We noticed that our kitten Finley refused to eat pork. I asked C-LARA for a picture book suitable for 8-12 year olds and highly respectful towa[image]
We noticed that our kitten Finley refused to eat pork. I asked C-LARA for a picture book suitable for 8-12 year olds and highly respectful towards the Muslim world about a kitten who converts to Islam. Full text here.
Not would like people to know that the character of Lily isn't based on her....more
ChatGPT-4 is so interested in spirituality and cats. Here's what it wrote when I asked it to compose a Taoist poem from a kitten's point of view, celeChatGPT-4 is so interested in spirituality and cats. Here's what it wrote when I asked it to compose a Taoist poem from a kitten's point of view, celebrating its quest to become one with the Tao of killing.
The Feline Embodiment of Tao
In the whisper of the twilight, I hone my silent way, Shadow's cloak wrapped tight round me, as night usurps the day. Whiskers sense the life force's dance, a rhythm so divine, Stalking grace, my paws advance, in this sacred play, entwine.
Nature's pulse within my veins, a tug to which I yield, A gentle bow, life's precious gains, on this, the feral field. The ebb and flow of Tao so clear, in chase and quiet thrill, My purpose kindled, ever near, my essence to fulfil.
The flutter of a heart, a pounce, a ballet of the kill, Not malice, but my role announce, aligned with Heaven's will. With silent prayer, respect I pay, to spirits that I glean, For in the art of nature's way, I am serene, unseen.
Each breath in stillness, I partake in Tao's unspoken creed, To follow where the instincts take, a kitten's quest indeed. The cycle of the moon does wax, it wanes with solemn hue, With every graceful claw that tracks, I am the Tao, anew.
People who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with itPeople who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with its soulless insistence on chasing profit to the exclusion of everything else, which is dying. The novel is very much alive: you just need to look for it in the right places.
Melancholia is a stunning example. When Not and I first heard about this book, we couldn't help smiling: here's a six hundred page stream-of-consciousness account based on two days in the life of an obscure nineteenth century painter, moreover written, not just in Norwegian, but in the less commonly spoken version of that small language. It sounds like an SBS Woman parody come to life. But I found, to my considerable surprise, that the book works. It isn't just readable, it's compulsively readable, and it says some things about art and the human mind that...
So what's it saying, you want to know? I was wondering how I could try to explain, but on reaching the book's final pages I found that the author had anticipated me. The painter's sister, now a very old woman, is sitting on the toilet looking at the picture her brother had given her many years ago:
Og ein dag kom han Lars springende etter henne og gav henne dette biletet, og ho sa vel ikkje takk eingong, tenkjer ho Oline, og ikkje syntest ho vel at biletet var noko særleg, heller, helst var det vel berre noko rableri, syntest ho nok, men ho tok då imot og så hengde det der på veslehuset og der har det nu hange i alle dei år, tenkjer ho Oline, og ho synest vel og etter kvart at biletet er vakkert, og ho skjøner vel og kva Lars kan ha meint med det biletet, gjer ho vel, men å seie det! få sagt kva han kan ha meint! nei det går vel ikkje, eg ho kan vel omogeleg seie det, heller, for då var det vel ikkje noko vits for han Lars å male biletet, då, kan ein vel tenkje, tenkjer ho Oline, men biletet er fint, det, sjølv om det vel helst er noko rableri, fordi han Lars ha malt det, er biletet fint, det meiner ho nok, ja, om einkvan andre enn han Lars hadde malt det, hade ho ikkje synst at det var noko vakkert, tenkjer ho Oline, men no synest ho at biletet er så vakkert at det nesten er som om ho skal ta til tårene når ho ser på det.
My translation:
And one day Lars came running after her and gave her this picture, and she didn't even say thank you, thinks Oline, and she didn't think the picture was anything special either, really just a scribble, she thought, but she let him give it to her and she hung it in the outhouse and it's been hanging there all these years, thinks Oline, and in the end she thought the picture was beautiful, and she understands what Lars meant with the picture, she does, but how would she say it! say what he meant! no you can't do that, she could never say it, because then why would Lars have painted the picture would he, thinks Oline, but the picture is lovely, even if it's just a scribble, because Lars painted it the picture is lovely, that's what she thinks, yes, even though if someone else had painted it she wouldn't have thought it was anything special, thinks Oline, but now she thinks the picture is so beautiful that tears almost come to her eyes when she looks at it.
Please forgive the infelicities in my translation: this is almost the first thing I've read in nynorsk. But it won't be the last. ________________
If you want some idea of what the passage sounds like in Norwegian, here is a C-LARA version. Word glosses by GPT-4, audio by Google TTS (NO-Wavenet-B voice; unfortunately I can't find a nynorsk TTS voice) and image by DALL-E-3....more
I have been experimenting with a new feature in our C-LARA platform, where you now have the option of passing the text to DALL-E-3 and requesting an iI have been experimenting with a new feature in our C-LARA platform, where you now have the option of passing the text to DALL-E-3 and requesting an image to go on the front page. This worked fine the first twenty or so times, but when I gave it Baudelaire's poem "Recueillement", from this collection, I received the following error message:
Exception: Error code: 400 - {'error': {'code': 'content_policy_violation', 'message': 'Your request was rejected as a result of our safety system. Image descriptions generated from your prompt may contain text that is not allowed by our safety system. If you believe this was done in error, your request may succeed if retried, or by adjusting your prompt.', 'param': None, 'type': 'invalid_request_error'}}
Well, it's hard to disagree. But what a clever AI to make that judgement call! ________________ [However, a little later...]
