In my many pilgrimages to writers’ homes, I’ve felt two responses, often simultaneously. There’s excitement about my proximity to creation. About the whiff of genius that lingers—like lavender, like music—beyond a study’s velvet rope. But then I feel comforted, too. That my literary heroes were, in the sunny patois of supermarket tabloids, “just like us.” Folks who fretted over floorboards and flashing. Who had toilets, toasters, and trash.

Robert Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont is just that—a stone house—but it’s also where he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” That poem’s lines fill the rooms like winter light. Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, stunned me into a reverential silence until I saw it for its component parts: beds and windows, beams and bricks.

Another way to think about all this is personification. A writer’s home personifies its owner, giving visitors the sense of “knowing” a person (usually dead) who held the pen. It personifies their writing too. Here’s their typewriter, here’s their table, here’s something tactile on which to ground an artform that can, at its best, hang words in air.

This holds true for writers we admire and those we don’t. When I spiral up the stone steps of Hawk Tower, the poet Robinson Jeffers’ oceanside eyrie in Carmel, California, I feel like I am Jeffers, or at least his houseguest. No such joy accompanied my daily walks around the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I rack this up to the badness of Ben-Hur. My dog shared my disdain, peeing frequently on old Lew’s trees.

Lately, when I pass a sign for a writer’s home or peek into J.D. McClatchy’s coffee table book, American Writers at Home, I feel something sour. Like the foxing of a frontispiece. Like crawl space mold. At first, I thought it simple envy. We writers are envious creatures. We envy each other’s sentences. We envy each other’s successes. We even envy our predecessors’ sentences and successes, which surround us in their homes.

This stirring, though, was different, and newer, dating back to 2022, when my wife and I sold our home of six years in Crawfordsville, just across the street from Lew Wallace. It deepened in the year we spent in Portland, Oregon—lucky beneficiaries of my sabbatical—and even after we returned to a new Hoosier zip code. By then the very idea of a writer’s home, a domicile where an author sets up permanent shop, struck me as antiquated. Even privileged. What changed?

Well, we did. From 2022 to 2024, we bounced among three houses, returning to what was, for the majority of our marriage, native ground: the rental market. My perspective on housing shifted. Renting was flexible and maintenance-free. Ownership was permanent and bougie. Mortgage rates rose while the number of active listings plummeted. Prices ballooned, inflation flattened (or shrank) buying power. It felt like a bad time to buy a home.

And yet last fall my wife and I started haunting Zillow and pouncing on early showings. We chatted up our elderly neighbor’s sons—I’m not proud of this—when that neighbor died. (They were selling, but for more than we had.) Throughout it all, I thought about the writers’ homes I’d visited, and if those writers’ lives bore any resemblance to my own. Did I secretly hope, in buying a home, to mimic their lifestyle? Was that possible in 2024?

Not if I wanted to emulate Mark Twain, whose Hartford mansion boasts a billiard parlor and a fireplace with a fluted flue. Ditto Edna St. Vincent Millay, who’d ask the swimmers in her outdoor pool to splash about nude. Even the more modest homes, like Walt Whitman’s row house in Camden, New Jersey, reek of entitlement and stability. Photographs show the elderly poet’s floors there bestrewn with papers—like a hoarder clinging to a golden past.

Of course, this is all unfair—to these writers and to me. The economics of literature has shifted. Its cultural capital too. (Besides, it’s masochistic to compete with someone whose home address is a historic landmark.) As the internet makes writing more democratic, writers’ homes feel elite or off-limits. Don’t touch anything! isn’t just a warning about rarified artifacts; it’s a reminder that this is all out of reach. Today, writers’ homes represent twin goals that remain, for most working writers, distant or divorced: financial security and geographic certainty.

I’ve met few writers who publish their way to a down payment, and if the AI innovators have their way, I’ll meet fewer still. Most writers I know are peripatetic, moving toward the promise of a paycheck, which they often teach to secure. A “room of one’s own” was Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the solitude needed by (and denied to) women writers. But as the local Starbucks and public library, the soccer sideline and the playground can attest, solitude is a luxury that many writers can’t afford. What plaque will hang over these sites of hurried composition? Who’ll tour them, 50 years hence, to pay homage to the novels being written there right now?

If I’m still alive then, two things will be true: my poetry still won’t make money, and my mortgage will be paid off. That’s right, Dear Reader, we did buy a home, though not—at least in my case—because pride of ownership or wealth building held much allure. Nor did the promise of a home office, its shelves sagging with books. No, I bought a house to retain a feeling, however misguided or intangible, that I have some control over my own life. That my loves were perpetually protected. That we’re safe inside our weatherproof ark.

The history of writers’ homes reminds me that this is a delusion, and one we sign for on the dotted line. Ernest Hemingway lost his Havana residence, Finca Vigía, to the Cuban Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson watched his Concord home burn; he was so beset by despair or dementia that he tossed a few belongings back into the flames. The poet Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House (July 10th, 1666),” suffered much the same:

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I.

It doesn’t take a coup or conflagration to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “pleasant things” are bound, like our bodies, for ash. We can install smoke detectors, map the flood plains, and test for radon. (God knows, I’ve done all three.) But catastrophe will inevitably find—if not our actual houses—then everything they represent: family, contentment, a quiet place in the world.

