To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was often visited at home by fans, many of whom wanted his autograph. He wrote a short poem and had copies made so as to have a ready supply on hand. Here’s what he wrote:
Stay, stay at home, my heart and rest. Home-keeping hearts are happiest. For those that wander they know not where, Are full of trouble and full of care, To stay at home is best.
If you ask most people what copyright is for, they’ll tell you it’s about protecting artists. But that was never its goal. It was only meant to incentivise creative work by granting a temporary monopoly to its creator. By limiting control to a set period, the system was supposed to encourage production while guaranteeing that works would eventually enter the public domain for collective use. Case in point: when the US first implemented copyright in 1790 (inspired by similar laws in Britain), protection lasted just 14 years, with a one-time renewal for another 14. Early lawmakers saw copyright as a tradeoff – short-term exclusivity in exchange for long-term public access. As a federal appeals court put it in Authors Guild v. Google Inc. (2015), “while authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright, the ultimate, intended beneficiary is the public.”
As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.
Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren’t even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don’t make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.
I’m reminded of Dorothy Sayers’ comments on the artistic act in The Mind of the Maker. Worth looking into.
Etymonline is a can-opener, an imaginary labyrinth with real minotaurs in it, my never-written novel shattered into words and arranged in alphabetical order.
Rigney mentions social media early in his book, acknowledging that such technologies “amplify and reinforce our spiritual and social sickness.” But the problem, he says, “runs deeper than Twitter, Facebook, and cable news.” He’s right that social media is not the source of our problems. Delete your account and you will still wrestle with sin. But practically speaking, using Twitter and other social media eats away at the qualities that make a person a good leader. The more time you spend on Twitter, the less sober-minded, or differentiated, you become.
Well, I have joined the herd and started a podcast.
Of Knights and Pilgrims is an audio commentary on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. If you read this blog, you probably already know that I’m a big fan of the book. Unfortunately for the world of podcast listeners, one of my coworkers is also a big fan, and lo! unto you a podcast was born.
Episodes will be posted every Wednesday starting next week (Feb. 5). The first two are introductions to the poem, and the rest will be our summary and analysis of each of the twelve cantos in Book I. If we’re feeling especially spry, we may sally forth into Book II this summer and publish new episodes in the fall.
If you’re new to Spenser, we highly recommend starting at the shallow end. Roy Maynard has a very accessible modernized version here, and Thomas Copeland’s audio recording is fantastic. With great works of literature, there are no such things as spoilers, so you might even try dipping your toes into a children’s version. (Project Gutenberg has some for free. Personally, I’m excited about this new prose edition, assuming it ever actually comes out.)
One last thing: podcasting is a cheap hobby, but it isn’t free. If you’d like to sponsor a future episode, drop some coins in my Ko-fi coffer.
Christian Leithart 