On the Fashion Sense of Sarah, Isaac's mother

I love this very odd image of Sarah, Abraham's wife and Isaac's mother, by the Flemish engraver Hans Collaert (1545–1628). This image is mentioned in passing in my novel The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, which revolves in part around the story of Abraham and Isaac. I just cannot figure out what she is wearing, but I think it is a fashion faux pas. Call me a moderne, but I'd cover that belly, pull up the front of the dress, and not wear squares on my breasts.

On Loving Machine Compassion

 [Image from: http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/05/19/machines-of-loving-grace/]

I love the idea of Hunger To Hunger, a project to translate a poem in and out of English several times. Many people have done similar things with Google Translate, which makes it easy, though it lacks the linguistic elegance brought by a human translator with some poetic skill.

I used Google Translate to take Richard Brautigan's poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (which seemed an appropriate choice for such an exercise) from English to French to Czech to Danish to German to Japanese to Hebrew to Indonesian to Hindi to Arabic and then back to English. I was impressed by how well the poem held  up, a testament to how well Google Translate works these days. I played with this sort of thing years ago and it used to destroy the original completely.

The original and translation are listed below. I tried to set the two versions side by side line by line, but of course this might be messed up on your browser. The only change I made was to delete the word 'In' from the end of the translated title. 

No one would say the translated version was an overall improvement from the original, but I do believe that some of the simple spare prose in the translation is the way to go. For example, I think Brautigan's ponderous lines

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors  

are better rendered as  

I love 
(A must!)  
Environment cybernetic  
Where we are without work

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace        Grace Loves Almost Every Machine
I like to think (and                                                              (I like to think
the sooner the better!)                                                      The more the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow                                                    Pasture cybernetic
where mammals and computers                                      Computer with mammals
live together in mutually                                                    I live with one another
programming harmony                                                     Programming and harmony
like pure water                                                                 Clean Water
touching clear sky.                                                           Touched the sky is clear.

I like to think                                                                    I love
(right now, please!)                                                         (Now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest                                                      Forest cybernetic
filled with pines and electronics                                      Filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully                                           Where deer go in peace   
past computers                                                              By the computer
as if they were flowers                                                   Such as interest
with spinning blossoms.                                                 Spinning with flowers.

I like to think                                                                    I love
(it has to be!)                                                                  (A must!)
of a cybernetic ecology                                                  Environment cybernetic
where we are free of our labors                                     Where we are without work
and joined back to nature,                                             He returned naturally
returned to our mammal                                                Back to our mammals
brothers and sisters,                                                      Ladies and Gentlemen,
and all watched over                                                      View All
by machines of loving grace.                                         I love machine compassion.

On a Human Document

I have for almost my entire adult life been a huge fan of Tom Phillips' A Humument. Since 1966, Phillips has been continually altering pages from an obscure Victorian novel (W.H. Mallock's A Human Document) by 'treating' each page with paint and/or collage. The result, called A Humument, is an ever-increasing piece of art that is fascinating, brilliant, and beautiful in itself, but also arrayed across a time in a wonderful way. By now it is almost fifty years in the (re-)making. You can buy the latest (5th) edition of the book here or see and buy prints from A Humument here. Highly recommended.

[Image from http://humument.com/gallery/recent/i/hum-200503-06-500.jpg]

On Automating Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is an artist of the aphorism, whose work I have long admired. I used my user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface JanusNode to create some new Jenny Holzer aphorisms by Markov chaining some of her original lines by trigram (a statistical way of creating a new text from an old text). Although this method results in re-use of some input substrings, none of these aphorisms existed in the input in exactly the form shown here.

believing something can make reality more intelligible

a man can't know what it is to be proud of knowing yourself

personal gain potential counts for nothing but a restatement of the old

lack of charisma can be a useful motivating force

investigation is a kind of anesthesia

a natural law governing the new is dangerous as complacency

morals are crackpots

government is a burden on the people who go crazy

decadence can be a meal ticket

you should study as much as possible your parents

believing in rebirth is the most elegant weapon of the old

change anything anyway

what is dominant in a culture is escapism

sexless old friends are better left in the occasional debauch sacrifice

principles are more valuable than a famous person

you don't know what's interesting is the appropriate response to most people

dreaming while awake is absurd violence

playing it safe can cause a lot of damage in the bank

imposing order is man's fate

attractive dying should be advanced at all costs

a nice idea of transcendence is a prerequisite of success

disorganization is more important than metaphor

most people are not fit to rule the mundane

extra money creates taste monomania

the new is nothing except what you sense

repetition is the best way to live in harmony with inferior people

you are the unattainable

stasis is a legitimate area of investigation

wholesome men don't protect you anymore

you should act like money in the bank hiding your own business

noise can be a form of freedom

On Three Books With The Same Name

The original 'book' named The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée Mise à Nu Par Ses Célibataires Même) was Duchamp's somewhat book-like collection, also known as 'The Green Box', which was published in 1934 in an edition of 320 copies. It consists of a compilation of facsimiles of Duchamp's enigmatic notes (written between 1911 and 1915) for his sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, after which I named my novel. 

