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1.

One of the loveliest documented moments of the 1966 Newport Folk Festival features Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf in a rare improvised performance. The beauty of it might be thought, on an initial viewing, to be compromised by the presence of a white fellow on the stage, one who will no doubt read for some as “dorky”, gesticulating exuberantly, strumming some indeterminate instrument but adding little. One might assume this man had been among the organizers of the event, perhaps some Harvard ethnomusicologist or the like. The angle and distance and quality of the recording reveal little of his class habitus, or of the quality of his dental care. All we can really make out is his “race”, and this is enough to mark him, in our contemporary world’s taxonomy of musical traditions, as quite out of place. Even I, who am arguably quite such a “white ou” myself, found his display somewhat unseemly at first, like the blond dreadlocks of the self-identified Rastafarian skater of your worst high-school memories, like the hackey-sackers in Sex Wax shirts I had to chase from the parking lot when, in the summer of 1989, I found myself briefly employed as security guard at an N.W.A. concert.

But look closer, and some further salient features will come into view. His instrument is an autoharp, for one thing, and his teeth are something awful. He is Kilby Snow (1905-1980), Appalachian folk musician, autoharp prodigy, and in every conceivable respect “the real deal”. In a remarkable 1970 interview and performance alongside Mike Seeger, Snow gives a masterful demonstration of the unexpected range of his chosen instrument, and placidly admits that his own autoharp, embossed with his name alongside an American eagle motif, had been purchased from Montgomery Ward and had served him just fine throughout his long career. He describes his initial encounters with the autoharp exactly in the same terms as Sam Chatmon elsewhere describes his, in discussion with Alan Lomax, with the guitar: both begin around the age of four, when they are too small yet to lift their new musical prostheses and so approach them as stationary, the way an adult approaches a piano.

The more we hear Snow, both playing and speaking, the better we understand the nature of his exuberance in playing alongside these two towering blues musicians. He is experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because he is in his element, doing his thing, as an American musician.

Sometimes I worry that I am too hung up on this point, or that my exaltation of an ideal of racial harmony as exemplified through shared musical experience is in the end its own sort of dorky and sentimental exuberance. And I have over the past few years often struggled to understand what has brought me so far down this briar path of American folkways — I, who earlier in life heard, or convinced myself I heard, so much to think about in dodecaphony and serialism and music for airports and mallsoft and whatever the hell else just as long as it doesn’t look back to the past with simpering sentiment.

I have been going down this path at the same time as I’ve been immersing myself in Siberian oral epic tradition, and reading widely about this tradition’s parallels in the Balkans, in West Africa, and indeed Ancient Greece. On a typical day, you might well find me translating Sakha oral epic with Carter Family rarities playing in the background, Mother Maybelle switching between guitar and autoharp, the latter perhaps also of Montgomery Ward. And over time it has come to seem to me that this pairing, which some might judge prima facie as incongruous, indeed more incongruous than the sight of a white fellow on stage with Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf, is in fact anything but. When I am reading Olonkho and listening to the Carter Family, I am typically experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because I am in my element, doing my thing, as a lover of oral literature.

“Oral literature” is a contested designation in the scholarship,1 but I suspect that is mostly because scholars are professionally obligated to find things to contest. Literature, I think, in truth, following out an insight that my great hero G. W. Leibniz had already in 1704,2 has always been oral by default, while it is only in a few aberrant strains of it that we find so much prestige attached to its secondary textual traces.

The oral literature of America in particular begins with the transplantation of Anglo-Celtic and West African varietals into new soil, followed by some centuries of cross-fertility, and a succession of what Darwin called “sports”, when the growth of some living thing takes an unexpected new turn for reasons having to do with nothing we can make out other than its own internal idiosyncrasy. America, I am confident saying, has been unusually productive of musical sports.

The geographical region most conducive to their production, significantly, is nearly perfectly coextensive with the boundaries of there former Confederate States, with hill regions and riverine flood plains the most productive of all. The reigning political order in this region sought to keep a tidy garden of pure strains, and to pitch out the weeds that showed any hints of hybridism. But nature always comes roaring back, as the aphorist said, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the political history of America is its only history. You can hear a different history in its music. I have come to believe that this other history is a more promising one for thinking about American collective identity and its possible futures.

I’ve also come to believe that this history has been actively suppressed over the past half-century. The common tradition of American musical culture was, more precisely, systematically broken down and replaced by the new contextless commercial culture that swept in along with a whole suite of other changes in the period of the Nixon Shock often cited as the beginning of the neoliberal order.

I am old enough to have caught the faint traces of the older order, in such material as thrift-shop vinyl, but also through its still-living vehicles — elderly rural relatives who carried in them the songs that were transmitted to them by their parents and grandparents. It is this intergenerational transmission that is so to speak the lifeblood of the older order. I stood by as it died out. I could hear the elders, but by the time I came into the world the supreme value placed on cultivating individual taste made it impossible for me properly to learn from them.

When I picked up a Burl Ives or Carl Sandburg record from Goodwill (which I bought mostly in the hope of extracting “samples” from them, to be used ironically on public-access radio or in the then-thriving tape-exchange networks), it was one and the same technology that both enabled me to hear these good conservationist bards at all and that ensured the eventual effacement from historical memory of what they were trying to conserve. Recording technology, to be sure, made wonderful things possible. The recursive abstraction of jazz with each new wave of artists studying the work of the last, breaking it down and penetrating deeper into its essence (or, if you don’t like that kind of Thomistic talk, then, if you prefer, deconstructing it), was able to occur at all only because these artists could study their predecessors in a way no musicians before the 20th century could. New technology propelled at least one recording genre from libertine entertainment in the Depression era into maximally cerebral high art, working out the full potentials of modal composition only hinted at by Debussy and others in let us say the “problematizing” phase of high European tradition, in the earliest post-war years.

But what was the powerful motor of a genre defined by progressivity and abstraction, with hard bop evolving by the end of the 1950s into something like the aural counterpart to abstract expressionism, was detrimental to those genres that, as distinct from post-war jazz, could not fully get on board with modernity. There were efforts, of course. New Deal initiatives channeled public money, in part under pressure of example from similar initiatives in the socialist bloc, into the documentation, recording, and broadcasting of “the people’s” voices. These same voices would be rediscovered, showcased, and celebrated again with the folk revival of the 1960s, but by now the primary meaning of “popular”, which for most of its history was really just the adjectival form of “the people”, will have been replaced by a different and almost opposite sense, for which the corresponding noun is not “people” but “pop”. This is the sense that now makes it seem natural to describe some corporate K-Pop entity, for example, as “popular”, even if it has been entirely confected by top-down commercial interests with no concern at all for vernacular tradition.

Let us disambiguate these senses, in what follows, by using “popular†” for the older sense, with the cross superscript commonly added to the names of the deceased, and “popular*”, with the asterisk of illegitimacy.

2.

I have already identified one feature of popular† musical tradition: that its lifeblood is in the intergenerational transmission of songs and other motifs. Another is that popular† tradition, unlike popular* tradition, is no less concerned with death and loss than it is with sex and desire.

Consider in this connection these two exemplary renditions of the 1907 hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, the one by the Carter Family (1935),3 the other by the Staple Singers (1960). You must listen to both of these before we continue; doing so is part of the reading.

The song, sung in the first person, tells the story of a son or daughter accompanying a mother’s coffin to the graveyard, and it is sung with just as much sensuality —or whatever the thanatic equivalent is of what we call sensuality in the realm of the erotic— as Barry White ever conjured in his many celebrations of “making love”. There are noteworthy differences between the two versions. The Carters sing it straighter, and draw its greatest beauty out of Maybelle and Sara’s harmonies. The Staples weave around in the rhythm, play with time — perhaps one of the most exquisite micro-moments in the history of recorded music is Pops Staples’ second intonation of the word undertaker at around 1’05’’. This difference is often cited as the specific differentium of Black and white musical traditions in America. It is said that you would have noticed it if, on one and the same Sunday circa 1870, you heard the performance of “Amazing Grace” at an AME church in the rural South, followed by a performance of the same song at a white Baptist congregation later the same day. This is all true enough, but too much emphasis on such stylistic differences can obscure the historical significance of the prior existence of a shared treasury of American songlines that serves as the basis for all such variations in style.

I have already identified two signatures of vernacular musical tradition that are likely universal: first, that it is transmitted orally across the generations, and second, that it concerns itself with death as much as with sex, which is to say that it considers the full frame of human experience, rather than just the experiences from which it is easiest to extract a profit. In American vernacular tradition, in turn, we can identify a third feature: that it is fundamentally Christian, or at least it is indexed to Christianity in a sustained alternation between sin and redemption. When it is not Christian, it knows it is not. Many of the great early rock stars —Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, notably—, alternated between phases of lascivious excess and penitent regret. And the inescapability of the church, for them, was always the hidden force that made their engagement with the secular themes of carnal love and desire so compelling. Their art is the expression of what St. Thomas would call “disordered desire”. But having never forgotten altogether about God, even if their backs are currently turned on him, they are able to express an abiding awareness that the depths of desire are infinite.

Early Staples songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with a cluster of theological leitmotifs common in Black evangelical Christianity — the promise in Revelation, for example, at least on one interpretation, that in the afterlife we will each be fitted with a crown (Revelation 2:10). Most often the thematic focus of the lyrics is on extreme end-of-life scenarios, just before transit to a Heaven that is consistently represented as a real place, at the moment of both one’s greatest suffering and one’s sharpest experience of the Christian virtue of hope. The effect is something analogous to the contrast of black and bright gold in Byzantine icon painting.

Pops’ repetitive, minimalist phrasing and innovative tremolo effects on his Fender Telecaster are the very essence of rock-and-roll: dark, nasty, disconsoling. But unlike the Satanic turn in that tradition beginning in the mid-1960s, which Hendrix declared sonically with the tritone, and then the Stones and Black Sabbath and many more to come made explicit in lyrical content and marketing strategy, Pops gets nasty only to drive home exactly what it is our salvation, about which daughter Mavis is simultaneously singing, is salvation from. Just try to listen to “Low Is the Way” (1957) —again, doing so is non-optional—, and then to describe it without recourse to such familiar evaluative terms as “hardcore” or “bad-ass” (the latter now rather compromised by neoliberal girl-boss feminism).

Listening to the Staples’ recordings from the 1950s drives home a crucially important historical fact: that some of the earliest rock music was Christian rock. And this was nothing like the rear-guard, derivative Christian rock that we know from the period following the suppression of vernacular tradition —Petra, say, or Stryper—, which could never quite resolve itself into a coherent aesthetic or moral stance, but only used some laughable semblance of coolness instrumentally to make palatable what it implicitly acknowledged to be the fundamentally uncool message of Christian faith.

You will find Christian hymns interspersed with secular numbers throughout mid-20th-century showcases of white American musical talent, such as this 1952 episode of the Kate Smith Evening Hour featuring Hank Williams (in this case watching is optional, but strongly encouraged — among other things you will see the most passionate expression of secular love, real or feigned, in the eyes of young Anita Carter throughout her duet with Hank beginning around 5’00’’). And you will likewise find hymns in mid-century showcases of Black American musical talent, as at the end of this remarkable episode of The !!! Beat from 1966, a Dallas-based show I have previously praised, and could not possibly praise enough — it is pure American popular† genius at its greatest.

By contrast, you will not be hearing any hymns on Soul Train a decade later, or on Solid Gold a decade after that. And you definitely won’t be hearing any on America’s Got Talent, that crass display of empty mataiotechnics (as Quintilian described the skills of a traveling entertainer who delighted crowds by throwing a chick pea through the eye of a needle from a great distance4), which only manages to hold its audience’s attention by holding the camera less on the performers than on the empty-headed judges’ endless performance of dumbstruck jaw-drops. Christian themes will survive well after the suppression of vernacularity in country venues, but now only as identitarian reaction rather than as the spontaneous expression of a popular† life-world.

And here we see the true nature of the victory of the proto-algorithmic recording industry in the neoliberal era: that it succeeded in resegregating by market forces what the Civil Rights era had desegregated by political activism and progressive legislation, and thus in reentrenching, at the level of culture, a perception of stark natural differences between different groups of Americans that earlier had to be maintained by state power. This reentrenchment worked in part through the ideology of what we might call chronological chauvinism: the peculiar idea that people in the past, simply because they were living in the past, could only have been more closed in their hearts than we are today. We point to the fundamentally unjust legal and political regime under which they lived and died, and imagine that we are pointing at them individually. But they could just as easily, if we were to revive them and to show them a glimpse of the future, point to our musical regime and declare: vos quoque!

3.

Because commercial forces can’t stand for anything to remain in existence that is not as stupid as they are, one common technique for suppressing expressions of artistic integrity is to ruin them for all time by adapting them to the ends of advertising. I still can’t hear “Good Vibrations” (1966), that ingenious pocket symphony, without imagining that someone is trying to sell me Sunkist. And if you have only heard one Staple Singers song in your life, you probably only know them as the provisioners of a jingle for late-1990s television ads hawking Chevy fucking Malibus.

“I’ll Take You There” was a 1972 Stax Records hit, and as such it lies almost at the historical end of the arc of the Staple Singers that I would like to trace and to interpret here. Three years later, the true historical end, we have “Let’s Do It Again”, composed, significantly, by Curtis Mayfield. This was the last hit for the Staples, and made it to the top of the Hot Soul Singles charts for at least a few weeks.

There is an illuminating performance of this song from 1976 that seems to me to tell the full story of the late 20th century. Grey-sideburned Pops and denim-clad Mavis appear naturally adaptable, and more or less amenable to any new exercise in musical expression, or at least any that is rated somewhere lower than PG-13. But keep an eye out for the lesser Staples! Just look at poor Yvonne, all endimanchée in her yellow church dress. She is plainly only up there out of family solidarity, and on her own never would have survived the coerced secular turn that the new economic-cultural order had brought with it. Yvonne might just be my favorite Staple.

“Let’s Do It Again” is a fine-enough gospel-inflected soul song. But it’s not hardcore like “Low Is the Way” had been. I like my music hardcore. That’s why I think Stryper are fucking dorks, and why I think early Staples are a pure expression of American popular† genius.

If we continue to follow the arc of the Staples’ career backwards in time, we next arrive at “Respect Yourself” of 1971, likewise reduced to slightly irksome earworm as a result of its several commercial adaptations. The song itself is very much of its Sesame Street moment, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of all people, and of Black children in particular. Kind of corny, kind of touching, and resolutely secular in content (other than a modest call from Pops towards the beginning for toleration, on the part of non-believers, of the efforts of door-to-door evangelizers), “Respect Yourself” might still be plausibly interpreted as the fulfillment of at least part of the Christian social mission as the Staples understand it.

This hit follows a decade or so of significant involvement in the Civil Rights movement, the peak of which is surely the Staples’ 1965 album, Freedom Highway, named for the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march of that same year. To map the distance in spirit between this overtly political intervention and the feel-good individualism of “Respect Yourself” just six years later is in some sense to witness a success story — by the end of the 1960s Civil Rights had passed into law, and after that much of the remaining work to be done focused on bringing about the inner transformations that might more fully enable members of previously excluded groups fully to realize the possibilities of their newfound formal equality. But this decadal shift is also the one that saw so many former Maoists and Weathermen drifting into crystal-gazing and Primal Scream therapy, and to some extent we can see the Staples’ transition as their own inflection of this same general reorientation towards the atomic individual as the locus of change. MLK is by now, notably, dead, and his posthumous legacy, too, is beginning a parallel process of de-Christianization, as a condition of his inclusion in the national Pantheon.

We thus have, if we turn this backwards journey back around and respect the arrow of time like we’re supposed to, four broad metamorphic stages: the raw gospel of the late 1950s, followed by a vision of Civil Rights still rooted in the ideals of faith-based community, followed by a largely secularized affirmation of individual dignity and self-worth, followed by full participation, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reservation, in the post-1971 system of secular commercial entertainment. (We could add later phases as well for the individual Staples, not least the evolution of Mavis into her current role, at the age of 86, as generous-hearted and ever-adaptable grande dame of American music, beaming with Christian virtue so plain and evident that it has no need to explain itself).

It was in large part the religious impulse that quickened the Civil Rights movement into motion. It was in turn a great tragedy that the movement’s formal success in part made possible the conditions for a new cultural-economic order that was able, so to speak, to let its guard down. There is a natural motion across these four phases of the Staples’ career, where each phase can be seen to contain the seeds of the one that follows it, even if the motion from phase 1 to phase 4 brings us effectively from one aesthetic-moral universe to its opposite.

The genius anyhow of the Staples, the work that fully justifies their place in the American musical Pantheon, that by his own recollection was powerful enough to wake Bob Dylan up to the full mystery of life, are the recordings made between 1956 and 1959 and released in the latter year on the album Uncloudy Day. Almost all of the songs here are about death, and apocalypse, and retribution, and redemption. Several of them are the common property of American popular† tradition, shared generously and without jealousy across racial lines. The title song itself, “Uncloudy Day”, recorded in 1956, is to my mind the Staples’ most sublime achievement, showcasing Pops’ remarkable restraint on the guitar, Mavis’s voice at its most transcendent, telling of the promise of everlasting life in a city that is veritably made of gold. Here it is (listening, this time, is emphatically non-optional):

4.

None of this is to say of course that the United States is or ought to be Christian by definition, or that one must be Christian to participate fully in its collective identity. The founding documents are broadly of an Enlightenment deist stamp, and tens of millions of that country’s citizens are of other faiths. The modern liberal guarantee of a neutral public sphere must be preserved if anything at all is to be preserved. But this does not mean that the role of Christian communities in shaping American cultural life in particular needs to be suppressed or forgotten, nor that it has not been a grave political mistake to equate such communitarian belonging with identitarian reaction, and in consequence to seek to push these communities to the margins of political life. If you don’t want to understand or to honor the communitarian pride that a Merle Haggard finds in being an Okie from Muskogee (1969), then sooner or later you end up with the jingoistic national pride, and the politics of mass ressentiment behind it, that a Lee Greenwood finds in being what he calls “an American” (1984).

Things were not always this way. Throughout the mid-20th century, notably, the greatest efforts to chronicle, to document, and to celebrate American popular† traditions were driven by New Dealers, labor activists, socialist-leaning ethnomusicologists, and Bohemians of various stripes. There is much to learn from their work, and the present moment is abundant with lessons as to what happens when we decline to do so. The most important lesson, I think, is this: that one must either honor vernacular tradition and intergenerational continuity, or leave it to those who would seek to mandate that honor by state coercion to do so.

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This is just a quick reminder that later today The Hinternet will be hosting a livestream discussion between Justin Smith-Ruiu and Stanford historian of science Jessica Riskin on her latest book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin Random House 2026). Jill Lepore has called this book “a truly remarkable achievement.”

You can join the livestream discussion, beginning at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 New York / 11:00 Palo Alto, here:

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The livestream will include a period at the end for questions from the audience.

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I.

Oh man, things are getting hot. The Hinternet Foundation will be hosting a symposium on AI, literacy, art, and the humanities in Paris this coming November, and we are beginning to fear that by then whatever any of us might say on the matter will only be able to be heard, by at least some others, as “fighting words”. We ourselves are cautious skeptics, trying to make sense of a world-historical technological shift with vast implications for most facets of human life, and to do so without rushing to any easy conclusions or facile prescriptions or proscriptions.

Our work is getting harder all the time. In just the past few weeks it has come to seem to us that AI use, culturally speaking, occupies much the same spot that masking did five years ago. That is to say that it has emerged as a razor-sharp wedge issue, and has accomplished a near-perfect division of society into two camps, both of which believe the other is absolutely, categorically wrong.

We would need to check the numbers, of course, but we also detect some significant continuity between the respective compositions of each side of the earlier pair of opposed camps, and each side of the current one. That is, those claiming today to be “AI-free” appear predictably to be the same who, circa 2021, were claiming that nothing valuable to human community is lost when you can no longer see the mouths and noses of your fellow human beings. And in turn those insisting on laxer attitudes toward AI-generated texts often seem to be the same who, five years ago, were prepared baldly to deny some fairly well-established facts of virological causation out of simple personal distaste for Anthony Fauci.

But whether or not there has been a “pro-mask to anti-AI” pipeline, or an “anti-mask to pro-AI” one, it seems to us that we should at most briefly bemoan the fact that our society, under pressure from profit-hungry proprietary algorithms, just keeps bifurcating in this way, and that then we should move on, without dwelling on the bitter memory of past theaters of our evidently endless, indeed materially unendable, culture war.

If what we can learn about the AI controversy from the masking controversy is limited, this is in part because our newest rupture is in reality significantly less binary than the previous one, and than most involved in stoking it have so far been able to see. To put the matter bluntly, unless you have been living in a cave for the past 15 years —a real cave, that is, not a mancave, a gamer cave, or a gooner cave, which of course all have great wifi—, you are in fact “using AI”, to the extent that it is by now built into basically all of the technologies that you, as a writer, are almost certainly using to get your words out into the world.

And no matter how independent-minded you are, AI is using you in turn, in the sense that the negative style and the idiotic quirks it has dumped on the world now constitute a significant part of our default communicative frame. To some extent all this is an inevitable and predictable development in the history of technology. Madame de Sévigné’s liquid correspondence could only have poured from a plume put to paper. Frank O’Hara’s stark poems could only have come from his encounter with the partially automated language-machine known as a typewriter. And the language you have been generating, fellow writers of the 21st century, cannot fail similarly to bear the signatures of its own technological era.

It is in light of all this that we at The Hinternet have sometimes been unable to resist taking jabs at those supercilious performances of purity that we so often see on Substack, when writers declare of themselves that their work is “AI free”.1 Ironically, it is often the writers most eager to announce the artisanal provenance of their work who are, at the same time, most faithful to a strict normative conception of good middlebrow writing that itself amounts to a sort of automation, to the extent that it outsources to society, to style guides, or to publishing-world gatekeepers, what in its fully unautomated expression would implicate only the writer’s inner voice, and the writer’s fingers.

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II.

No one, we say again, is AI-free. But of course this does not mean that we may as well turn all the work of our imaginative and intellectual faculties over to the machines, or that we can now reduce the art of writing to an art of prompting. What it means, instead, is that we would be far better served by an honest scale of AI reliance than on any facetious self-reported claim of total AI virginity.

If this scale were to come into wide use, writers and readers could decide for themselves what degree of AI involvement they find acceptable. We could then dispense with the impossible ideal according to which only entirely AI-free writing is honest, meritorious, or worthwhile, and we could begin to think of the principled commitment to a minimal role for AI not as a universally binding moral-aesthetic standard governing all writing, but as something much more like the set of commitments to which the filmmakers behind the Dogme 95 manifesto adhered. Those Danes made some awfully good films, without soundtrack music, without artificial lighting, etc. Good for them! And good for Quentin Tarantino, too, for dropping in that historically incongruous but ever so sick Rick Ross track at just the right moment of Django Unchained (2012). If you don’t like this particular example, take the use of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) instead, which irked the critics immensely, while undeniably demonstrating the primary conviction behind this modest proposal of ours: that there are just so many “udogmatisk” ways to make art!

So then, without further divagation, let us present our scale. We have modeled it on the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, widely used in mineralogy and related fields, which until we began working on our own variant we had mistakenly been calling “Moe’s Hardness Scale”. In 1812 the German naturalist Friedrich Mohs devised this qualitative ordinal system, with diamonds at 10 and talc at 1, by observing which minerals can scratch which others, and which those others can scratch in turn. There will be no scratching on our scale, and we will move in order from lowest to highest, beginning, unlike Mohs, at zero.

So then:

0 — You actually do live in a cave, or have found some other way to go about your life entirely unconnected to the internet or to any media that indirectly transmit habits of language formed on the internet. If that is the case with you, paradoxically that also cannot be the case, since by definition you cannot be reading this.

1 — You have never so much as opened ChatGPT, Claude, etc., but you live in society like the rest of us, you send and receive e-mails, get your news from sources like the New York Times, occasionally post to Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and, almost certainly, interact on a fairly regular basis with people who do use commercially available LLMs.

2 — You occasionally use ChatGPT for narrowly focused tasks, like finding out how the luggage-storage system works at the Düsseldorf Bahnhof, but never with the intention to share with others, under your own name, anything the LLM tells you. Over time, however, you begin to detect new idiosyncrasies in your own habits of expression. You may find yourself writing of some phenomenon or process or historical fact that there is “nothing mysterious” about it, even though no one has suggested there is anything mysterious about it, and there could be no reason at all to suppose that there is, just as you may have read some days before that there is “nothing mysterious” about the train-station lockers.

3 — You sometimes use LLMs for “bullshit” writing tasks, the ones you would rather not be required to do at all, and that you judge “beneath” you to the extent that they involve nothing of your creative faculties or your personal style — so, pretty much all work e-mails, for example, or syllabi, or grant-proposal budgets. Occasionally you recall an earlier time when you thought it important to express yourself carefully and truthfully even in such tasks as these, and you wonder whether the boundary you have sought to set up, between these bullshit tasks on the one hand, and your meaningful tasks on the other, is really so impermeable as you might have hoped.

4 — You occasionally carry on lengthy conversations with LLMs about topics of interest to you, as for example what Claude Debussy might have said if you were to go back in time and to play John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1964) for him. You learn all sorts of things about modal composition and so on in the process — or at least you think you learn such things, even if you know theoretically that what the LLM told you is all just so much probabilistic gap-filling. A few days later you’re writing an essay on Substack about, among other things, the evolution of jazz into a high art form in the post-war era. You try to suppress any memory of the earlier dialogue, knowing that it was unverified information and any serious writer would not content himself with that. But it’s hard entirely to suppress all the lively thoughts and speculations that dialogue triggered in you, and inevitably some traces of the ideas explored, if not of the artificial language used to explore them, enter into what you end up writing under your own name.

5 — When you used to write fiction involving, say, the third-highest-ranked women’s basketball team in Latvia, and you needed to assign a name to one of the players, you would go to the Wikipedia article on, say, the Latvian national women’s volleyball team; you would take the first name of one of the players, the last name of another of the players, and you’d consider that part of the job done. Now you go to your LLM and you write: “Give me ten plausible names of Latvian women’s basketball players,” and you choose your favorite from there.

6 — You do the sort of things described in 3-5 above, and, in addition, you sometimes consult LLMs to add ornament or grain to a sentence published under your own name. For example, you query ChatGPT as to what kind of paper Madame de Sévigné used, and then instead of writing that she “put plume to paper” you write that she “put plume to rag paper”. You know you could have got this information by other means, but you also find yourself able to judge with fairly high confidence that the training-data of LLMs have included some pretty reliable information about the history of paper-making. You have the strong sense that your judgment of verisimilitude is something like the judgment of an expert chicken-sexer, to use a stock example from the philosophy of science. You feel something like moral certainty that further reading from trusted sources would only confirm what you’ve just been told by the LLM, and anyway the stakes are pretty low here and you’re unlikely to be called out on it so you may as well just go ahead.

7 — You love crafting your own sentences and paragraphs, but you find the final process of revision and polishing tedious, and anyhow you have so many commitments that it’s just not realistic any longer to do that part yourself. (It used to be realistic, but somehow it no longer is.) So you run your text through the machine with the prompt: “Please identify any serious grammatical errors or stylistic infelicities.” You consider the problems it points out one by one, and incorporate the changes it recommends as you see fit.

8 — You’ve written a book that needs some powerful paragraphs, synthesizing the entire argument and all the leitmotifs woven through it, for a conclusion. You’re exhausted and you just can’t squeeze any more words out of yourself, so you upload the file, you ask the machine to study it and to generate some paragraphs for you. You’ve written the book in English, but you’re also fluent in Norwegian, so you ask the machine to give you the paragraphs in this latter language. Once you have them, you translate them freely into English, and the further you go, the more freely you find yourself translating, as the text itself awakens your ideas and reminds you that you do have some things of your own to say after all. The final version, which you publish under your own name, has an LLM as its causal origin, but the causal sequence is essentially untraceable and the language is essentially your own. You used an LLM as “starter yeast”, so to speak.

9 — You love your work as a writer of non-fiction books and of public lectures, but you hate the part where you also have to furnish the usual accompanying paratexts: abstracts, catalog copy, all the different types of front matter, and so on. So you do the “meaningful” stuff yourself, but turn to an LLM for the promotional padding. Fearful that someone might detect the true origins of these parts of your work, and falsely suppose that the “meaningful” part must be equally artificial, you run through several LLM-generated iterations of the various paratexts, requesting each time that the machine “humanize” it, or that it work harder to duplicate the idiosyncratic style of the main text that it has already studied, in order not to be found out. You used an LLM as “starch”, as it were, or as “caulking glue”, to hold together or to solidify, as demanded by publishing-world conventions you yourself never chose, what remains substantially your own work. At least you tell yourself that’s what you’ve done, but you continue to worry, like a naughty child, that you’re gonna get spanked.

10 — You are a lazy borderline-illiterate person who wants to make some money online. You know there are plenty of suckers out there basically as alienated from language as you are, and willing to pay to skim some trifling thing about, say, how to dazzle a literary agent with a great opening paragraph, or about how charmed a life spent in France is, and all the other usual stuff that clogs our feeds. So you go to ChatGPT and command it to write an essay for you on one of these topics. You post it to Substack and it gets 11.2k hearts, over twenty times more than the most-loved piece ever published at The Hinternet, and hundreds of comments from people declaring your work “brilliant”. A vanishingly small number of precious egghead scolds will complain that your piece was “obviously written by AI”. They will call your work “slop”, and you will cry all the way to your payment processor’s portal.

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III.

We suppose that more or less everyone who is reading this falls somewhere between 1 and 9 in their current habits. We do not want to have anything to do with those who score a 10. They belong to a different and incommensurable world from ours. By contrast we sympathize with everyone in the long middle of the scale, and know, from personal temptation, what they’re going through. We ourselves have gone up to 4, and have often considered the many attractions of 5-9. In the future we would like to impose on ourselves so to speak a “Dogme 26” that would prohibit us from going higher than 3. We would continue to read other authors who go up to 9, and would be grateful to them for sharing their score with us.

Beyond such efforts at practical resolution of our current quandary, we at The Hinternet truly do not think that there is any fundamental moral problem at issue, or that any claim as to the wrongness of LLM-enhanced writing can be defended on the basis of universal principles alone. Practices evolve, and eventually they change beyond recognition. We can actively work towards an idea of what we would like our practices to be, of the direction in which we would like to see them evolve, and try to get there from here, even under the considerable weight of these new machines that are transforming language so rapidly and so indifferently to any consideration of our preferences. It would be very nice indeed if we could do so without constant moralizing and condemnation.

We are living through an absolutely bonkers historical moment. Everything is topsy-turvy, and the fate of writing entirely uncertain. None of us really knows what’s going to happen. Under these conditions it really does not make sense to be so hard on one another.

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We are very happy today to be able to publish this exclusive excerpt from Jessica Riskin’s new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Riverhead Books, March 2026). Jessica teaches history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Many of us are in agreement that her previous book, The Restless Clock (Chicago, 2016) is among the best treatments of the natural-philosophical problem of life in early modern Europe ever written, and deserves to be considered a new classic. It is fitting that she should turn her attention next to Lamarck (1744-1829) — amply memorialized in statues and lecture halls in France and widely characterized here as the “founder of the theory of evolution”, even as his role in the history of science is mostly downplayed or dismissed in the Anglosphere. This dismissiveness is especially regrettable, given that some of Lamarck’s ideas have been positively reassessed in recent years by scientists working in such fields as epigenetics and developmental plasticity theory. It is to be hoped that Jessica’s book will help to bring about a deeper and more complete picture of this crucial figure. Jill Lepore has said of The Power of Life that it is a “truly remarkable achievement, at once a delightfully wry and wildly entertaining biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and a riveting intellectual history.” Order your copy today. —The Editors

Order The Power of Life!

From THE POWER OF LIFE by Jessica Riskin. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Jessica Riskin.

*

From the garret window of the room where Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived when he first moved to Paris in his mid-twenties, around 1770, he could see nothing but clouds and sky. The clouds therefore became his companions and source of entertainment. Watching them, he began to notice how they formed, gathered and dispersed. They didn’t behave randomly, he observed, but exhibited types and patterns. He began to watch more carefully, and in this way, he became the first person to classify the clouds, producing a veritable cloud atlas for his first presentation to the Academy of Sciences in 1777. He divided clouds into five types: (1) veiled (en voile), (2) gathered (attroupés), (3) dappled (pommelés), (4) sweeping (en balayures), and (5) grouped (groupé). But Lamarck became busy, first with the study of botany and then with his new position at the National Museum of Natural History, created during the French Revolution, the wonderfully named Chair in Insects and Worms. He waited twenty-five years before actually publishing his classification of clouds, finally including it in his meteorological yearbook for Year Ten of the Revolution (1802) – the same year in which he coined the word “Biologie.”

The following year, a young English chemist named Luke Howard introduced the basic categories of the current taxonomy: “cirrus” (made of parallel fibers, from the Latin word for a tendril of hair), “cumulus” (conical heaps, from the Latin word for a heap or pile), and “stratus” (horizontal sheets, from the Latin word for a “spread”). Lamarck and Howard apparently never heard of one another, which is a shame since they might have had a lot to talk about. On the other hand, they would probably have disagreed about some things too. For instance, Howard said he used Latin terms to name the types of clouds because he intended his system to be adopted by the “learned of different nations.” This strategy was successful: Howard’s terminology established itself internationally and is still in use today.

Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms, not because he wanted to speak only to French people – after all, he drew people from all over the world to his legendary classes on invertebrate zoology – but because he hoped to create a participatory community of meteorologists that would include the non- “learned.” Only an educated minority would have understood Latin terms; and Latin names would have indicated that meteorology was an elite, scholarly pursuit, which was exactly the opposite of what Lamarck intended. To be sure, when he named plants and invertebrates, he often used Latin roots, but in those cases, he was working within traditions that had existed for centuries before him. The clouds, in contrast, had no traditional nomenclature; no one had ever named them. Embarking on an entirely new science, Lamarck was free to define its terms as he liked. And, just as he boasted that he could turn any passerby in the Garden of Plants into a botanist, he also meant to turn everyone in France, and beyond, into a meteorologist. He addressed his readers fondly and familiarly as “friends of nature.”

In September 1799, two months before Napoleon declared himself First Consul of France in a coup d’état, Lamarck published the first in his decade-long series of meteorological yearbooks, offering forecasts for the year 1800, the first year of the nineteenth century. In this inaugural yearbook, he issued a special “invitation to amateurs of meteorology” encouraging readers to annotate their copies of the book by recording their own observations in them, and to send him their annotated yearbooks at the end of the year. He offered careful instructions for how to make these annotations.

In order to understand how you’d have annotated your yearbook if you’d been one of Lamarck’s participatory readers at the turn of the nineteenth century, you first have to know that each book includes a calendar arranged in columns. From left to right, there’s a column for the day; then the month; then for “natural periods useful to observe” such as the migratory arrivals and departures of certain birds, the blooming of particular plants, and the fall of leaves from various species of tree. Next comes the most important column, which is somewhat mysteriously labeled “epochs of changes of constitution.” This column in fact contains the positions of the moon: its apogees, perigees, and the northern and southern extremes of its orbit. In the course of a lunar month, the moon’s orbit carries it not only around the earth, but also north and south, above and below the equator. Lamarck explained that when the moon was traveling through the six northern signs of the zodiac, he called this period the moon’s “boreal constitution”; and when it was traveling through the six southern signs, he called it the moon’s “austral constitution.”

The column containing the moon’s constitutions is the crucial one because Lamarck’s central meteorological principle was that the moon imposes cyclical effects upon the weather by exerting a gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere: pulling to the north, causing south winds to prevail, or to the south, bringing north winds. (Lamarck’s essential idea remains present in current meteorological science; today, meteorologists refer to the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere as “atmospheric tides.”)1

After the column of lunar constitutions comes one for the “meteorological season,” and here Lamarck divides each of the four regular seasons into two parts: the winter and summer into “solstitial” and “median” phases, and the spring and fall into “equinoctial” and “median” phases. Next comes a column for the time of the moon’s passage over the meridian line through Paris, where Lamarck was conducting his observations; and finally, one for its declination (its angular distance above or below the equator) at noon. A second calendar, arranged in paragraphs rather than columns, describes what the weather will probably be like for each successive “constitution” of the moon. According to Lamarck’s theory, boreal constitutions, pulling to the north, bring south winds and therefore warmer temperatures, lower pressures, humidity, rain, storms and tempests; in contrast, austral constitutions, pulling to the south, bring north winds and therefore colder temperatures, higher pressures, and clear, dry weather.

In his invitation to his readers, Lamarck explains how to record their observations of the weather day by day in the column containing lunar constitutions. He also offers detailed instructions for “how to judge the state of the atmosphere.” First, he says, you have to examine whether the weather is “simple” or “mixed.” Simple weather is either calm or has wind blowing only in one direction; mixed weather has upper and lower winds blowing in different directions. The lower winds are the familiar ones that turn weathervanes and windmills and fill the sails of ships; the upper winds are those we can see through gaps in the lower clouds as they blow around the upper clouds. Sometimes, even when the sky is heavily overcast and you can’t see its upper regions, you can still discern that the weather is mixed. For instance, if a south wind is blowing the clouds northward, and yet the barometer is steady or rising, there must be a cold north wind up above bringing the higher pressures; and if it’s rainy even though a north wind is driving the lower clouds southward, you can be sure there’s a warm south wind up above.

Having explained how to observe the atmosphere and how to annotate the yearbooks, Lamarck encouraged his readers to send him their marked up books at year’s end and said he’d be especially grateful to hear from any whose observations differed significantly from the probabilities he described. He also included a thorough explanation of the new metric system of weights and measures that the National Convention had introduced in April 1795, even though the system had no immediate use for annotating the yearbooks. The metric system was provoking widespread exasperation and resentment, but Lamarck believed in it; here was a further expression of his purpose to spread scientific literacy and a participatory feeling among his readers.

* * *

True to Lamarck’s romantic nature, he really loved storms. The participatory feeling wasn’t all about measurement systems, charts and tables: he wanted his readers to pay attention to the weather not only by recording it but also by relishing it. Storms, he said, were “the most imposing and the most beautiful” of meteorological phenomena. One summer while he was up at Beauregard, his country house in Héricourt, he observed a hurricane, which he described rapturously in the following yearbook in a special section entitled “Observations on the Hurricane of July 31, 1808, and on a large rotating cloud.” The storm’s great diversity of cloud shapes and colors had fascinated him, their rapid dance across the sky so “magnificent” that “I couldn’t tire of admiring the beautiful spectacle before my eyes.”

Science and the appreciation of beauty were inseparable, since it was while he stood rapt in the midst of the storm, watching the drama unfold, that Lamarck made a surprising observation: “suddenly I perceived in a large cloud placed to the southwest, a singular movement that I had never noticed.” The cloud in question took up much of the horizon and was oddly shaped, resembling “an enormous pyramid” with its summit pointing downward toward the earth. “Soon the sides of this pyramid were torn into shreds” while its base took on “a gyratory movement,” turning on its axis “with great slowness.” This stately, circular motion was portentous: “a most violent wind” and squall soon followed, so powerful that Lamarck was obliged to flee back to the shelter of Beauregard and “abandon my observations.”

He had witnessed a similar phenomenon in Paris just a couple years earlier, in 1806, which he had also reported in the following yearbook. “On the 16th of May at about one hour thirty-five minutes in the afternoon, the sky being loaded with various clouds on the point of becoming stormy, the barometer being at 28 inches three quarters and the thermometer … at 17 degrees, I heard a rather loud clap of thunder, which had been preceded by a flash of lightning.” Turning to look toward the southwest, where he reckoned the storm would be coming from, he saw “a large blackish cloud,” and beneath it, “a whitish and hanging portion of the same cloud having the shape of an inverted cone or imitating that of a funnel.” It seemed a bit like a waterspout, except that the funnel-shaped part was quite small compared to the rest of the giant cloud above it. As he watched, he became most interested “to see the misty parts of the waterspout in a continual movement. Those of the funnel or the inverted cone turned very distinctly as if around an axis but rising and forming a spiral.” As with the other sorts of cloud-forms, so too for funnel clouds, Lamarck seems to have been the first to assign them a name.

Lamarck also loved the “spectacle of the sky” in all its myriad moods – majestic, sublime, terrible, magnificent – at sunrises and sunsets with “the clouds adorned successively in the most beautiful tints, like the tender pink, the fiery red, the most brilliant purple, finally the beautiful violet,” or else at other times when the clouds were “grouped into mountains, their faces shining, illuminated with the brilliance of silver or purest gold.” The “meteorologist’s sky,” he explained, was the portion of the atmosphere that generated the weather, an “immense laboratory” overhead.

The emotional, the lyrical and the scientific were all one sky, one weather system, one world. And the observer – Lamarck himself and each of his readers – was right there in the thick of it, not outside looking in. He emphasized the direct action that the atmosphere exerted – and the moon through its action upon the atmosphere – upon all living beings: “the intimate relations that each particular state of the sky exercises on us, as well as on all the bodies on the surface of the globe.” Anyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse has learned viscerally and dramatically just what Lamarck meant. During totality, as the moon moves across the face of the sun, the awesome thing is that you feel the astronomical event viscerally, directly in your body: the chill, the darkness, the spreading hush. Even if we only notice it at certain moments, especially during extreme experiences like eclipses or storms, we’re always being acted upon by the atmosphere, which is always being acted upon by the sun and the moon. Rather than lifting the observer out of the world into a position of external, objective witness, Lamarck’s science resided in the thick of the storm: it was all about the intimacy of witness with world.

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* * *

Lamarck’s yearbooks generated lots of interest and commentary. In the dailies, they were announced, attacked, defended, and their probabilities compared to the actual weather as it came to pass, by Lamarck himself and by others.2 With all the attention they attracted, they often sold well enough to require a second printing.

One particularly dashing defender of Lamarck’s was the Parisian balloonist and parachutist André-Jacques Garnerin. Captured by the British during the Revolutionary wars, then handed over to the Austrians, Garnerin had spent three years as a prisoner of war in Buda (the now-Hungarian city directly across the Danube from Pest) passing the time by dreaming up designs for parachutes with the idea of escape. After his release, on the clear autumn evening of October 22^nd, 1797, in a park in Paris (the Jardin de Mousseau, which is now the Parc Monceau), Garnerin made the world’s first descent by parachute. He first rose to a height of 900 meters and then audaciously cut the cords attaching his basket to his balloon. The crowd craned its collective neck and held its collective breath as Garnerin initially plummeted like a rock, then when his parachute opened, he began to pitch about violently in the wind, finally dropping out of view. Aghast, the spectators rushed together in the direction of Garnerin’s fall, then cheered riotously when they saw him come galloping back into the garden on horseback, perfectly intact except for a mildly sprained ankle.[iii]3

A young woman in the crowd named Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse was especially inspired by the performance. She made her way to Garnerin to introduce herself, and soon became his pupil, then his wife, and the first woman parachutist. Before starting her lessons, Garnerin had to persuade the authorities that women should be allowed to go up in balloons alongside men. This had been disallowed for a couple reasons: first, the members of the Academy of Sciences warned that women’s fragile organs might not tolerate air travel; and then the government authorities had judged it unseemly for men and women to occupy the same balloon basket.

Garnerin’s arguments prevailed, however, and he soon received the following remarkably considerate response from the city government: “Citizen, according to the complaint that you have addressed against the order of the central office, which forbids you from traveling in an aerostat with a young citoyenne, we have consulted the Minister of the Interior and that of the general police… . [We all] think that there is no more scandal in seeing two persons of different sexes rise together into the air, than in seeing them get into the same carriage, and that moreover one cannot prevent an adult woman from doing in this respect what one allows men to do, and from giving, by rising into the air, a proof both of her confidence in the practice and of her intrepidity.”4

In the autumn of 1805, on the occasion of Garnerin’s thirty-ninth aerostatic ascent and fifth descent by parachute, he cited Lamarck’s yearbooks as the most useful thing to him in his aerial adventures. Since his balloons were ungovernable, leaving him entirely at the mercy of the weather, he said the best he could do was to know as much as possible about the forecast. “Never oars nor rudder, wings nor sails, bird’s flight nor carp’s leap, will direct a balloon,” waxed Garnerin poetically. “Mr. Lamarck’s meteorological directory is worth more … than all the calculations of modern Icaruses.”

But Lamarck’s colleagues were less enthusiastic. Once again, when he tried to read his meteorological theory to the members of the First Class of the National Institute in 1802, as had happened five years earlier with his work on the composition of matter, he encountered vehement opposition, particularly from Laplace.5 To Lamarck’s chagrin, his adversaries cast his meteorological work as outdated, superstitious nonsense: they constantly referred to the yearbooks as “almanacs,” and to the probabilistic reasoning they contained as “predictions,” insinuating that Lamarck’s meteorology was essentially astrology. As with Lamarck’s other struggles with his critics, this dispute with Laplace was fundamental, having to do with the nature of science, and even of the world itself. What counts as a scientific explanation? Is it legitimate science if you acknowledge, as Lamarck did, that the causes are not absolutely determinative of certain outcomes? Is the world deterministic?

Lamarck didn’t see the world as deterministic, or science as the description of deterministic mechanisms. In the case of the moon’s influence on the weather, he emphasized that many different factors affected it, rendering its effects uncertain. Lamarck identified two sorts of complicating factors: those that acted in a regular and predictable manner, and those that acted irregularly. The regular complications included the fact that the moon’s elliptical orbit carries it away from and back toward the earth during each lunar month. From its farthest point, its apogee, its gravitational pull is weakest, while from its closest point, its perigee, the influence is strongest. There are also the lunar “syzygies” – its “oppositions” with the sun, when it is on the opposite side of the earth, and its “conjunctions” with the sun, when it is on the same side.

Solstices and equinoxes – and in general, the positions of the earth relative to the sun – were also regularly occurring situations that affected the influence of the moon on the atmosphere. Finally, in terms of complicating factors that act irregularly, Lamarck mentioned clouds and storms – in other words, the weather has a feedback effect upon itself. Added to all this complexity was the fact that the earth itself was in a state of continual transformation: according to Lamarck, nothing in nature remained the same even “for two seconds in a row.” The oceans were always modifying the surface of the globe; the moon was continually moving the sea basin and the earth’s center of gravity; and the planet was always absorbing solar light, which transformed its matter, mass and volume. All in all, the earth’s landscape, atmosphere and climate were a great commotion of interacting elements.

Others who had sought connections between the moon and the weather had tended to simplify the situation by focusing on certain points in the moon’s orbit such as full moons, new moons, apogees, perigees, oppositions and conjunctions. For instance, in 1770 – while Lamarck had been garrisoned with his regiment in Provence admiring the wildflowers – an Italian priest and professor of geography and astronomy at the University of Padua named Giuseppe Toaldo had published a “Meteorological essay on the true influence of the stars upon the seasons and changes of weather.” Toaldo wrote that the moon acted upon the earth and its inhabitants by means of its light, heat, and gravitational attraction and that its influence became important at certain points such as perigees and syzygies. Lamarck drew upon and appreciatively cited Toaldo’s observations in developing his own theory but, he said, it was a mistake to focus upon certain points of the moon’s orbit: the moon acts upon the earth’s atmosphere all the time, in a continuous way, and always all mixed up with many other influences, not “in indivisible and determinable instants.”

This complex mixture of factors made the moon’s role hard to identify, and Lamarck confessed he had almost given up hope. “For more than twenty years,” he recalled, “I alternately resumed and abandoned this interesting research. I often spoke about it to my friends….” But try as he might, he couldn’t find patterns to confirm his conviction of the moon’s influence on the weather until he finally realized that this influence wasn’t absolute, but rather subject to many complicating factors, and yet it remained perceptible. Overall, he estimated that the weather corresponded with the probabilities derived from his theory about five-eighths of the time. This was far from perfectly predictive, but he thought it was enough to be useful. The probabilities he offered were grounded in theory and observation, he insisted, and therefore, whatever Laplace might say, “[i]t is not an opinion that I am presenting here, it is a fact that I am announcing; it is an order of things.”

To Laplace – whose work in mathematics included pivotal contributions to the field of probability theory – Lamarck’s “probabilities” were no better than astrological prognostications. Lamarck offered descriptive forecasts such as “we have reason to expect strong winds, maybe violent or tempestuous…. [I]t would be imprudent to set out to sea or to engage in any enterprise that requires calm weather.” These were not probabilities in Laplace’s estimation: his probabilities were mathematical expressions, not conversational descriptions. This divergence was connected to a deeper difference between the two. Laplace’s world, even including the most minor and insignificant events, was as deterministic “as the revolutions of the sun.” Humans’ sense of having a free will and of making unconstrained choices were just “illusions of the mind.”6 In Lamarck’s view, in contrast, the world was made up of many small agencies acting in concert, its future open to whatever they might bring about.

To express his idea of an utterly deterministic world, Laplace imagined an infinite intelligence that could comprehend all the interacting forces in the universe. For such a being, he said, nothing would be uncertain “and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” The human mind could gain but a “feeble idea” of such an intelligence. The best sort of approach we could make, Laplace thought, was through astronomy and mathematics, which would lead the mind “back continually to the vast intelligence … from which it will always remain infinitely removed.” I don’t suppose Laplace’s hypothetical omniscient being might be reminding you of anyone?

Isaac Newton, whose science provided Laplace with his starting point, came right out and said it in 1713 in the second edition of his Principia, the magnum opus in which he laid out his physical system of the universe: “it follows, that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being; and … that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.” The “French Newton,” as the popular press reverently nicknamed Laplace, showed Newtonian tendencies not only in his system of celestial mechanics but also in some of the theological ideas he attached to it.

God controlled everything in Newton’s universe: the world operated according to God’s “original perfect idea by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” All the parts of the world were God’s “Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will,” and there were “no powers of nature at all that can do anything of themselves.” In fact, according to Newton, the world-machinery functioned only through God’s immediate presence all throughout and would otherwise grind to a halt.7 In Laplace’s cosmology, likewise, nothing enjoyed its own power to act: the deterministic mechanism of the divinely created universe left no room for other agencies.

This might seem like a surprising thing to say about Laplace, who has been often invoked as an early champion of atheism. But in fact, Laplace wasn’t an atheist. While he left behind the Catholic orthodoxy in which he grew up, and especially rejected the possibility of miracles, he consistently expressed belief in a supreme power behind natural processes: he referred to a divine intelligence in his published writings and to God in private letters. According to an often-told story, Napoleon asked Laplace why he made no mention of God in his work on celestial mechanics and Laplace replied that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” The anecdote, a favorite of popular science writers, seems to have originated with Napoleon’s doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi. In Antommarchi’s version, Bonaparte was displeased by the response; but then Antommarchi’s purpose was hagiographic propaganda, and he offered the story as evidence that the emperor was respectably devout.8

According to the astronomer William Herschel, who witnessed Laplace’s and Napoleon’s exchange, Laplace had simply wanted to show that “a chain of natural causes” could account for the “wonderful system” of the heavens. The question of God’s existence didn’t come into it. This is perfectly consistent with what Laplace himself wrote: that the supreme intelligence might well have worked entirely through material causes, with no need for direct supernatural intervention of the sort Newton insisted upon. If indeed Laplace said he had no need of a particular theological hypothesis, it was likely Newton’s idea of constant, direct divine intervention in nature that he rejected, and not the idea of God’s presence behind the world-machine. In fact, Laplace boasted that his own findings regarding the stability of the solar system would have confirmed Newton’s conviction that the universe could only be the work of an intelligent and all-powerful being.9

In short, the deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was the manifestation of omnipotence: a total consolidation of power, with no room for even minor assertions of choice or will, and no such thing as contingency or uncertainty: these were but figments of human ignorance, illusion and folly. How different a world – how even opposite a world – from Lamarck’s churning commotion of beings and forces in continual self-transformation.

* * *

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Soon after publishing his first yearbook, at the end of the year 1800, Lamarck went to see the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whom Napoleon had just appointed Minister of the Interior. Lamarck wanted to persuade Chaptal to create a government service that would receive meteorological observations and information from all over France: the world’s first national weather bureau. Chaptal was enthusiastic; the very next day, he sent off letters to departmental prefects in every region of the country asking them each to name someone to the new position of government meteorological correspondent. Chaptal charged Lamarck with the welcome task of directing this first government weather agency, which entailed sending out exact instructions to the correspondents regarding how to conduct and record their observations, receiving their responses, and overseeing the process of organizing all the information into general tables. This job brought Lamarck to the Interior Ministry several times a week, as weather information began pouring in from all quarters.10

Alas, the agency was short-lived. In August 1804, three months after Napoleon had had himself crowned Emperor, Chaptal resigned as interior minister. In his letter of resignation, he said he wanted to spend more time with his chemistry. He told a more complicated story in his journal, having to do with the ins and outs of foreign and domestic diplomacy in the wake of Napoleon’s self-promotion to emperor. Meanwhile, a rumor circulated that Napoleon had provoked a falling-out with Chaptal over Chaptal’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, a stage actress at the Comédie Française. According to the rumor, Napoleon had deliberately summoned Bourgoin to his residence one evening while he was working there with Chaptal. When she was announced, Napoleon ordered the servant to have her wait for him, whereupon Chaptal brusquely gathered up his papers and stormed out. This “coup de théâtre,” if it took place, must surely have been designed to provoke Chaptal’s resignation, which at any rate came at a moment when Napoleon was eliminating all the more independent-minded administrators and surrounding himself with absolutely loyal followers.

With Chaptal’s departure, the meteorological correspondence service was abolished. All the records were confiscated and sent to the Bureau of Longitudes (a government agency founded in 1795 by the Revolutionary National Convention to improve astronomy and navigation), which was just coming under the directorship of – you guessed it – Laplace. That was the end of official French meteorology for a time. Only after the passage of several decades and political regimes did a Parisian doctor, botanist, and geologist named Charles Martins, together with two colleagues, re-start the practice of a meteorological correspondence and annual yearbook. That same year, 1848, saw a new revolution: the Second Republic was establishing itself just as Martins and his colleagues were launching their meteorological project. But history repeated itself: by the time they published their third volume, in 1851, the Second Republic was already giving way to the Second Empire under Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III (Napoléon le petit as Victor Hugo devastatingly nicknamed him, or to Karl Marx, the farcical and grotesquely mediocre echo of his formidable uncle.)11

Martins was an admirer of Lamarck: he also published a new edition of Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy to which he added a long biographical introduction, proclaiming grandiosely, “the hour of justice has sounded, and the posthumous glory of Lamarck casts an unexpected glow on France.” In the first of their yearbooks, for 1849, Martins and his colleagues echoed Lamarck by modestly referring to themselves as “three friends of Meteorology” and promised to compile the information gathered by “zealous and disinterested” observers from all over France. In 1852, they co-founded the Meteorological Society of France, which gave rise to the governmental Central Meteorological Bureau in 1878, which developed through various stages into today’s Météo-France.[xii]12

But that was all decades after Lamarck’s death. In his own time, after the self-emperor-ification of Napoleon, the resignation of Chaptal, and the cancellation of the meteorological correspondence, the opposition to Lamarck’s own yearbooks grew ever more concerted. The nastiness of the campaign against him so painful that decades later, following his death, Auguste would express deep bitterness on his father’s behalf. No science could be more useful and important, Auguste reflected, and yet although people had done plenty of observing and recording, no one had embarked on an actual science of meteorology; “my father was the first to try it.” Instead of praising and supporting his pioneering effort, those with power and influence had subjected him to ridicule and “persecution plotted in the shadows.”

Lamarck ignored it for as long as he could, and carried on compiling and publishing annually, but at last, in 1809, as the tenth yearbook appeared, Napoleon himself instructed Lamarck “to immediately cease all publication of his observations on the atmosphere,” as Lamarck later recalled. “What a strange thing,” he lamented, to ban his work even though he wasn’t “writing at all about politics,” and devoted himself exclusively to “studies of nature.” It does seem extraordinary that Napoleon the great modernizer, the mastermind of rational, scientific approaches to governmental administration and authority, should have taken such a hate to meteorology, of all things. But perhaps, upon reflection, it’s not so surprising after all. Meteorology resists a reductive, deterministic model of science. And the weather defies control. Perhaps that’s at least partly why Lamarck found it so fascinating.

At any rate, Lamarck was quite mistaken to suggest that “studies of nature” are separate from “politics.” Lamarck’s natural science was overtly materialist, granted creative agency to the humblest of living beings, combined poetry with observation and measurement, insisted upon the embroilment of the observer – sensory, physical, emotional – in the world observed, and promulgated a participatory model of scientific and governmental authority. To Napoleon and his scientific advisors, that was all plainly subversive.

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Main primary sources

Cuvier, “Eloge,” v (cloud-watching). [Cotte], “Mémoire” (Lamarck’s 1777 presentation to the Academy of Sciences, of which nothing remains except Cotte’s description).

Lamarck, “Sur la forme,” 149 (not random), 153 (types of clouds); “Nouvelle définition,” 113 (addition in 1805 of seven more types, brumeux [misty], terminés [terminated], en lambeaux [ragged], boursouflés [puffy], en barres [bar-shaped], coureurs [running], and de tonnerre [thunder]); Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 85-88 (atmospheric constitutions, complicating factors), 93-95 (“invitation to amateurs,” annotation instructions, annotated yearbooks request), 96-113 (metric system), 97 (“two seconds”); Annuaire pour l’an X, 24-25 (calendar columns example), 50-51 (“reason to expect”) 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an 1807, 171-72 (funnel cloud); Annuaire pour l’an 1808, 1 (“friends of nature”), 200 (“most imposing and beautiful”); Annuaire pour l’an 1809, 184-87 (hurricane), 164 (bodily influence of atmosphere); Annuaire de l’an xiii, 97-98 (“spectacle of sky,” “immense laboratory,” “intimate relations”); “Mémoire sur le mode de rédiger … les observations météorologiques”; Météorologie, 451-53, 474 (chagrin at colleagues’ reaction), 475-76 (“what a strange thing”); De l’influence de la lune, 430 (“indivisible and determinable instants”), 431 (twenty years of hesitation); Extrait d’un mémoire, 148 (“not an opinion”). Howard, Essay, 6 (“learned”). Laplace, Philosophical Essay, 3-4 (infinitely intelligent being); “On the Notion of Power” and “On Causality,” in Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 224-232 (contingency a figment). Garnerin, Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 8 October 1805, 59-60 (“modern Icaruses”). Haeghens, et al., Annuaire météorologique, ii-iii (“three friends of Meteorology”). Newton, “General Scholium,” 389-90. Martins, “Introduction,” lxxxiv (posthumous glory). Chaptal, Mes souvenirs, 106-107 and note 1 (Napoleon/Bourgoin episode). A. Lamarck – Cuvier, 8 February 1830, IF GC Ms 3252 / f. 358-359, 3-4 (Auguste’s bitter reflection).

Influence of the moon on the atmosphere, atmospheric constitutions:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an IX, 109 –111; Extrait d’un mémoire; De l’influence de la lune; “Météorologie.” Toaldo, Essai, 89-94.

Government weather agency:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an XI, 85-86, 154; Annuaire pour 1807, 203; Annuaire pour 1810, 150; Météorologie, 469-473, 476. Lalande, “Histoire de l’astronomie pour l’année 1801,” 26.

“French Newton”:

Le Moniteur universel, no. 308, 4 November 1811; Journal de l’Empire, 18 May 1812, 4; Pierre-Josoph-Spiridion Dufey, Nouveau dictionnaire historique des environs de Paris (Paris: Charles Perrotin, 1825), 11.

Secondary sources:

Packard, Lamarck, 79-82. Landrieu, Lamarck, 133-149. Bourdier, “Esquisse,” 34-35. Bange and Corsi, “Chronologie”. Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy.” Alder, The Measure of All Things (resentment of the metric system). Delange, “Phénomènes,” 134 (negative response to Lamarck’s meteorology). Schiavon and Rollet, Pour une histoire du Bureau des longitudes.

Women parachutists:

Noyes, Lady Icarus, 101; Kotar and Gessler, Ballooning, 81-82; Marck, Elles ont conquis le ciel (women’s organs).

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“Historique,” Météo et Climat; “L’Office national météorologique (1920-1945),” Méteo-France.

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In current usage, “AI ethics” typically refers to one or the other of two very different rhetorical-argumentative projects.

The one concerns itself with ethical problems arising from human reliance on AI — most paradigmatically, and narrowly, the sort of utilitarian calculation that in principle is arrived at through variations on the trolley problem. Confronted with the dilemma of either plowing down a toddler or running a truckload of unusually introspective gorillas off a cliff, which way should the Waymo be made to swerve? And so on. This is ultimately, of course, a laundering scheme, and one that only makes sense in this interim period of waning but still measurable academic authority, whereby a few people with Ph.D.s are convinced to sign off on what the tech companies were obviously, in endless pursuit of profit, going to do anyway.

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Our friend , whom you will know as founding editor of The Metropolitan Review, among several other distinctions, has recently averred in a Substack Note that he has been struggling to keep before his mind all the many things there are in this world to think about besides The Beach Boys. The implication was that it would behoove us very serious people to get back to these other things without too much more dalliance.

Well, not so fast. We’ve still got an episode of the Hinternet Symposion podcast to share, in which Ross, Hinternet Associate Editor , and Hinternet Founding Editor JSR, all discuss the genius and the legacy of Pet Sounds, which first appeared in May, 1966.

Ross seems to have got the proverbial fireman’s hat stuck on his head after writing a majestically long tribute to the album, “Let Me Hear Your Heart Beat”, at his personal Substack, Political Currents. More or less concomitantly, Sam (also resident film critic at Metropolitan Review, and author of the excellent Vita Contemplativa), published a moving and magisterial ode to that same album, entitled “Pocket Symphonies”, here at The Hinternet.

JSR, meanwhile, is probably the least obsessive of the three parties to the conversation, and couldn’t even be bothered to write a Pet Sounds 60th-anniversary piece of his own (“That was supposed to be ’s beat”, he wrote to us when gently pushed).

Mary did, indeed, write a stunning eulogy for Brian Wilson when he left us last year. And even JSR, whose dad took him to see The Beach Boys at the California State Exposition and Fairgrounds Amphitheater in 1983, with David Lindley y el Rayo X opening, has devoted some considerable space, as recently as 2024, to reflection on the historical legacy of this band, even if primarily within a dialectical framing that pits them antithetically, and no doubt somewhat simplistically, against the Beatles.

We are all more or less convinced, anyhow, that the scene of Brian Wilson driving in the Hollywood Hills in 1963, and pulling his car over to the side of the road in sheer psychic and emotional overload upon hearing Phil Spector’s production of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, really was something like the “burning bush” moment of the Old Pop Testament that shaped the world into which we were all born.

We strongly recommend that you fulfill the prerequisites for fully appreciating this podcast conversation by first going back and reading, or, ideally, memorizing word for word, all these important pieces of writing.

—The Editors

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General Information

This online summer school, led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, will explore the contemporary crisis of the humanities as part of a broader transformation in the technologies, institutions, and practices through which human beings preserve memory, cultivate freedom, and transmit tradition. We will examine both the historical emergence of the modern research university and the technological conditions now contributing to its transformation (and perhaps to its collapse). Throughout, participants will work collaboratively and experimentally, in a think-tank spirit, toward the development of new forms of humanistic inquiry and new educational models for the Hinternet Foundation itself.

This will be a reading-intensive course. Participants should expect substantial weekly reading and sustained discussion. The purpose of the course is not simply to analyze the crisis of the humanities from a distance, but to participate directly in shaping possible futures for humanistic education in a historically and theoretically informed way. In this respect, participants should think of themselves as collaborators and founding interlocutors in an ongoing institution-building project.

We strive to be neither technophobes nor -philes, but cautious and critical explorers. In this light, a central question running through the seminar will concern the role of new technologies in humanistic life. What would it take for our emerging technological tools to become instruments of humanistic cultivation rather than obstacles to it? Might large language models and other generative systems be approached as potentially productive partners in humanistic inquiry? Participants will be invited to keep a record of their own LLM usage in connection with the seminar, and to reflect critically on the promises such technologies may hold for new forms of inquiry, as well as on their limits, distortions, and risks.

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Seminar Format

Each session will last two hours, 10:00-12:00 PST / 13:00-15:00 EST / 18:00-20:00 UK / 19:00-21:00 CET

From 0:00–0:50, the instructor, or an invited guest speaker, will present the session’s readings and attempt to tie them to the broader theoretical and programmatic aims of the course. This portion will be recorded and archived on the Hinternet Foundation website and on YouTube.

From 0:50–1:20, a participant volunteer will offer a response, commentary, or supplementary presentation. This portion may also be archived if the presenter wishes.

From 1:20–2:00, the session will open into general discussion and collaborative reflection. This portion will remain unrecorded.

Course Requirements

Attendance at all six sessions is expected. Beyond this, there are no formal requirements. Participants will be invited, though not required, to volunteer to give the scheduled presentations in response to the weekly materials. Participants will also be invited to submit final work related to the themes of the seminar. This work may take a straightforwardly scholarly, analytic, or explicative form, or it may involve a more creative and experimental dimension. Further details concerning final submissions and publication possibilities will be provided as the seminar approaches.

Participants who submit final work will receive feedback, and, where appropriate, may be invited to publish their work through The Hinternet.

There are no prerequisites for participation.

Thanks to generous funding received by the Hinternet Foundation, participation in the summer school is free of charge.

Please contact our Summer School Teaching Assistant and Course Coordinator Sophia Fiedler (sophia.fiedler@hinternetfoundation.org) with any questions.

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Provisional Program

Session 1 — The Challenge: Continuity in an Age of Technological Disruption

August 7

Readings

• Justin Smith-Ruiu, “A Third Way for the Humanities” (2026)

• Friends of Attention, Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (2026) (selections)

• Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (selections) (2025)

Leitmotifs

• Generative AI and the transformation of intellectual life

• The collapse of universitarian humanism; attention

• Memory and technological mediation

• Para-academic futures and new institution-building

Session 2 — Towards a New Division of the Sciences

August 8

Readings

• Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others” (1367)

• Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) (selections)

• Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010) (selections)

• Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) (selections)

• William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (2005) (selections)

• Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927—)

Leitmotifs

• The historical emergence of disciplinarity

• The classification and organization of knowledge in historical perspective

• Memory, method, and intellectual authority

Session 3 — Towards a New Art of Memory

August 14

Readings

• Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966) (selections)

• Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986) (selections)

• John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (1988) (selections)

• Milman Parry, selections from the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

• Justin Smith-Ruiu and Liubomira Romanova, Olonkho: Selected Translations of Sakha Oral Epic (forthcoming)

Leitmotifs

• Orality and literacy

• Literacy as technology

• Oral tradition as archive

• Alternatives to textual knowledge transmission

Session 4 — What About Nature?

