 ArchaiOptix [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Today: We are proud to welcome the debut of Talia Lavin, our newest Hydra, author of the forthcoming Wild Faith; and Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy.
Issue No. 176Steal Back the Ghost From the Machine
Talia Lavin Checking in With the Boss
Rax King
Steal Back the Ghost From the Machineby Talia LavinI lost someone I loved two years ago and I miss her dearly. She was old and there is often a sense that if someone is old their loss, because it is more expected, is more acceptable; in the obituary there is only the death age and there is no other explanation. But her accumulation of years and experience only made her all the more valuable to me: how with half a century of gardens she could instruct me in cultivating my small new one; how she could tell me about the repartee she’d traded with authors now dead; how portraits of her, painted in the full black-haired beauty of her youth, adorned her house; and how that house was a place of treasures from decades past, cookbooks and pitchers and figurines and papier-mache masks on the walls. She grew old and she was in pain but the disease in her blood was still a quick-handed thief, and stole a huge spirit that never dimmed. Two years on I do not approve, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the cold ground. It’s incredible and cruel that someone you love can simply be gone for the rest of your life. That you will never hear a word from them again. There are any number of companies looking to profit off this eternal conundrum by offering digital simulacra of the lost. Companies like Eternos, Project December, Replika, Seance AI, and HereAfter AI purport to preserve a loved one, artificially continue that forever-stilled conversation. So much money has been made from the human drive of eros that the question of huge profits from the equally universal fear of death and the sensation of loss comes naturally. In this age of digital ghouls, the answer is, of course, why not?
She was a small proud woman and a genius in her way, though that genius was primarily expressed in the private arena, where she poured her love and her acerbity into generations of interlocutors, and cultivated roses so thick and thorny and healthy they far outlived her. And she wrote. There were so many handwritten letters, years of emails and even two novels and this is not to mention the role she played as muse to men who wrote about her. The idea of placing all her words into a machine, and having it recrudesce some digital shadow, some mockery without any animate soul—without those big dark eyes and the unpredictable barbs and the near-century of recollections—fills me with disgust beyond the ordinary and human experience of grief. Implicit in her words were those dark eyes; preserved in her letters are those strong, mobile hands, the back that never stopped bending to pluck errant bindweed and goosegrass from her rows of phloxes. Even after her passing she is present in what she wrote, and the enormity of the loss is present too.
Dulling it, diminishing it by creating an echo chamber of mimicry would be a betrayal both of the human soul she was and of the grief of losing her: it would undercut humanity itself. I cast no aspersion on those who, facing that void inside, want to fill it with any approximation that might palliate it. But I will throw every aspersion I’ve got at those who, from their bowers filled with money and smug fantasies of “disruption,” offer false promises, bastardizations of the dead, who twist and exploit grief for profit, who encourage us to commodify and cheapen the ones we loved who now are gone. In her hospital room I sang to her as she was dying; she was so cold, she couldn’t get warm, and I sang songs borrowed from Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez because I had no more words of my own. Into the earth go lovers and thinkers and this is cruel. But to mimic her in a machine feels crueler still. I will never let her go, and never be resigned to her loss. I loved her—those three words encompassing so much of my life. She taught me that my writing was something to be prized. How can I prize it without her? I loved her wit and her pesto and her long elegant hands; the way, utilizing the old tricks of the Depression, she used a match and ash to make eyeshadow; and how this was one of the last things she ever wrote to me: If I could have given you one gift, it would have been this very notion of planting a garden.
How wonderful you’re doing and feeling plant loving. To adore the miracle of the seed in the ground turning into a plant is to adore nature—its astonishing benefit to the eye and heart and the mouth! The very root of poetry in all things… I am getting carried away.
May your garden grow, daily pushing its floppy and branching bounty up to heaven.
Thank you for this missive and the pictures. And for the gift of you. Loving you sure pays off mightily.
I would rather see her return in a seed than in a chatbot. I would rather rage against her loss than have it numbed in a digital lie. I loved her. I am not resigned. And I will damn any who seek to profit from that. She left me in autumn, but there are seeds that can still sprout now before the frost: kale and aster, pea and purple sedum, whose blooms are shaped like tiny stars.
FLAMING HYDRA ON BLUESKYAs Bluesky keeps welcoming new users and building out its social network, it's introduced a new feature called Starter Packs—custom-made mini-networks of people you can follow with one click. The other day, we made one by collecting all the Flaming Hydra writers on Bluesky.
After we announced the Flaming Hydra Writers pack, Hydra subscriber Joe Flynn wrote to us with another idea:  A good idea If you're on Bluesky and you'd like to be part of a Flaming Hydra Subscriber Starter Pack, please write to hello@flaminghydra.com and tell us your Bluesky handle. We'll set up a starter pack with the first 50 subscribers who respond.
