by Hirsch Perlman

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Ten months ago Artificial Intelligence helped lift me out of a stubborn pandemic depression. Specifically, an AI image generator’s results from the prompt Schrodinger’s Cat; the name of the physicist’s thought experiment in which, under quantum conditions, a cat in a box could theoretically be both dead and alive at the same time—that is until the box is opened and an observation is made.

I wondered if and how AI would render a cat both dead and alive, or if it would just depict the box. And what other elements of the thought experiment it might create.

The results from the prompt were scribbles in need of completion, hallucinations of cats shimmering in and out of being. Tentative half formed felines hovering like sentence fragments lacking syntax and punctuation.

Sometimes it looked like the AI was capturing itself the nanosecond before I pressed the return key. It was as if I’d stumbled on AI picturing its own quantum state.

Starting with the AI scribbles, I redraw, combine, add to, and regurgitate never ending variations of cats in ambiguous spaces, ambiguous boxes. Boxes become cats or cats become boxes. What’s cat and what’s space is fluid, confused and melded- the cat deformed, carrying a bemused, malcontent, or often indifferent affect.

They’re allegorical mirrors: cat/cat and cat/box could be artwork/viewer, left brain/right brain, self/not-self, conscious/unconscious, tame/feral, or adaptive/maladaptive. Cats can mime any manner of relationship.

I’d found a deep digital rabbit hole. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

In last month’s column I criticised the ‘degrowth’ movement, which essentially proposes that we should produce and consume less stuff. This notion has some merit of course – we should always strive to ‘do more with less’ – if that simply means making our technologies more efficient.

But the degrowth ideology also tends to be motivated by the following claim:

‘Rich countries already have enough resources to secure good lives for everyone.’

CNBC Explains video – ‘Degrowth: Is it time to live better lives with less?’

The idea here is that if all the wealth in a rich country, like the US, was divided equally, everyone could live comfortable, dignified lives. This is a highly intuitive claim, given the visceral displays of opulence by billionaires. Nonetheless, it is both false and harmful if taken too seriously.

To unpack why, we need to first clarify what we mean by the term ‘wealth’. It’s a strange word, since it seems to apply to radically different kinds of things. Jewellery, real estate, intellectual property – these all obviously count as wealth. But what do an idea and a townhouse have in common? Read more »

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18 year-old who’d never really read a book through to the lives that can be found in them.… —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.

Narragansett Evening Walk to Base Library

Bay to my right (my rite of road and sea):
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line.

The bay moved as I moved, though retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how it perfectly matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
(Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here),
behind too, over shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier
transfigured in cloud of cool white light
sprayed from lamps on tall poles ashore and,
aboard, from lamps on masts and yards
lit needles of antennae which gleamed
above its raked stack in electric cloud enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
enveloped as it lay upon the shimmering skin of bay.

From here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
steel upheld on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight,
light as a bubble, line of pier behind etched clean,
keen as a horizon knife,

library ahead, behind
a ship at night.

The bay to my right (as I said) slid dark
at this confluence of all nights,
lights of low barracks and high offices,
those ahead that faced west, skipped off bay,
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface in
splintered sight,

ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring new tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain to spring its self-locked latch
to let some fresh air in crisp as this breeze
blowing ‘cross the bay from here to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then to

me here now

Jim Culleny
12/16/19

by Mary Hrovat

I recently read the wonderfully ambiguous sentence, “The love of stone is often unrequited” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. It inspired me to write love letters to stones.

To the mysterious front-yard stone

For a couple of years, when I was a very small child, you were part of my everyday life in southern California. I remember you as gray and white, granular, maybe a little sparkly. You rose unexpectedly from the front lawn, a small, more or less rectilinear interruption of order. You seemed to be made for children to sit on or around, a little stony chair or small narrow table.

We were lucky; no one else had a stone in their lawn. I don’t know why you were there; I assumed that you were too big to be moved. At the time, you were an everyday part of my world, like the trellised back porch permanently enveloped in gentle green shade or the peach and plum trees growing in the back yard.

