Anonymity
“We” who have names and personalities — and, not incidentally, bodies — are expressing strong views about ai. We speak or write of “it”, a noun with no other name, as something anonymous —...
Category: writing
AI can’t Lie
It could be a poem. Yesterday a friend sent me a short text and a question about whether “my” writer had written it. He was asking about a writer I admire a lot —...
Creative Writing
Remember the phrase, “creative writing”? Did it annoy you? It did me. Now that we’re getting more familiar with ai, I think I know why. And I’m even more annoyed. It goes beyond writing,...
Essayism Review: Towards a Definition
Brian Dillon, Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017 I’ll start with the conclusion so there’s no chance of wandering off and reaching a different one: the book led me to understand “essayism” to be...
The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Disappearing Writer
This morning I read an AI-generated review of my own writing. It was of an academic article[1] from 2010, about the photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). The notification and link came from academia.edu, a...