Do the AI evangelists understand that films aren't just empty visual spectacles but stories rooted in characters' emotional experiences? Without a guiding human presence that audiences can connect to, it's all just noise.

Obviously not the main point of the quote here, but that Jeremy Irons audiobook of Lolita is indeed a masterpiece.

Time for some performative reading:

Seiobo There Below is an incredible book. It’s easy to talk about the power of art and the soul of a work of art, but Krasznahorkai makes you feel it. The kind of book that changes the way you look at a painting or a statue.

It is kind of funny that AI might render Amazon unusable and lead everyone back to physical bookstores. Some might call this karmic retribution.

The thing about Pynchon is that amidst all the Scooby Doo silliness he can hit you with a hauntingly beautiful passage—a layering of sensory detail and a few wistful character beats that make a place and a moment come alive in an unexpected way.

Her command of sensory details is so good, so evocative. When I first read it, I had to stop and copy down this passage from the end of the first story "Aloeswood Incence":

One inch and the Dodgers would have lost. As the quote below says, the divine graciously descending.

Whenever I feel something like this, I go back to a classic 19th-century novel—Thomas Hardy or Middlemarch or Dickens. The kind of book to put modern problems in perspective, to help you remember that people have felt these things for centuries and found a way through.