The Nation – Treehouse Writers

Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:

On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.

And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.

It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.

The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.

(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. Continue reading “Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work”…

According to a recent essay in The Nation by Dan Sinykan, an English professor, literary fiction might soon be dead.

I’m probably one of many who will be glad to dance on its grave. While it is certainly true that not all fiction is great literature, the implication that only “literary” fiction is the truly good stuff made me furious long before I started writing science fiction.

Sinykan defines literary fiction as “fiction that privileges art over entertainment.” I find that definition ridiculous, given how much art I have found in science fiction and other work relegated to “genre” and how little I have found in some supposedly literary works.

I mean, are you really going to say that Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t create art? Or, for that matter, Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler?

And while F. Scott Fitzgerald had a lovely way with words, his subject matter was less than enticing. I remain unimpressed by The Great Gatsby, though I suppose the struggle between grifters and the more established rich is still a ripe subject for exploration.

When I was at Clarion West, Chip Delany told us that literary fiction was just another genre. It was a revelation. Of course, Chip’s work certainly reaches the standard of art.

I began to read science fiction at about the time literary fiction became a term – which Sinykan says happened in 1980 – because so much of what was supposed to be good fiction back then was boring the hell out of me. Continue reading “Is Literary Fiction Dead?”…