I see from street view on Google Maps that you’re not there any more. The house has also lost that porch and those fruit trees, which were replaced with a swimming pool surrounded by concrete. Well, we moved out of that house more than 50 years ago; it’s bound to have changed. Still, I would have guessed that you would outlast the house and everything else on that lot. I suppose you weren’t as large or immoveable as I thought you were, and someone got tired of mowing around you. I wonder now how you came to be there and where you went. I hope you’re still yourself, whatever and wherever you are. Read more »

Nabil Anani. Life in The Village.

“Nabil Anani is one of the founders of the contemporary Palestinian art movement, working with paint, sculpture and ceramics. His work often summons folklore and rich colors to weave a tapestry of Palestinian life and character, expressing nostalgia for lost villages and olive groves, but the pieces I have chosen are slightly different: they were all painted during the second Intifada, when in 2002-3 Anani was in Ramallah under seige, and they are haunting depictions of destruction and dreams of return. He was born in 1943 in Latroun, a Palestinian hilltop village 25km west of Jerusalem. In 1948 there was fierce fighting there, and since 1967 it has been controlled by Israel. The Palestinian village now sits empty. Anani lives in Ramallah: like so many Palestinians, a refugee. He has been arrested and interrogated by Israel for his art, especially for promoting the imagery and colors of the Palestinian flag.”

More here and here.

by David J. Lobina

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

So Joyce imagines in the interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as I discussed in What Joyce Got Wrong. Is it a psychologically plausible rendering of Stephen’s thoughts, I asked at the time, and answered in the negative because of linguistic reasons – in this occasion I would like to discuss some recent psychological investigations of the matter. But how can a private event such as inner speech be scientifically studied at all?

Imagine the following situation. You are about to cross the street and see a car coming; you stop on your tracks and realise there’s some space between the incoming car and the next one, enough in fact for you to rush to the other side safely once the first car has passed you. But as you start crossing the road something you are carrying emits a sound, a beep, you may even feel a vibration. It’s not your phone. It’s a device you are carrying as part of a experiment you have agreed to take part in. As soon as you hear the beep you need to stop what you are doing and write down your (subjective) experience immediately prior to the beep. You have to describe what you were experiencing at the time, whatever it was.

The idea is for participants such as yourself to take notes of their experiences at random intervals – typically 6 times within 24 hours – and then undertake a detailed interview with researchers soon after in order to produce a faithful description of the reported experiences.

Known as Descriptive Experience Sampling, this methodology requires a fair amount of training of both participants and interviewers in order to avoid possible preconceptions and confabulations and thus focus exclusively on the experiences themselves. The reported experiences are certainly varied, from inner speech and visual imagery to the sensation of having experienced thoughts that did not manifest in any particular medium, but the methodology is supposed to get to the bottom of things in any case. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

I accidentally stuck my foot into this picture of the ground in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Mike Bendzela

Given that it affects about 2.4% of the population, most of you probably know someone with this disorder. Some of you may even have it yourselves. Continually absenting yourself from others’ company out of chronic fear should come with the preamble, “It’s not you, it’s me,” which in this case is not just a line of bullshit. But you never get around to saying such a thing because it is tacit, as tacit as water is to a fish.

Revealing a personality disorder is like coming out of the closet a second time, but worse. For all its woes, coming out as gay initiates a new way of fitting in, a more honest way of relating to the world and others. Then you settle in and everyone forgets about it. This revelation, though, feels more like a post hoc explanation for the impaired way you relate to the world and others. That the awareness of it comes so late does not really matter, as there is nothing you could have done to make things turn out differently. It is something that has shaped every day of your life, even though you never knew there was a name for it until recently. Using the analogy of sexual orientation again: Imagine it were possible to grow up being attracted to others of your own sex, to form a long-term relationship, and then only later in mid-life to read about a condition called “homosexuality.”

Oh, so that’s a thing, then, you would think. You find that you have already adapted to it. Your life is the hand in the glove of your psychological predisposition. The variability that inheres in a world presided over by evolution by natural selection means we are all cast as certain types in the drama of life. This makes the term “disorder” in “avoidant personality disorder” seem a misnomer, even offensive, but there you have it. You did not write the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Read more »

by Richard Farr

This is the final part of My Drug Problem, a no doubt annoyingly elliptical three-part essay on psychedelics. Part One, A Mere Analogy, is here; Part Two, The Woman in the Cave, is  here.

