"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

The de-normalization of "normal."

I'm reading "Maker of Dove Soap Will Drop the Word ‘Normal’ From Beauty Products/Unilever.... said a study had found that the word 'normal' makes most people feel excluded" (NYT).

The study found that 56 percent of participants thought that the beauty industry could make people feel excluded, and that as many as seven in 10 people agreed that the word “normal” on products and in advertising had negative effects. That figure rose to eight in 10 for people between the ages of 18 and 35.... 

The changes were long overdue and “completely necessary” after last year’s worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations, said Ateh Jewel, a beauty journalist and an advisory board member of the British Beauty Council, an organization that represents the British beauty industry. “Saying the word ‘normal’ has been used to set you apart,” Ms. Jewel said. “I am normal. My dark skin is normal. My juicy West African curvy body is normal. Everything about me is normal.... Words are powerful and we’re so used to having this unconscious bias.... It just washes over us. We don’t even realize what we’re saying because we’ve been spoon-fed racism."

In this light, "normal" is not a bad word, to be avoided. It's a concept that demands more attention. If the position in the middle is called "normal," then it makes it sound as though the other positions on the continuum are defective. Even if the other positions are less healthy — such as oily or dry skin compared to "normal" skin — why be unpleasant about it by creating the inference that they are abnormal? 

It's pretty normal to have dry skin or oily skin and actually unusual to think you have normal skin! I can remember shopping for some skin product and having the sales person ask me if I had dry or oily skin and when I answered "normal," she rejected the answer. It just didn't compute. Surely, I lean one way or the other. Or maybe I have "combination" skin with a "T-zone." 

If I understand Ateh Jewel correctly, she would like to free up the word "normal" so it can be used across a wider array of possibilities. But what word do you use for the middle position? 

"Hormones don't make me cry any more or less, but now my emotions feel normal -- unmuted, not suppressed."

"My health insurance covers the cost of hormones and sex reassignment surgery, if I choose that. It doesn't cover facial feminization surgery, which some say is even more important to mental health, and even physical safety. I avoid using the restroom in public, when I can.... Many parents are concerned about their girls using the same restroom with an adult trans woman in public. I understand the source of the fear. We want children to be safe from danger, perceived or real, but I know of no trans woman who has ever attacked anyone in a restroom. Sadly, transgender folks get attacked, plenty."

From "One transgender woman's long road to finding herself" at CNN.com.

I'm interested in that argument about health insurance. The writer is saying, directly or implicitly, that "facial feminization surgery" should be covered in order to allay the (unjustified) fears of others and because of the transgender person's vulnerability to attack.

But I was most interested in the quote that I put in the post title: "Hormones don't make me cry any more or less, but now my emotions feel normal — unmuted, not suppressed." Are complex emotions abnormal? I can see preferring free-flowing, stronger emotion, but is it necessary to disparage the original feeling as abnormal? I know, the phrase was "feel normal." But I'm questioning the centrality of this idea of the normal. But I suspect this is the language of drug prescription generally. You can get a psychotropic drug from a doctor to only to get you to "normal," not to get you high or as an escape from life's complexity. Is this all too medical? Why isn't there more talk of personal freedom and self-definition and creativity and invention? Because the ethics of doctors are central? Because insurance coverage is desired?

I looked up the word "normal" (in the OED). The first definition is: "Constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, conventional." Is that what we want to be these days? It used to be what we wanted to get beyond — conformity. And, funnily enough, the third definition is: "Heterosexual." With these 3 examples:

1914   E. M. Forster Maurice (1971) xxii. 106   Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it.
1972   T. Keneally Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith v. 38   Of course, Jimmie knew, Farrell was not normal and had once begun to caress him.
1990   Lesbian & Gay Pride 11/4   Back west in a long standing ‘normal’ society like old Blighty, many lesbian or gay teachers go in fear of exposure.

Andrew Sullivan called his 1995 book "Virtually Normal." Here he is, back in 1995, explaining why he used those words: Half the people will object to the word "virtually" and half will object to the word "normal." And I observe that there are 2 completely different reasons to object to "normal."

And here's Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan lyrics from half a century ago pop up unbidden in my possibly not too oversimplified mind:

I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you

Hey, I have a tag for "normal." Cool.

"Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news."

That's from Chapter 6. I'm getting used to these F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences (as I continue with this Gatsby project, taking one sentence out of context every day). Each one — so far — has a little narrative arc, with perhaps a missing center or a surprising ending. In today's sentence, we see a process of inflation and then deflation.

"Gatsby’s notoriety" — Gatsby has fame. He's big. We begin this sentence with bigness. The word "notoriety" tends to refer to a negative sort of fame. For example, E.M. Forster, in "Room with a View," wrote: "Mrs. Honeychurch... would abandon every topic to inveigh against those women who (instead of minding their houses and their children) seek notoriety by print." Imagine what she would think about blogger ladies. 

But back to Gatsby. He's got notoriety — which is bigness — and it spreads. It gets bigger.

