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[English]. Pausanius 1.30.4:

κατὰ τοῦτο τῆς χώρας φαίνεται πύργος Τίμωνος, ὃς μόνος εἶδε μηδένα τρόπον εὐδαίμονα εἶναι γενέσθαι πλὴν τοὺς ἄλλους φεύγοντα ἀνθρώπους.

— Technology arises out of spiritual failure –our failure to concentrate– and must grow more complicated as our distractedness increases. (It also increases our distractedness.)

— “To be dominated by artificial intelligence is the same as to be dominated by thoughts of the future.” (Artificial intelligence is an embodied incapacity to live without forethought. Prometheus not only unbound, but boundless.)

— Question. If “being in the moment” is in some sense the spiritual goal (or anyway, a desirable state) which is a greater impediment to its attainment: dissipation or technology?

— True or false statement: “If we were all good Christians and Muslims and Buddhists there would be a steady decline in the use of technology.” (If we were all good scientists…?) (If we were all bad Muslims and Buddhists and Christians?) If we were all good Marxists?

— Robots are the Ideal It’s said that we can’t arrest technology’s advance because we’re “all human” (we can’t help wanting the convenience and advantage technology provides, so we couldn’t go backward in that respect if we tried). But perhaps it’s actually because we’re all, in our essence, robots that we’re really so drawn to technology? That robots are for us, not a necessity, but an ideal?

(To say it otherwise, human beings are the first robots, the first artificial intelligences, and are now in the process, as it were, of spinning these attributes off.)

— The arts. Even if a computer could create Sly Stone (or his music) would it ever have an incentive to do so? One can certainly imagine a computer having both the capacity and incentive to create a Jar-Jar Binks. But (as it seems to me) there is no demand for Sly Stone until he has happened — one wouldn’t know to make him.

(This is to say: maybe artificial technology will have the same constraints as commercial radio, being without the incentive to create anything very lasting or unique. Supposing it could make a Sly Stone, would it have the incentive to make his music widely available?)

–Although I suppose artists to be as replaceable as anyone else by A.I., if not more so, I wonder if there would be a shift noticeable between pre-and post AI music that might be found, in the long run, to be undesirable; and that this would be found to extend toward other occupations also.

Artificial intelligence, artificial knowledge? In reflecting on the possibility of a computer which is, from our point of view, all intelligent, all knowledgeable, it might be constructive to reconsider the limits of knowledge and intelligence. What do these do and not do for existence? Perhaps in some sense humanity’s lack of intelligence that is responsible for its evolutionary success? Perhaps un-intelligence makes existence seem worthwhile?

–How will A.I control human understanding of human history? Will the story of human history become — how it came to develop A.I?

— can literary fiction (say, a Shakespeare play) be distinguished from commercial fiction (say, a John Grisham novel) on this basis of their word distributions (how many words are repeated in what ways how many times in these different genres)?

–a related question: will a work of literary fiction (a “classic”) have more “repetitions” than a work of commercial fiction?

— how are we to distinguish words that are repeated thematically (‘nothing’ in Shakespeare) from words that are repeated out of poor writing or another reason (is there a need to make such a distinction).

— given x number of words (the “author’s vocabulary” or “all the vocabulary the author is known to have used in print”) and y number of words (“the book”/ the number of words in his book) can we make an informed guess about how many repetitions that work might contain.

–Do people with larger vocabularies repeat words more or less often than people with smaller vocabularies, or about the same?

–Do early English literary writers (Shakespeare) repeat themselves more than late English literary writers (Joyce); how does it compare to the trend in, say, non-literary epistolary writing over the same period?

–How about across cultures as well as times? Does Virgil, Homer, or Shakespeare make more use of repetitions? How do the repetitions in literary work compare to those in a legal document, or to those in a collection of the letters of a college-aged student.

–How about with respect to speech? do we repeat ourselves more when we speak or when we write? Does Philip Roth repeat words more frequently when he speaks or when he writes?

–Suppose literary word repetitions (‘Nothing’ in King Lear) don’t indicate a ‘deeper meaning’ — what else might such repetitions indicate? Is repetition a rhetorical device, a natural consequence of writing with some purpose in mind, or something else? If I were to right down eighty words randomly would it contain more repetitions than a sonnet of Petrarch that had around the same word count?

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This n-grams viewer graph jibes with my own sense that people are using the word robust a lot more often than they once did. (From latin robustus, literally “as strong as an oak.”)

I was under the vague impression that it was Donald Rumsfeld or the Bush administration that popularized its use, but the graph (which, of course, measures written and not spoken instances of the word) seems to indicate that its meteoric rise began circa 1980.

In a similar vein is the phrase “salacious details” which I recall as having arisen from the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (And, again, Iraq War, ‘embedded.’ — though contrast with ‘embedded journalist.’)

Other ngrams:

— Pale Blue Eyes,Candy Says;

—Ghana,Gold Coast;

—Joseph Conrad,Henry James;

—Mars,Jupiter,Pluto,Saturn;

—hurricane, cyclone …

Not getting a joke (He brews it) then suddenly getting it (hebrews it) — describing what is really going on there.

Question: how does Moses make his tea? Answer: He brews it. Is it that the mind, when it does not get the joke, hears he brews it and when it does get the joke hears hebrews it; or does it hear, when it gets it, hebrews it and he brews it at once? Or does it hear hebrews it, and hears two nouns, and thinks the statement makes no sense, two nouns, and trying to make sense of it discovers this alternate meaning. Does it hear “he brews it” and think “why is that even a joke?” then discovers the pun. Why should the discovery of the unexpected provoke laughter?

Question: to deliver the joke properly, on which syllable of the punchline should the teller place the accent? The question is whether to pronounce it as two unrelated words, “hebrews” and “it”, or as the phrase “he brews it”. (Or the question is whether to put the accent on the antepenult or penult, which is perhaps to say the same thing.) I tended to mix it up without about equal results.

What War and Peace has to tell us about our present moment is that no one is really to blame for the decline of the United States as a power: it isn’t illegal immigrants, or Trump, or NAFTA, or Wall Street, or rap music, or our failure to come to grips with slavery, or the repeal of Glass-Steagal, or what have you, but what some would call the will of God and others the inscrutable drift of history: not one factor but innumerable factors, interacting with a complexity we couldn’t start to comprehend, resulting in one’s country’s moving forward and another’s moving back, as has gone on from the beginning of time.

Marcel Proust: “Les êtres les plus bêtes par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimés, manifestent des lois qu’ils ne perçoivent pas, mais que l’artiste surprend en eux. À cause de ce genre d’observations, le vulgaire croit l’écrivain méchant, et il le croit à tort, car dans un ridicule l’artiste voit une belle généralité, il ne l’impute pas plus à grief à la personne observée que le chirurgien ne la mésestimerait d’être affectée d’un trouble assez fréquent de la circulation ; aussi se moque-t-il moins que personne des ridicules.”

Andreas Mayor: “The stupidest people, in their gestures, their remarks, the sentiments which they involuntarily express, manifest laws which they do not themselves perceive but which the artist discovers in them, and because he makes observations of this kind the writer is popularly believed to be ill-natured. But this belief is false: in an instance of ridiculous behavior the artist sees a beautiful generality, and he no more condemns on this account the individual in whom he observes it than a surgeon would despise a patient for suffering from some quite common disorder of the circulation; the writer, in fact, is the least inclined of all men to scoff at folly.”

War & Peace today. Sonya — able to bear her self-sacrifices, cheerfully even, because secretly she believes that it is not self-sacrifice, but deferred gratification, and that she will one day receive her reward (marriage to Nicholas Rostov). When she discovers, however, that that reward, too, must be sacrificed, the walls start closing in and, rather than seeming to herself, as formerly, a good and self-sacrificing person, she seems a person who’s never gotten anything of what she’s wanted. . . Yup.

Tolstoy locates her inclination toward secrecy in her financial dependency, but I wonder if that’s true of her self-sacrificing attitude also….Interesting that her rival for the love Nicholas Rostov, Princess Mary, who is herself a rich heiress, finds her “affected,” which I believe is the first time we hear a truly negative judgment made about Sonya’s personality, which even the Old Countess, who is annoyed by Sonya, doesn’t feel she can object to. (Sonya doesn’t really care, like Natasha does, that Prince Andrew is dying and the suffering this causes her, Princess Mary feels.)

Was interested in this exchange between Mcconnel and Manchin, haven’t before seen Manchin in action.

Outside the K-1

the worker exits the store
he is feeling so sore
he’s heading for his pickup’s door
he says to himself he can’t walk any more

in his black bag,
so it’s starting to sag
is a bottle of beer
that leans almost clear
held by one handle
a foot in a sandle
that walks from the door
he is feeling so sore

and puts it in the seat
a significant feat
what with the trash
and the abundance of ash
and the pile of plans
and the mountain of cans

and then off he goes
through parking lot groves
and pavement tahitis
with palm tree graffitis
and permitted zones
among holders of phones
with nice courts of cones
and advertisements for loans
and the pools of construction
amid spools for conduction

until finally he’ll sit
and open what’s in it
and not think of the day
or what it may say,
but sigh with relief
that it was brief.