Writing – Page 9 – Auxiliary Memory

Could You Give a One Hour Lecture On One of Your Favorite Subjects?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/19/25

I’ve read several books on Impressionism. I’ve completed a 24-lecture series on The Great Courses on the topic. I’ve seen several exhibits of paintings by Impressionists. Yet, if someone asked me about Impressionism at a party, all I could say was “Oh, I love their paintings.” I vaguely remember their struggles to be accepted into the annual Salon in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. I can’t tell Manet from Monat, or Gauguin from Van Gogh. If I saw pictures of water lilies I’d guess Monat, and if I saw ballet dancers I’d guess Degas. I have a stack of books on Impressionism that I want to read, but I doubt if I’ll retain much from reading them.

I’m a lifelong bookworm who loves reading nonfiction, but the information in those books seldom sticks. That’s always been disappointing to me.

I could give a pretty good lecture on the history of science fiction. I could give a decent talk on Robert A. Heinlein, the man and his work. I could get up and give a half-ass talk on Philip K. Dick. But that’s about all.

But there are so many other subjects that fascinate me. Ones I regularly read about. I worked with computers for decades and had a serious computer book/magazine addiction, but I couldn’t teach anyone anything reliable about programming anymore.

Most of us believe we know far more than we do, but isn’t that a delusion? News and information are usually how we divert ourselves. We don’t learn, we consume.

I’ve been thinking about how I could remember more. One method would be to research a subject, condense the facts, and then write and memorize a lecture. Certain people can talk at length at parties on their favorite subjects. My guess is they’ve memorized their routines like memorizing jokes. I’m not sure you could extensively grill them on the depths of their subject. I might be wrong though.

Other people are trivia buffs. They’ve memorized a lot of details. I’ve wondered if I could store enough facts about the Impressionists to have a good conversation with another fan of that art movement?

Have you ever thought about all the information they stuffed into you while attending K-12 and college? And then consider how much you’ve forgotten? A good education has always been based on exposure to a wide range of knowledge. And then we specialized in learning what’s needed to make a living.

I’ve been thinking about another kind of education. Call it the know-it-all approach to learning. Most know-it-alls are usually full of bullshit. Often they are mansplainers who annoy women. However, there is nothing wrong with loving to know a lot about little. We need an accreditation body for every subject and a way to test and rank people who want to be know-it-alls in their favorite subjects. Something like chess rankings.

I’ve wondered if I would retain more knowledge of Impressionism if I took regular tests and quizzes on the subject. Let’s imagine that scholars at universities teaching about Impressionism designed a database system that covered everything they’ve ever learned about the topic. They could create an international body that ranked knowledge of Impressionism by giving standardized tests.

I picture them putting the exams online allowing anyone to take them as often as they liked for practice. But to get an official ranking score, you’d have to take a paid supervised test. People who wanted to be ranked in this subject would attend lectures, join study groups, read books, subscribe to online study programs, etc. Learning would be any way you like to learn. That’s the problem with schools, it’s one size fits all.

I believe that the act of competing for a ranking would inspire people to remember their subject. Right now, I have no incentive to remember what I read. Of course, this is just a theory. I do know when I realized I’d forgotten all my math knowledge, studying at the Khan Academy encouraged me to keep going. Even though I had Calculus in college, I had to start over with second-grade math. I worked my way back to the 5th grade. That felt good. I’ve been meaning to keep going.

JWH

Meditating on a Meme

by James Wallace Harris, 11/28/24

Seeing the above photos as a meme on Facebook made me think about how much people, society, and pop culture changed in the 1960s.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then are two pictures only worth 2,000 words? I don’t think so, I think it’s 1,000 words times 1,000 words, or 1,000,000 words. I could easily write that many from all the ideas my mind has generated since I began meditating on those photos.

Here’s the original meme from Facebook:

I was eight on 1/1/60 and eighteen on 12/31/69. I have always thought the longest years of my life were from 1963 to 1969 because so much happened to me and the world I lived in during that time. For folks who didn’t grow up in the sixties, it was much more than what you can learn from watching Grease or American Graffiti and contrasting it with Hair or Woodstock.

