The Button Drawer #1

Welcome to New Subscribers

Hey there! Welcome to new subscribers. To old subscribers: I’ll see you at Thanksgiving or around the neighborhood or the reunion or work.

The Button Drawer

The poet William Stafford (father to the poet Kim Stafford) was a gentle and kind fellow who said that he kept his stray lines, murdered darlings, and half-formed ideas in his button drawer. If ever he was feeling uninspired, he opened the drawer, pulled out an old line and played around with it. Today I have a “button drawer” too. It’s a file called “Deleted from (name)” or a genre with “etc.” attached to indicate that it is unfinished. “Poetry etc.” In honor of both Staffords and any future Stafford, this is the Button Drawer. An irregular miscellany of paperclips, batteries that may or may not work, half burnt birthday candles, tools that came in the Ikea box, and old HyperCards with HyperLinks.

Some Stray Threads

• It’s a pleasure to read Charles Dickens. (Reading Bleak House may send you down a rabbit-hole re: spontaneous combustion.)

• “Fuck this shit” succinctly puts how game developers feel about Microsoft’s new Muse AI “helping” them create.

• The best writer on the intersection of fiction and A.I. is Lincoln Michel (IMHO). Pre-order his sci-fi book, Metallic Realms, on his site. Or just sign up for his newsletter.

• Speaking of pre-orders, there’s still time to get in on Handsome Darryl Campbell’s book Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software before it launches in April. HDC is the real deal — I bet he can explain why we are inundated with software nobody asked for, wants, or needs (see Muse AI above).

• BTW, all links here are not advertisements. For example, this link to The Rundown AI — a newsletter I subscribe to semi-ironically and for which I could have gotten $1 a click but offer here FWIW (not a full US dollar, probably). On the Acolyte to Luddite Scale® they are way over on the Acolyte side of AI — BUT they have interesting links.

A Good Use for Generative AI?

Via The Rundown AI, I learned about Fiverr Go. Imagine being a young freelance writer typing out, say, market reports for mid-tier software companies. You don’t get benefits or a steady income. You have to generate copy that is, essentially, meaningless. Meaningless in the sense that it does not connect to being-in-the-world or dasein. (Dasein is a mood, but here’s a definition.) Why not train a personal AI to do this work for you? Sure! Save wet generation (i.e. “thinking”) for authentic writing.

A few cast-off sentences on Ikiru

All this wet generation gleaned from my teeming brain creates roaming ideas without a home. Like this bit that the Desire Paths editing team (Kristin Gourlay) would not have tolerated from my piece on Kurosawa and bureaucracy. (It didn’t connect to the main idea.)

Close the Drawer

Desire Paths comes to you bi-weekly and consists of one essay about what it means to be human in an age of technology. (Except for the occasional Button Drawer, you will only get one e-mail every two weeks.) It’s always free, ad-free, human-written, un-slopped — please forgive any mistakes that slip by the editors. That’s how you know it’s artisanal.

Next week — a little dip into the river of music and poetry; a place where no A.I. can swim.