Friday, December 19. Third-shortest day of the year. Christmas music over the speakers. I'm hunched over the computer down in the basement of the coworking building I go to.
I've submitted a draft for edits and my coworkers have provided them. I work hard, I stay on task, I get through maybe 75 comments and I'm feeling good. At the end of the day, I look to see how many are left. 382.
So I plug away over the break, finding pockets of time here and there. I chisel off one note after another. The worst part isn't even the work, but knowing one of my coworkers is Italian, and I'm embarrassed to be seen working after hours. Typical American!
Saturday, January 24. Snow day in Tulsa.
I've committed to taking it easy and I'm doing an amazing job. I'm reading We Computers, by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega.
In the 1980s—this is a novel—once upon a time in the 1980s, there was a poet named Jon-Perse who discovered personal computers, and then he invented AI to write and understand poetry.
Jon-Perse admires and has studied a Sufi poet named Hafez, who wrote poems called ghazals in 14th-century Persia. So that's what he tells his computers to work on: what do we know about Hafez? What can we extrapolate about his life? What words appear most often in his work? ("Tulip" is near the top of the list.)
"We computers" are the narrators, telling the story of Jon-Perse from what they can infer from his digital presence. They include the stories they make up about Hafez. They include emails they write on behalf of Jon-Perse. They include poems they write on behalf of Jon-Perse.
Now that's tricky, isn't it? Or actually not even tricky, it just kind of sucks. Why bother writing poems if you're not going to write them?
Jon-Perse justifies himself by saying that it doesn't matter how the poem gets written, because the poem is created anew every time it is read. It doesn't matter who (or what!) wrote this. What matters is the text on the page, however it got there.
The novel doesn't affirm or criticize Jon-Perse for this, it seems to leave the question up to the reader. Or maybe it does, and I just missed it, because the novel was confusing to read, maybe because it was Uzbek and maybe because it was super postmodern.
Regardless, I might be willing to accept that premise. But it means the standard for AI-generated writing is higher, not lower: it has to be good. And that's very difficult.
For this project at work, my job is to take the data points that our labor market experts give me and then write them out into a cohesive whole, turning bullet points and rough drafts into clear paragraphs.
In early December, one of the authors said the draft I'd sent around was sounding kind of ChatGPT-y. That would be bad if I had used ChatGPT, but in fact, it was worse: I hadn't. He had looked at prose I'd personally written and found it sterile and vague.
I did not defend myself against the implied accusation that I had used AI, because the truth was more embarrassing. In fact, I had acted just like an LLM: I didn't understand what I was talking about, so I devolved into platitudes. "The stakes are higher than ever," I said, confidently. Which stakes? Uh
But jump ahead a month. Over Christmas, I combed through our 16,000-word draft a few different times: once to make all the easy fixes, once to catch all the hard ones, another to get all the hard ones I'd missed, and then again to work on clarity and flow.
Now I understand the whole thing! More, I'd venture to say, than anyone else—each of the authors knows their own work better than I do, but none of them have spent as much time on the project overall.
We're past the worst of the drafting and editing phase and now I have smaller tasks: webpage copy, social posts, and so on. A few weeks ago, they would have been clumsy and vague, just like the previous draft of the report itself, but now that I have the information down, the copy is sharper, and it's coming faster.
If Jon-Perse the AI poet had spent more time trying to improve his own writing instead of outsourcing them to his computers, he wouldn't have needed them anyway. But he's a character in a novel, doomed to his fate in order to illustrate a point. Me, though, I can make my own choices.
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In another email, I saw newsletter-writing compared to barkeeping. "I'm always here, you're a cherished regular, we make small talk and I share something interesting."
That made sense to me. It strikes the right balance between author and audience. I write these e-mails as a means of creative expression, I do it for myself, but I couldn't manage without an imagined audience. We've created a space here, together.
If I had a bar I'd call it "Timbo's."
Wow! Look at this thing. I think it looks nice! After taking January off from the newsletter, I spent some time redesigning Septology for the new season. If you go back and count, you’ll find that the first section was 777 words. These seven smaller chunks are each 77 words. That will be the format. I hope the brevity improves the clarity.
The heading font is Verre, by Emma Steinhobel. The body font is Geist, from Vercel.
I've been reading Genesis and reading Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead). She notices that the Burning Bush came 400 years after the story of Joseph, so "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" might have been surprising to Moses, prince of Egypt. Like if Odin appeared to me, Tim, saying "I am the god of your Norwegian fathers Olaf and Ragnar." I’m actually not very familar with you man sorry. Thought you’d be Jesus
Another house project: Becky and I now share a walk-in closet (I moved my clothes out of the office). I love it. The new closet takes more effort, but it's worth it. In a room of one's own, you can be messy; if you share, you can't. More evidence that marriage is making us better people, not because of who we are or are married to, but simply because we are married to someone. I recommend it.
Read an essay called "Have Taken Up Farming." Was encouraged and inspired reading the story of an open-source programmer sick of a life bound to the computer who found the strength to log off. Found it on an are.na channel called "Programmers Who Escaped." Was dismayed that the piece ended announcing a brand launch—you can buy the food from the farm he took up. Realized when someone successfully goes offline, there isn't a blog about it.
I love universities. I find it charmingly bizarre that we have special neighborhoods in every city to gather the world's greatest academics and...athletes. Thousands of hungover 20-year-olds are, uh, also there.
“Graduate Hotels” is a fancy brand with about 30 locations in different college towns. I picked up the art book they put out. I liked almost all of them, but my favorites were Minneapolis, Madison, and Iowa City. Which feels right. (Nothing in Norman yet.)
In-rotation "acceptance" playlist. Actual top songs playlist. Sally Rooney on snooker (I thought my MFA essays sounded like this, but now I'm less sure). Sick fits on the ranch. Sick fits on astronauts. A great Year In Review blog post—come for "Ten neo-noir movies I saw for the first time this year, ranked and accompanied by a verse from one of the major prophets," stay for "Best Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Episodes I've Seen More Than Ten Times"
Thank you, as always, for reading. I'll see you next time.
From Tulsa,
Tim