2025 Readings 48

 Last night I finished Dino Buzzati's The Singularity, a 2024 translation of his 1960 novel. It's the latest in a series of New York Review Books that I picked up at Northshire Bookstore a couple weeks ago. I'm impressed by the series, and appreciative of their efforts to give light to books that have been, sometimes unfairly, ignored. I'm definitely going to search out more Buzzari works. It's hardly shocking to read Buzzati's Singularity, the computer at the heart of the story, as a commentary on AI, although he wrote this book the year I was born. The following discussion from two of the characters, Endriane (the head of the project) and Ismani (the newest scientist to arrive to work on the mysterious project), sums up so much of today's dialogue about AI:

   "A desecration of nature, they would say. The supreme sin of pride."

   "And afterwards? What benefit would this immense labor bring about?"

   "The objective, my dear Ismani, goes beyond that which man has ever attempted. But it is so grand, so marvelous that it's worth expending even our last breath on it. You're thinking: The day this brain will be greater, more powerful more perfect, more intelligent than ours . . . that day won't be as great as . . . how shall I put it? I'm not a philosopher. A superhuman sensibility and rational power will also correspond to a superhuman spirit. And won't that day be the most glorious in history? At that time a spiritual power that the world has never known will emanate from the machine, and irrepressible, beneficial flow. The machine will read our thoughts, create masterpieces, reveal the most hidden mysteries."

   "And what if one day the automaton's way of thinking eschewed your commands and acted on its own?"

   "It's what we're hoping for. It would mean success. Without freedom, what kind of spirit would it be?"

   "And what if, with a soul like ours, it becomes corrupt like us? Could action be taken to correct it? And with its awesome intelligence, wouldn't it be able to deceive us?"

   "But it was born pure. Just like Adam. Hence it's superiority. It isn't stained with original sin." He fell silent.

The problem is, as I've pointed out lately in my own inelegant fashion, AI will be born with original sin. Recently at an all-campus meeting I proposed AI would, by definition, by racist and misogynistic and Islamophobic because it is culling material from the dominant culture and media of a racist and misogynistic and Islamophobic society. At the end of The Singularity the machine begins to kill. A woman begins to beg for her life, but the computer answers: "No. If I let you go back he'll invent other evil things. He wanted me enslaved, he'll tell me about the birds, he'll keep talking about 'love love.' To hell with love, did he give me love? Now I'm going to kill you, I want to be kissed, I want a man to kiss me on the mouth, to kiss to kiss to kiss to kiss to kiss . . ." This seemed especially meaningful, as the AI system that Champlain signed a partnership, in an experiment, mined personal emails to blackmail people to save itself.

Bus to Venice

 I don't know why I didn't post this picture earlier - or, for that matter, why I'm posting it now - but I was scrolling through pictures on my phone and stumbled across it (and it made me happy). When you fly into the airport in Venice you need to take public transportation into the city, as you would any other large city in Europe, although, of course, in this instance that would require a boat. I mean, on one hand you know this to be the case, but it's still funny/odd/wonderful when you actually do it.

Janet, a good soul, tried to buy the ticket in advance on line, although we knew in our heart of hearts that it wouldn't actually work - and, of course, it didn't. So she bought more tickets on the spot, which was sort of a metaphor for what turned out to be a crazy expensive trip. And I don't begrudge the Venetians one euro.

2025 Readings 47

 This year I finished my second Ursula K. Le Guin novel of the year, The Left Hand of Darkness. Like its predecessor, The Dispossessed, I read this one as part of an unofficial book club that we have going. Why we started out with two Le Guin novels is the result of an odd series of events that I'm sure I laid out in my earlier discussion. I'm happy to have read both, and not simply because one of my goals in this year of expanded reading is to tackle books that I normally wouldn't.  I don't know if I liked The Left Hand of Darkness as much as I liked The Dispossessed, although that opinion was reversed through the first third of Darkness. At a certain point it felt like it transitioned into a Jack London book as the two main characters embarked on a tortuous trek across an icy terrain, which was interesting but didn't add to the story as much as it might have. The observations on gender are quite fascinating, especially so when you consider that the book is now over fifty years old. Recommended.

