It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely

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EVERY time you turn around these days, another golden age is being celebrated. Nostalgia gilds the past, bad hairdos and all, and the present, to which we are wedded for better or worse, never quite seems equal to the glorious times we keep compulsively half-remembering.

Some sentimental journeys, however, are justified — even vital, if we’re ever to benefit from traditions inarguably richer than our current efforts. Such is the case with the era celebrated in “The House That George Built,” Wilfrid Sheed’s bouncily written, impressionistic history of American songwriters from the first half of the 20th century. These are the composers, lyricists and composer-lyricists who found their sound in the Jazz Age and spread it from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to Hollywood and the Hit Parade.

more from the LA Times here.

wonderful blood

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When Longinus, the blind soldier who pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, accidentally touched his eyes with Christ’s blood, he began to see (or so the medieval legend goes). Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood in turn makes us see Christ’s blood, and see it everywhere in late-medieval Christianity: it streams from his wound on the Cross; it gushes into the waiting mouth of believers meditating on the Eucharist; it cakes on his forehead in the Passion; it soaks the earth of Golgotha; it miraculously appears when Eucharistic hosts are stolen or abused; it imprints the heart of devoted Christians; it saves, washes and nourishes all; in short, it emerges as the central object of Northern European spirituality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For three decades now, Bynum has been pivotal in drawing the attention even of non-specialists to some of the overlooked, sophisticated conceptions that late-medieval piety developed of personal identity, death, redemption, gender, asceticism and the body. She now zooms in on and brilliantly illuminates the equally complex and equally crucial issue of blood, which – as first noted by Kathleen Biddick – had been conspicuous in her medieval material and sources, but absent in her analyses.

more from the TLS here.

Asia, a Decade After the Crisis

Asia, 10 years after the great currency crisis, in the Economist:

Ten years ago, on July 2nd 1997, Thailand’s central bank floated the baht after failing to protect the currency from speculative attack. The move triggered a financial and economic collapse that quickly spread to other economies in the region, causing GDP growth rates to contract precipitously, bankrupting companies that had overexposed themselves to foreign-currency risk, and ultimately necessitating costly and politically humiliating IMF-led bailouts in the worst-affected countries. Thus began the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Its effects, and governments’ subsequent responses to it, have defined much of the region’s economic policies and direction in the past decade. What has been learnt, and how has the region changed in the intervening period?

The financial crisis can be described as having been a “perfect storm”: a confluence of various conditions that not only created financial and economic turbulence but also greatly magnified its impact. Among the key conditions were the presence of fixed or semi-fixed exchange rates in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea; large current-account deficits that created downward pressure on those countries’ currencies, encouraging speculative attacks; and high domestic interest rates that had encouraged companies to borrow heavily offshore (at lower interest rates) in order to fund aggressive and poorly supervised investment. Weak oversight of domestic lending and, in some cases, rising public debt also contributed to the crisis and made its effects worse once the problems had begun.

Obama and Outsourcing

In Counterpunch, Vijay Prashad on Obama and outsourcing:

Barack Obama promised to run a different campaign for the United States’ presidency. Defiantly inclusive, he wanted to avoid “negative” campaigning and to draw together this divided country around his positive image. Thrown into the national limelight after his remarkable speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama became the standard-bearer for a new politics. “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism,” he asked, “or do we participate in a politics of hope?” Then, he let loose with a flourish, “I’m not talking about blind optimism here – the almost wilful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores… . Hope – hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” In keeping with his first name, Barack Obama was a breath of life in a political landscape torn between cynicism and ruthlessness.

The Politics of Thomas Bayes and of Bayesianism

Andrew Gelman (and Aleks Jakulin) from Statistica Sinica, posted over at his blog:

As a lifetime member of the International Chinese Statistical Association, I am pleased to introduce a volume of Bayesian articles. I remember that in graduate school, Xiao-Li Meng, now editor of this journal, told me they didn’t teach Bayesian statistics in China because the idea of a prior distribution was contrary to Mao’s quotation, “truth comes out of empirical/practical evidence.” I have no idea how Thomas Bayes would feel about this, but Pierre-Simon Laplace, who is often regarded as the first applied Bayesian, was active in politics during and after the French Revolution.

