Flooring

I clipped a small square from a New York Times photograph of the courtroom where Donald Trump’s trial is taking place. That institutional-looking floor tile — it’s the same non-descript stuff found in the building where I taught for thirty years. But the color is different: these tiles appear to be a dull brownish gold — gold-ish, befitting the defendant.

In 2012 I took a photograph of a little man in a floor tile in my office. I trust he’s still there, still smoking.

“Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators”

From The Washington Post Tech Brief newsletter:

“All large language models, by the very nature of their architecture, are inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators,” said Grady Booch, a renowned computer scientist. At a basic level, they’re designed to generate answers that sound coherent — not answers that are true. “As such, they simply cannot be ‘fixed,’” he said, because making things up is “an inescapable property of how they work.”

Grady Booch is in Wikipedia.

Have you had your rock today?

Related posts
ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Chekhov and Joyce

“The closest parallels to Joyce’s stories are Chekhov’s, but Joyce said he had not read Chekhov when he wrote them”: so says Richard Ellmann in the biography James Joyce, citing Herbert Gorman’s notes and papers for a Joyce biography. But try reading this passage from Chekhov without thinking of Joyce’s “Eveline.”

Anton Chekhov, Three Years, in “Peasants” and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: New York Review Books, 1999).

[Most of Chekhov was in English by 1903. Had this story been translated by then? Garnett’s translation was first published in 1916.]

In it and of it?

I was sitting at the kitchen table with an open bottle of Aurora Black, about to fill three fountain pens. I called up to Elaine:

“Do you have any pens that need filled?”

I was not trying to be cute. I was using the [need + past participle] construction with an utter absence of self-consciousness. It just came out. I may now be not only in east-central Illinois but of it.

Then again, filling German fountain pens with Italian ink isn’t exactly a regionalism.

Related reading
More [need + past participle] posts (Pinboard)

Block that metaphor

Of Donald Trump and Michael Cohen, from the prosecution’s closing argument:

“He cut him loose like a hot potato.”

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve gone with metaphor rather than simile because of “cut him loose.” The line as I have it is as MSNBC and The Guardian reported it. I’ve now also seen “The defendant cut him loose, dropped him like a hot potato” (CNN). It may be that there‘s no there here. But still, I‘d like to see a Glen Baxter illustration of someone cutting a hot potato loose.]

How I write certain of my blog posts

I’m always interested in seeing the materials of writing, so I thought it’d be interesting to show the materials that went into a post about Anne Curzan’s Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words. Why not?

If I’m writing a blog post of any length, particularly a review of a book or a recording, I always start by making notes on paper, more notes than I’ll ever use, but I know that’s the only way to figure out what I will want to use. A pencil or gel pen works best for me; I don’t want the frequent distraction of uncapping and capping a fountain pen (unless I really do). Here I ended up with four pages of notes in a large Moleskine squared notebook, accumulated over four or five days of reading.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

I go through these notes to find things that I want to use and to figure out how they should go together. That’s where a blue pencil comes in. I then write a very rough draft, always with a fountain pen, always on a legal pad. I never make an outline — I think outlines sometimes produce only the illusion of coherence, but this rough draft functions as a good outline would. It goes idea by idea, with page numbers for things to pull in from the book. My rough drafts tend to trail off as they near their end. You can see that happening on page two. An ending usually doesn’t announce itself until I’m writing.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

When it’s time to write a real draft, I use a text editor. For this post, which had only minimal details of HTML to attend to, I wrote in BBEdit, dropped the not-finished writing into Blogger, and began to tinker. I asked Elaine to read the draft in Preview, and she had several smart suggestions. I took them all, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, and posted the review.

Later in the day, at a friend’s suggestion, I removed a comma that I had added when second-guessing myself about a sentence’s readability. No, the sentence was fine without one, just as I had thought. Over the weekend I deleted and restored one word. Better without? No, with. And without realizing it, I had moved (once again) through the roles that Betty Sue Flowers describes in the work of writing: madman, architect, carpenter, judge.

When I taught an undergraduate prose-writing course, I always brought in images of writers’ drafts, many of them far messier than mine. Students always found it instructive to see how much work goes into the work of writing. It rarely, if ever, flows.

[Post title with apologies to Raymond Roussel. The careful reader will notice that the last two words of the rough draft were considerably softened in the finished post.]

The tells

[Click for a larger view.]

I got this message yesterday and for a moment was out of my skin (after jumping). Then I took the time to read. How many tells can you tell?

CEFCU, whatever it is, is real, and has a page about phishing scams.

Wild strawberries

I think I have finally figured out what interests the deer who visit the back of our backyard: Fragaria vesca, or wild strawberries. They’re why the deer appear so choosy as they browse the ground.

No strawberries, as far as we know, for the tiny fawn, who is still nursing.

Memorial Day

[“Decorating a soldier's grave in one of the Negro sections on Memorial day.” Photograph by Esther Bubley. Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. May 1943. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Esther Bubley (1921–1998) was a photojournalist and documentary photographer.

Sunday in the park with geese

[After Seurat. Click for a larger view.]

I took the photo on Thursday, and that’s not a park. But those are geese.

I’ll post a tax photograph again next Sunday.