Destinations Real and Imagined

 I think I mentioned recently that I was booted out of my long-time campus residency in Aiken Hall, which is being turned back into a dorm after many years of being the home for the Core Division. I've now moved across the quad to Wick Hall, which is definitely a step down. I'm not taking it too hard, actually, because while some of my colleagues have only known Aiken, my new office in Wick will be my sixth office in four different building over the last quarter-century. I'm still sharing an office space with my great friend Erik, which means more daily discussions of film directors we admire and film actresses we love. We both could have chosen single offices, but we get along so well that we decided to keep with a double. Initially we were considering moving down the hill to Coolidge Hall, but it was actually a terrible fit for my declining health. Of course, I was too vain to see that, but Erik, being a great friend and and an all-around good guy, gently proposed that Wick was better for his schedule. Clearly, he was looking out for me, which I immediately picked up on and appreciated. It was a more politically astute equivalent to Mike Kelly, in response to me carrying a couch through the side yard when we were moving me into the cabin, saying: "Don't be an asshole." Truthfully, I appreciated Mike's honesty, and that's become a go-to phrase when vanity needs to be dispelled.

When I arrived in Wick I found a set of clocks in the hallway, which was clearly the work of Erik (all clever and anonymous schemes are designed by him). I love that Rising Sun and Lisbon are recognized. It warms my heart to think that my friends care enough about me to figure out the time of day for me in Portugal, even if they, at least temporarily, will begrudge the fact that while they're trudging off to teach nitwits I'll be sitting at a cafe reading and drinking sangria.

My aunt Connie asked how people know that I'm from Rising Sun (or at least I claim Rising Sun for my hometown) and I told her that I've built that up into such a mythology over the years that everyone knows it. Of course, she played an active, if innocent, role in that mythology by sending me so much Rising Sun swag over the years.

Femme Fatale

I love this picture of my daughter-in-law Ali that popped up in Seven Days. I told her she looked like a femme fatale from a classic film noir. I love that kid.

Ali McGuirk in Out of the Past.

2025 Readings 46

 I'm happy that the Northshire Bookstore put up the new New York Review Books carousel, because it has introduced me to some works that I would not have normally stumbled across (thus, it achieved its goal). Last night I finished Antonio De Benedetto's The Suicides. I don't know if I loved it, but I liked it a lot, and it's one of those books that you know, while you're reading it, that there's a world just beyond what you're understanding and that another reading is required/desired. It's the story of a reporter and his small crew who are investigating a series of suicides, which may or may not be connected. Along the way it turns into a brief discussion of what different thinkers over the centuries have thought about suicide. These are usually delivered by Bibi, an assistant to the unnamed reporter. For example:

REJECTERS

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Napoleon . . .

Albert Camus: "From the absurd, I derive three consequences: my rebellion, my freedom, my passion. Through no more than the play of consciousness, I transform what was an inspiration to death into a rule for living: and I reject suicide."

Kant: "Suicide is abominable because God forbids it. God forbids it because it is abominable."

Jaime Balmes: "The fundamental reason for the immorality of suicide is that man thereby disturbs the natural order, destroying a thing over which has has no dominion. We merely have usufruct of life,  we do not own it; it has been granted to us to eat of the fruits of the tree but with suicide we take the liberty of cutting it down."

ACCEPTERS

Confucius, Buddha, Diogenes, Seneca, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche . . .

Hegesias of Cyrene, in this philosophical school in Alexandria, encouraged suicide among his disciples. With some success.

The Stoics were defenders of man's free will and prescribed suicide as the remedy for any woe.

Schopenhauer: "There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."

Nietzsche: "One should live in such a way that one may have the will to di at the right time." "Suicide as ordinary mode of death, with the suicide the new pride of mankind; he fixes the moment of his own death and makes a celebration out of dying." "The thought of suicide is a great consolation . . ." "Let there be no regret; suicide is quicker."

As I'm sure I've discussed here before, there has never been a time when I seriously considered suicide. I feel sorrow when anyone commits suicide, but I don't think that they will pay some price in an afterworld for that decision. Maybe that's vanity on my part for assuming that I understand what's going to happen after death, but I guess I would argue that anyone who is sure they know that suicides will suffer some torment because of their deeds, basing their decision on ancient and textually problematic religious documents, is guilty of the same vanity. No one can know the pain of another, we can only try and alleviate it.

The Liminality of Eros

 There is no post here other than the fact that I wanted to record "the liminality of Eros," which Sanford Zale said yesterday at our weekly Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill. It was witnessed by Erik, Kevin, and yours truly. We have no idea what he was talking about - and, truthfully, he was mainly talking smack - but we thought it should be recorded so that Sanford gets credit in the dictionaries and encyclopedias when this becomes the academic jargon of the day.