Florida Man So Far

Florida man wrestles puppy from alligator’s jaws in video. Florida man crashes golf cart, blames Trump. Florida man sets hospital bed on fire to get nurse’s attention. Florida man asks cop to help him start scooter he was trying to steal. Wal-Mart evacuated after Florida man found crawling through ceiling. Florida man drives lawnmower on highway. Florida man steals ambulance from hospital, drives it into mud. Impersonating FBI agent, Florida man harasses homeowner, leaves several live catfish on driveway. Florida man hides meth in belly button. Florida man caught on camera licking doorbells. Florida man tries to resist arrest by singing karaoke. Florida man wearing bonnet and flower dress steals baby formula. Florida man caught stealing from Kmart days after buying $8 million private island. On release from prison, Florida man burglarizes cars in prison parking lot. Florida man breaks into home, sucks on sleeping man’s toes. Florida man accused of groping 6 people at Disney Water Park, blames broken glasses. Florida man breaks into home, cooks breakfast, tells owner to go back to sleep. Florida man gets beat up by Easter Bunny. Florida man shot by police while eating man’s face. Florida man calls 911 multiple times demanding ice cream and liquor. Florida man threatens destruction with his army of turtles. Florida man arrested for assault with ketchup. Florida man bitten while trying to get alligator drunk. Florida man wearing bucket on head breaks into pet store, steals pigeons. Florida man steals $30,000 in rare coins, redeems at Coinstar for $30. Attempting to rob church donation box, Florida man’s arm gets stuck. Florida man attacks neighbor with machete in argument over squeegee. Florida man brings sword to gun fight. After winning cockroach eating contest, Florida man dies, asphyxiated by roach exoskeletal material lodged in bronchial tubes.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. You will laugh dust.

Salinger, Briefly

Everybody’s read The Catcher in the Rye. Which is unfortunate in a way. It’s one of those Books with a Big Idea on Society (TM), and though the Big Idea was maybe striking in the 1950s, since the ‘60s, well, we’re all pretty much one version or another of Holden Caulfield. But the real reason it’s unfortunate is that this first novel is not Salinger’s main work. Who would bother to reread the book unless he had to?

Rereading Salinger this past month convinces me that The Catcher in the Rye really needn’t be read at all. For those who haven’t read Salinger, I’d suggest just skipping it. The worthwhile Salinger is Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey—where, of course, the Glass family appears in all its messy glory.

Salinger’s main achievement came in chasing about his child prodigies, the Glass children, staging their cognitive sophistication against the background of their oddly normal New York childhoods. But his theme isn’t just gifted kids in a messy home. Elder brother Seymour’s religious quest, the way it impinges upon his brilliant younger siblings, adds the third key element of tenson. Through most of the work, Seymour himself is absent, dead in fact, but nonetheless drives the others. The final pages of Franny and Zooey wonderfully cement his stature as teacher.

These three elements (sibling child prodigies + rough and tumble New York + serious religious quest) make for a tough balancing act. And it’s this, I’d say, that makes Salinger’s last published work Seymour—An Introduction a failure for most readers. I.e., unlike the rest, it doesn’t balance. Narrator Buddy Glass, bubbling with juvenile energy in the verbal register, is simply not convincing given that at the time of narration he is in fact a pudgy 40-year-old academic. The takeaway: Salinger can give his children a virtually impossible sophistication—it definitely works—but he can’t make an adult, in this case Buddy, a convincing childlike voice.

Still Sallinger’s last volume is worth reading: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour have their high points: some of the character portraits in the former; Seymour’s literary life, his poetics, in the latter. But yes, long stretches of Seymour (the attempts to describe his appearance) shouldn’t have seen print.

Many Salinger fans regret that though he continued writing he didn’t continue publishing. I’m going to guess he knew what he was doing. Any artist knows when his work is just a rehashing of things he’s done better before, and he knows not to impose that rehashing on the world. Unless that artist is a rock band.

To conclude: Start with Nine Stories, then read Franny and Zooey. The rest mostly pales in comparison. Leave Holden Caulfield with his gripes on the shelf: Holden is a period piece and, for us, almost ancient history. His society is no longer ours, a fact we should regret. Why? The “fakes” Holden had to deal with were not, like our current fakes, dangerous to life, limb and basic liberty.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Poseidon Retires “Transitory”

Your sister, Laodamas, is a dividend aristocrat, but I’m afraid I must abstain. I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, and Ithaca is my goal.

