I don’t know how to write this thing. I’m writing it anyway.
I know that sounds dramatic. The things I have to write are not dramatic. Still I have been having a hard time.
(Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe! Rob, just breathe.)
(And so: I breathe.)
I know why I have been having a hard time. As I mentioned in an earlier installment of the Pig City Thing Whatever, I have an actual job now.
No one should ever have to work.
Day in and day out, we are out there doing our jobs that have to get done. What we’re really doing is everything we can to force a boulder the wrong way up the side of a hill. The boulder will roll back down the hill someday and kill us all and other people. But what choice do we have? Without work, we have no money, and without money we have no food or shelter, let alone goods and services. We have to do our best to keep shoving the boulder that any day now will roll over us as if we weren’t even there. It will crush us and our children and everyone who might have followed us into the world, and there are so many things we’re not doing for ourselves and one another because we have to put all of our strength into the boulder thing.
Or maybe we’re not, I don’t know.
My job as a Learning Content Editor is a good one so far, and as I told my boss the other day, I have spent some of my recent time at the office not as an editor of learning content so much as an editor who learns content. And who, I might add, is as content as I have been in a while, despite the ongoing war our taxes are paying for, which is part of why I mentioned the boulder. The boulder is not the war, but the war is part of what the boulder is, if you know what I mean.
The other day, at my job, I read a paragraph.
I want to tell you about the paragraph, even though I don’t think anyone will be as interested in it as I am. But before I get to it I’ll tell you what I have been listening to—which is, wouldn’t you know it, sort of related to what I have to say about the paragraph.
I have been listening the podcast American Vandal, by Matt Seybold, particularly some recent episodes that consist of recordings of an academic conference at which literary and other scholars discussed a recently published book edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant: Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century.
The podcast episodes are here, here, and here. And, listen: I would like to not use Spotify links. I don’t use Spotify anymore, and I never used it for podcasts. But I don’t know where others get podcasts. I know some people get them from Spotify.
What, first off, is close reading? Well, geez. I haven’t thought about it much in the last ten years, and in their book’s introduction the editors do a much better job of explaining it than I can. But I used to teach close reading in introductory literature classes, so I should muster up an explanation.
I just remembered, actually: fifteen years ago, I used the now-defunct animated video creation website Xtranormal to make a short film in which a man explains how to close-read a poem:
But to offer an explanation that isn’t a decade and a half old and deliberately stupid: close reading is what someone does when they are studying a text, or attending to it in some other way, and they seek to demonstrate an aspect of the text they have noticed and that they think matters. They usually want to make an argument about it. Close reading entails, or most often involves, quoting from the text, generally after providing some introductory context for that quotation, and then drawing the reader’s attention to whatever aspect of what’s been quoted the close reader is interested in, or wants to complicate in some way—whatever it is they intend to do.
If you wanted to close-read some of what I’ve written of this newsletter so far, you might write something like this:
It is evident, from Robert Long Foreman’s most recent newsletter, that he is a stupid person nobody likes, and who should shut up about everything forever. While this may at first appear to be a rash assertion, perhaps even an ad hominem attack that can hardly be substantiated in the eyes of those not already inclined to believe it—of which, indeed, there are some—the way Foreman writes will demonstrate the point plainly. Take the way he introduces close reading, and immediately pretends he is not confident he can sufficiently explain it. “What, first off, is close reading?” he writes. “Well, geez. I haven’t thought about it much in the last ten years.” It is the “Well, geez” that gives us the strongest indication that Foreman is an asshole. It is a plain attempt at self-abnegation, and a false one. It is a way Foreman has of shrugging at us, and saying, “Who, me?”—when there is no one else it could be, for he is the newsletter’s author. It is he who, in the first place, introduced the concept he pretends to be reluctant to explain. He knows he is about to venture into a good enough explanation of close reading, but whether it is due to insecurity, performative or otherwise, or his inability to resist being annoying, he inserts this “Well, geez.” It is a verbal way of tugging at his collar. “I haven’t thought about it much in the last ten years,” he writes, as if that mattered. As if not thinking about something much for ten years means one cannot explain it.
This is not a good example. I don’t know. Like I said, I have to work a lot, and it takes time to get these things right. I don’t have much time. Not only that, my daughter is playing the drums six feet from my head.
I love that she is doing that. I would never complain about such things. Unless they are doing something wrong, my children can do no wrong. Playing the drums is not wrong.