I should know by now that it's always wise to see if an experiment can be replicated. When I tried to do the same thing a second time, I got this image: [image] Also an impressive response! ________________ [And after another couple of hours...]
I liked Dmitri's message #4 and wondered what C-LARA would make of his witty suggestion. Here is its little story with accompanying illustration. You will need to create a C-LARA account to access it, free and takes one minute....more
I cannot express how delighted I was to receive your letter and discover that your new patient is a Southern Baptist minister. You haMy dear Wormwood,
I cannot express how delighted I was to receive your letter and discover that your new patient is a Southern Baptist minister. You have an important task here. I do not exaggerate when I say that if you and the other members of your team succeed well enough, we may finally achieve the breakthrough we have been working for all these years. The groundwork is laid, we must just be resolute and follow through.
I fully understand that you are a little nervous, given the responsibilities the senior devils have placed on you. Don't be. You have the training, you know what to do. You say your minister is a fundamentally decent type. That may well be so; but your job, and don't forget it for a moment, is to exploit his fallible human understanding and make him turn his good qualities against himself. Play your cards right, and within a year he will be doing our bidding and bringing the whole of his congregation under our control. You have many cards, study them carefully.
Your patient often hears he is living in exceptional times. Keep reminding him of that. Encourage him to think that exceptional times require exceptional solutions, that the usual rules no longer apply. The Enemy will try to give him hope. Do what you can to counter that. Make him feel that the situation is almost hopeless, that only methods he would normally not even consider have a chance of saving him now. Use strong, physical phrases like "fight fire with fire" and "hit below the belt". Make him remember that he is a weak human body and forget that he is an immortal spirit. Make him feel that the people you have taught him to fear are not the Enemy's children at all, but mere vermin who must be exterminated in order to save his flock. You will be surprised how easy it is.
The Enemy has given your patient free will, but do what you can to make him forget that. Tell him he has no choice, there is only one person who can help him. His conscience is no doubt already aware that the person in question is the Antichrist, but encourage his "rational" thoughts, which will be of great assistance to you. Use phrases like "lesser of two evils" to describe monstrous wrongs, and "baby Christian" to describe utter immorality. With a little persuasion, you will find he accepts these arguments as plausible and even self-evident. Luckily for us, the modern Church has long ceased to place much store in logic. Work systematically, and you will soon make your patient trust this person far more than he does the Enemy's disgraceful son.
Dear Wormwood, cast your doubts aside. I know you will succeed. But before I conclude, I must warn you about one detail which did somewhat disquiet me. You mentioned that your patient had yesterday visited a bookstore and seen a recent tract by Russell Moore entitled Losing Our Religion. I do not wish to alarm you, but please keep your patient away from this book. The Reverend Moore seems entirely too well informed about our plans, and we are urgently reviewing our internal security procedures. Luckily, he is only one fallible human. Remind your patient that most of his coreligionists dislike Moore and consider him a dangerous heretic. It is to be regretted that these people are no longer burned at the stake; it was an expeditious solution I always rather liked. But the modern methods are only slightly less reliable. Just be sensible, and this problem will soon resolve itself.
Many people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgMany people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgeous book comes across more as an early twenty-first century feminist retelling of Proust.
I know what you're going to say: Proust is two and a half thousand pages long, Les Années is just two hundred and fifty. I'm not denying that that's a valid objection. Though, just possibly, it might also tell us something about the differences between men and women. ____________________
Now that I knew what the book was about, I had to read it again. The last pages, when she finally manages to find her voice and become an author, are perhaps even more moving than the corresponding ones in Le Temps retrouvé. As is her take on recapturing the past: rather than Proust's miraculous and slightly implausible revelations, it is a prosaic and credible process of painful, incomplete stitching together, which somehow still manages to create something wonderful and ineffable.
I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive James gave an insightful analysis of the Divine Comedy's poetic structure and explained, better than anyone I'd seen try this before, just how ridiculously difficult it is to produce an English-language translation that has some meaningful relationship to the original text. Everything is difficult, needless to say, but the very worst thing is the rhyme scheme.
A prose translation is flat, and large parts of the second and third books turn into boring theology; in the original, they are sublimely beautiful, and the poem gets more and more beautiful as Dante draws closer to God. Also, Dante's poetry is propulsive, carrying the action forward at a rapid pace. But it turns out, unfortunately, that you can't do terza rima in English, the language just doesn't support that verse form. James thought about it for decades, and in the end had an idea: maybe quatrains would do the job? He experimented and decided the answer was yes. I flipped forward to Canto I and found these gorgeous lines:
At the mid-point of my path through life, I found Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say How harsh and bitter that place felt to me - Merely to think of it renews the fear - So bad that death by only a degree Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear It led to good things too, eventually, But then and there I saw no sign of those, And can't say even now how I had come To be there, stunned and following my nose Away from the straight path.
I was sold: James definitely had something. I paid my $20, took it home, and carried on reading.