In the twentieth-century Anglo-American statistical tradition, Bayesianism has certainly been seen as radical. As statisticians, we are generally trained to respect conservatism, which can sometimes be defined mathematically (for example, nominal 95% intervals that contain the true value more than 95% of the time) and sometimes with reference to tradition (for example, deferring to least-squares or maximum-likelihood estimates). Statisticians are typically worried about messing with data, which perhaps is one reason that the Current Index to Statistics lists 131 articles with “conservative” in the title or keywords and only 46 with the words “liberal” or “radical.”

Like many political terms, the meaning of conservatism depends on its comparison point.

Filtering Science from the Scientist

A strange but understanable history of some disregarded research, in The Guardian:

In 1943 two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, published their own case-control study in the journal Zeitschuft für Krebsforschung, demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer almost a decade before any researchers elsewhere. It wasn’t mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, and if you check in the Science Citation Index, the paper was referred to only four times in the 1960s, once in the 1970s, and then not again until 1988. In fact, it was forgotten.

It’s not hard to understand why: Nazi scientific and medical research was so bound up in the horrors of cold-blooded mass murder, and the strange puritanical ideologies of nazism, that it was almost universally disregarded, and with good reason. Doctors had been active participants in the Nazi project, and joined Hitler’s National Socialist party in greater numbers than any other profession (45% were party members, compared with 20% of teachers).

On American Patriotism

On this 4th, the unknown history of American patriotism, in The Nation:

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine hired Bellamy–whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward–to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line “One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all” to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

A Look ‘Inside Hamas’

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Book On April 6, 1994, Yehia Ayyash, one of the more elusive members of the Islamic Resistance Movement known by its Arab acronym Hamas, left an indelible mark on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The man whom former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called “the Engineer” dispatched a Palestinian named Raed Zakarneh on what would be a historic mission. When Mr. Zakarneh blew his car up, killing himself and eight Israelis at a bus stop in the Israeli city of Afula, he became Hamas’s first suicide bomber. The attack was retribution for a massacre perpetrated by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who threw a hand grenade into a crowded mosque, killing 29 Palestinians. And so Hamas literally exploded onto the world stage. Today, Israel and the US consider it a terrorist organization with which they refuse to negotiate. Yet neither they — nor the rest of the world — can afford to ignore Hamas, particularly since the group’s most recent historic feat: seizing control of the Gaza Strip and routing out Fatah, the main faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. So how did this marginal group, inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, grow from its shadowy beginnings in the densely populated slums of the Gaza Strip to first win a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian election and now to hold complete control over all of Gaza?

Zaki Chehab’s new book, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement, goes a long way toward answering such questions. Chehab’s book not only explains the methodical rise of Hamas, but also offers insights into the group’s psyche that go beyond the stereotypes perpetuated by so much of today’s news coverage.

More here.

Fiat says Cinquecento will become the iPod of cars

From Scientific American:

Car It was the small car you could park in the narrowest space on the piazza, as Italian as Prosciutto and espresso. On its 50th birthday the Cinquecento is back, and Fiat says it will become the iPod of cars. Fiat is launching a new version of the three-door Cinquecento — which means “500” in Italian — at a ceremony in its hometown of Turin on Wednesday, with the car making its comeback after going out of production in the 1970s.

Fiat’s chief executive says he wants to emulate Apple by making its cars as stylish as the U.S. company’s computers and electronic gadgets, including the mass-selling iPod portable music player.

More here.

A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré

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If 1957 marked the end of Durrell’s lifelong struggle to make ends meet— publication of the Quartet permitted him to move into a house he bought with his third wife in the French village of Sommières, where he lived until his death in 1990— something else ended in that season. The eight novels he wrote after the Quartet, including an inchoate set of novels he dubbed the Avignon Quintet, were tepidly received, disappointing his hopes—and not just his—that lightning would strike a second time. Perhaps his hunger was gone, or the creative well was dry, leaving only self-caricature. It’s also possible his public lost patience. The Alexandria Quartet is a tour de force, but a little Durrell goes a long way.

