This was big news a few days ago, but I found this particular video just now: Philip M. Parker has patented a way to write any (non-fiction) book automatically using a computer. It works by data-mining database and internet searches.
Parker’s video below provides the basic details on how it was done.
(The information here might be related to the seminar discussions about doing things ‘algorithmically’ vs creatively.)
Many of us are familiar with the experience of combining several languages and the interplay it creates: the tricks our ‘mother tongue’ plays on us after three weeks abroad, the playful but also strangely powerful potential of speaking in a foreign tongue, the element of role-playing it induces and beyond that the release from our usual self, into another perhaps. Welsh-born poet Heather Dohollau, now aged eighty three, has wielded both French and English in her writing process for over four decades. This refusal to settle down into a single language, and the in-between stance it creates, were foregrounded during her recent tour of the Scottish East Coast (March 9th—22nd). This tour, involving a fortnight of readings, talks, exhibitions and film showings in three different cities of the East Coast, took place in March: it’s time for thanks, and for stories!
Heather Dohollau is, among other things, the subject of my Ph.D., which will be the first written on her work. Hoping to bring her into the literary scene on this side of the English Channel/ North Sea, I organised the events of March. The Centre for Modern Thought generously invited her to give a reading in the Linklater Rooms, where the exhibition Words’ Eyes, on her poetic dialogue with the visual arts, was displayed. I have had the privilege of knowing Heather Dohollau for about six years, and ever since I have dreamt of sharing Scotland with her. The sea, islands and swift lights that are so present in her poems seemed to take on a new reality in this part of the world. More importantly, it was high time her work in English found a broader audience than the handful of people previously acquainted with it: she has lived in France since 1951 and her contacts with the UK have been few ever since. In March, for the first time, the public heard and appreciated both facets of her poetic voice.
When I first wrote to Heather Dohollau from Scotland, back in 2002, she answered that it sounded ‘so rich one can cut slices like a fruit cake’. The same image would apply to her stay last month. It began in Edinburgh, where she gave her first, superb reading at the French Institute of Scotland. Students had come all the way from Stirling to hear her. We also watched the film dedicated to her, La Promesse des mots, which is not a documentary but a beautiful ‘encounter’ with the poet (to use the directors’ term), retracing her steps to two places from which she was exiled, Wales and the island of Bréhat. The group of poems that she wrote afterwards served as a basis for both the sountrack and the montage of the film, resulting in a unique visual capture of the evoked moments. I had transcribed and translated the script for that viewing.
The rest of our time in Edinburgh was blissfully spent in art galleries and bookshops. I had recently revised a chapter on the dialogue between Heather Dohollau’s poetry and the visual arts, and discovering Ben Nicholson by her side was a rare and insightful experience.
Our next destination was St Andrews, where Scotland’s poetry festival, StAnza, had already begun. Each year StAnza brings together between 70 and 100 poets and poetry editors for a week of readings, performances, discussions, exhibitions, books and magazine fairs. The resulting buzz made for full rooms where attentiveness and enjoyment prevailed. This was the busiest time of my project, combining two seminars at the University with an exhibition and a reading at the Town Hall within the space of four days. The festival theme was ‘poetry and conflict’, and I gave a talk entitled ‘Transcending conflict? Heather Dohollau’s poems on Pierre Bonnard’. I had also contrived to hear a critic I admire, Professor Michael Brophy from UCD, on my favourite poet. His paper was ‘Tracing the absent real: The poetry of Heather Dohollau’.
What a steep learning curve the exhibition proved. Yet after months of detailed orchestration (bits of the display were imported from various parts of France) it was great fun and something of a miracle to see it come together. I even saw the same people come back and bring friends along.
After this whirl of events, windy walks and evenings with friends, Heather Dohollau and I pushed still further North to Aberdeenshire for a few quieter days where I live. At least Heather Dohollau could have a quieter time reading with (and to) my cats while I set up the exhibition in the Linklater Rooms, King’s College. This was where Heather Dohollau gave her final reading. Besides a poem on Jacques Derrida in Cerisy, it included an improvised duet with gulls, whose singing carried down the chimney in the middle of a poem (about birds, in fact. Well, about Hölderlin too).