But it is taking me days to write this. I wrote the drum paragraph on March 24, 2026. I wrote the paragraph after the next one a week and a half earlier than that. Writing a newsletter is like time travel, except it’s not very interesting.
Just look:
I am writing this on a Saturday morning, in between vacuuming the downstairs and vacuuming the upstairs. I was scrubbing dried toothpaste off the sink in my kids’ bathroom when I realized I had to come down and type this out. For that reason alone, you’re not getting the solid gold explanation of close reading. I am a learning content editor, not an English professor, so the time I can spend on this sort of thing is limited. The time English professors can spend on this stuff is also limited, but they have more of it than I do.
If you want a better explanation of what close reading is, read the book I linked to. It’s got some great stuff in it, and Johanna Winant, one of the editors, used to teach at my alma mater, West Virginia University. We weren’t there at the same time.
Also, listen to the podcast I linked to. It’s really good!
I was lying in bed one night, listening to it, hearing what the academics had to say about close reading. They agreed with one another about how when you’re close reading you can have the time of your life. They were saying stuff about how incredible it feels when you read close so close and so hard that it’s almost like your eyes are going to touch the page you’re looking at, like you’re getting closer to the thing you’re reading than you’ve been to anything or anyone in the whole world. It’s like looking at the sun except the rays from this sun radiate ecstasy instead of heat, light, and radiation that can kill you. Your eyes may never be the same.
I was psyched about their conversation, and felt that more conferences should be recorded and made available to the public, especially since, if presenters knew that what they were saying might be heard by more people than are in the room with them, they might do a better job of presenting. I have seen and given presentations at conferences that could have used that kind of pressure.
I was thinking, Wow, I am so glad these scholars who teach at universities get to do this and teach it to their students. Close reading is so cool. I am really glad for them all, that they get to spend their time this way. It was a great privilege, to have done it once myself, and while it’s not a tragedy that I don’t do it still, because I was never a great teacher—at best, I was a good one—I miss it from time to time.
My next thought, as I kept listening, was: What the hell does any of this stuff about close reading have to do with my life as I live it now?
I’ll come back to that question, but at one point, one of the contributors to the conference said her close reading instruction is always complicated, because 99 percent of the time she teaches using PowerPoint presentations. For a few seconds, after she said that, I thought what she meant was that she is, to an unreasonable degree, drawn to using PowerPoint whenever she teaches. She insists on using it, even when she doesn’t have to, even when it only makes teaching more complicated for her and doesn’t improve student outcomes. She simply cannot teach a class if she doesn’t get to show students a presentation using PowerPoint—and here she was, confessing to this unnecessary hindrance to her own success. Then it dawned on me that she must be an art history professor, and the things her students are close reading are visual images of one kind or another. That would make a lot more sense than her having a PowerPoint addiction.
It was on my mind for some time, how I enjoyed listening to the discussion of close reading, and how it lit up something in my brain that’s been dim for far too long. It reminded me of the dormant academic who lives in me, and who is me. I don’t regret that he’s there, but I don’t know what he is still doing here, you know?
What does close reading have to do with me now? Of what use is it to me, as a learning content editor?
No one at work wants me to engage in a close reading of anything. I can’t do volunteer close reading after hours, to provide aid to the unhoused. They don’t need close reading, they need money and food.
Is close reading a great thing that people get to do when they’re at school, and when they teach at a school, and that’s it? Is there no reason for anyone outside of a school to mess with or know about it? Why listen to American Vandal, and excite a part of myself that might be better off permanently sedated? Why not let the forever dormant academic in me die?
I will admit up front that I don’t have the answer, and that I’m not really going anywhere with this. If it seemed like I was, I apologize.
I really don’t know what close reading has to do with my life right now. I also don’t believe that thinking about it is a waste of time.
Playing ARC Raiders for the last few months was a waste of time. That’s why I’m not doing it anymore.
And I can’t deny that learning to close-read was good for my brain just in general, the same way that learning algebra was, though I never did a great job of that. When you learn to do something, and you get to be good at it, it becomes a part of you. You cannot measure precisely the effect it has on your life. If you learn to calculate stuff using the Pythagorean Theorem, you gain a skill that may never have a practical application in the rest of your life—but you also make yourself a little smarter. You have now done something that used to not know how to do. It may make other things easier to learn and do. It may simply boost your brainpower in a way that’s not applicable to anything, but which is good in itself.
If I hadn’t done a lot of close reading in college and grad school, I doubt I could have written this essay about Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown and family annihilation that I wrote recently-ish for The Culture We Deserve. I don’t recall that I do any close reading in that essay, but the close reading I did before helped make that essay possible. Or so I imagine.
