It's Always More Complicated

(Okay, I know that 'tulip fever' in C17th Netherlands is actually a historimyth, but 'South Sea Bubble'/'Railway Mania' wives doesn't sound quite so neat.)

Meet the Sad Wives of AI.

Cannot help feeling that this is less about AI than about MEN, and this is pretty much hinted at in the article: ' a generation (of men) convinced this is their moment, and everyone else trying to figure out where they fit. A bubble.'

I guess it used to be, or maybe still is, crypto, or trading stocks online.

Not entirely remote from that thing of 'bloke gives up the 9-5 grind to Make His Fortune as streamer or making video games' (maybe having a podcast is also A Thing now?) while the unfortunate woman he has hitched up with supports him and also does all the domestic maintenance.

Further back, he was writing The Great Novel or Screenplay while the little woman took care of him.

I think of all those women who wrote books in odd moments, whether it was getting up before the children were awake, or that woman who wrote a saleable novel on her lunch-breaks at work, or indeed were just doing some thing as a side-gig to the ongoing routine of her daily life rather than stomping her feet and declaring that she had to DEDICATE HERSELF TO HER ART. Sigh.

No, these two things are not the same, dingbat:

Mining of authors’ work is nothing new – AI is just doing what creative humans do. Creativity has always ‘trained’ on the work of others.

Can I get an 'It's More Complicated!!!!'?

He avers:

Isn’t all human thought an iteration of what has gone before? Artists and scientists have been mining the work of others for generations; that’s how human thought evolves. Ian McEwan was influenced by LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. George Orwell’s Nighteen Eighty-Four was inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Did Richard Osman invent the genre of cosy crime? The publishing industry as a whole is guilty of putting out bandwagon books, which ape the style, themes and tropes of a hit.

What matters is what the author/artist/scientist etc brings to the topic, taking it further/in a different direction.

I do wonder (she wonders) whether this idea of textual poaching all the way down is inflected by what seems to me when I am in grouchy mood a constant spate of works which are rewrites of Well-Known if not Actually Classic Texts from a different perspective (okay, I do not think we have had Big Brother's take on 1984 yet?) or in a different milieu or with the characters gender/race/etc swapped.

And with the genre thing: there is a lot of very meh genre stuff going around (see my plaints about being sent freebies of 'Golden Age' mysteries) and then somebody comes along and thinks, nice little set of genre conventions you've got there, I wonder what I could do with them....

I just bet there was somebody doing really interesting stuff with John Dennis's thunder stage effects: I daresay it was a whole lot more effective in the subsequent performance of Macbeth than in his own dud play.

This is totally observer bias, and maybe it's not actually A Thing, or maybe it has been A Thing for longer than this? - but I feel like I'm seeing a lot of fiction these here days which is either Well-Known Work/Famous Historical Episode/Myth, In Spaaace/the Future/Different Historical Period &/or gender-bent/queered in some way; OR, rewriting some classic work from POV of a subsidiary, or at least character who was not POV, in the original; OR, based on lives of known historical individuals/group rather than riffing off some such individuals or groups (which I thought The Children's Book pretty much got right).

Yes, I know that the KREE8IV process draws on the deep wells of stories and other materials we have already consumed and which are floating about, but you know, remixing them and doing different things?

One of the things I like and admire about Naomi Mitchison is that her historical novels do a lot of eschewing the obvious - they are not set in the obvious periods of high drama or among the major players.

I suppose there is the other trend that seems to be (or is it?) auto-fiction, where people (? esp young women?) are supposed to be drawing on their own lives and experiences - though I think back to those 'Rebel Writing Women' of the 1960s, who were a bit miffed that their first novels were taken to be a transcript of their own lives (but that's such a Russ category, right? -'she wrote it but it was just tidying up her diary of the time').

I know there is other stuff out there, but there just seems more of that first category than there used to be?

What I read

Simon Brett, Death and the Decorator (Fethering #21) (2022): one of the better ones, I thought.

Colin Spencer, Backing Into Light: My Father's Son (2013). Covers a fair amount of the same territory as the 'Generation' quartet - interesting that he says that Sundy as well as Matthew was him or used elements of him, which makes that climactic flood scene with her young son a bit creepy, honestly (but doesn't cop to Reg, hmmm). It's a bit tell-all about the famous closeted gays of pre-decriminalisation era he copped off with. One annoying thing (on the publisher rather than him) - careless copy-editing/proof-reading, is this just not happening anymore?.

Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation (2022). Hutton digging into the creation of traditions and where they originate from and how they seldom go back to Ye Deepe Rootes even of the medeevles, never mind primeval, is always worth reading. While suggesting things are actually more weird and interesting and fluid and that people are constantly overwriting longstanding practices with New Stuff. If I should ever meet him I would be making like a dumbstruck goldfish with fangirl awe.

Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022). I feel this is just a bit woolly around the edges - 'here are some women who were mothers and creatives (except that at least one was actually an academic)' and I'm not sure quite what the criteria for selection were, given that she never quite hones in on the fact that the bulk of them were of a Very Specific Period with lives/careers traversing the awful 50s through the 60s into the late C20th via feminism even though does evoke parallels/not parallels. Not all - gets in two of my earlier C20th pets, B Hepworth and N Mitchison and I will mark her up for a citation there! And, okay, contraception, available abortion, yay, but I think antibiotics and not dying in childbirth or of septic abortion might be in the narrative somewhere? Plus, I don't think A Carter was startling MODERN UNPRECEDENTED late motherhood in 40s because - I could not help thinking, what with the trip to Japan an'all - the trajectory had some similarities to Marie Stopes (and I can think of other instances).

On the go

Still intermittently dipping into Pin Money even though the pdf continues to play silly buggers with the ereader.

Have just started Susan McCabe, H. D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (2021).

Up next

I think that will keep me going for a while!

Feminist & Women's Publishing & Cultural Industries: A Guide to Archives and Resources:

This guide grows out of our research into the dramatic story of the feminist publishing revolution of the UK women’s movements of the 1970s-90s.... Such collections cast light on the evolving history of today’s urgent movements for corporate social responsibility, purpose with profit, and mixed economic as well as publishing models and products. We invite you to explore what they suggest about social, reputational, political, aesthetic and cultural value and capital, and how such considerations work with – and sometimes against – the equity or assets of a venture. We equally want to pay tribute to the ethical features of feminist business archive construction itself. The creators and managers of this heritage are vital participants in contemporary history, and often extraordinary memory-keepers themselves.

***

However, there are individual women - and networks of women - who vanish from the record or can only be painstakingly recovered because they are overshadowed - or have been erased - by the men they were involved with: On the Disappearing of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: Katie Bennett Measures the Emotional Toll of Writing a Feminist Recovery Story. I see someone else is said to have written/be writing a biography but is not named and I can't find any evidence of it.

***

Six Artists Balance Creativity and Motherhood. Results Vary. Francesca Wade reviews Julie Phillips's new book The Baby on the Fire Escape.

Essay here by Philips based on the Doris Lessing section: This Novelist Abandoned Her Toddlers. I Wanted to Know Why. I found a different Doris Lessing in her letters. I find it interesting - especially in the light of having recently read those studies of the 'rebel girl/women' writers who were approx her contemporaries, that she saw some of the motherhood/creativity issues as a generational problem.

***

Review of Sarah Fox, Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England - the book itself is available as OA pdf.

I daresay other people have seen this one to which my attention was drawn by someone tweeting about it:

My wife is an accomplished author who also holds down a fulltime job in an unrelated field, mostly for the benefits. When we had our first child last year, we agreed that she would pause her writing career—something had to go with a new baby at home. Except, it turns out she didn’t pause it. She got a great idea for a new novel, wrote it secretly during her lunch break at work, and sold it for $100,000.

Weeellll: I do think there's a difference between saying, 'not going to pursue my career', as in, not going to force herself to undertake authorly activity, and finding herself overtaken by INSPIRATION. Which, honestly, one imagines it could be really, really hard to resist or put on hold for the duration, and kudos to her for doing in neat lunchbreak-length chunks, eh?

The mention of 'job in unrelated field, mainly for the benefits' does sound as though it may not be terribly rewarding even if financially necessary (we do note that even with babby in picture no hint that she gives up that...).

Q: What did he give up, 'with a new baby at home'? Even if this wasn't something that was remunerative, it looks like a source of pleasure for wife.

