The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right

You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.

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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem book cover

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Boles.radio is LIVE!

We’ve discussed AI here several times here on Boles Blogs, and today we’re taking the logical next step into the Uncanny valley by sharing original musical creations and starting our own website radio streaming service using our new songs to accompany our new Boles.radio TLD (Top Level Domain)!

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Student Teach Thyself: My Dubbed Podcast in Italian

Navigating the difficult task of teaching oneself Italian through the marvels of AI voice dubbing is a 21st-century twist on the ancient wisdom of “Physician, heal thyself.” That age-old saying, ripped from the heart of biblical narratives, pushes us towards self-reflection and repair before we set out to fix or guide others. When we apply this idea to the adventure of self-learning Italian — or any foreign language! — by using our own voices echoed back to us in Italian through AI wizardry, welp, it’s like we’re living in a high-tech remix of that proverb.

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Your AI Voice Clone Will Hear You Now

Clones are not coming, they’re already here — because, the Clone, is you! Yes, the call is coming from inside your head! I now have an AI Voice clone of my voice trained on over 30 hours of my Human Meme podcast. I trained my AI voice on my Human Meme podcast so the source material was clean, and well-edited – and because of that early care in podcast recording, and production, my new AI voice is shockingly, and incredibly real and, frankly, Uncannily Fantastic! Plus, there is probably a little tinge of terror tossed in there too — because now my voice can live on without me. Let’s hope it behaves! From this moment on, I have touched true immortality. Would you ever want it any other way?

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Elon Musk and the Mechanical Mask

In a recent interview, SuperGenius Elon Musk warned the future is coming for us, and we better be prepared to fight A.I. drones, and we will become the machine, and we will be able to “download” other people, and their personalities, and their memories, to become them. Our faces become the death mask upon the artificial life façade. Want to become Abraham Lincoln? Check. Adolf Hitler? Check. Elon Musk? You’re gonna have to write a check!

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We Are Our Works: Anthea Syrokou Responds

written by Anthea Syrokou

[Publisher’s Note: In my recent, David Boles: Human Meme, podcast entitled — “We Are Our Works” — loyal listener Anthea Syrokou wrote a smart, and thoughtful, response to that piece of work and, with her permission, we share her fine mind…

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American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland (The Script)

I started a new podcast on July 18, 2016 called “David Boles: Human Meme” and I have had some great luck with episodes like Of Wealth and the Starless Eye and Omne Trium Perfectum: The Rule of Three and De Anima and the Demon Soul, but today’s podcast — American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland — has taken off on a life of its own, and that’s precisely what you hope to have happen in a podcast about human memetics and the how and why we learn and share knowledge!

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Welcome to the David Boles: Human Meme Podcast!

I’m delighted to announce today that my new podcast — David Boles: Human Meme — is now widely available for subscription! The podcast is free, and there’s no advertising, and I’m never going to try to sell you something. You subscribe because you have to make the podcast come to you. The thought behind the method of the podcast is simple: You and me! There’s no production or music or whistles or things that bleep. It’s a quiet conversation. You may listen via iTunes right now!

Continue reading → Welcome to the David Boles: Human Meme Podcast!