We embarked from the dusty plains of Troy, the tailwinds sped us on. Perhaps it was that led us to fall for the Lemonade hype. We awoke hungover on the coast of Ismarus, wailing Cicones approaching with spears. Maybe Upstart?

Polyphemus had the foresight to shift into commodities, but he didn’t see it through. If you know what I mean.

Frothy valuations carried my fleet across the wine dark wastes. But we ignored PE, ended scuttled in a sheltered harbor, our vessels smashed by hungry Laestrygonians.

Many a shipmate was cooked on a spit, eaten before my eyes.

Zeus still didn’t taper.

We came to the floating island of Cramer, whose wind gave us hope for a time, then blew us back. To the floating island of Cramer.

Circe and her maids gave us cheer and the delta variant. Natural emergence or lab leak? Porcine transformations notwithstanding, we guessed the latter.

Hades, Inc. has a wide moat, even Ocean. Does a vigorous business with vigorless clients. The blind CFO leaked us some Inside Info.

Back in Aeaea. Should I stay? I don’t stay.

We skirted the sweet song of Crypto, and soon the Straits came into view.

Talk about a supply-chain crunch! A huge octopus to one side, a yelping six-headed crab to the other.

We made it through, only to be stranded with the IPOs of the Sun.

I told my men to lay no finger upon them, but their semi stocks dragging, they bit.

Finally I was alone, adrift. I washed ashore on Ogygia, half dead. Calypso of the braided tresses nursed me back to health, offered me eternal youth and a simple Index ETF like SPY. I declined.

For Penelope my wife and Ithaca—rugged, brave Ithaca!

Oh if only I’d tasted that lotus.

I’ve now a third in cash, Eumaeus, waiting for the crash. Then I go back in.

12/04/21

Check out Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Introduction to Viktor Shklovsky

Humans broke their knowledge into shards in order to learn to talk, to talk out loud.
      Or else, to construct a whole, a unity from the shards.
      There are places in the mountains where the rocks respond to a shout by a landslide.
      There, the stones teach you poetry, teach you how to rhyme. --Shklovsky (c. 1983)

Alexandra Berlina's Viktor Shklovsy: A Reader makes for a really sumptuous introduction to the harried Russian critic, now best known as the man who first theorized defamiliarization as key to literary art.

Berlina is a wonderful editor, and selects from the whole range of Shklovsky's texts, critical or novelistic, often including things not otherwise available in English. The portrait that emerges is of a keenly persistent survivor, daring and muted by turns. The sections of memoir included, especially from A Sentimental Journey, capture everyday life during the revolutionary period in Shklovsky's sharp, prismatic prose. Selected letters bring out the disjunctions and pained miscommunications of a writer slipping in and out of Russia, nowhere quite at home. The volume catches Shklovsky's memories of Jakobson, Babel, Mandelstam and others.

Shklovksy lived a long life of writing, and in later years came to qualify some of his early Formalist claims. No matter, both the early claims and his later second thoughts (some of which were doubtless intended to appease Soviet authorities) show him always working at the same basic problems: the important ones. Like many great critics, he kept returning to the same handful of great writers to test his thinking: Tolstoy, Cervantes, and Sterne preeminent.

Shlovsky's prose, his edgy, jarring paragraphs, are unique, somehow both precise and slapdash. A great Russian who comes out in clear outline in Ms. Berlina's solid collection.

E.M.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Crosswalk

Every time you cross a city street you feel like you’re disappearing. Or rather, you feel that way just as you're reaching the other side. There’s a reason for it. It’s because every time you cross a street you’re hit by a car and killed. In at least one universe, you’re killed. But in at least one other universe the car misses you, and so you go on—feeling you’ve half disappeared.

The feeling wears off. Usually within seconds. The new universe is already growing on you, which is what universes do. Until you come to another road, with its cars and buses, another hit and miss.

But forget about cars. That’s just a teaser. The feeling you’ve half disappeared, which really occurs nearly every waking moment--isn’t it evidence that you’re always disappearing, every moment, but that something of you hangs on by hook or crook in every possible universe?