Owning a home helps us to forget that fact, however briefly, as we arrange new furniture and mow the lawn. I’d almost forgotten it myself, tucked away in my new basement study, until I looked out my only window to see the bees, right at eye level, pollinating the front yard. Then I remembered the siding needs painting. Then I remembered that I’m already halfway underground.

The post What Is a 21st-Century ‘Writer’s Home’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In April 2024, British author J.K. Rowling appeared in the news for the same reason she’s been wont to gain attention lately—not for writing acclaimed new books, but for writing long social-media rants against the transgender community. In the latest iteration, she offered to go to jail under Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act.

Many fans—including queer and trans readers who took refuge in the world that the Harry Potter series conjured—feel that Rowling has betrayed them. They find themselves in the position of choosing whether to renounce a beloved fandom or look past a politics they find hateful.

But Harry Potter fans aren’t the only readers facing this dilemma. In recent years, the ability to follow the lives and politics of writers in real time through social media has changed the reader-author relationship. How much should we allow the life of the author to influence our experience of their work?

When a beloved local used bookstore recently closed down after 30 years in business, I found myself in my personal version of this saga. For my final purchase, I chose Henry Miller’s memoir Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch from its discounted, dwindling stock.

It was the end of an era—but also, my conscience ached. I was going home with yet another book that I felt that I shouldn’t have, written by an author who was an absolute fiend to women.  I have a row of Henry Millers. All the F. Scott Fitzgeralds and George Orwells any English major would ever need. Jean-Paul Sartre’s mammoth Being and Nothingness.

Miller is perhaps the most guilt-inducing. Though a brilliant writer, he saw each and every woman he encountered—including his five wives—as a character to exploit in his books. When women appear on the page, they’re mostly just bodies, available (or not quite available) for sexual encounters. Here’s his idea of a simile, taken from his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer: “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”

George Orwell’s female characters—either whores or prudes—don’t fare much better than Miller’s. And while his Down and Out in Paris and London shattered every one of my naïve illusions about the 1920s, he couldn’t write a three-dimensional woman even if it could have ended a war. Orwell’s first wife was deeply involved in the early work that made him famous, but largely erased from his stories. In his private literary notebook, he wrote down “two great facts about women”: “One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality …” Fitzgerald, meanwhile, stole entire excerpts from his wife’s diary for his books and had her locked up in a mental institution. Sartre saw women as either mistresses or unobtained conquests, on the page and in life.

I have read biographies of and memoirs by all of these writers, and I always come away feeling uncomfortable about their treatment and views of women. And yet, these are some of my favorite writers. I confess to loving everything they have written. Their prose styles possess me. I look to them for inspiration in perfecting my own craft as a writer. Still, more often than not, I thumb past the icky bits of their books and their biographies. I burn simultaneously with admiration, jealousy, and discomfiture.

In 1967, the literary theorist Roland Barthes proposed a very simple concept in an essay titled “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argues that an author’s personal traits or biography should play no role in a reader’s interpretation of their literary output. The reading experience should remain objective and unrestricted; the written work should exist almost as an individual of its own, separate from its creator.

So, do I have the right, in this current cultural climate, to exercise the “The Death of the Author” clause to keep reading the books I like? “To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me,’” writes Barthes. In other words, it’s what an author has put on the page that is up for scrutiny and debate—not the background circumstances or life events that may or may not have influenced the writing.

This quotation particularly speaks to me because as a writer, I fret about my readers scouring between the lines of my fiction for traces of me rather than accepting my characters and worlds as imagined ones. Likewise, I wouldn’t want a reader to look more or less favorably upon my work because of my personal life or political views.

As readers nowadays latch on to “receipts,” meaning the author’s life choices or past errors, as indicators of the worth of their work, “The Death of the Author” has evolved in meaning. Subsequent critical approaches have argued that it’s important to incorporate the world in which a book was written into its reception. Furthermore, in this age of social media, authors’ lives unfold in real time for all to see, as opposed to the more private past, where they largely controlled how much and what of their private lives were made public.

One of the most visible sites of this debate is Rowling’s aggressive campaign against trans people. Some Harry Potter fans have renounced Rowling’s work entirely; others remain staunchly loyal to Rowling as a literary icon, whatever her prejudices. And then there are those lingering in the middle who follow the “Death of the Author,” and continue to appreciate the Harry Potter series on its own, as a separate entity from its notorious author.

In contrast to Rowling, the authors on my shelves—Miller, Orwell, Fitzgerald, and Sartre, and their misogyny—are all long in the past. They’re not personally profiting off my purchase of their books, nor are contemporary women being personally harmed by the writers’ objectification of them. The death of the author—taken literally—is my greatest consolation.

I’m also consoled by the knowledge that difficult authors still have lessons to impart and important conversations to start—not just in spite of but sometimes because of their odious points of view. My advice to the Harry Potter fans, in their precarious situation, is not to feel overwhelmed with guilt. They need to remember that they are just readers, not gatekeepers, and they are not responsible for Rowling’s unfortunate views. Fans of the Harry Potter series are also not obligated to side with her in real life just because they enjoy and appreciate a fictional fantasy world (which, by the way, can be enjoyed without necessarily purchasing the merchandise).

Our relationships with books can operate on the same basis as our relationships with people: They are not obligated to be perfect, and they would be unhealthy and under too much pressure if they were. My flawed array of writers forces me to think critically about what I’m reading. I can appreciate their prose styles without adopting their beliefs. I am also challenged by these authors to expand my repertoire to include other artists, whose work doesn’t have so much baggage attached.

