Weekly Links: September 9, 2022
Prescriptivism, the Egyptian Book Pit, and Byzantine Totoro
Once again, I’m a little late with the link roundup. I had blocked out some time to publish these last night, but then a friend offered me some rather strong beer. Reader, life is short and the teacher’s working week is long. I regret nothing, except perhaps this mild hangover. Anyway, to the links!
Orhan Pamuk on the Salman Rushdie Attack
At the Atlantic, Orhan Pamuk reflects on what life is like for a writer living with bodyguards and state-sanctioned death threats. Pamuk would know: he is one of many Turks persecuted under Turkey’s infamous Article 301, also known as the prohibition against “Insulting Turkishness.” The law was watered down about a decade ago, but before then it was effectively a tool of state censorship, mostly used to suppress any mention of Kurdish nationalism or, in Pamuk’s case, the Armenian Genocide begun by the Ottoman government and continued by its successor state, the Republic of Turkey. Pamuk makes an instructive point: the people who make and carry out threats against writers rarely read those same writers.
Whenever a writer comes under physical attack, everyone starts talking about responding to words with words, to books with more books. But does this old adage make sense? Those who are pulling the trigger or wielding the knife tend to have read very few books in their life. Had they read more books, or been in the position to write one themselves, would they have turned to this kind of violence? Would they have been capable of it?
What we need to do is use our privilege of free speech to acknowledge the role of class and cultural differences in society—the sense of being second- or third-class citizens, of feeling invisible, unrepresented, unimportant, like one counts for nothing—which can drive people toward extremism. (Rushdie’s 24-year-old assailant worked as a clerk in a discount store.) I say this with a novelist’s awareness that trying to understand a person does not equate to forgiving them or excusing their heinous crimes.
As Eliot Weinberger was pointing out in “The Month of Rushdies” back when the Rushdie affair was actually going on, vanishingly few of Rushdie’s critics had actually read anything from The Satanic Verses except for its title, itself misinterpreted to be a reference to the entire Quran, rather than a few apocryphal lines.
Life Goals: Egyptian Bookhoarder Edition
AI-Assisted Narrators Redux
Back in February,, I wrote about how artificial intelligence software is bringing text-to-voice programs scarily close to imitating real human voices. There’s a lot that can go wrong with this technology, like audio deepfakes, but it could also add some real benefits to audiobooks. Imagine having an entire “cast” of narrators reading to you, a different voice for every character or perspective, and you can start to see how cool this can get. That was my first thought, anyway, when I saw these demos for Koe Recast, which offers real-time transformation of speech into 10 different “voices.” This isn’t new, per se, but when Google was showing off this tech a few years ago, they were doing it with fancy supercomputers; Koe Recast wants to have a smartphone app that costs a few bucks out by the end of this year. Benj Edwards over at Ars Technica makes an apt comparison to Stable Diffusion and AI image-generators: sure, it’s not as good as the $100 million models over in Silicon Valley, but you can run Stable Diffusion on a laptop computer, and it’s free. This stuff is moving at a headspinning rate, and it won’t be long before it comes for publishing and audiobooks.
How Literate Were Our Ancestors?
Over at his excellent blog, Alan Jacobs is miffed at a pair of essays bemoaning the present state of public debate and declining literacy. Because so many of our notions about past eras come from writers, it’s tempting to imagine these periods as they look in the great books. Periclean Athens sounds like a font of wisdom and public spirit if you’re picturing a place teeming with Platos and Sophocleses, but we know from other evidence that it was a pretty small place where most of the population was enslaved and illiterate. Whether it’s ancient Rome and Constantinople, Renaissance Florence and Venice, medieval Chang’an and Kyoto, or 19th century Paris and London, the smart set was pretty much always a tiny elite of literate, rationally-minded elites surrounded by a supermajority of uneducated peasants. The closer you get to any Golden Age of Discourse, the more it starts to look like a mirage. I found these stats linked in the post to be especially interesting, and I’ve bookmarked them for follow-up reading.
New Words Just Dropped
The lexicographers of Merriam-Webster just added 370 new words to their dictionary. A few of the highlights:
Dumbphone
Greenwash
Sponcon
Dawn Chorus
Terraform
Yeet
Pwn (apparently pronounced pōn)
Altcoin
LARP
Banh Mi
Freddie deBoer also had some less than kind words for the descriptivists at Merriam-Webster this week. What should a dictionary’s stance be on the weird, semantic drift of literal? Probably not internet memes.
It’s funny, when you look back at the great prescriptivist-descriptivist dustup, how quickly and ruthlessly the debate was settled a few decades ago. These days, the only people who actually call themselves prescriptivists are trolling or isolated cranks. This isn’t a bad thing: prescriptivism is obviously false as a model of how languages actually work and not an especially helpful model for how they should work. Still, I have a weird sympathy, as I suspect deBoer does, for maintaining some kind of standards for eloquence and coherency.
Anyway, that’s it for this week. Here’s a picture of Totoro as a Byzantine icon, drawn by me (and, uh, DALL-E 2). Happy reading!