The Bit I Don't Do

For this imaginary book, I have a very firm rule: no machine writes a sentence of it.

The cover is another matter. I don’t do covers.

There. The principles are in place. We can begin saving money.

J Mascis has given an answer I recognize. In an October 18 interview with Terrence O’Brien at The Verge, the Dinosaur Jr. frontman talks about the generative-AI video for his solo song “Old Friends,” released two years ago. “Yeah, just some kid did it,” he says. “I thought it looked cool.” Then: “I don’t do much with videos.”

He also calls it a slippery slope. O’Brien reports that Mascis doesn’t believe there is a place for AI in music making. Onstage, he likes amps, no click tracks, the sound of the band in the room. He thinks some people in the audience are hungry for something “reality-based.” That’s his impression, not a census of the people buying tickets.

I am not going to convict him of anything from an interview. It doesn’t tell me what the video cost, whose work trained the machinery, or whether anybody lost a commission. It does give me that useful little sentence about what he doesn’t do.

I would like it on my stationery.

Back to my imaginary book. There is an illustrator, also invented, and I have sent him a description of the cover I want. A room. A man. Something wrong with the light. Not too literal. Not one of those covers which appears to have been assembled from the contents of a detective’s pockets.

He asks what the book is about.

I tell him about the room.

He says he can see the room. What’s the book about?

Already this is becoming a larger commission than I had intended. I wanted him to supply a picture, not discover that I have trouble describing the thing I have spent months describing.

He is quite willing to use a generated image as a starting point. He likes doing the lettering himself. He wants to know where the title will sit, what the picture ought to promise, what sort of reader I am trying to attract. He doesn’t need me to deliver a speech about the sanctity of drawing. He needs an answer.

I could supply a synopsis. The same machinery could help me make one. Feed it the manuscript, ask for the important parts. Then he wouldn’t have to read the whole thing and I wouldn’t have to explain it.

A wonderful arrangement. Almost nobody involved would have to encounter the book.

Except the customer. We are saving the full experience for him.

Now I become difficult. The important parts is not an innocent instruction when it concerns my own pages. There is a conversation in chapter four which doesn’t move the plot forward. I know this because I have defended it against precisely that charge. The man says something funny to avoid answering a question. Later he cannot remember what the question was. Nothing explodes. Nobody discovers a document. It could disappear from a synopsis without leaving a hole visible to a stranger.

I would notice. I have spent more time on that conversation than on the man entering the room.

The illustrator says, reasonably, that I can tell him this. He isn’t asking a summary to settle which paragraphs deserve to live. He is trying to put a picture on a book. He can work from an account of it, provided I give him one that is useful.

This is an irritatingly adequate answer. I had been preparing a defense of literature. He has offered me a small job.

And he hasn’t asked me to read a hundred pages about lettering before I am allowed to dislike his title treatment. I can look at it and say the name is hard to read. I can be right. Not knowing how to make it doesn’t disqualify me from wanting the result.

There goes the easy bargain in which everybody must either learn everybody else’s trade or shut up. We would never get the damned book out.

A generated image makes my request for the room easy to satisfy without making it less vague.

But in our imaginary exchange he wants to know whether the man should look frightened.

No, I tell him. The man thinks he’s doing rather well.

Does the reader think so?

Not by chapter four.

He asks whether we should see the man’s face at all.

I hadn’t considered that. I had been ordering a face with something wrong behind it. Now I am thinking about how little the man in my book knows about what he looks like to anybody else. The illustrator isn’t asking me to admire the difficulty of his work. He has made my instructions less satisfactory to me.

I still don’t want to do covers. He still doesn’t want to read every sentence. Neither of us has become an ambassador for the other’s profession. He says he has enough to try something.

Before he goes, he asks for the title.

I give him the one I’ve been using for months.

He says it sounds like a different book.

I was hoping to leave the words out of this.

Source: J Mascis has nothing better to do