Posts Tagged ‘literature’
“Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers”*…
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
A story for our times: “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World.”
* Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
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As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
The trailer is here.
“You can’t judge a book by its cover”*…
… Fair enough. But you can sometimes get a pretty good feel from the first several pages. And there’s a website available to help…
Read an endless stream of free book samples. Reveal and save the ones you like.
Judge a book by its writing: “Uncovered Ink.”
* Common idiom
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As we browse, we might send engrossing birthday greetings to a writer whose first pages are highly likely to compel you, David Mitchell; he was born on this date in 1969. A novelist, screenwriter, and translator, he has authored nine novels, two of which (number9dream and Cloud Atlas) were short-listed for the Booker Prize; one of which (The Bone Clocks) was long-listed for the Booker and won the World Fantasy Award. His 2016 work, From Me Flows What You Call Time, was the second contribution to the Future Library project (to be published in 2114).
“The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation”*…
Matt Pearce revisits Neil Postman‘s 1992 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology…
In the 1960s, a German-American computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum coded an early version of today’s AI chatbots. Weizenbaum called his program ELIZA, after the “My Fair Lady” character Eliza Doolittle who takes speech lessons (and gets better).
How people reacted to Weizenbaum’s crude creation tells us almost everything we need to know about AI hype more than half a century later.
ELIZA could hold basic “conversations,” including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. [In the example above, ELIZA’s responses to one woman are shown in capital letters.]
Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about AI romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA’s human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.
Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He’d already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But “what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.”…
… I learned about Weizenbaum’s ELIZA experiment from Neil Postman’s 1992 book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” a work of technoconservatism that, like Weizenbaum’s writings, was imbued with foresight about our struggles with today’s vastly more powerful technologies.
Consider this passage from Postman’s “Technopoly”:
In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.
Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing “Amusing Ourselves to Death”) thought the U.S. was the world’s first “Technopoly,” a society marked by “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology,” where information itself has become a form of pollution.
To Postman, “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning or purpose.”
Neil Postman wrote “Technopoly” before the introduction of ChatGPT and Sora; TikTok and YouTube; Twitter and Facebook; Google Search and the Netscape browser. Postman wrote the book before Windows 95 existed. A philosophy of technology that mostly holds up through successive eras of technical revolution has already passed time’s first test, which is for the philosophy to outlive the philosopher. And Postman’s philosophy is ultimately conservative, motivated by the desire to preserve the traditions of humanism, social cohesion and a shareable sense of collective history.
Technoconservatism was old before it was new. Postman quotes Plato’s “Phaedrus,” where Thamus warns that whoever learns writing (one of our first dangerous technologies) “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And Postman, to his credit, is like — well, yeah! Writing really did that. A new technology is neither good nor bad, but ecological: it “does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”
In previous generations, societies dealt with information revolutions (which always produced information gluts) by creating institutions that prioritize “good” information and deprioritize the bad; think about schools with their organized curricula, courts with their standards of evidence, newspapers with their party lines or codes of journalistic ethics. But Postman notes that we got lucky after the Gutenberg revolution, when information technology’s development slowed down long enough for societies to catch up and be excellent:
From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture undertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century [with the invention of the telegraph], no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism. New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books. It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. I weight the list with America’s “Founding Fathers” because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.
Contrast the luxuriously slow social pace of the Gutenberg era with today’s information development timelines. Over the course of three decades, we’ve seen the rise and now-decline of the open web; the rise and now-decline of social media; the rise of short-form video and the rise of chatbots and synthetic information. All created enormous economic and philosophical disruptions whose fundamental impacts you can’t get a group of people in a room together to describe accurately. Among the disruptions: These increasingly efficient forms of sharing information keep encountering falling test scores; universities are trying to implement AI as their own students use it for cheating or boo the tech at their graduations; people are falling in love with their chatbots, which sometimes tell their users to kill themselves. A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this…
Read on for how we might — dare one suggest, should— act: “A society that wants to understand itself probably wouldn’t act like this,” from @mattdpearce.com.
Compare to/contrast with with Yuval Avnar‘s riff on Pascal’s musing on the implications of his invention, the “arithmetic machine” (an early, if not the first, modern mechanical calculator): “The Inventor of the Thinking Machine Didn’t Worry. Neither Should You.“
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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As we introspect, we might send pointed birthday greetings to Ambrose Bierce; he was born on this date in 1842. His satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary was named as one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”; and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.
A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi argues that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produced, and can take his place with such figures as Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire. His war stories influenced Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and others; and he was an influential and feared literary critic. In recent decades Bierce has gained even wider regard as a fabulist and for his poetry.
In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared over the border and was never seen again.
Apropos the piece featured above:
TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
– The Devil’s Dictionary
“A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up”*…
Russell Samora has been fooling around with figures of speech; with his colleagues at The Pudding, he’s fielded a fascinating analysis of of that comparative workhorse, the simile…
Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”
I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives… I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had…
Samora explains how similes are structured and how they are used (and with what relative frequency) in literature. He examines some of the most common– and several special cases (“The Ironic Ones”). And he explains his methodology and sources… all in the context of a lovely interactive data visualization.