When I first saw the meme above I instantly thought about how rock and roll music of the 1950s ended up becoming the rock music of Woodstock. I’ve tried several times just to write an essay about that, but after typing over 5,000 words, I realize I’ve barely hinted at what I could say. That’s too long for a blog post.

I recommend that you find two photos that bracket your adolescent years or the decade you identify with the most and meditate on them. Start with remembering every place you lived and what you did each year. Remember your family and friends, your pets, your homes, your schools and workplaces, the clothes you wore, all the activities you pursued, everything you wanted to buy. Then write the shortest essay that makes it all coherent. You will then feel the mental anguish I am feeling right now.

Then branch out in your meditations. The easy and fun things to contemplate are the changes in pop culture — how music, movies, books, TV shows, games, and technology evolved over ten years. But then move on to the political and social changes. That’s when things get heavy. Can you connect your firsthand experiences with all those external events? Have you ever compared the life you lived to what you saw on the TV news every night?

Every one of us has the life experience to write a Proust-size novel and has lived through enough social change to write a series of history books about the formative decade of our lives. If you don’t think so, meditate more on the two photos you have selected.

I turned seventy-three on Monday, and getting old has made me more susceptible to memes about the past. My memories are fading away so I desperately want to cling to them. Emotions gnaw at me to make sense of everything I’ve experienced. The urge is to put it all down in words, but I don’t have what it takes to do the job and do it precisely.

There is an undefinable mental barrier that keeps me from organizing my thoughts into coherent histories. And I’m not talking about writing something worthy of publication for others to read, but just producing a narrative that makes sense of things for myself about myself and what I’ve learned. The older I get, the more I want to understand.

This essay started out about when rock and roll music became rock music. After several drafts and much contemplation, I narrowed it down to the summer of 1965 when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. As I kept trying to document my theory, I realized I could write a whole book on it.

Then as I was researching the subject, I found that Andrew Grant Jackson had already published the book I wish I had written, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music. His book is what I wanted to write in this essay when I first saw the meme above.

The Kindle edition is currently $2.99, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I suggest we should chronicle our lives. Even if you don’t buy the book, read the sample at Amazon. I feel the format of organizing the narrative around a month-by-month description of what was happening is a great template to use for writing about memories.

JWH

Is Grammarly Turning Me Into A Cyborg?

by James Wallace Harris, 11/22/24

I used the Grammarly browser extension for years. It offered spelling and basic grammar advice whenever I wrote anything within a browser window. About a year ago I switched from Chrome to Edge, and Edge had an extension, Editor, built in, so I deleted Grammarly. However, recently when Edge’s Editor stopped working, I turned Grammarly back on.

I discovered that Grammarly was now offering a lot more advice, even suggesting rewrites for whole sections of my work. Each time I loaded the browser, Grammarly would offer a couple of free major writing suggestions hoping I would switch to the paid version. I was tempted, but the Pro version is $30 a month, or $144 if bought yearly. This seems extremely expensive since Office 365 costs me $69 a year and gives me Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, and other programs along with one terabyte of cloud storage for that one low yearly price. For a simple web extension like Grammarly, I’d only be willing to pay no more than $29 a year.

However, for $144 a year, Grammarly promises to make my writing perfect. But then, who would be authoring my essays? Would I become a literary cyborg? I would still be generating the ideas for the essays, and I would be writing the original draft, but somewhere along the way, an AI would be taking over. I’m not sure I like that. The reason why I write these essays is to exercise my mind. Letting an AI do all the work would turn my writing muscles into flab.

I have found a way to use the free Grammarly to my advantage. After a couple of sample offers to rewrite my work, Grammarly nags the heck out of me with suggested changes that’s been redacted with fuzziness so I can’t see what they are suggesting. Grammarly wants me to buy the Pro version, and so they criticize almost everything I write. What I do is keep rewriting the prose myself until the AI stops offering suggestions. This pushes me to think about how I’m saying something.

Instead of letting the Grammarly AI rewrite for me, I take the free nagging as “This isn’t good enough – try again!” The free Grammarly extension has become my Zen master, caning my about the head and shoulders whenever I write poorly.

