Syllabus #186

I know I've been living in Nashville for too long when I'm reading a Stephen King book and so far, the scariest, most unbelievably disturbing part has been when a teenager puts a very large, important personal check in a residential mailbox.  It was like watching a horror movie where someone is about to open the door to a room where you, the viewer, know they are about to die.  I physically cringed.  Full body, sphincter-clenching cringe.  I was like bro, don't do it!  You're so young!  You've never had to file a police report and get a new bank account and change all your billing and direct deposit information!  You have so much to live for!

But then!  

Then, nothing, actually.  It was not a Chekhov's gun.  That was the end of it.  Presumably, the mail got picked up, the bill got paid, and I could no longer suspend my disbelief with this story.  Like, okay, Steve, you can convince me that a reclusive old man has a shed concealing a portal to another world full of gold and giant cockroaches, but you cannot make me believe that check wasn't stolen, washed, and passed at the Dickerson Pike Walmart.  Come on.

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Yes, this, absolutely x 1000.   I declare a moratorium on my birthday from this day forward.  Don't acknowledge it, don't speak of it.  I'll be come a Jehovah if I have to, except I'll celebrate your birthday if you're into that.  Just leave mine out of it.  

This comic strip breakdown of the trouble with AI art really resonates.  I read a picture book to a group of 5th graders about Marcel Duchamp and the urinal, and how that challenged notions and provoked debates about what could and could not be art.  Then we had a discussion about how we can draw parallels to the current controversy over AI creations of visual art and pieces of writing, and whether or not that can actually be called art.  A lot of kids agreed that AI art was probably not the same as art created by a human.  Did I lead them to that conclusion and they were just saying what I wanted to hear?  Maybe.  But this particular group of kids was particularly resistant to doing literally anything else I was asking of them, so who knows!

Analog Reading:

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta was spicy and thought-provoking but easy to digest.  

Fairy Tale by Stephen King is highly enjoyable.  It starts out sad but almost sweet, and then takes a sharp plunge into Weird Town, USA, but you definitely see it coming.  It's an interesting exploration of the act of storytelling - the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell others.