Bomb in an Orchard
I read a fabulous book about William Blake by John Higgs titled, William Blake Vs The World. Why did I read this? I can’t remember specifically, but it came to be in my hands through the gods of literature, my favorite gods, while I was in one of their churches otherwise known as my local library. I was checking out with a stack of books and saw the audacious cover of William Blake Vs. The World. It was in the new non-fiction section, and I opened it to a random page, which is what I have done in the library, both public and personal, since my twenties. Instead of the sentences ricocheting off my glasses, well intending and crafted as many may have been, Higgs words bored through, like an ophthalmologist hid in the page. I took the book home, scouted it out on our library app for the audio version and the e-book so my attention could stay rapt for a few weeks without interruption. I turned the pages, turned up the volume, lit its prose in my palm, and finished the book. Technology did its time-shortening thing.
And I loved it. But why would I love such a thing? I was an English major, literature and writing, but still a teenager when William Blake first crossed my eyes in an English Literature anthology. If that book was a piece of luggage, it wouldn't have fit in the overhead bin. I remembered little of Blake's work except for Songs of Innocence and Experience. I remember the title and the truth of concept; we are innocent until besmirched by experience. Hard to argue with that one.
I’m still not enthralled by the style of eighteenth and nineteenth century English poetry. Sorry to say, they alight sensations in me akin to that un-air-conditioned classroom baking in late-spring sun in the 1800s-vintage building that housed the English department at Lake Forest College. But John Higgs, like any great lecturing professor, captures selections of verse within the context of Blake’s life and times, the times being his moment in history, the history of his country, the broader world, the art world, and the world of literature. Long story short, Blake was a genius. A renegade artist. Unloved. Unappreciated and considered mad by most except for a new generation of writers, decades younger, that took him in late in his life and acknowledged he may have been crazy, but crazy in the right way. The way that cannot prove but suspects that there is something otherworldly present in the small-statured man with somewhat wild eyes and a gentle spirit that might also ignite into an ego-wielding, blue-fire torch.
image by DALL-E 3 | inspired by this essay
What captured me initially, I think, was that it wasn’t until the end of Blake’s life that both his artwork, he was an engraver, and poetry began being appreciated. A new generation of artists had plugged into the nature-wrapped, ethereal mythologies Blake created that embraced the angels and devils within us all. The innocence. The experience. Childhood to adulthood. Hopeful neophyte to battle weary vet.
So, interest piqued, I searched out a few texts of Blake’s work through our library and found Blake’s Poetry and Designs, a Norton Critical Edition. I picked the book up, felt its weight in my hand, a matching case for my literary travels, saw Norton in Roman font, and experienced another queasy, déjà vu of boring English classes in too-hot, old rooms. But I pressed on, dropped the book on our living room coffee table where all my recent book stacks go either to die or wait a very long time to get any attention. The library books have an advantage because of their inherent due dates, although our library has an auto-renewal system that lets the books ferment. If a book on our coffee table was instead a patient in a doctor’s office or a patron at a busy restaurant, it would wait for about three months before its name was called. Or it might never be called. A relatively short two-week gestation period found the tomb cracked open early on a Saturday morning. I scanned the table of contents. The first thing that caught my attention was a section of the book devoted to essays and criticism on Blake by twentieth-century writers. First up to bat, T.S. Eliot.
Let me now digress back to the concerns of this essay, the orchard and the bomb.
I have been working on a novel for a number of years. Yes, a number, is a coy way of admitting, too long. Part time? you might ask. By part time do you mean occasionally or when I feel like it or when the muse knocks on my door? No. Pretty much every day, per my routine. Two to four hopefully uninterrupted hours to put new words into blank space. That phase ended about three years ago. Since then, I’ve been recasting the words and trying to make them sound better or carry more meaning or whittled into something that reflects the world inside my noggin. That has been the last few years. And sometimes, I just keep going through and trusting that the parts of the novel that I don’t understand will somehow be understood, that they are so vivid in my imagination that if I can get them to sound right, then meaning and intent will cross paths somewhere in the woods.
That’s my faith in the un-scored music of words. And faith is probably the right word as I have no indication from the outside world that all this time I’ve spent will amount to anything worthy of a stranger’s precious time to read. Yes, I can pay editors; did that. Beta readers; did that. Friends and family, some; did that. But the further I’ve come as a writer, the less needy I’ve become for immediate feedback. I’ve come to trust the sound and rhythms of the language, and believe I’ve ventured this strange path for no other reason than to trust what I feel but cannot see.
Now, nearing publishing time, self-publishing time, no agents would even respond to my queries except one who kindly offered, good luck though, you seem thoughtful. I’m sure the collective thought of the interns going through the slush pile of query letters had the same declarative insights all over Manhattan. Let’s see… fifty years old and first timer? No. Six-hundred-page book? At this point, while straightening in the bathroom mirror, the intern makes a loud, echoing rejection sound not unlike the wrong answer on Family Feud.