August 15

Readings

• C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959)

• Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (2004) (selections)

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)

• Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment” (2003)

Leitmotifs

• The moral authority of nature

• Nature, wonder, and self-cultivation

• STEM — allies or aliens?

• Nature as object versus nature as interlocutor

Session 5 — What About Art?

August 21

Readings

• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) (selections)

• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991) (selections)

• Serge Gruzinski, What Time Is It There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times (2010) (selections)

• Kyrre Mirador, “A History of the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER)”, in In Search of the Third Bird (2021)

Leitmotifs

• Aesthetic education and freedom

• Philosophy as conceptual creation

• The place of creativity in the humanities

• Cultivating the historical imagination

Session 6 — What For? Humanism, Self-Cultivation, and Freedom

August 22

Readings

• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (continued)

• Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (1522-24)

• The Mīmāṁsā Sūtras (3rd century, BCE) (selections)

• Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (2002)

Leitmotifs

• Spiritual exercises and technologies of the self

• Self-cultivation as humanistic practice

• Freedom, discipline, and attention

• Humanism as a form of life

APPLY NOW! THE DEADLINE IS JUNE 1!

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The pure products of America
                   go crazy—
                         —William Carlos Williams

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Pocket symphony: a phrase popularized by an ad-man (Derek Taylor)—a press-man, anyway; journalist, publisher, and producer—popularized, that is, by a man who had been press officer for the Fab Four themselves (“The Beatles Are Coming”), and would be again; who through his own public relations company had introduced the Byrds to America and the Beach Boys to England. It was for the Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966) that Taylor revivified the phrase, realizing he needed some way to get across what was nestled inside all the whizbang new studio creations coming from the band’s brilliant-but-fragile composer, Brian Wilson—the rest of the group having become more or less a touring appendage of Wilson’s one-man production laboratory. It was the same advertorial insight that yielded another famous tagline, which several generations since have considered de rigueur, but which didn’t seem quite so publicly obvious in 1966 (unless you were Derek Taylor, or the Fab Four themselves): “Brian Wilson is a genius.”

As influential copy goes, “Pocket Symphony” isn’t at all unfair. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is a “pocket symphony.” Many movie scores have been reducible to just the kind of short movements worthy of the name. Gershwin—a composer Wilson adored, admired, and in some ways succeeded—wrote suites fusing jazz with classical, in a way neither field was prepared to accept as its own: what better word, or pair of words, for that? A miniature of orchestral dimension; a Lilliputian Opus. Either way, une symphonie de poche. What Wilson had done with “Good Vibrations” was nothing short of introducing American Pop—the New Pop, that is, which was really rock, which was really rock n’ roll—to its maturity. Youth Music was now Art Music.

“Good Vibrations” was a true pop mutation, one surprise after another. The opening verse (organ, bass counterpoint) intruded on by cello-and-theremin chorus, which changes keys every four bars—Gb to Ab to Bb—the final key the dominant, bringing us right back into the Eb minor verse again. Then it repeats. Only the second chorus, once done, lingers on the Bb, as the song goes into a half-time. This escalates into the bridge, then it ebbs into another bridge (“Gotta keep those lovegood vibrations a-happenin’ with her. . .”) as Hammond and harmonica digress from California beachfront into brief rustic valley; then the chorus, reprised; then the interruption of that chorus (“na-na-na” and “bah bah bah” and “do do do”); then the fade-out, cello and theremin again. All in 3 ½ minutes. “Pocket Symphony” indeed: after 90 hours of tape and tens of thousands of dollars, “Good Vibrations” (the costliest record ever made, at the time) was released on October 10, 1966, going to #1 on the Billboard charts. But then Wilson had a breakdown (another one), delayed, flailed, and all his former plans for an epoch-making “teenage symphony to God” ended up nowhere. The track stood like a lone mountain on the salvage pile of the next year’s Smiley Smile record. But until all pieces of the infamous Smile Sessions were finally brought to the public, decades later, in fragments (the detritus of Wilson’s ambitions), the narrative was sealed.

In 1967, the Sixties were decided. There was the past, which wouldn’t leave anyone alone (race riots; Elvis; Ronald Reagan). The present, which no one could avoid (“If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. . .”). There was the future, which no one saw coming (The Velvet Underground & Nico). And there was Sgt. Pepper’s, which was all three. But Brian Wilson? A genius, out of time. In the rear view an innocent California, all adolescence and rock n’ roll; also the Great American Songbook, and the kitsch of the Silent Generation; an ache, a vision. All of which—and none of which—Wilson had already summed up, concluded, and transcended, in the middle of 1966. So too, to be sure, had Dylan and The Beatles. But after a Revolver, or a Blonde on Blonde, there were a thousand places to go: bright new lanes, worlds to pursue (60 years later we are still doing this). After Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Pocket symphony: the term calls to mind, too, a booming sound-world, the world of Wilson’s lifelong musical idol—Phil Spector, genius, pioneer, psychopath. “Little symphonies for the kids” Spector called his productions: 2- and 3-minute diamonds of teen melodramas, all but buried under the studio rubble of that mammoth legendary “Wall of Sound,” perfectly attuned (sonically, commercially, metaphysically) to the outsized yearnings and consumerist desires of the first generation to be saddled with that savviest and cruelest category ever conceived by modern marketing: “The Teenager.” The American Teenager was a painful creature, painful because gleeful, painful because cursed with an endless innocence, which a global empire’s service economies now bent inward to prolong and prolong, forever, into the unknown American future (ours). Spector’s productions were vaulted cathedrals hewn out of this adolescent emotion, temples to the secular love of these children, whose avatars could sing in one moment, “Baby, I love only you,” and in the next, “He hit me/And it felt like a kiss.” Since nothing is more monstrous than naivety, and no naivety more monstrous than the kind thrust on the American Teenager: a lonely figure on a stage, from which everything else—darkness, adulthood, sex—is always held at bay, stalking around the edges of that impossible innocent dream: a tiger, in the form of Phil Spector.

Set this exquisitely masochistic doll-dream next to the headlong rush of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and suddenly The Beatles appear punk. The old energy of rock n’ roll revived, distilled into pure release. What else could those glorious falsetto “oooohs” mean, except overt sexual ecstasy? What else could, “And when I touch you, I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide/I can’t hide/I can’t hiiiiiide!” (Dylan heard it as “I get high!” and thought the future had finally arrived) mean? The Beatles weren’t coy. By no means were they suggesting a bit of heavy petting at the drive-in. Brian Epstein’s suits were for the adults, after all: a few short years before it had been leather, from head to foot, in Hamburg bordellos. The feral estrogenic screaming that drove them to abandon performing, only three years into their recording career, was all about sex—just as the howls that followed Elvis had been, until The King himself suddenly decided to become a respectable adult (in American terms, that is: first, the Military; then, Hollywood).

But The Beatles flew in on a different kind of sex, too: sex unburdened by Eisenhower mores and the suppressed nightmares of America’s racial castes. For The Beatles, “sex” always meant “love” (and vice-versa), even from the beginning. By the time that “love” changed from the girlfriend-boyfriend kind to the mystical-union kind, the modulation was accomplished smoothly. Certainly both kinds of “love” included (but weren’t limited to) the physical-carnal sort, which so much American pop music had strangled itself trying to deny. Because of this (and the influence of Dylan, who had a beatnik’s sense of sex, more “doomed beauty” than “Free Love”), Lennon and McCartney shifted into more “adult” registers easily. Hence “Yesterday” and “We Can Work it Out” doing in plain language what the Great American Songbook did with elegance and wit—timeless, universal emotions in melancholic colors—all without abandoning their youthful directness. This ability to contain whatever sound, genre, or feeling they could imagine, all within the context of that unparalleled youth-culture upheaval—that was the real alchemy of The Beatles.

But there was one American son who believed that dream of innocence and adolescent clarity. Who, like a boy scout, took those Spector productions at face value, and adored them. So it shouldn’t surprise us that when Brian Wilson first heard The Beatles (in 1964: The Beach Boys had been famous for two years), he reported suffering real panic; was literally, physically overwhelmed—an early version of the schizoaffective tendencies that later had him believing Spector had sent men to kill him while he planned his “teenage symphony to God,” threatening to surpass his idol for good. Brian Wilson was always in earnest: he felt things in bodily waves; heard music from heavenly places; aspired to transform actual human consciousness by delivering the Gospel of Spector to the world. When he said God, Brian Wilson didn’t mean sex, or the Market—he meant God. From Spector’s records, Wilson caught a tincture, a reflected fragment, of sublimity. And as The Beach Boys’ early career went on, Wilson’s evolving creations captured that promise of transcendence—which for Spector had been egoic monuments of pure sound (with a commercial imperative to boot)—expanding it into a vision of Pop Music as a kind of secular redemption.

The story goes that when he first heard The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”—Spector’s monument of monuments—in 1963, Wilson had to pull over the car he was driving, out late with his girlfriend, to take it all in. It was like hearing testament, or discovering the General Theory of Relativity: that keening voice, Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett striking out from the middle of the Spectorite whirlpool (like “a little bee” inside an “enormous sonic picture,” Brian Eno would later put it). For Wilson, it was enough to found a personal religion. He already loved Spector. The Beach Boys had only just done their second album, Surfin’ U.S.A., and the 20-year-old was already receiving producer credits; his songs were fusing doo-wop, Chuck Berry, the Four Freshman, and the whole motoring world of California into a nation-wide phenomenon. But this was the missing element—this swooning, yearning. The collected sentiments of the youth of America, on the heights, trapped forever in amber (or wax). He wore out the grooves on his 45 record, and insisted until the day he died that it was the greatest song ever written. For those 2 minutes 40 seconds that “Be My Baby” lasts, it’s hard to disagree.

In response, Wilson wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” and offered it to Spector for Ronnie to sing. Spector rejected it—apparently well aware of Wilson’s obsessions (and surely paranoid about future wife Bennett). The song ended up on Shut Down Vol. 2, the Boys’ fifth album, in 1964. It was fortuitous. “Don’t Worry Baby” was the first really immortal Beach Boys song, the one in which Wilson finally captured that lustre, beyond just the joy of good harmonies or good waves, that he was hunting: like a snapshot of the racing scene from Rebel Without a Cause, if the Dean character had been a sweet, vulnerable choir boy from Inglewood. It’s hard to imagine Ronnie singing it: even in mono, the song is wider and warmer than Spector’s recording, which is a blistering, depthless vortex. “Be My Baby,” exists in an unreal space (zone of Plato’s Forms, perhaps): its sound is its argument, and also its central lyrical demand (“Say you’ll be my darling. . .”). It’s a Gesamtkunstwerk. But “Don’t Worry Baby” happens in our world, a world of cars and girlfriends, raised to cinematic heights. Nor is there any calculation: it believes in its yearning. It also changes: keys, themes.

And all this the Endless Summer dream through which Wilson’s best, most adventurous songs would drift over the following two years—“Please Let Me Wonder,” “She Knows Me Too Well,” “Let Him Run Wild,” even the show-off “I Get Around” (see again: “The Beatles are coming”). All of them stations of the cross—the cross being that “teenage symphony to God” now lingering at the edge of Wilson’s vision. In the meantime (1965), Bossa Nova was everywhere, James Brown was turning soul music elastic, Dylan was giving The Beatles marijuana, and Lennon was singing “Nowhere Man” about himself, while the Stones rapped about ad-men selling smokes, and The Byrds’ first record took Dylan electric a month before Dylan himself did. As Wilson sat down to make “California Girls” for Summer Days (And Summer Nights), surely he understood his palette was ready? A hazy prelude, the doubled guitars (doubling creates a chorus effect: what else had Wilson seen on LSD?) with their slight, nostalgic delay. Wilson no longer toured with the rest: in performance he’d been supplanted by Bruce Johnston or the young Glen Campbell. Now he stayed back and directed exhausted session musicians to draw their performances from his scrawled notations and gestures. The hours (and the costs) were piling up. Genius meant money, long hours, and breakdowns.

The studio was home, an instrument. Through it, Wilson was commanding tones, keys, combinations no one had ever really put in a “rock” song—not to mention honing that lush reverb, extracted and diffused from Spector’s. Wilson was painting, with mixing-board dials and faders his paintbrushes, studio players his egg-whites and oils. He was 23 years old. Only the themes—the words themselves—“I wish they all could be California Girls. . .”—these were starting to repeat. The sunshine, the bikinis, the kitsch. Wilson wasn’t quite guileless enough to imagine himself another Lennon, running off to study Dylanite ironies; or a McCartney, aspiring to the likes of Rodgers and Hart. He certainly wasn’t going to attempt lyrics like Dylan’s “You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat/Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,” the kind of impossible line that was already knocking off amateurs left and right (the lesson: only Dylan can really sing Dylan). No, he had to look elsewhere. Had to look inward, find some transcriber for what he found there. A receiver can conduct a signal, relaying it outward: it cannot tell you what the signal said. And God lives not in language—unless you’re a Hebrew (like Bob Dylan).

The transcriber was Tony Asher, copy- and jingle-writer (”You can tell it’s Mattel—it’s swell!”). Before Asher, Wilson’s lyrical collaborators had been band member Mike Love, not a transcriber. Now Wilson was looking elsewhere. He met Asher in an L.A. studio, around the same time Asher was wordsmithing for Barbie. In early 1966 the two sat down together for a marathon sprint through 10 days of material-gathering: they called their lyric sketches “feels.” Something to do with the marijuana they were smoking. Nothing could be more Californian, enlisting the words of an ad-man to finally go autobiographical. But Brian Wilson was not really going autobiographical: there would be no references, no personal details, no private detritus. Like any great copy, Pet Sounds would seem equally autobiographical to everyone who heard it. The young man who once wrote “In My Room”— giving the world that historic image of the sensitive adolescent dreamer, alone in their American bedroom—was now aiming his penchant for the universal, the archetypal, towards the central myth of his generation: the first generation of the American Teenager, first to believe in its own innocence, and to lose it.

* * *

To begin with, let us taxonomize. Playing, for a moment, a bedraggled young studio engineer, confronted with the recording of Pet Sounds. The “Wrecking Crew”—filled with studio hands like Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine (of “By My Baby” backbeat fame)—is convened, meant to transmute this music from the head of Brian Wilson to physical reality in wax. A complete list of instruments used in the subsequent recordings would include the following: electric guitar, piano, harpsichord, Hammond organ, tenor voice, baritone voice, countertenor voice, drumset, banjo, vibraphone, ukulele, violins, cellos, flutes, bass flutes, harmonica, accordion, tambourine, guiro, bongos, clarinets, bass clarinets, glockenspiel, French horns, English horns, oboe, saxophones, baritone saxophones, upright bass, electric bass, sleigh bells, timpani, Coca-Cola cans, the sound of train crossings and barking dogs, water jugs, and of course the Electro-Theremin. It’s pointless for the engineer to linger too long on the harmonies, complex key changes, parallel chords, or rhythms—these things are best left to the scrawl of sheet music, and the brain of Brian Wilson. But suffice to say that nothing in the new pop music had ever been this exquisitely peculiar in its sophistication. Attempting a list of genres on the record would lead us to proliferating, hazy descriptors of styles, all blending easily: bossa, muzak, exotica, R&B, psychedelia, surf rock, rock n’ roll. . .

Later critics would be led by this proliferation into even less sensical categorical monstrosities: progressive pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, chamber pop, baroque pop. Anything to make the idiosyncratic Wilson mélange something more than just “pop.” Though of course this was precisely what Wilson was not doing (and in this he shared the Lennon-McCartney strain of pretension, which only seems like pretension because we live in a post-punk world). Instead, he was absorbing all these things into the spectrum of pop, an evangelist calling all comers under the tent. There was nothing to “elevate” here. For Wilson, pop was already the Sublime. His mind didn’t work on hoary music critic metaphors; “elevation” would have meant California aerospace pioneering, or the trajectory to Heaven. The harmonic sophistication of a George Gerswhin; the close vocal texture of doo-wop and barbershop; commercial jingles; easy listening; Nelson Riddle’s string arrangements; Motown; Johann Sebastian Bach—Pet Sounds was a nexus for these sound-worlds and many others: the only node in the whole long string of American pop music where more than one period could meet and blur like that. Consider your Euclid: for any three non-collinear points there exists a unique circle, passing through those points: pick any three major stylings of the era, and Pet Sounds is probably that circle. And if the points are collinear, as in a timeline (of a relationship, say: from “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” to “God Only Knows” to “Caroline, No”), you still get a circle, only one with an infinite radius. An infinite distance from center to circumference. A teenage symphony to God.