Reading widely and diversely is one of the greatest forms of lifelong learning. It’s important to read beyond the views that one agrees with, and to understand that writers, like all human beings, are complex and flawed. For the sake of my education as a reader, writer, teacher, and person, I have to keep telling myself: I am doing no wrong.

The post Authors Aren’t Perfect. Why Should Readers Have to Be? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up as a Chicana nerd, I never thought I’d write a book about myself, much less about Oxnard, where I grew up. This humble city on the Southern California coast was hardly the stuff worth writing about. Or so I had been taught throughout my elementary and high school years.

But then, as an adult, I began researching the late Chicana writer Michele Serros, who also grew up in Oxnard, and who deftly—defiantly even—wrote about our shared hometown in every work she authored, and I surprised myself. Discovering Serros sent me back home. I had planned to write a literary analysis of representations of Chicana adolescence throughout Southern California, using young adult novels set in San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Oxnard. I wound up penning a sort of memoir: confronting memories of pain, loss, and isolation that mirrored Serros’ own feelings of out-of-placeness in a city that has never quite welcomed Chicana misfits like us.

Mapping Oxnard’s presence in Serros’ work, and interweaving my own personal history, helped me understand what it meant to come of age in the 805 area code, and to consider Chicana adolescent identity and subjectivity.

Michele Serros’ school photos, from Rio Real Elementary in Oxnard. Courtesy of Michele Serros Collection, California State University, Channel Islands John Spoor Broome Library.

Oxnard is a curious sort of city. Known for its abundant strawberry fields and mild coastal climate, its main claim to fame these days is hosting the Dallas Cowboys’ yearly summer training camp. However, as scholar and Oxnard native Frank P. Barajas has written, places like Oxnard hold rich histories of community activism and political involvement. Oxnard was “founded” by white agribusiness settlers, but it was mainly Mexican and Japanese laborers who toiled in its sugar beet fields. While the Chicano Movement is typically associated with more famous parts of California such as Los Angeles, Oxnard too was the site of activism and political awakening throughout the 1960s.

Growing up I had heard stories of family members’ involvement with Chicano activist groups like the Brown Berets. My mother once shared that she and my grandmother sewed the hats my uncles wore with their cargo pants and white tee shirts—the preferred attire for activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But these were mere anecdotes I heard here and there. I never read anything about Oxnard’s history in my high school textbooks. I had the distinct feeling—even though it was never uttered aloud—that things like “history,” “culture,” and “literature” didn’t exist in Oxnard. Look elsewhere, my teachers implicitly said. Nothing for you here, the schools suggested. Move it along.

Michele Serros’ desk. Courtesy of California State University, Channel Islands Chicana/o Studies Department.

So perhaps it was not at all ironic that I only learned about Serros when I was working on a PhD in English, and that the discovery was purely accidental. I was researching contemporary Chicana literature; a library database search served up Serros’ most famous book, 1998’s Chicana Falsa, with its eye-catching subtitle: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. The collection featured gut-wrenching and funny tales of speaking Spanglish, hating high school, accusations of being a “fake” Chicana, and of course, dreaming of one day getting the hell out of Oxnard.

The discovery that such a book even existed caught me off guard and made me wonder if I’d been kept from a juicy secret that I should have known decades earlier. When I told my mother about it, she casually said, “Oh yeah, I know Michele. She’s related to la familia Serros.”

That familia Serros? As in the guys who taught my twin sister and me how to swim at La Colonia pool, minutes away from my maternal grandparents’ home?  Yep, that one. Serros’s grandparents and great-grandparents, much like my own, migrated to Oxnard in the first half of the 20th century and lived in the Mexican barrio known as La Colonia. Oxnard was relatively small, hovering at just about 40,000 residents by 1960, and most of its earliest Mexican residents would have, at one time or another, known each other.

In the first half of the 20th century, Cristina Herrera’s family, pictured, lived in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio—just like the Serros family. Courtesy of Serafina Herrera (author’s mother).

My Mamá Chonita and Papá Tomás, it turned out, had been close friends with Michele’s family. When I was in high school in the early to mid-1990s, Serros had already published Chicana Falsa. In the years that followed, she would publish other important texts, including How to Be a Chicana Role Model (in 2000) and even a young adult novel, Honey Blonde Chica (in 2006). Her works explored complex themes like identity and what it means to not readily be accepted as Chicana because of her struggles with Spanish. Like much Latinx literature, Serros embraced hybridity, even as she troubled identity terms like Chicana and Chicano. She died of cancer, at 48, in 2015. All this time, I had no idea about her family connection to mine.

When I learned about Serros’ work, I did something I’m still ashamed to admit. I tucked her books away in my shelves, occasionally reading them but choosing not to study them too closely for fear that they would dredge up unpleasant memories of Oxnard. Which they do. When Serros mentions Oxnard street names like Vineyard Avenue or landmarks like Plaza Park, I picture them clearly, a kind of familiarity that is akin to coming home. Except coming home isn’t always fun. Returning to Oxnard means having to relive the high school bullying, the invisibility, and my father’s abandonment. It means confronting pain.