One thing took me by surprise as I was feeling my way along the organising stages: the enthusiasm and cooperative spirit with which my poetry project was met. The guidance and help I received were, in countless cases, beyond the call of duty. Monika Vykoukal sent me providential e-mails. The jewellers Jamieson & Carry on Union Street lent a helping hand, letting me use a vintage show case that had been in the family for generations, and in which I was able to display original inks by artist Geneviève Guétemme.
The hospitality of friends and strangers alike gave a rich, warm texture to Heather Dohollau’s Scottish fornight. The first evening we halted in a bar to celebrate her coming so far North. As I brought Taliskers to our table I found a young man kneeling at her feet! That swift conquest proved very useful: he and his brother carried our suitcases all the way to where we were staying, while Heather Dohollau sang snatches of Burns ballads to them. One of them even invited her to his wedding! We were staying at the house of a friend of a friend, who not only opened his door to two complete strangers for four nights, but also cooked us porridge (to perfection) every morning, drove us around Edinburgh and lit a fire for us in the evenings. Even as far north as Aberdeen, Heather received such a warm welcome as could keep the cold at bay.
Serendipities multiplied: the first day at lunch, three people who had joined our table at the Modern Art Gallery turned out to come from Penarth – that holy place where Heather Dohollau grew up, south of Cardiff. A Welsh friend and philosopher whom she hadn’t seen for sixteen years, Professor John Llewellyn, appeared at her first reading and took us to dinner. In Edinburgh, Fife and Aberdeenshire, friends cooked fine feasts in celebration. Not to mention the Welsh singing that went on in certain restaurants, even before the Six Nations rugby final…
While Heather Dohollau savoured Scottish lights, malts and painting collections, she also sought proustean moments – though her own madeleine was found in ‘proper’ toast (the French make dry toast, you see) and crispy bacon! The change in perspective proved illuminating: I learnt more about her relationship to English and Wales in a fortnight than I had in the previous six years. She had much to share with the people she met, enthused about the Scottish accent at every opportunity and, I think, took back many happy memories home with her.
To me, needless to say, this was an extraordinary fortnight. It was a great chance to gather fresh impetus before writing up the rest of my thesis. I was able to branch out and develop new skills. And to share places, paintings and friends with Heather Dohollau made for beautiful moments that l shall nurture a very long time. My next plan (groan from my supervisor) is a post-Ph.D. plan (sigh of relief) involving the compilation and publication in Britain of Heather Dohollau’s selected works in English, as a basis for future research on her unique poetic bilingualism.
More on Heather Dohollau
She was born in 1925 in the mining valley of Rhondda in South Wales, and grew up near Cardiff. During the war and its aftermath, she shared her time between Cardiff, Paris and London, and settled down in Brittany in 1951 following her marriage. She lived for many years on a small Breton island called Bréhat where she had five children and wrote in English. Then she moved to St Brieuc, where she had another two children, worked as a librarian for twenty years and began to compose in French.
She remembers writing, and a sharp sense of the necessity of writing, ever since she was a child, connecting it to an early sense of loss; but a turning point came in the mid-sixties, when she adopted French, her ‘daughter tongue’, as her main poetic language. As she developed bonds of friendship with French writers, initially with Jean Grenier and Pierre Jean Jouve, French became even more part of her environment as a writer. In this ‘daughter tongue’, she felt she could express certain things which she had found difficult to articulate in English: her experience of the language change was a liberating factor in the elaboration of her poetics.
Referring to Valéry’s aphorism (‘Une difficulté est une lumière. Une difficulté insurmontable est un soleil.’), she talks about the ‘difficulty’ of the experience as something that she was able to transfer back to the English and that still determines her rapport to language in general, deconstructing the notion of mother tongue in the process. Poetry, she suggests, is not alien to a foreign language. It defamiliarises our perception of words and reinjects colour into the tongue’s idiosyncratisms. It works against the illusion of writing as closure and of reading as recovery. Long after her language shift, Heather Dohollau cultivates this element of resistance, having elected ‘difficulty’ as the cornerstone of her poetics.
Since the mid-seventies, she has published twelve volumes of poetry, beautifully printed by Folle Avoine. Her published works, all in French, also include one philosophical novel, La réponse, written mainly in the form of letters and inspired by the 19th-century Breton philosopher Jules Lequier. This early engagement with philosophy in prose will be kept alive throughout her poetic works. There is also a collection of critical essays, called Les cinq jardins, after a quote from Rilke’s Primal Sound, the main essay being on Malte Laurids Brigge’s ekphrastic evocation of the Cluny tapestries. Her English works comprises early works, recent poems on Cambridge and a steadily increasing number of translations, or rewritings from the French. None of these are available as yet - though I’m working on it!
