Remember what I said about Facebook and heaven? Remember how you rent your garments? Marshall McLuhan said the same thing about the telephone in 1965.
I’ve been surf-boarding a McLuhan wave of late and mostly sucking up salt water, but having a good time. Got tubular here:
Stoked, dude.
Ecce Quam Bonum, by Daniel Mitsui
(from Psalm 133)
The gifted and industrious artist Daniel Mitsui, a great favorite here at Korrektiv, has released the text (and illustrations) of a lecture he delivered earlier this month. The subject: Catholic religious art, and Mitsui’s approach to it as student and draftsman. This presentation is thought-provoking, edifying, and a pleasure to read. Here’s a taste, from near the conclusion:
You have undoubtedly seen [medieval 'drolleries'] in the margins of illuminated manuscripts: frolicking monkeys, marauding woodwoses, flirting peasants, anthropomorphized pigs playing bagpipes, funny monsters composed of various parts of men, birds, beasts and reptiles[...]. This grotesque, romantic, comical element is not limited to manuscript margins; it is found in almost every medium of medieval sacred art. [...]
This same element can be encountered in the worship of the medieval Church: a Festival of the Donkey honored the beast that bore the Blessed Virgin on the Flight into Egypt; during the Mass, certain responses were brayed rather than chanted. [...] Medieval sculptors and engineers introduced automation and puppetry into the church [...]. [An] example is the Boxley Rood of Grace, a crucifix whose Christ moved his arms and eyes and mouth by means of wires operated by a hidden puppeteer. For all that the Middle Ages can truly be described as a time of liturgical solemnity, monastic discipline, personal piety, scholastic disputation, crusading zeal and fleshly mortification, the faithful of those ages never lost their sense of humor or their spirit of romance.
I tend to keep the company of other traditional Catholics, and their reactions when hearing about these practices diverge; some think they are wonderful. Others are horrified, and see in them only a precedent for current liturgical abuse and artistic gimmickry. To my mind, they are very different.
To learn why Mitsui thinks they are different — and to help yourself to much more food for thought – click here for the lecture.
[Lecture link via Mr Mitsui's April 2013 newsletter, which is packed with art, including a commission for the American College of Surgeons; a preview of a forthcoming set of Stations of the Cross; and the Ecce Quam Bonum that illustrates this post.]
[For Korrektiv's previous coverage of medieval drolleries, click here.]
Teaching IBM’s Watson the meaning of ‘OMG’
The scientific test to gauge if a computer can “think” is surprisingly simple: Can it engage in small talk? The so-called Turing test says a computer capable of carrying on a natural conversation without giving itself away can be considered intelligent. So far, no machine has made the cut.
Eric Brown, a research scientist with IBM (IBM), is charged with changing that. The 45-year-old is the brains behindWatson, the supercomputer that pummeled human opponents on Jeopardy! in 2011. The biggest difficulty for Brown, as tutor to a machine, hasn’t been making Watson know more but making it understand subtlety, especially slang.
It seems like an even better version of the Turing Test would be based on whether the computer could make the humans LOL. I did a bit of light Googling to see if there had been a test conducted along those lines and found this article from 2008, in which one computer told the following joke:
Roberts said Elbot worked by catching some of the judges off-guard with provocative answers or impishly hinting that it was, in fact, a machine.
“Hi. How’s it going?” one judge began.
“I feel terrible today,” Elbot replied. “This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it.”
Roberts also said Elbot tried to dominate the conversation to keep it from wandering into areas it was not properly programmed to handle.
Sounds to me like Elbot has better social skills than I do. (zing!)
Then I hopped over to Cleverbot to see if it could recognize random allusions to high-minded fare, and incorporate them into jokey banter. Transcript:
User: Schenectady. (I always like to lead with a word that is inherently funny.)
Cleverbot: Ist das dein name? (Is Cleverbot being snarky or does it think I’m speaking German?)
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: Hi, Kara. Then you must me a girl. Nice to meet you. I’m a girl too.
User: What? That makes no sense.
Cleverbot: But we’re married. (Admittedly, this is not a terrible response to the comment ‘That makes no sense.’ Also: is Cleverbot making a reference to current events?)
Then I tried again.
Cleverbot: Who is going to speak first?
User: I speak for the trees.
Cleverbot: Yes but out of context. (Good comeback, Cleverbot!)
User: Have you not read the Lorax?
Cleverbot: No.
User: Then you wouldn’t recognize my allusion, which is too bad. I hope this makes for a good blog post. We need more traffic. Then again, there’s always money in the banana stand. (The ultimate test: has Cleverbot memorized transcripts from Arrested Development?)
Cleverbot: That would be you.
User: BURN! Well played, Cleverbot.
Cleverbot: Too true, too true.
I
Did you hear the one about the orange
Under the electron microscope, and how
The grand canyon of it all they found
In the black and white they took would give
The lie to think the gods of nature wrought
Cartesian topologies for men, our palms
To sooth, our minds to smooth, and tincture truth
With text of juicy parchment? Moist yet dry
It slices deep horizons into wedges.
II
(I digress.)
