Send them home, shut it down

Thursday 5/16/24

I was looking at a number of reviews of the Rolling Stones' Hackney Diamonds and it is not possible to tell the difference between anything that anyone writes with these things, which is how it is with most things. You get the same cliches, the same empty calorie, vague, could-apply-to-anything assertions by all of these insincere hacks.

What are we doing? I look at people who write on the Beatles, and every last one of them is bad at it. They have nothing to say and no writing skills. You get more out of Wikipedia. In the morning, I'll check Google, and at the bottom of that main page are a number of articles that Google has suggested for me. Here's what I know: If they're on the same subject and I click on those articles, I won't be able to tell them apart. There will be nothing in any of them. Platitudes, vagueness, lazy "adjective-ing," and the same quotes--to fill up the word count--that all of the other articles used.

Is this charity? Why are these people given any work? Send them home. If you have offices/real estate, shut it down, sell it off. Farm it all out to AI if this is what you're going to publish. It would be better. AI can do a better job than almost all of these writers. So they're just being carried? Why wouldn't you simply have the computer write it for free, get rid of all the overhead, and schedule when you want it published by the app?

These Beatles pieces...wow. Here's the opening paragraph of Kenneth Womack's recent piece on the Let It Be film in Salon:

In recent years, music aficionados have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches —particularly when it comes to the Beatles. A newly restored version of "Let It Be" (1970), splendidly directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, marks the latest gem in the Beatles’ multiverse. The film was unveiled during a private screening last week at an Upper West Side cineplex, and it didn’t disappoint. Returned to its original glory, "Let It Be" is a work of sheer beauty, capturing rock ‘n’ roll’s most extraordinary foursome as they battled a series of daunting conditions and rediscovered their art in the nick of time.

How do you write worse, write flatter, say less? We get two cliches, descriptors like "gem," "splendidly directed," "didn't disappoint," "most extraordinary." And music fans have been blessed with all of these riches in recent years? What the hell does that mean? How many years? Four? Three? What's the demarcation? Should we know what you mean? Music fans in general? Baroque chamber music fans, too? If you were going to do this kind of thing, it has to be like, "Fans of later period Wagner operas." You can't just say, "Um, music fans for everything!" And "marks the latest gem." Marks it? That's a mixed metaphor. Even if you wanted to use this hackneyed phraseology, it'd be "is the latest gem," but here we have someone who is so unnatural with language, has no feel for how efficacious language works or sounds. This is the first sentence and you've shown us that you're inept. Anyone can see how bad this paragraph is. Why is that guy writing on the Beatles for Salon? Who couldn't do this? You don't think AI could do this? If you tell AI to leave out cliches--the likes of "embarrassment of riches," "nick of time"--AI will do a better job.

We're going to get more into the corruption, shitty writing, the sexism, the racism, and theft that is prevalent at Salon.

You want a jarring contrast with the above? Here's the first paragraph I wrote on the same film:

A curious, oft-not-helpful effect occurs when we attempt to supersize the truth: aspirational narrative obscures autonomous reality. In the binge age, maximalism tends to be conflated with value. The Beatles’ Get Back docu-series, for example, was essentially pitched to the public as the rock and roll version of The Last Dance, the epic saga of the ending of a band, just as the latter told the tale of a basketball team. You may have thought you knew what had transpired, is the implication, but here’s the straight dope you’ve been missing, albeit straight dope that takes a long time in the telling.

Yeah...how do you have a bigger gap? And you see what the second example does, too? Brings you into the world of the piece. The unique world of the piece with expansive out-in-the-world application. It's not just going to be a Beatles thing--which is limiting--but the best Beatles thing and a lot more, in terms of its life quotient, its relevance and resonance. Its readerly utility. All of these other pieces are just air and stock adjectives. There is nothing in them. You can't bite into anything and it can't bite into you.

Presumably you, the reader of this entry, has a job. And whatever your job is, there are these very basic things to it, right? The most elementary building blocks stuff.

For instance, if you're a carpenter, one of those things would be that you hit the nail with the hammer. It's not the other way around. You don't try to press the nail into the wood with your thumb.

For writers, avoiding cliches is like hitting the nail with the hammer. It's as basic as it gets. And this guy can't do it. He has nothing to say and no real knowledge, no insight, no ideas, no way to make his writing relevant or resonant beyond anyone-can-do-this itemizing of the specs of the putative subject or product, no language skills.

