Wedding Colors and Why A.I. Isn’t Going To Make Art
Curated reads.
Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Two Weeks:
Staying tender
The lighthouse keepers
Transvestite freak
The shapes of silence (This one made me tear up)
Weeding my garden, and my sentences, through pain
The divorce tapes
Contrab and Marginalia
Wedding colors
American culture made me believe being black wasn’t good enough
Woman in the woods (Warning: there are horrific images of murder you can’t unsee in this reported piece)
Favorite Flash Stories I Read in the Past Two Weeks:
The eulogy competition
The books of losing you
How to set a house on fire
We went to the museum (deeply moving)
Favorite Short Stories I Read in the Past Two Weeks:
How he changed over time
Someday you will regret not replying
I looked for you, I called your name
Favorite Sentences I Read in the Past Two Weeks:
“ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language.” –link
“The people of India, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine were never seen as people in any narrative from the West, certainly not in the great English novels I grew up reading and falling in love with.” –link
“Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet.” –link
“Investigative police bureaus rarely give the same time and resources to finding the killers of women of color.” –link
“We never learned how to talk, so we kept things inside until we couldn’t.” –link
“In performance, imprisoned truth can be unlocked.” –link
“We were the ones dying, but they were the ones it was killing.” –link
“Being Black and Native American is seen as infinitely more special and exotic than being plain old Black.” –link
“I spent most of my formative years so immersed in whiteness that I stopped seeing my Blackness—like a drop of coffee diluted in a bowl of milk.” –link
Favorite Paragraphs I Read in the Past Two Weeks:
“It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.” –link
“Dad, it was probably too hard to talk to me about the violence you witnessed, just as it was too shameful to tell you about my sexuality. To have a conversation requires an engagement or an exchange—something we could not do since we were in constant translation. To you, I was an American girl in a Vietnamese family living a life that you could not recognize. We spoke in updates, never in dialogue about relationships, sex, life in Texas, or your life in Vietnam.” –link
“If I had dyed my hair blue, worn too much eyeliner, and taken up shrieking in math class, perhaps things might have been different. Had I not been trained by the expectations of my gender to multitask gladly while collapsing in on myself to avoid revealing too much, then perhaps my pain might have manifested in an outwardly concerning manner.” –link
“I wish I could’ve learned about gender-expansive and sexually diverse Timucuans growing up, how their culture viewed loving the same gender as natural and normal, how I was far from the first queer person on Georgia’s coast. I wish their legacy wasn’t strategically left out of history books. Since I rarely saw myself in history lessons, learning about Timucuans who diverged from sexuality and gender norms would have been affirming. Maybe I wouldn’t have repressed my queerness until college if I’d known queer people have always been here. It would have shown me Indigenous Peoples aren’t as “other” as my teachers made them out to be.” –link
“Depression is what it sounds like. Our facilitator describes it as an elevator we ride into the well of acceptance. We don’t want to go down, and we may detour back through denial, anger, or bargaining when we sense where it’s headed.” –link
“The men and boys in the home I grew up in sought to revoke my self-will at every turn by exerting verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence. I went to the patch of woods behind our house to get away, to be alone, to pretend the world was different. And there, it was different: none of the creatures around me showed the least bit of interest in taking my will away. No one told me what to do, or how to be. With the wood thrush and the otter, the salamander and fox, the hickory and oak, moss and fern, greenbriar and bellflower, I belonged. If even for the briefest of moments, I felt my imagination unfurl like a flower, felt myself grow taller like the trees. And then, I heard my own voice.” –link
Book Recommendation:
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
I was so surprised by the prose in this novel—there are so many unexpected sentences that made me want to stop reading the story and read the sentences again. And there is another surprise. The dialogue in this novel is part of the narration. There are no double quotes, no single quotes, to separate the dialogues from the rest of the narration. The dialogues are not even italicized and you would think that would be jarring and difficult to read—but it was not. Once I read the first dialogue where characters are speaking without even a line break, I looked forward to reading more dialogues from the lively characters.
Etcetera
What I want to write
Why A.I. isn’t going to make art (the best critical essay I read on A.I.)
The collapse of self-worth in the digital age