During these years of writing and editing, I’ve tried to learn as much as I could about the publishing industry. Along with every other industry, the book business has had a back-office bloodletting. The remaining major publishers, with their quiver of imprints, are galactic-sized Death Stars that have largely outsourced their editorial staff so that the process for finding new writers has become:
1. The agents - let them scout and scour on their own dime.
2. The editors, those still employed at said Death Star, narrow those selections.
3. Senior C-Suite people now working hybrid jobs, still struggling for work / working at home / life balance while scrambling to approve contracts and negotiate marketing budgets between overly grateful agents and miserly conglomerates, theirs is a constant appeasement of the financial press’s quarterly expectations.
4. A CEO who routinely berates (or strangles to death by pointing his black-gloved hand with fingers extended in a trachea-squeezing pinch) the harried C-Suite person who approved the editor who was sold by the agent that a very costly six-hundred-page book by an unknown, late middle-ager has no chance to earn out the minuscule advance they shouldn’t have given.
5. The C-Suite person is then lifted and dropped in a pile of suffocating shame.
Hence, self-publishing.
William Blake self-published his whole life. The history of literature is rife with self-publishers, although that won’t change the fact that in today’s synergistic, conglomerative, marketing-channeled maelstrom of publicist-necessary, online platform required, omni-channel world, promotionally savvy, agented, and signed authors are card-carrying members of the literary elite. Everyone else who isn’t good enough to be noticed by even a single agent? Maybe they can find a small press that doesn’t require agent representation. Or a hybrid press where the author pays the supposed pros for their slickly marketed back offices. I had a hybrid publisher offer to build me a website and social media platform, edit my already professionally edited manuscript, insisting their editors were better (they weren’t), create the book itself and all it entails for print and electronic versions, and market the book through all necessary channels. Sounds great! $70,000 please. Who does that?
Writers with $70,000, I suppose. Hybrid publishers pitch the idea that they are not vanity presses, but any writer that spends $70,000 to have their name on a book might consider that they have a vanity problem. Just sayin’.
Then there’s Amazon and the very industrious culture of genre novelists who produce several books per year, many intending to give away the first one, or more than one, and then joyfully feed the algorithmic carousel of books for a dollar. I get it though. If the writer is good enough and makes a fan, the fan goes to the back catalog of the writer who has enough books that they could fill an entire aisle at any dollar store of your choosing. And they offer print on demand publishing for hard copies (mostly soft cover) of which the quality of the physical book is...
All I’ll say is that I love the feel of a well-made book, and I like my shelves to have them. And I like to pull them out and, as I’ve already mentioned, open a random page and let my other favorite gods, the gods of serendipity, do their magic. But the timeless tangibility of high-quality book binding is lost to the budget-conscious independent writer. The books I love, many of their authors now departed, their pulse still beating through the page rubbing between my fingers, came to me through the industrial grind of reviews, essays, awards, things that are both industry related and valuable. And by self-publishing, I am like the narrator of Paul Simon’s cleverly great song, Wristband; prevented from getting into a concert of my own making. That’s as close as I’ll get to being like Paul Simon. Yet, in music, Indi-bands are cool. They are.
But Indi-novelists? Many are viewed as tech-savvy shlock peddlers unworthy of reviews they don’t have to pay for. And literary awards that matter? Those judges will snicker while accidentally bumping the cheaply made entries into their overstuffed circular file.
With or without a publisher, an online platform is absolutely necessary. So, I am venturing into social media and blogging and whatever else in order to do the other absolute necessity; build a subscriber list. Because this is what it takes to sell a piece of writing. Medium and Substack and other subscription services that monetize words have been studied. I haven’t decided about all that for me. I’ve gotten as far as this; Substack is free and has a community and a less persnickety algorithm than Medium. I also learned that I need to blog frequently and kneel at the altar of the almighty algorithms of Google and YouTube (not sure on that either) and Facebook and Instagram. I’ve been told to publish on the same days at the same time because they like that.
Why this all about me digression? Stay with me. There is a point.
I was also told that building a quality email list, the thousand true fans idea, is a long process. The only way to move the audience building along is by posting more frequently. The quantity over quality beast has awoken. And I have another novel I’m in the early stages of. And I have other short-form creative work to write. And I have walks to take and photos to capture and images to process. And then I’m supposed to blog and post and chat and, and, and… A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, a middle-aged man was found dead on a trail after having a heart attack while posting to Facebook…
While I am not part of the literati, I sure do respect, admire, love so many of its members. Yet, so many great writers, whether called to the form or not, spend so much of their time writing thought-provoking, inspiring essays and whole books about writing. Writers writing about writing... I’ve come to believe the purpose of all these writers writing about writing is to soothe all the lonely souls out there who put themselves to the daily task of placing one word after another hoping that what they somehow put together means something.
