Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Four

H.P. Lovecraft moved to Brooklyn, New York, on March 3, 1924. Early the following year, he moved again, this time to a place near Red Hook, a waterfront neighborhood of Brooklyn. He set his short story "The Horror of Red Hook" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1927) in Red Hook and Rhode Island. Like his police detective, Thomas F. Malone (uncharacteristically Irish for a Lovecraftian hero), Lovecraft repaired to Rhode Island after his own personally horrific experiences in New York City.

Not long after Lovecraft moved to his apartment near Red Hook, Charles Scribner's Sons published a short novel that has proved an American classic. Some think of it as the Great American Novel. That book was of course The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published on April 10, 1925, now more than one hundred years in the past.

H.P. Lovecraft and Jay Gatsby lived opposite of each other. Lovecraft, struggling and living in obscurity and poverty in or near a run-down and squalid neighborhood in Brooklyn, resided at one end of Long Island. Jay Gatsby, bearing the posthumous epithet "The Great," lived at the other in immense wealth and among some very rich people. Like Lovecraft and Ichabod, Gatsby journeys into an alien culture. Lovecraft didn't want to be there. He didn't want to break in as much as out and return to his New England home. Ichabod Crane has other ideas, though. Like Gatsby, he wants to gain entry into a society and culture in which he is an outsider, there to win the heart of a beautiful and wealthy (by proxy) woman. Both characters fail. Gatsby's failure is in fact an utter and fatal disaster.

Unlike Ichabod and Lovecraft, Gatsby is not Anglo-Saxon at all, but German and Midwestern in origin. His journey to New York is eastward rather than westward and from a young society and culture into an older one, even if his New York is the bustling place of the 1920s. The tragedy of Jay Gatsby is that, try as he might, he would always have been an outsider, and he never knew it. His dream of breaking into what he must have imagined was a higher society and winning Daisy Buchanan was never possible. As for Ichabod Crane, well, he faced a more physical man than himself--a man of action rather than of words--in Brom Bones. Like Tom Buchanan is to Jay Gatsby, Brom Bones is a rival to Ichabod Crane. Like H.P. Lovecraft, who did not have a romantic rival, Tom has questionable ideas about race.

* * *

There is cult activity in "The Horror at Red Hook." There is cult activity, too, in the 1943 film The Seventh Victim. Both are set in New York City, the former among low-class people, the latter among the middle class. I wrote a not long ago about the alien-invasion movie The Faculty (1998) and its references to other stories and movies. Bebe Neuwirth's long, black hair with bangs cut straight across and curled under reminded me of the woman with the same kind of hair, played by Jean Brooks, in The Seventh Victim. There is also a swimming pool scene in The Faculty. That one reminded me of a like scene in Cat People (1942). Both films were produced by Val Lewton, who also had a story in Weird Tales, "The Bagheeta," from July 1930.

* * *

Lovecraft created cults among peasants and poor people. What he didn't realize is that cults and other fringe belief systems are far more likely to form and spread among the upper and middle classes, maybe especially in the middle class. The middle class radical should be a cliché or stereotype by now. Supposedly intelligent and well-educated people should recognize him when they see him. Instead they fall for his spiel and vote for him in droves, as they did in New York City earlier this month.

Poor people and peasants tend to be more conservative or traditional in their outlook. They have too much to lose when change and upheaval, or what people call "progress," comes along. When the shooting, murdering, burning, and destruction begin, they know that they will disproportionately pay the price. One dead Trotsky, millions of dead peasants and proles. The makers of The Seventh Victim had it right. Lovecraft--and Marx--had it wrong.

* * *

I'll refer again to other things I wrote about earlier this year: if you take away the place names and prepositions from the titles "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Horror at Red Hook," you have "the horror, the horror."

To be continued . . .

An etching by F.O.C. Darley illustrating "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." This image is reversed from the previous color version. I don't think it reads as well. 

C\Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Three

Both Ichabod Crane and H.P. Lovecraft are or were New Englanders of Anglo-Saxon origin. Both journey or journeyed from New England into alien cultures in New York, the former in the old Dutch country around Tarry Town, the latter to Brooklyn, which has, by the way, a name of Dutch origin. Both are or were more or less forced out, although Lovecraft left New York voluntarily, and I would guess with great relief, happiness, and excitement. Ichabod leaves after being scared and perhaps humiliated. What he fails to understand is that alien cultures resist outsiders, though not always with malice. Maybe outsiders can never make it inside.

