Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

[Rob Zseleczky, August 2010. Photograph by Elaine Fine. The blur is accidental. I like it.]

I first met Rob on Fordham University’s Bronx campus. Was it 1978? We were a year or two apart in our trek through “English,” and I knew him as a fellow traveler in the field. Rob was a poet and the editor of Fordham’s student literary publication The Monthly (which was not a monthly), and he liked and printed the poems I offered. Our paths crossed again at Boston College, where we both ended up in grad school in 1980. I saw Rob at an orientation for new grad students, at the end of a row of folding chairs: a familiar face! After the orientation, we had a beer, and we became friends, for keeps. And we both became friends (again for keeps) with Luanne Paulter, another grad student in English (now half of the duo Jim and Luanne Koper).

In recent years, Elaine and I saw Rob every summer when we traveled east, always in the company of our hosts Jim and Luanne. There would be much food, much wine, much laughter. The nights would run very late. Rob and I would always play guitars for a while. Rob was a brilliant guitarist — beautiful tone, beautiful touch. And when he played something like, say, “Fire and Rain,” it was note-perfect. Yes, he liked that James Taylor stuff. Our common musical ground was blues. A, E: buy your vowel, or key, and we could go on forever.

Rob’s generosity went on forever too. It was there in e-mails, in letters, in mixtapes and CDs. When our son Ben took up the guitar, Rob gave him much encouragement. When Ben began tinkering with an electric, Rob gave him a Marshall amp. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got an envelope in the mail with a cartoon torn from The New Yorker, “24-Hour Blues Cycle”: “My woman done left me, ran off with my best friend. / Well, my woman done left me, said she ran off with my best friend. / Details are sketchy at this time, so let’s go to Jennifer Diaz standing by in Washington.” How had I missed that?

In the last two or three years Rob’s poetry got better and better and better. I saw “To the Coin Toss I Lost” in an earlier version in 2011. The finished version appeared last year in the Concho River Review (Spring 2012). I have typed out the poem — no mistakes.¹ I take the last two lines to heart:

Four related posts
A poem for RZ
Another poem for RZ
Good advice from Rob Zseleczky
Rob Zseleczky on clutter and stuff

¹ Rob worked as a copy editor and proofreader.

Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry

I often go searching for the past online. And thus I found (via Google Books) a letter about the possibilities of computer-generated poetry by my friend Rob Zseleczky, published in the February 1983 issue of the computer magazine Byte. Strange: a few days ago I took screenshots of the pages with the letter and did some cutting and pasting to make a column of text. And now this issue of Byte is available only in Snippet view.

[Rob Zseleczky, “Computer Poetry: Art or Craft?” Byte, February 1983.]

The key passage, to my mind:

An artist may draw upon any or all of his life’s history in order to pass judgment on a single word. His intellect, his moral integrity, his honesty, his passion, his love, his hope, his hate, his fear, his skepticism, his faith — in short, the sum of the poet’s whole existence gives him the ability to make artistic judgments. And a sense of tradition supports the artist’s individuality, which includes his powers of artistic discernment. Thus, in our ever-changing, prone-to-forgetfulness world, the popularity of computers is assured, but computers still lack what Keats called “the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem.”

If you could accurately enter your whole life into a computer without leaving the minutest fact out, then the computer could possess a chance of becoming artistic. But even then the computer would have to be considered the protégé of its programmer. For now, computers may be profitably used as electronic thesauri, as servants to the new craft of electronic poetry-writing. As far as the art of poetry is concerned, computers will have to wait.

Right on, Rob. Judging by the poems I ordered up from ChatGPT this past weekend, computers are still waiting.

Related reading
Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013) : All RZ posts

Rob Zseleczky on clutter and stuff

My friend Rob Zseleczky shares an insight:

I need less crap, even if it’s great crap.

I know what he means: I pass up books that I would’ve bought without hesitation in years past. Can get from library, says my interior monologue. I too need less crap, even if it’s great crap.

You?

Related posts
Good advice from Rob Zseleczky
“Wanting is big, having is small”

A poem for RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky figured out his pantheons and stuck to them. Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King. Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost, John Keats, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats. I may have left someone out, but I don’t think so.

On June 13 Rob sent an e-mail with a sampling of Yeats poems to mark the poet’s birthday. So our last e-mails were about Yeats, his genius and his self-regard, both of which we both acknowledged. Rob loved Yeats more than I do, or at least with greater fidelity than I can muster. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” seems very Zseleczkyesque to me right now. I post the poem in memory of my friend, angler and poet.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

Good advice from Rob Zseleczky

My friend Rob Zseleczky wrote these words in an e-mail. I think they're great for anyone to consider:

Life is hard enough when you try and you choose to at least try to do your best. It is much much much harder on those who do NOT try. Paradoxically, the EASIEST route through life is the path that chooses hard work and constant devotion to doing your best. Why is this? It's because life is difficult, and those who fully accept that life is difficult, and then choose to do their best in response, they paradoxically discover that for them, because they have developed the habit of always trying to do their best, for them life paradoxically becomes easier. But it only becomes easier for those who truly accept life's difficulty and meet it head on.