Memory and distance throw light on what The Alexandria Quartet was a half century ago—a dying burst of romance in the heyday of realism, an appeal to credulity on the eve of so much skepticism, a bold experiment in form that in only a few years literary experimentalism would render almost pallid. But the books do bear rereading for the same reasons, as a sweet remembrance of things from not so long ago. “Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honored by an awakened spirit,” Durrell once aphorized. By his lights and mine, The Alexandria Quartet remains a work of art.

more from The American Scholar here.

heat and thirst by day, cold and hunger by night . . . exhausting vigils, extreme marches, and fighting at every step

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Suddenly you are looking in his eyes. Officially, they’re brown, but for you they’ll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don’t. Rome or Death. In a moment, your destiny shifts. Incredibly, you have volunteered. You are given a red shirt, an obsolete rifle, a bayonet. You are taught to sing a hymn full of antique rhetoric recalling a magnificent past, foreseeing a triumphant future. You learn to march at night in any weather and over the most rugged terrain, to sleep on the bare ground, to forgo regular meals, to charge under fire at disciplined men in uniform. You learn to kill with your bayonet. You see your friends killed. You grow familiar with the shrieks of the wounded, the stench of corpses. If you turn tail in battle, you will be shot. Those are his orders. If you loot, you will be shot. You write enthusiastic letters home. You have discovered patriotism and comradeship. You have been welcomed by cheering crowds, kissed by admiring young women. Italy will be restored to greatness. From Sicily to the Alps, your country will be free. Then, with no warning, it’s over. A politician has not kept faith. An armistice has been signed. Your leader is furious. You hardly understand. Rome is still a dream. Your group disbanded, you receive nothing: no money, no respect, no help in finding work. But, years later, when he calls again, you go. You will follow him to your death.

more from The New Yorker here.

obsessed with the old bad Germany

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There are “two sorts of truth,” Niels Bohr wrote, “trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.”(1) Are Neo Rauch’s pictures of Germany trivially or profoundly true? Is Rauch a true dialectician, “living with live opposites,” or is he indulging in nihilistic absurdity? Does he picture the German Geist of Yesterday or the German Geist of Today? Does he represent or misrepresent Germany? Rauch’s works are allegories of German history, but is their ironical pessimism its whole story? These questions haunt Neo Rauch’s art, enriching its significance.

Let’s get more specific: Is Verrat (2003) merely absurd or is it ingeniously dialectical? The contradiction between the violent foreground figures and the seemingly peaceful background buildings — between the expressive action of the former and the inexpressive passivity of the latter — is clearly absurd. But does each also convey a profound truth about Germany? Do they convey the profound split in the German mentality? They are conflicting parts of the same picture, but the “good” upper part does not seem to know what is occurring in the “bad” lower part. The people in the buildings are silently sleeping, undisturbed by the shooting going on in the No Man’s Land below — or else afraid to do anything about it. The opposites turn away from each other, refuse to respond to each other, and this turning away, this indifference of disavowal, is the unwholesome whole truth. Each half not fully conscious of the other half is the truth of their opposition.

more from Kuspit on Neo Rauch here.

To use a phrase I learned the day I saw Transformers, “Oh, shit!”

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Surely this is not how Orson Welles imagined it would end. According to the chronology appended to Peter Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles, on Oct. 5, 1985, Welles spent the day on the set of Transformers: The Movie, giving voice to Unicron, a villainous, planet-eating planet. On Oct. 10, he was dead. The man’s first feature film had been Citizen Kane; his last was an animated movie based on a line of toy robots.

Of course, by 1985 Welles was a long way from Rosebud. His most visible role at that point was as a pitchman for Paul Masson wine, a responsibility he does not seem to have always discharged ably. He’d also recently cut the voiceover for the Revenge of the Nerds trailer. But it would be a mistake to lump Transformers in with Welles’ other regrettable late-career moves. Though a modest film compared with Michael Bay’s blockbuster out today, the original Transformers is the better film. And for a certain subset of Americans—boys who were 9 in 1986—it was every bit as shocking as War of the Worlds had been for Grandma and Grandpa.

more from Slate here.

a.e. housman: pejorist hedonist

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When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of Latin at University College London. In his application for the job he very properly drew attention to his Oxford failure. Not, you might think, a glowing CV, especially as he couldn’t claim any teaching experience. Yet these manifest disadvantages failed to deter the electors to the chair. They had their own criteria of eminence and saw that Housman was already one of the few. He would, before very long, be called the greatest Latinist of his age, to be named in the same breath as Bentley and Porson and Housman’s famous German contemporary Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.