Everything he has, so far as his writing career goes, comes down to two things: He tongues people. Then, anyone could write what he writes, and for tiny, bigoted, simple, talentless people, that makes them feel less threatened than they would if someone like this had any ability, let alone a great deal of ability, which would cause them to feel worse than they already do about how little ability, intelligence, and legitimacy they have. That's how he ingratiates. It's not his writing, which is terrible. He'll see this. And it's all true. But next time when he's in Salon writing about the Beatles, all because of the hook-up granted him by someone also without an iota of skill, there will be cliches. He could never write well. It's not going to happen. You'd think maybe he'd go, "He called me out! Now I'll do some great writing!" No you won't. You can't.

Why have someone like this around at all? It's alms. It's sinecure culture, broken, talentless people taking comfort in surrounding themselves with other people of no ability, and the bestowing of favors.

Here's another sentence from the Womack piece:

Indeed, beyond Lindsay-Hogg’s footage, we have scant imagery of the Beatles crafting their timeless music in the studio.

Do you not know what the word "imagery" means, man? Are you someone who, if presented with a word of the day offering in your inbox and saw that word to be "imagery," would think, "Oh, I should look that one up, be good to know." Because you act as if "imagery" means film footage. That's not close, sir. How can you not know that? How can a writer not know that? What are you doing, Salon? This is some great writer, huh? Amazing writer on the Beatles? This is so bad, but what he's closer to meaning is "images," which would also be wrong. We're talking wrong multiple ways over. Do you know how many photos of the Beatles there are from the studio? The word would have been "footage." Yeats uses imagery. You don't watch Yeats imagery if you see some film footage of him. And then that lazy nothingness, "timeless music." Super. Thanks for playing. This is autopilot writing, definitely, though it's also the best this guy can do.

Just to balance this out, here's something else from what I wrote:

Peter Jackson’s Get Back is slick, which is not so much a criticism as it is an observation of its methodology. It is meant to be tidy. Polished. Whereas Hogg’s Let It Be is akin to a well-made family video. Yes, Sally did just moon the camera, and there’s nothing we can do about that, for there it is up on the white screen. Hogg wasn’t endeavoring to be Orson Welles—who may or may not have sired him—in the editing process. He was compositing, you could say. Putting pieces of evidence together. Evidence of what? A band—this band, the biggest band of all-time—breaking up.

But what you see in the Womack piece is how it is with nearly all of the nonfiction I encounter. We talk often enough about how bad all of the fiction is, and this is how nonfiction goes.

So have the computers do it then. If you're just going to foist all of this worthless shit out there, get rid of everyone. What are you waiting for? You want to take care of your guy? Things like that? But you see how ability never enter into this, right? Everyone writes this same way. We see how they write fiction, we see how they write nonfiction. Everyone can be replaced by everyone or anyone else. So what's it come down to then? Because it sure as fuck never comes down to writing. It's all about other stuff. And none of it is good, none of it's merit-based.

It's like if you're a football team and everyone on the team is superannuated. They're sixty-seven-years-old on average and arthritic and the quarterback can't throw the ball more than two yards and the running back's hands are so gnarled that he can't even hold the ball and the linebackers are incontinent and hobbling off the field for a bathroom and you're like, "This is our team, year in, year out, and it won't change!"

Why?

One answer here, to stay with this analogy, is that there are no players/writers who are any better, really with just one exception. Who is going to be the new quarterback? Where do you get the people of superior talent and fitness to fill out the rest of the roster? You'd have to start over, right? It's kind of like hockey in the Soviet Union. They got a late start. Canada had been at it for a while. But then the Soviets were like, "We should do hockey," and they built up a hockey culture, a training program, they went through generations and, as a nation, they began to produce better hockey players, until some of those hockey players were at the level of those Canadian players.

You think these frauds who call themselves writers want to work at it at all? How dedicated do you think any of them are when you see this shit that I show you on here? Do you believe that writing well is important to them? Do you think they care about readers? What do you think their standards for their work are? Or do you think they just want to be a lazy fuck who is handed shit they don't deserve, to live a life of bullshitting, pretending they're this thing, and that the thing they wrote is good because a certain number of people just like them, who didn't even read it, and could not actually care less about it, said it was?

It's that last thing, right? It's so obviously that last thing.

Or maybe, I don't know, just hear me out, we could try to have good writing that provides value? Is that crazy? I guess that's crazy. But perhaps having writing that doesn't suck which couldn't just be done by a computer program would be better for readers, or for there being readers, or for anyone having any reason to read, and, you know, humans.