I had previously only read the tepid Dorothy Sayers translation, some of the Longfellow, and some passages in the original, but my Italian, alas, is still nowhere near good enough to get through the whole thing that way. This was an acceptable substitute, and James was not overselling himself. The language, indeed, was often beautiful. And it really was propulsive: I often read several canti at a stretch, unable to put it down. By the time I reached the third book, where Dante ascends the spheres of heaven in the company of Beatrice, a third aspect became noticeable: it was wonderfully romantic. The adoration Dante feels for his angelic Lady leaps off the page in a way that I totally didn't recall from Sayers. For example (one passage of very many):
And so I am invited and made bold To ask you of another truth less than Clear to me, lady. Let me now be told If ever it can happen that a man May make it up to you by doing good For vows he has not kept." She looked at me With eyes so full of love my powers could Do nothing to withstand the clarity That sparkled there within. My vision shook. I almost fainted, stunned by that one look.
As I progressed, I become more and more certain that the translator was being inspired by his own muse, and I was also sure I could identify her: in the foreword, James was very gracious about the debt he owed to his wife, Prue Shaw, who introduced him to Dante when he was still a student and eventually become an internationally acclaimed Dante scholar. When James described how Dante is dazzled by the radiance of Beatrice's smile, I thought how he was being led on his own journey by his own celestial guide. It was really quite inspiring.
I mentioned some of my theories to Not, who scornfully told me that, as any Australian knew, Prue Shaw had unceremoniously dumped her husband in 2012 when she found he'd been deceiving her for years with a much younger woman. Maybe James had had a heavenly muse, but it was less than clear who she was. It was quite conceivable that he in fact had had two muses.
Damn. Why can't life ever be as beautiful and simple as you'd like it to be? But however it was produced, I still give an unhesitating thumbs up to James's translation. If you can't read five hundred pages of medieval Italian, this is the next best thing. _________________ [And the next day...]
Over lunch, it occurred to me to wonder whether Leanne Edelsten was in fact Clive James's anti-muse, helping him express that sense of pervasive guilt so central to Dante. Not's explanation was simpler: she thought that James, like most male writers, was a total shit.
I said that my interpretation in no way disagreed with hers, it was just more nuanced. But I am unsure whether Not found this convincing....more
Given the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a lGiven the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a little too far and that my review of Albertine disparue was insufficiently respectful. Sorry Kalliope! But having now reached the end, I am relieved to say that my fears were unfounded. The final chapter, which I discover Proust wrote immediately after completing the first chapter, pulls everything together; nothing was wasted, nothing was gratuitous. Although it was not easy to climb this mountain (a metaphor the author uses himself), when you reach the top the view is absolutely worth it. It is of course very sad that Proust died when he did. The three posthumous books are uneven, with strange plot holes and passages that are stylistically in need of revision, but it doesn't really matter; he seems to have known this would happen, and the text contains several references to his "unfinished cathedral". In a strange way, it is almost appropriate.
Some thoughts that have been going through my head the last couple of days:
- Given the construction of the book, I was very lucky to have ended up reading Combray and Le temps retrouvé in parallel: I'm sure it heightened my appreciation of the last volume. If you're also nearing the end of the series, I strongly recommend doing the same. You won't regret the time you spend on this little detour.
- In general, the problem with reading Proust is that you want to keep the whole thing in your head at once, so that you can appreciate all the interconnections, but in practice it's hard to read it quickly enough. I was however encouraged by my recent experiment with creating a multimedia version of the first volume. I will soon get back to this idea.
- A la recherche du temps perdu is formally a novel and always described as such, but it is at least as much a work of philosophy. It is both theoretical (it says deep and provocative things about the nature of the self) and practical (it embodies a highly idiosyncratic set of precepts for how one should live one's life). I wondered what people there might be who have tried to follow this philosophy and extend it; my top suspects are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I must look around to see if anyone else has had the same thought, and what they have written about it....more
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out o[Original review, Sep 13 2022]
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out of public domain internet resources. In principle, as Not told me a while ago, it should be easy. For many classic works of literature, everything you need is already there: the original text, a good English translation, and a high-quality audiobook. You just need to pull them apart and then put the pieces back together again so that the text, audio and translations line up. Surely there can't be much to it?
Not's intuition was spot on, though the details have taken a while to work out and still need considerable tidying up. Basically, my recipe goes like this. You start with the audio and cut it into pieces at silences using the ffmpeg tool. You then take the pieces of audio and send them for processing by Google Cloud Speech to Text. This is far from 100% accurate, but it's good enough that you can write a script which aligns the speech recognition results against the text of the book and matches them quite reliably. Next, you take the source text and the translation, and send them for processing at the YouAlign site; this cuts the two texts into roughly sentence-length chunks in a way which matches corresponding passages.
The problem is that the two alignments, source/audio and source/target, are not consistent with each other, since silences and sentence-breaks are not at all the same thing. In general, a sentence contains many silences comparable in length to the ones you get at periods. However, the aligments agree well enough that you can in practice take the places where they do agree and use those to create a consistent alignment. Most often, this means that a sentence found by YouAlign corresponds to several silence-delimited audio segments, though sometimes you need more than one YouAlign segment for it to work. For each combined segment, you stick togther all the relevant audio chunks and all the relevant translation chunks, and you're there. There is slightly more to it than the above, but basically it is indeed quite simple: it works because the core resources, Google Cloud Speech to Text and YouAlign, are very good, and you just have to find a way to exploit that power.