Writing is lonely.
The inside of an artist’s head is not a bustling Starbucks. It’s an empty store with one barista operating a malfunctioning machine. An artist’s head may be swirling with actual Starbucks, but most art is of an individual nature. It’s William Blake Vs The World. If you want communal art, become a dancer, join a theater troupe, and so on. The composer, the choreographer, the playwright, after they have their moments bumbling through the dark and finding inspiration’s temporary flicker, they come upon nothing but a blank page. And then they fill it and spend weeks and months blocking scenes or choreographing the dance making the initial spark of creation come to life. Life in front of, hopefully, a ticket buying audience. A fiction writer, a poet, a songwriter is different.
image by DALL-E 3 | inspired by this essay
Maybe the songwriter has a band or a songwriting partner. Maybe the writer has a writer’s group. I haven’t found that to be helpful or worth stomaching the glancing jealousies or people checking their phones while your bloody soul is stretched across the butcher’s block. It’s clue number one that your scribblings aren’t polished enough to hold a stranger’s attention. Or perhaps some people are oblivious to the fact that their helpless distractions are rude.
I read an interview with Jennifer Egan where she said that she tests chapters of her novels, fine jewels that they are, with her beloved writers' group. The writers' groups must be like therapists; you don’t have a good one until you do. For me, though, in the various personal essays and writer interviews I devour, such as the Paris Review’s The Art of Fiction or The Art of Poetry, there is a sense of a distant collective of writers threaded together in and by their solitude. All these writers writing about writing. It seems that they are writing about writing because they are the art for art’s sake artists, who may be lucky enough to be getting a small but necessary paycheck for their thoughts, and God bless them. But does anyone who is not a writer read writing about writing? I don’t read the latest rags concerning law, accounting, or dentistry. Maybe a few people, the thousand true fans, have a shoptalk fascination, but in a zero-barrier to entry vocation, there is clearly a need for both wisdom and the call howling above the treetops that you are not alone.
I’ve thought about this a lot during the making of my book. The poems, the stories I’ve written, they were always private. I was working in the private sector keeping private things. But they will eventually, along with the book, be public. Perhaps a very small public, but public nonetheless, and partly because I am an admitted worshiper in the church / temple / mosque / mountain of the literary gods. What is made shall be shared and you shall do right by the creation... I care more about the content I create than being the content creator not making art for art’s sake but making content for Google’s sake. Yuck!
Yet Google and SEO and SERPs (whatever those are) are unequivocally necessary to being my own boss in the writing business. Without official membership in the shimmery literati, I began reading more essays by great writers as examples of the form and came to the depressing conclusion that I am not likely to produce essays of high quality all that frequently while posting this or that while also attending to the projects that truly move my spirit.
These thoughts were much of 2022 as it was closing. I was coming to grips with my limitations… again… and tried to envision the public voice I wanted to have with the least amount of time invested. Creating takes energy. Revision takes energy. If I’m posting multiple times per week / day / hour, there is going to be an energy shortage. Will I allow myself to be a consistent purveyor of crap? Not only a purveyor, but a scheduled and disciplined purveyor worthy of an upper management position at Amazon.
And then either in late December or perhaps early January, the public beta for ChatGPT was announced. I tried it. And tried again. And again. And again. I was at once amazed, mesmerized, incredulous, freaked out, confused. The whole order of everything that had assembled in my very limited IQ regarding writing, within days, was discombobulated as badly as if a tornado had ripped through one of those million square foot plus mega-warehouses Amazon dots the countryside with. And the more I played with the AI, the more the same-day shipping boxes were pelting through the walls and flying all the way back to their distant, under-paying shores.
In theory… I repeat, in theory, in the time I take to write and edit and re-edit, as per my nature, even a simple essay, an artificially intelligent natural language processing robot could write thousands and thousands of pages and chapters. Not syllables and words, but books and books if you wanted it to. These crazy Frankenstein’s have already swallowed the whole of the western canon and can spit out, in a thoroughly uninteresting prose style, cogent thoughts about anything worth thinking about.