Heather Dohollau’s published works in French have been increasingly recognised in public and academic spheres over the past twelve years or so, both in and outside France. Besides Jouve her friends, correspondants and admirers have included Lorand Gaspar, Henri Thomas, Yves Bonnefoy and above all Jacques Derrida. Her poetry has been celebrated at two colloquiums (one of which was held in Cerisy-la-Salle in 2005), in four exhibitions and one film.
Places are central landmarks in Heather Dohollau’s poetry: not just the places where she lived, and those from which she was exiled (Wales, Bréhat) but where she travelled: Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and especially the places where she returned. When returning somewhere, the potential of a place is not diminished, far from it: the return is the moment of realisation that something will always be left untouched in a place. And of course each poem is another return in its own right.
Heather Dohollau’s poetry welcomes what goes on in the margins of memory and perception, what might resurface in what she calls ‘le passé futur’. She refuses the directionality or the capture of sight, unfocusing to welcome the most elusive, yet the most immediate impressions of a place into the poem: light, tides, moments in-between. These we are invited to inhabit, as the most effective antidote to the experience of exile.
Another type of place is also explored, that of paintings, which are present in every volume and well over a hundred poems, navigating effortlessly from Pierro della Francesca to Thomas Jones, Balthus, Morandi, Bonnard and Joan Mitchell. As if it weren’t enough to wield two languages, she refers time and time again to the language of visuality, probing modes of signifying that don’t fall neatly within the scope of either visual or verbal media.
Deep affinities emerge with the thoughts of Benjamin (his perception of childhood as anticipated retrospection, again ‘passé futur’, his emphasis on the grey areas between languages) and Derrida. Her poetry not only shares a common problematic with Monolingualism of the other, but reads as an enactment of différance. Its resistance to closure results in a poetics of slowness, showing a receptiveness to meanings yet to be generated.
Clémence O’Connor Ph.D. student in French, University of St Andrews
The famous Monty Python skit. Not as funny as ‘Norman’ Chomsky, but ROFL seeing Karl Marx stretching and warming up.
NB: Franz Beckenbauer is the legendary German footballer, coach and manager.
Dear all:
Finn and I we will be working on the website this afternoon, so it is a good moment for questions, posting, comments and so forth. If you are interested in the semantic web, I wrote two reviews in my website about twine and freebase. I wrote them in spanish, I am afraid, but I think it would be interesting that you become familiar with these tools and with the importance of tagging your posts and contents properly.
I would probably write a couple of posts more on how to read on the Internet —use of rss, social bookmarking, etc.— and on the tools you can use to post and create content in the new website without logging.
Please, let me know if you need more information or a translation.
I think what still fascinates me, turning Thacker’s paper and our seminar discussion over in my mind, is exactly the issue that Chris pointed out—that we want a cause for social organization, as for complex phenomena from simple operations, that feels appropriate to us. A cause that seems “good”, or even simply adequate, and sufficient to take responsibility for that moment when something (as Thacker points out) tips categorically into the domain of the big, dynamic, complex, “living” system. Entomology is full of searches for the phantom commander who marshals the termites in building the hive, or the fireflies in synchronizing; part of difficultly surrounding fascinating domains like cellular automata in computation is precisely the counterintuitive way that certain very simple rulesets can produce very complex results.
Just for fun, I lightly adapted somebody else’s adaptation of the classic flocking algorithm (Craig Reynolds, 1986) in Processing, my current favorite artsy language, and put the result online: flocking. It’s set so the units explode somewhat arbitrarily from the center, as though startled from a tree, and move around the space. The movements of flocking will be different each time you load the page; you can add new birds by clicking in the space. Very slight variations in the parameters of only three factors—separation, alignment, and cohesion—can produce behavior very much like birds, or schooling fish, or swarming insects, or herds of animals. There is no guiding force for the flock as a whole, just the parameters of individual birds and their neighbors. You can see the source code, too, pre-Java, and it’s nothing special; of the 322 lines, most are related to visual elements and the physics engine. Flocking and schooling systems can, and have, been written much tighter than that (there’s a ton of links to variations on Craig’s site)—and, for that matter, you could do it with a pencil and paper, as you could a cellular automaton or a Turing machine; it would just take a really long time. (For the hell of it, I made a cellular automaton, too—an implementation of Rule 30, which produces chaotic behavior and can be used as a random number generator.)
