Working Together and Alone

I once said to a film director I know that I don’t see how movies ever get made, and he replied that in making a movie he has “so much help” from smart and skilled people — he doesn’t understand how I can just sit in a room and write books. But when I’m sitting in a room writing a book I am not accountable to or answerable to anyone else: I only have to manage Me.

Alan Jacobs

Jacobs goes on to paraphrase Lumet’s description of the director’s job:

In Lumet’s account, to be a director is to be in this mode of sensitively responding to all the people around you, with all their needs and demands, for weeks on end.

I find myself sympathetic to both modes of working. Few things fire me up like tackling a creative project with a group of talented people. I enjoy sensitively responding to them. But once the play’s run is over or the filming has wrapped, I can’t wait to get back to the computer and books. My ideal job would be divided between writing and directing… Hey! that’s an actual job, albeit one few people get paid for.

Built for mimicry

Generative AI systems may still struggle to reason, as discussed here recently, but they were built for mimicry, and their mimicry has gotten to the point where we must do something now.

Gary Marcus, arguing for tighter regulations around deepfakes

The world seems to be filled with people who have certain gifts and certain interests but are continually forced to acknowledge that the institutions that have been created to foster those gifts and serve those interests have ceased to do so…. If the institutions won’t do it for us, we’ll have to learn how to do it ourselves. And then maybe these amateurish and improvised endeavors will eventually develop into new institutions. 

Alan Jacobs

At last

As the French say, “Christmas is talked of so long it comes at last.

Moscow [Idaho] has, according to reliable figures, a greater number of church people than any other city of like size in the United States.

Hiram Taylor French, writing in 1914

They Dream of Mars

RAY BRADBURY But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—[Edgar Rice] Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.

INTERVIEWER Why do you think that?

BRADBURY By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers—one from Cornell, the other from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely.

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