"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.

"He saw his reputation tarnished when he pleaded guilty to a morals charge involving a minor."

A sad subheadline to the headline that, otherwise would have elicited a fond goodbye: "Peter Yarrow, troubadour of Peter, Paul and Mary folk trio, dies at 86" (WaPo).

Let's go back to simpler times, 1965:

ADDED: From Wikipedia:

"We lived in total poverty. We were bathing in the lake. Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books."

"And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week."

Said Anne DeLisle, the English pop singer who married Cormac McCarthy in 1966 and lived with him for "nearly 8 years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville."

Quoted in "Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89/'All the Pretty Horses,' 'The Road' and 'No Country for Old Men' were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders" (NYT).

"Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky."

"The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female. Charlotte Brontë wrote 'Jane Eyre'; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now...."

From "Overlooked/Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we're adding the stories of 15 remarkable women." (NYT). Among the omitted are Diane Arbus, who died in 1971. You'd think by 1971, the NYT would have caught up to the idea that women are people. But perhaps the fame of Diane Arbus was slow-developing, mostly post-death.  I was, at first, struck by the failure to do an obituary for Sylvia Plath, but she died in 1963, and I think it's pretty clear in that case that her fame arrived posthumously, perhaps because women's-movement proponents were working to elevate stories about women.

Yes, we the general public got to know Arbus because of a book of her work that came out in 1972 (a year after her death), and Sylvia Plath got big because of "The Bell Jar," which was published in 1971, 8 years after her death. And both Arbus and Plath committed suicide. As the NYT says in its late-arriving obituary for Plath, "Because the death was a suicide, Plath’s family did not much advertise it...." If someone who is not already quite famous commits suicide, I'm guessing, obituaries are rare, even for white men.

As for obituaries like the one for the man who invented Stove Top stuffing and the man who named the Slinky, they don't stand for the proposition that men don't have to do much to get a NYT obituary. They stand for the NYT practice of doing quirky obituaries for people with interestingly specific accomplishments. These are a wonderful sub-genre in the NYT, some of the most fun reading the newspaper offers. Don't diminish these obituaries as evidence of sex discrimination. I love those things, and they're often about women.

Here's an article from last year about a documentary about writing obituaries in the NYT:

Writing fast or slow.

Robert A. Caro, in a new interview in the New York Review of Books:

My first three or four drafts are handwritten on legal pads. For later drafts, I use a typewriter. I write by hand to slow myself down. People don’t believe this about me: I’m a very fast writer, but I want to write slowly.

When I was a student at Princeton. I took a creative writing course with the literary critic R.P. Blackmur. Every two weeks, I’d give him a short story I’d produced usually at the last minute. At the end of the semester, he said some complimentary words about my writing, and then added, “Mr. Caro, one thing is going to keep you from achieving what you want—you think with your fingers.”

Later, in the early 1960s when I was at Newsday, my speed was a plus. But when I started rewriting The Power Broker, I realized I wasn’t thinking deeply enough. I said, “You have to slow yourself down.” That’s when I remembered Blackmur’s admonition and started drafting by hand, which slows me down.

Relive the old-time frustration of typing on a real typewriter.

Here. I did:



Click to enlarge.

Via Metafilter, where someone bemoans the lack of simulation of the keys jamming when you hit 2 at the same time.

The Badgers and the stenographer.

Those with skills appreciate skills, and because they are Badgers, they appreciate them adorably:

But seriously - have you ever seen the magical powers of a stenographer? pic.twitter.com/36exonv2CG

— Wisconsin Basketball (@BadgerMBB) March 21, 2015

"It's kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer."

"It" = a Hermes 3000 typewriter, "surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius."

The quote is from Larry McMurtry, on the occasion of winning the Golden Globe award for the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." I'm reading that, from 2006, because I just got around, after all these years to making a Larry McMurtry tag for this blog. I dislike tag proliferation, and I avoid making a tag for individuals unless I think they'll be used a few times. It turned out there were 4 old posts with Larry McMurtry's name in them.

The other 3 are:

1. Larry McMurtry effusing over Diane Keaton: "She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

2. Larry McMurtry answering questions from a NYT interviewer, including ""What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?" Answer:

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

3. Here's the good, timelessly timely one: "Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book." Clinton is Bill Clinton, and the book is "My Life." Let's go back and read what McMurtry banged out on his juicy Hermes 3000 back in 2004:

Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for bedroom sports, but not much time. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may be three of the nicest ladies in America, but their "conquest," however we are to understand that term, does not make Clinton the world's No. 1 ladies' man, or even the No. 1 ladies' man of northwest Washington....

