Adventures in Conjunctions, NC edition

There is a child in my house who would like to know when they are allowed to not be in a booster seat anymore. I informed them that the NC law, which I researched, is very clear: at 8 years and 80 pounds. They usually emphasize the "and".

Of course, as I reflected on it, it seemed clear this was wrong in some way, since not all 8 year olds are going to clear 80 pounds, or even be close. So I did additional, more detailed research, and discovered further explanatory language to this effect: "a child must be 8 years of age and weigh 80 pounds. If either condition is met, a booster seat is no longer required".

Where I come from (Michigan), the term we use to describe when only one condition need obtain is "or", not "and". But I guess they do things a little differently down here...

Why Cars 3 is the Best Pixar Movie

Stipulated: Pixar movies are not really for kids. Kids are not gonna cry at the beginning of Up. A memory of your childhood means little when you yourself are a child, so Ratatouille is out, too. Who doesn't love a good wordless 45 minutes baked in nostalgia? Etc etc.

Cars 3, the end of a hack series that shouldn't have existed in the first place, looks like it's headed in the same direction: Lightning McQueen is supposedly too old to compete anymore, so he makes a desperation move to train himself to get back to where he wants to be. His personal consequences for failure are steep. He is teamed with a young whippersnap who thinks she knows more than he does, and he has to teach her the history of the sport she's supposed to be an expert at. He gets to the big race, does better than expected, and... hands the reins over to his young woman of color protege, who wins the big race without him.

A tale of aging gracefully and accepting that newer things can sometimes be better than the older things.

One brief moment of AI snark

AI advocates often sound like logical positivists from the early 20th century: "All we need is a list of all true statements, which we know must be finite and discoverable, and then we can rationally construct a logical language and science out of it, no problem" except that you will never generate a list of all (and only) true statements, so the claim can never be true. Wittgenstein, who was smarter than you, moved from the Tractatus to a never-finished second work for more or less this reason, and it's not coincidence the second one was never finished.

There's something dispiriting about the wide use of AI, but it's no different than what is dispiriting about people not reading, or watching reality tv, or never paying attention to politics or the world around them. I long ago accepted that people don't read like I do; I suppose it follows that people will not write like I do, either.

Everything seems inevitable until it doesn't. Thank sports for teaching me that: USC was never going to lose at college football, then they did; Alabama wasn't ever going to lose at football, then they did; Georgia, Ohio State, etc etc.

Currently reading: an 80s classic and more

Jay McInerny, Bright Lights Big City
You approach this one with some trepidation. Somewhere in the back of your head, you have the idea that you don't like the author, possibly by association: he didn't like DFW, right? (He wrote a pretty favorable review of Infinite Jest, so that's not it.) Maybe he was too nice to DFW? He might've been part of that clique of overrated writers from Bennington, who wrote ponderous tomes of dubious quality, like American Psycho or The Secret History? (He was not.) Maybe you remember him from your parents' bookshelves, and associate him with fads of the 80s? In any event, you know his book is about a writer (strike one) in NYC (strike two) who does a lot of coke (strike three) in the 80s (strike four. What sport are we playing?). And you will refrain from saying anything about the author's weird narrative conceit, which reminds you unfavorably of novels of that period (The Mezzanine) that try too hard to be clever. You know it's going to be a big book, and a slog, but you figure you should be open to trying new things.

What you find is not a big book, but a small one. You expect bombast but it's a fairly reasonable catalogue of actual human emotions. The parts that seem overwrought--the drugs, the poor treatment of women--come to have an explanation in the twist, and the twist feels earned and, for once, as though it provides a sort of reasoning for the personal dissolution taking place in the book. The novel indulges in some misogyny but, unusually, lets the women involved have some amount of agency and dignity. You find it to be a hard book to hate, and leave yourself open to the possibility it might even be a book you love.

Hilary Leitcher, Temporary
As a reader I have begun to come around to the idea that the success of a novel depends on whether it does the thing it sets out to do. I have lately been putting whether I like said novel to the side as a relatively uninteresting question--I should probably write on this at some point. I Who Have Never Known Men was not a novel I particularly liked but largely because it seemed to need to violate its own rules to keep the plot moving along--it perhaps somewhat lacked the courage of its convictions. Temporary sticks to its guns: there's little to no explanation of the process by which one becomes a Temporary and the metaphysical turn that comes late when it becomes clear what it means to be allowed to become Permanent moves it perhaps into fairy tale or myth. It's not an unpleasant read, playing out like a longer version of a Cesar Aira conceit, though I will confess to being somewhat unclear at the end about What It All Meant; but perhaps, like a Cesar Aira story, the narrative is itself its own justification for being.

Currently reading: just checking in edition

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
It took almost a year and 1200 pages, but I've finally begun to lose track of the minor characters. There's been a shift for the last 200 pages--no dead characters coming back to talk with the narrator--and so we're left with a teenager's recollections of what 1946 was like. The recollections, like all of ours, are a mix of things she saw and noticed at the time with the addition of things she knows to have been true, and as a result a bit of the focus is lost. The stakes are also unclear: preparing for and surviving war are comprehensible; the outcome of municipal elections do not have as clear stakes. (I think the implication of all this business is that the Soviets are attempting to get the East Germans to do what they want without explicitly instructing them, for the resonances with Prague in '68, but this has not developed yet.)

