QUIDDITY, 88, ***(BECAUSE OF AUDIO PROBLEMS, THE VOICEOVER RECORDING WILL BE AVAILABLE LATER THIS WEEK.)***
The Pack Rat Chronicles, Part 4; Meanderings; Hypatia's Bookroom
It Became More than That
From the time she was 15 until her passing in 2018, writing was an ever-present influencer in Leah Napolin’s life. Writing provided her with the platform to observe and comment on the events and people that were consequential in her world, - from the minute to the universal, from YENTL to THE DOGS OF PRYPIAT. Future issues of QUIDDITY will provide you with the opportunity to become familiar with some of her insights. **********
THE PACK RAT CHRONICLES
by LEAH NAPOLIN
PART 4
(Part 3 ended with Leah discovering a long forgotten cigar box that held a childhood “glass menagerie” that her father had allowed her to pose as players in one of her “kitchen table dioramas.” )
Oh, the thing-ness of Things. By that I mean the whole of the earthy, temporal world—everything man-made, absurd, ugly, foolish, vain, impossible, hopeful and surprising. My heart recognizes the pack rat's sensibility, the pack rat's legacy. Rages and rejoices at the same time.
Not long ago we hired a man with a one-ton dump truck. Five times he came—five times, five tons—and it still isn't done. So, every weekend while the weather holds, we continue the work, pulling stuff out of the house and garage and throwing it on a pile under a big Norwegian fir. Sometimes, doing it makes me feel energized as though I'm accomplishing something worthwhile. Other times I feel spent, as though my life has been poisoned by it; that I will never, ever be rid of his things.
As the rooms get emptier, the pile under the tree grows bigger. I resolved to rent a dumpster, compared price quotes, puzzled over the size in cubic yards that was needed. Pine needles drifted down and covered the pile. Then snow fell and blanketed the pine needles. Soon, everything froze hard. The pile took on the look of a wintry grave. Spring came, the pile thawed. "I'll definitely get this stuff hauled away before Labor Day," I promised myself. And so it goes, each new season bringing with it new resolve, to be followed by frustration, apathy, dark dreams of solutions contained in a stick of dynamite.
Archeologists have a name for it, the trash heaps of civilization: they're called “middens," and they've been found to exist in every culture, from the earliest hunter/gatherers to our own industrial/technological one. Trash, or junk, it seems, is the rosetta stone of culture. Dig down through the middens of prehistoric settlements and you can learn what food people ate, what medicines they took, what tools they used, how they fought and worked and played, what they valued, what they didn't.
Now, when I pass by what has fondly come to be known as "Moe's Midden" I wonder what someone in the future, sifting through it, will conclude about us, about life on planet earth in this place, at this time? Communing there with the spirits of the past, it doesn't seem like such an idle question.
Oh yes. We did find one thing of value. It came from the hidden room under the porch. It tumbled out of a box and the flash of color on the ground caught my eye. It was a lapel button bearing a photo of Charles Lindburgh—"Lucky Lindy"—and the date and times of his flight into history. Underneath the button, suspended from a faded campaign ribbon, was a lead replica of the Spirit of St. Louis.
The dealer who appraised it said it was a nice piece, not one-of-a-kind you know, but certainly nice. He offered me twenty-five dollars for it.
"No thanks," I said, “I think I'll keep it." &
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MEANDERINGS: “To See or Not to See”
I feel like I'm channeling Hamlet: To believe or not to believe. To trust or not to trust. That is the question. This feeling came to a head this last week or so with a Facebook post of a video that showed Rachel Maddow, smack in the middle of a raging river in central Texas, rescuing a baby. I immediately responded with an “oh my god” and several donations to relief organizations. There was no way I could ignore this. But, here's the thing. The tragedy in Texas with its horrendous loss of life and environmental armegeddon is real. However, the Rachel Maddow video was not.
Forward a couple of days to the July 21 “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Rachel announces that the Texas story and other “news” articles about her are ALL fake.
