After reading:

You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer, Riverhead Books, New York, 2024.

This novel is two parts historical fabulation and one part magical realism. Of these ingredients, I found the former more compelling. The author imagines the court of Moctezuma II as the empire encounters what would become European colonialism. The portrayal of Moctezuma’s palace leans a little bit too hard on some tropes of the exotic and has notes of The Heart of Darkness, but, nonetheless, does the work of reminding the reader that empires are empires and emperors the same.

I spent several decades of my life reading nonfiction at work and mostly poetry for fun. The main fiction works that made it into my diet were three different translations of Don Quixote, one reading of Moby Dick, and an occasional short piece. During that time, I grew, somewhat, old.

Now, such a constrained diet seems a little pointless – quite the opposite of what I thought aging would do to my reading preferences. As a young person I figured time was valuable and the less you have of it the more valuable it becomes. Therefore, in that equation, one’s reading choices become pickier and pickier. For now, though, I give up. (Or time is short and what even matters.)

I didn’t want to start this way. But it’s where I am. Sorry.

Two and half years after ChatGPT launched and I am just now beginning to sort out what LLMs are for. From my reluctant and limited recent use, it appears that Gen AI in writing and image generation is for the bored. The product it produces is not meant to be read. The images are cringeworthy.

The tasks it completes are those that the user was too bored to tackle. Sure, maybe it gets some people off to a start, but even that start is a dull one.

This is the first post on my latest effort to create a Hugo site.