It is spread about by the hundreds — now the sense of inflation comes not in the form of the great Gatsby but the hundreds, the horde of people. Who are they? They are the ones who "had accepted his hospitality," so there's an inference of big parties. In moving from Gatsby to the hundreds, we see a transaction occurring. Gatsby is giving hospitality and getting fame-spreading. The fame comes in the form that he wants. It's a joke to say that these people are "authorities on his past." Drawn to his parties, they got loaded with the stories he wanted told. He plied them, got them drunk with an illusion of authority, which motivates them to spread Gatsby's PR. And they spread it successfully because of their belief in the stories they are telling. The hundreds desire inflated size too, and if they are authorities, they have it, and they seem to love to go about in the world, flaunting their bigness, even as they are dupes for Gatsby, increasing his notoriety.

Notice the progression of -ity/-ety words in the sentence: notoriety, hospitality, authority. There's poetry to the sound alone, but the similarity of these words makes us feel a logic to the mechanism operating here. Hospitality promotes authority and thus notoriety.

We finally arrive at the verb of this sentence: increased. If we were diagramming this sentence, we'd build around notoriety | increased. The bigness got bigger. We've arrived at the peak of the narrative arc, where we get to stay all summer until — "until" is the word that warns of change — he fell. He fell! We are plummeting into the back end of this arc. He fell just short. Where's our bigness now? We get our 2 jarring smallness words: fell and short. And now we arrive at the punchline: just short of being news.

He was so big, he had his hundreds and his notoriety — increasing all summer — but in the end, how big was he? He didn't break the surface of the public consciousness. He wasn't news.

Danny Boyle has declined a knighthood.

He's about being "an equal citizen," he says.

Who else has declined a knighthood? Among others:

David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer

Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."

The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?

Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.

Said Thomas Paine.

The horrible Mr. Wead.

I'm officially abandoning my theory that Bush knew Douglas Wead was taping him -- because things have gone so badly for Mr. Wead:

Mr. Wead has appeared on several television news and talk shows to defend his actions, insisting several times that he had never sought to profit from the tapes and had decided to release some of them only after the president's re-election.

"My thanks to those who have let me share my heart and regrets about recent events," Mr. Wead wrote in the statement, posted on his Web site Wednesday. "Contrary to a statement that I made to The New York Times, I know very well that personal relationships are more important than history."

That statement itself is a lame formulation of what Wead had to have learned from his long twisting in the wind. What he learned -- and he's too much of a weasel to put it straightforwardly -- is how deeply wrong it is to betray a friend for personal gain.

Are personal relationships more important than history? That question calls to mind a famous movie quote: "[I]t doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Many virtuous people have sacrificed personal relationships because they understood that there were historical matters of greater importance.

Here's Wead regrouping his thoughts:

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Mr. Wead, sounding noticeably fatigued, said he decided to change course because of "the perception that I have tried to exploit the tapes and make money off of it and hurt the president and had all kinds of agendas."

"This seems like the best thing to show that isn't the case," he said.

"Nobody believes my story that I saw him as a figure of history," Mr. Wead said with exasperation. "I guess I have got a story that is unbelievable to people."

Oh, no one believed his story? We all formed a "perception" about his motives -- which was wrong because those motives in fact were so unbelievably lofty. We imagined his mind worked like that of an ordinary person -- an ordinary person with a book to sell and a publicity gimmick and the ear of the NYT.

Yeah, and we don't believe that either, Mr. Wead.

UPDATE: Regarding my question "Are personal relationships more important than history?" Richard Lawrence Cohen -- AKA my ex-husband -- emails:

E. M. Forster famously said, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." That comment, although collected in the 1951 TWO CHEERS FOR DEMOCRACY (the essay is "What I Believe"), is often seen today as emblematic of the mentality of prewar middle-class British appeasers.

Strangely, as I was in the middle of writing this update, I opened an email from the Conlawprof list and saw that someone was offering this very E.M. Forster quote about a completely different subject. Just a coincidence I guess, or are people thinking a lot about betrayal these days.

ANOTHER UPDATE: For more on coincidences, read this recent post of mine and click on the last link.

"All for the joy of writing."

Ruth Franklin writes in TNR (it's a review of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," but I'm not addressing that):

As a professional who almost never writes anything without getting paid, I am continually amazed that the Internet is full of people who sit down at their computers every day and send out thoughtful commentary on politics, books, music, even grammar--all for the joy of writing. There are plenty of swine amid the pearls, but the case could be made that blogs constitute the contemporary revival of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commonplace books--journals of sorts in which people would collect and comment on passages from their reading, with the difference that blogs enrich the experience by inviting commentary from others.

As a professional who talks for a living, I am continually amazed that the world is full of people yammering away all for the sheer pleasure of expressing themselves. Nah! Obviously, people (some of us) live in words--spoken, or written or swirling around in our heads. What else can we do? (I say rhetorically, not soliciting suggestions.)

Oh, and of course blogs are like commonplace books. I've always liked commonplace books: here's one by E.M. Forster that I keep on the desk in my bedroom.