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president....

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved.

Haptics...

"... is a field of study that explores the relationship between visual perception and sensorimotor activity."

Mangen and Velay's [2010 report, "Digitizing Literacy"] delved into the implications of switching from writing by hand — a unimanual activity, in which our focus is on the very spot on a page where we're shaping letters we've practiced and memorized — to typing, a bimanual activity, which involves splitting our attention between keyboard and page, and in which "readymade" characters appear on the page with a percussive thrust of a finger.

The transition comes at a cost.

"Without the sign, without the context, I definitely look like someone who is a bit insane."

"That’s how I thought of it, before I clicked to look at the hundreds of replies; I figured people were probably wondering why I would bring my typewriter to a park."

"Has the typewriter remained in use because of me... or am I still around because of the typewriter?"

Obituary for a typewriter repairman. Manson Whitlock was 96.

Now that we're talking about the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," we must take note of Ayn Rand.

We were talking about "King of Kings," because we were talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand, because various blogs were talking about an Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to carry out a stoning. I started to wonder whether the first commenter who mentioned "King of Kings" was talking about the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille picture or the 1961 Nicholas Ray flick. So I'm over here on the King of Kings (1927 film) page at Wikipedia, and I see:

Sally Rand, before becoming notorious for her "fan dance" at the 1933 World's Fair, was an extra in the film.

Ayn Rand (no relation to Sally Rand) also was an extra in the film, and met her future husband Frank O'Connor on set.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip of Ayn Rand in "King of Kings," but I did find Sally Rand and her notorious World's Fair fan dance:



I also found this 2009 New Yorker article about Ayn Rand that covers the "King of Kings" phase:

Rand... left the U.S.S.R. for America.... Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing.... Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.”....

How do you feel about all those connections? The Soviet Union, the love of movies, immigration to the land of movies, name-changing, finding the love of your life on a movie set in Hollywood, strippers performing what is only the illusion of nakedness, and... Jesus.

At the Writer's Café...

... why is there no 1 here?

"People treasure old, weird typewriters. But you throw out a computer..."

"... and it’s gone. It’s sitting in a pile of toxic rubble in India."

"What songs other than 'Leader of the Pack' have the sound of a motor revving?"

A question I asked Google this morning a propos of List-a-Beefy's "I don't get Leader of the Pack. I just don't." Not get "Leader of the Pack"? This immense aficionado of pop songs doesn't get "Leader of the Pack"? I don't get it. Maybe it's the motor revving:

According to legend, to add the authentic sound of a motorcycle engine, one was driven through the lobby of the hotel and up to the floor of the recording studio. No one was arrested, but a ticket was issued. However, in an interview four decades later, Shangri-Las lead singer Mary Weiss said the motorcycle sound was taken from an effects record. The Zombies' drummer Hugh Grundy recalls revving up a motorcycle backstage when the Shangri-Las performed on a U.S. tour.

By the way, if you combine their hairstyles into one hairstyle, you get Amy Winehouse.

Anyway, I'm looking for more songs with motor revving. Google didn't really help. Poking around in YouTube for car songs was a better method. I tried "Dead Man's Curve" and "Little Cobra," then got successful with "409."

Help me generate the definitive list of songs with motor revving sound effects. And express whatever opinions you have about sound effects in songs. It's a tradition that presumably predates recorded music... and perhaps even musical instruments. A classic early example — the not that early — is "The Typewriter":



I'd like to see a video synthesizing "Leader of the Pack" and "The Typewriter." I'd call it "Leader of the Nerds." You have the girl singing about falling in love, the parents breaking up the relationship, and the kiss before dying routine, but the boyfriend is a nerd, not a Brandoesque rebel, and the sound effect is a typewriter.

"Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period."

I'm so relieved to have this in writing!

Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.

The typewriter is so romantic.

Last night I dreamed that I went to class — as a student — and found that at my place, there was a manual typewriter. What did that mean? Going back to school, to old things... my obsolescence... a desire to get my hands on writing...

Today, I see — via Boing Boing — Rick Poyner's "In Memoriam" to his manual typewriter:

... I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter. Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms. Even now (but for how much longer?) a typewriter is the icon to show if you want to convey the idea of a dedicated literary life....

The point, of course, is that the computer has never been a dedicated writing tool — writing is the least of it — and everyone uses them....

