Hey, pals. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

• I read the infamous, (allegedly) AI-generated, Commonwealth prize-winning short story, “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir. It’s so awful I’m half-convinced it’s a secretly genius commentary on the short-story-prize-clout-accumulation industrial complex. I talk about it in this month’s Patreon bonus video.
• I read The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. The idea behind the quirky title is that technology—including but not limited to AI—is empowering when its practitioners use it at their discretion and disempowering when its use is mandated from the top down. Ride a bike to your job as a copywriter? You’re a centaur. Spend your day editing slop because your word count quota is so high that no human could meet it without AI assistance? Reverse centaur.
  • I’d broadly recommend the book. It’s quick and punchy, and Doctorow’s indignation at the misery brought on workers by AI boosters and their ilk is therapeutic. If you don’t want to read it, though, Doctorow’s also a great speaker, and he’s explained his reverse centaur idea at least a hundred times over the course of his press tour for the book. I’d particularly recommend his chat with Adam Conover.
• My husband and I recently celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary. Bragging about being happily married is annoying, so I’ll keep it brief: being married to Seth is my favorite thing about my life.

• I lost my earbuds. If you see them lying around anywhere, let me know.
• After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey earlier this summer, I was feeling nostalgic for the slippery, dangerous Odysseus who briefly appears in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, so I decided it was finally time to pick up Miller’s sophomore novel, Circe. I thought it was fine.
  • For what’s widely touted as a feminist novel, Miller’s women are markedly one-note. Pasiphaë is venomous, Penelope is patient, and Circe is… well, Circe is the little mermaid, basically. She wants to be where the people are.
  • Ironically, Miller’s men steal the show. Her take on Telemachus, specifically, and the murky shape of his relationship with Odysseus, is what I’m still thinking about weeks after reading. Like Patroclus in Miller’s Achilles, Telemachus rejects wholesale the vision of greatness pressed on him by his father, which the text rightly praises as a deliberate and courageous act. For Circe, though, her rejection of her parents’ values is framed as a fact of her character—immutable and marked from birth. And how feminist is that, really?
  • I talk more about Circe and The Song of Achilles in this month’s Patreon bonus video.
• Our beloved Georgetown Drive-In hosted their annual Creepy Car Cruise-In, which is basically what it sounds like. People dress up their cars for (early) Halloween, other people walk around and look at them, and then, after it gets dark, we all watch scary movies.
  • The main event was Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. Everyone’s right. It’s good. I appreciate the scope and ambition of Cregger’s previous films, but in terms of sheer enjoyment, it’s hard to beat the elegant simplicity of Resident Evil, a film that is fundamentally about a guy trying to bring a thing to a place.
  • Unfortunately, before we were allowed to enjoy Resident Evil, we were forced to endure The Wraith (1986), starring a dead-eyed Charlie Sheen. I’m guessing this movie got made because some studio executive couldn’t decide if he wanted to rip off Grease or Back to the Future and wound up splitting the difference.

• I spent the first half of September in a Heated Rivalry fanfiction fugue state. If I had to pick just one fic to recommend, it’d be the short and sweet "duel income" by Anonymous.
  • I almost didn’t read this one, because I’m a snob who initially thought the title spelling was a mistake. Dear reader, it’s not a mistake! It’s wordplay!
  • This particular anonymous author writes nothing but bangers, by the way. For something longer and darker, I’d recommend “the suicidal duckling”.
• Speaking of fanfic, I revamped the recs section of my website.
• I finally finished Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J. Ong, first published in 1982.
  • Wow!
  • If you suffer from ambient anxiety about humans becoming so reliant on technology that it fundamentally alters our cognition, I’ve got bad news about the ancient technology of alphabetic writing.
  • It was a story in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation that introduced me to the idea of literacy as an irrevocably mind-altering technology, in good ways and bad. Plato, too, was worried about the ultimate consequences of literacy, and, as Walter J. Ong argues, he wasn’t entirely wrong to be.
• I read Madison Square Murders, the first in C.S. Poe’s series of detective romances featuring a cold case expert and his forensic artist love interest. I didn’t like it very much, and I won’t be continuing the series, but the argument that Walter J. Ong makes in Orality and Literacy that the detective novel is the peak expression of interiorized literacy helped me appreciate it more than I otherwise might have. Thanks, Walter!
• I’m about to completely fuck off for two glorious weeks. (I’m going on vacation.) See y’all on the other side.