George Eliot, Middlemarch
The one-chapter-a-day-to-finish-in-three-months system has, as predicted, allowed me to get past secondhand embarrassment at Dorothea's poor decision-making, but it has alas reminded me of all the other young people also making poor decisions. But it's a good reminder that Eliot has the authorial and narrative presence that so many other narrated novels (movies, tv shows) wish they had but do not. If it weren't for the length and density of the books, Eliot would be a perfect author for the stereotypical gen z reader: she will tell you exactly what she thinks about everything.

Heinrich Böll, Collected Stories
The "literature of the rubble" is as advertised, painting what one feels to be a accurate portrait of what it must have been like to live as a former soldier of a defeated and shamed nation, and manages to do so without incurring any sympathy at all for the people who more or less knew what they were doing. The Train Was on Time does what it says on the tin, and while it has a certain thinness, it is a novella, and so effective as long as you're not expecting a novel. But the literature of the rubble gives way to just plain literature, and the success or failure of the stories depends on whether the hook is any good--metier is no help.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
Over time, you read enough novels and you can pick up the themes--so this is another multi-generational story of familial decline that is meant to throw light onto Germany's decline as a country and empire. I liked Doktor Faustus but was a bit cooler toward The Magic Mountain, so I guess we'll see.

Watchmen

Alan Moore, Watchmen
It is a hard book to think about clearly, in the first place because it originates a number of tropes that then entered the world and have been done many times, both better and worse. In the second place, the sheer volume of edgy superheroes makes it difficult to evaluate fairly. I grew tired of superheroes around 2012, it's been a rough decade plus.

I thought pretty well of it halfway through, and was disappointed at the end in a way hard to pinpoint. It was good when the characters were whirring and there was one clear overarching narrative, but then Rorschach gets unmasked and it becomes about too many different things, none of which get full enough attention. But even when something does get full attention, it doesn't get enough development--there might be something to be said for the dynamics of abuse and affection, but it's not said, or the ways parents and children recreate generational trauma, but that's not said either.

But no, the real problem is the ending: a giant squid-alien is teleported to Manhattan and kills half the people, and we are to believe that this somehow brings the world together? And that the cynical heroes are willing to accept the lie of it? 

If you are a certain kind of white person (not exclusively American, cf the Beatles' "Revolution") who made in through the 80s and 90s and 00s, you may well have practiced or continue to practice a politics of nostalgia and cynicism: there once was a time we were united as a people, but we are not now; there once was a time we never had to think about politics, everyone just got along with their neighbors; people who talk about changing things for the better, especially through the government, are best treated derisively because don't you know this is just how things are and it's foolish to try and change them? And thereby the treatment of all of one's life in public as a kind of status positioning game, where you win by caring the least.

And at the bottom, that's what seems to be going on in Watchmen. It acts and looks like cynicism born of experience and trying to hold itself above the fray, but really it's just a baseline contempt for people and a belief in their stupidity. (Ah, but don't you see it's a meta-commentary on people who look to superheroes for their moral clarity, forgetting they're just people and as stupid and brutal as anyone else? Sure, but why write a comic book about it?) It tries to position itself with a certain level of sophistication, but at bottom it's childish and naive; it relies on the reader to supply ideas and context that just aren't there.

And the truth of the matter for me is that even as the world seems increasingly grim, my general faith in and interest in people remains high, and perhaps even increases. I can find plenty of both of those made in correct proportions. Heck, there's even a superhero made just for this attitude: his name's Superman.

On AI

A long time ago the Wirecutter used to review some piece of tech--smart tvs, maybe?--and would note that of course they came with inconvenient ads and surveillance. First it would show up in reviews as a valid concern to be addressed seriously, and then it was treated with some well-of-course-what-did-you-expect handwaving, and eventually it moved to "objecting to your tv trying to learn as much as possible about you is stupid, stop complaining about it" before being dropped entirely. Of course you must put up with surveillance, what else are you going to do? So now my tv tries to collect data on me, it will occasionally freeze and restart itself while I am watching it, and occasionally the buttons on the remote won't do anything at all. A very clear step back that I guess people pretend not to notice because of some nominal convenience?

There's a certain amount of AI hype that feels exactly like this. Of course people are going to use it, of course people aren't going to look too closely at what it outputs, of course the only way to get an answer to your question is to do a bunch of matrix algebra and waste amazing amounts of power and water. There are some obvious responses--if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?--but it's extending even beyond this. I had an interview recently with a company that wanted their HR function to create AI agents to coach managers, and considered making these to be one of its highest priorities. If you work in HR you know there's a baseline contempt for everyone else in the company that is shocking, bordering in some cases on active hatred, but this seems one step further: I do not even want to pretend like I'm putting in the effort to fake writing something that you won't read; I will not interact with you and I want you to know that. The entire thing feels hostile to being human.

The inevitability of it is pitched to make you feel like resistance is useless, but there's still (for now) a world out there and still some merit in knowing about it and how to live in it. I'm not a doomsayer and I'm not predicting a tech apocalypse, but you might be better off having options about what you can do in the future.