ETA I've seen some suggestions that original was fake. While certainly some of the details might not be entirely accurate, one has seen, alas, sufficient numbers of resentful plaints by men that the laydee in their life has this disturbing habit of doing some occupation for their enjoyment which is not all about him, or desiring time/space free from him &/or the kiddiez: so it did have a certain resonance of general probability.

ETA2 Just spotted the interview with Diana Gabaldon in today's Guardian:

Gabaldon began writing novels in absolute secrecy: she knew her husband would have raised an eyebrow at her desire to add writing to her packed schedule, so she’d get up and work between midnight and 4am, before getting on with her day. “He would have said, wait till the kids are in school and you have more time, wait till my business is doing better and you can quit one of your jobs. It would all have made perfect sense, and he would have succeeded in stopping me because my grip on it was very tenuous to start with.”

The British creativity I grew up with – in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel – has almost always come from outside the mainstream

A codslap (one of several) delivered to That Person Woezing About Diversity = End of Civilisation, or something.

Which sounded awfully like those wails whenever the playing field does actually become even a little more level...

I fear I have more than once perorated in this venue that the place where creative things are happening is not the mainstream/socially accepted spaces, it is among people who are vagabond players and writing things that 'only a novel' and other despised forms written by despised out-groups.

During the conference last week I consoled another scholar who was deploring the fact that at Large Conference Pertaining to Their Disciplinary Field the panels on their rather innovative work using new approaches/texts were seldom outnumbered by the audience, while down the hall, Same Old Same Old On Same Old Texts By Same Old Canonical DWMs were packed to the doors. Lo, said I, I am a historian, and innovations always start with half a dozen people being largely ignored and overlooked. (Dorothy Hodgkin doing crystallography in a curtained-off bit of corridor, e.g.)

Also, I went on, when I began in my little corner of history, there were about three other people doing work in the same general area, and I am not sure any of us had secure formal academic positions, plus maybe a few people flying under flags of convenience. And now the field has positively exploded: and, I said, the Brash White Boys are coming in.

(Of course, they will rewrite the genealogy of the discipline, she adds cynically, but I did not do so at the time.)

Dept of, Rant:

That thing about the new UK passport that is supposed to celebrate Britcreativity and picks overwhelmingly creative persons of the bloke persuasion? Saw article yesterday saying something along the lines of: historical accuracy - becos sexism etc, women did not have chance to be creative. Helloooooo: given the lack of educational opps, professional positions, etc, is it not remarkable that so many women did in fact Create Stuff over a period of several centuries? Mostly (I think) in the literary field, because of Reasons I think V Woolf (yes, Y No V Woolf in passport?) delineated in A Room of One's Own.

(Okay this is like whoever it was claimed that you needed a degree to understand Shakespeare: to which the response was, well, that lets out the Bard himself from comprehending his own works.)

Dept of, Trivia was always there:

Spotted in review of a volume of published correspondence between Eminent Man and his almost equally eminent Daughter:

{M]uch in these letters does not deserve enshrining.... there is much correspondence dealing with travel plans and news from various resorts. Apt comparisons can be made to the ways texting, Facebook, and Twitter are used today. In short, the letters are filled with mind-numbing trivia, of interest only to the individuals at that moment. One can conclude that the correspondents probably would also have used Instagram if it had been available.

Dept of, Personally I Think They Should Be Put On A Huge Bonfire, and Tonight would be the Best of Times:

Various commentaries on the refusal of the V&A to take M Thatcher's clothes: Jonathan Jones brings the poncey (and also some psychosexual reveal that we would rather not have); Jess Cartner-Morley suggests that Not the V&A's mission; and Lucy Mangan nails the issue:

Done right, a display of our old friend’s wardrobe in the centre of London could be simply the final destination on a whole day’s trip round a living exhibition of her achievements. First you step over today’s homeless people on the way to the station.... you’re having a day out, and staying true to the spirit rather than the letter of the age is what’s important, so laugh and step lightly on to a shonky, overpriced privatised train, avoiding the eyes of any mentally ill people who need to be in the hospitals that have no room for them. Then travel into town through decimated public housing stock, unaffordable rental properties and a deregulated financial district, making sure that the better buildings act as foreign investors’ reserve currency of choice. And hop off for a bun and a squiz at the vestments of the woman who made it all possible! It’s a fun day out for all the family.