It’s mighty odd
To be bruised and bothered by blisters;
Though I have lately found
July’s clouds – July’s birds
And July’s raving wind. They sing July’s graves, wild with dew.
Though I called, though I called,
Though I most seriously called
They were the facts I lost, ever-divergent,
Told in angles and slants;
Yet, bruised and bothered by blisters,
They say to me no true word that’s not.
III
They say that atoms are God’s rosary beads –
They spin off through fingered voids like blebs of fire,
Each revolution increasing by one
The total sum that sloughs from stars and sand,
What Abraham was pained to count. And yet
His foot would make its mark and guide his eyes
To smart additions of eternity,
The promised land extracted ex nihilo.
Unpeel that mystery, you’ll find it rhymes with prayer.
A little existentialism from the New Yorker. My favorite:
Monday, 27 July, 1959: 4:10 A.M.
Lunch with Merleau-Ponty this afternoon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I was disturbed to hear that he has started a photoblog, and skeptical when he told me that although all its images are identical—a lonely kitten staring bleakly into space as rain falls pitilessly from an empty sky—he averages sixteen thousand page views per day. When I asked to see his referrer logs, he muttered evasively about having an appointment with an S.E.O. specialist and scurried away.So this is hell.
Basically me looking at Potter, back when I used to post at the Quotidian. Back when, you know, I used to post at all.
Have done some nosing around and happened upon this:
This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum.
“Because,” I said, “everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.”
“Jesus,” S. said. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2012/10/le-blog-de-jean-paul-sartre.html#ixzz29mrxS9iA
Le monde est plein de fous… -Le Petit
What is history but a fable written by fools?
Or the mirror’s vaunting – as if necessity could be
Reclaimed by parting hairs split to their roots
The way the Greeks had before the tumbled gates
Of Thermopylae would yield to history –
(The price of fame? The cost of being there…
The price of anonymity? Ah! But who would care?)
And Sparta, greasing up, combed and handsomely oiled
For one more shouting jag with spear and shining shield,
Knew that any final preening primps and glances
Wouldn’t hurt nor help survive their chances.
Or the mirror’s haunting – as if mortality can
Capture alive even by a winking sidelong
Glimpse at the backside of one’s head (Wouldn’t Armstrong
Forget to live or breathe or ride a bike or dance?
Or remember weightlessness, pulling on his pants?
Or sigh in frequent out-of-spacesuit-experiences
As evening stilled the wind, saddened the autumn air?
He turns the porch light down low: full moonrise out, out there –
A bald spot on the dark side of nostalgia says,
“Unreachable now – or ever again.”).
Or the mirror’s taunting – as if passivity mixed
In great men and small souls coincidentally
Imparted smarting clarity, an explanation
Of what occurred on St. Helena, colonized
After Waterloo and Wellington: champagne
Luncheons surrendering secrets of each campaign
With rue as fragrantly bitter as the weed it baptized –
(Ah, un malheur ne vient jamais seul!)
What Josephine saw in her modest vanity
As she sat and primped in history’s boudoir –
The abattoir of sanity! The playground of the fool!
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
This is a demo store for testing purposes — no orders shall be fulfilled.
The boys of…winter?
There seems to be something twitching in the cultural scalp that’s got so many folks itching about the fate of boyhood.
There’s this little gem from the fellow over at Wondermark which is just a hoot.
But it got me thinking about Hanna Rosin’s recent report in the Atlantic (WARNING: Much stripping of mystery and manners to the crude and obscene throughout):
One of the women had already seen the [porn] photo five times before her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night that they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend asked if the two of them were getting married, he gave the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see it, so she wouldn’t get any ideas about a forthcoming ring. She remained unfazed. She was used to his “juvenile thing,” she told me.
Which in turn reminded me of Jeff Minick’s piece in Chronicles (WARNING: much discussion of the restoration of mystery and manners throughout):
We begin by teaching boys from an early age the romance and adventure of life. How did the adolescent who played a high-minded knight-errant evolve into a sullen, nihilistic teenager? How did that same adolescent become the 30-year-old who wears his baseball cap backward, plays more video games than the teenager, and lives with his parents? Boys who come of age watching sex and violence in movies, or the cynicism offered by most television comedies, who listen to loveless music drenched in ugliness and despair, who possess no sense of responsibility or consequence, will likely join Peter Pan’s tribe of Lost Boys. To buck this trend, we must keep a vigilant watch on the culture. To grow men, we must teach our boys heroism, taking our models from literature, movies, and living examples.
Which in turn recalled that this book will be coming out sometime soon:
From his celebrated appearance, hatchet in hand, in Parson Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, the all-American boy was an iconic figure in American literature for well over a century. Sometimes he was a “good boy,” whose dutiful behavior was intended as a model for real boys to emulate. Other times, he was a “bad boy,” whose mischievous escapades could be excused either as youthful exuberance that foreshadowed adult industriousness or as deserved attacks on undemocratic pomp and pretension. But whether good or bad, the all-American boy was a product of the historical moment in which he made his appearance in print, and to trace his evolution over time is to take a fresh view of America’s cultural history, which is precisely what Larzer Ziff accomplishes in All-American Boy.