From the Compost Heap header. A pencil style illustration of a compost heap with flowers and plants growing around it. A bee buzzes by and a white rabbit hops by.

  • “Hey, I work with college students often. Do you know what brings their attention back to the surface after years of Zoom classes, Generative AI cheating, and smart phone usage? 

    Zines. Freaking zines. You put a zine in an undergraduate’s hands and say “Someone like you made this. You could make this. All you need is some found images, paper, scissors/glue, and your own imagination. No chatgpt necessary.” 

    They light up, every single time, without fail. They start to recognize how little Generative AI serves them in the long run. They’ve called zines “Anti-AI” to my face and gleefully showed me their first zines with thought, intention, and inventiveness. 

    Critical thinking isn’t dead in the land of zines. It’s thriving. Academia has to pivot, as much as I loathe that corporate term.”

    Abigail Schleifer via Substack Notes

    See also: What Are Zines? by Abigail Schleifer

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  • “The work of writing a book is not the selection of suitable words,” writes John Higgs. “The work is the task of engaging another mind. It is a constant dance between understanding your subject and understanding how a future reader will react to it – a reader you can never know, but which you still have to intuit.”

    via Austin Kleon (in the context of discussing AI)

    Source

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  • “In my experience, there is no such thing as “clerical work” in writing: the donkey work is crucial to the process, as is having to sort through the mess of the draft — that’s the art of self-editing, and it’s the art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for.”

    Austin Kleon on AI

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