Tag Archives: art

The Devil in the Machine

23 Saturday May 2026

Posted by in Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science, Utopia and Dystopia

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My wife and I went out last weekend to see a Canon Shakespeare Company production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on a whim. I loved that a small scrappy company was taking it on—I had never seen the play, though I once taught the text at my college 20+ years ago. It was wonderful to watch nine actors with little more than a stage dagger and a bunch of borrowed library books for props conjure up this Renaissance classic in a theater called, appropriately, The Wyrd Hut. It was a very Portland experience.

While I often classify Marlowe and Shakespeare together because of the period in which they wrote, every time I actually encounter a Marlowe text, I am reminded that he is no Shakespeare. Comparing the two feels to me a little like comparing Georg Phillip Telemann with Johann Sebastian Bach: they were contemporaries and worked in the same stylistic language, but the depth of Shakespeare’s characters is simply of a different order than Marlowe’s.

Still, for as clunky as some of the characterizations and plot elements are in Doctor Faustus, I realized only on later reflection how perfect that play is for these times. Faustus, the German medieval genius who has grown weary of all the books and fields of knowledge that litter his desk, has decided that his real future is in magic. Why not summon the devil? Why shouldn’t he pledge his soul to Lucifer in exchange for unlimited magical power?

Sound familiar? I was reminded the next morning of Sam Altman’s infamous 2015 quip (which was apparently not a joke) “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” It’s easy enough to dredge up similar self-regarding twaddle from Altman’s nemesis Elon Musk: “In less than 20 years, working at all will be optional… like a hobby pretty much…” and “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course.”

Faustus shows the same mix of (apparent) brilliance and extreme lack of introspection. And his use of the powers that Mephistopheles lends him has the same disconnect between lofty goals and tawdry, even ridiculous, triviality. Faustus’s dream is to rule the world, to remake reality for his purposes:

FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!

Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,

Resolve me of all ambiguities,

Perform what desperate enterprise I will?

I’ll have them fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;

I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,

And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;

I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,

And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;

I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,

Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;

I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,

And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,

And reign sole king of all the provinces;

Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,

Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,

I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

And yet, once he has the “servile spirit” of Mephistopheles to do his bidding, much of the action has all the gravitas of a Three Stooges short: Faustus becomes invisible so that he can steal the Pope’s hat; Faustus places cuckold’s horns on a mouthy knight; Faustus presents Emperor Charles V with a deepfake of Alexander the Great and his paramour.

And by the end? This brilliant doctor who once dreamed of liberating his country and altering the course of the Rhine has decided to enter into a romance with an illusory Helen of Troy. I am reminded of all of us LLM users in this moment, contemplating a servile spirit that will “read [us] strange philosophy,” unless of course we just want to use all that water and electricity and compute to cook up an AI girlfriend instead.

No spoilers (or no more spoilers), but the play doesn’t end well for Faustus. I’m more guardedly optimistic about how our Mephistophelean AI servants will treat us, as well as how the world may improve for all humanity over time. But we’d be wise to look to Faustus, that brilliant, self-deluding renaissance nerd who sold his soul and got nothing real in return for it.

When Danez Smith Came to Clark College

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Reading Roundup

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One of the most celebrated poets in America right now, Danez Smith, came to my college to read last week. My job, as a utility infielder on Clark College’s creative writing committee who happens to live near the airport, was to pick up Danez and drive them to their hotel downtown.

The pick-up was a breeze–Danez has clearly done this kind of thing many times–and I was pleased when they got in the car at how easygoing they seemed, as well as how I was not coming off (in my own mind, anyway) as too star-struck.

As I drove, we chatted about America’s two main Portlands–Danez is living in Portland, ME right now–and they pressed me on my mixed feelings about my own Portland (i.e. a great American city driven to a terminally twee nonconformity by, among other things, the show Portlandia). We talked about the amazing restaurant town that Portland, OR, has become, and I was overjoyed to hear that Danez would be eating at Gado Gado, a brilliant Indonesian place in my neighborhood.

And then, while describing to Danez what the gado gado dish consists of, I took the wrong exit on to I-84–instead of the westbound, towards downtown, I took the eastbound, towards Utah. I’ve driven from the airport to I-84 hundreds of times, so I am not sure what made me take the wrong exit just then: maybe my poor memory for foods was taxing my brain as I tried to remember what was in gado gado, or maybe I was more star-struck than I realized.

In any event, the wrong exit I took was one of the worst wrong exits I could take in the whole benighted Portland metro freeway system. Exits do exist on I-84 eastbound between Portland and Utah, but really there are a lot fewer than you would think. I got off the freeway at 122nd street and started making a loop down to the butt end of Sandy Boulevard, where I knew I could get back on to I-205 and thence to westbound I-84. We talked about family, about the trouble that comes for our loved ones at the end of their lives (and, by extension, for us one day). I navigated expertly after my breathtaking blunder back to the freeway, got us back on, and we were back on the track. Danez looked up at one of the exit signs and said “Wait, wasn’t that where we got off the freeway last time?”

Indeed it was, Danez Smith, indeed it was. I’ve just taken 15 minutes of your life force at the end of a very long travel day for you. Forgive me.

The next day, Danez read like a dream. They came up in the slam tradition, and they have a theater background to boot, and it shows: each poem was like some incantation, a crazy pile-up of language that blew us all away. Part of me wished that I was one of the shell-shocked 19 year-olds from Intro to Literature sitting in the audience, encountering their first poetry reading the way I took in mine from William Stafford in 1989. You poor suckers, I wanted to say to them, it’s never going to get better than this. If you go to a thousand more readings, you’ll always be thinking about this one.

Danez is a better and younger poet than me. I had to remind myself of something I tell my creative writing students every term to help them get past the anxiety and professional jealously that comes from reading the work of someone better than you: that both Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young were at Woodstock–in fact, they arrived together in the same hot-wired truck–and that not one of the 500,000 people at Woodstock would have said that Neil Young was the more talented guitarist of the two. But Jimi Hendrix’s greatness does not make Neil Young less great, and Neil Young is no less singular a talent just because he had to share the stage with someone as incandescent as Jimi Hendrix. (Of course, in this extended analogy, I am neither Jimi Hendrix nor Neil Young, but rather an accomplished and nearly unknown player like Dave Schramm or, even more aptly, like a member of the fictional band the Late Greats from the Wilco song).

Here’s Danez’s most famous poem, one they didn’t read last week, but one that will give you a taste of what we heard. Good Jimi Hendrix energy–we were lucky to catch it at Clark College, “The Harvard of Two-Year Colleges,” in scenic Vancouver, Washington: