Episode 06: Paul Bradley Carr, Part 2

Bestselling author and bookstore owner Paul Bradley Carr returns for Part 2 of our conversation about artificial intelligence, the power of narratives, drinking blood, and whether vaping is cool (spoiler: no). The AI chatbots kept trying to disrupt our Zoom session with Paul, but for now, humans remain dominant. We also discuss Tom Comitta’s Patchwork, a novella constructed entirely out of snippets of text taken from other, previously published works. One of our hosts was turned off by this experimental approach. Try to guess which one! We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The New York Times called Paul’s most recent novel The Confessions “a terrifying window into the future.”

Patchwork by Tom Comitta is published by Coffee House Press.

Works Cited this episode:

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
“Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries,” Matt Novak, Gizmodo
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
Untitled metafictional literary short story about AI and grief, ChatGPT and/or Sam Altman
A Void, George Perec
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Only Revolutions, Mark Z. Danielewski
The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci
Guernica, Pablo Picasso
The Clock, dir. Christian Marclay
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Matrix, dir. the Wachowski siblings
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov