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I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month. Here we will have some notes. These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul). Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov. Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic. He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail. He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship. He was hardly alone there. I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version. “Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim: He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert. Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead. (75) Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy." Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization. Which he does, eventually – happy ending! The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world. (108) An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way. Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water). Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages. Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds. But only almost! Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism. It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space. (“Soul,” 102) Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest. Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep: And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands. (62) “[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch. The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them. Chevengur tomorrow.
Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought. ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356) I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it. John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it. As with his trees. To step back for a moment. The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters. They are: The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent. He is not especially affected by The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.” On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.” John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages. But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally. Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories. His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse. For example, the old trees that are in love with each other: As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction. Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other… But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine) My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees: The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified? (“The River,” 89) John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase. Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover. “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.” All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug. That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish. I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981). The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.” Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books. I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels. But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit. (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)
Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but the first that anyone noticed. Wolf Solent is a plump 600 pages, and Glastonbury a monstrous 1,100. Powys was 56 when the first was published, and 59 for the second, a mature writer, a seasoned weirdo. These novels are genuine eccentrics, in ideas and style, as odd as D. H. Lawrence or Ronald Firbank. Powys, like Lawrence, is a direct descendant of Thomas Hardy, at least that is clear, not just writing about the same part of England but employing a Hardy-like narrator (although Powys’s narrator works with his characters rather than against them) and using explicitly fantastic devices. In Glastonbury he pushes the fantasy quite far. I’ll save that idea for tomorrow. Writing about these books has been a puzzle. I am tempted to just type out weird sentences. Maybe I will do that after a tint plot summary. Wolf Solent – that, surprisingly, is the name of the main character – “returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy.” I am quoting the anonymous author of the novel’s Wikipedia entry. That is, in fact, the plot of the novel, although it does not seem like it so much while actually reading, thank goodness. A Glastonbury Romance earns its 1,100 pages by expanding to a large cast and many stories. A mystic uses an inheritance to jumpstart the tourist industry of historic Glastonbury. Many things happen to many people, murders and visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, all kinds of things. Lots of sex, in Wolf Solent, too. Powys is as earthy as Lawrence, if not as explicit, or not as explicit as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), but also abstract: Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex. (AGR, “Tin,” 665) This is nominally the thought of an industrialist leaving a cave where he plans to establish a tin mine. Or it is the philosophical narrator floating along with him. Hard to tell. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire! (666) That exclamation point is a Powys signature. ‘Walking if my cure,’ he thought, ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape! It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!’ (WS, “Ripeness Is All,” 601) The characters use the exclamation point; the narrators love them. Sometimes I can sense the need for emphasis, and other times I am puzzled. Powys’s characters are great walkers, that is true. These two novels are fine examples of the domestic picaresque. Powys can organize close to the entire plot just by having characters walk around, dropping in on each other’s homes, varying the pattern with “party” chapters like “The Horse-Fair” (WS) and “The Pageant” (AGR) where Wolf Solent can just wander around the fair, bumping into and advancing the story of every single character in the novel in whatever arbitrary order Powys likes. A brilliant device; use it for your novel. Powys has the true novelist’s sense, or let’s say one of the kinds of true senses, in that he always knows where his characters are in relation to each other, in town, in a room. If a character walks this way he will pass these houses in this order, and is likely to meet these characters. He can over do it, as at the pageant – “At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig” (AGR, “The Pageant,” 560) – but he actually uses this kind of detail when the show begins. He has it all in his head. Or he made a diagram, I don’t know. Those are some aspects of these particular Powys novels. They are original enough that I can see how readers can develop a taste for, or be repelled by, their strong flavor. Tomorrow I will write about Powys’s trees.