Duchamp claimed to have gone to what seems like absurd lengths to reproduce the notes exactly like the originals, down to the type and shape of paper, and the ink. However, modern scholarship, which has access to the original notes as well as his allegedly 'exact copies', has cast doubt on this claim. Many of the ink and paper types simply don't match and have perhaps even been systematically changed (details are here). 

The notes in The Green Box have been republished in various forms, perhaps most notably in Richard Hamilton's excellent typographic English translation, also titled The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (though subtitled A typographic version), which the characters in my novel make sure they have with them when they go on a road trip from Medford, MA to Philadelphia, PA.

It seems to have clearly been Duchamp's intent that his notes to The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even should be considered in some sense as part of the sculpture, to prevent anyone from thinking they might have just a purely visual relationship to it. You can't just look at the piece. You have to think about it. That is what makes it great.

On Nudity Across Time

 This photograph from a fantastic set of photographs by Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama reminded me of (and was apparently inspired by) Duchamp's (1912) famous painting Nude Descending A Staircase, #2, which is, like so many of Duchamp's greatest works, now in the Arensburg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This photo was created exactly 100 years after Duchamp's painting, and has almost the same name: Nude #2.

[Image from www.wired.com]

On What To Read While You Are Dying

There are advantages both to dying quickly and dying slowly. One advantage of dying quickly is that you can avoid the physical and mental suffering that often goes along with dying slowly. One advantage of dying slowly, however, is that you get to choose what to read as you are dying. 

If I am given the opportunity to die slowly, I am going to read Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace while I die. I love Weil's strange and wonderful brand of Jewish/Catholic mystic Existential spirituality. She has lots of good advice for dying slowly, such as but not limited to the following:

• "The death agony is the supreme dark night which is necessary for the perfect if they are to attain absolute purity, and for that reason it is better that it should be bitter."
• "I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness."
• "Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void."
• "There is, as it were, a phagocytosis of the soul: everything that is threatened by time secretes falsehood in order not to die, and in proportion to the danger it is in of dying. That is why there is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death."
• "We must give up everything that is not grace and not even desire grace."
• "Time and the cave. To come out of the cave, to be detached means to cease to make the future our objective."
• "May God grant that I become nothing. In so far as I become nothing, God loves Himself through me."

Of course, we are all dying slowly all the time, so it is best if (like me) you read Simone Weil early, and keep re-reading her until you are actually dead.

[Image: Altered illustration from Eugene Talbot's (1898) Degeneracy]

On Automatically Generating Character Names

One amusing thing that my automated freeware text-generation program JanusNode can do is generate character names, ranging from the mundane to the extraordinarily bizarre. I didn't take advantage of this in my novel The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even but since then I have used JanusNode-generated names in other (as yet unsubmitted) fiction. Here are a few random examples (that you may feel free to use as you wish....):

• A woman named Gilda "Stunning Chemical" Lumpthoud.
• A Buddhist named Kristie Humpella Unschooled, Sr.
• A man named Sung Mouserood.
• A woman named Saundra Inane Sigmund Freud-Hank.
• A man named Arthur Pittman-Pup Warm "The Idiotic Dog" Larker.
• A checkout clerk named Amparo Puntalina Pope.
• A woman named Norma Burpcoyde.
• A personal woman named Poetic Goof.
• A man named Archie MacPeculiar "Rank Acidic-Sole" Murki.
• A man named Brant Von Moody.
• A woman named Mari "Grubby Dauber" Cockroachcell.
• A woman named Kasey Shoe "The Sugar-Free Honey" Von Chowderhead.
• A ruler named Jodie Goyie Shamauskas.
• A personnel officer named Luther Zebrajeh.
• A man named Carmen Freak.
• A man named Lewis Sikhella Mariana Roofellesity.
• A concessionaire named Ivory Ingram-Ashley.
• A woman named Reverend Lucille Turnson Noif, MA.
• A woman named Fern Insipid Watkins.
• A installer named Daub-daub Bellie Otternest.
• A despot named Tenssho Tigerchi
• A man named Woodrow Spotorda.
• A cryptographer named Lend Assiassibosk.
• A woman named Reverend Sparrow Taylor "The Cat-Damned" Pitiful, BSc.
• A man named Reverend Donald Harter.
• A man named Miles Rat Bush.
• A woman named Retesi Oifoifholy.
• A man named Lustful Greer.
• A woman named Fey-fey Wayward Elki.
• A woman named Elva Apollo McHolmes.
• A domestic named Soto "Fanciful-Eyebrow" Workman.
• A man named Faoge Guminheot O'Zipperhead.
• A jolly woman named Esperanza Fencdo.
• A woman named Greasy Gashson Miller-Blair.
• An anxious man named Sensual Tiltalina Turding Otter.

