Assorted Thoughts
31 for 31
I’m turning 31 this year, a number I have a surprising number of feelings about. In recognition, if not celebration, of the occasion, please enjoy 31 songs from 1992. 31 for 31. No, these songs don’t represent 1992 perfectly. I hope, though, that they capture some of what made that year compelling and complicated musically. I also hope they capture some of what I love about the music of 1992. There’s a little metal, though little of it from bands in their prime. (Bolt Thrower is probably the exception there. Or Darkthrone?) There's a little rap, a little R&B, a little country, one song from a musical. There’s a little bit of everything, I suppose. That’s what I want, I think. A little bit of everything with a solid dose of decent riffs thrown in for good measure. Horns up and, as self-congratulatory as this is, here’s to (at least) 31 more years, to more music and complication and wonder.
I Love Things By Examining Them
From Molly Templeton’s most recent Mark as Read column for Tor.com:
This is how I love things: by examining them. Some things, I want to look more closely at than others. Some I just want to bask in. Some I want to pick up and carry over to every friend I think will understand, to hold them out and say: Here. Try this. I know it’s a whole book and it takes longer than trying a bite of something. Trust me. Please? Or: Can I tell you the seventy-six reasons why this is the best thing I have ever experienced, or at least I think it is at this particular moment in time?
Molly Templeton’s writing for Tor.com is generally great, but this week’s column really resonated with me. A thing that often frustrates folks I know is that I want to pick at the things I read, consider them under a harsh light, poke and prod them until I understand them and how they work. I love things by examining them. That is exactly it. Exactly the thing. To be critical — not to criticize but to think critically — is the way that I engage with the writing I most enjoy. I find joy in coming to grips with a text, with the ways it says what it says, with the ways it succeeds and fails to convey what it means to convey. That’s fun!
Templeton is writing about reading generously, about giving the books we read the breathing space and the grace to be what they are. I appreciate that she makes a distinction between reading critically and being a jerk. These aren’t the same thing! It’s possible to see flaws in a book and still have a great time, to root around and find the inner workings without the whole falling to pieces, to weigh up and toss around and find real pleasure in the weighing and the tossing. And it’s possible to do all of these things without being unkind to an author or disliking a book.
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.
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.
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.