The sun rises over a book in the logo art of Resurgam NFP, a new fundraising organization for projects like George Moore Interactive. Resurgam in Latin means “I shall rise again.” It was the title of the final chapter of Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906) where George pondered his origins and legacy during a visit to Moore Hall. The leaves of the open book are blue, like the rippling waters of Lough Carra where he imagined his funeral (and where he was later buried). The covers of the book are green, like woodland and meadow that surround the lake still. The red sunrise says change is coming. This logo symbolizes the specific aim of Resurgam: to kickstart literary legacies in the digital age.
The Calling
I was taken aback at the end of Michael Chabon’s essay, “The Midnight World,” in the New York Review of Books (19 December 2024). He wrote:
“It takes a rare kind of mind to care so deeply, for so long, with such discernment, about something whose worth and significance have been so thoroughly neglected, and then to persevere in the piecemeal, painstaking work of ending, at a stroke, that neglect.”
Though Michael was characterizing Glenn Fleishman, the author of How Comics Were Made (2025), he seemed to be talking about me!
Lest you think I’m preening or gloating when I say that, I hasten to add that “a rare kind of mind” may not be a brilliant mind. It could be anything as long as it’s different.
If my own mind is rare (arguable), that’s probably because it is centered, calm, independent, deliberate, and orderly. I believe those are the drivers of my perseverance with George. I make no loftier claims.
Researchers like Glenn Fleishman, who likewise strive to kickstart literary legacies, have minds that are different from each other’s. Each has a unique blend of strengths and weaknesses that make a noble and seemingly Quixotic mission not just feasible, but profoundly satisfying.
I take my hat off to Glenn and everyone like him, or like me. We follow, however obscurely, the footsteps of heroes in that famous Apple commercial. We are not changing the world, but we do think different.
In turn I bow to the occasional applause from folks in what is always a nearly empty theater. The show — the piecemeal, painstaking work — must go on, and it does.
Letters of 1888
Since last month’s newsletter I have published George Moore’s extant letters from 1888. That was a disappointing year for him, though I’m not sure how he felt about it.
The year began with the failure of an experimental novel, A Mere Accident. It ended with the failure of a conventional novel, Spring Days. Yet another futile novel, Mike Fletcher, was emerging on his desk under the working title of Don Juan. George’s publishers so hated the manuscript submission of Don Juan that they parted ways, most likely with hurt feelings.
What the heck was George up to in 1888?
The answer for me is self-actualization. George admitted to a journalist in 1888 that he was a wannabe — an improbable, accidental man of letters. Lacking a liberal education and technical training, spinning like a pinball between English and French language and aesthetics, his writing looks like a chockablock process of stymied heuristics.
Intrinsically motivated as he was, almost selfless in his dedication to modern art and literature, he was nonetheless a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian — a “righteous apostate” — from tip to toe and morning to night, almost entirely lacking in what contemporaries would have called genius and purpose.
Yet somehow he bumbled into self-actualization in his memoirs of this period. It seems almost laughable now, that a Nobody like George in his mid 30s should publish any memoirs at all, and yet he did, twice. Parnell and His Island in 1887 was followed by Confessions of a Young Man in 1888, the latter somehow achieving the rank of untoward masterpiece. (Both books are digitally published by GMi.)
In 1888 George the budding novelist hit his stride most improbably, not by writing career-advancing fiction, but by reinventing himself as a “man of wax” and reporting out the results. He self-actualized like a genie springing impulsively from a bottle that nobody had bothered to rub.
For readers like myself who find his surprising behavior oddly charming, his novelistic failures are no less fascinating than his autobiographical successes. They all have the charisma of eggs in a nest about ready to hatch. They just didn’t hatch as planned.
Near the end of 1888, a reviewer in a prestigious London newspaper wrote that Spring Days was the worst novel he had ever read. George calmly noted that appraisal, filed it, and carried on.
My AI Buddy
I have talked about reanimating George Moore with generative artificial intelligence. During the past couple of years since launching GMi, those aspirations have turned into pragmatic intentions, but not because of anything I did.
AI is now so accessible, powerful, capable and adept that the technical challenge of reanimating George is low-hanging fruit. The groundbreaking stuff still to accomplish — digital curation, integration and preservation of George’s lapsed literary legacy — is where the action is today.
That’s not to say that I’ve set AI aside while I perform mundane editorial tasks. Indeed I am performing the mundane tasks with the help of AI.
Take for example the logo art of Resurgam pictured at the top of his post. Not too shabby? I am not a graphic designer, yet I designed that logo in a few minutes, and the results speak for themselves.
How did I manage that?
I did it with my first AI buddy, ChatGPT. As mentioned two months ago, after pondering the meaning of the word resurgam — wondering what sort of tangible, visible object would connote the behavior of “rising again,” I settled on the sun as my metaphor. The sun rises everyday for everybody and makes life possible. Good choice!