And don’t for a minute think that their stale, Wharton MBA class-passing prose won’t improve. It will improve because there are patterns to sound, even the sound from words, which is why Hemingway and Fitzgerald, while opposite to the style of Proust, all sound so good. Their words have a music. Within the sound is the meaning. They’re poets of the first order minus line breaks other than paragraphs and dialog. These machines are pattern readers. Language and music; patterns. Meaning in patterns. Billions of lives. The history of man. Patterns.
image by DALL-E 3 | inspired by this essay
The technology is as disturbing as it is incredible. I’ve had enlightening discussions with an AI about feminism as a theme in the novels of Elena Ferrante, Nazis and pandemics in Philip Roth, and any number of strange, esoteric topics. It informs me and I also notice errors and I inform it and it apologizes. A humble genius, an impossibility in human history. And with humans merrily providing thumbs up and down, the AI will improve with every conversation, millions turning into billions of them, constantly training by correction, and by feeding it more and more and more until they will have swallowed everything ever written by a human, and probably everything currently in process of being written as if it just recorded and analyzed the last syllable in this sentence.
That was quarter number one of 2023 for me. And in 2024, I’m still editing and intend to self-publish my book. I’m still chatting almost daily with this growing intelligence that is at once alien and self-created. I’ve started new books. There’s a website to be launched. A platform to support, which has been made obvious by the fact that you might be reading said blog post. Can I work in hybrid (novel term that it is) with the AI to produce, not creative work, a total blasphemy, for me anyway, but blogging, quick essays, social media? Can I somehow reign in the wild horse? Can I stay aboard the bucking and farting bronco and use the intelligence to leverage my time while not sacrificing quality? Could it improve quality? I’ve come to think of it as another tool. Not a replacement, but an augmenter like we’ve never known, and, sadly yes, a replacement for some who will be, inevitably, in its way.
Another of man’s technological tools, right up there with fire and the wheel and electricity and the printing press. Maybe we can learn how use it for the saving of time and labor, to put those efforts to more humanly honed creative chores. How many hours have writers saved with the Dewey Decimal System, with micro-fiche, with Google? Be honest, writers, for there is probably not one of you that hasn’t pecked away a research question and had it instantaneously answered because Google or Bing knew the answer to your question before you even finished writing it. It knew questions you hadn't even thought of that spurred something worthwhile. Time will tell how I will choose to enlist AI’s vectored magic. To answer the question though, I haven’t come up with a way for it to be an enlisted writer, not to my satisfaction anyway. As an editor, I find it pretty good. Try Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet; sometimes it’s spooky good. As a researcher, sometimes jaw dropping, sometimes not. Ask any of them for scintillating prose and they dump unflavored oatmeal on your lap.
Which brings me full circle back to William Blake. A few quotes from Mr. Eliot:
…Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch, or a fashion, have this quality; only things which, by some extraordinary labor of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul. And this honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment…
… he (Blake) has an idea (a feeling, an image), he develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his verse, often, and hesitates often over the final choice. The idea, of course, simply comes, but upon arrival it is subjected to prolonged manipulation.
If that’s not attestant to the power of constant revision, I don’t know what is. Revision, I think, is the fourth wall between man and machine, as it is in this shaping and the sounds it produces that we come closest to the undefinable nebula of our starry souls. No machine that I have tested, comes close to the unexpected language of the artist. We seem to be in an era with multiple Gutenberg-like moments, first through the internet, then, I think, through the interrupting force of self-publishing, and now, with artificially intelligent language processing, we have at once democratized thought sharing while diminishing the art of crafting language. AI writing is more like directing, and the skill level will relate to prompting and learning the language of artificiality to get the information the writer desires, or what they thought they desired while somehow maintaining enough cranial oxygen for inspiration to flame eternally. Many writers, if the calling is blown into the dust of history, will ask, if not a writer, then what?
I see the delegatory appeal of prompting. There are moments where I’m greedily imagining the relief from all things I’d rather not do. Who wouldn’t? If the human is deeply engaged in the generated text and editing their way to quality prose at several times the speed of their typical creation period, content production is about to have lift off. What will be lost in the rocket flames and billowing exhaust? Craft. It doesn’t have to be, but based on our globalized recent history, it surely will be. Even more than it already is. Content creators, affiliate marketers, drop shippers, testicle… I mean listical makers, already make up most of the four million-plus blog posts per day(!). Imagine what AI-aware capitalists will do with this newfound, effortless verbosity. What is the over / under for the number of blog postings in a day? Eight, ten, forty million? Whatever it is, it is likely to far exceed consumer appetites, similar to the number of shopping centers in America. Will we ever ask ourselves, how much shit do we really need?
image by DALL-E 3 | inspired by this essay, irony not lost
And yet, I’m joining the rat race or space race or whatever this ever-changing, market starving / feeding economy is morphing into. Why? Because I too have shit to sell. And I suppose it’s going to be an ever-present internal debate of how I will put these machines to use in a way that I can live with. What I decide will differ from what you decide and on down the line it will go. We writers will be in a constant race to catch up with the world spinning forward as we may be left so quickly behind. The world of art was once an orchard, and every apple plucked could be as sweet and crisp as the next if you knew what to pick. What is it now after this technological bomb has gone off? It’s pulp and prairie with seeds scattered in the wind.