Chekhov and AI

My favorite Anton Chekhov short story to teach is "The Letter" (1902).  It has been a few years since I’ve had the opportunity, but this term I’ve assigned it to one of my classes.  So I was excited this morning to sit down and read it again for the first time in a while.  It touched me as it always has.  One quality that Chekhov’s devotees love in his writing – how he invites us in on the chuckle he’s having at the poor fools who are his characters, but also nudges us to have a heart for them because aren’t we all kind of this way? – it’s there in abundance in this story.                                                                                                                                                                                

To my amazement, I found that the “The Letter” also speaks to one of the big contemporary crises in my beleaguered profession: artificial intelligence in student writing.  

"The Letter" goes like this.  It is late at night in some unnamed Russian town, the day before Easter.  We are in the very comfortable home of a high-ranking church authority, Archdeacon Orlov, but he's very uncomfortable, beset with a familiar kind of annoyance: a guest who won’t leave.  Father Anastasy, an impoverished, alcoholic, defrocked priest, has come for a visit (and to sponge some vodka and leniency) and he won’t go away, even though he knows very well that he’s being a burdensome irritant.  He just can’t generate the wherewithal to depart. This awkward scene is interrupted by the arrival of Lubimov, a financially secure but lummoxy member of the church.  Lubimov has terrible news:  his son Peter, whom he has provided with a comfortable upbringing and a fine education, has repaid his generosity by shacking up with a married woman in the city.  And eating forbidden meat during Lent.  Orlov remembers Peter – even as a little kid he was bad news, a snarky unbeliever.   While the pathetic Anastasy listens and wheezes and giggles, Orlov lays in to Lubimov about his history of spoiling his rotten kid.  It's no wonder that Peter flouts church edicts.  Lubimov complains that he did the best he could and now he needs help – he doesn’t know what to do.  Orlov suggests a scolding letter.  Lubimov protests that with his poor education he wouldn’t know where to start.  He begs Orlov to write it for him.  At first reluctant, Orlov finally agrees and begins dictating (for Lubimov to copy) a fire and brimstone lecture to the wayward Peter.  Lubimov is in ecstasy.   What a letter!  If this won’t straighten out the kid, nothing will.  He wishes he could write like this.  The effort of composing and dictating finally exhausts Orlov's patience, and he politely directs his two visitors to get out of his house.  Anastasy makes his overdue departure, accompanied by Lubimov. As they walk to Lubimov’s house, the father raves more about the epic takedown of a letter he’s carrying – he can’t wait to send it to Peter.  But Anastasy begins appealing to him not to send it.  Peter’s feelings will be hurt.   The boy needs forgiveness - as he himself does – and where else can he hope to get it but from his father?  At Lubimov’s house Anastasy helps himself to a few gulps of booze, makes one more appeal to Lubimov not to send the letter, and passes out.  Lubimov meditates on Anastasy’s appeal, pulls out the letter and adds a postscript of tawdry village gossip (entirely undercutting Orlov's stern message), and puts the letter in a place where he’ll remember to put it in the mail.

That’s how it ends.  The P.S. gets to me every time.  The doofusy tenderness of that moment has a truth in it about the delights of boorish interactions within families.  But there's more to it, of course.  In light of the Easter timing, and the fact that during their walk Lubimov thinks that Anastasy’s “open cassock looked like wings in the night” (angelic?) leads me to perceive the drunk and disgraced old priest as a holy messenger in the time of resurrection.  During Orlov’s audience with Lubimov, Anastasy pointedly asks (with tittering skepticism) whether “excessive reliance on Divine mercy” is really a sin.  And without directly referencing either of these well-known episodes from the Gospel of Luke, Anastasy counsels the raging Lubimov to be like the welcoming and forgiving father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and prays a prayer (“Lord forgive me, sinner that I am”) that echoes the prayer of the penitent tax collector, a prayer Jesus commends to his listeners as exemplifying genuine faith.   