Writing about one’s wounds is a tricky thing. It’s messy, even ugly. But it’s a necessary voyage, I learned as my book took shape, and Serros’ works loomed ever and ever larger. As I wrote about Chicana Falsa and her later books, I started to do so with an unabashed glimpse into my own Chicana teen years. How terrifying high school was for a quiet kid who struggled to make friends, the exact opposite of my popular older brothers, Chavita and Marcos, who everyone knew by name because they excelled in sports. Much as Serros’ poem, “The Best Years of My Life,” documents a facetious but all too real account of a Chicana teen lost in the crowd, I also was largely invisible in Oxnard High School, a place that rendered me not really Chicana. When Serros wrote, “Every day I dragged my feet in customized black and pink Vans (only thing about me the right color, right size),” she may as well have been talking about me, for no matter how you sliced it, I was never quite right in my classmates’ eyes. My classmates viewed me as the lesser kind of Brown because I was shy, awkward, and liked to read.

I attributed these painful years to living in Oxnard, a place I was desperate to flee the first chance I got—and did, taking jobs in Central California and Portland, Oregon that put Oxnard in my rearview mirror. Serros, too, yearned to escape, to live in a big city, to create art. But even as we drive away, we can’t avoid the rear view. My book taught me that. Oxnard taught me that. Michele Serros taught me that.

I live far from the city that raised me, but my hometown still resides in me. Readers may be uncomfortable with my refusal to romanticize a city I haven’t always loved, and that hasn’t always loved me in return. My family will likely struggle to understand why I have written these words, and why I chose to write them now. Call it a compulsion, an itch, a drive. Oxnard called to me, Serros called to me. This time I finally answered.

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Mustafa was one of the first young writers I mentored through We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led program based in Gaza that tells the stories behind the numbers in the news, giving voice to Palestinians and advocating for their human rights. Mustafa is a graduate of Al Aqsa University, and he managed a small convenience store to supplement his family’s income.

Two years ago, I worked with him—virtually, from my home in Los Angeles—as he drafted and refined an essay about 13-year-old Muhammad, a familiar figure in his Khan Yunis neighborhood, who was bullied at school and compelled by extreme poverty to scavenge for castoff bread in the streets. In offering Muhammad odd jobs at the convenience store and extending his friendship, Mustafa awakened a sense of self-esteem in the boy. Through a series of Zoom meetings and Google Doc exchanges, we generated multiple drafts of the essay. And though Mustafa struggled with English, his piece displayed the rich detail and authentic dialogue of a born storyteller. One day, he logged on to Zoom on his phone from the store so that Muhammad and I could “meet.”

Mustafa married this year. In the aftermath of October 7, his wife’s family home in Gaza City was bombed, and the couple has been on the run since. “We are in our fifth place,” he texted me on WhatsApp, “but there is no safe place in Gaza. My wife is pregnant in her seventh month, and she is sick. She cannot get medical care.” My most recent messages to Mustafa have gone unanswered.

Since October 7, I’ve hovered over WhatsApp for messages not only from Mustafa but also from other young writers in Gaza I’ve mentored over the past several years. I leave my ringer on overnight, something I never did before, to seize the rare moments of internet connection and respond right away, even in the wee hours. I stare at the phone, hoping those single check marks will go double, offering me at least the assurance that my message has been seen, even if the writer is unable to respond.

Right now, all the stories published at WANN are about Israel’s current “aggression,” as our writers call it. They have lived through at least five aggressions in their 20-odd years. When the bombs aren’t falling, WANN writers have written essays about the World Cup, the “Hummus Theory,” a foodie blog of modernized Palestinian recipes, the soothing power of the sea, and aspirations to forge meaningful lives in a place where opportunity is scarce and danger abounds, even in the best of times.

Walaa, once a teaching assistant in English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), wrote a cogent essay for WANN that drew parallels between the tragedy of Othello and the occupation of Palestine. Last year, she was one of only two students from Gaza to receive the British Council’s Higher Education Scholarships for Palestine, enabling her to enter a master’s degree program at the University of Birmingham. She started her studies in September 2022 and planned to return to a faculty position at IUG in early 2024. The university was destroyed in an October 11 bombing, and she is now stranded far away. “This is putting more uncertainty on me now, because I’ve lost a job,” she texted me. “But it’s 25,000 students who’ve lost their education, meaning even more unemployment.”

My current mentee, Roaa, is a college student from Khan Yunis with a passion for physics. In a fiction story she completed just before October 7, a young woman enjoying life in a free Palestine and another witnessing the rubble of her Gaza home after an Israeli airstrike experience glimpses of the other’s reality by means of quantum entanglement. “It’s mind-blowing!” Roaa enthused on Zoom as we worked on her story. “It literally states that when two particles become entangled, changes in one particle’s state instantaneously affect the other, no matter the distance separating them.”

Roaa spent her first sleepless night during recent bombings writing about what was happening. She said it helped her get through the night. In more recent messages, she has reported that she and her family “had to evacuate our house twice in the past few days,” and that she’s been writing about that, too.

Other messages from writers tell of homes destroyed, and friends and relatives missing or dead. Four WANN writers have been killed in bombings since the “aggression” began, losses that have left this creative community reeling.

Yet amid the devastation, WANNers, as they call themselves, continue to create. When I asked Roaa what she would want readers to know about WANN, she texted, “The main aim is that each soul in Gaza is a whole life, dreams, and memories, not only a number. As long as we are alive, we will never stop sharing our stories with the world.”

