editors'/ note/

KB: Everytime I log into a tech interface at the moment it’s like, why don’t you try AI? And honestly, over my cold, dead body would I want to get AI involved in this conversation. I met someone recently who told me that she talks to ChatGPT about her breakup every day. 

 

CC: Oh no. 

 

KB: And she said to me, ChatGPT told me this thing today which I’ve found so useful, which is that in our relationship, I was asking him to carry a vase full of water along a tightrope. And even after I told him it was okay to put the vase down he was still tired from walking on the tightrope. I was listening to her thinking, what? What are you talking about?

 

CC: You know what, writers are safe. Poets are safe. Because this shit is so bad. Do not even try to get ChatGPT to give you a fucking metaphor. 

 

KB: I was so lost. Anyway, how are you?

 

CC: You know what, I’m finding it really hard right now to spend a lot of time on something that is not my personal writing. I know that’s a super obvious point because you must labour under this society, but I find it incredibly frustrating. Also because at any workplace there is all this pressure to perform your personality in a certain way, that actually to me feels opposite to the openness required for creativity. 

 

KB: I think that’s really hard at work, particularly as a woman, where being likeable is so important. 

 

CC: A million percent. The other thing that I find really challenging is that many businesses want what they call “creativity” - partly because of the AI thing, they’re afraid of being generic - and then you try to be creative and it immediately gets watered down and watered down and watered down.

 

KB: I think a lot of it is that people are scared of being vulnerable, and people feel exposed when they put forward something they believe in that’s a bit different. So people just circle the drain of the same ideas. Everyone wants everything to be beige. 

 

CC: Yeah, I think people say they want a strong vision or opinion but they often don’t. AI literally aggregates information, to come to a perfect neutral. In a professional group, everyone tilts towards agreeing with the people around them, and if you don’t do that, it’s seen as inherently combative. And like fine - then I shan’t have an opinion. Because that’s what you're asking for. 

 

KB: Not to be too Sheryl Sandberg about it, but if you were a man no one would give a shit. So often in creative industries, men are so combative in meetings to the extent that they can be rude and mean and people say, oh you know Paul’s just like that. Someone told me once that I had to work on keeping my face blank in meetings so I don’t frown too much and offend someone.

 

CC: When you are trying to create anything as an artist you have to lead with “I think this is right and I am going to do it”. While I've had to hone that instinct in relation to my own work, it has been genuinely hard to cultivate, because of that complete dissonance between needing to suppress all my instincts and opinions at a workplace, but then tap into them again when I need to make art. I find that really self-alienating.

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/ It’s so refreshing to read something where

the author doesn’t care if you don’t get it.

You can tell that the author thinks that it’s

good, that they are being themselves. /

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KB: This really reminds me of Joan Didion’s essay on self respect. When you’re making work you have to have quite a high level of self respect and basically our entire social structure is engineered to disenfranchise women from themselves because it makes us easier to take advantage of. I had this epiphany recently: why am I trying to write something in a certain way so that people think I’ve written a good novel? That’s not a real reason. It’s so refreshing to read something where the author doesn’t care if you don’t get it. You can tell that the author thinks that it’s good, that they are being themselves. 

 

CC: Definitely. It’s nice to experience someone articulating something that is completely singular to them in a singular way. Especially right now, when AI is writing more and more copy, and every Hollywood movie is written by committee – there’s no singular vision. 

 

KB: There’s this great Jim Jarmusch quote, which I’m about to butcher, but he basically says, people ask me what my movies are about and I’m like, I don’t know, that’s your job. 

 

CC: I love Jim Jarmusch. 

 

KB: The things that we are publishing in this edition are very emotion-led, and most of them have something speculative about them which I love. And it rejects this craving of literalism, which I think is a misunderstanding of what certain works are trying to do. It’s okay to come away from a movie with a vague feeling of ennui and a loose grip on the plot, like I don’t think that’s a bad reaction. 

 

CC: Agreed. I am totally against explaining symbolism - it drives me bananas. I really hate it when I read it, I hate it when I see it in films. This feels prescient right now with all the conversations around creativity and AI. ChatGPT doesn’t understand subtext. It doesn’t understand how we play with language. Reminds me of this great Arthur C Danto quote where he says ‘machines do not have headaches, do not eat, do not have stress, cannot take vacations. To understand these idioms one has to have a body, like the body we all have. One has to be human. Though we can play language games with machines, without the body we have no capacity to understand any of these concepts. A body must be involved in comprehension regardless of where language is used.’ That’s exactly it. Even trying to allude to the experience of being human, they can’t make the allusion sensible. It’s just guessing. It’s collage, not comprehension. ​​

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/ We’re looking for humanity in everything [and yearn] 

for a moment of comprehension and recognition. I think

everything we’ve picked for this edition speaks to that

desire to be witnessed. /​​​​

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KB: I find it so thrilling when people use language in a way that’s totally unexpected, particularly when they describe something familiar to you but in such a novel way. I think that’s so different to a machine trying to figure out what you want most to hear. 

 

CC: That speaks to the melancholy tragedy of being human - we’re looking for humanity in everything. As soon as language is being used we desperately look for the humanity in it - yearning for a moment of comprehension and recognition. I think everything we’ve picked for this edition speaks to that desire to be witnessed. The language is playful and singular and I get so much out of reading all of them in terms of an experience of the world that’s not my experience of the world. I love how everyone in this edition has explained that for themselves without being explanatory. There’s something here about the resistance to being fully comprehended while also really wanting to be comprehensible, which is a delicious duality. 

 

KB: Definitely. There’s something that runs through all of them about wanting to be known and sometimes being a stranger even to yourself, and how language constructs identity. And how through your desire for assimilation you are constantly in the process of alienating yourself from yourself. 

 

CC: The pieces are very place-centered as well – how a particular place makes you familiar and unfamiliar to yourself.

 

KB: And how a place can hold emotion – I think childhood as an experience is really an experience of being seen and unseen. Being a child is so uncanny, the rules of the world are so strange when you’re a child.

 

CC: When you remember things from childhood, it’s funny how ingrained a certain detail is and it’s almost impossible to explain to yourself why that detail is so salient. And I love seeing that urge in other people, those touchstones, which I think we see in some of the pieces in this edition. And you know, a memory is not a story. And a couple of pieces hit on this – how to make something that feels like memory into an actual story that you can go along with. 

 

KB: Especially when we’re thinking about being of a place and whether you belong - so much of what happens to you in childhood are things that are told to you, and so I see them in the third person. They probably aren’t even real memories. We get better at parsing some of the absurdities of the world as we get older but not all of them, the world is still absurd. All the pieces capture that edge – the rules might change. There could be a flood, grandpa might go into hospital, your lover might leave you. 

 

CC: What is familiar to you won’t be forever. And you know that already ahead of time.