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The Literary Saloon Archive

1 March 2025

1 March: Martin Puchner Q & A | Andrey Kurkov's 'books of my life' | The Aesthetics of Resistance - the play

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       Martin Puchner Q & A

       In The Harvard Crimson Kate J. Kaufman has Fifteen Questions: Martin Puchner on Philosopher Chatbots, AI Writing, and the Future.
       Among Puchner's responses:

FM: What advice would you give to current students who are grappling with how to use AI in their writing classes this semester ?

MP: I think there is only one use of AI, especially if you’re trying to learn how to write, that’s not good. And that is, just produce a couple of prompts and let it write the first draft. I think everything else is great. It’s great as a search engine. I think it’s really great as a sparring partner. I think a lot of students have trouble incorporating counter-arguments and counter-evidence into their writing.

So there are actually lots of uses, and I’m all for them. The one use where you just push a button and use the first answer it gives — I think that’s the one use where I feel like you would actually cheat yourself because you wouldn’t learn good writing.

       See also Puchner's Custom GPTs page, where you can: "Time-travel to converse with philosophers".

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Andrey Kurkov's 'books of my life'

       The latest The Guardian 'The books of my life'-column features Death and the Penguin-author Andrey Kurkov: ‘At 17, I got my hands on an illegal copy of The Gulag Archipelago’.
       Among his responses:

My favourite book growing up

Martin Eden by Jack London. The main character’s dream of becoming a writer -- his tremendously strong will -- was probably what captivated me most.

       (This is also the book he selected for: "The book I could never read again".)
       And:

The book that made me want to be a writer

Goat Song by the Russian poet and novelist Konstantin Vaginov. Banned in the USSR, it was given to me by an American professor of literature who, when I was about 19, visited the university in Kyiv where I was studying English and French. You'll find traces of Goat Song in my novel The Silver Bone.

       Conveniently, New York Review Books is bringing out a translation of Goat Song in May; see their publicity page, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.co.uk

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Aesthetics of Resistance - the play

       With the third volume of Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance finally coming out in English later this month -- 25 March; mark your calendars ! see the Duke University Press publicity page -- it's worth noting that there is a French stage-version, L'Esthétique de la résistance, which, conveniently is being revived at the Théâtre National de l'Odéon, running today through the sixteenth -- see their publicity page.
       Play-time is three hours and twenty minutes, with two intermissions extending the whole to four hours.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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