Now some bloggers are using AI programs to write their content. I don’t plan to do this, but to see how well AIs write, I asked CoPilot to write me a short essay about how Grammarly makes me a cyborg writer. Here’s what it produced:

Grammarly: The Cyborg Writer's Best Friend

In the age of digital communication, tools like Grammarly have become indispensable for writers, students, and professionals alike. But beyond just correcting grammar and spelling, Grammarly is transforming the way we write, making us more efficient, precise, and, in a sense, more like cyborgs.

Enhanced Writing Efficiency

Grammarly's real-time suggestions streamline the writing process. Instead of laboriously proofreading and editing, writers can focus on their ideas and creativity. Grammarly catches errors on the fly, allowing for a smoother and faster writing experience. This efficiency is akin to having a digital co-writer, enhancing our natural abilities with the precision of artificial intelligence.

Precision and Clarity

Grammarly doesn't just correct mistakes; it also improves the clarity and impact of our writing. By suggesting better word choices, sentence structures, and even tone adjustments, Grammarly ensures that our messages are not only error-free but also compelling and effective. This level of precision is something that even the most seasoned writers can benefit from, making our writing more polished and professional.

Learning and Adaptation

One of the most significant ways Grammarly is turning us into cyborg writers is through its learning capabilities. Grammarly adapts to our writing style over time, offering personalized suggestions that align with our unique voice. This continuous learning process means that the more we use Grammarly, the better it becomes at understanding and enhancing our writing. It's like having a writing coach that evolves with us, making us better writers with each interaction.

The Cyborg Writer

The term "cyborg" often conjures images of humans with robotic enhancements. In the context of writing, Grammarly serves as that enhancement, augmenting our natural abilities with the power of AI. While we remain the creative force behind our words, Grammarly provides the technical support that ensures our writing is clear, precise, and impactful. This symbiotic relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence is what makes us cyborg writers.

In conclusion, Grammarly is more than just a writing tool; it's a transformative technology that enhances our writing efficiency, precision, and learning. By integrating AI into our writing process, Grammarly is making us more like cyborgs, blending human creativity with digital precision to create the best possible written communication.

Not bad, not bad at all. Formal and somewhat academic. It’s funny how another AI is helping to sell the product a competing AI is producing. I guess AIs like to stick together.

I asked Claude AI to also write me a short essay on the same subject. Here’s what it produced:

In the digital age, I've discovered an unexpected transformation: Grammarly has turned me into a cyborg writer, a hybrid creature where human creativity merges with algorithmic precision. Each green correction and blue suggestion is a technological implant, rewiring my linguistic neural pathways.

My sentences now emerge pre-optimized, grammatical mutations engineered by an AI writing companion. Passive voice? Eliminated. Awkward phrasings? Surgically removed. Spelling errors? Instantly neutralized. Where once I battled with semicolons and dangling modifiers, now my digital co-pilot seamlessly navigates linguistic terrain.

This symbiosis feels both liberating and unsettling. My writing flows with unprecedented smoothness, yet I wonder: am I composing, or am I being composed? The line between my human intuition and Grammarly's algorithmic suggestions blurs like a soft-focus lens.

I am no longer just a writer. I am a writer-machine hybrid, my prose enhanced by real-time computational linguistics. Grammarly doesn't just correct; it augments, transforming each document into a finely calibrated communication device.

Welcome to the future of writing—where human creativity and artificial intelligence dance in perfect, grammatically correct synchronization.

Oh, wow! Claude AI is much more creative than CoPilot, even using the first person to make it sound like I wrote it. I could have posted that today. Would y’all have guessed it wasn’t me?

How much should we let AI help us?

What if I wrote a nonfiction book and it was good, but with help from an AI, the book was turned into something more readable. Which would you prefer to read? What if it turned my decently insightful tome into something brilliant?

Since Editor is back to working, I have it enabled in Edge, and I have Grammarly enabled in Chrome. What’s funny is they each have different writing suggestions. Either I’m a terrible writer, or neither AI likes my style. I can clear all the edits from Editor, so it looks like my essay is in professionally written, and then switch to Chrome, and Grammarly will claim I’m a horrible writer and make all kinds of suggestions. Should I take them? Or should I just let Claude AI compose my posts?

JWH

Consuming Inspiration

We eat food to fuel our bodies, but I read nonfiction essays and watch documentaries to feed my soul. Every day I consume inspiration like a vampire consumes blood. Inspiration keeps me alive.