So Anastasy as unlikely agent of grace?  It is not that easy.  After all, this is Chekhov, who never gives us any clearcut message other than that human beings are a mess.  He won’t allow us to indulge in easy moralizing.   Peter, the target of the stern letter, does not sound entirely like a poor misunderstood kid getting hassled by his repressive elders.  In fact, he sounds like kind of a skunk  If he’s the Prodigal Son, he’s a long, long way from the penitent homecoming stage of his story.  And Anastasy?  He needs to go straight to an AA meeting and pick up a white chip.  His advocacy of forgiveness seems to come more from his immediate personal need to be relieved of his guilt than from a holy impulse to champion mercy.  And then there’s that wry acknowledgement at the end of the crassness that sometimes constitutes the ties that bind.  If Chekhov had written the reunion of Jacob’s sons, Joseph and Judah would have hugged in reconciliation and immediately started cracking jokes about their father’s hairline.  So “The Letter” defies my attempts to make it an emphatic sermon on the glories of mercy.  Read another way, it could be a critique of moral lassitude. 

And then there's this new contemporary connection.  It wasn’t until I was a few pages in to the story when the AI connection came upon me.   Here is Lubimov imploring Orlov to write the letter for him:

I am an uneducated man, with a poor mind, but you the Lord has endowed with intelligence and wisdom. You know and understand everything, you have a mind that can fathom anything, while I’m not able to put two words together. Be charitable, instruct me as to how I am to go about writing. Tell me how to phrase it and just what to say.

He sounds like a desperate 10th grader in 2023 making a midnight appeal to his Macbook.  

Some of the public discourse about ChatGPT and its ilk has an undertone to it that when it comes to students using AI to do their writing, the people who are most upset about it – notably we English teachers – need to stop all this melodramatic hand-wringing.  If we would turn down the professional existential dread for one damn minute we would realize that virtual Orlov is not just unstoppable - he's our friend!  Here’s a sentence in that vein from the journal Ars Technica:

AI writing assistance is here to stay, and if used wisely, AI language models can potentially speed up composition in a responsible and ethical way. Teachers may want to encourage responsible use and ask questions like: Does the writing reflect the intentions and knowledge of the writer? And can the human author vouch for every fact included?

"Assistance" is a funny word to use for how many students are using AI.   We used to have another word for it.  But those questions at the end, the questions teachers may want to ask.  May I want to ask questions like that?   I may.  I may also point to “The Letter” as an illustration of what’s dreadfully wrong with this line of thinking, how in exclusively valuing the product of writing it egregiously discounts the experience of writing and what it can bring about in our confounded hearts and minds.  Lubimov thinks Orlov’s letter reflects his intentions.  On the walk home with Anastasy he can’t stop talking about how splendidly it reflects his intentions.  But it doesn’t, not really, as he comes to find out.  The fires of his anger extinguished, Lubimov's mind goes in another direction:

He was thinking of his son . . . remembering the years when [he] would come home for the holidays.   His mind dwelt only on what was good, heartwarming, touched with melancholy, on what one could contemplate for a lifetime without getting tired. 

These reflections prompt him to write the postscript that "spoils" Orlov's letter.  It is not until Lubimov engages in the "desirable difficulty" (as one theorist calls it) of doing his own writing that something like the truth of his intentions emerges (even if he doesn't quite realize it): he'd rather cherish his son than admonish him.  That’s the nature of their relationship. 

Many have said it: writing gives you a chance to find out what you know.  

Of course not every writing task is like a letter to one’s child at a pivotal moment in life.  Writing occasions that really break open our consciousness come along rarely.  My son’s 200 word response to a documentary he just watched for a college class and my wife’s letter to our health insurer don’t have this kind of juice, nor are they supposed to.   But for each of them, even in those commonplace undertakings, the act of composition can do something in their minds – create a clarity or a confusion, or strengthen a resolve, or cause a satisfaction to blossom, or provide a reason to change direction.  In Lubimov’s case, ceding to Orlov the job of writing to Peter may alleviate his frustration, but it deprives him of the opportunity for discovery that writing - and the struggles that go with it - can provide. 