These are voices we need to hear, to deepen our understanding of the lived experience of Palestinians in Gaza and gain insight into their yearning for freedom. Only a full and permanent ceasefire will ensure that they are not silenced altogether.

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Last week, the board of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI fired its CEO, Sam Altman, only to reinstate him days later—an ouster/“inster” that left many questioning the leadership, safety risks, and oversight of the booming artificial intelligence ecosystem. This week, people called foul after Sports Illustrated published articles seemingly written by AI, and Merriam-Webster announced “authentic” as its 2023 Word of the Year, in part because of the rise of AI technology.

Last night, Zócalo, together with Arts for LA, ASU Narrative and Emerging Media Program, and LACMA, presented an evening asking the timely, urgent question: “Is AI the End of Creativity—Or a New Beginning?”

The event brought together a panel of creative workers and thinkers: LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab program director Joel Ferree, Concept Art Association co-founder and artist advocate Nicole Hendrix, Writers Guild of America AI working group member John Lopez, and interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena. Curator, educator, and author of Use Me at Your Own Risk Anuradha Vikram moderated.

The panelists all agreed that AI technology could change the creative economy fundamentally, and offered takes on how artists might protect their work. The discussion touched upon the unique role artists have as critical thinkers in the face of expansive AI use, the opportunities AI presents for arts and entertainment, and ways that law and policy can ameliorate some of its risks.

But top of mind was AI’s effect on artists’ labor.

“We were acutely aware that we were the first labor negotiation happening in the age of AI,” Lopez said, speaking about this year’s Writers Guild of America strike and union members’ desire to instate meaningful regulation over AI. “No one was going to put rules or boundaries around this stuff if we didn’t speak up.” Discussions around AI were the toughest parts of the negotiations, he said. “This became the hill a lot of the studio negotiators were dying on.”

The fight, he said, is between the humanistic mission of arts and entertainment—“to facilitate communication … whether you’re writing a poem, you’re making a painting, or you’re writing a really dorky screenplay about talking dogs”—and the forces of industry.

Rosalena, who has been using AI in her own artwork, agreed, pointing to the extractive nature of AI models in taking artists’ work and creating other, AI-generated works from it—a value reproduced each time an artist’s original work is used in these processes. “I really admired the writers’ strike, and fully support people who truly understand the impact and how this could easily take over in an awful way.”

Hendrix grew concerned with AI companies’ tools like ChatGPT and large-scale visual databases when she started poking around in the repositories and found her own husband’s artwork, as well as images created by friends and colleagues, posted without permission. “The thought that their work was scraped without their consent, credit, or compensation—and that’s the foundation a lot of these models are built upon—just didn’t sit well with us.”

“What is most upsetting about all of this is the job replacement,” she said, citing examples of gaming studios in Texas letting go of their art departments, businesses contracting advertising agencies using AI-generated images in lieu of designers, and independent producers coming to meetings with pitch decks full of AI images. “Job loss is here, and it’s only going to continue to grow.”

Hendrix noted, too, a recent AI-generated Cosmopolitan cover. “A model … the photographer, the hair and makeup artists, the person that pulled the fashion, the wardrobe—all of these artists and true art and collaboration [are] replaced by one AI image. It’s a two-dimensional flat version of what art is, when art has so much depth, humanity, and soul.”

AI devaluing creative work and labor is an even bigger concern for younger artists who now must compete with AI as well as established creatives to rise in the field, Lopez said.

“But [AI] also takes your portfolio and makes you compete against your own portfolio for a job,” Hendrix pointed out.

So, what is the artist’s role in all of this?

“Artists really need to be aware and extra critical of images,” Rosalena urged.

Ferree empathically agreed: As a curator with sway over purse strings, he seeks to nurture projects that engage or critique technologies like AI. “Artists are probably the best people to engage with emerging technologies because they can be critical,” he said. “As these tools become more commonplace … The role of a curator becomes even more important, the same way a librarian is going to have a pretty big fight ahead of them. Because you are fighting for the sake of art history, for the sake of information itself.”

What do we need to do, then, to protect ourselves? asked Vikram.

Ferree wondered about using technology, such as blockchain-based watermarks or NFTs, to protect artists’ assets. Perhaps some form of digital registry could provide a record when an artwork is used somewhere else.

“What a lot of people found out, the hard way,” Vikram responded, “is that an NFT is not actually a legally enforceable contract.” In the online world, they added, people are abusing the idea of fair use and taking copyrighted material without permission. They are hoping to profit while the courts figure it out, they said.

Hendrix mentioned two defensive web apps that people can use to help their work evade algorithms contributing to AI databases—Glaze and NightShade. Hendrix’s organization has held town halls with the U.S. Copyright Office, and raised money to lobby on behalf of individual creators.

Throughout the evening, the online audience participated via a chat that was visible to the in-person audience and panelists. While most panelists spoke of artists fighting against AI, one online guest thought that AI could open up the art world’s gatekeeping practices. Another wondered if there was room for ethical AI in creative practice.

At the heart of the conversation were questions about our very humanity.

“We already have a lot of things in this world pushing against human connection,” Lopez said. “[AI] is not about human expression, but about amalgamating a whole bunch of people’s prior expressions and putting it into a data blender.”

“As artists, we are the bearers of humanity,” Rosalena said.

And, wrapping up the conversation, Vikram said, “AI is nothing without us. Human beings still call the shots. And let’s keep it that way.”

