Leaving Sunday Behind

 Church went well. The peaceful center of my week.

I got back here a little after noon. There is work I need to do here before I walk over to do my laundry. That I plan on doing at 3, so I have 2 hours.

These are things I have culled from my email.

When AIs do science, it will be strange and incomprehensible (Aeon Essays)

If we follow Humphreys’s trajectory, the full abdication of our epistemic throne of science would occur only at a later stage. At this point, artificial superintelligences would not only be capable of completing tasks we set for them (a continuation of the hybrid scenario) but would also be capable of setting their own tasks: their own research agenda, data collection, modelling and theories, according to their own independently identified set of theoretical virtues and values – a science all their own.

***

Given the possibility (and, in my view, likelihood) that such AIs would quickly abandon human epistemic baggage, we may choose to follow a Wittgensteinian line of reasoning and think of the automated scenario as the stage at which they would begin to speak and develop an independent and new scientific language. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously (and, true to form, enigmatically) says in Philosophical Investigations (1953): ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.’ Though the statement feels contradictory, Wittgenstein’s point is that the meaning of language is deeply embedded and intertwined with the internal experience of being human. So, too, for science. As the superintelligences begin to set and execute their own research agendas, the work they do would therefore become unintelligible for us because we would lack the internal perspective necessary to understand their science. From our view, their research would be a science created for theoretical-aims-we-know-not-what, with purposes-we-know-not-what, to be interpreted in ways-we-know-not-what.

This might be even scarier than the so-called singularity point - if it is, indeed, a different event - a science conducted by an entity we create whose findings we could not know.

Continuing with my MC5 kick:

Meet the woman who initiated Socrates in the philosophy of love (Aeon Essays)

The ‘truth about love’ that emerges is neither purely abstract nor entirely concrete, but rather a recognition that love operates as a transformative force across multiple domains – physical, ethical and intellectual. Diotima’s ladder represents not a rejection of physical love in favour of abstract contemplation, but a developmental account of how erotic energy can be progressively refined and redirected toward increasingly comprehensive objects of desire, culminating in wisdom. Socrates’ methodological concerns and intellectual influences are shown as emerging from beyond the exclusively male Athenian coterie port­rayed in the Symposium. By accepting Aspasia’s contribution to Socratic thought and method, we see how philosophical ideas might arise and develop in practice through dialogue across intellectual, gender and social boundaries. We should also recognise that Aspasia’s method of argument and ideas about love, if indeed they underlie those of Diotima, as argued, excitingly position her as a genuinely foun­d­­­ational figure of Western philosophy.

Sitting with the Grief (Los Angeles Review of Books) - Afrofuturism.

Each of the authors in the collection sits with the griefs of the past and present, with the countless forms those griefs take, in order to highlight how their own fiction helps to construct possibilities for African futures. Sitting with grief does not mean getting lost in it, but recognizing what grief has obscured—and what can be built from that recognition. Nerine Dorman writes that, “much as we can’t disentangle ourselves from the events of the past, if we attempt to erase them, we set ourselves up for repeating the mistakes of our forefathers.” Instead, she says, “we can choose to be nourished by that which is bitter.” In other words: part of sitting with the grief is also claiming joy, recognizing it as an intimate and inextricable part of life amidst devastation.

Many of the authors in the collection hold this tension. Kagunda, for example, foregrounds the vibrant potential of Black imagination. At the same time, she emphasizes the necessity to “completely overthrow systems that have equated our value to our labor” if there is any hope of escaping the “game of responding to the white patriarchal capitalist desire.” Similarly, Bacon looks for hope within dystopia as a form of “subversive activism” that calls readers to “enact and perhaps realize the new dreams and destinies of Mother Africa.”

While some turn to the future for hope, others look to ways the past can be revived. Dilman Dila, for instance, details how Yat Madit, a historical form of African governance, might be used as a model for direct democracies in the future. Xan van Rooyen also mines the past for resistance to contemporary colonial structures, reminding us how queerness has always been a part of African life. They argue that colonial ways of knowing must be completely overthrown to achieve the normalized queerness that African queers deserve: “[O]ne would need to eschew Western hegemony, decolonize current views of queerness within African societies, and consider a postgender future.” Their work compels us to consider: What might it look like for African storytelling to flourish not just beyond colonial griefs, but without reference to them entirely? If Africans did not have to labor to constantly delink from colonial logics in the publication process, reception of their work, and recognitions conferred on them, what kinds of futures could be written?

***

That is, sitting with the grief means contemplating how coloniality requires African authors to define themselves in the first place. Maybe this is part of the reason some authors struggle with the white-assigned label of Afrofuturism, or the strictly defined contours separating Africanfuturism from Africanjujuism. Parceling narrative territory into clearly defined possessions that you either identify with or not is, when it comes down to it, a colonial means of thought. Through this lens, Afro-Centered Futurisms does something enormously important in its tensions and frictions, overlap and dispersal: it avoids the colonial logic that reduces an entire group of people to a flattened identity label, and instead asks readers to understand the complexity of their relations in the world. It compels us to spend time with difficulties that cannot easily be smoothed over, and to see what beauties might emerge from bitterness.

***

That is, sitting with the grief means contemplating how coloniality requires African authors to define themselves in the first place. Maybe this is part of the reason some authors struggle with the white-assigned label of Afrofuturism, or the strictly defined contours separating Africanfuturism from Africanjujuism. Parceling narrative territory into clearly defined possessions that you either identify with or not is, when it comes down to it, a colonial means of thought. Through this lens, Afro-Centered Futurisms does something enormously important in its tensions and frictions, overlap and dispersal: it avoids the colonial logic that reduces an entire group of people to a flattened identity label, and instead asks readers to understand the complexity of their relations in the world. It compels us to spend time with difficulties that cannot easily be smoothed over, and to see what beauties might emerge from bitterness. 

We All Inhabit This Small Planet (Los Angeles Review of Books)

THE PUBLICATION OF a new novel by David Szalay is an event for anyone who cares about fiction. He is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists, arriving equipped with insight, wit, curiosity, and an unmistakable voice. He is Zadie Smith good, Eleanor Catton good. Like them, he won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for first novels by Commonwealth writers under 35, for London and the South-East (2008). He has not yet, like Catton, won the Booker, but, like Smith, he has been a finalist for it, with All That Man Is (2016); the book’s title is an accurate gauge of Szalay’s ambition.

Anything that pertains to human experience is of interest to Szalay. He is a shape-shifter, persuasively inhabiting the skins of men and women anywhere on the globe. He is also a world-builder, creating an ever-growing cast of characters whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. He is interested in the past and future of Europe, the local effects of a globalizing economy, sex, every kind of work people do to support themselves, the rewards and costs of intimacy, and the mechanics of power.

 But the subject that really calls forth the poet in Szalay is male failure. Wherever a man lets down the people who depend on him, refuses to face the truth about his own life, or fails to live up to even his lowest standards, Szalay is there. A precise and relentless anatomist of male fecklessness, violence, opportunism, addiction, self-interest, and vanity, Szalay can be bitingly hilarious on these subjects, but chooses not to be in his most recent novel, Flesh (2025). Composed in a newly lean style that forgoes most of the author’s signature fireworks, Flesh tells the story of Hungarian-born and -raised István, whose life as a character is synonymous with his maleness. The novel’s risks, in plot and style, pay off to mixed degrees, but nevertheless show how serious Szalay is, six books in, about keeping his art alive and growing.

***

Szalay’s chosen instrument as a stylist is the declarative sentence. It is to him what the sledgehammer was to John Henry, or the whisk to Julia Child: a simple tool from which he gets awe-inspiring results. In London and the South-East, he is wincingly funny with it: “One of the buttons of the Pig’s white polyester shirt has come undone and, as he sits, a shape of colourless, hairless flab pours heavily through the gap.” (It is typical of Szalay’s savage tact to observe that the fat makes a shape while declining to specify what that shape is.) He frequently uses his declaratives to give his characters just enough rope to hang themselves. Here is the moment when London’s protagonist, the alcoholic, utterly unskilled Paul Rainey, having been booted with extreme prejudice from the shady sales job he has done badly for years, plans for the future: “He does not want a job, he thinks—pleased with his precise semantic distinction—so much as work.”

1:40 pm 

This was St. Thomas Sunday; if you think you know about "Doubting Thomas", then you should read this: The Sunday of Thomas (Public Orthodoxy). Not what I was taught or thought when younger.

Healing intergenerational trauma is at the heart of another article from Public Orthodoxy: The Depth of a Wound.

What did I get from reading “I Am Making the World My Confessor”: Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte (The Public Domain Review)? The vagaries of fame and literary taste and that America has never been as simple as "Leave It To Beaver".

Colorful Plots and Racial Undertones in Modern Crime Fiction (JSTOR Daily) troubles me for two reasons: relying on Michael Crichton's Rising Sun as an example of racism is like taking coal to Newcastle, and whether bias against the multiracial abides in today's crime fiction. I remember hearing when I was a kid that mixed race children had it rougher - that neither side of the color line wanted them. That was long before Tiger Woods. I wonder if it still stands. I would like to think that those who retain this disdain for the multiracial are the problem.

Disillusionment Arc in Storytelling: A Powerful Tool for Character Growth (Helping Writers Become Authors)

The Disillusionment Arc in storytelling revolves around a character awakening to an uncomfortable thematic Truth, often at great personal cost. Unlike the Positive Change Arc, the Disillusionment Arc doesn’t always lead to a hopeful resolution. Instead, it challenges the protagonist—and the audience—to confront the stark realities of life. Although dark and difficult, this arc plays a crucial role in human growth, offering a transformation that involves painful yet profound insights. It serves as a bridge between the Positive and Negative Change Arcs, in that characters who face these harsh and disillusioning Truths are left at a crossroads from which they may either integrate the lessons or spiral into bitterness.

Fanfiction and an Analysis of “Cringe” Writing: Why it’s a Lot Better Than We Think (Long River Review), actually makes a very good argument for using fanfiction to gain experience.

1. The Freedom to Write Anything Without Judgement  

As double edged of a sword as this may be, this has to be the biggest reason why fanfiction or cringe worthy writing needs to continue. Without fear of judgement, writers, at whatever age, can experiment freely and let their creativity and writing style emerge. Even if it’s with characters from a franchise or random OCs they created at school, they’re still writing and letting their brain get used to creating new ideas. Often times, fanfiction can lead to original works since writers realize the characters they love don’t necessarily have to belong to the fandom they’re in but the story can live on its own.  

How about some fiction? “Monster Monster” by Jeff Bond (Epiphany Magazine). I am not sure what to make of it, but pretty sure it will be in my head for a while.

It is 8:29, and I need to work on a document. Good night, dear reader.

sch