Ghost Notes 2

Short takes on things I have been watching, reading, listening to, thinking about, or longing for

I have a new piece in The Saturday Paper about the deal between News Corp and OpenAI and what such deals might mean for public interest journalism. (There’s even a ghost reference.)

A good non-racist writer is hard to find: I was thrilled to see that what looks like a decent biopic of the writer Flannery O’Connor is about to be released. I first read O’Connor’s work a hundred years ago, in my twenties, and was awed, confused, astounded and terrified by what I found, in just the right proportions. I graduated from the short stories to her novels (there are only two of them), her essays, and finally to her letters, and was I completely captivated by the complex, troubled and hilarious person that emerges from all that writing.

Ethan and Maya Hawke better do her justice.

Eventually, like all her fans, I had to confront O’Connor’s racism and I hit all the usual notes of trying to play it down and contextualise it with reference to time and place. You realise—if you can be honest about it—t…