A friend asks me: are you writing your book with a neural network? Of course I am, I tell him — how could you make anything these days without such a powerful tool? But my book isn't fiction; here even a strong AI couldn't push past simple derivatives, though it helps enormously with the routine parts, with typing out the formulas. And it got me thinking — what about fiction, then?
This is the age of books — not the books you used to go to the library for, but books that have gone mass-market. The only ones I feel sorry for in all this are the beavers, since the posturing doesn't work on everyone, and nobody's forcing anyone to read.
I have a rule: when you don't understand what's going on — quote Baudrillard, whom you needn't actually read; it's enough to read what others write about him. So, he said that the sign breaks away from the signified — it's a kind of cargo cult. Your parents kept a couple dozen books “in the kabinet,” Simonov, Sholokhov, and now it's the age of books... yours! Your book will stand right there, “in the kabinet,” and it'll have your surname on it, maybe even a double-barreled one — sounds so foreign. Seasoned hacks and neural networks will help you write the book, and there you are producing the wow effect, bringing the sign of glamour into your own home. And as for the signified — well, that's simple too; it's just like in Dostoevsky: firstly, because the coaches promised it would be, and secondly, because you're comparing the neural-network summary of your masterpiece with a plot summary of The Brothers Karamazov, and so they come out equal in power.
One clever fellow countryman told me some fifteen years ago that you should pound on the keys only when you can't not pound on them, not when you feel like it. Bukowski's gravestone reads “Don't try.” Don't try to be someone you're not — it won't work; a book isn't a sign of glamour, it's the necessary psychotherapy of an author who “already has his reward.”
And why did Perelman turn down the prize? Because he'd already received it when he wrote his work. He's like water, which was given the property of flowing, and so it flows; it doesn't try to do anything else not proper to it, it doesn't try to turn into wine to make itself sought after — if it turns red, it won't be wine, it'll be red water, which only repels.
How do you find a picture of Charles Bukowski where he's neither smoking nor drinking? Well — apparently this “sign” of genius sells well.
I'm still the one composing the text, as the typos at least give away.