Actually, I remember, in the early '80s, when secretaries had big computer-looking things on their desks that were called "word processors"... but I know what you mean....

They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.

Not a shred of romance? I've seen an incredibly romantic photograph of a man with a laptop — a laptop called "Cupid’s bow" — under his arm.

So what are your typewriter memories? Romantic stuff, please. Anything equally romantic with computers? Obviously, you can use a computer to get to real, in-the-flesh human beings, and you can do it quickly... like: right now. With the typewriter, it will be you and the inanimate object for a long time, and that, perhaps, is why we see the romance in the thing. The typewriter is as romantic as a lonely room.

Penmanship and nonverbatim notes.

As I finish up grading exams, which are nearly all handwritten -- almost no one uses a typewriter and computers aren't permitted for exams here -- my heart lifts to see this article about the newly rekindled interest in teaching good handwriting! For years, everyone has just assumed that handwriting had gone into hopeless decline, that the hands of our youths had adapted to keyboards and would scarcely know how to hold a pen soon enough. What is the cause of this glorious, historic turnaround?

NOTHING, though, supplied such a jolt to the handwriting cause as the advent of the new Scholastic Aptitude Test. In the version being introduced this March, each student must write a 25-minute essay. And that essay, unlike the answers to the SAT's multiple-choice questions, will be read and rated by two genuine human beings, as Nan Barchowsky was quick to remind a class at Harford Day School.

"Do you know anything about the SAT's?" she asked, and the hands of these ambitious children predictably rose. "The people who'll grade those essays won't have any time to decipher illegibility. Scary thought, isn't it?" She paused. "And you're probably going to be taking notes for the rest of your lives. I don't know anybody who works on a computer and doesn't also have a pad nearby."

Ms. Barchowsky could add that they might want to go to law school some day. And then there's our new era of hotly contested post-election disputes:

As The Journal News in Westchester County recently reported, a judge disqualified ballots in a tightly contested State Senate race because he could not read the signatures.

Here's something else in the penmanship article that caught my eye:

In high school and college, any student without a 24/7 laptop cannot hope to keep accurate notes on a lecture course. Kate Gladstone, a handwriting specialist based in Albany, estimates that while a student needs to jot down 100 legible words a minute to follow a typical lecture, someone using print can manage only 30. "That's fine for class," she said, "if the class is first grade."

If my students are taking notes at that rate in my 3 credit law school courses, that means their set of notes for the course would be 220,000 words long. That's about 500 pages! The handwritten notes would be 66,000 or about 150 pages (in typescript). Isn't there some advantage to summarizing in your head as you write as opposed to speedtyping close to verbatim? The student with more voluminous notes has a big task ahead compressing those notes into a form that can be studied. The student who had to think to compress while writing in class has saved all that time and, if he is doing a good job of taking concise notes, will have absorbed the material better while writing, because you need to understand things at the time in order to phrase the notes concisely. Verbatim notetakers can get by thinking I'll figure out what this means later, but later, you've got those horrendously voluminous notes to deal with. And the notes actually won't be verbatim, just close to verbatim, so they may be quite puzzling. You may read it later and say to yourself: I know the teacher said that or approximately that, but what did it mean? Sometimes a student will come to my office and read something from his or her notes and ask me what it means, and it's too late to make sense of it. Being able to take down words nearly verbatim may give you a comfortable feeling that you've got everything there and you'll be able to get to it later. But will you?

UPDATE: Washington University School of Law lawprof Samuel Bagenstos writes:

Although I can't say I always agree with your comments, I am a frequent reader of your blog. I have to say that today I read something with which I completely agree. Why are so many students wedded to verbatim note-taking? I want my classes to be a conversation, where we work our way through difficult issues (and work our way through how to *think* about difficult issues). I don't want my classes to be a monologue, where I talk and they dutifully write down my words. (The only exception: At the beginning of each class I usually spend about five minutes lecturing in a way that recapitulates and synthesizes the previous day's discussion.) I want my students to think critically about the assigned reading and what I and their classmates say about it. They can't do that when they're trying desperately to get down every word I say. Anyway, virtually nobody I know talks in such a way that every word is precisely chosen and essential to the point. Among law profs who come to my mind, the only person who talks that way is Erwin Chemerinsky. When a student writes down my words verbatim, the words take on a kind of oracular quality in the student's mind. The student often spends undue time puzzling through hermeneutic questions about what that text means, when really there was nothing special about the particular words I was using. (You can see, I've had the same students-coming-to-my-office experience as you.)