Interest in psychedelics has gone so mainstream that it’s embarrassing not to be able to do the usual thing, and share with you my experience of effing the eff out of the ineffable while sitting in a pool of my own ayahuasca-scented vomit in a hut in the Peruvian Amazon. 

So far however, despite a strong, longstanding, and multiply motivated interest, my own psyche has never once had the opportunity to be rendered more delos by any of these substances. That’s partly because there seems to be no way for me, like most ordinary people, to get hold of them legally or illegally in a tolerably safe form. It’s partly, also, because the avenues that are slowly opening up are expensive, impractical, and/or radically inconsistent with the way that I (or most reasonable people, I will suggest) would choose to introduce ourselves to them.

*

We use the words drug, experiment, recreation and therapeutic in at least two distinct senses each. 

Drugs are the blessings of medicine that free us from the clutches of disease. Ordinary but amazing Ibuprofen (C13H18O2), stalwart bug-killer amoxicillin (C16H19N3O5S), and so on. Drugs, on the other hand, are serpents in the tree, evil substances full of temptation and danger to the foolhardy; key vectors for the spread of many ills including both dependence and sanctimonious do-goodery. Heroin (C21H23NO5), methamphetamine (C10H15N), and so on. Wonders and terrors. Alpha and Omega. God and the Devil.  Read more »

On the Banks of the Rāvi

by Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)

I am standing on the banks
but I have no idea where I am.

The sun — old man of sky —
a goblet in his trembling hands

spills wine, dipping the hem
of evening in red. The day

drinks itself into oblivion,
raining rose petals on a grave at dusk.

Rāvī’s low and high rhythm urge me
to bow in silent prayer. Do not ask

how my heart feels. My world
is a precinct of the Ka’ba.

Far off, amplifying the solitude,
are minarets of Jahangir’s tomb —

history book about cruelty, still place
like silent music only trees hear?

A boat swiftly rides Rāvī’s breast,
the boatman struggles with waves,

and swift as a glance moves quickly
far away from the orb of sight; so

does the ship of man’s life born into
a sea of eternity never recognizing

defeat — out of sight
yet at no time shipwrecked.

***

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari

by Mindy Clegg

It should be obvious by now that science fiction of the 20th century wasn’t in the business of predicting the future. Low earth orbit space travel does not reflect the commercial feel presented in 2001. We’re no where near having robotics and artificial intelligence as advanced as that of Blade Runner. Our current iteration of what we’re (probably incorrectly) calling artificial intelligence (AI) has not remotely reached the level of a Skynet in Terminator. But if any sci-fi franchise correctly “predicted” the current era and the struggles we currently face, that might be Star Trek, especially Deep Space 9 (DS9). In fact, 2024 ends up being a pivotal year in the Trek time-line and some of the events set in that year seem incredibly plausible in the world right now. Rather than predicting the future, these events reflected political and social issues of the day in which the show was produced. DS9, in fact, were deeply embedded in the domestic and global politics of the 1990s. The show addressed critical issues, such as ongoing decolonization movements, the fall out of the end of the Cold War, and domestic social issues like homelessness, racism, and inequality. All of these have gone to dangerous places recently, as we seem unwilling to understand the warning found in a show like DS9. Of all the Star Trek shows, few seem as critical to understanding our modern condition than this one. I’ve been reading David Seitz’s excellent book A Different Trek and it informed much of this essay.¹ Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

I never intentionally set out to read what one critic referred to as “landfill nonfiction,” and yet it seems harder than ever to avoid falling into such a book by accident. The term is a bit harsh, but you probably already have some idea of what kind of books I’m talking about. 

These are the books with bright covers and upbeat titles that follow roughly this formula: This is Actually Pretty Obvious: A Really Overblown Claim about How We Can Fix Everything and Maybe Even Have More Fun. Many of the books I’m talking about would be shelved in the Self-Help section of your bookstore (remember those?) but the format has now expanded to include popular science, general psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and more.