And I’m only a dilettante programmer, if that; nothing magical is happening here. Simulation might be able to contribute to the conversation happening around Thacker’s paper precisely because of its daunting ease and simplicity. Once you have a means (mechanical or electric computation) to automate the repetitive steps and speed them up, what becomes obvious and compelling within a simulation perspective is the absence of a need for any larger “Life itself” force or metaphysical entity. Just these few rules, with some starting parameters, iterated over and over and over, often heading in directions that are “irreducible”—sufficiently unpredictable that you have to run the program to see what it will do. Perhaps, then, to Chris’s point, and Thacker’s in some ways, one of the questions we can ask is precisely why the lightness of these rules is so counterintuitive and dissatisfying; why, that is, we need to turn to “Life itself” at all, rather than staying with the analysis and critique of our models of networks, swarms, and multitudes.
This is the program I mentioned in seminar, a singularly beautiful thing: q a b c=putStrLn $ b ++ [toEnum 10,’q’,’(‘] ++ show b ++ [‘,’] ++ show c ++ [‘,’] ++ show a ++ [‘)’] main=q “q a b c=putStrLn $ b ++ [toEnum 10,’q’,’(‘] ++ show b ++ [‘,’] ++ show c ++ [‘,’] ++ show a ++ [‘)’]” “def q(a,b,c):print b+chr(10)+’q(‘+repr(b) +’,’+repr(c)+’,’+repr(a)+’)’” “def e(x) return 34.chr+x+34.chr end;def q(a,b,c) print b+10.chr+’main=q ‘+e(b)+’ ‘+e(c)+’ ‘+e(a)+’ ‘+10.chr end” (I’ve had to insert some line breaks so it doesn’t blow out our formatting.) A Haskell program that outputs a Python program that outputs a Ruby program that outputs the original Haskell program. Via the marvelous hacker Dan Piponi’s study of [a third order quine in three languages.](http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2008/02/third-order-quine-in-three-languages.html) Quines are really fascinating: a specialized form of metaprogram whose sole output is its own source code (“I am that I am”?).
Dear all:
I found [this good news](http://digg.com/educational/The_Complete_Work_of_Charles_Darwin_Online_3) in [digg](http://digg.com/). You can find Darwin *Complete Works* [here](http://www.darwin-online.org.uk/). I hope it will be useful for those interested in history of science.
Dear Finn and Jorge:
I am anxious to start using this, what’s the next step? From my neck of the woods I’d like to have everything related to the New Paths conference, including the preconference discussion, and also the pictures, the youtube videos, etc. posted, so that we can have follow up at least among participants before the enthusiasm wanes.
Also, I’d like to have the description of the Political Thought track, announcements of coming workshops on Spinoza in Murcia and on Comparative Imperial Histories here, and supporting materials also posted. And plans for next year, etc.
I’d like to start working on my own page, which for me mainly means to make my publications available online, and I would encourage everyone to do the same. But is there a better place and/or a better way of doing it? I could start with my normal UoA page, how do I transport it? Or should I?
Three visitors, namely, Carsten Strathausen, David Johnson, and Eduardo Gonzales will come to Aberdeen in coming weeks, and I would also like a space for them, including a link to their pages or cvs., etc., and links to some of their articles—but before they come, and Carsten and David arrive the week after next.
I thought if everybody gives a list of what they’d like to do, then at least Finn and Jorge can develop an agenda of things to do once they fix the glitches and figure out what remains.
This is exciting, and thanks so much once again, Finn and Jorge. Best, Alberto
I love stuff like this: The gang over at Google Code have written specialized spiders that find declared social connections between people using different kinds of metadata, like microformats and the syntax used by social sites like Facebook to generate a social graph (as in graph theory, mapping the connections and edges, not a pie chart). Their annoucement: URLs are People, Too. Quote:
Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF.
(FOAF, wonderfully, is the term for a syntax that describes “Friend Of A Friend” relationships.)
Here’s the code page for the API. It’s like making cheese from milk, straining the social shape out of the soup of connections.
