What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[rotting bones]

Raga Bhairavi: https://youtu.be/v488qzY6kpA

[Raphael]

For much of last night, instead of sleeping, I was up, reading through the archives of Nathan Goldwag's blog, which I had discovered late yesterday evening: https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com

It's a bit weird that I hadn't discovered that blog before, given how many interests and opinions I seem to share with the author. In fact, given Goldwag's interest in things like alt history and SF, I find it a bit surprising that, as far as I can tell, no one has mentioned him on the ZBB so far.

Among my early favorites were his tongue-in-cheek argument that Napoleon I was actually a comic-book-style supervillain (https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/201 ... ervillain/), and his Wildest True Stories of the Napoleonic Wars (https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/202 ... onic-wars/), which starts with a paragraph summing up the "supervillain" idea:

The Napoleonic Wars are an objectively absurd historical time period, and I think only the fact that we’re so used to prevents us from seeing that. I mean, think about it. You’re reading European history, you’re going through the Middle Ages and feudalism and then the Religious Wars of the 16th century and the Discovery of the New World and the Columbian Exchange and then mercantilism and capitalism and the rise of Absolute Monarchy rivalry between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons and then, oh yeah, Dr. Doom took over Europe for a decade and everyone had to team up to take him down. Seriously!

The blog even taught me some things about European history I hadn't known before, and I think I know a lot about European history.

[rotting bones]

Cross dressing in the classical arts: https://youtu.be/3RISY7LU3u0

Name: Vasant Ras means "spring mood".

Scene: Village girls dancing with a cowherd playing the flute.

Note: The village girls are not virgins. Radha is married to someone else.

Philosophy: The cowherd represents the divine (Krishna). The village girls are souls seeking union with the divine. Infidelity signifies the priority of the divine over temporal affairs.

Practical meaning: Please don't eat the cows.

---

I'm reading Negative Dialectics by Adorno. I like it so far. It's a good starting point to explain why 21st century "geniuses" are exhibit A for arguing that humans are mindless automatons. I might like it less if it goes full reactionary later.

[rotting bones]

Things I randomly found:

History of Modern Art: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hFGN68 ... r77iM/view

Video on procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHxDZPS ... =4&pp=iAQB

[rotting bones]

Operatic arias with AI images: https://youtu.be/8TslVGAhZ-I

[bradrn]

Philip K. Dick is in a class of his own. I don't know if he can really be explained!

Nah, his fiction is just straightforwardly paranoid. Now, RA Lafferty, on the other hand…

(To wrench this thread back on topic: Lafferty has a book about an AGI, namely Arrive at Easterwine, which I happen to be reading right now. Or rather, attempting to read — apparently it’s considered the most opaque of his books, and when you’re talking about Lafferty, that’s quite something to behold.)

I don’t often discuss the books which I’ve read. However, since I mentioned this one already, and have now finished it, I feel that I ought to review it…

Briefly put, this book is bizarre. I’m strongly tempted to describe it as surrealistic, but it doesn’t feel like it makes no sense. Rather, it feels like it makes a sort of sense which my brain isn’t quite yet able to comprehend. The experience may be the closest I can currently get to talking to an alien.

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters. (No-one can name characters like Lafferty: ‘Aloysius Shiplap’, ‘Charles Cogsworth’, ‘Diogenes Pontifex’…) And these characters set the machine three tasks: ‘to establish or create a Leader […], a Love […] and a Liaison’. All three tasks fail, which isn’t a spoiler because Epiktistes says so himself just after being given them.

Beyond this basic structure, it’s a very hard book to summarise in any way. Lafferty was much better at short stories than he was at novels, and it shows — each of those three tasks is essentially a short story in itself (or even multiple short stories), and the links between them are thematic rather than establishing a single coherent plot.

Furthermore, Lafferty’s imagination is clearly a very strange place to be. There’s one episode where three goats are let loose throughout the machinery of Episktistes, in order to be bloodily devoured by an anthropophagous alien and by the former director of the Institute. There’s another where a ‘Sky-Rocket’ preaches a sermon on love, then takes off and explodes like a firework. In a third, an Institute member tries to find messages written on snakes’ bellies. The whole thing is absurdly rich with symbolism and metaphor (often Epiktistes talks entirely in metaphors, only sometimes bothering to laboriously explain them for the benefit of us mere humans), and I don’t pretend to understand much of it at all.

Oh, but the other thing is that Lafferty is funny! Admittedly not so much in this book, where the density gets in the way of humour. But nonetheless, it has great turns of phrase scattered liberally throughout. Like: ‘The only thing more disquieting than coming on a snake suddenly is to have one disappear suddenly into nothing.’ Or: ’It still is not certain whether Ganymede was first settled from Tartary, or Tartary from Ganymede; the countries are remarkably alike.’ (It’s not very quotable, though, since much of it makes less sense out of context. It makes little enough sense in context…)

Anyway, in case any of this has piqued anyone’s interest at all, let me recommend some of Lafferty’s more approachable short stories (of those openly available): Seven-Day Terror, All the People, or Dream World.

[Ares Land]

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters.

I'll have to check this one out! I see Lafferty also coined the wonderful and (seemingly) Greek-Nahuatl ktistec machine.

κτίστης is apparently used once in the New Testament in the sense of 'creator'. In Modern Greek it means a mason.
No idea what kind of meaning the epi- prefix would add.

[bradrn]

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters.

I'll have to check this one out! I see Lafferty also coined the wonderful and (seemingly) Greek-Nahuatl ktistec machine.

Yes, Epiktistes is described as ‘the first Ktistec machine’. I didn’t pick up on it myself, but I guess the suffix is Nahuatl — I wouldn’t put it past Lafferty to play such a trick…

(Indeed, just yesterday I encountered another story of his — Continued on Next Rock — where he explicitly mentions Nahuatl writing, though I have no idea if his description is accurate or not: ‘The old Nahuatlan glyphs for Time are the Chimney glyphs. Present time is a lower part of a chimney and fire burning at the base. Past time is black smoke from a chimney, and future time is white smoke from a chimney’. Mind you, earlier in the story he mentions ‘Nahuat-Tanoan, cousins-german to the Aztec’, which of course is simply nonsense.)

κτίστης is apparently used once in the New Testament in the sense of 'creator'. In Modern Greek it means a mason.
No idea what kind of meaning the epi- prefix would add.

Ah-ha. As a devout Catholic, it would certainly make sense for Lafferty to have been aware of this.

As for epi-, according to Wiktionary the Greek preposition can mean ‘having’: e.g. έπὶ τῶν πραγμάτων ‘in power’. It gives a similar gloss for the prefixal form, though with no examples. So ‘Epiktistes’ could mean ‘having the ability of creation’ — which accords both with the gloss in the book, and what he actually does.