Longinus

Now when I want to get away, I escape into literature, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence.

Having escaped I see we’ve forsaken every other form of oral intelligence, having sacrificed the language of real people on some sort of Web-based funeral pyre manufactured in a foreign country, made of a type of flammable synthetic material where words seem to be burning brightly, then suddenly curl up and die.

Yes, before and after AI there were real words in literature. And there were writers using real words. And, not to be overly critical, I was once one of the writers using real words, and once in a while I got it right, though mostly I did not, have not gotten it right, handicapped as I am by the the crippling disease of writing all by myself, knowing now that the vast majority of writers are terrible writers, that men are just as poor writers as are women, that men now outnumber women and that I am among both the men and the women, the judged and unjudged.

My late friend the writer Bill Witherup once spoke of something he called the “word hoard”. I took it to mean that Bill meant there was a bee’s nest hanging in a tree somewhere in the hills above Big Sur and that if a writer poked it with a sharp stick he or she might be stung by a swarm of bees, and either go on writing or die a withering death without having written a real word.