One of the first things you notice about landfill nonfiction (which I’ll call “pop nonfiction” to be less mean), aside from the formulaic, casual title and the trendy aesthetic of the cover, is the abundance of “malcolms,” folksy anecdotes that an author uses to gently and obliquely introduce a topic to readers imagined to be intellectually shy and prone to bolt at the first sight of a difficult idea.

Often, the malcolm seems to have no relevance to the topic at hand, at least at first. The coy author-as-compère is waiting for the right moment to show you why this story is relevant. The more random the malcolm seems, the more satisfying will be the payoff (or so it is supposed) when the author ties it all back together. A story about a day in a busy hospital that started like any other, or the author’s boat trip with his wife, or a scene from Fiddler on the Roof, eases you into an intellectual project without shocking your system with too much thinking right off the bat. It’s nonfiction writing envisioned as PowerPoint presentation, a corporate icebreaker and team-building exercise before you get down to brass tacks. Read more »

Schrödinger’s Cat

by Derek Neal

I simply can’t seem to stop writing the same essay over and over. This is, I admit, not a great opening to a new essay. If all I do is repeat myself, why bother reading something new from me? Fair enough. You’ve heard it all before. But allow me one objection, which is that many writers write the same novel repeatedly, many filmmakers create the same movie multiple times, and these are often the best novelists and filmmakers. Now, I don’t mean to put myself in this category, but I can take solace in the fact that the greats do the same thing I seem to be fated to do.

Paul Schrader, whom I have mentioned in many of my recent essays, has made the same movie for the last 30 years. I thought it was just his recent trilogy—First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener—but then I watched Light Sleeper from 1992, starring Willem Defoe as a drug dealer trying to change his life in New York. Does he write in a journal? He does. Does he sleep in a spare bedroom with no furniture? You bet. Does he try to change his life, only to be dragged back into the world he thought he could escape? Of course. Finally, does the move end with the Pickpocket ending, with the main character achieving something akin to a state of grace while paradoxically in prison? He sure does, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. This is Schrader’s world, it’s what he does best, and when I feel like spending a couple hours there, I know where to go.

Another writer who does this is Patrick Modiano, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. It had been a few years since I’d read a Modiano novel, and a week or so ago I decided I’d like to go hang out for a bit with the phantoms that haunt Modiano’s France, stalking the dark streets with the silent specter of French collaboration during World War II hanging over them. I started reading Des Inconnues. Was there a character narrating a story in the first person about their past? There sure was. Did this character fall in with a shady group, a cast of characters who used fake names and performed clandestine activities? Absolutely. Was anything ever resolved, or would the characters exist in a dream-like state from beginning to end, unable to explain the meaning of what had happened to them? Indeed, the characters would never wake up.

The fact that writers repeat themselves is not a criticism, then, but a recognition that they are performing variations on a theme close to their heart and presenting their version of what it means to be a person living in the world. Read more »

Ruth Asawa. Drawing from Works on Paper, ca 1980’s.

More here and here.

Current show.

Thank you Philip Kivitz, for the tip.

by Joseph Shieber

The humanities are once again in crisis, as they have been so many times before. What distinguishes this latest crisis from many of the crises preceding it, however, is the extent to which the current crisis in the humanities is exacerbated by the current political climate. Attacks on the humanities fit very well with the current right wing attack on higher education more generally; the Right moves seamlessly — one almost wants to say thoughtlessly — from attacks on one to attacks on the other.

Given this climate, it is not surprising that diagnoses of the current crisis in the humanities would focus on the politics of the humanities. Emblematic of such diagnoses is a widely discussed recent piece by Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic, “The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction.” There, Harper suggests that the current crisis of the humanities is the result of political capture: the humanities disciplines are now hostage to left-wing political movements and, as a result, have become targets for critics from the center and right.

Underlying this diagnosis is Harper’s suggestion that the political capture of the humanities is the result of an attempt by representatives of those disciplines to respond to a perceived lack of practical benefit of the study of the humanities — a low return on investment (ROI) — by suggesting that the practical benefits of the humanities are not monetary, but social or political. “If the humanities have become more political over the past decade,” Harper argues, “it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’ In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.” That is, the study of the humanities makes for better people and, in turn, better societies, rather than better workers. Read more »