The future of writing and human experience

Hi, it's Ollie. Uh I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at the New Statesman. I hope you In 2011, Ben Lerner stormed onto the scene with his debut novel, leaving the Atocha Station, a winning blend of low comedy and high art. He has since firmly established himself as one of America's most acclaimed novelists and is a leading voice in so-called auto fiction. Now he returns with his fourth novel, and it may be his most profound yet. In transcription, Lerner turns his mind to the nature of art and of aging. It's a novel about generations, of growing children and dying forebears and the way the secrets and gifts of life and art move from one era to the next. It's also a novel about technology and our increasing reliance on it, the way it shapes our speech, our thoughts, our memories, and even our conceptions of ourselves. I'm Tanjal Rashid and you're listening to the Exchange from the New Statesman. In this episode I sit down with Ben Lerner to talk about how we record our conversations, why novels may matter even more in the age of AI, and in his words, the bankruptcy of political speech. I have to say you've made me very paranoid as a journalist about technology. I mean your your book is about a writer who is on assignment for a magazine like the News Statesman to interview a writer, much like yourself . And a bit before the interview he drops his phone in the sink, it breaks, and he's inexplicably unable to explain this and conducts the interview anyway. Hilarity ensues. Um has this happened to you It's happened to me before that I've been interviewed and then the person has written me to say, I'm so sorry the device was broken or I erased it or whatever. I haven't ever had it happen when I've interviewed someone, which I haven't done that often. But it's not just that he breaks his recording device. It's that he lies and says it's functioning when it's not. And that that I certainly have never had. Well, I d I I mean it's a very relatable experience. I mean this personal struggle with and dependency on technology that the narrator has. You know, phones get broken and iPads get dropped in sinks and coffee gets spilled on laptops, uh, connections fray, you know, on Zoom. I mean this this is kind of the pattern of of of modern uh existence. I mean, is that kind of what you were just sort of trying to portray in, you know, in in in transcription? I mean a little bit. The book is certainly interested in our dependency on devices and what they enable and what happens when they go miss ing. I mean, I think the novel as a form for me, I've always been attracted to the way the novel is like an old technology that can describe the emergence of new technologies Like there's there's a long tradition of the novel talking about the phone. I mean, less the smartphone than the landline. But um I mean, the example I always think about was Proust describing his first telephone call call with his grandmother, where she suddenly aged because her disembodied voice, you know, has like the texture of her fragility in a way that he didn't experience in her physical presence, like a new intimacy is opened up by the mixture of presence and absence that is the disembodied voice. So there's also um there's also that wonderful scene in Ulysses when um the character is imagining a phone call going back to the Garden of Eden and the telephone line is a sort of umbilical chord through the history of humanity, strand entwining cable of all flesh. I mean technology has for so long been imagined by novelists as this thing that sort of connects us. Well but also I think like in this scene you mentioned, it it's the mixture of novelty and ancientness, right? It's that it's it's it's new it's new it's new technology, but the disembodied voice is as old as hearing the voice of a god or you know or or or of a ghost. So I think it's that new old relation that the novel can capture about technological change that attracts me particularly. And um you know technology is sort of meant to connect us. It holds out the promise of sort of connection. But also one finds in in your novel um how much technology sort of disconnects us from from reality . Um you know, there are these sort of wonderful moments early in the book when the narrator is suddenly phone free and he finds, you know, reality sort of supercharged and you know, uh the stones are stonier, you y you write. I mean it it i very, very related. I mean ha have you had this sort of this this struggle and this breaking free from technology? Yeah, sure. I mean I think that you know it's interesting because when he loses his phone, he describes it as this, you know, intensification of presence, but it also immediately produces this revelry where he's kind of traveling back in time and remembering when he went to college in this town when he was deviceless. And I mention that because I think what happens is not just that he experiences the present, but he experiences the layering of temporalities. Like he also experiences the past. And and one of the questions in the book is like which media and which media configurations let the past in connect a previous present with our present and which ones kind of level and flatten ever ything into a perpetual present? Because as in the experience of the telephone and the disembodied voice, it's that mixture of like intimacy and distance, of presence and absence, of pres ent and past that can produce the pert a particularly profound experience. So it's not just that when he's deviceless that he's um he's more present, it's also that he's more haun ted. And many things in the book are about the way, you know, what what technologies allow the dead to speak to us, right? Um and what technologies use it it screen out the dead, that other sense of screen, right? Where a screen can be a technology of intensification, like you experience um something through the screen that's very intense, but it can also be a kind of defense against memory , it