He was usually quite modest about his claims: ‘I wish they would not compare me to Bentley . . . I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge.

more from Frank Kermode at the LRB here.

dibdin: requiescat in pace

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Crime fiction is driven by death, but the guaranteed survival of the detective counters the morbidity of the form. So it’s unsettling beyond the usual effects of the genre to read a book by a writer who has recently died.

The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games, Michael Dibdin’s 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer’s death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday.

more from The Guardian here.

Debating Who Is the Real Socialist

In Jewcy, Michael Weiss offer three sets of “poseurs” vs. “real deal” leftists and starts a discussion that, er, takes strange turns.

When Karl Marx famously said that events and figures appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, he might have been referring to today’s glut of hand-me-down Marxist kitsch. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, pseudo-radicals had long prostituted the socialist revolutionary tradition as a cheap reference for bumper sticker fatuities. The revolution will not be televised. Yes, well, it wasn’t ever supposed to be. The situation is even worse now that so-called “anti-globalization” activists blithely don Che Guevara t-shirts yet think Das Kapital – the most pro-globalization text ever written – is the latest post-punk sensation out of Hamburg.

Fascism in its worst, most medieval form is once again an ideological menace, and indigence has kept apace with exploding populations that are still too fettered by venal regimes to benefit from the market economy. It’s vital that there are socialists and social democrats in our midst serious about helping the working class, rescuing victims of genocide, and establishing parliamentary democracy on the ruins of lethal dictatorships. The left owes it to itself to identify and root out today’s species of buffoonish and sinister politicos claiming Marxist discipleship but demonstrating only moral and philosophical poverty. What follows is a troika of the worst poseur Marxists—faux-cialists, if you like—plus three world leaders who are actually literate in radical politics and willing to put their knowledge to good use.

Can Cell Phones Change the Face of Finance?

Can cell phones improve access to finance in the Third World? Kabir Kumar of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor on NPR’s All Things Considered:

In developing nations, many people still do not have bank accounts — but they do have cell phones.

Now, a group with the World Bank is trying to develop a way to allow poor people to use their cell phones to save and transfer money.

Kabir Kumar of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor talks to Debbie Elliott about the project.

Mother donates frozen eggs to daughter

From Nature:

Eggs A seven-year-old girl in Canada might one day give birth to her genetic half-sibling. The girl’s mother has donated her own eggs to give the child, who was born with a disease that affects her ovaries, the chance to have children of her own. Melanie Boivin, a 35-year-old lawyer from Montreal, secured legal permission for the move after realizing that her daughter, Flavie, could not have children without donor eggs. Flavie has Turner syndrome, a rare condition in which one of the X chromosomes is missing, causing ovaries to malfunction.

The unprecedented legal agreement means that the eggs could remain frozen for 20 years, until Flavie decides to start a family of her own. If she uses the eggs and has a successful pregnancy, the resulting baby will be her half-sister or -brother. Mothers have previously acted as surrogates for their daughters, giving birth to their own grandchildren.

More here.

Winding Through ‘Big Dreams’ Are the Threads of Our Lives

From The New York Times:

Dreams “Back to life” or “visitation” dreams, as they are known among dream specialists and psychologists, are vivid and memorable dreams of the dead. They are a particularly potent form of what Carl Jung called “big dreams,” the emotionally vibrant ones we remember for the rest of our lives. Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions. “Big dreams are transformative,” Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a “poetic creativity” that connects the dots and “deforms the given,” turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives.

Grief itself is transformative. It is a process of disassembly. The bereaved must let go of the selves they were, as well as the loved ones they have lost. The dreams we have while grieving are an important part of that process.

More here.

Ocracoke Post: On the AFI Top 100 Films of All Time Ever

Were you paying attention when CBS broadcast the American Film Institute’s Tenth Annual “100 Years, 100 Movies,” a list of the Top 100 American Movies Ever Made? If you missed it or the ensuing critical flap, the two lists are side by side here at the Wikipedia. Part of the idea was to compare how this year’s list would stack up against the AFI list from ten years ago. You wouldn’t expect Citizen Kane to vanish suddenly from the Top 100, but there have been some pretty good films made in the last ten years, from The Big Lebowski (denied!) to the Lord of the Rings (#50) series. Don’t worry, I’m not writing this to complain about the AFI choices, while clutching my goatee and watching my battered copy of Last Year at Marienbad frame by frame again. Even if AFI did put three Spielberg films ahead of Double Indemnity last time, the world probably won’t end. (How Toy Story got on the new list is a mystery for the ages, but then again how can you complain about the addition of Sullivan’s Travels?) I just want to add a few titles from the last ten years that didn’t appear on the show. These are great movies, most by great living directors. Some of these films get the respect they deserve and some are great or very good films that don’t. I’ve listed nine films here so that you can provide 3QD with the tenth film in the last ten years overlooked by the AFI.

