The Grasshopper Sunday May 21, 2023: The Opportunist
It’s not an insult
I saw someone described as an opportunist and it was meant as an insult. But I can’t figure out why it would be. Aren’t we all opportunists? If you’re not, you’re probably not living a full life.
I’ve been wondering when my next opportunity will present itself because I’m due to grab one. Life isn’t bad but I’m getting that feeling that my routines are just that, routine. I write, I drink coffee, I walk, and I compulsively sift through a lot of news, forming opinions and then writing about them. And I take breaks from that and write The Grasshopper, which is about writing, sort of.
The government’s inability to function is on display this week with the debt ceiling kidnapping by a minority of lunatics. ChatGPT and its pals may be writing a lot of what we read (not this, 100% human). One college class appears to have used it on all their exams and their professor may fail all of them. And Ron DeSantis’ war on education may chase Florida’s best students out of state.
As a writer, I watch the adoption of AI with serious misgivings. It is entirely possible that an innovation with the word ‘intelligence’ in its name may actually make us collectively stupider by doing too many things for us.
We learn by doing, not by just inhaling information. All that news I read doesn’t acquire clarity for me until I write about it. The writing organizes my thoughts and forces me to find patterns and bigger themes. If I just asked ChatGPT to summarize a news story for me, it could but it wouldn’t make me any wiser.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Congress this week that AI should be regulated and Congress members tripped over themselves congratulating him for his honesty, unlike some other tech bros who won’t tell them anything. But I think he was just covering his ass for having let this thing out in the wild without seriously considering what people would use it for.
At my age, these developments won’t really change the track of my life, but, like climate change, they will drastically change the lives of younger people in unpredictable ways. That class of cheaters I mentioned earlier may just now be realizing how their choice to use that tech turned out to be a bad idea. Or, maybe not.
That would require self-awareness.
I am in a querulous mood this morning, irritated by the crap I just read through in Substack’s Notes feature. Why post incomplete thoughts and bad poetry randomly? This is why I never look at Twitter and rarely look at Facebook. It’s just the written version of noise pollution.
Querulous is a great word, but not one you can use in conversation because it’s actually very difficult to say out loud. Try it and you’ll see why.
This leads me to an idea I have about how the written word is not reflected in the spoken conversation. They are two different ways to use language to deliver a message. That’s why the idea of using a voice to text program to write never caught on. The results just won’t scan right to a reader.
When I write dialog I always try to be as minimal as possible. It’s a very tricky thing to do, to write dialog that sounds natural. Though I’ve written a fair amount of fiction, this still trips me up, putting words in my character’s mouth. I find it a lot easier to write about their interior thoughts because I have more leeway as a writer and they give me a chance to show the reader what the world looks like from their perspective.
Salinger was very good at dialog. Catcher in the Rye has its narrator speaking directly to the reader in a kind of long monologue that actually works. You can hear that kid speaking.
There are rumors that Salinger left a safe full of unpublished manuscripts when he died, things he didn’t want published because he was fed up with the publishing industry. I know many of his fans are dying to see this stuff if it exists but I’m mixed about it. His published writing is nearly perfect and undoubtedly the product of a lot of careful work. But now he is not there to see his work through to the reader.
To be honest, I’ve written a lot of stuff that I’d rather did not get read because I was not satisfied with it for one reason or another. So, the idea of someone posthumously going through and publishing stuff I did not give them in life does not appeal to me.
I think most writers are their own best critic and that is one of the joys of the pursuit.
Apropos of nothing
What Substack newsletters do you read? Leave me a note in Comments. I’m asking because it would help me understand more about my readers.
I had a new subscriber this week and when I got the notification email it mentioned that they subscribed to over 300 Substacks. In a thread Substack runs for writers on promotion several publishers noted they were seeing new subs with these huge numbers of Substacks, one as high as 700.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to cram their email with that many stories, and no offense to that subscriber, I suspect the presence of bots, robot programs that go around the platform subscribing to everything they find for some reason I cannot fathom. It’s one of the oddities of online writing. There are many.
In the Aesop fable I took the title of The Grasshopper from, the grasshopper in the story is a kind of anti-philosopher, a carefree spirit who lives for the day, carpe diem-style, until it catches up to him when the cold winter finds him unable to protect himself. I suppose he dies. Everything does eventually, but hopefully my grasshopper will find his endless summer.
These Sunday Editions are getting more and more random and I’m just going to let the writing take me where it does.
I woke up this Sunday morning with an odd thought, that I had found a way to sell my perspective on things through writing. It’s not particularly lucrative, and it does require a certain consistency because people’s intellectual radar these days has a short life span. We tend to follow things and people based on how often they force their way into our attention window.
The British novelist Martin Amis died this week at 73, which strikes me as too young. I only read one of his books, and while I recognized his writing ability, I didn’t care for its dark, very British cynical humor. Then this morning I read a piece in the Guardian where the writer described his work as ‘screamingly funny’.
It was not screamingly funny. Almost nothing is. This is the kind of hyperbole bad writers and editors use to create blurbs and it always turns me off. You see it a lot in reviews. I often wonder whether these reviewers actually read the books or just recycle things they have read elsewhere.
Summer is creeping in where I live and today we shook off the steady rain and the sun is out. I live next to a boutique hotel with a large garden out front and there was a brunch party going on when I got up. Sometimes they hold weddings there. It’s a nice sight when I’m having coffee and it’s a lovely day.
Did you write today?
Martin
1277 words
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Glad to hear it. I wrote a couple of venting pieces myself. I'm looking forward to your next post here.
Martin, I'm glad you are writing about whatever you're thinking about in the moment. I started writing about one subject but found that my mind is occupied by so many different subjects that I have started to write about what's on my mind, and it feels good. I enjoy reading The Grasshopper more than your Medium Daily Digest political rant. I've reached the point that I'm supersaturated with the insanity that screams at us daily in the political and politician realm. I've pretty much stopped reading or writing about it because I'm tired of how much attention it's taking away from possible solutions.