—it is the “narraton particles” emitted from the Oort Cloud that explain the capacity of a certain well-known terrestrial species for telling stories, or in other words for presenting as true what is in fact false.

–"Back from the Oort Cloud: An Interview with JSR in PLOOI Magazine," Hinternet (This, the premise for The Oort Cloud Review Volume 1, Issue 1, is among the most sensible things ever said on the advent of AI.)

I've been following Justin Smith-Ruiu for years (he knows). Sometimes boring, never dull—for example In Search of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021, ed.s D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen, Justin E.H. Smith (as he went by then), with the table of contents as follows (copied from my local library website, request now!):

Introduction p. 15 

I Preliminaries  

1 "Birds" as a Historical Problem  

Considerations on the State of the Field Eigil zu Tage-Ravn

2 Estar(ser) and the W-Cache p. 79 

The State of the Discussion Gregg C. Toomey

3 A Publication History of the Proceedings of Estar(ser) 1880-2014 p. 113 Kyrre Mirador

II Attention and Its Objects  

4 The Eads Sublation p. 149 

Fly-Fishing, Kentucky Hegelianism, and Evolutionary Theory in American Bird Practices, 1821-1889 Cisco T. Laertes

5 The Nachtigall Convolute p. 183 

A Previously Unknown Ottoman Protocol, Turkish Practices in the 1940s, and Possible Links between the Order of the Third Bird and the Work of Erich Auerbach The Niblach Working Group  

6 The Vorkuta Antinomy p. 223 

Kant, the Birds, and Primavianist Deviations in the USSR Yu. K. Kuznetsov

III Metempsychoses  

7 Met-Him-Pike-Hoses p. 277 

The Literature of Amphibious Ecstasis in the Americas, 1948-1968

The Greer Papers Working Group  

8 The Rülek Scrolls and the Practice of the Door p. 319 

Marton Bialek (1892-?), Central Asian Syncretism, and the Guardian of the Threshold Easter McCraney  

9 Madame Banksia p. 355 

Margaret Preston's Flower Gazing and the Japonist Protocols of Félix Régamey The Preston Working Group  

IV Rogues and Renegades  

10 The Vater Legacy p. 391 

The Philistine Controversy and the Order of the Third Bird in Germany, 1684-1888 Ansgar Bleibtreu

11 The Fitzwilliam Schism p. 429 

Practical Criticism and Practical Aesthesis in Britain and Beyond, 1925-1975

The Sevens Working Group  

12 "Fix Your Eyes Right Here!" p. 469 

The Life and Times of Inyard Kip Ketchem, the Performing Attention Doctor The William James Working Group  

V Gatherings  

13 The Kittiwake Dossier p. 523 

Object-Oriented Aggregation and Foundational Efforts of the Order among the Parisian Surrealists, 1932-1941 Joanna Fiduccia

14 The Magpie Trove p. 561 

Decoying the New York School, 1950-1985 Caitlin Sweeney

15 The Mazumdar Legacy p. 593 

Practical Aesthesis, Practical Politics, & the Order within the Jorasanko Triangle, 1910-1930 The Working Group to Decolonize the Proceedings  

VI Remains  

16 The Finding Aid Folder p. 631 

Seeking Order in the Archives of the Order The Meta-Archival Working Group  

Acknowledgments p. 671 

Notes on Contributors p. 673 

Bibliography p. 683 

Index p. 717 

Graphic Sources p. 747 

Colophon p. 749 

Plates p. 753

Please note the presence of scholarly apparatus, complete and unimpeachable (cf. I Am Out of Control of My Own Material). Hugh swears In Search of the Third Bird is the best book he has ever read. And if that's not high enough a recommendation, see my disparagement of Justin E.H. Smith's earlier (in the context of my own awareness, since here is where I first encountered him) The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: Justin E.H. Smith’s book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is not what I thought it was & is not what it says it is, A History, A Philosophy, A Warning: it’s the reverse. Then, it is to E.H. and J.S.R. that I owe the concept of computus, from his The Reckoning of Time, now behind a paywall, to my Bergson, Deleuze & Cinema (to be contd.) , which is not, where I refer to computus—the calendrical time-reckoning used to calculate dates of note, holy days and so on—as the old time machine, that cinema, the new time machine, replaced. It must be in the to be contd. bit (that is, it's written but unredacted. And saying you'd like it to be will naturally expedite the process @outside light).

Ruiu-Smith and I earlier diverged and have converged, while he has risen (to sequestering himself behind a paywall),

music break:

and I bring now to your attention, without, apart from the foregoing, the slight hesitation or reservation, his latest and most recent work,

The Oort Cloud Review
Volume 1, Issue 1

of which he is possibly an author among other real and possible contributors, a circumstance he explains in the feature interview in PLOOI, covering the cutting-edge of fashion, art and culture, which can be found here in translation from the Netherlandish: Back from the Oort Cloud.

The interview contains some of the most sensible things—where he and I converge entirely—anyone has ever said about AI. Accused of being in two minds (just in two?) about these "new technologies" being a threat to meaning as well as presenting opportunities for the exploration of new creative potentials, J.S.R. puts it plainly,

... like what Leonard Cohen sang about shooting heroin: “Did some good, did some harm.” Anyone who tries to come down dogmatically one side or the other of such a complex historical transformation is just an idiot. It’s like what that one guy, what’s his name… like what John Ganz posted about Steven Pinker when the latter said something characteristically simplistic about how “good” the Enlightenment was, in contrast to those who deem it “bad”. “What no dialectics does to a MFer,” Ganz wrote, if I recall correctly. Well, I don’t want to be that MFer.

–at ibid, but please read the whole shemozzle, at the same.