From Who Owns the Future? (2013) by Jaron Lanier:

Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats book as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from  individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.

Added my review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge over at Good Reports. Pynchon is one of those all-too-common older writers who has just been living off past glories for decades now. He’s managed his brand well by cultivating a persona as a media recluse, long past the point where I think anyone would care if he “came out.” But his recent novels just go over the same themes, and they’re not well written at all. I guess some people get a pleasant retro buzz out of them (witness the new movie coming out of Inherent Vice), but I can’t think of any evidence from the past twenty years of him improving.

Why is it that we allow artists, and in particular authors, to get by for so long on reputation alone? Is it a lack of critical confidence? A deference to the cult of “genius”? Pynchon isn’t the most egregious example I can think of. Don DeLillo is probably worse. Haruki Murakami has been embarrassing himself for years. Cormac McCarthy is pretty awful now too. But it seems as if writers are given a lifetime pass if they’ve ever done anything good. In what other profession does that happen?

From Nature (1836) by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

From Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn:

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.

Added my review of Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season over at Good Reports. I don’t usually review (or, for that matter, even read) YA fantasy novels, but this one came to my desk by way of a huge hype train. It seemed to me to be no worse than any other YA franchise fiction I have sampled. Which is faint praise, I guess.

From Hydriotaphia (1658) by Sir Thomas Browne:

Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.

From Vultures’ Picnic (2011) by Greg Palast:

The Chenega Natives, decked out in yellow hazmat suits, look like firemen from outer space, wielding high-pressure hoses and pulling up the crude from the Exxon Valdez. It’s six years after the spill, and you can see this black crap all over them, like they’d thrown grenades into an outhouse.

And here I am on Knight Island in 2010, two decades after the tanker spill. I just have to stick my hand in the gravel, and the place will suddenly smell like a Bronx gas station.

In June 2010, the U. S. Department of the Interior said the Deepwater Horizon spill will be cleaned up by the fall. In the fall they revised that to “two years.” What they mean was, it will take two years for you to forget all about it.

Remember the Tsunami of 2007 that killed a quarter million people? I don’t: That is, I had to Google the date. The massacre of over three-quarters of a million people in Rwanda in . . . what was it, 1996? 1998?

The poet Wordsworth said, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Exactly. In a couple of years, you’ll forget all about the Gulf Coast, and BP will run ads that Nature has taken care of it all. And in two years or five, you’ll chuck this book in your recycle bin or clean it out of your iPad’s hard drive.

And we repeat the story again. The levees of New Orleans collapsed in 1925, and the nation was repulsed and angry. Then we slept and forgot. The United State of Amnesia.