In this piece for The New Yorker, John Seabrook wonders:
Could the machine learn to write well enough for The New Yorker? Could it write this article for me? The fate of civilization may not hang on the answer to that question, but mine might.
Sigh. Remember the good old days, when automatic writing was limited to the spirits or subconscious? I have a feeling this new breed of writer will rely on a different solvent than did its human predecessors.
“Gimme a benzene. Make it a double. I’m stalled on this goddamn novel.”
I’m not and never have been a sports fan, though I appreciate certain subsets of sportswriting (see Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, et al.). Thus I can’t speak to the quality of today’s Sports Illustrated, though the new management’s strategy certainly sounds familiar.
“Bricks, bitches. Chop chop. No, you don’t get straw. Who do you think you are, Frank Deford?”
But boy howdy, have some big hitters ever swung through SI’s pages over the years.
I’m talking Deford, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Jenkins, George Plimpton, Rick Reilly, Kurt Vonnegut … that’s right, Kurt fuckin’ Vonnegut. Not your basic dime-store jargon-jockeys, is what.
Over at Deadspin, Ray Ratto posits that the gutting, as has become traditional, “was pointless, needlessly cruel, stupid and thoroughly corporate.”
And Ratto expects more of the same:
I want to be more depressed and affected by what seems to have happened to Sports Illustrated, but it is the fate that awaits everything. Some corporate lamprey is coming for every generation’s best and brightest, dimmest and thickest, because you can count money and clicks but not curiosity and discovery. Others will have to provide those last two things now, and will have to do so while knowing that it’s a finite world out there. We will lament its passing too late because we have come to accept the mortality of things we thought would never die, and watch with a shrug as the monuments of our formative years are demolished and turned into Stalin’s Finest coffee stands, and eventually into parking lots.
In the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Michael LaPointe muses at some length on “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” as performed by the literati.
Following his examination of two recent books arguing for “walking’s invigorating literary power” and capacity for resistance to “the desire of those in power that we should participate in growing the GDP … as well as the corporate desire that we should consume as much as possible and rest whenever we aren’t doing so,” LaPointe wonders whether, for the writer, walking to work is really nothing more than another day at the office, albeit a larger, airier one.
And he poses the question: “What would it mean, for once, simply to walk and say nothing about it?”
What it would mean, Michael old sock, is that you would not get paid.
“Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet. …
Ho, ho. Robinson Meyer at The Atlanticexamines NPR’s new “Morning Edition” theme and finds it wanting.
He’s not the only one. Composer Timo Andres and jazz singer Theo Bleckmann had thoughts as well.
“For me, it was so reminiscent of childhood, of car rides to school,” Andres told me later of the old theme. “Even though, objectively, it sounds like an artifact from a universe where Steely Dan was co-opted into writing state-propaganda music.”
The new theme, meanwhile, was summarized more pithily by Bleckmann. “Yeah, it sucks,” he said.
Ouch.
But what do you expect when you commission a committee to compose your theme song?
Robert A. Heinlein was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right on target when he noted that a committee was “a life form with six or more legs and no brain.”
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