Harper’s Notes (12/10/24)

The mechanics of writing: In The Harper Review’s final essay of the quarter, PhD student and former high school teacher Chase Mendoza calls out the elephant in every teacher’s lounge: ChatGPT. Invoking the “versificators” of George Orwell’s 1984, the midlife crisis of Dante’s Inferno, and his own experiences in the classroom, Mendoza suggests that there is something farcical about how we discuss the threat that artificial intelligence poses to education. As teachers panic and smart aleck students gloat that the chatbot “can write poetry,” Mendoza asks us to consider the issue from a new perspective: “What does feeling threatened by ChatGPT reveal about the state of writing?” Mendoza argues that ChatGPT is an indictment of our education system, the just deserts we get when “we train students to write in the same way that we train these machines to gather information.” Good writing comes from somewhere, knows what it is for, and cannot be done by a machine. It is this kind of writing that we must remember to teach, lest we learn to serve only ChatGPT.

Eros the bittersweet: The late David Yaffe, writing in Tablet magazine, reflects on the ever-enigmatic Jewish poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen—or “Koan” as Yaffe calls him in the subtitle, as a reference to his Buddhism. The description Yaffe attaches to Cohen/Koan in the subtitle is more relevant, however: “boudoir poet,” taken from Cohen’s ex-lover (well, one of many), Joni Mitchell.
Interspersing Cohen’s invariably raunchy lyrics with exegesis and biographical context, Yaffe ardently explains the fundamental eros—“waiting for the miracle,” as he puts it—that guided Cohen. His songs were certainly colloquially erotic, but, as Yaffe claims, they also revealed his “pursuit of the unreliable narrator known as God, or G-d.”
In other words, Cohen profoundly and honestly understood his promiscuity. It was not something to be embarrassed of—quite the contrary. Yaffe explains that Cohen “elevat[ed] the profane to the sacred, the booty calls to high poetry.” Neither was Cohen under any illusion that such profligacy would actually fulfill the desire. Rather, Yaffe states, “[d]esire is where a poem begins.”
The denial of sex—whether perpetrated by himself in his relationship with Suzanne (the one who was not his partner), or by others—proved the greater “inspiring” force. These are not contradictions, nor are they coincidences. To shamelessly borrow a phrase from another off-the-derech Jew, they are part of a heroic delusion.

Such clouds: In Kālidāsa’s short poem the “Meghadūta,” one of the most famous Classical Sanskrit works, a banished yaksha attempts to send a message to his forlorn wife via a cloud. Within director Payal Kapadia’s recent film All We Imagine as Light, clouds also serve as bearers of love-tidings to forlorn women. However, in a masterful combination of lyricism and realism, All We Imagine as Light presents this interplay from the perspective of the women waiting for messages, thereby depicting female love and loneliness in modern Mumbai and Ratnagiri.
The film centers three female characters, but perhaps the most pivotal is Prabha, a nurse in Mumbai with a self-consciously disciplined and serious mien. Married to a man working at a factory in Germany, the closest thing Prabha has to contact with her husband is a rice cooker which arrives mysteriously in the mail. Prabha’s loneliness only rarely breaks through her polished exterior, particularly in her dealings with an infatuated male doctor, in scenes that are piercing and powerful.
Kapadia situates her characters’ struggles in Mumbai, a city she portrays as sparkling but deeply treacherous, where people are bound by the chains of familial duty and class. It is only when Prabha and her friends leave the city for the coast that the potential for freedom appears on the horizon. For Prabha, this possible liberation rests on a crucial question: whether she should continue waiting for her husband, or begin to seek the promise of a new life.

Hidden threads: There’s something about the changing of the leaves that draws me back to the music of Haitian-American rapper Mach-Hommy, whose artistic sensibilities have more in common with modal jazz than modern hip-hop. While examinations of similar avant-garde rappers reveal intricacies, Mach’s 2021 album Balens Cho is not meant to be analyzed deeply—the guy doesn’t even let you read his lyrics. Rather, Balens Cho is a tapestry, composed of varied themes and ideas woven together, each inseparable from the whole.
The album is in many ways the standard braggadocious mafioso rap that Mach’s former label Griselda Records popularized, but his lyrics are packed with so much wit that they’re hard to resist. It’s like if Lao Tzu wrote a rap album. Case in point: the “closet got more loafers than welfare” on “LABOU,” and he’s “been playing with the heat as long as Udonis Haslem” on “LAJAN SAL.”
The album is most interesting, though, when Mach drops his posturing and reflects on the survivor’s guilt of leaving people behind. The feeling cuts in early but is fully realized on the album’s crown jewel, “WOODEN NICKELS.” Accompanied by a somber piano loop and a few saxophone flourishes, Mach describes the kindness his grandfather showed others, his brother-in-law who left to study art, the favors his father never received. It’s here that the tapestry ties back into itself: Mach is now in the same position he once resented, with the eyes of his family and friends on him. It’s up to him to decide whether he’s willing to weave them in.