novel unfolds through their entanglements with women, the accidents that shape their paths, and the choices that follow – a study of personal psychology, identity, and the fragile, unpredictable nature of creativity.

Adele Myer’s The Tobacco Wives was recommended by a friend as one of those word-of-mouth hits in her Florida community. Set in late‑1940s North Carolina, the story takes place in a town effectively owned by a vast tobacco company – a thinly veiled R.J. Reynolds. We see it through the eyes of a 15-year-old seamstress who is temporarily staying with her aunt and making couture dresses for the wives of the tobacco executives. It soon becomes obvious that this is a fictional exposé of the dangers of tobacco production for the workers and more importantly the coverup surrounding the health risks in smoking, especially for pregnant women. The focus on post-war women as labourers and consumers makes this novel worthwhile. As for the writing, it isn’t literary fiction, and at times I could see the seams (no pun intended) between characters and their plot functions. Occasionally the prose felt rather bland. AI‑assisted? Who’s to say.

Preparing for Winter

This weekend, we turn the clocks back. Ten days later, the US has its presidential election. These two events are bumping into each other in my brain’s anxiety lobe.

My David anticipates the clocks going back with a sense of dread. He pulls faces – the emoji with his eyes squinted, a tongue half out. David suffers from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), which is at its worse when we find ourselves in England in the winter months. I’m not so affected by the onset of winter. This is because I grew up in Chicago, where winter meant snowmen, ice skating, mittens drying on the radiator while our hands cradled cups of hot chocolate. That’s not to say I haven’t experienced that greyscale world of depression, but my occasional bouts of it have not been linked to the seasons of shorter days. They’re simply not linked to anything. Nevertheless, sharing a life together, David’s clouds of SAD cover my head as well.

Psychologist Kari Leibowitz has observed that contrary to popular belief, people who live in Scandinavian countries do not have high rates of SAD. Their prevalence of the winter blues is among the lowest in Western countries. This is because Scandinavians embrace the winter months with outdoor festivals, activities and sports and indoor candlelight gatherings with friends and family. That is, our moods and feelings towards winter have a lot to do with our mindsets (as this former Chicagoan knows). Leibowitz explains:

‘…we might have a mindset that winter is limiting or that it is full of opportunity, dreadful or delightful. We conflate the objective circumstances – that winter is cold, dark and wet – with subjective things, like it being gloomy, boring and depressing, when you could just as easily make the case that it is cosy, magical and restorative.’ (from an interview in The Observer )

Leibowitz makes a good point, not only for the onset of winter, but for anything. Our mindsets can predispose us to how we experience situations and events. In this vein, while David is dreading the 26th of October, I’m fearing the 6th of November. Yes, the US election is on the 5th, but given the time difference, the results won’t trickle in until the following day here in Europe. I’m not looking forward to learning that either America will soon have the MAGA version of fascism or that Harris has won, and the Tr*mp/Musk ticket reacts with inciting riots and cyber-pandemonium. Both could ripple  disastrously across the States (another civil war is no longer the stuff of dystopic fiction) and across the world in ways ranging from the environmental to the geopolitical. Of course, logic tells me that other scenarios might occur – American politics is never short on surprises. But that’s not found in the anxiety lobe.

Taking Leibowitz’s advice, I’ve suggested to David that he ‘resets his mindset’ for the weeks we’re in the UK after the clocks go back and before we migrate to France for the winter, starting with evenings of candlelight to soften the mood. We are also planning nights at the cinema, concerts and book talks, along with socialising at our local pubs.

As for resetting my own mindset, my version of candlelight is found in meditation and practicing mindfulness as each new disturbing situation emerges from America. In seeking the ‘delightful,’ to use Leibowitz’s word, I can look forward to the social and political satire in the months and years ahead.

What I’ve been reading

The last two novels I’ve read do not use quotation marks when characters are speaking. This meant careful reading at times to distinguish thoughts from dialogue, but in both cases this style of writing was effective. The first was Sandrine Collette’s On Était des Loups (avail. in English), a dark novel about a hunter who lives in the wilderness with his wife and child until the wife is brutally killed by a bear. He reacts by setting  out on a journey through the mountains and forests with his son in order to find a more appropriate home for the boy, the five-year-old he barely knows and didn’t want in the first place. Both live in the haze of trauma and grief left from the bear attack and deal with it in their own contrasting ways. Like the winter months, light moments can be found flickering in the gloom through character study interwoven with nature writing. A strangely life-affirming novel.

By sheer coincidence on my part, Paul Auster’s Baumgartner is also about a man whose wife had a premature death. When the story starts, he’s nearing retirement, and his wife has been dead for a decade. Set in the town of Princeton, Baumgartner is a professor of phenomenology who encounters falling in love again and incidences, such as falling down the stairs, against the backdrop of the loss of his wife. Without quotation marks getting in the way, the descriptive narrative, blends in beautifully with Baumgartner’s philosophical and mundane thoughts.

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes is an absorbing account of the British ceramicist’s family history, traced through the ownership of Japanese figurines, called netsuke. These objects were brought to Europe by art collector Charles Ephrussi of the well-known banking family. Years later, he gave the 200 plus netsuke as a wedding gift to his cousin in Vienna, who later had her money and possessions confiscated by the Nazis. De Waal’s descriptions of the acts of antisemitism are chilling. Luckily, while Nazi soldiers occupied the family home, a housekeeper saved the tiny figurines by hiding them in her mattress. Eventually, they’re returned to the Ephrussi’s and inherited by de Waal. This work has inspired me to read more biographies about artists. De Waal mentions the works and lives of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists linked to his family, including Berthe Morisot, whose paintings and drawings I saw  recently at an exhibition in Nice. I’m now reading a biography of her by Dominique Bona. There’s something about the connected world of artists and writers in France at the end of the 19th century and into the early twentieth that makes me wish I lived at that time (though not as a woman).