Rob says that he's repeating an idea that he read somewhere, possibly in M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, but as he also says, Who cares? The advice is good, and I'm glad that it came into my mailbox. Thanks, Rob.

Probably not from Calvin Coolidge

My friend Rob Zseleczky had in his apartment a postcard with these words:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and will always solve the problem of the human race.

This passage has been atttributed, famously so, to Calvin Coolidge, and appeared with his name in a Depression-era pamphlet issued by the New York Life Insurance Company, of which Coolidge was a director. But Coolidge scholars David Pietrusza and Amity Shlaes, the source of the information in the preceding sentence, make a strong case that the passage is “probably not Coolidge’s.” It’s good advice though, whoever its source. For me, its source is Rob Zseleczky.

RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky died a year ago. The one thing I have learned about losing a friend — or losing anybody — is that the losing goes on for a long time, taking different forms at different times. In other words, you keep losing.

How many times in the last year have I read or noticed something that I’ve wanted to tell Rob about? Many.

I wrote these words for Rob last year. There’s a poem of his there too that I love.

WWRZS

Last night I tried to imagine what my friend Rob Zseleczky might have said about about the traces of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes in Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture. “He’s an outlaw, Michael,” I imagined Rob saying. “He doesn’t care what you think of him.” And then I imagined Rob laughing helplessly: “CliffsNotes!”

Imaginary Derby

I watched the Kentucky Derby and began to think about assembling a field of twenty horses. Those horses are now approaching the starting gate:

Reflux : Hashtag : Ampersand : Metatarsal : Cohen’s Choice : Dear Landlord : Uncle Petrie : Occam’s Razor : Mister Rogers : Memphis Minnie : Strawberry Fields : Comey’s Dilemma : Waterloo Sunset : Sunset Boulevard : Gluten Intolerant : Montezuma’s Revenge : Mothership Connection : Ineluctable Modality : Kranmar’s Mystery Appetizer : All You Can Drink

This field is in memory of my friend Rob Zseleczky, who always exhorted his friends to watch the Kentucky Derby. I finally have. Rob would have appreciated the silliness of this list.

[Elaine’s horses: Hashtag, Cohen’s Choice, Mister Rogers, Strawberry Fields.]

RZ, i.m.

My friend Rob Zseleczky died at this time three years ago. He was a poet and musician. These lines are from the poem “To —” (1821), by his favorite poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The period and dash (Shelley’s punctuation, not an editor’s) make me think of a string plucked and still sounding. We will toast to Rob’s memory tonight. Still sounding.

[Text from The Poems of Shelley, Volume Four: 1820–1821 , ed. Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan, and Kelvin Everest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).]

RZ, i.m.

[Lines from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “With a guitar. To Jane.” The guitar that Shelley gave to Jane Williams is in the Bodleian Library. All details there.]

This post is in memory of my friend Rob Zseleczky, who died at this time two years ago. He was a guitarist, and a poet, and his favorite poet was Shelley. We toasted to Rob’s memory last year on this night, and we’ll toast to his memory again tonight.

Giggles and glances

Marcel is enduring the actress Rachel’s dreadful recitation:

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Oh those young people. I recall from grad school days a poetry reading with an ultra-distinguished poet who begged off reading his work after repeated starts and stops. He had a cold. He announced that he would comment on his poems, which would be read by the fellow who introduced him, a Jesuit priest who had not been prepared for this eventuality. (Who would be?) I think it was a line about thighs &c. that set us off — just the incongruity of it all.

On a more reserved note, I recall sitting at a dinner table with my friend Rob Zseleczky, both of us waiting to see how one was supposed to eat an artichoke. Innocents abroad, or at least in someone else’s house. I bet Rob would remember it too. Our host was gracious.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

How to salute a professor

[Genuine, unretouched Google search that brought a seeker to Orange Crate Art.]

I can think of three explanations for wanting to know how to salute a professor in an e-mail:

1. The searcher is a student at a military academy.

2. The searcher has English as a second language.

3. The searcher, intent on observing all formalities, is thinking in terms of salutation, a term better reserved for dowdy old letter-writing.

I am glad though to see someone asking the question rather than beginning with Hey, or with nothing at all: I am a student in your class, &c. Good titles for poems there: “Poem Beginning with Hey,” “Poem Beginning with Nothing at All.”

Everything this searcher seeks can be found in this world-famous Orange Crate Art post: How to e-mail a professor. Am I tooting my own horn? I guess. Toot. Toot. I am tooting softly, with a Harmon mute.

The word salute reminds me of a startling essay-starter that Claire Hahn of Fordham University shared with our class one day: “Chaucer stood with one foot firmly planted in the Middle Ages, and with the other he saluted the dawn of the Renaissance.” She loved it.

Which in turn reminds me of something my friend Rob Zseleczky was fond of recalling: someone asking him a professor at a party, “Milton: didn’t he write Chaucer?”

