Feature image via The Gender Spectrum Collection.
Hello and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Machines learn from our texts, so of course they replicate our structures, writes Kristen Menger-Anderson at the Establishment:
“I think about how imbalances in our corpora magnify bias, not just in subject matter (stories about male characters or biographies of men), but in the words we see and choose. The technologies we are using to generate text—from auto-replies to articles—are learning the patterns in the set of texts we give them. And these technologies, in turn, are not only writing for all of us, but imposing the patterns they’ve learned. Not all people who write (or read) about technology are men, but the story the artificial intelligence knows, based on the words and the associations made from its training corpus, says otherwise.”
“Fiction and nonfiction both have the power to inform, to move, to stir. So why does ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ endure in a way that Gilman’s first-hand accounts on the same subject matter have not?,” asks Greer Macallister at Lit Hub.
Here’s “how to be a writer and still get really, really rich.” After all, that room of one’s own is expensive. Here’s how to not fuck up your neck and back on the way. And here’s Sandra Newman on writing sex for money:
“I really would love not to care about money, and I’m a very impractical person, so I have huge potential in this area. But I’m always really poor, so I can’t get started. I care or starve. That doesn’t mean my novels aren’t inspired by ideas and feelings and experiences, but I also have to write something that sells.
I’ve often found that pressure helpful. I suffered for years from writer’s block, but there’s no cure for being blocked like being a month behind on rent when your only marketable skill is writing.”
Are books clutter? And Hannah McGregor asks, “What about Kondo’s advice — that people should consider getting rid of some of their books, if those books have become stress-inducing clutter — is so profoundly threatening that white feminists across social media have been led to produce such very bad takes?”
“Justice begins not with you changing, but with me knowing I must.”
Check out these new words in the OED.
Read these books this spring. Read these books this April. Read these debuts by writers of color this 2019. Read these books by writers of color that embrace self-love. Read these black women novelists. Read these books about the wealth gap. Read these books about sexual horizons. Read these novels by forgotten women writers.
So many great links! I really liked the Hannah McGregor article on Electric Lit.