It’s December 31st, which must mean we’re at the magical interval between Taking Stock and Resolution O’Clock. Though I’m not an especially Christmassy critter, I’m terribly fond of the prospect of annual revision and reinvention. I’d imagined that I might get a bit of a head start, as the folks we imagined we’d spend the Eve with have fallen ill, but it looks like we’ll be a bit social after all, so the rejiggering will have to wait.

I’m not fond, however, of doing year in review exercises, largely because my imagination tends to fix on What Might Have Been. It’s not an especially rueful exercise in the abstract, but it tends to get me thinking about things I might have done differently. For instance, since I often think in terms of the academic year and professional progress, I’ve published six short stories in the AY 2022-23 frame, which is life-affirming in a number of ways–not only because my university views four publications as sufficient for meeting our standards for tenure and promotion. I also have a story on the publication slate for New Myths in Fall 2024, so the wheels are still a-turning. Right now in the social mediasphere, however, I’m seeing quite a few folks tout their award-eligible work, and I’ve not yet mastered that knack. It’s not, to my thinking, a major omission on my part, but one of those matters I might want to rethink in 2024.

As a teacher, I often mull over the famous Socratic dictum on the Corruption of The Youth around this time of year: ”The unexamined life is not worth living.” Self-examination is, I know, a difficult bit of business, especially since the tactics that got us this far will undoubtedly get us at least a little further. It feels to me a little tragic when I see it from the outside–when you see folk so committed to the Truths they’ve dreamed up or borrowed from others that any other prospect seems untenable, if not ridiculous–but it also seems tragic to make change blindly and reactively, without a little due diligence to suss out the advantages that might attend A New Way, whatever that way might be. January tends to be a good month for Trial-Size Truths, with the feelings we get from abiding by those short-term commitments helping us to decide if we’d like to fold those truths into out lives. 

The end of the year is also Garbagetime for Purity Testing, as plenty of folks will try to get us to commit more fully and less mindfully to the Truths they think we ought to share–often indirectly, by criticizing public figures who are not pure enough. Because I poke around the edges of the web to look at the latest news in neuroscience, I get plenty of pop psychology to do with the business-minded Growth Mindset, citing several very rich people as proof of the virtues of that way of thinking. It’s also the time of year when folks will tell us that we need to cultivate a daily writing habit (we don’t), that we need to announce our position on several key issues (we don’t), &c. If we fail to do so vocally and determinedly, the theory goes, then we must be bad people. (I say this having just skimmed past bitter criticisms of Selena Gomez, Neil Gaiman, and Lynda Carter, all of whom have failed in the arena of public opinion, according to a few vitriolic folk, by not weighing in on international matters with sufficient vehemence.) It is, I think, Much Too Much of a Muchness, but it gives us a sense of how folk conceive of themselves in relation to weighty matters.

(Sidelong fact: one of the reasons I prefer to teach ENG 101, centered on expository writing, rather than ENG 201, a course on research and argumentation, is that it’s a great place to practice one of the most essential writing skills–convincing readers why they should care at all about what you think. We’re in a weird place as far as expertise goes, I know, but at bottom I think it’s sort of important to establish how experience has equipped us to weigh in on various matters of cultural import.)

To my thinking, preconstruction involves a bit of self-reflexive scrutiny, the gentle reconsideration of patterns and habits that clearly work but might be worth revisiting. For much of the past year, for instance, given the persistence of the Never-Ending Headache, my daily routine has begun with five pills–Vitamin D, a multivitamin, and a krill oil capsule as basics and a couple of NSAIDs to ease the dull discomfort of my skull. For the past few weeks, however, I’ve been exploring the possibility that my gut health might be linked to my brain pain in some material ways, and I’ve adjusted my startup routine accordingly. Yet today is the first day I’ve dispensed with the NSAIDs, which I suspect on some days I’ve taken merely out of habit rather than need. It’s a little thing, but a foundational one, and probably indicative of a few dozen things I do every day without really thinking about them.