In this respect, AI doesn’t help.  It steals.   

Holy Week Echoes in Lit Class

 Sometimes – quite often, actually - what I’m teaching kind of rhymes with what’s going on in the world.   It has been a long time since I taught The Scarlet Letter, but back when it was a significant part of my repertoire, it seemed that every time I took a class through that book coincided with some celebrity moralist being exposed as a fraud.  It was as though in merely writing the word "Dimmesdale" I had set in motion the unmasking of William Bennett as a high stakes gambler.

It has happened again, though in different form.  Not that my reading list is having some kind of butterfly effect on current events, but another kind of accidental connection:  in the past month, the events of Holy Week have been bubbling up in the texts we’ve been studying.

1. “Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests and said unto them, ‘What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?’ And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:14-15).

In a well-known scene from Raisin in the Sun, Karl Lindner (of the euphemistically named Clybourne Park Improvement Association) has come to a run down Southside apartment to make his organization’s official offer to buy back the house that Lena Younger has purchased, in order to prevent a black family from moving in to his all white neighborhood. Before Lindner names the figure, Beneatha Younger says – without missing a beat – “Thirty pieces and not a coin less.” In an earlier scene this same Beneatha professed her atheism, but the Gospels remain enough of a frame for viewing the world for her that when she needs a truly appalling example of selling out, Judas is at hand.  It's automatic, instinctual, and there's no mistaking (even for Lindner) what Beneatha means with this reference: for the Youngers to take his offer would amount to betraying sacred commitments  - in this case, to ancestral sacrifices and to the principle of equality - along the same lines as a Biblical character whose name has become synonymous with betrayal.  

2. “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit': and having said thus, he gave up the ghost” (Luke 23:46).

Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s 1961 novel Weep Not, Child is a fictional account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.  In one horrific scene, British colonial soldiers, desperate to find and punish guerrilla fighters, accost a harmless group of religious pilgrims making their way through the forest.  One of their number, whom we have earlier seen delivering a dark sermon (rooted in Matthew 24) on the tribulation that must occur before the coming of God's Kingdom, suffers what amounts to a crucifixion:

Isaka squatted and calmly watched the scene. He had no documents. When the white soldier shouted at him, Isaka answered in a calm, almost resigned tone. Where had he left the documents? Satan had made him forget them at home. But the white soldier knew better. Isaka was a Mau Mau. Again Isaka replied that Jesus had saved him and he could not exchange Jesus with Mau Mau. The officer looked at him with reddening eyes. Yet he did not touch him. Njoroge wondered if he was afraid of Isaka. There was something strange in the teacher’s calm. When the others were allowed to go, Isaka was made to remain. He did not protest.

  ‘Come this way and we’ll see what Jesus will do for you.’ He was led into the thick dark wood. Before the others had gone very far, they heard one horrible scream that rang across the forest. They dared not turn their heads. Njoroge tried to hold his breath so that his stomach was taut. They went a few more steps. Suddenly there was one other scream which was swallowed by a deafening report of machine guns. Then silence.

  ‘They have killed him,’ one of the men said sometime after the report.  

I haven't yet read much Ngugi, but I can tell already that of his many grievances with the entire colonial enterprise, one of the strongest is the colonizers' brutal infidelity to the moral imperatives of the faith whose propagation they had used as moral cover to take over Africa.  

3. “Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27).