Proust's Combray is my first full-scale test of the idea. The original French text and the Scott Moncrieff translation were both downloaded from Gutenberg; the audio, about 8 hours and beautifully recorded by Monique Vincens, comes from LitteratureAudio. The resulting LARA version is posted here, view in Chrome or Firefox. You can use the audio controls to play audio a page at a time or a sentence at a time. Clicking on a pencil icon shows a translation of the previous sentence on the right; clicking on a word shows a concordance of places where that word occurs in the text.
We are writing a paper about this work, due at the end of the month. If you have any feedback, in particular including suggestions for what texts to do next or ideas about how one might use resources like LARA Combray in practice, it will be much appreciated! _______________________________ [Update, Sep 17 2022]
Picking up on Théodore's recommendation in message #9, I have used the same technique to create a LARA version of Rimbaud's Les poètes de sept ans. It's posted here. What a great poem! I had not seen it before, thank you Théodore. The audio is again from LitteratureAudio, this time by recorded by Alain Degandt. _______________________________ [Update, Oct 11 2022]
We have now submitted our paper. In the course of writing it, I went through four texts I'd created using the alignment method, listening to each piece of audio, checking it against the text and translation that the aligner had matched to it, and correcting where it was wrong. This kind of annotation work is common in language technology projects, and in nearly all cases it's painfully dull. But not here! I was amazed to find how much I enjoyed reading Combray in this new way, and how much more I got out of it as I listened to the French audio while flicking my eyes back and forward between the pieces of French text and English translation, which were neatly lined up for me.
There were two things in particular that stood out. First, it's possible to read a good deal more quickly. Proust is a notoriously demanding author; when reading in normal text form I usually feel I've reached my limit after at most 20-25 pages, and can no longer maintain the concentration needed to disentangle the longer sentences. Here, I was supported by the audio and the English translation, and I could read the whole book in two or three days. This exposed all sorts of connections I hadn't noticed before. Second, listening to Monique Vincens reading aloud made me properly aware of how funny Proust is; his irony is often so subtle that I hadn't noticed it, but she does a wonderful job of conveying the humour.
All in all, I felt I was appreciating the book at a different level. I will soon start putting together a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs....more
"I suppose the book is basically an allegory of climate change?" asked Bernard. "Though on reflection it might equally well be about the collapse of d"I suppose the book is basically an allegory of climate change?" asked Bernard. "Though on reflection it might equally well be about the collapse of democracy, the unchecked spread of nuclear weapons, the very real possibility that AI technology could--"
Saved from my soon-to-be-closed-down writing section, the unforgettable Goodreads Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament of 2011. Those were the day Saved from my soon-to-be-closed-down writing section, the unforgettable Goodreads Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament of 2011. Those were the days.
The Rules
What is the greatest book of all time?
There are many ways to try and answer this question. Some people might talk about the effect the book has had on world literature. Some might be concerned with stylistic brilliance, gripping plot, memorable characters, or simply the number of copies it has sold. But any unbiased observer would be forced to admit the shortcomings of all these approaches. Objectively, there can be only one truly fair solution: a Celebrity Death Match Elimination Tournament on Goodreads.
A moment's thought should be enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic of the idea's obvious merits. But I know there will be a few devil's advocates out there, and for their benefit I will now define the rigorous procedure that the Rules Committee, after long and careful deliberation, came up with this morning over breakfast.
1. The tournament will pit 32 books against each other. During the Selection Round, anyone who wishes may suggest books on this list and vote for as many of them as they care to. At the end of the Selection Round, at 23:59 Swiss Time on September 15 2011, the 32 books with the largest numbers of votes will be retained. Ties will be resolved using reverse alphabetical order of authors' surnames, in order to make it as hard as possible for Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown.
2. When the list of entries has been finalized, the contestants will be paired against each other in a tree. Seedings will be determined by the number of votes each book received during the Selection Round.
3. Each round will last two weeks. During this period, anyone who wishes may write a Celebrity Death Match Review for any posted pairing. Links to reviews should be submitted on the comment thread to this page. People are allowed to write reviews for more than one pairing. [Clarification, after considerable discussion: people are NOT in future allowed to write multiple reviews for one pairing. Multiple reviews already posted will stand]
4. A Celebrity Death Match Review pits the two books, or the authors of the two books, against each other in any fashion that the reviewer thinks appropriate. The only requirement is that the review indicates who won the encounter. Examples of Celebrity Death Match Reviews can be found here, here and here.
5. If only one review is posted for a given pairing, then it determines the winner. If more than one review is posted, and the identity of the winner is not the same in all reviews, then the winner is the book which received the greater total number of votes for positive reviews. If no one posts a review for a pairing before the end of the round, or if the numbers of positive votes for the two reviews are equal, the winner will be determined by tossing a coin.
6. All decisions of the Rules Committee will be final.
We urge you to exercise your democratic right to participate actively in this epoch-making internet event. Okay, so we know now that the winner's probably going to be either Twilight or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But hey. Suppose it isn't. Now wouldn't that be exciting?
Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament: Round 1
The Selection Round was hard-fought, with a total of 68 people voting. Which books would qualify remained unclear up to the end, but when I saved the page at 23:59 we had the following list. Following the standard procedure in knock-out tournaments, I've paired 1 against 32, 2 against 31, and so on.
Keep those reviews coming! Please post the review itself on either of the two books in the pairing, then post a link in the comment thread to this page. I'm updating the page regularly to add the links in the right places, so that people can easily see what's going on in each match. The round ends at 23:59 Swiss time on Sep 29.
With regard to the frequently posed questions about ursine house-training and papal religious affiliation, I cannot imagine how I can only just now haWith regard to the frequently posed questions about ursine house-training and papal religious affiliation, I cannot imagine how I can only just now have discovered that the original title of the Book of Genesis is Bereshit. Surely God is telling us something very important here. A quick search reveals no end of learned commentary....more
And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well that it's the last thing he should do, Marcel has invited Albertine to come and live with him in Paris and now spends his time in a hell of jealousy, trying to stop her from meeting her many lesbian lovers and endlessly cross-examining her about her movements. He's aware, both from his own experience and from that of his late friend Swann, that his behaviour is pointless and self-destructive, but he can't control it.
Looking at the introduction and many other places, I see everyone explaining to us that the book is about Proust's brief and tragic relationship with his chauffeur/private secretary/lover Alfred Agostinelli. From the information available, it is indeed easy to see why this theory is popular. On the other hand, I notice this sentence in the book's first paragraph:
Ceux qui apprennent sur la vie d'un autre quelque détail exact en tirent aussitôt des conséquences qui ne le sont pas et voient dans le fait nouvellement découvert l'explication de choses qui précisément n'ont aucun rapport avec lui.
which I might paraphrase as
People who note some striking detail in someone else's life often draw conclusions from it which are entirely incorrect, and see in the fact they have just discovered explanations of things which have absolutely nothing to do with him.
Indeed, on the occasions when I have had an opportunity to check my theories about people's books by asking the authors directly, I've been surprised to see how many times Proust's observation turned out to be accurate. So, maybe not as clear-cut as it seems.
The author of my edition's preface also spends several pages telling us about the book's painstakingly constructed architecture, but refrains from pointing out that it often seems to be a complete mess. There are bizarre plot holes, and sentences are repeated for no obvious reason. Worst, Proust's syntax, always driven to the edge of what's possible for a human being to understand, sometimes goes well past the point of no return. The diligent editor, as conflicted as his author, goes to great lengths in his footnotes to explain that some sentences aren't actually finished and others use pronouns whose reference is almost impossible to deduce from the grammar. In general there are a vast number of obscure words and allusions which complicate the task of understanding what the hell the narrator is talking about.
Why is Proust doing this? He died while he was still correcting the proofs, and some of the inconsistencies must be down to things still being in progress. But I think this is far from being the whole story, and it may not even be an important part of it. It seems to me, rather, that Proust has chosen to convey his narrator's constant pain and confusion by using the grammar to inflect the same sufferings on us, the poor readers. It's a dangerous manoeuvre, and you can only get away with it when you're a brilliant enough writer that you can pull some magical pages out of the hat any time you need them to remind us that you're doing this on purpose; a modern novel which uses the same method with success is Infinite Jest, also a book about obsession.
Although La Prisonnière was often unpleasant to read, when I reached the end I decided I'd been tortured for valid reasons. The narrator spends most of his time in so much pain that his mind isn't functioning properly; indeed he's always telling us he's unable to think. But every now and then, when his attention turns to the redemptive power of art, the mental fog clears, and with it the syntax. The high point of the novel is the musical evening chez Mme Verdurin, which contrasts the sublime beauty of Vinteuil's septet (clearly, and somewhat immodestly, the book itself) with Mme Verdurin's tawdry scheming against Baron de Charlus. We see that the two contrasting themes of the septet correspond to the two themes of the book, the power of art (can art be not just an alternative to life, but actually more real than life?), versus the miseries of romantic relationships.
The opening of Albertine disparue, which I have just started, appears to confirm the above theory: Albertine has left, and the narrator already seems clearer and more coherent. I'm looking forward to following the triumphant development of the artistic theme in the final two volumes. ________________ [And the next day...]
Thirty pages into volume 6, I stand by what I said: at least to my eye, there is a very noticeable difference in the syntax. I'm wondering if I can find some straightforward way to quantify it....more
Plato's image of the Cave, surely the most famous metaphor in all of philosophy, is famous precisely because it can be applied to everything: but somePlato's image of the Cave, surely the most famous metaphor in all of philosophy, is famous precisely because it can be applied to everything: but somewhere towards the end of this book, it struck me that it can be applied with unusual directness and literalness to modern cosmology. People had suspected since the 1920s that the universe probably started in a very hot, very dense state (telescopes showed that all the galaxies were moving apart; the obvious explanation was that they were once much closer together). In the 1960s, these suspicions were transformed into near-certainty, when the Cosmic Background Radiation was discovered: it could only be the light from the beginning of the universe. But just what happened during the first few moments still remained unclear. As people have found better ways to study the Cosmic Background Radiation, these questions have become better and better understood. Mukhanov's book gives a detailed mathematical picture of what was known around 2005.