Somebody in my online circles was posting recently about undertaking a performance and rocked it approximately 95% -

To which I wanted to say, and meant to go and look for it and then got distracted, that thing in a poem by DH Lawrence:

And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dream
must run the pattern out in a little break at the end
so that her soul can come out.

Of course, I am not sure if Lawrence was actually correct about this, although he did spend time in the relevant part of the world, so maybe he did know. (But I think I have come across claims about this necessary imperfection in some other context as well - Persian rugs?)

I also thought of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (which seems to me to be entirely different to the point of antithesis of the whole 'stark minimalism' aesthetic).

Plus there was something I glanced at recently and haven't kept the link about what older forms of technology contributed to music because you could not get the soulless perfection of finish and balance that modern systems enable.

Though perhaps what I am wondering here is whether 'slick and polished' (or do I meant 'swept and garnished'?) are really, really equivalent to 'perfect'.

Was also stimulated to thoughts by another post in my rlist about the fact that if you are singing in a long choral piece if you give all of it your 100% you don't always have anything left by the end and that perhaps some of it you have to give less so that the whole gets more.

Which reminded me of a lengthy passage somewhere in my beloved GB Stern's ragbag chronicles about debating with her friends over 'the perfection box' and what works they would put in it and there was a general consensus that it was shorter works which managed to achieve that. (I think they had to start creating other boxes for other kinds of works, about which there was also debate.)

In its turn, that reminds of me of something I think I once posted about longer works that were not afraid to risk being boring and not a constant string of points of high drama or emotional epiphany.

Not at all sure that these ideas actually mesh into any kind of coherence, but I guess it is within the spirit of what I am thinking about to leave them in this rather random condition.

Have been thinking about the role of monetary reward and the place of work which is either not directly, or only minimally, remunerated but that nonetheless may lead to remuneration and may indeed be a precondition.

(This is not about the dubious practice of expecting people to do stuff for free because EXPOSURE.)

Thinking of the academic model of publishing journal articles, reviewing, refereeing, etc, which does not bring in the moolah (does it ever not, even with one's ALCS payments for photocopying etc) but it is, particularly thse days, what has to be done in order to get an academic job - and of course, if you're really lucky, a TV gig that's actually paid.

And this grew out of a gentlemanly model of scholarship, where a) the scholar did not need filthy lucre in return for his endeavours and b) the outcome was circulated to other interested scholars. This led to the setting up of various societies which published journals and other things like edited texts, but essentially for the love of it and to disseminate the debate.

And then these publishing initiatives got swallowed up by Evil Conglomerates which see them as an income stream (no, honestly, I do not see a single 1p of what Evil Conglomerates charge should you wish to download one of my articles).

But the original model was that it was more something that one did as part of the route into a particular profession - I will concede that having committed some work of scholarship a not insignificant number of scholars, having got their Oxbridge college fellowship, spent more time laying down the college port than in the archives or producing, you know, further scholarship.

I also wonder whether there has not been a not dissimilar pathway for the not bestselling or major critical repute novelist, whereby, with the claim of 'being a novelist' under their belt (while the publisher wrote off the advance with a sigh) managed to parlay this into being a literary journalist and reviewer, teacher of creative writing, etc.

However, thinking about this I was also given to wonder about the role of gross commerce on creativity and the number of Great (or at least, enduring) Works that we owe to the fact that the author was obliged to put bread on the table, shoes on the feet, roof over head, etc, rather than indulging their Creative Soul.

Particularly when, if they did ever publish the thing into which they had poured their creative soul, it does not have the staying power of the works they churned out to keep the bailiffs from the door.

(Possibly relevant here is something that somebody told Margery Allingham, which was that if you were writing in a popular genre widely deemed to be hackwork, you could write anything you liked.)

Thought sort of emerging from that utopian notion that in The Future everybody is paid a modest but adequate amount which they can top up with productive work: whether this would lead to more works in which Creative Soul was unburdened, or whether it might actually lead to a greater production of works which might never be major bestsellers but ongoing niche favourites. Or what.