can obliterate memory, it can obliterate the present. So those that double meaning of screen, the way that it can intensify or the way that it can keep out is one of the things the book thinks through technologic ally. But all this stuff, of course, is inextricable from the kind of emotional dynamics that are at play in the novel, too, because Thomas is a partisan of older media that enable distance and enable haunting, and he's quite critical of the new media that he thinks flatten everything into a perpetual present. Is this sort of 90-year-old writer and media theorist? I mean, you you you describe him in the book as as one of the world's leading sort of thinkers on on art and technology, and he he has grown up in Nazi Germany and he's sort of haunted by you know by by that history. Um and he is the individual the mentor of the narrator who who the narrator goes to goes to interview and loses the recording, etc etc . So so we we clearly have these sort of different kinds of devices to mediate reality. And the book is one of those kinds of devices, right? I mean you referred to it just now as a form of technology, which many social scientists do re fer to writing as a as a kind of technology. But your novel in a way dramatizes a kind of struggle or dialectic between these two different handheld devices, you know, the phone and the book. And what they represent. And the technology represents a kind of logging or transcription of reality. And the book represents a kind of imagining of reality. And there's a sort of is is this not the sort of manichan struggle that's unfolding around us today? Yeah. I mean I think um you know as a as the media as as a m you know when the good thing about the relative marginalization of the book as a form, you know, compared to the iPhone or whatever, is that precisely when a technology like the book is no longer taken for granted. I think we come become more sensitive to what it can do and what we value about it as a specific medium, right? So I'm not like going around saying books good, cell phones bad. I mean I feel that way. But but that's like a boring argument that, you know, like what who is that gonna convince? But I but I do think it's an opportunity when you no longer take the book for granted, you start to get interested in its like materiality. You know, like every every part of the book becomes relevant in a kind of fresh way. You know, like like that, I was just the other day, I was I was reading a book and I was having that experience of like the actual weight of the remaining pages in my hand, like as they, as it dwindled, as the weight of the unread diminished, it became like an important part of the experience of reading. And I feel like something like that, like I'm just I'm more sensitive to the specificity of the codex as a form, precisely when these other more addictive devices are increasingly monopolizing our attention. And really, attention is the heart of the matter, too, right? I mean, I'm very uh grateful for like the work of D.Gram Burnett, who's writing a lot now about attention fracking. I mean, many people are. He's particularly eloquent, I think, about, you know, living in a condition in which the most powerful corporations basically try to capture, divide, and monetize our attention in ever smaller increments. And while that's of course a great threat to something like literature, it also means that we can ask again and with a new urgency, like what are the kinds of attention that the book as a form can sponsor and reward? And why might we care about that? And the book is a kind of attention preserve or oasis in the midst of this general environment of attention fracking. Like it makes me more excited about the book as a technology. Because increasingly, in order to feel like our lives are worth living, I think we're gonna have to have other modalities of attention other than scrolling or whatever. At the same time, within your novel, you sort of play devil's advocate for technology and for the phone. I mean, in a way, clearly technology holds um greater promise in terms of capturing and transcribing reality. I mean much more effectively than the imagination can and than writing can. I mean, there's a uh section I was struck by, um which I'll read from now. I still have it in my call history, or at some point I took a screenshot of my call history, and I have that , a record of a three-minute and twenty-seven-second incoming call with Laura. I put her in my contacts for some reason at 2:13 on April 21st, 2020, when she held the phone to my father's ear and I said the things I couldn't say again, things that he had no memory of hearing, at least no conscious memory. When my body was in the hospital, my mind was on a distant star. I uploaded that scre enshot to the cloud. So there's this sort of bewildering array of factual data documenting our existences. I mean, how can any writer compete with that? Yeah. Well because I mean because the in the I mean in generally, because the way that we're bombarded with information, which is kind of like stupefying uh and overwhelming actually gets in the way of a meaningful contact with reality. I mean, like just one total mundane example is the fact that I mean every parent I know, well, everyone I know, it doesn't have to be about parenting, has, you know , like an infinite number of photos on their phone, right? And as a result, you kind of don't look at any photos, right? Like no photo is special because of the kind of supersaturation of images. And you know, as opposed to there's not like an aura around a particular photo. A photo doesn't travel in time in the same way, like as a as a print. So the surfeit of that kind of information also kind of obliterates the power of the photograph in the first place as an index of experience, right? I think so I think there's a way in which more is often less with these kind of media, and that's certainly true in the book. Like ta uh Max was able to say those things to Thomas when they s like that mattered when they switched from video to phone. He said that he wouldn't have been able to say those things either in Thomas's physical presence where he would have been overwhelmed by his father, but nor could he say it on like a video call. It was only when a nurse held the phone to his ear. So again, it's it's the the channel is open when there's not too much and not too little. Uh and the too muchness can be the too muchness of physical presence or it can be the too muchness of a certain um of the verisimilitude on the screen. But but in that instance, you know, Max is Max is hungry for a signature that that conversation took place, both because Thomas doesn't remember it, obviously, but also because Thomas is always overwhelming Max's own sense of reality. So he needs some kind of relic. But I but one thing that I do think is fascinating in this, in the contemporary media environment is precisely what we do. with these relics Like I was talking about someone that about this earlier today, where like I have a voice message on my phone that was left by someone I love who's dead, and I don't listen to it. I don't want to listen to it. But I also don't feel like just swiping it into oblivion. Do you know what I mean? And and the question of kind of how we how we handle all of these artifacts, these like digital artifacts is quite fascinating to me because it feels like to delete it, I wouldn't I would almost like I need some kind of like ritual. I would need some way, you know, some kind of like religious ceremony around it. So I just I think that we're at a moment where our capacity for capture raises this second order question that I don't hear discuss that much, which is like, what do we let go and how? And you have to let it go. You have to de-accession something in order for your collection to be a collection, right? If you just try to capture everything, you have nothing. Aaron Ross Powell Transcription is, as you've very strongly hinted already, about lineage, about what connects one generation to the next. I mean Thomas is a father figure to the narrator, and the narrator is also a you know somewhat challenged father. Where does this interest , this inter generational sort of fixation you could say come from? I mean I um Middle Age, maybe is the boring answer, right? Where you're where you're I mean, I I know it's like deadly to describe your book as concerned with middle age, but but middle age in the sense of thinking about what it means to care for your elders and also if you're a parent caring for the young. And so that that state of being between generations um and the way the voices are thrown across them is particularly fascinating to me. I mean it's always been fascinating to me because art you know, when you're a when you're a writer, you're you're in conversation with the dead and with the future, right? Like you're receiving messages from the dead and you're transmitting them to unknown readers in the future. So I think parenting in middle age is just an inten sification of that question of how the voice travels across time. Um in this book, right, the narrator is between um a kid who he's worried about who's desperate to have a phone and an elder who never, even though he's a media theorist, never had one. And so he's also in the middle of the he he describes Thomas and his daughter as the only two people he loves who didn't have cell phones. And so he's also in the middle of a certain kind of media environment, which also I think made the book feel writ able. But I don't know. I mean, I I just to me, to me, the um I mean in the grandest terms like art and culture is about the possibility of a of a voice communicating beyond its the the the lifetime of its body. And and what Thomas and what hopefully the novel is trying to intensify is our experience of the air as alive with messages, right? As there being voices in the ether. And it suggests that sometimes the way to pick up those voices is by writing. That like if you put your cell phone on record, it's not going to hear the voices of the dead, but when you engage in the act of writing in relation to your predecessors, you end up taking dictation. You end up hearing and interacting with voices when you read and when you write of people who are long gone. So to me it's just the foundational mystery of of language and art making. I mean it's a surprisingly I wouldn't say conservative, but traditional model of creative inspiration where you're engaging with uh a tradition which is not something one would instinctively think about you, but you 're so engaged with the idea of forebears. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Um So who are your your literary ancestors, your intellectual ancestors? I mean there's so there's so many that that it's hard to say. I mean I I would say that maybe I should say because it's so relevant to this book and because he just died, that Alexander Kluga was a really important figure for me. I mean, I don't sound anything like Kluga in my writing, but but but Kluga, like a great mentor, a writer like Kluga is also somebody who gives you like his dead, right? I mean, so that you know, Adorno speaks through Kluga, Fritz Long, who was his first teacher in film, speaks through Kluga, and also his, you know , fascination with like obscure twelfth century rabbis speaks through kluga. Like your great teachers and figures are themselves media. And they were transmitted to you through kluga. Exactly. Exactly. Or like the way, you know, like or more recently, like the way I get Stein and Stevens is in part through John Ashbury. Like you need I needed someone who was a live body around me to give me the dead recently or otherwise. Like that's part of the mystery of teaching and transmission. So, you know, Kluga is very important. Another figure that maybe I should mention in regards to this book, is Rosemary Waldrup, who's a great poet and novelist, because I actually part of this book came out of being sent to interview Rosemary for the Paris