There’s an intriguing quote attributed to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola related in a review of the new book The Grammar of Angels: “Voices that mean nothing have more magical power than those that mean something.” (“The Grammar of Angles by Edward Wilson-Lee Review — spellbound”) This accords with the way empty or anti-rational rhetoric seems more effective at manipulation than meaningful or rational language. From anti-factual political demagoguery to stultified religious preaching, maybe what’s at work is simply the visceral gesture of the voice at work on the psyche. It also agrees with my poetry-reading experience. The more carefully my […]
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Le Guin’s notes on fantasy tropes
I’m grappling with how to avoid formulaic fantasy tropes in my fiction writing. I lean into a nuanced character-centered novel with depth, set in a fantasy milieu, vs. a violent battle between good and evil (the popular paradigm). Ursula K. Le Guin’s notes are helpful… Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. […]
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Fantasy challenges
As I’m working on some fantasy fiction, a friend asked what was the most challenging part. I said: trying to balance buoyant imagination and believable realism. But maybe there is something more challenging: learning to let your characters’ fantasies eclipse your own.
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Undying Greek Poets, hallucination, and ChatGPT
While the success of the internet as a global town square is dubious at best with its pervasive misinformation and polarization, one area in which it is unquestionably beneficial is in language learning. I’ve made wonderful progress learning Greek in three years, with vast internet learning resources, online literature and newspapers, and virtual in-person lessons with native speakers. Given that a language-processing AI like ChatGPT can be trained on open source text available online and is increasingly trained on multiple languages, its use for linguistic and literary information gathering should be seen as promising. I’ve been reading the paper “Language […]