In the concluding scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, we see what amounts to a resurrection, a return to life by one believed dead.  Twins Viola and Sebastian, shipwreck victims, have separately come ashore in the alien land of Illyria, each believing the other is dead.  Twelfth Night is mostly a comedy of romantic love, but there’s a particular production I’m fond of (the 1998 Lincoln Center version) that emphasizes – more than any other production I’ve seen - the intensity of family love, and the pain of loss of a beloved sibling.  This aspect of the play puts me in mind of Stephen Colbert, who at ten years old lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash.  In a portion of an interview about his Catholic faith, Colbert speaks of a period of his life, in his twenties, when he was an atheist, and how difficult that was for him: “I didn’t want to not have a god.  If for no other reason than I really wanted to see my father and my brothers again.  Which is the most understandable, but in some ways kind of the most selfish reason to have a God.  But that was real, that was a promise given to me that I would see them again.” Shakespeare's Viola, as played by Helen Hunt at Lincoln Center in 1998, could relate. In one scene, disguised for her own safety as a boy, she disputes with her master Orsino (with whom to she is secretly in love) about men and women and love, and when he asks her about the fate of a family member, she replies, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too.”  See how Helen Hunt reads that line  (1:10:45) – heartbroken, remembering that her dear brother Sebastian is gone forever (or so she thinks).  When the siblings are reunited at last in Act V, each believes at first that they have seen a ghost, and then - like a pair of doubting Thomases - they exchange identify-affirming details, and before long they experience an explosively joyous triumph over death.  It is not a genuine resurrection, of course, but it feels like one, like the jubilation of the empty tomb. For this reader, Sebastian's exultant cry of "Thrice-welcome, drowned Viola!" beats any of the romantic schlock that follows. For those who feel they have been left stranded alone here by the death of a loved one, that scene depicts the gratification of a familiar ungratifiable longing. 

All Them Things They Did

Note:  If you happen to have been led here from the barrage of Facebook posts memorializing Todd McBride, I should explain that I composed this when I read that he was in hospice.  With that awful news came the motivation to write at once about something that has been percolating in my mind for a long time: my brother's life in music.  I had wanted to take up that subject while Rob is still with us, and learning that Todd was looking at his own end increased the urgency. I hoped Todd might see what I wrote because I admire his work and I appreciate that he was such a faithful good friend to Rob.  I thought I had longer than I did.  Todd died hours after I posted it, and now I hope to God not a second of his final hours was wasted on my blatherings.  Because of who I am what I've written here necessarily emphasizes my brother, but I do not mean for it to turn grief over the loss of Todd in another direction.  Far from it.  Look at the tributes to Todd on Facebook and I think you'll agree that what I say about friends and fans in the final paragraph is true.  RIP Todd.  

A few months back the Social Security Administration determined that my brother Rob is entitled to disability payments.  A medical accident in September of 2021 – one related to the Type 1 diabetes he has been living with since his early teens - left him cognitively unable to work or live by himself any longer.  He’s in a spot where he’s getting good care, but the situation is sad nevertheless, of course.  Rob took pride in working, no matter what kind of work it was.   He treasured his independence like no one else I have ever known.  What has been especially hard to see is that he no longer seems to have it in him to play music.  The last time we saw him in good health, a month before his accident, he jammed for a while with his nephew, my son Ike.  I wish that had been the first time of many.   Instead it was the first and the last.  If you have lived long enough to see a loved one cognitively wrecked, you know what it is to be with someone and miss them at the same time.  That's how it is with Rob now.

Around the time the disability was awarded, Rob and I had to get on the phone with a Social Security agent who wanted to doublecheck a few things about his resources.  By happenstance, he had just received his annual royalty check for music he has composed.   I told the agent about it.  The number was small, two digits.   In the pause on the line while she recorded the number, I said, “If there was any justice this number would be huge.”  Rob smiled a wan smile.  But I looked at him hard, wanting him to know that I meant it.  I want you to know I meant it, too.

