DIY culture

Micah Mattix’s Prufrock on Monday linked to two essay-reviews that I think should be considered in tandem.

In Aeon, Richard Beard writes:

Turing’s Imitation Game paper was published 14 years after the first Writers’ Workshop convened at the University of Iowa, in 1936. Turing may not have known, with his grounding in maths at King’s College Cambridge, that elements of machine learning had already evolved across the Atlantic in the apparently unrelated field of creative writing. Before Iowa, the Muse; after Iowa, a method for assembling literary content not dissimilar to the functioning of today’s LLMs.

First, work out what effective writing looks like. Then, develop a process that walks aspiring writers towards an imitation of the desired output. The premise extensively tested by Iowa – and every creative writing MFA since – is that a suite of learnable rules can generate text that, as a bare minimum, resembles passable literary product. Rare is the promising screenwriter unfamiliar with Syd Field’s Three-Act Structure or Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey: cheat codes that promise the optimal sequence for acts, scenes, drama and dialogue.

I think Beard could have made it more clear that what people learn at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop is very, very different from what they learn in screenwriting workshops, but let that pass for now. He is right to suggest that our arts education in general had a mechanistic I/O character. Thus a point I have made on this blog: LLMs can so easily produce a classic undergraduate thesis essay because the assignment is already so formulaic that it might as well be written by a machine.

Meanwhile, in the WSJ, Daniel Akst writes about a new book that documents the traumas that await any book that can’t satisfy armies of sensitivity readers and other searchers-for-transgression. Isn’t this also a way to impose formulas?

There are lessons to be learned here that converge with other developments: for instance, see some recent essays — one and two — celebrating the great Anglican tradition of choral Evensong and fearing for its loss. Now, to be sure, there’s nothing like listening to trained choirs singing in an ancient beautiful church — and I am immensely grateful that we do choral Evensong on Sunday evenings at my parish church — but: if you really love Evensong you can do it yourself, with just a few friends, a prayer book, and maybe some sheet music. Will it be as aesthetically polished as a thoroughly practiced choir singing in a medieval cathedral? Of course not; but it might be more powerful in other ways. Maybe more lastingly meaningful ways.

(Not directly relevant to this, I guess, but in this context I find myself remembering what may well be the most powerful musical experience of my life.)

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. Sometimes the misbehavior of large institutions can spark the creation of new units within them, such as the creation of the many new institutes and schools devoted to classical liberal themes and questions. But the failure of many universities to steward the inheritance of the greatest of books is what moved Zena Hitz to start the Catherine Project. Many people on Substack are trying to renew the lost tradition of the literary magazine. 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.