“…[because of AI] the fake stories are more compelling to people and more believable. They’re really finely targeted and calibrated to tell people what they want to hear, or more specifically, to them things they want to click on to learn more about… now, there are often AI-generated pictures, or videos that are designed to make you think you are [watching/reading] visual proof…And AI will generate any proof that you want. [Before AI took over all of social media,] … Today, 90% of google is less reliable than it used to be. Facebook is the worst of it. AI dominant content in American social media. It is designed to manipulate what you click on, your feelings, your perception.”
Until recently, my emotional and intellectual interplay and responses were based on my trusting that what I was experiencing was genuine/authentic. However, more and more I’m finding my experiences appropriated by algorithms that are lying, cheating, or robbing me of my humanity/my compassion. It is controlling my trust in my ability to truthfully respond to another human who actually wants to communicate with another human being/soul.
* A study by Ahrefs found that 74% of new webpages contained AI content, with a large portion (71% - 99%) having dominant AI use (could reach 90% of online content by 2026).
How can I now authentically interact with the texts and experiences that are predominantly AI generated or photoshopped? I feel hollowed out somehow. And, I’m probably not alone.
I can easily go to SNOPES or one of the other fact-checking sites. But, it will always be a deliberate choice, a choice founded on doubt/suspicion, a choice that will force me to leave my current context/venue and begin to weaken my trust or interest or support of the idea, object, voice. Aside from being uninvitedly time-consuming, it will interrupt my engagement with the text that has garnered my attention (justly or unjustly). It is an intruder/interloper, a kind of unwelcome overseer.
Here is where I’m certain you could list your own examples of being duped and taken advantage of via AI and/or photoshop.
This column is NOT intended to be a bitch fest. We all know our world is imminently upon us all, and each of us has to find her own path for living in the AI and photoshopped universe, whether the arts, politics, science, religion, or just buying gas for my hybrid SUV. But, as I am wont to say, “The personal is universal.” Maybe my meandering through my individual angst about a world that has me questioning the validity of almost anything I come upon can help ease your own hill climbing.
With the insertion of one last word, I hope to follow Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: Pay attention: Be astonished; Tell about it. -- (Truthfully)
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HYPATIA’S BOOKROOM
A New Kind of Library
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library.” –Jorge Luis Borges
QUIDDITY, is building its own library of books that are of importance to us--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, ethically, etc.-- books that we would definitely rescue from a trash pile. We’re calling it Hypatia's Bookroom after the chief librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria. Tell us the title, author, category, and why this book is important to you. Questions you might consider include: Would you read this book again? Would you gift it to someone (who, why)? What note would you write on the cover page?
On the shelves so far: The rescued books selected by readers has grown and takes up too much space to list them all here. You can peruse the entire listing by going to the blog section of my website at blmurphy.com.
"There are so very many books, and we have forgotten almost all of them." (Lit.Hub) May we save all we can.
Kafka’s ideal of what a book should be: “An ax for the frozen sea within us.” (Sigrid Nuez interview in “By the Book,” NYT Book Review, 12/10/23)
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— The Grand Rapids Public Library in Michigan has launched a mobile library service that delivers books, Wi-Fi, printing and weekly programming to apartment complexes across the city. Operating from June 9 to Aug. 14, the initiative aims to engage children and families by providing consistent access to library resources within their communities.
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Over the past several months, quite a few readers have recommended that George Eliot’s Middlemarch be added to “Hypatia’s Bookroom.” For one reason or another, I’ve put off its inclusion. Most likely because I’ve never been a fan of early (or even late) Victorian lit. However, in a recent essay titled “When Novels Mattered,” David Brooks asked “…where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?” And, I had to admit that George Eliot was hidden and dust covered on the highest shelf of one of my bookcases. So, taking up Brooks’ implied challenge, I am picking up the gauntlet and have set a goal to read Middlemarch from cover to cover. In my Wordsworth Classics edition that’s 690 pages of immersion into the life, loves, and legacies of the Victorian upper classes and landed gentry. From time to time I’ll report on my progress toward understanding why the tale of Dorothea Brooke warrants being on all those lists of the world’s best novels.
I ignored the 47/50 page rule and directly plunged into the first 124 pages and the introduction to Dorothea and her younger sister Celia. Here’s the emerging main character as described by the narrator: “The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path…” (Seems like a 21st century young woman, doesn’t she?)