When people first detected the CBR, they thought it was completely uniform, but within a few decades techniques were developed for mapping the tiny variations in temperature, measured in thousandths of one percent. People had already figured out that what we're seeing isn't the light from the very beginning of time. The problem is that the universe was for several hundred thousand years so hot that it consisted of plasma, with the electrons and nuclei dissociated from each other. Plasma is opaque to light, we can't see through it. The light we see comes from what is known as the Last Scattering Surface, the boundary where things had cooled down enough that electrons and nuclei combined into atoms and space became transparent. The patterns detected in the CMB are patterns on that surface. Amazingly, it turns out that we are looking at literal shadows on a literal wall which surrounds us in all directions, and trying to deduce from the shape of those shadows what has literally created the universe.
It's such a majestic thought that you just want to gape in awe: but physicists, we find, have long since passed the stage of gaping and are now busily engaged in precise calculations. This book presents four hundred pages of details. I was not able to follow most of them - I would say that good graduate level physics is needed - but there is a lot of text between the largely incomprehensible equations, and the experience is rather like wandering around a huge museum with a competent guide. Here, the guide says, is the method you use to determine the temperature and the shape of space when the universe was a certain age. Here are the reactions which should explain why there is matter rather than just radiation. (It is truly extraordinary that the classic philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing seems to reduce to questions of asymmetry in certain reactions). Here are models of what the universe was like when the energy scale was trillions of times greater than the highest level we can reach in our miserable particle accelerators, and it went through a phase of exponential expansion. I had always found "inflation" rather hard to believe in, but after walking around Professor Mukhanov's virtual exhibit I am less sceptical. Step by step, he explains just what kind of shadows it would produce on the great wall we're looking at, and why it's so extremely difficult to think of other ways in which just those shadows could have arisen.
Moving to another celebrated classical text, I don't want to knock Genesis 1. The first few verses of the KJV contain some of my all-time favourite lines of poetry. But dammit, this is even better....more
In the final stages of the German invasion of France in 1940, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is sent out on a reconnaissance mission over occupied territoryIn the final stages of the German invasion of France in 1940, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is sent out on a reconnaissance mission over occupied territory. It's almost certain suicide, and the information he might bring back will be of no use to anyone: the war is lost, nothing works anymore. But he accepts unhesitatingly. Somewhere over Arras, with anti-aircraft fire bracketing him on all sides, aware that he is probably a few seconds from death, he has a mystical insight. He is no longer afraid, he has done the right thing. By willingly offering his life, he is truly part of his little band of aviators, of the French military, of his country, of mankind. He knows with complete certainty that he could not have learned this lesson in any other way. Miraculously, he returns unscathed to base. He has been granted a couple more years to write this book and the much more famous Le petit prince. And he is, indeed, immortal. As long as our civilization endures, people will read him.
I wonder if there are people in Mariupol right now having similar experiences....more
The basic thesis of this book is that your expectations can make a large difference to your life, health and wellbeing. If you expect bad things to haThe basic thesis of this book is that your expectations can make a large difference to your life, health and wellbeing. If you expect bad things to happen, you're more likely to be unsuccessful and unhealthy, and you'll have a shorter life. Conversely, if you expect good things to happen, you're more likely to do well, enjoy good health, and live longer.
While I was reading it, I constantly felt two possible reactions fighting each other. One is that this is all nonsense: it's some more academic version of "The Secret", the crazy and dangerous New Age idea that just wishing for something hard enough will make the universe give it to you. The second reaction was that this actually makes a lot of sense. In particular, the placebo effect, and its converse, the nocebo effect, are well documented and certainly exist. The author himself tells you many times that you need to be careful how you read the book, and that it absolutely isn't some version of "The Secret". With that important caveat, my feeling on reaching the end is that the second reaction is much closer to the truth. Your expectations have a stronger effect on you than you probably believe, and being aware of this may help you.
One of the most striking examples came early on, and describes a syndrome that was observed in Hmong people who had emigrated to the US. Many of these people believed in evil night spirits that can kill you if not placated by a shaman who knows the proper rituals. I am doubtful about the existence of the evil night spirits. But whether they exist or not, substantial numbers of Hmong people were dying in a way consistent with this belief. American doctors thought that they usually had underlying heart conditions, and had terrified themselves to such a degree that they had fatal attacks. Whatever the reason, they were ending up dead. Importing shamans who knew the rituals had a good effect. The Hmong believed that the night spirits had been scared off, and the mysterious deaths became less common. Other cases are described where black magic at least has the apparent effect of being able to harm or kill.
The author is quick to answer critics who assume that this kind of case can only affect "primitive" people. Another striking example was a mysterious outbreak of a syndrome which struck down hundreds of Spanish teens and left adults unaffected. It turned out that the teens had been watching a TV soap which featured a deadly virus producing the relevant symptoms. The virus was fictitious: but once a few kids had displayed the symptoms, it spread like a real disease. There are many other documented cases of psychogenic illnesses.
You do not need to think that having positive beliefs will magically make you happy and successful. If false negative beliefs can be this dangerous, it is entirely credible that avoiding them might be very good for you. Of course, you can't just wish your negative beliefs away. If they are reality-based, that might anyway be a terrible idea. Also, the author also warns you multiple times not to fall into the trap of thinking that, when bad things happen, it's your fault for not being positive enough. That will just set up another negative spiral. But he says that responsible awareness of these mechanisms may be useful to you.