When I was, for a brief time, an English professor, teaching classes and everything, I had a terrible case of imposter syndrome. I knew I didn’t belong in that role. I was not good enough, not even close—but I was there. And I wasn’t smart enough to have a doctorate, but I had one. So I came to think of that degree, and that job, as things it was up to me to live up to. The PhD was not a certificate that told the world I had studied hard and earned something. It was instead a kind of mandate, a directive that I had to live up to the three letters that now appeared at the end of my name. Maybe that’s what the ability to close-read is to me now. I would not say I am a premier close reader—not while Dan Sinykin, Johanna Winant, and their peers walk the earth—but I know how to do it, and maybe the burden I carry now is that I have to figure out how to use it. It’s a thing I can do that I must find a purpose for.
And that leads me to the paragraph I came across at work, which I did my best to close-read while I was at work. As I did that, I wasn’t sure why I was doing it.
And, listen. After this point, the newsletter gets pretty dicey, if it hasn’t been already. I’m pretty sure I venture into things only I care about, out of everyone in the world and universe. And I’m not even sure that what I have to say amounts to anything, or is valid.
So, you know. Teal rising.
How is it happening, that we are at war again? How is this the thing that’s taking place in March of 2026?
So many people are going to die.
When this happened in the early 2000s, and the wars started in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was in my twenties, and I hated it. There was nothing I could do, and it felt so far away. Now I’m forty-five years old. I know what it’s like to be twenty, twenty-two, and thirty. I know how good it is to be those ages, and to get to be other ages, like thirty-three and forty. Sure, there are hard parts, and they can be incredibly hard. But there are people who are nineteen and twenty-one, and because they are Marines or in the Army, or because they were born and still live in places like Lebanon and Iran, they won’t get to be twenty or twenty-two. And it’s all because a miserable pack of shitheads decided it was time for them to die on Kharg Island, or in their homes, or on one of the bases that’s getting attacked by drones.
I hope the Marines don’t get orders to invade. I want the bombing to stop. I want everyone to stop killing, and I want more people to keep living. I don’t think that’s so much to ask.
But I was learning about GIS, for my job. I was put on a task force for GIS, in the role of a liaison—and I thought that, since I was in that role, I should find out what the letters GIS stand for.
It’s not “gastrointestinal specialist.” Not in this context.
GIS stands for Geographic Information System.
GIS is computer maps. Or it’s the circuitry and software and stuff that work together to push the boulder of computer maps up the hill that’s going to kill everyone. It’s all the stuff and labor that comes together to shape computer maps.
If you have used Google Maps before, or something like it, you have interfaced with GIS. Zillow, Pokemon GO, and plenty of other things depend on GIS, which was invented in the 1960s, and which has become more complex and commonplace ever since.
I sought out and read a series of articles that were about GIS. Many of the more recent ones are about the use of artificial intelligence in GIS.
I am generally skeptical toward AI, in part because it’s been used as an excuse to lay people off. I am against people getting laid off. Not having an opportunity to push the boulder a little farther, or losing your place in the mob that’s boulder-pushing, can be almost as bad as getting crushed by an actual boulder.
I have read about one way AI is used in GIS that seems fairly straightforward. When you’re mapping a neighborhood, you need to divide the neighborhood into parcels—find out where the property lines are, and draw lines there, deciding the shapes of the polygons that constitute parcels. If you show the AI a thousand maps that have already had parcels drawn on them, and show it a map where the parcels have yet to be drawn, it can draw all your parcels for you. It can do a pretty good job, saving everyone meticulous labor. It makes mistakes, but those can be corrected.
Something I found interesting: the process of doing this is called generalization, and so when the AI does it, it’s also called generalization. The AI is not engaged in prediction, like with text generation—nothing is being predicted. It’s generalized.
I think if we called the texts that are made by chatbots “generalized content,” or something, it might sound a lot less interesting than it does to certain people.
I was trucking along, reading articles on GIS, and found an article that describes in some detail what it calls an autonomous GIS system. An autonomous GIS can, the authors say, do everything that’s required for generating a GIS map. It doesn’t only draw lines and form polygons. It does all of the other work that goes into creating a GIS map. If you ask it to create a map of property values in Kansas City, it will research those property values for you, and embed that data into the GIS map that it produces. It will seek out all of the data it needs, and develop a map that reflects the stuff you have asked it to put in there.