The post ‘AI Is Nothing Without Us’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light, 1988.

After 20 years of working and volunteering in a mixture of direct anti-poverty services, Jewish community organizations, and the arts, I find there is almost no situation that writer, poet, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde hadn’t already anticipated, considered, and conquered. At a moment of local, national, and international crises, when I consider the role I must play—and the space the organization I lead, Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center, should occupy—I find reason and answer in Lorde’s indelible wisdom.

Lorde—who was Black and queer—lived the daily reality that her very being had been politicized, with or without her art and activism. This is the experience of many non-dominant artists and culturally specific institutions today: Your very existence is, apparently, political. You don’t have the luxury of deciding whether you are or are not an activist. You will be perceived as such, and as engaging in culture wars, regardless of your intention or action.

That assumption, and others that underlie it, are worth pushing back against. Especially right now.

I am not an artist, but as the head of a Jewish-identifying cultural institution, I have encountered such assumptions in small, largely innocuous, ways. I have been assumed to have a political agenda vis à vis Israel. I have encountered an assumption of progressive politics and feminism in my work. I have been assumed to work in the nonprofit sector to enjoy more time at home with my young children (ha!). And I have seen far more problematic instances of assumption and even aggression impact my colleagues of color, different cultural backgrounds, or minority sexual orientation.

It is infuriating to be reduced to one aspect of myself, without regard to the merit of my whole person, or the effect of my demonstrable efforts. It makes me appreciate those moments when I do have the freedom to decide to engage in activism. Or not. What extraordinary luck of birth and circumstance to have the freedom to make art without political retribution. It seems to me that the least those of us with that privilege can do is attempt to extend that freedom to others. This includes the freedom to choose not to be an activist, or to choose what issues to address and when and how.

Many artists I have had the privilege to know stress that their work is in dialogue not just with external influences and influencers, but with the audience itself. For them, the art is completed in the reaction and response of its consumer. Activism is, by definition, intended to persuade. To force artists to engage with audiences as activists is to narrowly define what creative interaction can entail.

I know this because I am one such audience member. On bad days at the office—when the office was a homeless shelter, a street clinic, or a courtroom during my time as a civil rights lawyer—the artists who brought me comfort, joy, distraction, and ultimately resilience were those who took my mind off my work. Who reminded me of my humanity. I would sit as the sun set on the Temple of Dendur. I would rest beside Whistler’s “Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink.” I would take a break from trial at the Irvine courthouse and have lunch in the Noguchi Garden. In each of these moments, the art felt just for me, no matter how many hundreds of other people were walking by. These scenes touched something in me. Not because of their subjects, much less the political context in which they were created, but because of the works’ aesthetics and mine.

Activism is inherently time-bound. To force artists to speak only of the here and now is surely to deprive them of their chance at timelessness. Their chance at connection to the as-yet unborn, whose needs we can hardly imagine, but might yet be healed centuries from now, by the art of today.

I think of Peter Krasnow, the Ukrainian refugee whose oil paintings we showcased in a collection spotlight at the Skirball this past spring. In response to the events of World War II and the Holocaust, he transformed his artistic style completely, moving to the abstract and a color palette of highlighter greens and bubble gum pinks. He explained in his autobiography that this was his personal therapeutic approach to the depression he experienced as war raged and his family and homeland were annihilated. Seventy years later, his work not only feels current, but his clutching for beauty and light in a period of overwhelming darkness is resilient and instructive. I saw visitors to this show smile, cry, wonder aloud, point, decipher, get close, take a step back, and move forward.

Would we say to the Peter Krasnow of today, “No, your emotional expression, your desperate attempt to heal yourself, this is insufficient”? I hope not.

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In September 1955, 67 TV critics got the opportunity of a lifetime: An all-expenses paid trip to London for a week, courtesy of Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Cream Oil.

They were there to learn about a new TV program called The Adventures of Robin Hood. The series was the first British-American co-production, and one of the very first programs available in the UK’s then-fledgling commercial television landscape. The half-hour episodes starred Richard Greene as the title character and Bernadette O’Farrell as love interest Maid Marian. It filmed at England’s historic Nettlefold Studios, renamed Walton Studios.

The junket was something out of Mad Men. The critics boarded a martini-and-cigarette-laden charter out of Idlewild Airport, which would later become JFK Airport. They stayed at London’s new Westbury Hotel, and luxury buses shuttled them around to the usual tourist draws, including Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.

Then, there were parties on the actual set at Walton, where the entertainment journalists could mingle with the show’s producers, set designers, actors, and directors.

But not the writers.

The writers of Robin Hood would never be made available for interviews. And they would never be credited for their work on the program, at least not with their own names. Indeed, some of the writers of Robin Hood would not have been allowed to leave the United States.

That’s because they were among Hollywood’s blacklisted—media workers victimized by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s persecution of those accused of communist ties and banned from working.

Had the writers’ identities been discovered, the show couldn’t have proceeded. Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot would have immediately withdrawn their millions of dollars in investment. And this loss of investment would have led to the withdrawal of Official Films, the U.S.-based distribution company that sold the program to CBS-TV in America and the CBC in Canada. Naturally, the broadcasters themselves would have withdrawn their commitment to air it.

So why did the show use these writers despite those risks?

The answer to that question was Hannah Dorner Weinstein.

