Facebook Marketplace just sent me an email suggesting I might want to buy a 1963 Chevy Impala. Should I be insulted?
What I’m working on carving this week: six panels, 15”x18”, custom handmade frame. The smaller panel of leaves took close to four hours, or roughly one baseball game and half an opera.
If you are trying to figure out what makes certain kinds of “creative” work visibly or obviously “human” in the age of AI, be aware that this is not a new problem! People have been struggling with it since the dawn of the first industrial revolution, and thinking deeply about it since at least the time of William Morris and John Ruskin. You may be very late to the party, but you are not alone.
There’s a whole reading list I could offer, but start with David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship, which has some really good thoughts about what makes a physical object visibly handmade: what he calls “the workmanship of risk.” How would that concept apply to writing, or visual art? (If anybody wants to have a book club reading, I’m in.)
Regarding this headline, the next time it crosses my mind that I might subscribe to the Atlantic, I will remember that I cannot possibly do so, because I am literally nobody.
Today in Wild Raleigh:
- A coyote ran across the greenway not twenty paces in front of me and yapped hoarsely from the brush until I’d passed.
- On a pond, three adult Canada Geese bullied four juvenile mallard ducks out of their way, making one paddle a wide hurried circle around them to rejoin his siblings.
- Walking out front at dusk I disturbed a rabbit with three babies in my front yard. The mother immediately hopped ten feet away to draw my attention away from the babies.
- My dogs slept all day on the couch.
Look what arrived in the mail just now!
Times like this I find myself asking… What would Hayduke do?
I don’t know what is going in over at social.lol / omg.lol and don’t care to, but I have picked up enough to confirm my opinion of people who choose silly names for (supposedly) serious products.