Currently, a person has to enter that business into the computer map thing, after gathering the information themself. It takes a long time. With autonomous GIS mapping, it is all done for you. The boulder moves up the side of the hill on its own. All you have to do is check to make sure it’s still rolling, that it hasn’t stopped moving and may soon reverse course and smash you.
The article is titled “GIScience in the era of Artificial Intelligence: a research agenda towards Autonomous GIS”—which seems like a fairly modest thing for an article to do. The authors are laying out a research agenda that’s moving in the direction of autonomous GIS. They’re not claiming, at least in the title, that what they’re discussing has yet been developed.
What bothered me about the article was that while its authors lay out a vision of what an autonomous GIS is capable of, a GIS that’s fully AI-driven, with the software gathering data, making decisions, and doing everything on its own, it became unclear to me whether or not the technology they were describing exists yet. I knew, going into it, that they were laying out a research agenda. They were plotting a course, I guess, to the development of this thing. But the way they wrote about it made everything fuzzy, and I found I kept losing track of whether they were describing something imminent or something immanent. And if it’s imminent, I can’t tell how imminent. Like, will it be available for use next month, or in ten years? It’s unclear.
I felt, when I read the article, as if I had found something that was much more than the sum of its parts. It was like I had uncovered the fulcrum of not only this particular article’s obscurity on certain important things, but the fulcrum of the overpromising and outright grifting that characterizes how people discuss artificial intelligence. I felt like I had found the verbal subterfuge by which the tech CEOs, and those who are on their payrolls, make what might soon happen with AI sound like it definitely will happen, or—why not—may even be so inevitable that it’s already here.
Or, rather than frame it as something nefarious—like the authors of this article are trying to trick us into thinking autonomous GIS is capable of what they say it can do—it’s as if their enthusiasm for what an autonomous GIS might in the future be capable of overtakes the present reality that there currently is not an autonomous GIS that can do the things they write about. They get so enthusiastic about what they’re certain this technology will be able to do that they obscure the reality that, at least for the time being, there is no system that can do the stuff they’re going on about with such fervor.
I was drinking a lot of coffee, and so I’ll admit I was overexcited when I went apeshit all over this paragraph. And it’s possible that I’m out of my depth just reading the article, and that I have misunderstood some basic technical things that readily make sense to science people. Scientists, I mean.
Still, I want to share my findings.
This is the big paragraph I tripped over, as I read the article:
We believe that autonomous GIS represents an emerging paradigm of integrating AI with GIS, where it is not merely another tool but becomes an ‘artificial geospatial analyst’ or ‘digital agent’ who knows how to use geospatial tools and geographical analysis and with what data to solve geospatial problems. In this context, ‘agent’ refers to an autonomous software entity that can take requests and perceive its environment, make decisions, formulate plans, and take actions. Instead of being a specific system, we view autonomous GIS as a broad concept and a distinct paradigm similar to WebGIS and Cloud GIS. Compared to traditional GIS systems, autonomous GIS is intended to improve accessibility, aiming to democratize spatial analysis and geospatial technologies for a wider audience.
As I did my research on GIS, learning what it was and why there was a task force on it, I wrote an annotated bibliography. I had to write a number of those things in the course of my time in graduate school, and I always hated writing them. But here I was, at an actual job, where I wanted to keep track of what I read and what I thought of what I read. And so an annotated bibliography was what I made.
I will now share what I wrote about this paragraph, and the rest of the article, in my annotated bibliography:
In the first sentence [of the paragraph quoted above], the authors are pretty straightforward about laying out their vision of what AI is capable of and where it's going; they write that they "believe" autonomous GIS is an "emerging paradigm"--meaning it's not here yet--and that it "becomes"--as in, it is not yet--a "'digital agent.'" The second sentence explains one of the terms in greater detail. What do they mean by "agent?" Why, they are referring to "an autonomous software entity," and they go on to explain what that autonomous entity can do. In doing that, they use the word "can"--expressing that an agent is capable of doing these various things--rather than saying it would be able to do those things if it were real. The less misleading way to write that sentence would be to write that it could do the things they lay out, or to write instead, in another verb tense, that it will be able to do what they describe. But no, the agent "can" do all of this stuff. Fine. Okay. The third sentence is where the magic happens: as the authors parse the terms they're using a little further, and offer more details about their vision, they start--maybe without intending to?--to kind of lose sight of the fact that their vision is only a vision. They're describing something that's not real; but that is not what it sounds like. It stops reading so much like they're discussing a technology that doesn't yet exist--and therefore may never exist, since things that haven't happened yet may not actually happen, despite how inevitable they might seem to be. The fourth sentence only extends that further; they're saying autonomous GIS isn't like traditional GIS in this specific way--and, by this point, it's as if autonomous GIS is a real thing that can be distinguished from an older technology. By the end of the paragraph, on a first reading, it becomes unclear to me whether autonomous GIS actually exists. I know that it doesn’t, but the verb tenses and the clarity of the authors' vision have obscured for me something that I would consider to be very important, which is: is this thing you're describing real, or something imaginary that you hope comes into being? The authors seem to be so certain that this stuff is just around the corner. Maybe their certainty is justified, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were. But that's not the same thing as this thing being actually real, and it's bizarre, to me, to read this paragraph and the whole article that it calls home, which seems to me to consistently blur the distinction between the fulfilled promise and the one that has not been fulfilled and therefore may never be.
I copied the above into this newsletter, and started to question myself. Had I really stumbled onto an article that’s doing something weird, when talking about AI, that’s worth anyone’s attention? I had my doubts. So I returned to the article, to see what I thought upon a second reading, and found another paragraph, earlier in the article, that bothered me in the same way:
We envision that autonomous GIS should be designed as a programming- and data-centric framework that automates coding to address geospatial problems. This framework can be implemented into various ‘autonomous GIS agents’ that work individually or collaboratively. These agents assist in and automate various spatial tasks, such as preparing data, designing geoprocessing workflows, performing spatial analyses, conducting predictive modelling, extracting insights, creating maps, evaluating the results, adjusting workflows, generating reports, and making recommendations. An autonomous GIS agent does not need to be all-round and versatile; it can be specialized to focus on a specific task, such as data collection or cartography, being built upon existing GIS components. Specialized agents can collaborate to accomplish complex tasks, much like human teams. We consider these GIS agents as the building blocks of autonomous GIS. In this sense, an autonomous GIS can also be referred to as ‘agentic GIS’.
I don’t want to go on about this for too long, because I have the distinct feeling that I’ve ventured someplace that other people aren’t so willing to go, or that I’m just wrong.
But this paragraph does the same thing with verb tenses as the other one did. Autonomous GIS “should be designed as a…framework”—okay, so far so good. Telling us what it should be rightly reflects that it isn’t yet what they’re saying it should be. I should be doing something that brings in some revenue, like driving for Uber or Lyft in my off-hours, but instead I’m typing this newsletter. In the next sentence, they write, “This framework can be”—and it’s not could be, which would be the more straightforward way to phrase that, since in fact it can’t be anything; it doesn’t exist. “These agents assist in”—and here I go, wait, what? The agents assist? As in, they do it now? There follows a long list of things they assist with—not could assist with, or will assist with, just assist with. And then they tell us more about what the autonomous GIS can do.
This is why, when I was first reading the article, I got confused, and felt uncertain whether I was reading about a presently usable technology or one that’s still in development. And as you can tell from the fact I’m still writing about it, that bothers me.
Maybe all I have done here is gripe about verb tenses as they are used in an article I shouldn’t have spent my time reading in the first place. And if this is the best I can do with close reading, in my current life, then it might be best for me to hang up that pair of spurs for the rest of my life, because this ain’t accomplishin’ much, pardner.
Still. I don’t know.
Another sentence from the article that bothers me goes: “Autonomous GIS is expected to become an emerging tool for GIS analysts, affecting GIS training and education.”
This technology is expected to become emerging.
Meanwhile, bombs are dropping, drones are striking, and the war will be over in a matter of weeks, not months. It’ll take no more than two weeks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, though it’s also likely that Iran will be in direct control of the Strait from this point forward. We don’t need to negotiate, because our nation is stronger than anything, but we’re also negotiating, and it’s definitely with the right people. But there won’t be any boots on the ground, though there are several thousand Marines hanging out on boats, and hour by hour they get a little nearer to the country there is no way they’re about to invade.
I’m bringing all of this to an end, now, because I’m not sure where I was going with it, and I’m a little bit convinced that the material I wrote, above, when I was at my job, is like the sound a whale makes when it’s been speared enough times that it’s bleeding so much it will die in the ocean and float away to be eaten by sharks.
I am going to keep living, because I like being alive. And someone has to eat the cans of SpaghettiOs they won’t stop stocking the grocery store with.
I am the only man in Kansas City who can eat five cans of cold SpaghettiOs in one sitting.
I know what my purpose in life is.
It’s not to close-read anything. It’s to eat all those cans of SpaghettiOs.