bsmall2Feb 6
> I worry that he’ll leave us the way he left the office every June, after a year of endless hard work: doubtful that he’d done enough. I hope for a miracle to show itself at the eleventh hour, a positive nod in his direction so that his last breaths on this Earth won’t be sighs of discouragement. And you probably know he’s not a big fan of AI, at least not in terms of it acting as a substitute for human thinking.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/chomsky-and-me-an-interview-with-bev-boisseau-stohl/
#ChomskyOnAI #BevStohl #ChomskyLegacy ??
Chomsky and Me: an Interview With Bev Boisseau Stohl

Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those

ZNetwork
Show threadbsmall2Dec 16
> That picture with Bannon is jarring, but from speaking with people who knew him better than I did, for me, the image of Chomsky’s unworldly worldliness holds. He knew much about the world’s evils, but didn’t know what Saturday Night Live was when he was invited on. He was a workaholic under constant, relentless demand—read the memoir of his longtime secretary, Bev Stohl, for a sense of what Chomsky’s everyday life was like—who assigned the royalties of his books to others at signing.
#BevStohl #ChomskySecretary
Jay CeeJul 6, 2024
Stohl, Bev. 'Chomsky & Me: A Memoir'. OR Books: 2023.
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A pull quote for this on GoodReads says, “This is a beautiful, tender and profound book about one of the most important thinkers of our time, by one of the people who know him best. A masterpiece of observation and memoir.” And while that's true, I found it a bit of a stretch to have a 300-page book of anecdotes about being Noam Chomsky's assistant for 24 years.
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24 years in any job is nothing to sniff at and Stohl shares a number of interesting experiences she had during that time, how working with Chomsky helped broaden her understanding of the world (she got the job because she wasn't a "groupie", as she puts it), heartful and profound moments of loss, regret, etc., etc.
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But I had to push myself to finish this. It got repetitive. I'm trying to say it nicely, but yeah, as much as I find Chomsky boring and have used his writing in the past to put myself to sleep when finding it hard to do so, Stohl's book did get a bit boring about 3/4 of the way through.
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I like reading memoir, auto/biography, things which humanize the people we might think of as celebrities in this activist milieu we participate in. So, there's that. And it was a nice book. It just wasn't anything to write home about. I kind of thought there's not much to write an IG post about but it's the second or third book in a row that I've finished thinking, "Not much to say about that one." Oh well.
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#anarchism #anarchist #anarchistreadinglist #bevstohl #chomskyandme #noamchomsky #chomsky #memoir #ORBooks