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 On the trip I finished another of the New York Review books I picked up at Northshire a few weeks back: Natalia Ginzburg's Valentino and Sagittarius. Ginzburg is another writer who I had, inexplicably, never read, which is sort of the point of the NYRB series. Valentino and Sagittarius are two novellas, and I enjoyed them both immensely - so, yes, highly recommended. I'm definitely going to track down some of her other work. I read most of the book sitting at a café in Coimbra, happily watching the world go by and nursing a liter of sangria.

A Desaparecida

 I made it back Monday night from my latest trip to Portugal, my eighth. Every time it's harder to come, leaving behind a place I dearly love for a country that I'm growing to hate. It was a wonderful week, and, in addition to everything else, I got so much great writing done. It's amazing how much writing I do when I'm overseas in Portugal, but more on that later. Last Sunday, my last night in Lisbon, I was flipping around the TV looking for the Portugal vs. Spain championship match (I wish I had remembered it was being played that night, I would have watched it in a bar) and stumbled across John Ford's The Searchers, in English with Portuguese subtitles. It has long been, and remains, my favorite Western, and a film that I believe is one of the five greatest American films of all time. I snapped this picture of John Wayne and Ward Bond. As discussed below, The Searchers was turned into A Desaparecida, meaning something like "the missing" or "the disappeared." Janet and I were texting while I was gone (she stayed home to try and sort out the madness of her job, and, of course, regretted the decision) and she pointed out that if we had not gotten together I'd already be living in Portugal. One of these trips I'll probably go missing, referred to, from then on, simply as "o desaparecido."

I think it's interesting that in Portugal The Searchers was rendered as A Desaparecida. In doing so, the emphasis almost passes from the men searching (mainly John Wayne as Ethan Edwards and Jeffrey Hunter as Martin Pawley) to the missing girl (Natalie Wood as Debbie Edwards - played by Natalie's younger sister Lana as Debbie at the moment of the kidnapping). It made me wonder if that might have been closer to the original intent, but the film is based on a novel of the same name, The Searchers, by Alan Le May (born in Indianapolis, of all places) so I guess not. I might have to track down a copy of the original novel. 

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 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.