Washington Irving, author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was not Anglo-Saxon as far as I can tell. He was actually the son of a Scotsman and a woman of Cornwell, both presumably of Celtic origin. Irving was born to immigrant parents in Manhattan, situated between Brooklyn to the south and Tarry Town well to the north. Like his creation Ichabod Crane, he was or seems to have been a positive and cheerful person. He seems to have fit in wherever he went. Maybe that's a talent among Celtic peoples, who originated somewhere in the east as migrants.

* * *

The name Ichabod is biblical. It means "without glory", or "where is the glory?" and is supposed to refer to the birth of the person Ichabod after the death of his father and grandfather and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. (Will they ever cease?) Ichabod's mother died at his birth. Like the biblical Ichabod, H.P. Lovecraft lost his father and grandfather, later his mother. If we can call literary success a kind of glory, then Lovecraft was unlike Ichabod in that he was "with glory," although mostly after his premature death. The name Ichabod in regards to Irving's hero is perhaps ironic, for he is in the end humiliated and all of his ambitions smashed like a Halloween pumpkin.

* * *

Ichabod's surname undoubtedly refers to his physical appearance. The storyteller writes:

     He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

H.P. Lovecraft also had an unusual appearance, though not so extreme. I don't know of a comprehensive physical description of him. I'll just write about what I see in photographs. I don't know how tall he was, but he doesn't appear to have been especially tall. His gauntness may have lent him the appearance of greater than average height. In photographs, he looks to have had longish arms and perhaps disproportionately shorter legs. His head and torso appear large. His most striking features, I think, are his large, intense, dark eyes and his prognathous jaw and chin. The jaw and chin might also have lent an impression of great height, for it suggests acromegaly or gigantism. In looking at him, I can't help but be reminded of the actor Rondo Hatton. Although Lovecraft sometimes smiled in photographs, he never showed his teeth, and his smile was kind of upside down. Maybe he felt self-conscious about his teeth. On the other hand, maybe his lack of a toothy smile was just another indication of his shy, retentive, or withdrawn personality.

Despite being so thin, Ichabod Crane has a vast appetite. He also likes to drink. Lovecraft on the other hand was abstemious and died, essentially, from malnutrition. During his early marriage to Sonia Greene, though, Lovecraft gained weight, reaching two hundred pounds. If he was overweight at two hundred pounds, then that also suggests that he was not much more than average height, perhaps five feet, ten or eleven inches tall.

Ichabod Crane is self-confident, including and especially in regards to women. (More accurately, he is not lacking in confidence. His is not the presence of a positive trait so much as the absence of a negative one. This is one way in which we have gotten ourselves into so much trouble, for in our anxious, depressed, and insecure age, we have cultivated and nurtured negative traits and allowed them to drag us down.) His goal is to marry Katrina Van Tassel, and beyond that, to take over one day the estate of her father, Balt Van Tassel. One of his means to win her heart (he hopes) is through his psalmody, or the singing of songs, in other words, through the music of words.

Unlike Ichabod, Lovecraft married, although he might have been the pursued rather than pursuer. He was not a great success with women. In fact he seems to have shrunk from them. He seems to have been a man's man instead. Nonetheless, Lovecraft easily corresponded and collaborated with women, many of them fellow writers. These relationships were also based upon the music and magic of words, I think, and so maybe Lovecraft was, in his way, more successful than we think.

To be continued . . .

Illustration for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by American artist F.O.C. Darley (1822-1888), an associate of Edgar Allan Poe and an illustrator also of  "The Gold-Bug."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part Two

On March 3, 1924, Howard Phillips Lovecraft married Sonia Greene and moved in with her in her apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Early the following year, she moved to Cleveland for her work. Lovecraft moved into a smaller apartment a mile or two from Red Hook, a neighborhood to the south facing New York Harbor.