But forget about universes. That too is just teaser. The stuff of B-movies. In fact this whole piece so far is a B-movie. The real hook and crook are elsewhere.

“I am the bread of life,” He said.

GPT-3: Who should be in charge?

Finally a computer game worth playing. Problem is, it’s still off-limits to the public. It’s called GPT-3, and Meghan O’Gieblyn writes it up in N+1.

GPT-3 is a language system model that has ingested most of the English-language Internet and through deep learning draws on the collected data to generate plausible human texts. In other words, it’s AI that can write strikingly humanish texts in any chosen genre. The results are (sorry, but the adjective is inevitable) surreal.

So far GPT-3 can mimic human writing at the level of sentence and paragraph. With prompts, it can mimic styles. This means, for instance, that GPT-3, fed an English translation of Proust, could rewrite it as a cowboy western. Which is maybe the first thing I’d get it to do.

It would be endless fun creating projects for this Beast. And probably soon I’d think of ways to get in trouble. 

O’Gieblyn’s article touches on a lot, though for me the psychoanalytical models weigh a bit too heavily in her big picture. Still, it’s hard to blame her. The psyche according to Freud and Co. really does offer an obvious referent for posing many of the questions this Beast’s presence provokes.

When the name Borges appeared in her piece, “The Library of Babel”, I thought “Yes, too bad he’s no longer with us.” He’d be the one to put in charge of managing GPT-3 prompts and R&D and publications going forward. And he’d resist the predictable psychoanalytic mire. 

In any case (and I know people are already thinking along these lines) the next task should be to get the Beast to recognize and then be able to mimic narrative categories: hero, plot, suspense, climax, etc. One might start with, say, the morphology of the folk tale as laid out by Propp and followers, and build from there. GPT-4, then -5.

It’s evident that just as deep fakes pose potential problems at the level of imagery, this kind of linguistic AI poses problems at the level of text. I’m thinking here more of the social and political realm than of issues like copyright. It is, after all, a Beast that is beginning to awake in these technologies. We have no reason, besides, to trust the Silicon Valley titans now forging them. 

Which is why, finally, they should just put poets and writers in charge. 

Read O’Gieblyn’s piece.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Taiwan Love-Hate

The novelty of being here is starting to wear off. I know that’s an absurd statement on the face of it, given that I’ve been here more than two decades. “Novelty”? That I could use the word in regards to Taiwan--I suppose it reveals something of my character: compared to most people, my enthusiasms move and develop in geologic time.

Still, slow as I am to change, my love for Taipei is wearing thin. The roads always blocked by blockheads double-parking; the constant racket; the hardware stores and pharmacies with aisles so tight you can’t turn around without knocking things from the shelf; the crowded sidewalks, now with women pushing their dogs around in oversized baby strollers--and finally, this cursed tonal language that still, after decades of my singing along, leads to misunderstandings.

The Taiwanese are wonderful, yes, impressive in every way; you can’t beat the Taiwanese. But the space they’re crammed into, that’s another thing.

I did move house a few months ago, out of one of the city’s most double-parked districts. The new place I moved into was “christened” almost immediately. Within a week or so of getting settled I was shaken awake one morning by an earthquake. Then a major typhoon hit, which caused the ceiling in one room to leak.

But these things don’t really bother me. What bothers me is the piling up of annoyances in public space. The feeling of being constantly harried by inevitable nuisances that are no one’s fault, given the population density.

Whenever I arrive in Taiwan after being abroad I’m always greeted by the unique scent of the air. I’ve noticed it every time, starting from my first visit. The air of Taiwan smells of a faint mixture of car exhaust and rotting fruit. Sounds awful, but there’s something attractive in it, something that always cheers me as I leave the airport. For decades this scent has carried a certain promise, and that promise has largely been fulfilled.

If I left Taiwan I know I’d miss it, probably within a month after leaving. Were I to move back to the US, at this stage, I’d be in a somewhat foreign country, a land now made up of two distinct tribes, with rank idiots everywhere, especially in the leftward tribe. I’d join with the mostly sane tribe (with its small corners of idiots too) and try to do my part to save our tottering Republic.

Taiwan's subtropical climate, which I’ve not really mentioned, only exacerbates every annoyance I’ve cited above. It is a climate suited for mold and fungus more than for humans.