Review. Rosemary doesn't resemble Thomas at all, except by being brilliant and German and around that age. But you know, I was really struck . You know how I mean we talked about this a little at the beginning. Like I interviewed her, and then the Paris Review makes edits and things are moved around, and you end up with a document that's real, but it doesn't bear much, it doesn't bear an exact relation to the conversation you actually had. And that got me thinking about how so many of the voices that matter to me are actually in a sense fictions or reconstructions. But Alexander Kluga, Rosemary Waldrup, and John Ashberry are just three recent figures I think about who are both amazing artists in their own right, so crucial for me , but also were media for other figures from the past. And you've not only received the tradition from many writers of the past, you also, as a teacher, pass pass it on, you also transmit. I mean you you've been something of a mentor to the poet Ocean Wong. Um could you tell us a little about that relationship? And I mean an amazing best-selling sort of poet and now prose writer, but also someone who's I haven't followed the appropriate with uh Ocean Ball Mike. I love Ocean. I mean he's a he's a total sweetheart. I mean I um as a teacher, uh if you're teaching Ocean or anyone else who's like really talented, I feel like you largely recommend books and get out of the way. But also I think I think when you teach, um and this is an aspect of teaching that is a little bit like parenting, like you never really know what you're teaching, right? I mean, there's a really good in Adam Phillips new book, there's a really good essay about Winnicott and thinking about Winnicott in relation to teaching, where it talks about like teaching is this thing where I think I think Phillips says at a certain point, you're you're provisioning the dream life of the student. It's not like you have like a stable body of knowledge that you communicate. You're, you're, you don't know what they're going to take from you, but hopefully, and and they're going to see things in you that aren't really there. There's all kinds of transference and displacement and everything else. But that can be another way that you provision the dream life. Like you become a figure, they're reading you, they're reading things through you that you might not be in possession of, but then they So um I mean it was a great blessing to have Ocean come through a classroom. But I think that in all of teaching, beyond just like you taking your students' work seriously, it's a lot about helping put them in contact with contemporaries and with forebears that will have unpredictable results in their own writing practice. But I love that idea that you that what the some of the most important things you teach are not things you know. They're things that you transmit without exactly possessing. And I really like that phrase that I think is Adam Phillips and not Winnicott's, but now I'm not so sure about teaching being the provisioning of the dream life. And leaving um art behind and returning to life. I mean, what were your actual ancestors or your your parents like? I mean what was your childhood like and your relationship with your parents? I mean we're very close. And they're all they're psychologists. Yes. My family is full of psychologists . And which means like language is all and my mom is a writer of books on women's psychology and and the there was certainly a sense that language um was always primary and that language might be expressing more than you knew you were expressing. And probably a sensitivity to family systems in a way that influenced ma'am, I wouldn't have known this at the time, that really influenced my thinking about the novel as a form, like the triangle that's so central to this book. You know, the way that when when the narrator is relating to Thomas, he's also relating to Max and so on and so forth. So I mean I suppose um intergenerational dynamics are so central to the study of psychology and the practice of psychoanalysis. I mean in a way is that kind of where you get it from this this uh interest of yours. Aaron Powell I'm sure yeah, I'm sure on some level, but it's also the way tradition and experiment works in literature generally. There there's no such thing as starting fresh. And it's always about you you inherit a grammar of the possible and it's like what new move can you make within it? And how might you expand it? And that's always a you know, that's always an intergener ational practice. How do your parents feel about your writing and and their portrayal in in your writings? I mean, there's a funny moment in your first novel where you refer to your father as a fascist Yeah, and he claims his mother is dead when she's alive and well in order to get away. Yeah definitely. But they can also tell me apart from the protagonists pretty easily. But they do have a sense of humor about it. I mean, it was my last novel that was most intimately involved in their voices, or at least in my mother's voice. Topeka school portrays, in a sense, your alter egos, but also your childhood in your youth in Topeka. I want to ask about that. I mean, um you were uh you were a debater and you you portray that experience, you're very interested in that book in you know public discourse and rhetoric. Um so I want to ask you some political questions. I mean, what do you think about Donald Trump ? Oh man . We're going to take a quick break now. Stay with us, we'll be back after this . What do you think about Donald Trump right now, let's say, I mean what you know and and and world events which you would be debating, let's say you were still at the Topeka School. What would a coherent statement be? I mean uh you know I'll I mean I'm I'm horrified. And I'm I'm horrified not just about um the kind of psychotic behavior, but also about the whole like political class in America, right? I mean , as someone who used to do some of that debate stuff in high school, it was quite a profound