The Ever Present Three C’s

Those who have read my latest book, Tennis Talk of a Nobody, will know it weaves life’s three C’s: chance, circumstance, and connection.

This photo was taken on March 4th at Dallas-Fort Worth. I arrived there from Southern California’s small and manageable Santa Ana airport.  Not so at Dallas with its speed train and multiple terminals. And the gate for my flight to Richmond kept changing: A to C, back to A, again to C. At one point I stopped to consult a big board above my head and heard a woman’s voice behind me. “May I help you?” A tiny woman in a volunteer ambassador’s uniform said she could check my flight if I gave her my boarding pass. Which I did. I thanked her and left.

What I needed to do was let husband Mike know I’d reached Dallas. Before the first flight I’d shut down my “simple” Consumer Cellular phone. But when I turned it back on, flipped it open and hit “contacts,” I got a message about airplane mode.  I knew my husband, the pilot, would say, “Did you troubleshoot the problem?”  Yes, I fiddled around until I gave up, unable to make a call. That’s when I remembered the kind ambassador and scuttled back to her. 

 “This is supposed to be an easy phone for seniors,” she said. So they say.  She fooled around with it, then said, “I’ll ask someone young!” She flagged down a young woman in the busy corridor.” Ah, youth. She met the challenge and proudly announced, “I’ve turned off airplane mode.” We both thanked her. That’s when I looked at the ambassador’s name tag.

 “Lee Lee, if you don’t mind me asking, what is your country of origin?” With delight, I heard, “Malaysia.” I told her that I’d lived in Kuala Lumpur on Jalan U Thant from 1987 to 1990.  I asked when she had left, and then learned she had accepted a contract as a mid-wife to the U.K., later accepted a position as a nurse in the USA. That’s when she met her husband, an airman from Hawaii, who was stationed at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.

            Really? I’d lived there in 1968 after marrying a USAF student- pilot. Had he fought in the Vietnam war? she asked.  Yes, and so had her husband. At that point she sent a text to Mike, then showed me a photo of her two daughters. One named Michelle!  I dug out an actual photograph of my Michelle, and said that I, too, had a second daughter.  Why had I been in California, Lee Lee asked?  To talk to an old friend’s book club about my latest book.  Really? I learned she is in a writing group and hopes to see her memoir published this year. At this point in our conversation, she flagged down another woman and asked if she would take a photo of us.  She already had Mike’s number and sent the photo to him.

            I did not tell Lee Lee about the multiple connections with a woman in the book club I’d attended days earlier. What were the chances I would meet someone who had done business for years in Venezuela and Colombia, mined gold in Peru (three countries where I’d spent a decade)? More than this, she has a house in the Napa Valley (my haunt for another decade), and her nephew, a retired Major General, is someone my daughter knows from the U.S. army.  Best of all, this woman and I are USC graduates. There is even more related to the South for both of us, where she worked for 15 years and where I’ve lived since late 2004.  

            What’s my point? That I am renewed by each encounter with Life’s Three C’s. I returned home from this six-day trip in time for the first meeting of the 2024 RCC-RILL book club. We had a fine discussion of Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping.  That’s for next week.

More Isolated and Less Private

The three articles I mentioned last week brought back two incidents that relate to what Rebecca Solnit and Adrienne LaFrance expressed in their articles about artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley Despots.

In November of 1965, as a poor graduate student in San Francisco, I became a Christmas season hire at Joseph Magnin, a posh department store. It turned out JM had junked cash registers and introduced computers. To get the job I had to take a test that showed I would be able to use the new machine.  I was young. My synapses fired! In the Children’s department where I was assigned, some saleswomen had not survived due to the computer. I was paid an hourly wage but an aging woman I worked with depended on a commission. Ironically, the computer slowed her down. She struggled to remember the codes, bemoaned the loss of fellow JM workers, some relegated to stock work or terminated. She and I made a deal. I would hover at the computer, which given my feelings about machines was ironic, and she would sell merchandise.

