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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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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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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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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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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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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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You have already been introduced to this essay’s “thesis statement”. But before coming back around to its narrow defense, we will have to do some significant ground-clearing.

I have never understood, …

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1. Universal Brainrot

We should begin with news of a disconcerting development here at our editorial offices in Quimper. It seems our interns, Augustus and Eglantine, have seized control of The Hinternet’s social media. We are completely locked out of our own Instagram account, which Gus and Eggy now seem intent on transforming into a veritable cataract of grade-A bona-fide Gen Z brainrot.

A dissenting minority on our editorial staff, including JSR himself, has argued that this twist might not turn out entirely to our detriment. Brainrot, they maintain, is really the only significant aesthetic sensibility that matters in 2026, the only that is not moribund, but is in fact likely to continue to evolve, and, within a few years, some of us are now predicting, to ramify into high and low branches, to insinuate itself into museums and fashion and the narrative arts and whatever is left of academia, to serve as the new stone on which our lapidary critics will whet their faculties of judgment. Could this be possible? Friends, as of 2026 anything is possible — anything, that is, except returning to the status quo that prevailed before the massive cultural, technological, and geopolitical reset currently underway.

And so we are coming around, at least in one of the branches of our operation, to seeing the strategic appeal of placing our bet on the youngest of the currently adult generations — whose creative fecundity, significantly aided by image- and text-generating machines, is already showing us, or at least those of us who know how to see, the rough outlines of our future. And it looks something like this:

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The closest Trumpian equivalent to Bubba’s well-timed display of New Jack Swing fluency is surely his cameo appearance in Azerbaijani post-Soviet gala-pop artist and gangster-industrialist scion Emin Agalarov’s “In Another Life (feat. Donald Trump and Miss Universe ‘13)” (2013). We can deplore the excesses of the Russiagate accusations that dominated our news headlines for so much of the later part of that same decade. It remains however the case that what we are seeing in this video is profoundly, essentially un-American, utterly incompatible with our Whitmanian spirit. You could know already, from the support that the future president lent to this gross display of Eurasianist pop kitsch, that something was deeply rotten in our Republic. Bad taste, in sufficiently concentrated dosage, can be as great a threat to our American way of life as any subversive ideology…

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1.

Here at The Hinternet we have copped, openly and repeatedly, to passing off AI-generated writing as human-generated. But we always rush to add that a far ofter-used trick in our bag is the reverse: to pass off human writing as if it were coming from a machine. Both approaches have noteworthy effects, and while the latter is more time-consuming, it is also, for now, one that usually gets results more in line with our creative vision. Still, we insist, the only thing that matters to us is the result: is this or is this not a text that will challenge, puzzle, delight, or inspire its reader, quite independently of any consideration of its ontogeny?

In what follows I will explain why I believe that far from carrying stigma, in the very near-future machine-aided or hybrid writing will be the new norm, and will bring in its train new standards of appraisal and criticism with just as much integrity as any that have been applied in any other domain of human excellence over the past many thousand years.

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1.

Unreliable sources will tell you that the French word for “fox” is renard. But this is in truth only a recent imposition (over the past 800 years or so). The correct French word is goupil, while renard, though written today in lowercase, is really a proper name, of Germanic origin. Reinhard or Reinhardt in turn has sometimes been glossed in popular etymology as “Pure of Heart”, though the truth is you just can’t get hardt from Herz, and the real meaning is something more like “strong in counsel”. It is however difficult not to read the name from the point of view of modern German, as a pairing of two attributes, rein and hart: “pure-hard”, or perhaps “so hardcore”. And curiously, given that the English core derives ultimately from the Latin cor, we seem to have arrived back where we started.

The fox anyhow is supposed to be, in medieval Europe as in Indigenous North America and elsewhere, the consummate trickster. While this is a character profile that we may naturally associate with hard-heartedness, it is much more difficult to link it with pure-heartedness, unless perhaps we draw inspiration from Kierkegaard and conceive such purity as belonging to any being who wills only one thing. Renart, the protagonist of Europe’s greatest animal epic —the medieval template for Tom and Jerry and Itchy and Scratchy and basically everything else in that venerable mode of imagining, through anthropomorphism, a comic and ultraviolent fun-house-mirror world parallel to our own— is plainly pure-hearted in at least this sense. He wills, namely, nothing but harm to those around him (perhaps with the exception of his dear wife and friend, the vixen Hermeline), and nothing but ill-gotten gains for himself.