I don’t mean this post as an appeal for money.  Things are OK where that is concerned, although Rob’s situation is another illustration of the absurdity of how we administer health care in this country.  But I wanted to make clear to all that whatever I post on this blog, no matter how much I aspire with these essays to be a poor man’s Sarah Vowell (or whatever it is I'm trying for with this hobby writing), everyone should know that Rob is the Veal brother whose creative output should endure.  It bothers me that the royalty checks that Rob and his bandmates in the Dashboard Saviors receive will never be commensurate with the gritty brilliance of their music, but it bothers me even more that their music may fade into even more obscure obscurity than the obscurity it exists in today.  The Dashboard Saviors ought to be a household name in the "Y'allternative" genre.  

As I've noted elsewhere, Rob was part of the Athens music scene, not just present but in it and of it.  He has done a couple of solo albums.  I’m partial to his song “The Ballad of Bigfoot” because, in addition to being such a great evocation of what it is to be afraid when you’re a kid, it is a 10 out of 10 in the category of accurately describing the family camping trips of our childhood.  In our house we love his song “Boss of Me”  not only because it is funny but because, if you know Rob, it is the anthem of one facet of his character.  I say one facet - Rob has a sweetness in him that inspires real devotion in his friends. The last time I talked to him before his accident I asked him to tell me about opening for Los Lobos. If that were my story to tell I'd just flex the hell out of it, but all he wanted to talk about was how down to earth and generous they were.  My memories of Rob are full of "heart in the right place" stories like that.  But he can also be a pigheaded, aggravatingly so.  These lines of dialogue from "Boss of Me", between some self-appointed community standards monitor and his cussed slob of a neighbor (certainly Rob himself) may be as close as we’ll ever come to a Rob Veal mission statement:  

“Hey young man won’t you pick up that trash 

Sittin’ on the side of the street?

Don’t you want to have house to show 

where the yard looks nice and neat?”

I said “A well-made bed looks halfway dead, 

so I’m gonna let my trash run free.  

Walk on by, cause you ain’t the boss of me.”

 

That would be Rob  - nobody is going to tell him what to do, at least not without a fight or some grumbling, especially if what he is being told to do strikes him as onerous conformity.  Sometimes this quality has appeared as self-destructive, pain-in-the-ass obstinacy, but other times it is authentic moxie, a disposition at the root of all of his accomplishments, everything that pours out of me after I say, "Let me tell you about my brother."  He was self-taught (of course) as a musician and composer, but it is safe to say that generous support and mentoring from others in his musical tribe, some of the best who ever played at the 40 Watt or the Uptown Lounge, was huge in getting him as far as he was able to make it.  He was a good friend of Vic Chesnutt, did some collaborating and performing with him. How could up close exposure to otherworldly brilliance like Vic's not catalyze your own creativity? His bandmates - Todd McBride, Mike Gibson, and John Crist - must have had a similar effect.  When the Dashboard Saviors were at their height, and briefly profiled in a 1992 issue of Rolling Stone, Todd said of how he wrote lyrics, “My friends talk in poetry.  I can’t help it if I’m listening.”  As an English teacher I’ve always loved that line – by and large my students don’t realize that every moment of their lives they’re up to their necks in great material to write about – but I also know that it is too modest.  What Todd made of the language he heard is not just an act of transcription. It is art. Consider the lyrics to his remarkable song "A Trailer's a Trailer", which has been a staple of my poetry teaching for over 20 years:

He takes one last drag off the cigarette

Drinks the last gulp of warm beer from the can.

The sound of the baby crying

Couldn't drown out the noise from the window fan.

Rattling noise from that last-leg window fan.

Well there's soggy cornflakes on the table.

There's a broken down Dodge Dart out in the yard.

It's got a faded bumper-sticker from a Daytona beach motel. 

It says, “Ain't life hard?”

A smiling shark in sunglasses, says “Ain't life hard?”

And he traded a Stratocaster 

For the downpayment on a lie.

He says, “A dead end's a dead end,

A trailer's a trailer

Even if it's a double wide.”

Those lines are so of certain parts of rural Georgia (Todd is from Griffin) and so evocative of how it feels to live in the bitterness of a dream that didn’t pan out, that I've used them to demonstrate to hundreds of students what imagery can do.  And yes, the words come in part from listening, but you don’t have to be a poetry scholar to see how much more Todd brought to composing those lines than just his ears.  

I’ve had lyrics and Georgia on the brain lately because I’ve been reading Glenn Eskew’s excellent biography of Savannah’s Johnny Mercer, one of the all timers, a legendary lyricist.  Like the musicians I've been writing of, Mercer was known for blending Southern diction and settings into popular song - its just that Mercer's is more of a flirting under a shade-tree South than a cruising down the four lane in a Camaro South.  But there are more similarities than meet the eye.  As Glenn writes (I’m calling him Glenn because we were neighbors and we had a shared sense of silliness about our dogs), in composing one of his best known songs, “One More for my Baby (and One More for the Road)”, Mercer endeavored to “write a new, more realistic kind of torch song, a loser’s lament that bemoans the loss of a lover to hide failure in life . . . the lyrics express a complete story that satisfies the listener on several levels.”  The most memorable and affecting songs of Mercer’s fellow Georgia lyricist Todd McBride have that same quality.

Here's one that fits that bill. When I was obsessing last year about my ancestor Chester Scott, an account I read of him hiding out in the woods near his father’s house after escaping from jail put me immediately in mind of one of Todd’s greatest songs, performed by the Dashboard Saviors with accompaniment from Marlee MacLeod: "All Them Things I Did." The lyrics are in the form of one half of a conversation. A son who has always been an outlaw shows up at home in the middle of the night, on the run, wounded, needing shelter, and he tries to get caught up with his mother and explain himself to her.   Below are the lyrics, in their entirety.  I know this is bad form.  Many times I have chewed out a student writer for quoting too much of a passage in a paper instead of picking out the most meaningful lines.  If any of those unfortunate students should happen to read this, well, I’m sorry.  In this instance it can’t be helped.  Todd McBride writes too damn well for me to leave any of it out:  

Call the dogs off Mama, 

if you could please douse the lights.

I got some people a’huntin’ me, 

and I’m too tired to fight ‘em.

Could I stay here a night or two, 

at least until my guns get cold?

I feel a storm brewin' up 

to wash my tracks right off the road

Ain’t no need to wake up Papa, 

I'll just bed down out in the barn.

I know I ain't been nothin' but trouble, 

It’s the way that I was born.

Mama I ain't no Jesse James

ain't no Billy the Kid. 

Hope you understand I had to do 

all them things I did.  

Heard the preacher got struck by lighnin'. 

Ain’t  that a hell of a note?

If I could have laid my hands on a pencil and paper, 

I swear to God I'd of wrote.  

Is it true what they say about Nellie, 

marryin' the Baldwin boy?

Good for him, bad for me.  

You know she was my pride and joy.

See Mama there comes a time in every man's life, 

when he sees he's been surrounded

Even if he fights his way free, 

forever he'll be a’hounded. 

Mama I ain't no Jesse James,

I ain't no Billy the Kid. 

Hope you understand I had to do, 

all them things I did. 

Mama don't you worry about all this blood on my shirt. 

It looks a lot worse than it feels.

The truth is, it's just a flesh wound, 

and thems the kind that heals. 

Mama I wish we could talk all night,

set on the porch and watch the sun rise. 

But I’ve been a long way in a very short time, 

I better close my eyes.

Mama I ain't no Jesse James, 

I ain't no Billy the Kid.

Hope you understand I had to do 

all them things I did.

Listening to this song today, given everything that has happened, and thinking of Todd and Rob and their talented bandmates Mike and John and their devoted friend and manager Len, the lines “I’ve been a long way in a very short time / I better close my eyes” – they get to me.  That's where we are.  Those fellows have friends and fans who can tell of their history and express their appreciation more intimately and perceptively and eloquently than I ever could.   It may be that this is just a brother’s pride talking.  But it is a brother with some discernment, I think, so the pride doesn't feel misplaced, and I would hate to leave it unexpressed.