For the same reason I’m thinking about reconstructing my daily docket, which has had the same top twelve items since around Thanksgiving. I’ve churned through 13-27 with some regularity, but the stagnancy of those first few suggests that I’m probably conceiving of them wrongly. My plan this year is to get a bunch of new writing done, and I’ve lined up projects big and small to keep me awfully busy from now until May. I might need to get each project broken down into smaller, more manageable daily chunks to get in the habit of making steady progress, and that will probably entail thinking about them all a little differently. It’s all doable, but figuring out how I’d like to manage the doing is the tricksy bit of business. I’m happy to say it’s already underway–one project, for example, will involve putting together a sixteen-page zine, or about eight total entries, for Kickstarter by March, and I’ve drafted seven already, page by page–but I need to find ways to keep that forward momentum going.

I’m convinced there are big things on the horizon in 2024. I don’t think I need to reinvent the wheel to reach them, but it seems wise and worthwhile to consider how I’m moving toward them.

Today I’m taking a break from grading final exams to eat a little lunch and think a little thought. Exam week involves a classic Wandlessian paradox: I quite like grading them, as it turns out, since they usually give me a good glimpse of the sorts of learning that stick, but I also admittedly resent them a little bit, as the middle stretch of December is usually right around the time my mind starts fixating on other stuff.

What I think I like most about the style of exam I administer is the humane engagement it involves. I used to give finals that were a little mix-and-match at the level of objective knowledge and subjective questions, but all the adjustments we made in academics to maximize opportunity at the height of the COVID era have led to more venturesome essay-driven modes of response. I know some folks are terribly fretful about the prospect of LLM-generated responses, but to my thinking (and in my mode of evaluation) the risk seems smallish.

LLM stuff has no place at all in my creative life; I view it largely as a toy rather than anything verging on some simulation of genuine intelligence. I’ve used ChatGPT and a couple of image generators, all to results I more or less expected. The former offers useful pedagogical illustrations I can bring to my classes, and it helps to get a feel for the sort of prose it spits out. Were I a more adventurous professor I’d probably challenge one of my intro classes to a race, if only to see if an earnest essayist writing a first draft composes more quickly than an LLM user who has to revise the churned prose to make it sound almost human. My bet is that the original authorship goes much more quickly and smoothly, with far fewer vestiges of robotic lameness. I once asked the program to give me a jillion-dollar screenplay idea, and it gave me the plot of Needful Things, albeit with a 2500-word screed on ethics as a bonus. There’s a bit of tragicomedy to it all, but I’d like to think we’re beginning to figure out how little it’s actually good for. I have no doubt that there’s a certain kind of business mindset that imagines profits flying everywhere from all the time saved, but the fact that creative writers are in high demand to undo the silly things that LLM programs invariably do gives me some comfort regarding those bleak visions of the future.

The image generators make the prospects for LLM content even starker. I’ve not yet been brave enough to run a program live in a class, largely because my own experiments have been so wildly various (ask for a familiar figure in a party hat, for example, and the program might neglect to render any other clothing), but there are some vivid illustrations out there in the world already about what these models do, both by design and inadvertently. There’s some incidental racism and censorship cooked into most programs right out of the box, problems that can only be remedied by aggressively training a home model, never mind the creepy mutations and other errata. The images generated, at least for me, at best can inspire a bit of uncanny-valley fascination. There’s no art in them, no humanity–just strangeness.

At one level, I kindasorta get it. We value ease, or the appearance of ease, and the idea that a machine can produce images or writing at a high standard, allowing us to forgo decades of training and practice, is not without a certain kind of tantalizing interest. But I am, at bottom, an 18th-century scholar, and I’m often reminded of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” when he writes: ”True ease in writing comes from art, not chance/as those move easiest who have learned to dance.”

Someday I’ll write on the ethics of all the copyright violation that has made LLM vaguely possible, but today, for the sake of my own humanity, I’d better get back to grading.