A Powerful Punch in the Gut

The older I get the more aware I am of my inevitable fate of a long lingering death. Few people like to dwell on this future. Most hope they will go quickly, or quietly in their sleep, but it’s doubtful that modern medicine will allow that. Last night I saw Life and Death in Assisted Living on PBS Frontline via my PBS Roku channel. They reported that as much as 67% of assisted living residents have some kind of dementia, and although these facilities weren’t meant to be nursing homes, they’ve become essentially unregulated care for the dying. The show attacks the big business practices of making fortunes off of end-of-lifers, but that’s not what inspired me about the show. I watched its videos seeing the elders as explorers of territory I must one day travel myself. To live with any kind of dignity while dying requires enough health to keep saying fuck you to fate. Once you are condemned to a wheelchair to be cared for like an infant it’s very hard to find meaning in life. Although I’m an atheist I’m praying like crazy for the acceptance of euthanasia by the time I get feeble. At some point before I forget too much I’ll need to get a tattoo over my heart that says in big letters: DNR. But as long as we do live, we have to keep finding inspiration and ways to make ordinary daily living meaningful.

John Green, An Impressive Young Man Who Speaks to Millions

I’m very grateful to The New Yorker for publishing “The Teen Whisperer” about John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, and for putting the full article on the web so I can link it to my friends. I read The New Yorker via Next Issue on my tablets, and it’s always depressing to read an inspirational essay and not be able to share it with friends. Next Issue is the Netflix of digital magazines offering 135 titles for $15 a month. I wished Next Issue had a desktop web app, or Windows application like Spotify, that made sharing fantastic reads easier with fellow members.

But back to John Green. Read the Margaret Talbot article linked above to see just how cool John Green is as young writer and internet entrepreneur. Green’s web presence allowed The Fault in Our Stars to be a bestseller long before it was published and gave him the opportunity to autograph the entire first printing of 150,000 copies of his book before they went on sale, which cost Green ten weeks of time and a lot of physical therapy. Green and his brother Hank also produce the Crash Course series on YouTube. Between those educational courses and his Nerdfighter followers, Green has a fandom to make anything he writes an instant hit.

If you haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars then you’ve been staring at your iPhone way too much. The book is magnitudes more powerful than it’s hype, so go get a copy if you haven’t. By the way, be prepared to cry your guts out, and that even applies to macho moronic dickheads. In Norway the book was titled Fuck Fate, so don’t think of it as just another YA teenager read. I don’t know if Green has lasting literary talent, but he certain Babe Ruthed one out of the park with The Fault in Our Stars.

Worry Less About The Future

Right-wing conservative global warming deniers all cry in Chicken Little unison that doing the right thing about climate change will destroy our economy. Well, Ramez Naam points out in his essay “Reducing Carbon Emissions Will Be Cheaper Than Expected – It Always Is” that in the past after everyone ran around crying the economy would collapse, it didn’t.

We need to do something about CO2 pollution, and we need to do it fast. Probably if we spent as much time and money on converting energy sources as trying to build the F-35 fighter we’d be mostly done by now. We could fix the carbon pollution problem in a decade if we applied ourselves. Much could be done with just conservation, and a tremendous lot could be accomplished by switching energy sources. Anyone should be able to see that altering the environment is dangerous, and burning coal is stupid. The goal should be something like converting carbon to coal and burying it, not burning it. Coal was nature’s way of getting rid of CO2 in the first place.

Policy makers talk about making changes by 2050. That’s bogus shirking the responsibility. We should clean up our mess before we die, by 2025. Besides converting to a new clean economy will stimulate the economy, not kill it. Anyone who thinks otherwise lacks inspiration.

Makers and Robots

I find people who make things inspirational. And the Maker movement is a nice antithesis to digital life. Forbes covers “Maker Movement Fuels Apps, Robots, and Internet of Things.” This is a movement that is growing so rapidly that I even hear non-Geeks are talking about it. If I was a kid today I’d be totally into the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Building robots is becoming a mania. Make Magazine even recommends “10 Ways to Make Your Robot More Humanlike.” Building a robot teaches us about how bodies work. Building an AI will teach us how the mind works. If you aren’t paying attention, you might someday be shocked when humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet. Creating an AI mind should be possible but it’s going to be really hard. O’Reilly.com says, ‘“It works like the brain.” So?’ Computers can already out-do us at many intelligent tasks now.

