Harper’s Notes (1/27/25)

Artist’s tools: In his latest essay, Harper Review managing editor Michael Butler questions the artist Peter Halley’s criticism of the creative power of artificial intelligence. Butler argues that if AI recognizes complex processes of change, “it must also recognize hundreds of other analogies it sees but we don’t.” Creativity, Butler writes, is exactly that: the recognition of similarities between seemingly disparate things. AI then does not merely “regurgitate” information, “it understands the same way humans do.” Through a rigorous examination of AI’s decision-making process, the media theory of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, and “the precise definition of creativity,” Butler proposes that AI could become better at painting than we could ever imagine.

Hat trick: It’s less than a month out from Valentine’s Day which means it’s time to start thinking about gifts. If your loved one is a fan of American author Don DeLillo, literary trivia, or collecting rare books, consider buying them a copy of the novel Amazons. Published in 1980, Amazons is a bit of a literary Easter egg. It follows Cleo Birdwell, the fictional first female member of the National Hockey League, as she navigates the world of professional hockey and engages in a constant stream of ridiculous sexual escapades. The prose is fast-paced and quippy, the characters are colorful, and the narrative provides an amusing exploration of casual intimacy in all its forms. Here’s the catch: DeLillo kept his authorship a secret. He and co-author Sue Buck opted to use the name Cleo Birdwell as a pseudonym, making the novel a faux memoir. Publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston even hired a model to masquerade as Birdwell at book signings, adding to the deception. Reviewers, noting DeLillo’s distinctive prose, caught on quickly, but for decades the White Noise author glibly hid his involvement, ducking interviewers’ questions and omitting the work from his official bibliography. DeLillo finally admitted that he wrote the book in 2020. Copies of Amazons are rare: only 20,000 exist, all from the original 1980 release. Scour eBay and thriftbooks.com, though, and you’ll eventually find one. The best gifts come with a story and can’t be easily replaced, so buy a copy of Amazons and give your loved one a small piece of literary history.

Politically incorrect: We have a tendency to relegate a person’s beliefs to the realm of the absurd when we do not like what they have to say. When something seems wrong, it is easier to assume that the person defending that wrong thing is simply erroneous, with no logical, emotional, or social explanation for their offense. In her debut novel, Quarterlife, Devika Rege presents an array of explanations that attempt to understand the forces shaping our political wills. The novel follows a group of friends from Bombay, India and the effects of the Bharat Party’s election victory (a thinly veiled representation of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2014 victory) on their relationships with one another and themselves.
Each chapter is told from a different friend’s perspective, which Rege describes in an author’s retrospective at the end of the novel as “a way to explore a loosely related set of anxieties” and a duty to “represent an ever wider variety of irreconcilable yet interdependent perspectives, each a responsible part of a whole.” With Quarterlife, Rege reminds her readers that people grow into their politics and beliefs from personal experience, history, and identity; a person’s politics come from something, not from a black hole of pure evil or pure benevolence.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, Concert in the Egg, oil on canvas, ca. 1561 (Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France).