Peter Murmann

Diary

What is behind David Bowie’s Creativity

Great visual article in The NY Times, giving a glimpse of his 90,000 item archive.

Books, Fiction

And the birds rained down

I am not sure how I became the owner of this book. I found it on my bookshelf this summer.
The only thing that was clear is that it was bought in my local bookshop because of its label
on the back cover. Did I buy it? I typically do not buy contemporary novels because I want
novels to have withstood the test of time before I give them my attention. Did someone give
it to me as a present? This is possible. I live in the summer, surrounded by woods, in a
wooden house.

Movies, Comedy

Ticket to Paradise

The best thing about this rather uninspired romantic comedy is the destination: I wanted to buy a ticket to Bali as I was watching “Ticket to Paradise.” The second best thing is the chemistry between Julia Roberts and George Clooney. You can sense that the two genuinely like each other. As they tell the story, Clooney would only do the film if Roberts was playing the female part they are having fun. Instead of watching the film, travel to Bali.  It just moved on my bucket list.

When Novels Mattered

Important article by David Brooks in NY Times.

He writes: I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.
It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher’s Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.

Movies, Phantasy

Companion

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading more and more alarmed voices calling for a moratorium on the development of advanced AI models. Even researchers who were previously enthusiastic about the positive potential of AI are growing concerned that we may be stumbling into building systems that could turn against humanity—like in one of those sci-fi movies where robots either enslave humanity or wipe us out entirely. Indeed, I just ready a study that expert on AI are more concerned that AI can harm humanity than the general public.