This might be Kierkegaard’s fox but it is not Tolstoy’s or Isaiah Berlin’s: Renart does not waste his time sniffing around, now at this, now at that, but thoroughly digs in, like Tolstoy’s hedgehog, to the one thing that matters to him: pure malice.

Just how malicious is Renart? His worst deed, surely, is…

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Let me be clear that I love everyone I am about to put through the ringer. Among them pride of place surely goes to all those American collaborators and associates of mine who at this p…

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Is it not clear that we have entered an age not of the propaganda, but of the shitpost of the deed? How else do you make sense of the bullet casing, left at the site of an assassination, with the words “Notices bulge, OwO what’s this?” inscribed on it?

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In September, 2021, as regular readers will already know, I hit my head in a scooter accident. The impact shook a few things loose, and while no measurable damage appeared in the MRI, I have suspected ever since that it changed me in both subtle and profound ways. For one thing, in my previous life I had been content simply to enjoy music — to judge it, to curate it, to learn about its creators, and sometimes fully to feel it. Post-accident, I find that enjoying music is not enough. Music, I find, is now coming out of me, like sweat out of my pores, and I have no choice but to let it come out — i.e., to “make” it.

One obstacle here is that I am not a musician. Or am I? In the Categories Aristotle speaks of the musical man who is musical even when he is not making music — unlike the sitting man, who ceases to be a sitting man the instant he stands up. Could I have been a musical man for all those years, without knowing it? Are these songs seeping out of me, now, hints of a latent internal capacity that only had to be awakened? Is this capacity latent in all of us, qua human beings, while only some of us are fortunate enough to have it jostled out of us by one or several little traumas?

To be clear, I am not talking about talent — as I am about to show you, I have none. I am talking, in the first instance, about a capacity, something comparable, perhaps, to the capacity to perceive mental images; and in the second instance I am talking about a desire, comparable to the desire to take a pencil in hand and to draw the images one sees. I find the desire more surprising than the capacity — I often feel, these days, like the folks in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) who find themselves instinctively sculpting clay models of the site to which the aliens are calling them. I mean, I’ve just got to make this stuff.

The music churns up in me willy-nilly: the melodies, the lyrics. The difficult part comes in trying to translate what I am hearing in there, to get it out of me and into the world, a process for which I have no training at all, and, I have found, no real natural aptitude either. Europeans, who all seem to have received proper musical educations earlier in their lives, have often told me that to be able to discern a note means automatically to be able to reproduce it. But that’s just not how this American experiences music. I can’t sing at all, and I can just barely play the guitar or the piano to pick out melodies. Sometimes, if I have a melody in my head, I will press piano keys one by one, or at random, until I happen to find the note I was hearing. I have to count from middle C in order then to learn what note it actually is.

I also have lyrics for the melodies, which usually appear spontaneously in my head around the moment of the first appearance of the melody, though sometimes I write them first and then only later do I find the music to put them to. Writing lyrics is not like writing poetry, no matter how much the vapid poptimists are eager these days to analyze some mediocre Taylor Swift couplet as if it were Edna St. Vincent Millay. When it comes to song lyrics, at least the kind that pop up in my head, a fair amount of cliché is welcome — pure banalities like “Say you’ll be mine” and even “Ooh baby” that aren’t so much language in their own right as recycled fragments of the human cultural history that these songs in my head are in some deep sense “about”. Again, with due credit to David Lynch — in the 21st century, you do not issue the hortation to “do the Loco-Motion” out of any real expectation to see your friends doing the Loco-Motion. You hortate because it helps to move you into a mode of aesthetic receptivity that is at the same time a hard reckoning with the artistic legacies of post-war mass entertainment.

I have been obsessed recently with the Cuban classical guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer — a musical man if there ever was one. I must have watched this performance a hundred times by now, and each time I have detected some new subtlety to astound me and to make me wish to watch again. (I also love his look, and the Cuban revolutionary mural behind him.) Brouwer went on to a prolific career as a film composer, and in several interviews has presented himself as an absolute master of his craft, working according to the highest standards and the most stringent idea of what his compositions ought to be doing. One by one he dismisses as unnecessary, as frivolous, as cliché, the most familiar features of a musical work: rhythm, melody, dramaturgy — you don’t need any of it! What is left over at the end of this process —his film scores—, does not sound particularly lush or lively, but the artist keeps his integrity intact. This is not quite Adorno telling us to eat our vegetables, that modern music, if it is to succeed at what it is trying to do, must sound unpleasant; it is not quite that, but pretty close.