experience to watch the Biden Trump debate. Which was like what? A contest between like senility and psych osis and psychosis one, because it had more energy. I mean it's not it like it there there are all kinds of things to say about Trump and the the current regime and all the different forms of madness that are happening, but I actually think it's more useful to broaden it to the whole political class. I mean, uh i in the sense that, you know, we were all told that questions about Biden's functioning were a right-wing conspiracy, and then we saw the reality. So I just mean to say that the bankruptcy of American political speech is something that's circulating through the whole political class. Um But I'm terrified and I'm looking for pockets of optimism that are happening on other political levels. Like it was very exciting to see the political establishment get upset in the mayoral election and have a sense that like new coalitions can emerge and there are new possibilities for imagining the city. But it's definitely a moment where where whatever political speech is, it isn't even discourse. It's a kind of um it's a kind of experimental sound poetry, a kind of mashup of of of I mean there's not even there's no principle of non-cont radiction in a single sentence you can say several contradictory things. It's a it's a state of it's a it's a state that when I was younger, I associated more with like data and experimental poetry than I thought would come to characterize political discourse, which is not to say political discourse was in great shape when I was young, but it was different. So I don't know how to make a general statement except to say that the bankruptcy of the language of the American political class is stupefying and poisonous, and there has to be the emergence of a new language. I mean, one of the perhaps underappreciated aspects of transcription is the way it's sort of haunted by certain kinds of history. There's particularly the history of fascism. Thomas grew up in Nazi Germany. Was that a pointed reference? I mean, do you think we are staring in the face of something similar well there's no question that we're staying in that's there's no question that we're in a moment in which the combination of you you can't think the contemporary right without thinking about its relationship to the internet and Twitter. And there's this moment in the book, you know, one of the first things that Thomas says in his interview is, you know, that his earliest memory was of the disembodied voice, and he talks about hearing Hitler's voice on the radio, which is also something Rosemary Waldrip said in her interview, this endlessly ascending, shrill voice on the radio. And then he goes on to say that the radio was always on even when it was off, that it was kind of structuring experience. And there's no quite you know it's not there's no question that the the book poses and wants to make felt without spelling out the question of what part of the present and its relation to media parallels or doesn't parallel that f infamous conjunction of Hitler and the radio. Yeah, the r the role of the mass media in in um uh disseminating f fascist ideology. Um do you think there's a comparison here with the sort of frenzied mass media of our own age, you know, on social media and the disinformation and and and so on. And Trump is a sort of social has got his own social network, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean and also that you just can't think any political situ ation without thinking about it's the way it disseminates the voice and the image. But this book wanted to have a different, you know, I felt like the the t Topeka School tried to be in a way, although I think this was kind of overstated in the way the book was positioned, but it was kind of positioned as being this kind of sweeping prehistory of the American present, which I don't really think it was. I think it was much more idiosyncratic in particular than that. But in this book, I wanted to kind of make all these issues felt around the edges, um, but not really engage them essayistically. Aaron Powell Yeah, it's quite hard to subtract the way your narrator and other characters talk about it from your own kind of deeply ironic kind of mode of narration. Um so a lot of people will be wondering what you would what you actually think. Yeah. Yeah. Well what I think I I don't think I've I mean what I think is not particularly interesting, it's that but it it is that we are in a state of m emergency it would be impossible to to minimize. Right. I mean, my my first reading from this book was at the exact same time that Trump had casually said he was gonna well I don't even remember the quote exactly, but he was going to a whole civilization would die at 8 p.m. Yeah right? I mean just this a an American president just speaking casually of a genocidal, no embarrassment of a genoc idal project. And but but but but part of what's what's difficult in this moment too, right? Is on the one hand it feels crazy to talk about books or anything without just talking about um Trump and Netanyahu and what's happening in the world. But on the other hand, it's like as soon as one starts talking about it, you're you're kind of surrendering to the endless news cycle and you're surrendering the domain of the imagination or the slower rhythm of literature, which can't save us, but seems like a really important domain to protect to. It's an age old debate. Yeah, and I'm I just I feel it is an age old debate and I think it's a I think it's a particularly intense moment for it, in part because as so many people have commented upon, like attention has become the kind of currency of the political sphere in a new way. And it's like, do you let your attention be captured by the latest truth social post? It seems crazy not to pay attention to someone with nuclear weapons saying such things. But on the other hand, do you surrender your attention to the perpetual scandal of that domain, or do you try to preserve, you