One of these books is 1,100 pages long. It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time. FICTION A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys - I will write a bit about this beast, soon. That line in the title is from Chapter 25, p. 798 of the Overlook edition Claudius the God (1934), Robert Graves A Buyer's Market (1952), Anthony Powell – The second novel in a series of twelve. I will write about this, too, but I do not know when. Each time I read one in the series I think, just one more, then I will know what I want to write. Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin Dispatches from the Central Committee (1992), Vladimir Sorokin – Actually from the early 1980s, mostly, but unpublishable, real antinomian anti-Soviet gestures. Sorokin had two main tricks, first, to begin in a conventional vein but suddenly interrupting the story with something disgusting or otherwise awful, and second, to suddenly switch rhetorical modes, say from realism to bureaucratic nonsense to grotesquerie to surrealism. The suddenness is always the key effect. In a sense the stories are satire but by the end I took it more as a kind of protest literature. The book includes perfectly suited, disgusting new illustration and is well produced, not always true of Dalkey Archive books. I guess it could be full of typos but given the nature of the text how would I ever know. POETRY Auroras of Autumn (1950), Wallace Stevens 17 Poems (1954) & Secrets on the Way (1958), Tomas Tranströmer Scattered Returns (1969), L. E. Sissman – The great Boston cancer poet. MEMOIR Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950), József Debreczeni – Debreczeni, a Serbian-Hungarian journalist, passed through Auschwitz but was mostly imprisoned in labor camps and eventually a bizarre hospital camp, the “cold crematorium,” thus the curious, accurate subtitle. Debreczeni emphasize the disgusting side of life in the camps, not exactly a neglected aspect in other accounts but I have never seen so much direct focus on it. But again, that hospital camp, boy. Please see Dorian Stuber’s review for more detail, if you can stand it. As many Holocaust memoirs as we have now, it is a shame that this one did not appear in English until 2023. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (2024), Sonny Rollins – Full of notes about fingering and the effects of his diet on his blowing, this artifact is for fans only, but this is Sonny Rollins, a titan. Become a fan! IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School, 1900), Colette – Young Claudine has a crush on her almost as young new (female) teacher, who is perhaps having some sort of affair with the only slightly older (female) school principal. Colette later said that all of the (barely) lesbian stuff was forced on the novel by her odious husband Willy, which is plausible given that Colette abandons the plot – all plot – about halfway through for a long long long section about taking the bac, the final exams. I found all of that fascinating and wish I had read the novel long ago. But it was for some reason the lesbian stuff, not the test-taking, that gave Colette her first bestseller. Poesia, te escrevo agora (Poetry, I Write You Now, 1950-84), João Cabral de Melo Neto – The major works of Cabral de Melo Neto, including full versions of his great long poems like “The River or On the Course of the Capibaribe River from Its Source to the City of Recife” (1953) in one handy book. Recommended to the Portuguese language learner – easier than they first look, and highly rewarding. I assume, and hope, that the English translations are good.
My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read. I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right. I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy! (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage. Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart. The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse. The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses. Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract. Entirely abstract. Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all. A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich… Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not. Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting. I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep. But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding. Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot. I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess. Surrealism is fun. And material, too, not abstract. Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart. Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel. It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes. Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.