Then in 1972, my third year as a secondary English teacher in the Napa Valley, I took a summer “media” institute at U.C. Berkeley.  One day the speaker was an ex-Catholic priest who had become a big name in Education & Mass Media. I have not forgotten a claim he made, that television was the equivalent of running a sewer through the living room. How could I forget that image, especially given the wave of violent movies: Straw Dogs, Clockwork Orange, and others in 1971. Besides violence, the speaker’s concern was the abject stupidity of commercial television with its advertising and schlock. Days of Playhouse 90 and serious drama were gone.

The second image this guru ex-priest left with me was of film and television moguls living behind high walls to protect themselves from the world they were creating. Now its Bill Gates with his own island in Belize, Larry Ellison with 98% of Lanai, and Zuckerberg with 1400 acres on Kauai, to name just three tech titans mentioned in Rebecca Solnit’s London Review article.  She says this trio and others find a segregated life as their ideal while profiting from technologies that encourage social withdrawal. Meanwhile they are capturing as much information about us as possible. Solnit concludes, “We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been.”

Adrienne LaFrance ends her article, powerfully. “Our children are not data sets waiting to be quantified, tracked, and sold. Our intellectual output is not a mere training manual for the AI that will be used to mimic and plagiarize us. Our lives are meant not to be optimized through a screen, but to be lived… We are better versions of ourselves when we are not tweeting or clicking “Like” or scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.  LaFrance’s article is in the March 2024 Atlantic and one to read.           

Next week I will be away in Southern California. But the following week I will share thoughts on Marilynn Robinson, whose latest book is discussed in the March Atlantic.

Do You Remember Your First Timed Test in Life?

I do, third grade, Fullerton, California, Ford Elementary, a strange Booklet, a sharpened number two pencil. Mrs. Leander said, “Begin.” Soon came “Stop.” Then “Turn the page…Begin.” This woman, as kind and encouraging as any teacher in my life, did not say this was an IQ test. What eight-year-old would have understood?  But statewide, third grade was the year a student received an IQ number.  Did the crude grading machine in Sacramento indicate that Gail Wilson ignored parts of the test?” I was not deemed an imbecile but not far from it. I only felt the result of this when I entered high school and IQ affected placement. The number more important than excellent grades in junior high.

What section of the IQ test had I failed to do? Anything with geometric shapes and manipulating them. By eight I read voraciously but disliked numbers. The day of my first timed test, I remember looking out the window, wanting to be outside.  A child of nature then, walking beside the Pacific, collecting seashells. Or in the Sierra Nevada at my grandparents’ cabin with a wood stove beside a stream in a forest. 

The book I loved more than any other was The Yearling. Jody lived with candles or darkness. Ma Baxter had a cast-iron wood stove that burned logs and kindling. I relished Little House on the Praire & read the series repeatedly, along with The Black Stallion books. Oh, to be on an island. Early in life I concluded I had been born in the wrong century; that I must have lived earlier, before electricity, when no machines ruled life. I feared plugging anything into an electrical socket because of frequently being shocked.  In high school I wrote an essay titled, “A Dam is Taking Over Our Lives.” A Divine Automatic Machine. (I left off the letter N!)

 At this time in the late 1950s, I would not have heard of Jacques Ellul: a French philosopher, sociologist, theologist, professor, and author of fifty books.

His work throughout the 1950s concerned the effect of machines on humanity, on mechanical activities performed in the shortest time with the least possible effort, which would lead to the production of faster and better machines.

I read about this Frenchman in the September 2023 Commonweal. The article, “More Than Machines,” is by Nolen Gertz, who discusses Jacques Ellul’s ideas and AI’s threat. I also read, “The Despots of Silicon Valley” by Adrianne La France in The Atlantic’s latest issue (March 2024).  In the February London Review of Books, I twice read a long article “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley” by Rebecca Solnit, who wrote Orwell’s Roses, a book I used in a course not long ago.

            What if I could ask Chat GPT to digest the three articles and come up with a page for next week?  If asked to do this, might AI incriminate itself?  Since I don’t have the capacity to do this (though someone out there might), I will endure the mental hodgepodge of working through many thoughts, and to see what emerges for next week.