Deconstructing Harry (1997) or Celebrity (1998)Celeb
So you don’t like Woody Allen’s late style. I feel sorry for you. Stop confusing the man with the artist. Go back to Allen and appreciate him while he’s still around. In Celebrity, you can watch Kenneth Branagh try to be Woody Allen, and the ever-astounding Charlize Theron puts in an extraordinary performance as a pretty messed up model.

The Game (1997) or, yes, I’m sorry, but Panic Room (2002)
David Fincher’s take on the thriller genre in The Game is a paranoiac’s dream. It’s difficult to describe why this movie is so much fun, but it is. Sean Penn buys his brother, Michael Douglas, a very special “experience” for his birthday. Panic Room inspires nothing like the emotion promised by the title in most people I know, but they’re just wrong. Great performances from already classic Jodie Foster and the soon-to-be classic Forrest Whitaker.

Lost Highway (1997)
David Lynch is so scary. I don’t even ever want to watch this movie again. Considered a dud by many, Lost Highway is actually completely terrifying and weird. It has perhaps the scariest lines of dialog in movie history. Something to the effect of: I’ve been in your house. In fact, I’m there right now. Ugh. My skin is crawling just thinking about this movie, let’s move on.

The Big Lebowski (1998) or The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
At least the AFI put Fargo on their last list, but dropped it this time around. To quote Roger Ebert: “What? No Fargo?” To have Jaws, E.T., Raiders, Private Ryan, Schindler, and so forth all securely fastened to the current list is fine I gThman_who_wasnt_there_11uess, but if those choices meant excluding the Coens altogether, that is simply “laughable, man, bush league psycho-out stuff,” as Jesus Quintana once put it. Of course, I’m biased: a book I wrote with a friend on Lebowski has just been published by the British Film Institute. (The Barbican in London is showing a wonderful double bill of The Big Sleep and The Big Lebowski with our Introduction on July 15). You know what, though? At the risk of blasphemy: The Man Who Wasn’t There might be even better than Lebowski. It’s an extraordinary period piece crime genre bender and philosophical investigation of the basic noir tenets laid down by Double Indemnity. The Coens even filmed the execution scene that Billy Wilder notoriously shot at great expense but left out of the final cut.

Rushmore (1998)
This movie has probably influenced more younger writers than most living novelists and was largely responsible for the much-deserved Bill Murray rennaissance. Don’t mess with the love-life of a high school kid who knows how to train bees, I think that’s the basic message of the film.

Made (2001)
I know few people who have even heard about this hilarious mock-mob movie from Jon Favreau (who wrote Swingers), starring Favreau and Vince Vaughn, with great appearances by Peter Falk and the artist formerly known as P. Diddy. Basically it’s a story of two wanna-be gangers from L.A. who go to New York and get themselves into terrible trouble with real mobsters. If you like to laugh and especially if you love the mob genre this movie is a lesser-known gem.

Donnie Darko (2001)
Probably you are already a rabid fan of Donnie Darko or else you will never care. Supernatural giant bunny rabbits, circular time, Patrick Swayze as a pervert, and terrific scenes from life in an American high school circa 1980s.

Inside Man (2006)Photo_07_hires_3
Speaking of late styles, I love the movies Spike Lee is making these days, from subdued and classy thrillers like Clockers and Inside Man to the documentary experience of When the Levees Broke. Inside Man is just a damn-good suspense film with fine performances from Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, about a bank heist in which the money in the vault isn’t actually the main prize.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)
I hear no end of complaints about this fine movie. I can’t imagine why. Richard Linklater gets fabulous performances from the out-of-favor crowd, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Winona Ryder, as well as another terrific strange version of the hardy perennial Woody Harrelson. The special effects thing, developed for Waking Life (also used in those Charles Schawb investment commercials), is a digitized painterly version of reality that is half-human and half-illustration or something like that. But Linklater’s greatest accomplishment is getting the dialog of Philip K. Dick, a great writer who had no idea how humans talk to each other, to sound hyper-realistic.