Noteworthy

Each hilarious answer spat out by ChatGPT is a nice little bag of futility plopped on a writer’s doorstep. Two additions to Biblioasis’s Field Notes series contend with such modern flavours of literary despair. Jason Guriel’s On Browsing offers a personal “browser history” that reveals the author as much as it elegizes the habit of sifting through physical copies of music, books, and movies. Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure romps through a series of anecdotes about the thwarted aspirations of authors so as to instruct a “kid writer” not to hope for anything. Reading the pamphlets together shows the connections between their topics. After all, writers browse most while failing to write. (Hello, Twitter.)

As Marche observes, “failure is big” these days. Tech and business thinkers welcome foundering so loudly that it seems a lucky charm for ensuring inevitably big...