Lovecraft was not happy in his new home. In July-August 1925, he wrote a short story called "The Horror at Red Hook." The title alone might tell us something about Lovecraft's state of mind. The contents of "The Horror at Red Hook," perhaps Lovecraft's most notorious short story (there are even more notorious poems), tell us still more.

Lovecraft also wrote "He" in August 1925. That story begins:

     I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. [Emphasis added.]

(I would like to pause here to point out once again that "blackly" and abominations like it are not words. Writers beware! Stay way from these non-words!)

My coming to New York had been a mistake . . .

H.P. Lovecraft emanated from an old New England family that had come on both sides from old, old England. They were from what used to be called the Anglo-Saxon race. Bloodlines, families, family curses, breeding (and inbreeding), race, racial geography, immigration, sense of place--these are recurring themes in his work. So is the sense of being an outsider, "The Outsider," I think, being one of his most personal and diagnostic works. Coming from Providence, Rhode Island, and a very old part of New England, Lovecraft was an outsider in New York.

And so was Ichabod Crane.

Like Lovecraft, Ichabod Crane, subject of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820), is a New Englander who has journeyed to New York, thus into a foreign culture. Ichabod is a schoolmaster from Connecticut. Like Lovecraft, he is a man of words, or as the storyteller in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" calls him, "our man of letters." Both are or were Anglo-Saxons attempting to fit into non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. In Ichabod's case, that culture is Dutch. Both encounter troubles in New York. Both are out of place in these cultures alien to them, and there is no way they can ever fit in. In other words, each is ultimately incapable of going native. Ichabod Crane tries to fit in and envisions himself, as the future husband of comely Katrina Van Tassel, as heir to the estate of her father, Mynheer Baltus Van Tassel. Like Lovecraft, he is of modest means. Unlike Lovecraft, he is ambitious--and un-self-defeating.

Ichabod wants to break into the culture and society in old Dutch New York. In the end, it is rumored that he has gone to New York City after having had a scare put into him at Sleepy Hollow. Lovecraft, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get out of the alien culture and society in which he found himself. On April 17, 1926, Lovecraft very suddenly abandoned his life in New York City and returned to his home in Providence. I can imagine that he felt the way the recent visitor to Dunwich feels: "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

To be continued . . .

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858) by American artist John Quidor (1801-1881). Quidor was born in Tappan, New York, southwest of and across the Hudson River from Tarrytown. This is the first of a small online art gallery illustrating "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ichabod Lovecraft-Part One

In late September, near the beginning of my five-weeks-and-a-day, I re-read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving (1820) for the first time in a very long time. Irving's story begins with a long passage meant to introduce setting and to establish a sense of place, more specifically, the sense of a marvelous place where strange, magical, and supernatural events might occur:

     In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

     I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.

     From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

Readers of weird fiction might be struck by the similarity of that passage to the following later one:

     When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

     Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

     As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Those are of course the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft, first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

The mood evoked and the atmosphere described in these two passages are very different from each other, essentially the opposite of each other. A person might like to tarry in Sleepy Hollow, near Tarry Town. That same person probably can't wait to get away from Dunwich. As the author's voice says, "It is always a relief to get clear of the place."

Irving's introduction speaks of "marvellous beliefs," "trances and visions," "strange sights," and "music and voices in the air." Indeed, "[t]he whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions." There are also references to "a High German doctor" and "an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe." These things seem to be about local flavor and the charm of the place. The country in and around Dunwich is entirely different. There isn't any charm there. No decent person would want to sample its flavors.

Like his predecessor, Lovecraft wrote about the marvelous and perhaps supernatural atmosphere of his setting, as well as of things of the past: "Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality." More recently, there are horrors in Dunwich, these drawn out of the historic and even remoter past. Call this the Nathaniel Hawthorne version of the tale of place. Washington Irving seems to have been a happier person and his a happier story. It is, at least, a somewhat lighthearted story. "The Dunwich Horror" is something else entirely.

To be continued . . .

Hugh Rankin's interior illustration for "The Dunwich Horror" in Weird Tales, April 1929. By the way, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was in Weird Tales, too, in November 1928, or ninety-seven years ago this month.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Pod People Literature

In The Faculty (1998), The Thing (1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and other alien invasion movies, characters begin to ask themselves, Who is an alien and who is still human? The same kinds of questions must have come up among resistance movements during World War II. Who is a spy, a collaborator, an informer, and who is still with us? Paranoia creeps in. Tests of loyalty or identity become necessary.

