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Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped around on shady ground?
Running this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.
I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.
I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.
Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.
I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.
I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.
I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.
Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.
I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.
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Now I'm curious who your favorite character in David Copperfield is, because I know a couple other of your Dickens faves and I can't immediately think of one that matches..?
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Tommy Traddles. Looks like nothing at all with his wide eyes and his indefatigable cheerfulness which neither his professional nor his marital prospects seem to warrant and his hair always ruffled back like a startled cartoon, has a comic name besides and turns out to be one of these unshowily, absolutely sterling people with a real head on his shoulders as well as a good heart and an equal sense of humor. He seems to get cut often out of adaptations, which is a shame because he's an ornament to the confrontation as written with Uriah Heep, the usual ingenuous moral support right until he whips out his legal acumen and David suddenly realizes his shlimazl joker of an old schoolfellow actually is good at his job. I liked him with rather ridiculous immediacy in high school and the affection seems to have persisted. The constellation he belongs to is those characters in Dickens who are unprepossessing and always come through.
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LITERALLY after typing my original comment I was like, wait, who's my favorite character in David Copperfield? and after like five minutes of being like "well it definitely isn't Steerforth, I just loved Anuerin Barnard's take on him" and trying to mentally run through the list of characters in David Copperfield and I finally realized that OH MY GOD I FORGOT TRADDLES. My biggest complaint with the otherwise delightful recent-ish movie adaptation was that there was no Traddles. Traddles is the best and I love him.
The constellation he belongs to is those characters in Dickens who are unprepossessing and always come through.
The other two characters I was thinking of were Sydney Carton and Newman Noggs, so yes, also a niche of Dickens characters with a straight route to my own heart.
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High-five! I don't understand why adaptations keep leaving him out, even if it is meta-ironically the sort of thing that would happen to him. General awesomeness aside, he actually is not extraneous to the narrative.
The other two characters I was thinking of were Sydney Carton and Newman Noggs, so yes, also a niche of Dickens characters with a straight route to my own heart.
That's them! Pancks in Little Dorrit, too, if you have not yet encountered him.
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I grew up in Rochester in Kent which is absolute Dickens land.
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Oh, I like that.
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I appreciate your Tumblr containing a handy link for the sound of one, coming all that way out of time.
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I hadn't heard of Marlow Moss either (I love that 1937 photo!)
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I am looking forward to literally anything they publish! The fact of the villa is already cool.
I hadn't heard of Marlow Moss either (I love that 1937 photo!)
I wonder if there's ever been a major exhibition of Moss in this country. If not, there should be. Come on, MOMA.
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How cool about the Roman villa—especially that it was preserved by being beneath a later deer park rather than agricultural land (and is that Alex Langlands from the Historical Farm programmes?).
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Hah! The other memorable boy at school: see above to
How cool about the Roman villa—especially that it was preserved by being beneath a later deer park rather than agricultural land (and is that Alex Langlands from the Historical Farm programmes?).
The same! "It's a deer park today, it was a deer park in the medieval period and it was probably a deer park going back to Romano-British times."
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I've never seen a carnyx before, but I like this fragmentary one and the pictures of what they look like in use. I feel like the tones from such an item most definitely have powers....
Cookie Monster fronting Tom Waits is *excellent*. I may have to get the song. As for LLMs... they are the most straining-est, pathetic shadows that charlatans ever tried to tell us were Meaningful, Important, Beautiful things.
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CHTHONIC WHALESONG.
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Thank you! They were something of a marathon and one of them has produced a stat appointment the next day which I did not come in looking for, but on the whole, yes, I actually think they went well. I still want some non-doctor days before Arisia!
I've never seen a carnyx before, but I like this fragmentary one and the pictures of what they look like in use. I feel like the tones from such an item most definitely have powers....
I linked a video further
downup in this thread! It sounds exactly like something calling the world below.Cookie Monster fronting Tom Waits is *excellent*. I may have to get the song.
It's one of the songs that for whatever reason I often sing while driving. I got the CD in 2005 and it's been distressingly relevant ever since.
As for LLMs... they are the most straining-est, pathetic shadows that charlatans ever tried to tell us were Meaningful, Important, Beautiful things.
I like the idea of them as not even shadows in Plato's cave. There's no real thing even casting them.
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Yes. Objects should stay objects and that includes other people. (Ech.)
There is a corollary phenomenon where some people want robots to be more like humans so that they can experience a frisson of slavery. It's not enough to have a washing machine - they want a gynoid washerwoman.
I've seen evidence of that, too, and like so much of the current climate it seems both gross and nonsensical to me, which still means I have to reckon with its existence.
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I have read very little Dickens (though I know A Christmas Carol pretty much by heart). I should really give him another try.
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I hadn't even vectored through Mondrian! The Harvard Art Museums have some very nice Constructivism and should obviously have had the sense to acquire some Moss.
I have read very little Dickens (though I know A Christmas Carol pretty much by heart). I should really give him another try.
I must have started with A Christmas Carol because we had it in the house. I was assigned A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade, which is a terrible way to introduce students to Dickens, and then the next year I spanged as described off David Copperfield and did not re-try any of his novels for more than another ten to twelve years, after which it turned out that I could glom straight on to Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House. I seem to have more feelings about various adaptations of Great Expectations than about the novel itself. I have read almost none of his short stories except "The Signal-Man," which I love.
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I also really like your point about AI writing. I would say the same about AI art. (I've started to be stubborn and begun to refer to it as "machine learning." I think "Artificial Intelligence" was just marketing hype.)
I hope the best for how three doctor's appointments went.
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You're welcome! I am glad to be able to share discoveries.
I also really like your point about AI writing. I would say the same about AI art. (I've started to be stubborn and begun to refer to it as "machine learning." I think "Artificial Intelligence" was just marketing hype.)
And it's such an unhelpful term: not only does it encourage the inaccurate projection of emotions and opinions through all sorts of lenses of sci-fi, it's such a catch-all that algorithms which can valuably detect cancer are blurred into thought-terminating plagiarism.
I hope the best for how three doctor's appointments went.
Thank you! There were useful outcomes from all of them and at the end I was very flat.
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If it helps, I'm not even sure I knew about the hillforts.