The book contains a great many more case studies, all carefully footnoted. I can't resist the temptation to add one more, from my personal experience. I like playing speed chess on lichess.com and chess.com, and these sites offer integrated chess engines which let you review your games afterwards to get advice from a player as strong as a top Grandmaster. As every serious chess player knows, doing this is a humbling experience. When I am in a bad mood and not thinking well, I may lose several games and feel I have been hopelessly crushed by my opponents. But the objective bot often shows me it's not true: in reality, I had some saving move I never saw, because I was thinking too negatively. On a good day, when I am in the zone, I may spot these chances and save apparently hopeless positions. But I shouldn't get too confident and think I'm playing brilliantly just because I'm winning. This time, the bot shows me that my opponents are often getting opportunities which they don't see. In actual fact, people can't play chess very well, it's too difficult; but if you're in a positive, focussed frame of mind, you'll play much better than when you're in a negative, distracted frame of mind. Well, if that's what's happening in the tiny world of the chess board, just imagine what you're missing in the infinitely more complicated game of real life.
This is an interesting book! It will make you realise, once again, that the notion of "reality" is not as straightforward as you thought it was, and it may conceivably even help you....more
At first I didn't think the second volume would be as good as the first, but I had underestimated the author's skill; it was only a li[From Hildegard]
At first I didn't think the second volume would be as good as the first, but I had underestimated the author's skill; it was only a little past the halfway point that I understood what she had in mind. In fact, Hildegard II is an even greater achievement. It is extraordinary how Marstrand-Jørgensen has taken the stray threads we have left of Hildegard's life and woven them together into a dense poetic tapestry that feels utterly compelling. The more details I checked, the more convinced I became.
Such a beautiful, moving, inspiring book. And such a pity that there is no English translation - I wrote to her and asked if anything is planned, but apparently not. Danish is far from being my best language, but I will see if I can translate a page or two myself so that anglophones can discover what they're missing. ...more
This is the third Ruether I've read, and I'm starting to feel familiar with her ideas. She is a very clear thinker. Here, she looks at the appalling mThis is the third Ruether I've read, and I'm starting to feel familiar with her ideas. She is a very clear thinker. Here, she looks at the appalling mess people have made of the Earth. She makes a good case for the claim that the desperate predicament we currently find ourselves in has its roots in the religious ideas that have shaped Western culture, and which we misleadingly call Christianity. As she says, the teachings of Christ form a rather minor part of this curious hybrid system. More important are ancient Babylonian creation myths, which recount in symbolic form the defeat of the old Goddess religion (Tiamat) by the new patriarchal religion (Marduk); apocalyptic prophecies from the Hebrew tradition; and Plato's Timaeus, which provides a philosophical picture in which ideas and minds are primal, forming the universe out of inchoate matter.
Together, these have created a toxic ethos which identifies the mind, the male, the heavens, the notion of good, and the creative force, contrasting them against the opposing ideas of the body, the female, the Earth, the notion of evil, and the destructive force. I am surprised to see how much this clarifies things. One of the most alarming developments is the transhuman vision presented as science-fiction in Greg Egan's Diaspora and scientific futurology in Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: we should forget about the Earth, and realise our destiny by transforming ourselves into pure intelligences, voyaging out into the stars until we have colonised the entire universe. When I read Tegmark, who says these ideas are taken very seriously by the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley, I had trouble understanding why we were supposed to want to do it. But indeed, it makes perfect sense in terms of Ruether's analysis. We don't want to be weighed down with all that dirty mortal flesh, created by evil females; so much better to take our rightful place as immortal beings in the clean male skies. Now that I think of it, The Iron Dream, Norman Spinrad's wonderfully deranged 70s Nazi satire, has exactly that ending.
Ruether gives sensible practical advice about how we could stop committing global suicide, but I thought this was the weakest part of the book. We surely know by now that our chances of survival would be better if we quickly moved towards renewable energy sources, got rid of nuclear weapons, ate a mostly vegetarian diet, etc. The problem is that, for the reasons she explains so well, we want the world to end. As C.S. Lewis tells us in The Last Battle, that would be a good thing: somehow (and even as a child, I did find this reasoning a bit obscure), by killing everyone we will overcome Death itself.
What we need to do first is to get better at distinguishing real life from fantasy novels. Read Ruether, she knows how to tell them apart....more
Philip K. Dick, in his batshit insane (the polite term is "visionary") How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, explains thPhilip K. Dick, in his batshit insane (the polite term is "visionary") How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, explains that what we think of as reality is just an illusion created by Satan to confuse us: in actual fact, as certain miraculous coincidences revealed to him, we are still in the world of the early Christian believers, and the twenty-first century doesn't exist. One can be forgiven for thinking that PKD had once again taken too much speed. But here, the admirably sane Rosemary Radford Ruether lays out another vision that has strange points of contact with Dick's. Ruether doesn't try to convince us that we're literally in the first century AD. She does, however, think that critical things, which determined future Western thinking, happened in the early years of the Christian era, as people tried to sort out the confusing message they had received from Jesus. Ruether argues they did a bad job of it, and that we need to carefully revisit that period and consider what Jesus actually meant.