“The general public recognizes [certain chords] as something nice”, Brouwer reflects in one interview. But “the abuse of something nice becomes a banality.” Perhaps, yet it seems to me that in pop music, perhaps somewhat as in the joke drawn out so long that it becomes unfunny and then funny again, to continue to abuse certain well-chosen banalities can sometimes bring them back again from the ridiculous to the sublime. Even “Ooh baby” can never be lost forever.

So I admit that the music in my head is banal, cliché-ridden, worthy of scorn from Leo Brouwer. I also think it’s beautiful. Because it’s beautiful, I struggle to get it out, and what comes out is only ever a dim after-echo of what I had originally heard. On a few occasions I have managed to get out something that at least sounds, melodically, like the internal original —the work itself?—, simply by pecking patiently away at the keyboard or the fretboard. But when I have not been able to do that, I have, recently, found myself turning to technological aids to bring to life what I cannot.

And what I really want to write about today is how that part of the effort is going. I have found, in short, that some of our new tech prostheses are really quite powerful in aiding the only-latently-musical to be fully musical, to manifest our internal music to others. These prostheses are at the same time bringing about a transformation in the way we experience music that is at least as significant as anything that has occurred since the dawn of the recording era. This transformation is exciting, destabilizing, and worrisome all at once. Especially as concerns those tools that rely on artificial intelligence, I have found, technology is giving us something far worse than the “banalities” Brouwer despises.

The music I hear inside of me is, in the end, reprocessed human culture — it is the organic filtering, channeling, and recomposition of the sounds of other human beings, mostly American ones, mostly from the 20th century, sounds that were themselves often, in their initial production, enhanced or vehicled by new technologies, but that continued to testify to a clear origin in the human creative drive. AI music is different. It is, rather, the ground-up and reprocessed waste of mass human culture — the part that got wiped off, and left recordings, footage, tape, film, and data as its trace.

I found my way to Mureka, a subscription-based AI music platform, and I got myself a monthly pro plan. My idea was that I could upload recordings of myself humming or singing these little tunes of mine, so that it might then process them and make them into something appealing. I had expected that there would be a digital keyboard, and that I could supplement or correct any notes that were not entirely to my liking, that I could improve upon the original with small adjustments, some of which might require at least some competent musical input on my part, compelling me, I anticipated, to rise to the challenge and to improve in my musical ability.

In fact I had no opportunity to provide any such thing.

A big part of the problem is that if you upload a tune, the AI can only give you something that is like that tune, since to give you the tune itself, just as you had wanted it, could violate copyright protections on existing songs. Let’s say, simply for the sake of illustration, I upload an audio file of myself singing Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 hit, “Conga”, such as the following:

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In recent months I have often felt somewhat like that library janitor in “One for the Books”, a 1986 episode of the Spielberg-produced TV series Amazing Stories, who acquires the ability osmotically to absorb the information on the stacks surrounding him. He collapses, ultimately, like the victim of a lightning-strike. His mortal brain just can’t take it, you see.

I’m not sure my mortal brain can take it either. But at least until I collapse, or the world collapses, I do believe that we are now in the midst of the most significant cognitive revolution in the history of our species — not just a revolution in our “prosthetic knowledge”, where we can in some qualified sense be said potentially to “know” whatever fact we might be able to access within five seconds or so of pulling out our phones, but a revolution in the sense of being able, now, to absorb a significantly expanded body of learning into our God-given wetware, which then quickly becomes integrated with the totality of our internal resources for making sense of the world.

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence. To be clear —pace Nick Bostrom and, more recently, Mark Zuckerberg—, I personally do not believe the notion of machine superintelligence, considered independently of the way human beings are interacting with the machines, is coherent in the least. Yet I do think the term is at least helpful in understanding the transformation of the human mind itself that is already occurring as a result of the sudden proliferation of these new cognitive prostheses. We are the ones who are becoming superintelligent; “machine superintelligence” is a misnomer, but it does point to something real.

In partial demonstration of this claim, below the fold I provide some “receipts”, in the form of two pdf documents, well over 500 pages in total, containing the transcripts of my exchanges, this past month alone, with ChatGPT and DeepSeek (some pages have been deleted that contained personal information; I sincerely I hope I found them all!).

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