know, the capacity to actually have a thought and an experience that isn't totally assimil ated to that crazy rhythm. Right. So so it it is, you're absolutely right that it's an ancient debate that I feel like is having a very , I feel like we're in a really intense mode I mean you mentioned um in this conversation Theodore Dawner's you know, something of a media theorist who perhaps has influenced your book. And of course he argued that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz and obviously writers such as yourself have been writing poetry and prose and carried on making art. I mean, i is that something that artists just need to keep doing regardless of the injustice and the tyranny that's unfolding around themselves. Or or is it frivolous? Somehow both. Somehow it's both totally essential and totally frivolous. You know, I mean, the narrator of my first novel ha like had this youthful statement that uh like increasingly actually feels right to me, where he's he he can't he's he's kind of repudiating all the vanguard claims about what art could do, at least what his art could do, you know, that you could write disjunctive poetry that was going to interrupt the smooth functioning of capitalism or whatever. Like he has basically no investment in the idea that poems can really make things happen. But he also says that if he imagines a world in which you subtract the poems and the novels and the paintings and the films, and if you really took all of art out of it That it would be a world that he would find totally uninhabitable, that he'd swallow a bottle of pills. And I think there's this way in which we have to hold at once the idea that we don't want to exaggerate the claim that like certainly not a weird book of mine, it like constitutes radical political action, like by no means, but but that preserving domains of alterity and possibility and imagination, it is nevertheless a question of survival. And if you really concede everything just to the political news cycle and the people who have monopolized our attention or the blue light of the screen, you will have lost, you know, the things that make life worth living in the first place and the capacity for thought that can hop hopefully eventually unfold an alternative to the disaster of the present. Aaron Powell How do you envision the future? I mean, you're the father of two girls. Yeah. Does that not mean you have to be optimistic to a certain degree? I mean how how do you see it all panning out? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, you uh optimistic. I mean optimistic would be like, you know , the the Klugian answer, the Alexander Kluge answer would just be that chaos, you know, the chaos of the present also means that things are unpredictable. And whether or not you're optimistic about the future, the future is not foreclos ed because you don't have the authority or the knowledge to think of the to think of the future as a known quantity. And I think, you know, I mean, I think with when you write a book or when you parent or when you do anything, you're you're you're you're ha you have you have a minimal faith that there is unpredictability and possibil ity. And like that's that's enough because it has to be. And that the future is really a texture of the present, like the future is a fiction. And that we have to experiment with telling each other fictions about the future that enrich the present and make actual futures more possible. Am I like walking around feeling great about the prospects of the species? No. And what about the prospects of the writer? I mean is there a future for the writer in an age of supposedly sort of diminishing literacy? I mean you'll have heard all the punditry around that. I mean will the large language model become the prospect It might become prevalent or it might become dominant, but the things I care about have never been like that I care about most have never been dominant relative to the culture, right? So I think that the it's that thing again where if the large language models, which are fascinating and mysterious too. Like I'm like not like don't look at them. I mean, they're incredible. They're scary, but they're also like incredible and full of mystery, and I'm sure we'll learn all kinds of of things. Um t to m to me the issue is not whether writing I think writing and reading can be revitalized precis ely when they're they're relatively marginal. Like whose life is worth living if you don't have an ensemble of basically marginal practices relative to like, you know, OpenAI and Amazon and the United States government. I mean the thing that makes life worth living are marginal practices relative to those forces. So writing might well become an incre human writing of complexity might well become more marginal, but that doesn't mean it'll be less valuable to me. Do you know what I mean? And like when you ask about like parenting, like when I imagine my girls' lives or whatever, like I'm I'm imagining to me, it's not about whether or not poems are viable, widespread, cultural forms or not. It's about whether their lives can involve practices of all sorts that they feel like are humane and meaning-giving. And that's a different question from whether or not like will LLMs be dominant, you know. Um But again, I I would just say that like the unpredictability, you know, like the book is not just about like new media as loss. It's about refreshing our capacity for wonder before the fact of mediation itself, that media can exist, that we create these extensions of ourselves that allow our voice to be thrown across generations. So it can be faked now, you know, very easily by an AI, the voice, but that doesn't change my interest in the real thing. Aaron Powell Ben Lerner, thank you so much for joining us on the at the New States man and um it's been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much . You've been listening to the exchange from the New Statesman with me, Tanjil Rashid, and Ben Lerner. The podcast will be back