Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Adolf Loos once said: "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects."
20 July 1969. Apollo 11 Astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon, and 6 hours later walk on its surface. As he stepped on to the moon, Armstrong famously said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
C. Pam Zhang: “It’s fascinating to see that there’s no linear relationship between input and output when it comes to creativity. For me, it feels like there’s a vein you tap into sometimes if you’re lucky.” - The Guardian (UK)
Express UK: “As Britons experience a cold, rainy summer, experts are urging them to appreciate the milder conditions while they can.
A new interactive map developed by scientists from the University of Marylandoffers a glimpse into a much hotter future, predicting drastic changes in climate for cities worldwide within the next 60 years. According to the research, more than half of the planet is expected to shift into new climate zones by the end of the century.
For instance, London’ssummers are predicted to become 4.6C warmer and 10 percent drier, resembling the current climate of the South of France. Lead researcher Matthew Fitzpatrick said: “Everything is moving towards the equator in terms of the climate that’s coming for you.”
Is AI the Bitter End or the Lucrative Future of Book Publishing?
AI models were trained on at the time, she felt violated. She and other authors took to social media, lobbing anger, hurt, and frustration at the tech companies that had secretly “scraped” the Internet for data without consent from or compensation for creators. Kwon’s novels and others were poured into machine learning models, teaching them how to make “new” content based on patterns in the ingested text. (It’s this “generating” that makes generative AI distinct from other types of models that may only identify patterns or make calculations.) The years of work on those books added up: 10 years for one novel, 20 for a memoir, multiplied by the nearly 200,000 books found in the dataset. “It’s potentially the biggest rip-off in creative history,” says Douglas Preston, a best-selling author and one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed in the aftermath of the outrage.
In September 2023, 17 authors partnered with the Authors Guild, the oldest and largest professional organization for writers, to file a lawsuit alleging that Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI violated copyright law by ingesting books into their generative AI models. OpenAI and Microsoft, for their part, deny allegations that they infringed any copyrights. The tech companies claim that training their models on copyrighted content is equivalent to a person reading books to improve their own writing. The future of books—and perhaps of creative industries writ large in the United States—may come down to one judge’s definition of “fair use.” Words and who gets to use them are serious business.
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI evolved well before The Atlanticrevealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020.
Now, tools, workflows, companies, industry standards, and, of course, grifts are in full operation, already shifting the way some books are written, published, and read. The technology has clicked right into the publishing industry’s recent trend toward efficiency, consolidation, and reader service—and seemingly away from sustainability for human labor. But some believe that generative AI could offer a path forward for writers at a time when it’s harder than ever to make a living through books. It all depends on the meaning of a few words.”
The Joy, from South Africa, more music from them here.
A woman becomes increasingly jealous of her boyfriend’s ex-partner in Bea Setton’s unsettling, risk-taking novel
“I suppose you can guess where this is all heading,” says the narrator of Paris-born, US-based author Bea Setton’s second novel Plaything, around halfway through her story. Well, yes and no. The general trend of the plot is clear — a woman’s increasing obsession with her boyfriend’s ex-partner — but the delight is in the details, which are unpredictable.
The narrator is Anna Mead, who’s 22 years old when in 2019 she goes to Newnham College, Cambridge, to do a PhD in reproductive physiology. “But don’t get excited. This is not a campus novel.” Anna measures herself by what she sees as her strongest attribute: her intelligence. “I wanted to be a great mind.” And she sidelines her appearance: six feet in height and broadly built. “Don’t worry, darling,” her mother offers unhelpfully, “plenty of men like tall women.”
Anna covers her insecurities in personality, putting on “the Anna Show”, amusing friends with tales of family calamities — like the time her mother served up dog food for dinner to annoy her unfaithful husband — or giving as good as she gets. When one of her new colleagues says, “You’re big, for a woman,” she replies, “And smart for a woman, too?”
She joins the university rowing team, but when she injures her wrist and goes to see a physiotherapist — Caden — he turns out to be distractingly attractive, or as Anna puts it, “being as beautiful as this was a form of genius”. She asks him out, and they settle into a casual relationship, which becomes intensified as spring 2020 arrives, Covid lockdown descends, and Anna decides to move in with him.
Well-controlled scenes of tension, such as when Anna and a friend go through Caden’s belongings while he’s out, made me want to skip down the page to see what’s coming
Yet she never settles comfortably into the relationship: she can’t allow their compatibility to simply be, but insists on interrogating it. Anna’s complex blend of vanity and self-deprecation is brought out perfectly when she frets that “I hadn’t even had the opportunity to prove my intelligence” but adds that Caden probably “wouldn’t be able to grasp how clever I was” anyway.
The other problem is that Caden keeps making references to his ex-girlfriend, which even when well intended, just muck things up. When he tells her “you’re much lower maintenance”, it makes Anna feel like a spider plant. His ex Giselle (“kind of a stripper name”, says one of Anna’s friends) unaccountably still has belongings dotted around the house, so that “there was something creepy about her absence . . . like the New York skyline without the Twin Towers”.
Elements here recall Setton’s equally action-packed, darkly comic thriller Berlin: a smart, mildly paranoid narrator, and the heightened emotions that life in a new place brings. And as with that debut, there’s a lot going on in Plaything, but the increasing pressure in Caden and Anna’s relationship, enhanced by the ever-present absence of Giselle, provides the core of the story. Setton delivers well-controlled scenes of tension, such as when Anna and a friend go through Caden’s belongings while he’s out, that made me want to skip down the page to see what’s coming. And the whole thing builds to a pleasingly horrible conclusion.
But plot is just one of the pleasures of the novel, which takes its title from Nietzsche’s dictum that a man “wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything”. There are two aspects that make Setton a writer to watch. First, she is efficient, packing in a lot of information without the prose feeling cramped. One short paragraph where Caden recounts being given bad news by his old football coach, as his mother couldn’t bear to do it herself, is a masterclass in emotional control of the reader.
Second, Setton presents Anna’s life in full — home, friends, work, love — so she feels like a rounded character. This means it’s about 80 pages before the central plot really gets going, but it makes all that follows feel more substantial. There are nice elements of characterisation: how Caden says “yeah, baby” every time a cooling fan rotates towards him, or the fact that Anna’s beloved cuddly toy is called Mango Bango Jambo Banana — silly but plausible details that add texture. The only weakness is that some elements are a little sketchy, such as subplots on both Anna’s and Caden’s fathers — a corollary of making the book as busy as it is, as is the sense at times that we’re settling on the surface of things rather than digging deep.
Plaything also takes risks, bringing in black comedy that makes us laugh when something terrible has happened. But that blend of the grotesque and the funny, of course, is just like life — and stories are all about being manipulated. At times the reader feels like Setton’s plaything, but she does it so well, we don’t really mind.
Plaything by Bea Setton Doubleday £18.99, 336 page
