July 12, 2024, by Brigitte Nerlich

Being all at sea

It’s summer, but it isn’t. It is intermittently grey and rainy and stormy, with a few days of sunshine in between. In another year without a summer, namely 1816, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or so the myth goes* …. If she could sit in the Villa Diodati in gloomy weather and write, why can’t I, I wondered (not that one could ever say that ‘writing’ means the same thing in the two instances)?

I have written a blog post or two every summer since 2012, at home, in coffee shops, on the beach, even in the rain. This year, I sit here in the intermittent gloom and can’t find a topic. My inspiration has totally dried up.

I look at AI and what I see just overwhelms me. Look at this on explainable AI for example – it even has the word ‘arts’ in it, but I can’t get my head round it. When perusing the programme for the conference ‘Science in Public’ I came across the keynote by Jack Stilgoe “Making AI public”. Right up my street you’d think. That should inspire me… So I started to think what I would say about the topic (as there was no abstract and I wasn’t at the conference), but because of the sheer volume of stuff, I soon gave up. I looked at some philosophy of biology things and oh dear or dear, what’s written there goes straight over my head. And as for climate change, words fail me…

I feel like somebody who stands forlornly on the sea shore and all the boats, big and small, representing the fields and disciplines I have once dabbled in, are floating away from me.

The only thing I got a bit excited about was the announcement of a Leverhulme project that traces a network of early 20^th-century women who pioneered university language teaching. Professor Emma Gilby, who is affiliated with Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, will carry out the research. Reading about the project made me quite nostalgic, as I once taught a bit of history of linguistics at Cambridge for a term while being affiliated with Sidney Sussex – a very long time ago. Even that ship has sailed now, but at least I still vaguely understand projects like this. I wish Emma Gilby good luck and I hope she has great fun rummaging around in the archives.

And now I’ll go and read Pat Thomson’s blog post on ‘writer’s block’!!

*HT @EssaysConcern

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, The monk by the sea, 1809

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