But how to associate a rising sun with the notion of literary legacy? I asked ChatGPT to work that problem. I prompted it to design a logo for Resurgam that combined a sunrise with a book (a literary artifact). Very basic direction. Mere seconds later, voilà. The sun rises from the leaves of an open book and it looks just fine to me.
Staring at the bitmap, much impressed, I asked ChatGPT if I must pay a fee to use it? Does the copyright of the logo belong to somebody or something? Mere seconds later, the answer: Bob Becker owns the copyright. The logo is my intellectual property. I am gobsmacked.
Picking myself up off the floor, I then asked ChatGPT for a vector of the bitmap it had made for me. I wanted to be able to scale and manipulate the art, not just publish it. Mere seconds later, ChatGPT delivered an EPS file of the logo, along with its original PNG, that I can scale and manipulate to my heart’s content.
The final step of logo creation was to color the monochrome design that ChatGPT generated. I did this in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, completing the metaphor that is described at the top of this post.
I pause now to reflect.
None of this creativity would have been possible for me on my own. Based on my experience, it wouldn’t have been possible if I had engaged an artist to make a logo, but I would have spent a lot of time and money finding that out.
All of this was possible because AI is available to extend my thinking capabilities into areas formerly off limits: designing, drawing and painting.
Other Uses
Profoundly impressed by ChatGPT, I decided to test whether I had benefitted from beginner’s luck. I created three more logos for different brands on my LinkedIn profile, following the same steps as before: think, prompt, refine prompt, edit. In every case, I produced good results (IMHO), fast and free.
I was again on the floor, picking myself up and wondering, what’s next? I have all the logos I need for now.
I turned to the bylaws of Resurgam. Bylaws are needed after registering a not-for-profit corporation in the State of Illinois, before qualifying for tax exemption at federal and state levels. Because of legal PTSD, I had been dreading the prospect of engaging an attorney to draft the bylaws.
Instead a got back with my AI buddy and prompted it, first for general guidance and templates, then zooming into particular questions, all related to composing bylaws of a not-for-profit Illinois corporation that is compliant with IRC regulations for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation.
Two dozen prompts later (each followed by mere seconds of artifical cogitation), I had all my answers.
The answer to each prompt was followed by my own writing and editing. I customized my text to the specific needs of Resurgam.
When all of my human writing was done, and a complete draft of bylaws was on my desktop, I took one more cautious step before sharing the bylaws with Resurgam’s board of directors.
I uploaded my entire draft to ChatGPT and requested a quality check. Mere seconds later, I received a few tweaks to my 14-page draft along with solid confirmation that everything I had composed should fly with the Internal Revenue Service when I apply for tax exemption.
Yay!
As with designing logo art, drafting corporate bylaws was rapid, easy, downright enjoyable and free, with good results and with assurances that what I created in this step of corporate formation is a strong foundation for the next step.
Gemini
I’m tempted to admit that ChatGPT and I are now a thing. We’re going steady, man. Only I have strayed a little from the straight and narrow and started a ménage à trois.
The other day, in order to access some amazing and needed features in Google Meet, I upgraded my Google Workspace for GMi. Google Workspace is one of my main toolsets for curating and writing content in the cloud.
In addition to gaining those nifty features in Google Meet, my upgrade brought the Google Gemini large language model into all of my Workspace apps.
Now with a click or a tap, I can do the kinds of things I did with ChatGPT, but within Google apps. Integration! I have not even scratched the surface of these AI capabilities, but who knows, when I do, I may be able ask an AI buddy to write my newsletters for me.
Nah, that would be weird. It’s one thing to make an artist or an attorney redundant, but a human still needs to be here. To persevere.
Coming Soon
Claudette Walsh in Ireland has looked at a sample transcript of my scan of Terre d’Irlande. As I feared, my transcript is unusable.
In order to create the first unexpurgated edition of Parnell and His Island in English (and the first-ever e-book of the original French text), I must go back to square one.
The problem here is that my OCR of the scanned pages is crappy, making my transcript useless. I will have to rescan the physical book with different scan settings, to improve the OCR somehow. One way or another, Claudette and I shall persevere. Stay tuned!
Also coming soon, the letters of 1889 are being prepared for publication on GMi. My speed is increasing lately despite temporarily impaired eyesight, so hopefully I will be able to stay ahead of Claudette.
As you may recall, she is correcting George Moore’s very sloppy French letters, so that they are as readable and meaningful today as they were to his original correspondents.
Finally, by this time next month I may be on the cusp of filing Resurgam’s application for tax exemption. I am not nearly there at present, and I don’t know what I don’t know, but what I have seen so far is not frightening. “I think I can, I think I can.”
I’m not an artist; I’m not an attorney; I’m not an accountant; but somehow, according to me, where there’s a will there’s a way.