Checking in With the Boss Fabian Tompsett (WMUK) [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons When I started my first office job, as a newly minted executive assistant who’d been hired out of a customer service gig, I was vastly out of my depth. My boss was a chaos-brained CEO who was constitutionally incapable of completing a sentence, much less giving detailed instructions for tasks upon which millions of dollars always seemed to hinge. The years I’d spent absorbing the rage of angry customers hadn’t prepared me for the sedate, mannered confusion of the job I’d just taken, which was in most ways much easier but just incomprehensible enough to keep me anxious about my job security. Right around then I started reading Ask A Manager, Alison Green’s workplace advice column. Though Green occasionally answers letters from workers in food service, retail, and the trades, the bulk of her advice has always been for professional email-senders. It felt almost like work, covertly reading Green’s guidance to people who cried when they received professional feedback or couldn’t word a business email. When I ignored my mounting pile of bewildering assignments in favor of reading Green’s advice to other executive assistants who were in equally far over their heads, it felt like a pleasantly low-effort form of professional development. Green started Ask A Manager in 2007, back when everyone with an internet connection was starting a blog. But her project was different from the aimless, who-cares fare that characterized much of the early blogosphere. She had a killer hook—to borrow the words of her introductory post, “If you’re not sure what the hell your manager is thinking, or how to ask for a raise, or whether you might be in danger of getting fired, or how to act in a second interview … ask away.” Who doesn’t want to know how to ask for a raise or predict their own firing? At first, Green supplied boring entreaties to job applicants to “individualize” [sic] their cover letters for specific jobs, plus listicles (“5 questions job-seekers should ask interviewers”; “9 ways to ruin an interview”). She’d link to other workplace-related blogs, mortared together with pious filler posts about how important it is to tell awesome employees that they’re awesome. She isn’t a thrilling writer—a lingering side effect, maybe, of all the time she spent in a world where the first task of writing is not to thrill, but to communicate in a convincingly managerial dialect. Those early entries evince the chipper eagerness to please that remains an endemic feature of LinkedIn blog posts and Indeed job listings everywhere. References to “rock stars” run rampant, as do “formulate,” “execute,” “drill down,” etc. What is it with managers and the word “formulate”? They’re all addicted to it, and I’ve never heard it used by anyone else. I suppose the purpose of the word, along with its cousins “utilize” and “ping,” is to tell listeners they’re hearing from a capital-M Manager—which is certainly how it sounds on Green’s blog. It was in answering readers’ letters that Green really came into her own; her real milieu is written conversation, returning a serve. The jargon gives way to a warm, pleasant directness. She’s able to simplify the most confounding workplace snarls into steps anyone can take. Her always-knowledgeable voice becomes one you can imagine actually speaking to you, one you’d like to hear. When she tells a reader to let her know how the situation goes, as she often does, you sense that she really wants to know. At its best, the blog and its community felt like one big water cooler around which to gossip freely about unreasonable bosses and lazy coworkers. Sadly, even a strong gimmick can only remain enjoyable for so long. Green long ago began resorting to the standard tactics of the burned-out one-man writing operation trying to keep things fresh: guest posts and “ask the readers” round-ups; best-ofs; endless canvassing for updates on situations past, to the point that some letters have been updated three or four times with decreasingly interesting news from the original correspondent’s life. Green’s best quality as a blogger was her ability to split her ostensible loyalties between workers and managers—to see workers’ concerns from a manager’s perspective, and to provide useful sanity checks about managers’ behavior to workers who suspect that it’s unreasonable. In recent years, however, as bloggers and newsletter writers so often do, she seems to have noticed that the most outrageous posts get the most traffic, and begun selecting more sensational letters accordingly. But it’s hard to see much value in reading advice for the person whose dad and boss want to take them to couples’ therapy, or the person whose coworker told her to stop flirting with her teenage employee. Though she does gamely try to advise both people, the sense one gets reading these sorts of letters is of Green inviting us to gawk at her freak show. It should also be noted that recently, when a reader expressed unease with Green’s vaguely worded Zionist sympathies, Green commanded her to “never read here again,” followed by a chorus of sycophantic commenters expressing their over-the-top gratitude. Though it’s obviously Green’s right to moderate her blog according to whatever standards she chooses, this particular moment speaks to the cults of personality that invariably develop around the most prominent bloggers. The same interactive, DIY quality that makes blogs enjoyable—that sense the readers get of not just reading their favorite writers, but knowing them, even having a relationship with them—is destined to make those blogs unpleasant sooner or later, even if nothing about the writer or the blog ever meaningfully changes. For 17 years, Green has been writing the same posts in the same voice, successfully maintaining the same broadly palatable, depoliticized appeal. That it’s taken her this long to “speak up” in a way that readers like myself are bound to find politically and morally intolerable is, in its way, impressive. Now that those gates are open, it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of them next. As for me, I quit that office job in 2020 because a stranger doxxed me to my boss, showing her my thirst traps and tweets about hating my job. It’s hard to say which horrified her more. Funnily enough, I’d spent my time in that office obsessing over etiquette minutiae like which office should set up the conference call, all the while baring my cleavage online in tweets with captions about how my boss made me want to kill myself. Green could have told me which gaffe I should have worried about committing, if I’d been heeding her advice as carefully as I thought. But like devoted blog readers everywhere, I only heard what I wanted to hear.
Two weeks to go in the SWAG fundraiser! Wanna buy a shirt???
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