In April, the Dead, Natalia Theodoridou
I really enjoyed this elegaic flash about memory, grief, and those we love.
For the rest of the month, the afternoons come and go like the tide, and I watch the dead ones arrive, and sit, and go again, leaving behind all their peculiar possessions: a suitcase full of sand; a fish that is impossibly light and floats in the air tethered to a silver thread, like a balloon; an umbrella so large it can be used as a boat.
The Difference Between Love and Time, Catherynne M. Valente
What it’s like falling in love with the space-time continuum. Cat Valente has been one of my favourite writers for many years, and every one of her short stories hit me in a place I didn’t know existed.
She hugs me and there is no difference. All the time spent in love is one time, happening simultaneously, a closed timeline curve of infinite gentleness. The continuum hiding in all the faces of people I have needed and wanted and cared for and grieved, the faces through which I loved the world, all one, all at once, memory and dreaming and regret and desire, injera bread and lentil soup and sushi and champagne and running toward a pickup truck in the yellow afternoon, red and white Rainier beer cans and rhinoceros iguanas and orchids and plastic Army camouflage-print glasses and psychology and physics and circular saws and Dazzle Dan feeding the birds in front of the Catedral and the Loch Ness monster’s ancient reptile heart beggared with love for her baby in the dark.
What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing, Laura Hartenberger
This is one of the most nuanced takes on AI and writing I’ve read to date. It strikes a great balance between both extremes of thinking about AI, and makes compelling arguments for what AI can and can’t do.
Even if we use AI to make writing feel easier, we still need to do the hard, lifelong work of becoming ourselves. To write well, you need the specificity of perspective that comes from communicating critically with others over an extended time. AI might make writing faster, but figuring out who we are in relation to others cannot be accelerated.