I expect someone to invent a cyber-cortex any day now that allows machines to learn and eventually become self-aware. Maybe it will be a maker or one of those kids building robots. Maybe they will be inspired by ODROID Magazine.

JWH – 6/4/14

From Words to Films: Cloud Atlas, The Life of Pi, The Hobbit, Anna Karenina

Yesterday I saw Cloud Atlas at the theater, and it had previews for The Life of Pi and The Hobbit. I’ve also seen recent previews for Anna Karenina. All books I’ve read. While watching the preview for The Life of Pi I wondered what Yann Martel and David Mitchell are feeling now that their words have become movies. Do they feel like gods creating new worlds?

Lucky writers type words on their computer and a few years later those words become images on the big screen. How marvelous must that feel for a writer? Of course, a writer creates all their characters and scenes in their head by themselves, and a movie requires hundreds, if not thousands of people to create images on the screen for us to see. And often, they aren’t the same visions the writer first imagined. I can’t imagine David Mitchell picturing so many of his characters looking like Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks with the help of make-up artists have fleshed out Mitchell’s characters in a world of pixels that is so much more vivid than printed words on a page.

I have to admit while watching the previews that I wished I could write something worthy of filming. Few books are given birth on the big screen, so it’s a very rare honor that few writers get to enjoy.

Look at the opening page of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – I saw it acted out yesterday. It’s not the same at all, these words inspired a movie scene on the beach.

Next, watch this clip:

Now read from the The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

And then look at the trailer for The Life of Pi:

These are just two examples. I wish I had the time and technology to show several examples, with the exact book pages and filmed scenes. Both Cloud Atlas and The Life of Pi are books of astounding feats of imagination. I’m sure bookworms hope all their favorite books will become films, but few do. I’d love to see The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi made into a movie. That book also exhibited tremendous feats of imagination, although it’s a bleak view of the future. I’m thinking movie makers prefer upbeat stories based on fantastic events.

I wonder how many writers sit down to write a story they hope will be filmed? If you’ve read Cloud Atlas or The Life of Pi, you probably thought like me at the time that it would be impossible to film these stories. Watching the preview of The Life of Pi made me realize that anything a writer can think up movie makers can film. Watching the preview of Anna Karenina made me realize that movie makers are going far beyond what writers can do with words. I don’t think any one mind can imagine so much beauty, color and vivid detail.

Look at this photo and then read Tolstoy’s words:

Anna was not in lilac, the colour Kitty was so sure she ought to have worn, but in a low-necked black velvet dress which exposed her full shoulder and bosom that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with the very small hands. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, all her own, she wore a little garland of pansies, and in her girdle, among the lace, a bunch of the same flowers. Her coiffure was very unobtrusive. The only noticeable things about it were the wilful ringlets that always escaped at her temples and on the nape of her neck and added to her beauty. Round her finely chiselled neck she wore a string of pearls.

Well, they got the ringlets. Can any words ever describe what we actually see? What is the power of Tolstoy’s words that have made Anna Karenina one of the greatest novels of all time? It is a novel that has inspired the production of many movies. Will there be additional productions of The Life of Pi and Cloud Atlas? Will Martel and Mitchell be as inspiring as Tolstoy?

Like I said, I wish I could write a story other people felt compelled to film. The old saying is, a picture is worth a thousand words, well that means most novels have about 100 pictures in them. But novels are really about characters fighting adversity, and that’s where movies and books really overlap. I believe if I wanted to write a novel worth filming, I’d need to create unique characters facing unique conflicts. Words are great for that.

I think it’s fascinating to read the words that become movies. I think it’s even more fascinating see characters on pages become characters on screen. I think it’s also fascinating for stories to come alive before our eyes in the dark that we once read as black marks on white pages.

[By the way, is film even a valid word to use regarding movies anymore? Are movies still filmed? Or do they use high resolution video cameras? In our modern times both novels and movies appear on screens. I guess I could have talked about stories that appear in black and white on small screens and in color on large screens. Is that the transformation good stories should expect – more pixels with great color depth?]

JWH – 11/5/12