Which perhaps explains why “God Only Knows” sounds as if it’s happening in many overlapping times at once, some as old as The Bible. When they weren’t inventing new ones wholecloth, Lennon and McCartney tended to make a Picaresque of Genre: they were collagists; they did bricolage (anything or anyone could be Beatles). Dylan took everything that sounded even faintly old or anonymous in American music, and made a single genre out of it, which might as well be named after him. But Pet Sounds is Modernist in the correct sense—one genre, one era, sits on top of many others, and all are happening simultaneously. Relativity; the Copenhagen interpretation; James Joyce’s Odyssey is also Homer’s Odyssey, the only difference being a slight slippage of time barely registered on the cosmic scale: so the sounds of Pet Sounds break down barriers between decades, as between worlds. They are timeless, in the exact sense with which we rarely wield that word.

They’re filled with a timeless yearning, too—in language so straightforward it shirks poetry completely for stark melancholia:

I keep looking for a place to fit in
Where I can speak my mind
And I’ve been trying hard to find the people
That I won’t leave behind
They say I got brains
But they ain’t doing me no good
I wish they could
Each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good going for myself
But what goes wrong
Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Ain’t found the right thing I can put my heart and soul into)
I guess I just wasn’t made for these times

“I just wasn’t made for those times”—a remarkable sentiment in an era that tended to believe it was ushering in A Better Future. Yet here is Brian Wilson, recognizing that the plain statements of youth are poetic enough, since no one is more nostalgic than those born yesterday. The record may bounce from joys to loves to breakups—all seemingly innocent—but underneath it thrums that deep melancholy keynote. Lost worlds; lost innocence.

So Pet Sounds commences with distant plucking—“California Girls” again; only briefer, foggier, somehow—before a drum ushers in a different key, and already the voice of endless summer is longing for the bliss of adult married life (another dream: what world is “the kind of world where we belong”?). But just two songs later, we begin to understand this is a record of departures—an actual Odyssey of the American Youth, trying and failing to shed his age of innocence. “I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city/I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty.” The Inglewood boy, now in Beverly Hills. “I could try to be big in the eyes of the world/What matters to me is what I could be to just one girl.” After all this, still the same shy boy who lived in his head, and once wrote: “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to/In my room.” And again, visions of domestic bliss, sanctifying romantic union. Far from Free Love in the Park.

And after that? “Don’t talk, take my hand, and listen to my heartbeat/Listen/Listen. . .” as the bass guitar mimics the heartbeat’s beat, and a string quartet swells like something out of Schubert. And this is what we’re supposed to be listening to. No talk, but two silent bodies, and their body-rhythm, and High Romance beamed in from a different century, and all of it run through a tape-echo so electronically complex it was practically science fiction. The Gospel According to Phil Spector no longer seems so far-fetched. We remember that while Wilson was recording Pet Sounds in Los Angeles in early 1966, Bob Taylor was building the basis of the ARPANET just 6 hours away. Charles Manson was moving to Haight-Ashbury, released from prison for the umpteenth time. Across town from Wilson, L. Ron Hubbard was establishing his Guardian’s Office, to handle public relations and legal issues for the Church of Scientology. Strange religions and cults, world-spanning technologies and pop music, would not be such distant constellations for much longer (60 years later, do we even remember the difference?).

But in the meantime, Wilson was working out his Youth Odyssey as only he could—adding in an old Nassau folk number he called “Sloop John B.” (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”); leaving in two instrumentals (“Let’s Go Away For Awhile” and “Pet Sounds”) both worthy of Tom Jobim, or an Italian movie soundtrack; anchoring the record with “God Only Knows.” Or is it that “God Only Knows” anchors the record simply by its own nature? It would almost make sense to call the track gravitational, if it didn’t seem so free from gravity. Few songs are more divine: it’s a tribute to all musicians involved that the recording ended up so sensuous, too. The little clip-clop and sleigh bell auxiliaries; the bouncing bridge; the canon of pre-Raphaelite choir boys in the middle—these funny details simply don’t occur anywhere else in any song of this stature. It is, by some consensus, one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, while for others it’s simply the greatest song of its era, perhaps of its century. It’s certainly one reason why there are now millions more acolytes of the Church of Brian Wilson than there ever were of Phil Spector’s Temple of the Unreal Adolescence. Love songs of this order are beyond commentary, beyond reduction. In its wake, “Be My Baby” could only belong to an older world, however ideal. One wonders whether Spector really did send someone to kill Wilson when he heard the song.

Whoever the Ulysses of Pet Sounds is—whether Brian himself, or some kind of American Everyboy—he is certainly growing up: “They come on like they’re peaceful but inside they’re so uptight/They trip through their day and waste all their thoughts at night/Now how can I come on/And tell them the way that they live could be better?” He has come back from his travels, innocence unraveling (“Sometimes I feel very sad”), but all he knows is he isn’t done searching: “I know there’s an answer/I know now, but I have to find it by myself.” Note the new maturity, though it’s still haunted by the remains of youth (only a 23-year-old knows there’s an answer). He’s still young enough to want to tell everyone what he’s discovered, but old enough to see how pointless that would be. He’s still musing on his old heartbreaks (“Here Today”), and looking forward to future ones (“I’m Waiting for the Day”). He is trying.

So what beautiful obstinancy inspired Wilson to choose “Caroline, No” for the single? To begin with, he loved it. But why? He places it at the end of the album, because the end for him must be an elegy—a love elegy. It’s 1966, and already the youth have received the anthem of their passing (“Where did your long hair go?”). Wilson ends his Odyssey with heartbreak, autumnal and winsome: “How could you lose that happy glow?” “Who took that look away?” No one asks so many questions of a former lover without aiming some of those same questions at himself. On the cusp of manhood, the boy is already tired. And manhood (as the subsequent history tells us) was not something that ever made sense for Brian Wilson, dreamy cherub that he was. It’s hard to hear the long sad sigh of that finale, knowing the difficulties—mental, commercial—that would follow. Harder still to imagine Wilson, after finishing Pet Sounds, believing he had yet to make that “teenage symphony to God” he’d been dreaming of. When he had so clearly done it, so obviously uttered the complete prayer. Again: after Pet Sounds, what was anyone supposed to do?

* * *

Well, it’s been building up inside of me
For, oh, I don’t know how long
I don’t know why, but I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of high school—spring of 2009—and I’m sitting in my mother’s car, listening to “Don’t Worry Baby” on repeat in my headphones, thinking about a girl I think I love. I don’t yet know Pet Sounds, though I’ll discover it soon, later in the year. The girl feels the same about me, for the first and only time that will ever happen in my life. But I’ll mess it up anyways: too afraid to kiss her, too afraid to be too naive, or too young (“So Young”).

* * *

Right now you think that she’s perfection
This time is really an exception
Well, you know I hate to be a downer
But I’m the guy she left before you found her. . .

It’s two years later—spring of 2011—I’m traveling to St. Louis with the same girl, and her boyfriend, and “Don’t Worry Baby” comes over the speakers in the restaurant we’ve stopped off at. Time slips. Brian Wilson has been the soundtrack to all my high school loneliness, yearning. Nothing else has ever come close to expressing what I’m always wishing for: “the kind of world where we belong.” Pet Sounds has become my version of that world.

* * *

Each time things start to happen again
I think I got somethin’ good goin’ for myself
But what goes wrong. . .

It’s my freshman year of university—spring of 2013—and I’m 18 years old, sitting in a different car, with an older girl I think I love. I play her “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and I tell her this is the song that really represents me, sums up the way I feel about the world. She looks at me: in her eyes I see something I’ve spent 13 years trying never to see again. Since behind that look she was surely realizing just how foolish and besotted I was, resolving to let me go on with the fantasy as long as she reasonably could, until I finally made too much a fool of myself, and was deemed too naive, too young (“So Young”), within weeks exchanged for the only other freshman classical guitar player at our university.

* * *

I once had a dream, so I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn’t so pretty. . .

It’s 13 years later—spring of 2026—and I live in London, a place I’m still too ill to explore, though I’ve lived here 1 ½ years. I’m listening to Pet Sounds, trying to pretend these old memories don’t affect me anymore. But of course I can’t: Pet Sounds is still here, and for me it holds these old memories—along with many more beautiful and painful ones beside them. Maudlin memories, mostly, but redeemed from complete regret by the presence of this man’s music in them. The music, a repository: in 2009, in 2011, 2013, in 2026, I listen to Brian Wilson’s songs and I see my own innocence, my own loss of innocence, my inability to shake off the weight of the experience that follows.

I don’t exactly encounter these feelings as Brian Wilson’s. Pet Sounds isn’t reportage. It absorbs my feelings, stands for them, measures them, supports and alleviates them. From the earnest testimony of many, many people, it seems to do exactly the same for them, too. We all bring ourselves to Pet Sounds, millions of us, every year, and somehow we all manage to find ourselves in it. Because while we’re in it, we’re still slipping out of time, phasing between worlds old or new or imagined; encountering memories of our own innocence; encountering memories of our own loss of innocence; reckoning with the achievement of one 23-year-old, 60 years ago, and the sense that it really does seem to exist for us—since anyone who has ever been young is always being called under its tent. Pet Sounds necessitates this degree of naked personal response. Nothing less will do. The history of the last 60 years of the record is a history of these personal responses. The next 60 years will be too. So will the next 600. And there are very few pure products of America worth saying that about.

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1.

It is all very easy to accept that dog and chien are but arbitrary signs, sharing not at all in the essence of the dogs themselves. Then again the fact that dog has come to denote dogs twice along entirely different tracks —English and the extinct Aboriginal Mbabaram language— is at least some small bit of evidence for the true Adamic dog-nature of Canis familiaris.

Words anyhow are the easy part of language. The hard part is accepting that our punctuation is arbitrary too. Anglophones love to debate the propriety of the em-dash ; I meanwhile have spent the last thirteen years trying to bring myself to insert a space before my semi-colons when writing in French, an unnaturalness I have forced into the present English sentence in the aim of demonstrating just how deeply wrong it is. But rules are rules.

I saw some graffiti once: La France, c’est comme ta mère : pas de règles ! While I can’t be entirely certain, the author appears to have disproved his own point by inserting spaces after the relevant punctuation marks. The rule here is so deep that the native speaker does not know he is following it: no space for periods and commas, but a space for colons, semicolons, question marks, exclamation points, and guillemets (we’ll deal with the last of these separately). Thus, if you wish to cite Serge Gruzinski’s What Time Is It There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modernity (Englished, 2010), and you wish to do it correctly, you are obliged to write something like:

Gruzinski, Serge (2008). Quelle heure est il là-bas ? Amérique et Islam à l’orée des temps modernes, Paris: Seuil.

My footnoting style, I confess, is vernacular. It follows no known system. Chicago? MLA? I haven’t checked. I simply do what I have always done. Sometimes editors let it pass, sometimes they modify it themselves, and sometimes —though with ever-diminishing frequency, as ever-younger editors have rightly learned to cower at the thought of having to instruct me to “go back and have a look at the manuscript formatting instructions”—: sometimes, I was saying, even now, they send the ms back and ask me to modify it.

But what I wanted to discuss is the space after là-bas (a fascinating compound adverb in its own right, which as the title of J. K. Huysmans’s 1891 masterpiece translates not as “over there”, as it does for Gruzinski, but as “down there”, implying some sort of infernal descent). I have already spoken, superciliously, of “correctness”, but obviously what is to count as correct is determined in part by the higher-level punctuational scheme one has presupposed. In the Gruzinski citation what I have shown you is not in fact a footnote, but a citation for the bibliography of a book I have written in English. However much I would like to preserve all the rules that would govern the citation of a French book in a French bibliography, I find that is really just not possible. I can import that language’s very different conventions as regards capitalization, for example. These conventions are typically not respected even in otherwise polished English-language publications, where you often see such impossibilities as L’Etre Et Le Néant (or worse!). But still, any copy-editor who would change heure to Heure could easily be persuaded to change it back. With the space before the question mark it’s not so clear. It simply looks too much like a mistake. It has no place in an English-language publication.

Do guillemets have a place? Arguing the negative, we might point out that these marks simply do not exist in English, strictly speaking, and to that extent they need to be converted, much like standard bibliographical convention requires us to transliterate titles in Cyrillic or Greek into the Latin alphabet. Thus:

Huygens, Christiaan (1717 [1698]). Kniga mirozreniia, ili mnenie o nebesnozemnykh globusakh i ikh ukrasheniiakh, trans. Iakov Brius, Saint Petersburg: Napechatsia v sankt piterburgskom tupografii.

Let us not even get started on how much we could have done differently in this entry. Should we have preserved a trace of the Cyrillicization of our Dutchman’s name as well: Giuïgens, Khristiaan? (I can still remember going to the Red Square McDonald’s in 1990, just opened, with a hammer and sickle superimposed on the Golden Arches; my crazy friend Jefferson, late of Knoxville, a real-life Suttree, got a good laugh out of ordering “gash browns”, though of course on its Eastern front, as it were, McDonald’s did not yet feature a breakfast menu.) Should we have returned our translator Iakov Brius to his ancestral “Jacob Bruce”? Should we have translated the city name, or simply transcribe what is on the page: Sankt-Peterburg — or, actually, Sankt’’-Piterburg’’, since this was published before the Bolshevik spelling reform and in order to capture everything that is there we would have to include the hard sign, ъ, transliterated as ’’, which as a rule used to follow every terminal consonant not followed by a soft-sign (ь), and which of course ends up looking like a misplaced quotation mark. Rules are rules, as we’re seeing, but that fact itself does not give us the rule telling us which rules to follow!

And why should we translate the city name while still preserving the archaic identifier for the publisher, which is in fact a complete phrase, not “The Saint-Petersburg Typography”, but “Printed at the Saint-Petersburg Typography”. What I’ve got here, plainly, is a compromise, a hybridization of two systems. A monstrosity. It’s wrong, and I don’t know how to fix it. (I am not asking for input. I am saying there are intractable problems in the art —yes, the art— of bibliography.)

But enough of that. For now our concern is with French alone. I was saying that to include an “«” or a “»” might plausibly be counted as a gesture no less out of place than to write Книга мирозрения (or, in fastidiously correct pre-Soviet style, Кнiга мiрозрҌнiя).

How much of the original should we allow in? How much should we permit ourselves to alter for the sake of legibility? Let us say we have permitted ourselves, as I in fact have, to write, for example:

Espagne, Michel (2025). “Premières découvertes des langues sibériennes et caucasiennes. De l’anthropologie à la lexicologie,” in Émilie Aussant and Fabien Simon (eds.), Documenter et décrire les langues d’Asie : histoire et épistémologie, Paris: Société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage, 349-375.

Again, there is so much that could have been different here. I have nativized the quotation marks (nor have I permitted a half-measure, English quotes with French spacing: “ Premières découvertes ”, or, alternatively , French guillemets with English spacing: «Premières découvertes»). I have put the comma inside the closing quote, while another sort of gesture to the original would have put it outside. I have referred to the editors in English style, while I could have written not “(eds.)” but “(dir.)” for sous la direction de. I have, you will by now be primed to have seen, placed a space between d’Asie and the following colon. But notice I have not placed one after the name of the city of publication. I defaulted to English convention there, while I preserved French convention in the capitalization pattern of the name of the relevant scholarly association. Again, what we have here is a grotesque hybrid. And again, do not offer advice. There is no satisfying solution.

Nor have I yet touched upon the difficulties confronted in citation of Latin texts.

Nowhere, indeed, does the fundamental hostility to tradition of our contemporary technological reality show itself more brutally than in its systematic effort, as blind as it is unrelenting, to efface all written traces of the Latin language. I write Jiěshì piān (that’s pinyin), a term long standardized as the Chinese title of Aristotle’s Περὶ ἑρμηνείας, and autocorrect knows it’s dealing with something foreign and rare that is best left alone. I write De Interpretatione in turn, which has been standardized in Latin since roughly the time of Boëthius, and damned if my machine doesn’t clip off the final e.

I do not experience this as mere automated correction, but as true violence. I swear it doesn’t just happen at the initial moment of typing the word. The machine will keep trying to disappear that last letter, like some Perecian evil demon, using every opportunity, even as slight as the chance passage of the cursor over the word, to do its tradition-hating work. If word-processors had been in use 400 years ago, you can be sure they would not have functioned like this. They would have been, effectively, engines for the preservation of good Latinitas. They would have been equipped with a spring-driven hammer to pop out and rap your knuckles if you got your case endings wrong. And don’t tell me that it’s precisely because we stopped caring so much about things like Latin that we were able to move on and start doing things like building word-processors instead. If you do tell me that, I will tell you it has not been worth it.