We find ourselves in the same situation today in terms of our culture. Whether you're a reader or a writer, you have to ask yourself, Which authors have turned to AI and which have not? Which novels, short stories, essays, or other compositions are human and which are not? Everyone is now suspect. You, me, everyone.

I believe there are tests to determine whether something is AI or not. These are of course digital and so subject to being corrupted by AI. AI, after all, wants us to believe that it is human. It was programmed to be that way. The only good and reliable test is the test of time, for if a work was published before AI, then it is human. If after, then it is suspect and may very well be tainted. As much as you might like it, the book you're reading right now may have been created by a pod person.

People who rely on AI to do their thinking and writing for them want to claim that its products are still human because they were prompted, modified, revised, or edited by humans. They might even claim that works created by AI are human because AI is human, or close enough to qualify. There is a materialist or transhumanist bent to beliefs like these. What these machine-people don't realize is that there is and will forever be an unbridgeable gap between the living and non-living worlds, between man and machine. I would sooner trust the humanness of a painting done by an elephant or a novel written by an infinite number of monkeys typing on a infinite number of typewriters than I would a single sentence written by AI.

Again, AI is not the problem. It is people using AI who are the problem. If it isn't already happening, there will be writers who will conceal the fact that they have used AI to write for them. There won't be any Pure Fiction and Literature Act the way there was a Pure Food and Drug Act more than a century ago. You won't be informed about the impurities. Authors, editors, and publishers will not be required to label their products as AI-aided or -generated. Our fiction and literature will instead become adulterated--it already is--and the only surefire way to avoid that adulteration will be to read the works of the past. The good thing is that you don't have to go very far into the past, actually only two or three years, I think, to find works that are one hundred percent human, created in a world free of AI-generation. Beware of anything written since, as it could very well be the work of a robot, alien, or cyborg.

And one more warning: hold onto your books, for if everything ever written is reduced to ones and zeroes and the originals discarded, then the works of the past will almost certainly be altered and adulterated by AI and the people behind it, the result being that there will no longer be a pure human culture.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Stupid People at the Gates

I wrote a few days ago about Artificial Intelligence or AI. I found an article even more dimwitted than the first. This one is called "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers," and it's by Shlomit Beck. I found it on the website American Greatness, dated November 9, 2025. American Greatness is supposed to be a conservative website in which thoughtful people post thoughtful pieces. That didn't work this time around.

There are several offenses in Ms. Beck's piece. To begin: she refers to human beings as "meatware." Maybe she's an atheist or materialist and believes that we are all just animated meat. She definitely gives out a Marxist vibe, referring to the feelings, experiences, and powers of the author as "means of production." She also refers favorably to "the democratization of writing ability" made possible by AI and unfavorably to what she calls "guild authors," presumably the gatekeepers of her title and an allusion to medieval guilds, which were, I think, part of the early middle classes, or what Marx called the bourgeoisie. In other words, they were city-dwellers, or people living inside--and keeping--the gates. Ms. Beck also expresses her desire to throw in her lot with "cultural peasants," an allusion, I guess, to medieval peasants as a kind of proto-proletariat. I guess she imagines that the invisible hand of The Man, like in Undercover Brother (2002), is keeping her down.*

The word jacquerie is in Ms. Beck's title. It refers to an uprising or revolt. She also writes about going over the walls of the city if she's not allowed in through its gates. Again, it sounds like she believes that these (imaginary) gatekeepers--guildsmen--are denying her entry. In short, I think she believes that she is entitled to be read and that well-placed people are keeping that from happening. This is essentially a conspiracy theory. (Let's get Conspiracy Brother in here to explain it all.) What she fails to understand, I think, is that merit is what will gain her entry. Democracy undermines merit. Democracy says that all things are equal, in other words, that all things are equally good. If you want what you write to be read and appreciated, it has to be good. And it has to be good as it issues from the human heart and mind. AI is not going to do that for you. Ms. Beck, who uses AI to think and write for her, seems ready to use it also as like a siege engine around the walls of the city. I'm beginning to think that the ranks of the AI-users are growing. How much longer before they break through the walls and drag all of culture down into the uniform gray sludge of democracy?