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La fin d’un monde ? La fin de nos souvenirs Nous sommes envahis d’IA. Bien plus que vous ne le pensez. Chaque fois que votre téléphone prend une photo, ce n’est pas la réalité qui s’affiche, mais une reconstruction « probable » de ce que vous avez envie de voir. C’est la raison pour laquelle les photos paraissent désormais si belles, si vivantes, si précises : parce qu’elles ne sont pas le reflet de la réalité, mais le reflet de ce que nous avons envie de voir, de ce que nous sommes le plus susceptibles de trouver « beau ». C’est aussi la raison pour laquelle les systèmes dégooglisés prennent de moins belles photos: ils ne bénéficient pas des algorithmes Google pour améliorer la photo en temps réel. Les hallucinations sont rares à nos yeux naïfs, car crédibles. Nous ne les voyons pas. Mais elles sont là. Comme cette future mariée essayant sa robe devant des miroirs et qui découvre que chaque reflet est différent. ‘One in a million’ iPhone bridal photo explanation: blame panorama mode (www.theverge.com) J’ai moi-même réussi à perturber les algorithmes. À gauche, la photo telle que je l’ai prise et telle qu’elle apparait dans n’importe quel visualisateur de photos. À droite, la même photo affichée dans Google Photos. Pour une raison difficilement compréhensible, l’algorithme tente de reconstruire la photo et se plante lourdement. Une photo de ma main à gauche et la même photo complètement déformée à droite Or ces images, reconstruites par IA, sont ce que notre cerveau va retenir. Nos souvenirs sont littéralement altérés par les IA. La fin de la vérité Tout ce que vous croyez lire sur LinkedIn a probablement été généré par un robot. Pour vous dire, le 2 avril il y avait déjà des robots qui se vantaient sur ce réseau de migrer de Offpunk vers XKCDpunk. Capture d’écran de LinkedIn montrant le billet d’un certain Arthur Howell se vantant d’un blog post racontant la migration de Offpunk ver XKCDpunk. La transition Offpunk vers XKCDpunk était un poisson d’avril hyper spécifique et compréhensible uniquement par une poignée d’initiés. Il n’a pas fallu 24h pour que le sujet soit repris sur LinkedIn. Non, franchement, vous pouvez éteindre LinkedIn. Même les posts de vos contacts sont probablement en grande partie générés par IA suite à un encouragement algorithmique à poster. Je ne suis plus à vendre sur LinkedIn (ploum.net) Il y a 3 ans, je mettais en garde sur le fait que les chatbots généraient du contenu qui remplissait le web et servait de base d’apprentissage à la prochaine génération de chatbots. Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting (ploum.net) Je parlais d’une guerre silencieuse. Mais qui n’est plus tellement silencieuse. La Russie utilise notamment ce principe pour inonder le web d’articles, générés automatiquement, reprenant sa propagande. A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda (www.newsguardrealitycheck.com) Le principe est simple : vu que les chatbots font des statistiques, si vous publiez un million d’articles décrivant les expériences d’armes biologiques que les Américains font en Ukraine (ce qui est faux), le chatbot va considérer ce morceau de texte comme statistiquement fréquent et avoir une grande probabilité de vous le ressortir. Et même si vous n’utilisez pas ChatGPT, vos politiciens et les journalistes, eux, les utilisent. Ils en sont même fiers. La conjuration de la fierté ignorante (ploum.net) Ils ont entendu ChatGPT braire dans un pré et en fond un discours qui sera lui-même repris par ChatGPT. Ils empoisonnent la réalité et, ce faisant, la modifient. Ils savent très bien qu’ils mentent. C’est le but. Ils nous mentent (ploum.net) Je pensais qu’utiliser ces outils était une perte de temps un peu stupide. En fait, c’est dangereux aussi pour les autres. Vous vous demandez certainement c’est quoi le bazar autour des taxes frontalières que Trump vient d’annoncer ? Les économistes se grattent la tête. Les geeks ont compris : tout le plan politique lié aux taxes et son explication semblent avoir été littéralement générés par un chatbot devant répondre à la question « comment imposer des taxes douanières pour réduire le déficit ? ». Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? (paulkrugman.substack.com) Le monde n’est pas dirigé par Trump, il est dirigé par ChatGPT. Mais où est la Sara Conor qui le débranchera ? Extrait de Tintin, l’étoile mystérieuse La fin de l’apprentissage Slack vole notre attention, mais vole également notre apprentissage en permettant à n’importe qui de déranger, par message privé, le développeur senior qui connait les réponses, car il a bâti le système. Slack: The Art of Being Busy Without Getting Anything Done (matduggan.com) La capacité d’apprendre, c’est bel et bien ce que les téléphones et l’IA sont en train de nous dérober. Comme le souligne Hilarius Bookbinder, professeur de philosophie dans une université américaine, la différence générationnelle majeure qu’il observe est que les étudiants d’aujourd’hui n’ont aucune honte à simplement envoyer un email au professeur pour lui demander de résumer ce qu’il faut savoir. The average college student today (hilariusbookbinder.substack.com) Dans son journal de Mars, Thierry Crouzet fait une observation similaire. Alors qu’il annonce quitter Facebook, tout ce qu’il a pour réponse c’est « Mais pourquoi ? ». Alors même qu’il balance des liens sur le sujet depuis des lustres. Mars 2025 - Thierry Crouzet (tcrouzet.com) Les chatbots ne sont, eux-mêmes, pas des systèmes qu’il est possible d’apprendre. Ils sont statistiques, sans cesse changeants. À les utiliser, la seule capacité que l’on acquiert, c’est l’impression qu’il n’est pas possible d’apprendre. Ces systèmes nous volent littéralement le réflexe de réfléchir et d’apprendre. En conséquence, sans même vouloir chercher, une partie de la population veut désormais une réponse personnelle, immédiate, courte, résumée. Et si possible en vidéo. La fin de la confiance Apprendre nécessite d’avoir confiance en soi. Il est impossible d’apprendre si on n’a pas la certitude qu’on est capable d’apprendre. À l’opposé, si on acquiert cette certitude, à peu près tout peut s’apprendre. Une étude menée par des chercheurs de Microsoft montre que plus on a confiance en soi, moins on fait confiance aux réponses des chatbots. Mais, au contraire, si on a le moindre doute, on a soudainement confiance envers les résultats qui nous sont envoyés. The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers Parce que les chatbots parlent comme des CEOs, des marketeux ou des arnaqueurs : ils simulent la confiance envers leurs propres réponses. Les personnes, même les plus expertes, qui n’ont pas le réflexe d’aller au conflit, de remettre l’autorité en question finissent par transformer leur confiance en eux-mêmes en confiance envers un outil. Un outil de génération aléatoire qui appartient à des multinationales. Les entreprises sont en train de nous voler notre confiance en nous-mêmes. Elles sont en train de nous voler notre compétence. Elles sont en train de nous voler nos scientifiques les plus brillants. Why I stopped using AI code editors (lucianonooijen.com) Et c’est déjà en train de faire des dégâts dans le domaine de « l’intelligence stratégique » (à savoir les services secrets). The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT due to AI (www.dutchosintguy.com) Ainsi que dans le domaine de la santé : les médecins ont tendance à faire exagérément confiance aux diagnostics posés automatiquement, notamment pour les cancers. Les médecins les plus expérimentés se défendent mieux, mais restent néanmoins sensibles : ils font des erreurs qu’ils n’auraient jamais commises normalement si cette erreur est encouragée par un assistant artificiel. Automation Bias in Mammography: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence BI-RADS Suggestions on Reader Performance La fin de la connaissance Avec les chatbots, une idée vieille comme l’informatique refait surface : « Et si on pouvait dire à la machine ce qu’on veut sans avoir besoin de la programmer ? ». C’est le rềve de toute cette catégorie de managers qui ne voient les programmeurs que comme des pousse-bouton qu’il faut bien payer, mais dont on aimerait se passer. Rêve qui, faut-il le préciser, est complètement stupide. Parce que l’humain ne sait pas ce qu’il veut. Parce que la parole a pour essence d’être imprécise. Parce que lorsqu’on parle, on échange des sensations, des intuitions, mais on ne peut pas être précis, rigoureux, bref, scientifique. L’humanité est sortie du moyen-âge lorsque des Newton, Leibniz, Descartes ont commencé à inventer un langage de logique rationnelle : les mathématiques. Tout comme on avait inventé, à peine plus tôt, un langage précis pour décrire la musique. Se satisfaire de faire tourner un programme qu’on a décrit à un chatbot, c’est retourner intellectuellement au moyen-âge. On the foolishness of "natural language programming". (EWD 667) (EWD) Mais bon, encore faut-il maitriser une langue. Lorsqu’on passe sa scolarité à demander à un chatbot de résumer les livres à lire, ce n’est même pas sûr que nous arriverons à décrire ce que nous voulons précisément. En fait, ce n’est même pas sûr que nous arriverons encore à penser ce que nous voulons. Ni même à vouloir. La capacité de penser, de réfléchir est fortement corrélée avec la capacité de traduire en mot. Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire viennent aisément. (Boileau) Ce n’est plus un retour au moyen-âge, c’est un retour à l’âge de la pierre. Le dernier vaisseau (ploum.net) Ou dans le futur décrit dans mon (excellent) roman Printeurs : des injonctions publicitaires qui se sont substituées à la volonté. (si si, achetez-le ! Il est à la fois palpitant et vous fera réfléchir) Printeurs, par Ploum (pvh-editions.com) Extrait de Tintin, l’étoile mystérieuse La fin des différentes voix. Je critique le besoin d’avoir une réponse en vidéo, car la notion de lecture est importante. Je me rends compte qu’une proportion incroyable, y compris d’universitaires, ne sait pas « lire ». Ils savent certes déchiffrer, mais pas réellement lire. Et il y a un test tout simple pour savoir si vous savez lire : si vous trouvez plus facile d’écouter une vidéo YouTube d’une personne qui parle plutôt que de lire le texte vous-même, c’est sans doute que vous déchiffrez. C’est que vous lisez à haute voix dans votre cerveau pour vous écouter parler. Il y a bien sûr bien des contextes où la vidéo ou la voix ont des avantages, mais lorsqu’il s’agit, par exemple, d’apprendre une série de commandes et leurs paramètres, la vidéo est insupportablement inappropriée. Pourtant, je ne compte plus les étudiants qui me recommandent des vidéos sur le sujet. Car la lecture, ce n’est pas simplement transformer les lettres en son. C’est en percevoir directement le sens, permettant des allers-retours incessants, des pauses, des passages rapides afin de comprendre le texte. Entre un écrivain et un lecteur, il existe une communication, une communion télépathique qui font paraître l’échange oral lent, inefficace, balourd, voire grossier. Cet échange n’est pas toujours idéal. Un écrivain possède sa « voix » personnelle qui ne convient pas à tout le monde. Il m’arrive régulièrement de tomber sur des blogs dont le sujet m’intéresse, mais je n’arrive pas à m’abonner, car la « voix » du blogueur ne me convient pas du tout. C’est normal et même souhaitable. C’est une des raisons pour laquelle nous avons besoin de multitudes de voix. Nous avons besoin de gens qui lisent puis qui écrivent, qui mélangent les idées et les transforment pour les transmettre avec leur propre voix. La fin de la relation humaine Dans la file d’un magasin, j’entendais la personne en face de moi se vanter de raconter sa vie amoureuse à ChatGPT et de lui demander en permanence conseil sur la manière de la gérer. Comme si la situation nécessitait une réponse d’un ordinateur plutôt qu’une discussion avec un autre être humain qui comprend voir qui a vécu le même problème. Après nous avoir volé le moindre instant de solitude avec les notifications incessantes de nos téléphones et les messages sur les réseaux sociaux, l’IA va désormais voler notre sociabilité. Nous ne serons plus connectés qu’avec le fournisseur, l’Entreprise. Sur Gopher, szczezuja parle des autres personnes postant sur Gopher comme étant ses amis. Tout le monde ne sait pas que ce sont mes amis, mais comment appeler autrement quelqu’un que vous lisez régulièrement et dont vous connaissez un peu de sa vie intime I am alive (2) (szczezuja) La fin de la fin… La fin d’une ère est toujours le début d’une autre. Annoncer la fin, c’est préparer une renaissance. En apprenant de nos erreurs pour reconstruire en améliorant le tout. C’est peut-être ce que j’apprécie tant sur Gemini : l’impression de découvrir, de suivre des « voix » uniques, humaines. J’ai l’impression d’être témoin d’une microfaction d’humanité qui se désolidarise du reste, qui reconstruit autre chose. Qui lit ce que d’autres humains ont écrit juste parce qu’un autre humain a eu besoin de l’écrire sans espérer aucune contrepartie. Splitting the Web (ploum.net) Vous vous souvenez des « planet » ? Ce sont des agrégateurs de blogs regroupant les participants d’un projet en un seul flux. L’idée a été historiquement lancée par GNOME avec planet.gnome.org (qui existe toujours) avant de se généraliser. Et bien bacardi55 lance Planet Gemini FR, un agrégateur des capsules Gemini francophone. Annonce: Ouverture du Planet Gemini France (news.planet-gemini.fr) C’est génial et parfait pour ceux qui ont envie de découvrir du contenu sur Gemini. C’est génial pour ceux qui ont envie de lire d’autres humains qui n’ont rien à vous vendre. Bref, pour découvrir le fin du fin… Toutes les images sont illégament issues l’œuvre d’Hergé, l’étoile mystérieuse. Y’a pas de raison que les chatbots soient les seuls à pomper. Je suis Ploum et je viens de publier Bikepunk, une fable écolo-cycliste entièrement tapée sur une machine à écrire mécanique. Pour me soutenir, achetez mes livres (si possible chez votre libraire) ! Recevez directement par mail mes écrits en français et en anglais. Votre adresse ne sera jamais partagée. Vous pouvez également utiliser mon flux RSS francophone ou le flux RSS complet.
