I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them. One night, when my husband was asleep, I asked for its help in telling a true story.
I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.
Most people spend their lives thinking about poetry so infrequently that it takes a marriage (or a death) to coerce them into listening for a moment. The after-party anecdote is no novelty: when one attends a wedding, a poem is read—sometimes written specifically for the event, for the people being wed. What makes that poem suited to the occasion for its making, its public reading; what does one expect from the ceremonial poem? For the crowd at a reception dinner, after cocktail hour, does the poem express the intense love of those being married? Is it different from a toast? Does it approximate the reflections and conversations cherished in making this lifetime decision? Does that disagree with the party’s levity? Who does the poem include in its audience besides everyone in that moment? I suspect the answer is anyone who cares, if several hundred years of wedding poetry speaks to the present.
On the surface, this appears to leave young workers with ample tools to improve their working lives: to get an education on how they’ve been screwed, with a manual showing them how to make their narrow escape. But a closer read reveals a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a publishing trend pretending to provide the answers to structural problems that merely acknowledges a broken system and seeks to address it through superficial, commercially-friendly solutions.
Today, the section can seem like an anachronism — a cramming of countless cultures into a single small enclave, in a country where an estimated 40 percent of the population identifies as nonwhite, according to the Census Bureau, and where H Mart, a Korean American supermarket chain, has become one of the fastest-growing retailers by specializing in foods from around the world. Even the word “ethnic,” emblazoned on signs over many of these corridors, feels meaningless, as everyone has an ethnicity.
“The Human Zoo,” the fascinating new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Sabina Murray (“The Caprices,” “Forgery,” “Valiant Gentlemen”), is a tale of indecisiveness. Or maybe it’s a political thriller. Or it could be a love story.
It’s definitely a social critique targeting the grotesque inequalities of an authoritarian regime in the contemporary Philippines. It also takes a look at past colonial-era outrages: the human zoos of the title, in which indigenous tribespeople of the Philippines were put on display for the delectation of American and European audiences at world’s fairs in the early 20th century.
“‘But … the main character, it — isn’t she …’ Mrs. March leaned in and in almost a whisper said, ‘a whore?’” With these words, prompted by the suggestion that she was the unwitting muse for her husband’s latest novel, the eponymous protagonist of Virginia Feito’s debut book of fiction ushers us into her world and her ensuing descent into madness. It is the first of many such instances, both real and imagined, in which Mrs. March is confronted with her husband’s work, for everywhere she turns it seems that people are talking about his novel — and, by extension, about her and Johanna, the fictional character in question.
“Playlist for the Apocalypse,” Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best. The title makes it leap from the bookcase. It’s about life in what she calls this “shining, blistered republic.”
“Save your tears for when your mother dies,” is a proverb that singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner heard a lot from her Korean mum, Chongmi, when she was growing up in Eugene, Oregon. Her friends had coddling “Mommy-Moms”, always at the ready with a white lie or a verbal affirmation; her own mother, by contrast, provided love tougher than tough. “It was brutal, industrial-strength,” Zauner writes in her first book, a vibrant, soulful memoir that binds her own belated coming-of-age with her mother’s untimely death, and serves up food, music and, yes, tears alongside insights into identity, grief and the primal intensity of the mother-daughter bond.