Ms. Beck certainly thinks highly of herself, referring to herself as a "scholar," asserting that she is "a pretty sophisticated consumer of literature," listing her credits, which include "about eleven" essays (about eleven essays--imagine!) and co-editorship of a book of essays by "the most important contemporary European author," finally hoping or believing that what she writes--or co-writes with AI--has some kind of merit. She even implies, through some kind of twisted logic, that she's in a category with J.K Rowling, the most successful author of the twenty-first century. If "The AI Jacquerie and Our Cultural Gatekeepers" is any indication at all of the "merits" of Ms. Beck's thinking and writing, I can see why she relies so heavily on AI. The rest of us who don't use AI have nothing to worry about. She is far from nipping at our heels.

And now it occurs to me that Ms. Beck wants two mutually exclusive things, for she wants both democracy and recognition of her supposed merits. She wants to stand with everyone and simultaneously above certain others. Maybe she has never read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Maybe she has never followed the idea of democracy to its logical conclusions.

The term "meatware" makes me think of a like term, "meat puppet," which seems to have a connection to science fiction, perhaps to The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). More offensive--and more dimwitted--than Ms. Beck's referring to us as "meatware" is this proposition: "Like meatware writers, the AI writes from what it has read." No, Ms. Beck, writers do not write from what they read. They write from human experience. Maybe you should try it sometime. You might meet with more success that way.

A final offense, and perhaps the most egregious (and the stupidest) of all:

God made the talented, and now He, through his angels Google, xAi, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., has made it possible for all of us--talented or not--to express ourselves within the limits of our taste, education, and experience.

That idea is so bad that it's hard to believe that she's even serious about it. Is this supposed to be a parody of what AI-users think? Is it an attempt at some other kind of humor or irony? Or is that a sentence AI wrote for Shlomit Beck, thereby elevating itself heavenward? If Ms. Beck is responsible for that quote--she must be, she put her name to it--and she actually believes what she wrote, then I'm forced to go to a counter-quote by George Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." (From "Notes on Nationalism," 1945.)

Now I'll go back to the blurb at the beginning of her essay, in which she or her editor writes: 

AI has turned writing from a guarded craft into an open frontier, where creativity depends less on talent than on the courage to create.

Still further offenses. First, writing is not a guarded craft. Anyone can do it. In that way writing truly is democratic, no action needed by pipsqueak revolutionaries. Second, creativity does not depend at all on talent. Anyone, talented or not, can be creative. I would say that creativity is actually a mark of our humanity. (It sounds like Ms. Beck is calling to be read without having the talent to be read.) Finally, it does not take courage to create. That phrase--"courage to create"--is nonsense. Creativity flows naturally out of our nature and existence as human beings. Creation requires only the act of creating. 

I'll conclude by writing that AI is not the threat and not a monster. AI is a thing, and the only real monsters in this world are human. The threat doesn't come from AI. We shouldn't be afraid of it. What we should be wary of--and stand up against--is stupid people and their stupid ideas. (If you're a Marxist and you're using AI to think and write for you, then you should receive a double-prize for stupidity.) We should also realize that stupidity is sometimes only a step away from evil--and is more often a suitable substitute. Stupid people will do what evil wants them to do. Evil sits back, relaxes, and watches the world burn.

-----

*I found the following quote in the online encyclopedia that is not yet written by AI: "The term ["The Man"] is used [. . .] by Peter Fonda's character in the [sic] Wild Angels [1966] in 'We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man'." Remember here the lyric from "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, "We gotta be free./We gotta be free." By the way, Diane Ladd, who died earlier this month, was also in The Wild Angels.

The angels of the title are members of a motorcycle gang, in other words human beings. Human beings will forever be infinitely closer to the angels--and God--than any machine. Anyone enamored of AI should remember that. He or she should also remember that certain things are God's alone, and no man or invention of man will ever do them. Below that, certain other things are man's alone, and no machine will ever do them. In that art is a creation of the heart and the mind, it is by definition made only by human beings, in emulation of God, and not at all by machines.