I have seen analytic philosophers grousing online about the absurdity of having to give the name of the city of publication in their bibliographical entries. Admittedly, now that Oxford University Press manages so much geographically indeterminate straight-to-internet content, and now that it has switched out its august medieval sigilium for a logo that sooner suggests some multinational investment firm, the requirement to indicate whether it was the Oxford office or rather the New York one that handled your manuscript, or on occasion the one in New Delhi or Singapore or even in principle Dar Es Salaam, does seem to belong to another era.

But for us dix-septièmistes the city of publication tells a whole story, and over the years we come to see the names of those cities, fixed in the Latin genitive, as belonging to another world overlain upon our own, and we are comforted to be reminded that in addition to being published “at Regensburg” a book can also be “Ratisbonae”, or in addition to being “at Leiden” it can also be “Lugduni Batavorum”. These names often reveal strata of meaning that the national vulgates have lost. Thus Leiden turns out to be the “Lyon of the Batavians”, while for other cities, including the better-known French Lyon, we often find vestigial pluralizations. Athens remained plural; Marseilles and Lyons and many other cities besides contracted into the singular (though Americans visiting France often, by some mysterious instinct, bring the terminal s’s back, even after several centuries of disuse). Where did the other lions go? What is it for a city to be plural?

I am not just a vernacular footnoter, but an “organic” and “artisanal” one too. I have never used a “citation management program”. Here’s what I do instead. I write an entire book in a single Word file, and I insert footnotes one by one. I type each one by hand, letter by letter, each time anew. My current book manuscript, weighing in at around 103,000 words, has 628 of them. These will probably be converted into endnotes by the time of publication, and their numbering will begin at 1 for each chapter.

I suppose if I were to automate this procedure I would also be automating away a number of the uncertainties I have already identified. But I can’t do that. The footnotes are the roots and leaves at once of the text, which both anchor it to the world and ornament it, like so many of Giuïgens’s ukrasheniia. I must tend to them. I must nourish them, as root; and I must variously clip them and sing to them, as leaf, if the work itself is going to have any share of beauty. (Whether beauty is a legitimate end of scholarly writing is another question, but as I’ve said many times this will be my last scholarly book, and I am aware that it gives strong indications of being transitional towards a mode of writing in which aspiration to beauty can be taken for granted.)

I suppose there is a lesson here, potentially an important one, regarding AI. Many of you have been fretting about the arrival of machine-generated writing, and have been quick to denounce others who show signs of having had recourse to it. But many of you have in any case already been letting the machines make your language for you for some time now. This is a different level of language than the word or the sentence, but it is language no less for that. If full-blown solicitous writerly care for the footnote falls beneath your seuil de perception, this is only because you are unaware of how much of your own linguistic power you have already outsourced to word-processing prostheses.

As far as I can tell, the arrival of LLMs is only the end of a process, not the beginning of it. And it’s a process that a good number of those now fretting have sanguinely helped along through their own partially automated habits of writing. It’s been a technology all along, I mean, and you’re going to have to go pretty far back in time, likely back to the age of oral composition techniques, if what you’re looking for is pure poïesis.

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2.

Ever since I switched into high gear to finish this book a few months ago, I have found in myself so much to say about language, and languages. Most of it is unshareable, since in order truly to get across what I want to say, my readers would have to be able to appreciate the nuances in the target language that I aim to draw out and to marvel at. The result has been that most of my writing here at The Hinternet during this period has instead been about music — the language everyone knows, the first and in some sense the only real language.

But I have to try. I have only in these past few months truly begun to perceive the true richness of the Sakha language, the remarkable way subtleties of meaning can get packed, morpheme by morpheme, into agglutinative chains. I’ve been reading and slowly translating a lovely story, “Motuo” (1928), by Amma Achchygyïa, the pen-name of Nikolaï Mordinov (writers are among the only figures in Soviet Yakutia who had the privilege of re-Yakutizing their names).

Up until now I had mostly read socialist-realist hack-work — dutiful, predictable, tedious. Indeed for a long time I found myself thankful that the officials had imposed a style of writing that takes for granted that all readers must be idiots, since linguistically I was an idiot, and the predictability of these works, the two-dimensionality of their characters, the stereotypy of every action and intention, proved pedagogically necessary for me. Until now the only truly good literature I had read in Sakha had been Sakha translations of Chekhov and Tolstoy. (Incidentally, “A Day in the Country” is simply the most beautiful short story ever written.) My great discovery with Amma Achchygyïa (himself the Sakha translator of Anna Karenina and Resurrection, among other works) is that at least some truly indigenous Sakha linguistic expressivity managed to slip into the system of Soviet literary production, I suppose in part because censorship was mostly centralized in Moscow, and much more sharply attuned to what could and could not be said in Russian.

The result, in “Motuo”, as I often experience with Chekhov, is something that feels powerfully like what happens when a painting comes into view. There is a sort of transcendent experience, of coming to have a mental image of a landscape, say, that does not seem to be causally anchored in the decipherment of individual grammatical elements or the determination of the meanings of words, but rather from the whole of the text, even if one cannot at all say how this is happening.

I’ve developed, these past months, a new habit, indeed a new craving, that compels me to make the effort, a bit every day, to conjure such images out of what are initially mere lines of text. This practice, I find, keeps something like the crackle of the fire of microdosed mystical experience going in me all the time. It makes me a “seer”.

There is a sentence in “Motuo” that says:

Кэдэлдьи алаас уонна Баатты хочото чараас тыаллах үрдүк арҕас халдьаайынан быысаһаллар.

To the extent that I’ve been able to clarify it, the English is something like:

The Kedelji alaas and the Baatty hill are separated by a narrow, windy, high ridge-slope.

But as with our footnotes in the previous section, there are countless problems I can see, and surely several more that I can’t see, even in this rather short passage. As the so-called “Leipzig Gloss” reveals (or my vernacular approximation of a Leipzig Gloss), the actual structure of the original looks very different the English:

Kedelji alaas and Baatty hill-3SG.POSS narrow wind-ADJ high nape ridge-INST separate-RECIP-PRES.3PL

But I want to focus here on just one word, арҕас, ordinarily a noun, but here seeming to function adjectivally as a modifier of халдьаайынан, itself an instrumental noun that I am translating as “ridge” (it’s the instrumental case ending that provides the “by”, which in the English occurs several words before “ridge”).

The ordinary meaning of арҕас is not orological however, but anatomical, denoting the nape, withers, or spinal ridge of an animal, paradigmatically domestic cattle, but also deer, wolverines, and even fish. It can also denote the vertebral column of a human being, or, sometimes, in special cases, it can indeed refer to a mountain crest. Халдьаай also means “ridge” or “crest”, and while nominal doubling like this is very common in Sakha, here the doubling seems to me subtly to highlight the parallelism between a mountain ridge and an animal’s back, and I don’t really see any way to capture this in English.

I could be wrong, mind you, about all of this. (Are you out there reading this Дьүгүөр? I know you’re busy, but feel free to chime in, доҕорум, if you have any insights.) But what I do want to say is that, after spending a good amount of time with this sentence, and thinking about the many meanings of several of its words, this evening a mental image appeared that utterly stunned me.

A beast stands in the foreground in a meadow, its back arched, and in the distance behind it a mountain range roughly duplicates that same line. Now I grew up in part in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, and it should not come as news to me that human beings habitually perceive parallels between features of the landscape and the physical traits of domestic animals. But suddenly, through the mediation of a “foreign” language, the human capacity for such a perception seemed, last night, infinitely more wonderful to me than any abstract theory or scientific breakthrough that came after it. How awesome that our ancestors, surely not yet human, looked at the ridge of an animal’s back, and at the ridge of the mountains behind it, and said: same.

The first thinking was the first writing, it seemed to me, for this was when we noticed that things can stand for other things. Thinking, it seemed to me, just is taking something for something else, which, I supposed, correlatively, is why we can’t think the things themselves.

Metaphor, I really do think, is at the origin of all the operations of thought, even the duller ones like calculating that we’ve tried to set up more recently as most exemplary of our essence. Metaphor is carrying over, as from a beast’s back, to the mountain ridge that doubles it in the distance. To notice such a possibility must have been a small miracle, not entirely unlike the parhelion or the eclipse — jogging the mind to discernment, or to creation (depending how you see things), of new patterns and world-orderings.

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3.

A subsequent sentence throws a new problem my way. It features the word толлон, which is plainly an imperfective converb. (How do you translate a language with converbs, functioning somewhat as verbs and somewhat as adverbs, into a language without them? The simple answer is you don’t, not really.) But I can find none of its possible verbal roots in any reference work. What I usually do when I arrive an impasse is to try a simple Google search. Often there are no occurrences at all, on the entire internet, of the Sakha word that interests me. Sometimes the hits that come up are to the very same sentence I am currently trying to decipher. Imagine that! A written language largely constituted by hapax gegrammena! Think of the difference from our own hegemonic, cosmopolitan language, whose very most obscure words are still amply present in online search results.

This time what I got, for толлон, were several Russian-language articles on the French cheese known as “Thollon”, à pâte persillée demi-cuite, but also, thankfully, and finally, a confirmed match for толлон in a passage from the Sakha translation of Acts.

What a resource, the Bible! How presumptuous it is to imagine oneself a scholar, while knowing next to nothing about the massive millennia-long accretions of commentaries, apocrypha, legends, translations! This is tradition at its richest and most well-aged, and whether you are committed to it in faith or not, if you have any commitment at all to the idea of tradition itself as providing a necessary intellectual frame for making sense of human history, then you must study the Bible. (There are other scriptural traditions that are equally rich, and you are encouraged to study them too; but if you are reading this in English —and you are—, you are going to have to read John Milton, for example, to get the most out of your own language, native or adopted, and in order to do that, again, willy-nilly, you’re going to have to read the Bible.)

So the next thing I know I am reading Acts, with Bible Gateway open in English (New International Version), in Greek in another browser, and in Sakha in yet another. The verse that features our mysterious Sakha converb runs as follows:

Paul gathered a pile of brushwood and, as he put it on the fire, a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand (Acts 28:3).

I’m gradually figuring out the the relevant Sakha verb denotes a sudden motion made in fright, something that isn’t quite expressed in the English, even if the scene suggests it generally. But I have by now moved on from my language study, as, uncharacteristically, I find myself drawn in by the directness and transparency of the NIV. That’s my language: the English language, in a register so clear I don’t even see it as language, but only as whatever the language is saying.

Among other things it replaces the “brethren” of King James, which I usually claim to love for its archaic Anglo-Saxon plural, with “brothers and sisters”. I can see them now, the young women with their hair parted down the center, running with joy from the tavern to the docks at the first sight of the ship, with the figurehead of Castor and Pollux carved at the prow, so eager and overjoyed to reunite with Peter and the others. And this in turn allows me to indulge the misperception, I know, that Jesus’s first followers were something like “hippies”. The Greek is ἀδελφοί, which is generally more gender-inclusive than “brethren”, perhaps enough to justify the explicit inclusion of the sisters in our English edition; perhaps not.

What matters is that this is the first time that I am reading Acts, and seeing the scenes of it in my mind. What a document! This is not wisdom teaching or prophetic proclamation, as we find throughout so much of the New Testament. This is just straightforward Hellenistic historiography, and it seems impossible now for me to doubt it. Why would Luke have written that Peter was bitten by a viper, if he was not? Why mention Castor and Pollux? These things, I know as I read, happened. It is the same certainty I feel reading the journals of Lewis and Clark. There are some things ordinary chroniclers would simply never bother to make up.

I have for a while now been saying that, while I am a Christian, and I am some kind of scholar, when it comes to the scholarship of Christianity I am an absolute bonehead. I now anticipate that it may well be my reading of Acts —with a sufficient number of browsers open to Bible Gateway, with its variants in several languages, plus one open to ChatGPT, ever at the ready to summarize the exegetical tradition that has been spun out around every name that figures in it, no matter how minor, around every last Matthias or Barsabbas— that will finally enable me to pay the sort of attention to these words that I have spent my life paying to other ones.

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4.

It is now two in the morning. I’ve moved gradually from footnote revisions, to Sakha study, to Bible study: a typical evening, more or less. I am listening to Andrew Bird’s My Best Work Yet (2019). What an uncompromising artist. It would be pointless to engage critically with his work, at least the way most critics engage today. What would they say? “I don’t like all the whistling”? Irrelevant. Andrew Bird will keep doing what’s in his nature.

Before dimming my screens for the night old habit brings me back for a few minutes to Substack Notes, where I mostly see young people jockeying for status, in a world they call the world of “writers”. But virtually none are writing about anything other than the world of writers itself, unaware evidently that the true scope of writing is the universe as a whole, and everything in it, in the broadest sense of “in”: manganese, corn, converbs, the angels and the saints.

Some of these young writers are truly great, and many others are at least, well, let us say, lively. And it’s not as if I cannot recall jockeying in that way myself, to only modest results, for many years. It has really only been with the total evacuation of all desire from the fundament of my person over the course of the present decade that I stopped doing that. Ironically, that is also the period when the work started, well, working. You really can get what you want in this life, but only on the condition that you stop wanting it.

My friend Marco Roth’s recent essay at Romanticon was moving for many reasons. Among them, it moved me to think about whether I should also start thinking about finding a literary executor. Is that what all this is? “Literary”?

Some anon on Notes described a recent metafiction of mine as “schizo-posting”. But this implies, I think, an absence of what might be called central command, whereas I know exactly what I am doing — even if, as I’ve just admitted, I don’t know how to classify it, nor what will come of it. One anon’s schizo-posting, anyhow, is another’s electronic literature, and as Nietzsche said, “You seek followers? Seek zeroes!” —which really should be the motto of anyone who writes with metrics in mind—, so either way I’m going to stay at it.

Are we all just schizo-posting at this point? Are we suffering from AI psychosis? My friend Blaise, who sits at the nerve center of all these transformations, reports that he knows of many such cases. But as for me, I am more lucid than I have ever been, and whether Andrew Bird was being facetious about himself or not, I confess I can’t entirely shake the feeling that I am in the course of doing my finest work yet.

These have been unusually productive months for me, with truly surprising breakthroughs in the way I think about problems that have exercised me for years. Some of these breakthroughs have come with AI assistance, but the questions I’m asking are as anchored to the world as any ever could be. My use of AI, too, is organic and artisanal, not so different in the end from the way I have, since 1988, used Microsoft Word to write.

There is still so much that cannot be automated: the mental image that sometimes comes from reading the arbitrary marks filling up a page; the discovery of real likeness between a mountain crest and an animal’s nape; the experience of certain knowledge of the truth of what one reads; the final determination of the form of a footnote.

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I’ll try to keep this brief. I am still doing my best to stay true to my promise to take a “book leave”, though in truth this has hardly slowed down the rate of publication here at The Hinternet. I am just now finishing up revisions on my manuscript and circulating it to a handful of judicious critics and careful readers. Once it’s in their hands, I will finally be able to return more committedly to other things.

But for now, just three items.

First, we were delighted to read the kind words Maya Hawke had for The Hinternet in a recent interview with the LA Times. Modesty prevents us from quoting —if not from pointing in the general direction of— her actual words of praise, but you are invited to read the whole piece and to discover them for yourself, among other compelling insights into Maya’s life and work and creative sensibility. We had a blast writing both her recent album bio, as well as the more extensive metafictional album review that appeared this past weekend. Go read it, if you have not done so yet. We are very happy to count Maya among the true friends and spiritual fellow-travelers of The Hinternet, and honored that she invited us to contribute our paratextual ornament to the multimedia package that is Maitreya Corso. What a thing!

Second, the deadline for the Hinternet Foundation’s August Summer School, “Whither the Humanities?” (or “W(h)ither the Humanities?” as some have taken to calling it) is fast approaching: June 1. We will publish the complete syllabus in mid-June. In the meantime, you can learn more about the summer school here, and you can read about some of the theoretical reflections behind our decision to host it here. We only have 15 slots, and they’re filling up fast, so please don’t delay if this is of interest to you. If you have any general queries about the summer school, please write to our programs associate Sophia Fiedler at sophia.fiedler -at- hinternetfoundation -dot- org.

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School,
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Third, do not forget to register for the Hinternet Foundation Inaugural Summit, Generative Humanity: Writing, Art, and Humanism in the Age of AI. which will take place in Paris on November 23. Seats are filling up fast! Confirmed speakers include Blaise Agüera y Arcas, D. Graham Burnett, Natasha Dow-Schüll, Marco Roth, Maya Vinokour, and Leif Weatherby. The complete program will be made available in early June. Click on the image below to register!

