Shane Devine

1 week ago | shanedevine.substack.com | Shane Devine

When in the course of human events, it becomes evident that men can no longer be considered equal; that, because of the dissolving of a mysterious quality of grace, a species of one-time gentlemen trifurcates into a tier of tyrants, a tier of those clinging to what’s left of the middle class, and a lowly band of rabble, we find ourselves asking, out of a need to stop these people from bothering us, where they all came from. Who are the rabble? Are the rabble simply the poor?

4 weeks ago | shanedevine.substack.com | Shane Devine

Ricocheting out of New Orleans came a car five strong, speeding under weeping willows drooping out from marshes and chrome-colored rivers. Seated in the middle of the back, Maurice untangled clumps of tobacco and rolled them into fine tips like an old Plains Indian. Laurianne became documentarian and narrated the history of the destination, Lafayette, an old encampment teetering on the banks of a bayou deep in the jungle, west of the Mississippi River.

1 month ago | shanedevine.substack.com | Shane Devine

“i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about its flagship product, ChatGPT. Over the last few years this AI software has spread virus-like across the globe, swallowing up inane tasks like writing student essays and helping corporate workers with operations and strategy. But its long-term promise is that it will refashion the arts from the ground up.

1 month ago | shanedevine.substack.com | Shane Devine

If Summer is understood to be the spirit of celebrated excess, if we permit ourselves to thematize it as the triumph of life, brash and verdant, over the contemplating autumn, the immobile winter, and the still-thawing spring, this summer of which I speak is thesource, the summer in which all others participate when they approximate it here and there and in certain parts.

1 month ago | shanedevine.substack.com | Shane Devine

Empty yourself out. Empty it of everything: all passions and all notions. Now rid yourself of your faculty of reasoning, along with its illusory pretense that it can understand truth. Put a cloud of forgetting between yourself and all creatures and aim your focus up to a cloud of unknowing. Pierce it with your love, not with your mind. Love only God. Now empty yourself of God, for that too is too much. It is your vanity reflected. Empty yourself out even of that Nothing that is left.