Weinstein developed the series with leftist writers Ring Lardner Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and others. She’d worked with many of them on FDR’s 1944 re-election campaign, as executive director of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), which she co-founded. They’d also worked together when she was a vice-chair and co-founder of Progressive Citizens of America.

Lardner and Hunter had both been targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and were unemployable as screenwriters. Their involvement in Robin Hood was known only by Weinstein and two or three others on the show who were sworn to secrecy.

In making Robin Hood, Weinstein followed a formula she developed two years earlier with two other blacklisted writers, Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky. With the writers using pseudonyms, they’d created a single-season detective program called Colonel March of Scotland Yard. That series, featuring actor Boris Karloff (a friend of Weinstein’s), caught the attention of British mogul Lew Grade who decided to help Weinstein build her own studio. She did, and in 1954, Sapphire Films was created.

Still under surveillance by the FBI and the CIA for her own political activities back home in New York, the petite former journalist implemented a strict procedure for getting scripts and notes back and forth across the Atlantic. She did the same with getting the writers paid—no easy feat, considering they had to use pseudonyms for everything. Weinstein, 44 and a single mother of three, sweated mightily each time a journalist asked to speak to one or more of the show’s writers. She’d redirect the questioner to a trusted producer or assistant who would then find a way to deflect.

Weinstein’s choice of the legend of Robin Hood to challenge the cultural climate of the Cold War, and allegorize the contemporary geopolitical conflicts of the period was an apt one. As historian of blacklist-era entertainment Andrew Paul summarizes, Robin Hood “was an outlaw with a keen sense of social justice…His antagonistic attitude toward the authoritarian Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had the potential to reflect midcentury antifascist sentiments. And his empathy toward the poorest of England’s inhabitants could reflect socialist and Popular Front positions on wealth distribution.”

For example, in one episode of the show, called “The Miser,” a lord collects double rents from his tenants to cover his own taxes. Robin tricks him into thinking that an alchemist can turn buttons into silver and returns the money to the villagers. In another episode, “A Year and a Day,” Robin assists a serf who has taught himself how to do surgery by helping the man gain his freedom so he can treat the poor for free.

Lardner and Hunter weren’t the only blacklisted writers involved. Episodes were written by Adrian Scott, John Howard Lawson—members of the Hollywood Ten along with Lardner— and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt, Gertrude Fass, Fred Rinaldo, and Robert Lees (creators of the Abbott & Costello franchise), Arnold Manoff, and Hyman Kraft. Lardner headed up a writing cadre in New York; Scott did the same for Los Angeles.

Weinstein’s productions gave blacklisted writers the ability to put food on their tables, while allowing those same writers to impart sociological subtext about fascism, persecution and, leadership (good and bad). She also allowed them to take aim at the injustices of the Hollywood blacklist.

In “The Vandals,” for example, the sheriff interrogates a village ironsmith to make the man confess that he has made arrow tips for Robin Hood.

“I know you are a decent citizen now,” the lawman goads him, mimicking the language used by Congressional inquisitors who baited former radicals into naming the names of communists and fellow travelers.

Above all, though, Robin Hood was entertaining. The series was a huge hit in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, often taking a spot among the top 20 programs. It was in production for four years and wound up with 143 half-hour episodes. Before its first season was half over, Official Films and sponsors commissioned more seasons of it—and of Sapphire-produced costumed dramas The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers, featuring a very young Robert Shaw (1956) and then Sword of Freedom (1957).

Ironically, the popularity of these Sapphire programs made life even more difficult for its writers. Talent agents wanted to poach them, but could not find out who they were. The writers couldn’t be at the 1955 junket, and they weren’t ever available stateside, either. The job of deflecting chiefly fell to story editor and trusted lieutenant Albert Ruben, who ran interference between the production company and these types of requests from press or advertising executives.

What made it all work was that Weinstein and her writers trusted each other, perhaps because she faced the same risks that they did. In 1950, she had been fired from her job as a public relations executive for her leftist activity, and her appearance on McCarthy’s list of “concealed communists.” The listing was incorrect—she was not a communist. But, had she not left the country, it was likely she would have been subpoenaed by some arm of McCarthy or the House on Unamerican Activities Committee, or had her passport revoked, or both.

So it was that, in the mid-1950s, this woman who had been outspoken for decades made a shift and let her television productions be the face of her activism. “Meet Hannah [Weinstein],” a British, syndicated columnist wrote in 1959, “the Quiet Woman of television. You won’t have seen her on your screen. She rarely makes news in the papers, avoids interviews if she can. But the fabulously long-running Robin Hood, Sword of Freedom, and Sir Lancelot all owe their tele-creation to this petite American.”

Their writers quietly owed their livelihoods to her, and never forgot.

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For one thing, she can sing.

Phoebe Bridgers, a brilliant and versatile 26-year-old musician and songwriter, isn’t just contending for four Grammy awards this March. She is challenging the status of Joan Didion, now 86, as the most nationally respected and quotable of California interpreters.

Such a challenge is long overdue. It’s been 40 years since New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani declared that “California belongs to Joan Didion,” and the British novelist Martin Amis (backhandedly) praised her “almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the California inanity.” Didion’s accounts of the Golden State, in both novels and essays, still influence American perceptions of our state, even though she moved to New York in 1988, and her work is mostly about a mid-century California that died with Jerry Brown’s first governorship. While Didion may have a new essay anthology out this year, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the most current piece in the collection is from the year 2000.

That’s why the rise of the Didionesque Bridgers, who grew up in Pasadena and lives in Los Angeles, should be welcome.

Bridgers’s challenge comes clothed in homage, not criticism. Bridgers frequently praises Didion’s writing and even her writerly fashion style, and often quotes Didion in media interviews to explain her inspiration for songs about 21st-century California anxieties.

“Didion reminds me of when I’m really dark and the way I think about the world,” Bridgers told the music and culture magazine The Fader. “It’s so hopeless. She just shamelessly goes there.”

Bridgers’ declarations of her Didion love are also, of course, an act of self-promotion. Didion is the rare California figure who managed to be both a mainstream celebrity and a member of the intellectual elite. Bridgers, the sort of rock star who tweets insults even as she wears a Paris Review hat to her New Yorker interview, clearly wants that same mix of mainstream and elite credibility.

But the Bridgers-Didion connection is about more than marketing. Bridgers’s poetic, indelible lyrics manage to match the power and precision of Didion’s famous prose. Take Bridgers’ song, “I Know the End,” which is about driving up the California coast:

Over the coast, everyone’s convinced
It’s a government drone or an alien spaceship
Either way, we’re not alone.
I’ll find a new place to be from

Hearing that last line—a reference to Didion’s memoir of the Golden State she left behind, Where I Was From—made me wonder if California finally had a successor to the Didion throne. So I re-read Didion’s work again, while listening for the first time to Bridgers’ entire discography, which includes two critically acclaimed albums and enough collaborations with other artists to rival Kenny Rogers’ record.

It didn’t take me long to realize the similarities between Bridgers and Didion are uncanny.

Both bring a literary sensibility to pop forms—music and journalism. Bridgers, who has said she tends to “tweak lyrics a million times,” shares Didion’s painstaking method of sweating every single syllable in service of creating unforgettable lines—from “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion) to “I’ve been playing dead my whole life” (Bridgers).

These two California writers both believe in genre-bending, fusing forms and shifting structures. Didion memorably did this in her “new journalism,” in her elliptical novel, Play It as It Lays, and in the unconventional narrated novel, Democracy. Bridgers writes songs that start as ballads and end with heavy metal (or even destroying a guitar, as Saturday Night Live).

“I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting,” Bridgers told Apple Music.

Both are deft at employing language to cut others. Didion used the New York Review of Books to take down Bob Woodward; Bridgers used her song “Motion Sickness” to take down Ryan Adams. Didion called writing “an aggressive, hostile act” and recounted learning, while at Vogue, how to turn words into “weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” Bridgers has the same skill: “I’m gonna kill you/ If you don’t beat me to it,” she says in one song. In another, she sings of a friend’s mother, “It’s amazing to me/How much you can say/When you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Both write with the intense curiosity of explorers who enjoy observing everyday things at a distance. Didion, in an essay about writing, remarked, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing”—from fear of driving the Carquinez Bridge (in The White Album) to the aftermath of her husband’s death (in The Year of Magical Thinking). Three generations younger, Bridgers, in her hit “Kyoto,” recounts how “I’ve been driving out to the suburbs to park at the Goodwill and stare at the chem trails.” In the title track of her 2020 Grammy-nominated album Punisher, she writes of moving to L.A.’s “Eastside,” Silver Lake, because “I love a good place to hide in plain sight.”

But perhaps what these two brilliant women most share is California itself, and a sensibility that looks at the place through its dreams, its ghosts, and its absence of rationality or reasonableness. Didion’s observation that “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension” is a foundation for Bridgers’s work.

Listen again to “I Know the End,” an “apocalypse song” in which Bridgers sings, “Like a wave that crashed and melted on the shore/Not even the burnouts are out here anymore.” Or check out “Garden Song,” in which she recounts staring at her reflection in a pool at the Huntington Library and declares, “I grew up here, ‘til it all went up in flames.”

That song, she told an interviewer, “is very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too.”

Maybe Bridgers should aim even higher than Didion. Listening to Bridgers while re-reading Didion, as I’ve been doing, the superior talents of the young musician, and the weaknesses of the older author, became clear.

Didion, who focuses on surfaces, rarely gets to the emotional depths that Bridgers plumbs. Didion’s upper-class Sacramento snobbery—in essays decrying the opening of Hearst Castle to the public, and recalling how she didn’t get into Stanford and settled for Berkeley—hasn’t aged well, as even Bridgers, who barely graduated high school, noted in an interview: “It is funny reading Joan Didion. You get so jealous of her lifestyle, though. She’s like, ‘And then I flew from New York and I ate at the country club and went for a nice walk in a beautiful garden.’”

Didion’s lack of empathy for her subjects can be galling—in her newly released collection, there’s an ugly essay about a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Gardena where Didion feels so much revulsion at an addict’s search for serenity that she flees the room rather than hear him out. In contrast, Bridgers’s lyrics are rich in empathy, especially for those who, like the musician herself, struggle with depression.

But it is in portraying California that Bridgers has the most room to improve on Didion. The author, relying on personal experience, offered a pessimistic view of a whiter, richer California than the one we live in today. If the rock musician is to avoid the same mistake, she’ll have to reach more outside her own experience, to find the light in the Didionesque darkness, and honor the hard-won gains among all our Chekhovian loss.

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