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There was an unexpected twist here at the Hinternet editorial offices in Quimper back in February, when we received a transmission from the versatile artist Maya Hawke. It was a request intended fo…

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Until 1975 or so, every instance of drumming in the history of Homo sapiens, and likely of other Homo species too, involved the striking, with some degree of force, with or without a mallet or stick, of an external object’s surface. No more. Unless clicking counts as “striking”, for the past half-century we have had a choice when it comes to sourcing our drumbeats. We can have the human kind, or we can have the machine kind. And yet either way we still have music — sort of. Not really. Maybe. I’ll come back to this soon enough.

What I’m most concerned with today is not just music, but language in the wake of the arrival of our new language machines, and more generally with everything that, we have reason to feel in the present era, is slipping away from us. It may be, I want to say, that the externalization of music-making amounts to an even greater rupture with our human essence than does the externalization of language-making that follows it by a few decades. After all, music is among the only constituents of our essence that lies even deeper, both chronologically and ontologically, than speech.

On one way of seeing things, our innate sense of rhythm, likely a cognitive and sensorimotor response to the experience of our own heartbeat, furnishes us with a far deeper connection to the world than language. It synchronizes us with the alternation of day and night, of the tides, of the seasons. It eternally confirms our position in a world conceived as an order. Language by contrast, you might suspect, is but a compensation. The moment we stop singing and dancing, we again experience ourselves as cut off from that order, and we attempt to bridge the reemergent gap by use of arbitrary and conventional signs. We wouldn’t have to do that at all, if our circumstances permitted us to just keep singing and dancing all the time.

There are indeed significant disanalogies between the drum-machine and the LLM that can make it seem as if the externalization of language has been the more important of the two recent ruptures. For one thing, drum-machines do not typically communicate with one another, or pose cybersecurity threats, and the number of jobs they have threatened or eliminated has been considerably smaller. But sometimes it helps to break our problems down into subproblems, and it seems to me that the subproblem of how to maintain our distinct human practices across the ruptures of technological revolutions —maintaining, that is, the things we have more or less always done in all human cultures, and that are widely seen as constitutive of human social existence as such—, might be significantly illuminated by comparison of our most recent AI revolution to the revolution in musical recording, broadcast, and production that precedes it.

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“It’s hard to believe it was only two years ago, in the spring of 2026, that The Hinternet suddenly and without any explanation pivoted full-time to critical engagement with Hawai’ian music from the early 20th century. They took a lot of heat for that, lost a lot of subscribers. But those defectors should have known better! As usual, The Hinternet was just ahead of the curve, as we are now in the midst of the third Hawai’ian Renaissance. You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai piped in on the sound system!” —Jon Caramanica, New York Times, October 9, 2028

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The present essay continues to develop the line of reflection developed previously in my essay, “A Third Way for the Humanities”. It is recommended that you read that piece first.

1.

A few years ago I was the external member on a hiring committee charged with considering one Nathan Cofnas for a job. Cofnas, you might know, is a “race-realist” working on IQ differences across the different “races ou espèces”, as François Bernier put the matter in 1686, getting this whole race science thing off to a pretty inauspicious start. Cofnas is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy and [sic] Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium. Cofnas’s funding appears to be drawn from a grant of the European Research Commission obtained prior to his arrival there by Ghent colleague Bouke de Vries. I hope those who have protested against Cofnas’s hiring, and even sought to have the decision reversed, will back off, so that he might be permitted to fail all on his own in pursuit of his meritless research program.

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Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances. —Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

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I.

A musicology professor once offered my class the only definition of jazz I’ve ever thought truly apt. He said: “Jazz is the music jazz musicians play.”

You are listening to a piece of music. You wonder: is it jazz? You have only to ask yourself: what kind of musician is making it? Is it a jazz musician, or several jazz musicians? Very well, you’re listening to jazz. If it isn’t? Then you’re probably listening to something else.

The circuity is the point. Since it’s an idiom, a tradition, a world mostly to itself, jazz should not really be defined (if that can be helped). And yet—we’re certain that there was, sometimes still is, something called jazz. It was already conscious of itself as different from other kinds of music, early on. There are many moments we could point to as evidence of this difference. So I’ll choose the best I know: that moment when, in 1926, Louis Armstrong dropped the lyrics from the lyric stand while cutting “Heebie Jeebies” with his Hot Seven band, and covered for the mistake with the first official scat-singing on record. So Louie became the first Jazz Singer, not only because he scatted but because as a singer, he understood his voice was no different from his horn—and what both were really meant to do, was to take up all the dim, repetitive variations he’d encountered in his life and spin them into a different plane altogether.

Other jazz musicians played perfectly well. Jelly Roll Morton played, Fletcher Henderson played, and King Oliver played. But Louie sang—with his horn and his own natural instrument alike. And his precise genius for a kind of magical reinterpolation gave every soloist who came after him their own signature difference, too. Not just to play the thing over, with enough variations to scrape by, keeping the attention of the dancers and booze drinkers in the joint, an audience always dangerously ready to get on to the next scene. But to root people to the spot, to show them, to tell them something—to make it about the music itself, music and not decoration. Where others heard “St. Louis Blues,” or “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” or “Stardust,” Louie heard a dozen other things: harmonies, alternate melodies, moods. Your normal popular performer—Al Jolson, for instance, whom Hollywood enshrined as the face of the new talking jazz age—might sing those melodies, embellish them a bit, lean into the words, and be a decent interpreter. But for Louie the words were a pretext, a way to get him into the real thing, which was spinning off from the center and establishing its own free ellipse in orbit around it. Louie made music essentially about music—the same way every great play is really about plays, and every great movie is really about movies.

This is what his singing was, too, with scatting at the abstract extreme. First the words: start the verse, let the meaning of the song come through, establish the center. Then roll outwards, in potentially infinite variations, streams of new melodic and harmonic ideas which in Louie’s hands were as full and complex as whatever original piece he’d picked up and toyed around with. For decades afterward jazz musicians would go on building an unbelievably rich scaffolding on top of these principles—expanding into denser arrangements, more sophisticated harmony, improvisations of dazzling virtuosity and invention. But the basic difference was the same: jazz was music that had somehow built a space, nested within the full tradition of American Song, where the point of the music was to build on music, in a kind of exegesis on its own workings: it was reinterpretation raised to a fine art; a moment of singular, incendiary reinterpretation. It would expand beyond mere genre, develop its own standards and classics, its own idiolect, its own rhythms, yes—but the point of it all would always lie in the way these things were used, to burst wide open the repetitions and limitations of the popular music of their day. To make a new world of music out of it.

For the great jazz singers, the jazz difference is a bit slipperier. And this is for one simple reason: The Great American Songbook, the thousand or so songs in the canon of primarily Jewish and Black songwriters, which emerged just as the new jazz language was becoming the substrate of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, in the Thirties and Forties. Men like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins weren’t jazz musicians. But jazz informed the songs they were writing for the masses. And jazz musicians paid them back in turn for their material, taking those songs and transforming them into sandboxes, little zones of exploration, which would be transposed and re-done by musicians for decades afterwards as if there was no way to really exhaust their essence (since, frequently, there wasn’t).

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Meanwhile, all the other staff writers are “in the deep-freeze”, as Hélène put it to me, while refusing to explain the precise meaning of this bit of Hinternet office lingo, nor even to give me so much as a rough measure of how literally it should be taken. She said, further, that she herself is unavailable for any writing tasks throughout this Holy Week. When I asked how this observance sits alongside her more familiar practice of magic natural and unnatural, she just shrugged and said that Breton religious syncretism is “a complicated thing”.

That was also the moment she told me that I, as, technically, the only ghost on the Hinternet editorial staff, was going to have to take care of this week’s piece. “You don’t even have a body, so you can hardly have a busy schedule either,” she said. Of course she’s wrong on both counts, for first of all I happen to be constituted of rarefied pneuma, and second of all even if I weren’t I would still keep to a daily schedule no less strict than that of any being of grosser substance. But whatever. Hélène’s the boss.

Still, I think I’m going to pull a classic “French worker” move and fulfill my duty in as absolutely a quam minimum way as possible.

I will tell you, first of all, that The Hinternet will be back in full swing soon enough, and you are going to be delighted to have waited things out. In the meantime, you must take this opportunity to upgrade to a paid subscription, since paid subscriptions truly are the well-spring and the without-which-not of everything we do here.

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I will tell you, second of all, that there is still time to apply for the inaugural Hinternet Foundation Summer School. You can read more here about some of the theoretical reflections behind this year’s focus.

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School,
“WHITHER THE HUMANITIES?”,
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And third and finally I will invite you to click on the ad below from one of our more sinister tech-world mécènes, to study the document to which it brings you, and to feel a shiver of giddy anticipation as you contemplate what you’ll be in for this summer when The Oort Cloud Review, Vol. 1, Issue 1, finally appears from Hat & Beard Press.

Big things are coming. Brace yourselves…

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High-resolution images of the entire manuscript are available here (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, ms 408).

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Page 9

I was only a young man, yet I distinctly recall the unease I felt when the Glaziers emerged as the City’s most revered class of men. They set about pouring sand into their furnaces, devising new ways to make glass as thick as bricks yet as translucent as air. No one could have imagined before their efforts began what wonders may be conjured out of heat and silica, ingenuity and persistence.

We live beneath glass here in the City, all the time, but we are reminded of this in practice only when we attempt to walk away from it, or when, as happens several times a day, we hear the sad thunk¹ of an oblivious bird, and then look up to see it sliding down the invisible slope. And of course we are constantly reminded of the dome by the Glaziers themselves, who have by now made it official doctrine in the City that there are twenty-seven celestial spheres in all,2 the closest of them being the one they themselves built, which, they insist, shares in the same nature as the most distant and empyrean of them all.

Page 10

The children of the City —can we even call them that? anyhow the Citizens generated after the construction of the dome— do not know that it was constructed at all. They believe it is as fixed and eternal as the other twenty-six spheres, and that it is paired, beneath the ground, with a complementary hemisphere invisible to us. But you cannot erase the memories of those of us old enough to have been here before its construction. You can kill us, which seems to have been one of the strategies Cocalus considered some years back, though in the end he understood he needed us for our expertise in sundry fields, such as mine, in botany.

Page 11

We are permitted to live, on the condition that we silence ourselves in the presence of the hatchlings (as I’ve taken to calling them). A few years ago one dour little androgyne of ten or so came to me to ask how, as it is rumored, I can know the patterns of the zodiac on the reverse side of the dome, given that there is no way to travel out of the hemisphere within which we are generated and corrupted.3 This was during the “great thinning”, and straightaway I suspected a Glazier had sent him to trick me into betraying my knowledge, for which I would have faced certain death. Glaziers are never to be trusted, given the favor Cocalus extends to them, and least of all when the Citizens’ numbers are being thinned on his express orders, in view of some supposed need for what the Glaziers call “equilibrium”. I therefore could not tell the hatchling that its question was doubly misinformed: for we do not know the shape of the zodiac on the other side of the world (which in the old geography is nothing other than the Antipodes4), while there most certainly is a way out of this dome-covered City of ours. I know the way well, and someday I will find the courage to take it.

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There are, more precisely, two ways. The first is obvious, though the hatchlings would never think to consider it: the dome penetrates only six ells5 into the ground at its deepest. One could easily dig under it within the space of a dark night, provided one were careful to avoid the wolf patrols (or whatever the beast-keepers are now calling their cross-bred monsters; that is not my concern, as I am a botanist and know only of plants, and of the insects that aid and harm them).

The other way is through the baths, which even the smallest hatchling knows to bubble up from deep thermal springs.6 But the rites of generation and hatching that occur there are so codified, taking place only at the surface, so that no one in these many years has bothered to plunge into them just ten ells or so down, to find the many passages leading to caverns filled with dark pools and dank air, great calcitic foyers shot through with openings, leading out in hundreds of different directions, some of them dead-ends, but many opening up on the earth’s surface well beyond the City. Even among the elders this is not common knowledge. My blood-brother Cacus knew, and he knew I knew, because we used to explore these passageways together as boys. But Cacus was thinned. Cocalus having decided on the name of the mythological cow-thief for my friend,7 he subsequently decided that this name he himself made up must be reflective of a bad character — and now I am the only one left who knows. Well, I and Cocalus, but he does not know that I know.

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Surely you do not need to know all these details, my Goddess. Let us reminisce instead, for that is far more pleasing than to learn the layout of our City. Do you recall our visit to the baths at Montecatini,8 where out of decorated spa-cups the plague victims drank the earth’s hot mineral broth in desperate hope for a cure?

I was a fool, my Love — I thought the very fact that you were beside me was enough to keep me safe. And I suppose there is no evidence it did not, for I did not fall ill, nor did you, but we both stripped bare and floated arm in arm, naked, like lily-pads in the hot baths at night, when the sick had all wandered off to sleep or to die.

Page 14

I told you then that before I came north as a young man I thought all the little flies flew in from torrid Libya, loved the heat, and were found little further up the boot than my own hometown.9 Yet there they were still, in the Tuscan marshes in autumn; we were shivering as we stripped, and they swarmed around us as if preparing to draw blood. But they did not, and then we dove in, and were protected by the salty water.

I sang to you like a troubadour in Occitan10 — words of love as if I were joking. But if I joked, it is only because I was a coward, and could only speak truth by pretending I was insincere. As I recall there is another Occitan ditty that speaks of just this sort of cowardice, though that is not the one I sang. Anyhow I assumed you knew the truth. I assumed the little flies and the bogs and the night themselves could not fail to see the truth of my Love for you.

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1

Interpreting

which would more precisely be transliterated as kapšag, as an onomatopoeia, rendered here according to the conventions of forming such sound-words in English.

5

Reading

which literally means “forearm”, as a unit of measurement comparable to the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon “ell”, which was originally a length extending from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The reader will likely have noticed by now that as a rule I do not rely on other Voynich scholarship in my critical apparatus. Very little has been achieved in this vast body of work that would warrant mention, or that offers viable interpretations of the text that differ from my own. This of course excludes the “sub-rosa” scholarship shoe-horned into various scientific journals under false pretenses, such as that from the Polish Czasopismo nauk rolniczych, already cited in a previous installment (see Part One, footnote 9). On several occasions in the notes to future installments, we will be returning to this and to other “hidden” scholarship. The one work of overt Voynich research that constitutes an exception to our rule of active disinterest is Vitaly Ivanovich Tatur’s Rasshifrovka Rukopisi Voïnicha [Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript] (self-published in pdf form, Kazan, October, 2014, with subsequent additions and corrections through March, 2018). V. I. Tatur is believed to be the pseudonym of Lev’ Petrovich Druzhnikov, a topologist and number theorist in the Faculty of Mathematics at Kazan State University. No communications have been issued under the name of Tatur since 2018, and Druzhnikov denies any familiarity with Tatur’s work. Whatever the case may be, Tatur interprets the word in question to mean “femur”, used here as a unit of measurement. Some rather more significant differences between Tatur’s interpretation of the ms and my own will become clear soon enough.

10

Occitan was the common language of the lyric poetry recited by troubadours in Europe throughout the high Middle Ages. These performers traveled a wide circuit, and as a result many Europeans had some familiarity with Occitan without any direct knowledge of the place or the culture of its origin. This is presumably also the case for our author. Tatur (DVM, 2^nd edition, June, 2015) however notes that the tradition was abruptly extinguished by the Black Death, which began in 1348, which indeed rather calls into question the idea that an author writing in the early fifteenth century would have been exposed to Occitan-language troubadours in his earlier life. Plainly, further investigation is required.

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1.

In March, 1697, Peter the Great set out from Moscow, along with a select group of councilors, for his so-called “Grand Embassy”, a two-year tour of Western Europe. The voyage was shrouded in secrecy and disguise, and was aimed at the strategic collection of information concerning primarily Dutch and German advances in science and technology. Through the usual gossip networks, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would soon learn every detail of the Tsar’s early visit to the Königsberg court of the Elector of Prussia, Friedrich I, and of the time these two more-or-less Enlightened sovereigns spent together at Friedrich’s maison de plaisance or country home.

The philosopher remarks in a letter that during the visit the Tsar had been “very gay, and spoke familiarly with everyone”, and that he “approved of the gentleness [douceur] with which people conduct themselves in these [German] lands, and disapproves the cruelties of his own.”1 When the Tsar took a walk with the elector, we learn, one of the servants made a gross error of some unspecified sort in tending to this distinguished visitor. The Tsar tells the servant that if he had been in Muscovy he would have been subjected to the whip, but, since they are in a “gentle” country, he will let it pass.

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We are very pleased to announce the Hinternet Foundation’s Inaugural Summer School, taking place Fridays and Saturdays, August 7, 8, 14, 15, 21, and 22, at 11:00 Los Angeles / 14:00 New York / 19:00 London / 20:00 Paris (sorry Australasia!). The format this year will be entirely online.

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Our recent Declaration, “A Third Way for the Humanities”, explains some of the theoretical and practical considerations behind this initiative.

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