It’s as cool as hell: “Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise,” from @pudding.cool.
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As we agree with Steve Martin that “a day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.
A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.
But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) that led to some referring to him (all too poignantly) as “crazy as a bed bug”: he hated bugs (especially flies). Kirwan paid his servants a bounty for each one they killed.
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind”*…
As Greg Woolf observed, “The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest examples of what is sometimes termed a “Mirror of Princes,” a book that illustrates the conduct of both bad and good rulers, and makes clear the difference between them.”
Nicolas Liney reviews a new verse translation of the 4,000-year-old text by Simon Armitage and considers its remarkable power, its extraordinary history, and its profound relevance to our moment…
There are two stories of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic written in the second millennium BCE. First, there’s the story of Gilgamesh himself, the semidivine king of Uruk. He is 11 cubits tall and four cubits from nipple to nipple (roughly 16 by six feet). He is hyperactive and priapic. He is not a good ruler. The gods create the wild Enkidu out of clay to keep him in check. The pair clash mightily, and then become inseparable. Restless and hungry for glory, they journey to the Forest of Cedar to defeat the monster Humbaba. Then they slay the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar, the god of sex and war whose advances Gilgamesh rejects. The gods deem that Enkidu must die, and so he does, slowly and unheroically. Gilgamesh watches over Enkidu’s body until a maggot falls from his nostril, a fantastically intense image that drives home death’s finality.
At this point, the register of the poem shifts, and Gilgamesh’s triumphs are replaced by sorrow and an overwhelming awareness of his own mortality. Alone and anguished, he journeys to the underworld to visit Uta-napishti, the immortalized survivor of a cataclysmic flood, intent on unlocking the secret to eternal life. Inevitably, he is disappointed and returns to Uruk. Gilgamesh is an epic about power, about self-knowledge, about passionate companionship and the unquenchable pain of its loss. Fundamentally, it is an epic about death. Rilke labeled it “das Epos der Todesfurcht”—the epic of the fear of death—and this is what gave it its vital appeal: “It concerns me,” he confessed. “Thousands of years later death is no less bewildering to humankind,” the poet Simon Armitage says in the introduction to his new translation of the epic; “there is no more relatable subject.”
The second story of Gilgamesh is about the text itself, one of the world’s oldest surviving long-form poems. Like Homeric epic, its roots are most likely oral, and questions of authorship are futile. The earliest version was a Sumerian cycle of five poems from around 2100 BCE, probably part of a larger group of stories about the heroic dynasty of Uruk. Sumerian eventually died out, and the five episodes were replaced by one unified version in Akkadian. This was recorded in cuneiform script, often carved in clay tablets, and spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Levant. Sometime between 1300 and 1000 CE, a man called Sin-leqi-unninni created a heavily revised edition organized into 11 “tablets”—referred to now as the Standard Version—which was copied widely and included in the great library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king, built in Nineveh in the seventh century.
And then … silence. By the new millennium, Akkadian was a defunct language, and Uruk and Nineveh were in ruins. As far as we know, Gilgamesh was not translated into other writing systems, so when cuneiform fell out of use, the epic seemed to go with it. For centuries it slept, until the Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in 1850, and what documents could be recovered were transported to the British Museum. Cuneiform was eventually deciphered, and in 1872, George Smith, an assistant curator working on the archive, came across a fragment of the epic describing a great flood—similar to the one in the Book of Genesis,but in a work significantly older than the Bible. This was too much for Smith, who began stripping his clothes off in excitement: “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.”
Critics like to say that Gilgamesh is both incredibly old and refreshingly young. Its sheer age staggers—for comparison, just try to imagine a current novel being rediscovered in the year 5120 CE. As a quasi-historical figure, Gilgamesh was considered by Babylonians to be even older: the Sumerian King List,a chronographic record,hyperbolically places his reign in 7800 BCE. Within the world of the epic itself, time reaches back further still: when Gilgamesh meets Uta-napishti, the Noah-type figure who survived the flood long before Gilgamesh, even he can speak of an “ancient city,” Shuruppak, on the banks of the Euphrates. The epic constantly forces us into these dizzying loops of deep time, forces us both to drastically exceed the limits of our brief lifespan and to be persistently reminded of them.
But Gilgamesh’s comparatively recent reentry into the modern imagination makes it feel fresh, not overburdened by centuries of interpretation and adaptation, like Homer or Virgil, and firmly outside Western literary traditions. There is no first looking into Chapman’s Gilgamesh.This can be dangerous for translators and adapters: there’s an urge to treat the epic like a blank canvas, to make it say something relevant to contemporary concerns, which can strip it of its strangeness and also cut it loose from its Iraqi heritage. But the subject matter of Gilgamesh also seems undeniably contemporary: how could a story about ecological destruction, poor leaders, and misogynist alphas not concern us here and now?…
Eminently worth reading in full. A classic which has survived, against all odds, and what it offers us today: “The Epic of the Fear of Death” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* William Butler Yeats
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As we reach back, we might recall that it was on this date in 2004 that the discovery of what was (and is) believed to be the world’s oldest seat of learning (dating from 295 BCE), the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
See also: “Oldest University Unearthed in Egypt“
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