Matt Kirkpatrick

Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!

Flashback Friday! THE AMBROSE J. AND VIVIAN T. SEAGRAVE MUSEUM OF 20th CENTURY AMERICAN ART, “a #novel of ideas whose appeal goes far beyond its target audience—be it literary readers skeptical of yet another postmodern yarn...(1/2)

Haha love this. It was definitely confusing why the pigs wanted gold.

I thought it was fun and my kid dug it. Def bummed there weren’t axolotls. Did not pick up on the Paradise Lost parallels, though agree it is mostly empty.

Moby Dick themed Taylor Swift tribute band “Starbuck’s Lovers”

Early April

Yeah, not even close to funny. "Tree Factories"

"TREE FACTORIES" = Trump "ordering" half of our national parks open for logging. Hilarious!

I'd go see it

This is great. Thanks for the rec.

Love the #inkstains posts--I'm so glad Markson is still on people's minds. (Discarded reminded me that I've got a couple of his Strand books, though nothing annotated)

Matt Kirkpatrick, Katie Nowinski, David Kuhnlein reading at Cafe 1923 in Hamtramck on March 30 at 7:30 flyer; Music by Aidan Pope

Detroit/SE Michigan friends:

@colinhamilton.bsky.social

Love this—a collection of descriptions of (imaginary) discarded texts. My fav is the Markson biography. “Borgesian panache” indeed

Matthaei Tuesday

Yo Philly come on out to the launch party for @barrelhouse.bsky.social print issue 25 next week, 3/19/25 at Tattooed Mom!

I probably don't read enough 2025 MFA stories to say, but I notice that "big press" novels are SO full of exposition. I don't love a lot of interiority--I'd rather just see characters doing things and talking, but it is weird to think of a first person narrator narrating objectively.

Some yellow flowers

Matthaei Tuesday

A truth from Trump that reads “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter”

If you’re a professor in a classroom today & you don’t mention this, I believe you’re doing your students a profound disservice. This is targeted 1st at international students, but it’s deliberately broad enough to lay groundwork for a scene Trump & Hegseth have fantasized: troops on campus.

Revisiting this old friend—I first read around 2003 maybe?—to teach tonight to my MA students—still great!

Audio book cover of The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

Awesome—fascinating how much we still don’t know, depressing what’s happening to science right now. Still, highly recommend.

“The US of AI,” public draft of a talk given yesterday at Princeton.

drive.google.com/file/d/1O2qk...

Every Tuesday this semester, I come to write at Matthaei

"Diane, 11:30 am, February twenty-fourth. Entering town of Twin Peaks. Five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line. Never seen so many trees in my life."

I was there! Remember really loving Plow and (of course) Chisel was so good. Feel like they should have exploded after Set You Free

The next Bond is Bezos.

The results are presented differently, but ChatGPT searches the web in responding to queries. It's not just using the data used to train it. Anyway, I think we agree about all of this.

I haven't seen a huge push in higher ed, but that's just at my institution, so my sample size is small. I think rhet/comp folks are def curious, but also seem skeptical? Also, AI works great for stuff like teaching math--my six year old's crushing it because of adaptive apps.

Yeah, but Google uses AI to generate search results--the reason ChatGPT got it wrong in your example is because somewhere there's a problem with the data, which would also trouble google. It's just slightly easier to discriminate when you have a list of search results. Also, switch to DuckDuckGo

I think they do realize it? I think what most people don't get is the stuff they're using it for--cheating, writing emails, marketing copy, etc) -- is a kind of novel side effect of a technology that's really good at something else (analyzing huge data sets, etc
)