But my favorite use of the word salute is this one:

[I’ve corrected the anecdote, as per Luanne Koper’s memory: it was Rob’s story, but the question was asked of a professor.]

Wheels of fire

When I told him that I was teaching Dante, my friend Rob Zseleczky mentioned that Wheels of Fire, a double-album by Cream, took its title from Dante’s description of Charon the ferryman.

Sure enough—it’s in the description of Charon in Inferno 3:

che ’ntorno alli occhi avea di fiamme rote
[who around his eyes had wheels of flame]

Cream, as anyone of a certain age will remember, was the original power-trio: Eric Clapton (guitar), Jack Bruce (bass), and Ginger Baker (drums). This poetic touch was apparently provided by sometime-lyricist Peter Brown.

Thanks, Rob!

“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

Chomsky et al. on ChatGPT

In The New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull consider (with examples) “the false promise of ChatGPT”:

ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.

All OCA ChatGPT posts
A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT : Spot the bot : Teachers and chatbots : Imaginary lines from real poems : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : ChatGPT on Edwin Mullhouse : A reporter’s “conversation” with ChatGPT

Edwin who?

One more try, and I’m done. What can ChatGPT tell us about Edwin Mullhouse, of Steven Millhauser’s novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright ? Presented without comment:

Edwin Mullhouse is the main character in the novel “The Breakthrough” by American author Jonathan Safran Foer. Edwin is an 11-year-old boy who dies suddenly and is remembered by his best friend, Jeffrey Eugenides, who recounts Edwin’s life in a fictional memoir. The novel explores themes of memory, childhood, and loss, as Jeffrey tries to piece together Edwin’s life and personality. “The Breakthrough” is a coming-of-age story that blends elements of fiction and non-fiction, and is widely regarded as one of Foer’s most notable works.

Related posts
A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT : Spot the bot : Teachers and chatbots : Imaginary lines from real poems : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough puzzle that took me forty-one minutes to solve. (Your minutes may vary.) I started briskly with 1-A, three letters, “Color close to silver”; 1-D, four letters, “Tender feeling”; 9-A, four letters, “Latter-day cheaters”; and 12-D, four letters, “Marvel debut of ’63.” And then my pace slowed considerably.

Matthew Sewell knows how to put the um in Stumper. 28-D, five letters, “Fortes”? 32-A, three letters, “Bar display”? Um . . . no idea. At least not right away.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

3-D, seven letters, “Thrown-together attention-getter.” I just discovered that the answer is in Merriam-Webster.

14-D, eleven letters, “They take the edge off.” I was thinking of files and sandpaper.

25-D, ten letters, “Medieval military governments.” Just a surprising word to see.

35-D, eight letters, “Two shovels for ‘work available,’ for example.” I should have known this one immediately.

43-A, five letters, “Rome’s ___-Shelley Memorial House.” Every crossword reference to ___ or Shelley reminds me of my friend Rob Zseleczky.

43-D, six letters, “Submits for approval, perhaps.” Clever.

57-A, four letters, “Snow the heat, maybe.” Also clever.

61-A, three letters, “Common rack range.” The clue redeems the answer.

My favorite from this puzzle; 8-D, eight letters, “Kingston trios, often.” I wrote in an answer, no crosses, no nothing. It had to be, thought I. And it was. Is the answer plausible, really? Trios? I’m not sure. But for a moment I felt that Matthew Sewell and I were having a mind meld.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, was surprisingly easy, aside from the southeast corner. But man oh man that southeast corner. It had arcana: 60-D, three letters, “Onetime North Island herbivore.” It had a tricky spelling: 48-D, six letters, “Trifling.” It had general weirdness: 59-A, eight letters, “Verdict of disapproval”; 64-A, six letters, “Creatively turbulent.” And it had a clue that reminded me of what must be my considerable distance from current trends in entertaining (62-A, eight letters, “Cutlery carrier”). I’m glad that those clues were not the whole puzzle.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

11-D, seven letters, “Boston Public Library muralist.” Because Boston.

16-A, eight letters, “Fashion effect aka ‘manscara.’” Not that I use the stuff.

25-D, seven letters, “108 Odyssey fellows.” I always like seeing Homer in a crossword. The 108 is an extra treat. And that is the number, which a reader can work out by adding numbers as Telemachus gives them in book 16.

36-A, four letters, “‘A nightingale who sits in darkness,’ per Shelley.” I like to think that my late friend Rob Zseleczky is pleased whenever Shelley turns up in a crossword.

46-A, five letters, “Many a paperweight.” Mine are rocks and tile trim.

And another one of the clue-and-answer pairs that baffle me until I begin typing them out: 58-D, three letters, “Fellow from Wheeling.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

ChatGPT and a forklift

From Ted Chiang’s essay “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” (The New Yorker ). If I were teaching, I’d share this passage with my students:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Related posts
“Human interaction might be preferred” : “Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators” : 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