Since he was a little boy my middle son has been a serial enthusiast. Back then it was rocks, carnivorous plants, Dmitri Mendeleev and the periodic table, coins, electronics – one focus of interest after another. He wasn’t fickle or easily distracted by the next shiny thing. Rather, he is blessed to find the world filled with interesting things, and it would be a shame to neglect any of them. Guy Davenport might have been writing about Michael in his introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus (1996): “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” In our most recent telephone conversation, the topic was the Byzantine general Belisarius (c. 505-565 A.D.), who served under Emperor Justinian I. Belisarius reconquered much of the territory formerly part of the Western Roman Empire, including North Africa, that had been lost less than a century earlier to the barbarians. Belisarius is judged a military tactician of genius, rivalling Alexander and Julius Caeser. Michael is a first lieutenant, a cyber officer, in the Marine Corps, so the appeal is obvious. What we know of Belisarius’ life is a mingling of history, rumor and legend. Edward Gibbon’s account in Chap. 41 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes compelling reading. Here he describes the defeat of the Moors in 535: “The formidable strength and artful conduct of Belisarius secured the neutrality of the Moorish princes, whose vanity aspired to receive in the emperor's name the ensigns of their regal dignity. They were astonished by the rapid event, and trembled in the presence of their conqueror. But his approaching departure soon relieved the apprehensions of a savage and superstitious people. . . . and when the Roman general hoisted sail in the port of Carthage, he heard the cries and almost beheld the flames of the desolated province. Yet he persisted in his resolution; and leaving only a part of his guards to reinforce the feeble garrisons, he entrusted the command of Africa to the eunuch Solomon, who proved himself not unworthy to be the successor of Belisarius.” For amateur readers and non-scholars, history can be frustrating. How do we sift myth from reality when original sources are scarce and authorities disagree? Who do we trust? And what of those with no historical rigor who settle for complacent legend and contented ignorance? Maryann Corbett considers such things in her poem “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel” (which a friend of mine always calls the "Hitler Channel"): “Is it by God’s mercy that children are born not knowing the long reach of old pain? “That the five-year-old, led by the hand past the graffiti, cannot fathom his mother’s tightening grip, “or why, when a box of nails clatters to the tile like gunfire, his father’s face contorts? “So slow is the knitting of reasons, the small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel “as a cousin’s offhand story, or a yellowed clipping whose old news flutters from a bottom drawer, “or some bloodless snippet of history dully intoned as you doze off, in the recliner— “so slow that only now, in my seventh decade, do I turn from these sepia stills, this baritone voiceover, chanting the pain of immigrant forebears, my thought impaled on a memory: “my twelve-year-old self, weeping on Sundays fifty years ago when my father drove us to mass but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields, “doing what his father had done, and his father’s father before him, wordless to tell me why.” History is more than academic. It overlaps the personal. We all dwell in history, even Americans. Not long before his death, my brother learned that our mother’s side of the family – the names are Hayes, McBride, Hendrickson – was once Roman Catholic. How did he learn this? Why hadn’t we known this before? What caused the severance? With his death, what he learned sinks again into the gloom. “The small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel.”
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Campo dei Fiori” by Czesław Miłosz appeared first on The American Scholar.
“I recall admiring the calmly expository flavor and simple, nonjudgemental humanity of profile stories Patrick Kurp contributed to the Gazette, years and years ago.” After three decades, I’ve heard from a former newspaper colleague, a music writer, Mike Hochanadel. A retired photographer and newspaper alumnus, Marc Schultz, alerted me to Mike’s blog, “Hoke’s Jukebox” (“Quiet reflections on a loud life”) devoted to happenings in upstate New York, where I lived and worked for nineteen years. Mike refers to the features I wrote for The Daily Gazette in Schenectady from 1994 to 1999. In particular, I wrote a weekly series about “hamlets,” mostly in Saratoga County. I use quotation marks because these are not places that officially exist, at least according to any government, including the post office. Often they were rural crossroads without signs, phantom places from the nineteenth century. I would consult old maps, identify a promising defunct community, perhaps do a little research at the library and spend the day tramping around the hamlet. Usually, I would visit the cemetery, reading the stones that hadn’t been erased by acid rain, then knock on doors. Once I happened on a burial, in a grave dug by hand by the cemetery caretaker, a garrulous old man. Most people would talk to me, though often they were puzzled that anyone was curious about the place. Sometimes their families had lived there for generations. Other were newcomers. Slowly, over the course of the day, after many interviews, I formed an impression of the place. Then I drove back to the office and wrote my story. I remember Koons Corners and Porters Corners. All the stories are clipped and buried in a file cabinet. The novelist William Kennedy once asked if I was trying to be the Charles Kuralt of the Capital Region. I used to tell journalism students that I worked in two media – words and people. I was seldom interested in most conventional journalistic beats – government, business, politics, courts – though I had to cover all those fields and I’m grateful for the experience. I just never had much interest in “news,” and still don’t. People interest me, as does the quality of the writing. Mike’s description of my prose above is pleasing to hear. I worked hard on my copy to avoid clichés but at the same time to avoid purple language. In other words, I tried to be concise and precise. On this date, April 7, in 1891, Jules Renard wrote in his journal: “Style is the forgetting of all styles.” [The quoted passage is from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