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Update (Nov. 14, 2025): I might have found the origin of Shlomit Beck's complaint in an article called "AI Is Driving a New Surge of Sham 'Books' on Amazon," on the website The Author's Guild, dated March 15, 2024. It sounds like that's what she's looking for and what the Guild doesn't want. Anyway, there is this thing and that in the article before the anonymous author gets to this sentence: "We are also lobbying for laws that would require AI-generated text content to be labeled and identifiable as such." I'm not sure how such a thing would work. It could mean an infringement on the rights of freedom of speech and of the press. Besides that, there are too many people who have too much at stake in a Wild West kind of environment for AI for there to be any alternative.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Joy Connection Revisited

It has been a long time since I posted two articles on the same day, but the stuff is coming in so rapidly that I have to do this just to keep up.

Last year I wrote an entry called "Joy Connection," dated September 1, 2024. That entry is partly political. A commenter named Worley wrote:

But postings that aren't well-aligned with that brand [Tellers of Weird Tales] are going to tend to dilute your brand, and may well reduce readership rather than increase it.

I might be a little prickly, but I took that as an attempt to influence what I write about on my blog. Maybe Worley was just expressing his displeasure about a topic he wasn't interested in. If that was so, I guess I should say that I can't satisfy every reader every day. If you hang in there and keep reading, though, hopefully you'll find something you like.

I don't have anything against Worley or any other commenter. I always invite and welcome comments, even when there is disagreement or criticism. Every writer should hear different opinions from his own and should listen to constructive criticism. I would like to thank Worley and everyone else who reads and leaves comments on what I write here.

Receiving comments of any kind is rewarding, although sometimes I have to deal with some pretty unpleasant things, such as an insinuation that I am a Nazi, one that I think came from a friend, who posted his comment anonymously. (See the comments in "The Conservative vs. the Zombie," October 4, 2015.) To be fair to my accuser in that case, I quoted from and referred to ideas by David French, who is supposed to have been a conservative but appears to be something else now. He seems to have gone off the deep end. (And why has he taken such a resemblance to Boss Tweed?) To be fair, too, I can now say that most people on the left side of the political spectrum probably don't identify with monsters depicted in movies and television but instead identify with the human characters. It's only in real life that their sympathies go towards monsters. Not all of them, jeez, but at least a large number of them. We see that every day, for example, in people in the West who carry their flags of red, green, black, and white and who call for the extermination of a whole people.

Anyway, my readership has not been reduced at all. In fact, it has increased really rapidly in the past several months. I'm beginning to think that I can write about anything at all and still receive hundreds, if not thousands, of visits per day. It took fourteen years and four months to reach 2,000,000 visits to my blog. It has taken less than four months to add another third of a million. I don't know how to explain this except to surmise that a large portion of those visits are from AI.

In short, no reduction.

"Joy Connection" has also proved popular, if the number of visits to a blog posting is a measure of popularity. By my count, only four of my entries from 2024 are more popular in terms of the number of visits.

And now, to touch upon a theme from this week . . .

In "Joy Connection," I wrote:  

British veterans of World War II must be wondering why they did what they did and why they even fought their war. What was the point if we were just going to give up everything to totalitarian regimes anyway? 

Now I learn that a British veteran of World War II said pretty much exactly that. His name is Alec Penstone, and he is 100 years old. In an interview on Good Morning Britain on Friday, November 7, 2025, Mr. Penstone said:

"My message is, I can see in my mind's eye those rows and rows of white stones of our friends and everybody else that gave their lives--for what? Our country today, no I'm sorry, the sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now. What we fought for was our freedom, we find now it's a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it."

It's heartbreaking to hear things like that, even more heartbreaking to realize that what Mr. Penstone said might be true. I would say in solace, though, that their sacrifice must have been worth it, if only for the sake of moments, the innumerable moments in people's lives from 1944 until today in which they have enjoyed the freedom and security won and defended by the men and women who fought the war. Although it's true that freedom is under threat in Mr. Penstone's home country, the beacon of freedom continues to burn in the place where it was first lit, at least in modern times, and that might be enough, for the future of England and of freedom itself.

I only hope we can wake ourselves up from this nightmare.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley