So now what?

A question, some words, and the end of reality as we know it

Hello and happy Sunday. This isn’t a long post, so I’ll try to make it unusually boring instead. Just three (fairly) quick things...

Something about the Substack

Over the last six months (or it was supposed to be that long, at least, but occasional inefficiency on my part stretched it out) paid subscribers have been receiving regular short stories. The first planned tranche finished with the one yesterday, and I’m going to take a break from that until I have the time to produce more ebooks and covers and graphics, because that all takes a minute.

I hope they were enjoyed. (If you choose to upgrade to paid in the future, those stories will be there for you in the archives).

This prompts me to ask you as subscribers what you’d like to see me doing more of here — whether you pay or not. As I’ve said before, I feel uncomfortable about the idea of creating an “us-and-them” tier system, but I’m also very aware and grateful for the people who have actually chosen to contribute financially, and want to ensure that you feel well-served.

So... any thoughts or suggestions, for either general content or niche? And what about frequency? Would you tolerate more frequent missives, perhaps shorter ones, or would that have you reaching for the BLOCK button? Put on your focus group hats and tell me how to improve this thing.

And as always, if you can think of someone who might like to subscribe, do please let them know about this Substack.

Something about Words

After my mentioning making a ChatGPT bot to try to learn conversational French in the last post, two subscribers were kind enough to volunteer their human services. I’m holding off on those offers for now as I realize just how badly faded my already scant facility with French has become through spending over a decade living in a country a long way from France — and in an area in which basically nobody speaks the language. Spanish would make vastly more sense, but I’d be starting from a position of embarrassingly complete ignorance beyond the ability to name core foodstuffs.

The latter point did make me wonder why it remains a goal for me, over and above simply liking France and the French. This made me realize at least part of it is how even a tiny understanding of a second language gives you insights onto how your first language works, and the implications for the way we think, and the way we are.

Little things like the way French frames some situations around “having” rather than “being”. In English you are hungry, cold, lucky, or in pain: in French you possess these qualities instead — “J’ai faim” (lit “I have hunger”) rather than “I am hungry”. This extends further into expressions like “J’ai envie de toi” — “I have desire for you”, instead of “I want you” — and the truly backwards-sounding “Tu me manques” — lit. “You are missing to me”, which is how you express “I miss you”.

All of these change circumstances from a state of being (“I am fifty”) into one in which you possess or exhibit a quality instead (“J’ai cinquante ans”), a subtle but interesting distinction which de-centers the speaker — especially with “Tu me manques”, which romantically throws the focus on the missed, rather than the person doing the missing. We are what we think, and what we think — including how we perceive and interpret the world — is structured by how we use language, as Edward Sapir laid out in his ground-breaking Language: An Introduction To The Study Of Speech.

There are more striking examples. In English we’d say “I’m standing in a forest”. In certain other languages (including some Native American dialects) this information would instead be presented as “There is a forest, and a clearing in it, and a person in that, and that person is me” — a clear difference in hierarchy and ego. (This and a wealth of other fascinating insight is covered in Mark Abley’s book about vanishing languages, Spoken Here.) I can’t help wondering whether the fact that English (and similar languages) so explicitly center the speaker in creation is a factor in its speakers’ expansionist and environmentally-damaging proclivities, along with the modern American tendency to believe each person is entitled not just to their own relationship with God, but their own reality (especially if your name is Donald Trump).

And then there’s idiom. Much of speech is intensely metaphorical, as Guy Deutscher demonstrates in The Unfolding of Language, but that’s easier to spot in a language not your own. The French verb “arriver”, for example. You can say “J’arrive” to mean “I’m coming” or “I’ll be there soon”. But also conversationally to mean “I’ll be right back”. And further to convey something more obviously metaphoric like “I can’t get there” — as in “J’arrive pas à dormir” (I can’t get to sleep), or even “J’arrive pas” (I’m not there for it, it’s not happening) and “Je n’arrive plus” (I’m not doing that any more). It’s French idiom that I find myself most intensely interested in, in fact, possibly because of these little elisions in sense, these usages, that reveal so much about how we think.

Finally, of course, there’s the delight and insight that comes from finding words that have no direct translation into English: like “Dépaysement” — literally “the state of being de-countried”, for the feeling of uncanny dislocation and disorientation you may experience when confronted with a very foreign environment; and the verb “Flâner”, better-known through the noun form “flâneur”, someone who wanders apparently idly through an urban environment, observing life (a concept the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin made great play with).

And finally finally on the subject of words, a big recommendation for John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which I’ve just finished. It’s basically a collection of neologisms, but whereas made-up words are most often conjured for slightly trivial observations or jokes, Koenig’s diligently coherent etymologies are used to capture thoughts and feelings and states of being that are genuinely resonant. Seriously, I wound up highlighting almost half the book.

Something about the Future

To very briefly return to the theme of AI, OpenAI suddenly dropped news of something called Sora last week, their generative model for video.

And there’s a bunch more examples below. Of course none of it’s perfect, but this thing isn’t even released yet….

Say good bye to reality, folks. It had a good run.