2023
21 Pen Questions
In May, Ana over at The Well-Appointed Desk asked #21PenQuestions and provided her answers to all of them. I haven’t written about my pens here, but I thought that these questions might be a good way to start! I had a lot of fun thinking through my answers. It’s not often I think critically about my (too many?) fountain pens and how or why I use what I use. We choose the things we use intentionally. Why not think about them just a little bit?
Let’s roll.
What I Read in June 2023
We’re halfway through the year, which is somehow a surprising thing. Time moves slow-quick these days, I find. The StoryGraph tells me I’ve read 65 books so far this year, which puts me just a little ways behind the pace I need to set in order to reach 135 books, which is my goal for the year. That’s okay! 135 was always aspirational. At the moment, the point is just to keep reading. I still feel like I’m being spurred on by all the books I wasn’t able to read in grad school. I’ve said this before, but it is a strange thing to feel stuck a little in program that asks you to read. I’m kind of gulping books now, whether I should or not? But I love how it feels to be able to read again and I’ll enjoy it while I have the time. Opening a new book feels wonderful, like opening a little world, and I want to absolutely revel in that feeling while I’ve got it.
Reach out if you’d like — the links are in the sidebar — or follow me on The StoryGraph. As always, I’m happy to hear from you.
A Brief Interview With Your Host
It’s great to get to talk to you, Ian.
Likewise! I’m glad to be here.
You’re an academic librarian, right?
Yes. It’s a job that gives me the opportunity to learn a ton! I’ve always been an enthusiastic consumer of any kind of information and one of the best things about my work is that students and faculty arrive with questions about things I haven’t had the chance to learn about or think about before. This past semester I had a number of questions from students working on theater history projects, which was a lot of fun!
So, you blog now. Tell me about that.
I like writing and I needed something that would drive me to write a little more frequently. It’s easy, as I’m sure you know, to get distracted by tasks other than writing. The blog makes it easier to set a schedule for myself. Feeding it regularly and giving it posts is a motivator in a way that, say, filling a notebook is not.
The Smile - “Bending Hectic”
I wrote last year about The Smile’s “The Smoke,” a song I spent a lot of time with off an album I absolutely loved. The Smile is a Radiohead … what? Side project? Spinoff? Is it Radiohead now? It is a band that contains Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, both of Radiohead, but also a jazz drummer, Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet. So maybe a bit of all those things. Regardless, it is not unfair, I think, to say that A Light for Attracting Attention, The Smile’s debut record, felt like a continuation of Radiohead’s most recent album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. That record struck a balance between the electronics of 2011’s The King of Limbs and the (relatively) straightforward rock of 2007’s In Rainbows. A Light for Attracting Attention does the same thing, making space for electronics while also allowing Yorke, Greenwood, and Skinner to find their version of a groove. That’s the version of the Radiohead universe that works best for me, the version that tries to experiment without losing touch with the real organic strengths the musicians bring.
American Smiles
On Friday, I attended the Lake Superior Libraries Symposium, a very fun little library conference. My favorite presentation was given by Nancy Sims, copyright librarian at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, who gave a fantastic summary of so many of the ethical and legal issues surrounding generative AI at the moment. Nancy pointed to “AI and the American Smile,” an article by Jenka Gurfinkel that points to generative AI as a tool that has the potential to be a force for the homogenization of culture:
In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions. As we increasingly seek our own likenesses in AI reflections, what does it mean for the distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions to become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset? In the AI-generated visual future, will we know that Native Americans didn’t smile for photos like WW2 U.S. Navy Officers?
The article makes a few missteps (the American Indian men in the photos from the 19th century are likely not smiling because exposure times were longer then, something the author acknowledges in the comments), but I agree with the broader point. We know that the United States already has an outsized presence on the web. What happens when AI trained on American-centric training data is thrown into the mix?
I'm sure not everything about AI will be bad. I'm sure there are real benefits to be had! I won't, though, pretend to be excited about it. So much of what I love about our world comes from difference, from opportunities to learn and experience new things. I don't want to lose any of that.