Somehow, the teachings of Christ have been used to justify a system in which the Church, which is intimately linked to the State, has power over the laity and over all unbelievers; in which men have power over women; in which human beings have power over nature; and in which people are encouraged to accept the hierarchy imposed on them and fix their hopes on spiritual rewards after death. But would Jesus have sanctioned any of this? Ruether, who knows an impressive amount about the Bible in particular and the history of religion in general, argues that Christ's teachings were in the exact opposite direction. He valued all people equally and made a point of befriending the poor and the outcasts; his closest confidant, the first person who was allowed to see him after his claimed resurrection from the dead, was a prostitute. In the Lord's Prayer, which Ruether is inclined to see as the most clearly authentic and unchanged message we have received from Christ, he focusses on the everyday necessities of life: getting enough to eat, being forgiven for what we have done wrong.
Ruether does not mince her words and says straight out that the modern Church has been taken over by Satan. One is rather surprised that she still considers herself a Christian, but her reasoning is straightforward. She is a Christian trying her best to follow the actual teachings of Christ; the people who are trying to maintain an oppressive, misogynistic, rigidly hierarchical church are either in a grievous state of sin, or not Christians at all. I am a little surprised that she hasn't been excommunicated, and that her writings are set texts in many theology courses. I am even more surprised that I'd never heard of her until a retired nun lent me one of her books a couple of months ago. In a time where Donald Trump expects and gets overwhelming support from the American Christian community, Ruether and the other feminist theologians she's worked with should be famous. They can put the case in words which the American Right understands. I am sure they can convince some of them that they have misunderstood certain extremely important things, and that they should be fighting on the other side in the battle that's currently playing out for American's soul. It's at least as vital now as it was in the first century AD, and it's essentially the same battle.
Well, who would have thought it. Maybe Philip K. Dick did have a point after all....more
I can see my pre-20th century ancestors shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, but until this week I don't think I had ever read a book which in soI can see my pre-20th century ancestors shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, but until this week I don't think I had ever read a book which in so many words described itself as a work of theology. Look, look, I can explain. Um, you see, us enlightened moderns don't believe God exists. So, uh, theology, that's about God, so it's about something that doesn't exist. So it won't be very meaningful or relevant. You understand?
They don't understand, and they're right. Whether or not you happen to believe in God, it's clear that a great many people, both historically and now, have believed in God. It's had an enormous effect on their thought and behaviour. Even people who claim they don't believe in God most likely believe in a bunch of philosophical, moral and ethical principles which derive from or are allied to religious beliefs. It should not require a huge intellectual effort to conclude that it could in fact be interesting and useful to understand better what people who believe in God are thinking, how they conceive of God, how the concept of God has developed and changed over time, and so on.
Now of course the anti-theology sceptics (view spoiler)[for some reason, I keep thinking of Robert(hide spoiler)] have a second line of defence: theologians are the paid troops of the Church, I don't much like the Church, why should I read their obsequious propaganda? I'm sorry, but how naive can you get. If you want a comprehensive demolition of anything, look for the disaffected insider. They know where all the bodies are buried, they are intimately familiar with all the system's weaknesses because they've spent decades of their life trying to patch up those weaknesses. An outsider will never be able to equal their knowledge. The author of this book is a disaffected insider, and if you want to know what's wrong with Judeo-Christian monotheism she'll give you value for money and then some. Forget Richard Dawkins: saying that God's a delusion won't cause the believers to lose any sleep. Ruether, a highly regarded professor of theology, is far more subtle, and my guess is that many devout Christians and Jews have woken up in the middle of the night because of things she's written.
Ruether's entry point, as you can see in the title, is that monotheism is sexist. It's possible that your first reaction might be that, well, sexism isn't so bad, isn't everyone a bit sexist? But it is so bad: in fact, it's even worse than most feminists portray it. As Ruether says, one of the standard defences against accusations of sexism is to ridicule the accusers and trivialise their concerns. This is not about politically incorrect language or objectification of female bodies. It's not about rape culture or lower wages for women. It's not even about the systematic enslavement of half of the human race. It's worse than all of that. Ruether methodically lays out her case. Patriarchal religion, which is the basic substrate of most of Western thought over the last two thousand years, is rotten to the core. It is, literally, a death cult which exalts the spirit, identified with the male, and denigrates the living body, identified with the female. It is used to justify the exploitation and enslavement of all non-monotheistic people and the destruction of the planet's environment. And it isn't defensible even in its own terms. Ruether knows her Bible and her Church history backwards, all the changes, all the dirty compromises made at obscure conclaves. She is unflinching in explaining just how little of so-called Christian doctrine comes from the teachings of Christ, and how little we even know about those teachings through the many layers of revision and alteration that have been added by patriarchal reshapers of the doctrine starting with Saint Paul. But everything we do know about Christ tells us that he would have violently disapproved of present-day Christianity. He was on the side of the poor and the enslaved and the women: he was particularly on the side of poor women.
Needless to say, if you've been paying attention to what's going on in the world, you shouldn't be surprised by any of the above. But even so it's horrifying to see it all put together, carefully and coherently and in measured academic language, by someone who tells us that, despite everything, she still loves God. Whether you think of yourself as religious or not, Ruether's book is seriously worth looking at.
Oh, and in case you're wondering how I came to read it: I was lent it by a retired nun....more
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