Dribs and Drabs
you guys love this stuff, so here you go
Hello, people who can’t believe they’re not 22 anymore,
Speaking of time: what exactly is “a brief three to five minute hold”? How does it differ from, say, an interminable three to five minute hold?
Imagine if there was an autocorrect for your kitchen: it could tell you that you put in twice the amount of baking soda or let you know you left out the egg. Maybe it could offer suggestions: you neglected to add eggs, how about applesauce, do you have that?
But… I am sure that within days Kitchen Autocorrect would be telling you that maybe you should substitute whole grain bread for that brioche and eat less sugar. Maybe it would even mess with the recipes without your knowledge, making them lower fat.
And then the next stage is when it randomly starts telling you that you haven’t cooked Lebanese lentils in a while or hey, other people your age eat a lot more tofu than you…
Finally we hit the stage where corporations ask the AI suggest products to you while you’re cooking, and then the stage where the AI just populates your fridge with products that the algorithm things you might like.
Ah wait, Amazon Pantry already does this.
You know those family stick figures suburban parents put on their cars? When your kid moves out and becomes an adult, do you replace the stick figure with an adult figure or cross them off or what? Buy a new car?
IP question: If I were to take a classic, say, Don Quixote, and change all the place names using search and replace would it still be plagiarism?
What if I changed the time to current day and altered all the people’s names and reversed the genders of all the characters?
What if I meticulously added an intentional typo, say the letter M, into every single word. Is that my work or Cervantes’ work or the translator’s work?
What if the Ms on every page all made a picture of a man on a horse carrying a spear near a windmill? And then when you flipped the book pages it looked like the man was charging the windmill? What then?
THINGS I DID THIS WEEK:
You can’t make this stuff up: a literary magazine that rejected me with the most glowing review of my story possible has followed up. The editor of the magazine continued the thread in which she said wonderful things about my story prior to rejecting it for reasons she herself was unable to articulate and in the email she forwarded to me a call for submissions for an anthology to which she suggested I submit my rejected story. Mind you, she has nothing to do with this anthology. My story just happened to come to mind, apparently, a month after she rejected it—and she wanted to make sure I was able to publish it elsewhere. (I couldn’t submit to the listing she forwarded because my story doesn’t fit their theme, but the thought is what counts—?)
An arts publication on Medium republished another of my Medium essays. This one is called Art Hurts.
If you’re not tired of 20th anniversary 9-11 stories, this is not a day-of story but rather a recent reaction to the Tribute in Light: you know? the annual memorial? I wrote about it here: “A Stabbing in the Sky.”
Got such good feedback on the Billy Joel/NYC video that was in a previous newsletter that I’ve decided to share another: it’s the Dance Theater of Harlem doing ballet in the empty streets (don’t worry, they’re masked) at the pandemic’s height. (Thanks for the share, Lisa! )