[Image is a JanusNodeLOL, as invented by Calum Rodger. I maintain a full collection here.]

On Living Well

"CT: [...] I think that Duchamp is a kind of Montaigne-like figure.
PC: What do you mean?
CT: He wasn't telling you how to live so much as he was just trying to find out for himself. His friend Henri-Pierre Roché once said Duchamp's greatest work was his use of time."
     Calvin Tomkins (2013) 
     Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. p. 19
     [PC = Paul Chan. CT = Calvin Tomkins]

[Image from: http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/index.html]

On the MacBook Pro as a Signed Duchampian ReadyMade

On Naming Nothingness

I like the idea of giving names to absences. My current favourite is 'airplane mode on', which turns almost everything off. I like that we have to ask for 'room' at StarBucks if we want less coffee in our cup, as if the absence of coffee were a commodity that StarBucks prided itself on being able to deliver. Wittgenstein remarked on how odd it would be (and yet how consistent with normal usage) if we went into a room to see if Mr. Nobody was there.

When we turn off the lights we should say we are turning on the darkness. When we end a relationship, we should say we are enabling solitude. When we die, let it be said that we have just switched on our nothingness.

[I plagiarized this blog post from my own FaceBook post, December 12, 2013]

On the Most Dangerous, Least Useful Thing

In my day job as a research psychologist, I study how human beings process language. I use many methods, one of which is to model semantics using a  co-occurrence model of semantics. These computational models bootstrap word meaning by quantifying patterns of co-occurrence in a very large text corpus, using some fancy math that would be boring to explain here. The basic idea is this: the model can figure out that cats are more similar to dogs than they are to tractors because the word 'cat' occurs more often near the same words as the word 'dog' than near the same words as the word 'tractor'. Quantify that notion, and you have the model.

Recently I spent some time trying to construct a computational model of human judgments of a word's dangerousness and usefulness. My friend Lee Wurm has shown that people's behavior is measurably affected by a word's dangerousness and usefulness, suggesting that these dimensions are unconsciously assessed by people when they process words. He and I used my co-occurrence model to try to see if we could model these dimensions, with some success (the paper we wrote has been submitted for peer review).

One of the interesting side-effects of having a formal model of these dimensions is that we can compute quantitative estimates of dangerousness and usefulness for every word in the English language. Once we have done that, we can ask: What is the most dangerous, least useful thing there is?

The answer was kind of brilliant. According to our computer model, the quantifiably-proven most dangerous, least useful thing is [See if you can guess and then select the box to see.] anger!

[Image taken by me in about 1984 at the Acropolis in Greece.]

On Peeing on Duchamp's Art

In my earlier post on the varieties of the ReadyMade, I failed to mention an interesting example of a Reciprocal ReadyReMade, which I define as a replaced mass produced object designated as art that is then used a piece of non-art. In 1917 Duchamp selected a toilet and designated it as art, thus creating a ReadyMade. That original Fountain was lost so Duchamp later selected other toilets to stand in for the lost one, thus creating what I call ReadyReMades. Several people (Kendell Geers, Brian Eno,  Björn Kjelltoft, Pierre Pinoncelli, and Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, according to Wikipedia) have had the idea of urinating into Duchamp's ReadyReMade urinals. (Pinoncelli also attacked one of them with a hammer.) Peeing on one of Duchamp's urinals is the equivalent of Duchamp's idea (never carried out) of using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. By peeing into his ReadyReMade, these people turn Duchamp's ReadyReMade back into a urinal, this creating a Reciprocal ReadyReMade, perhaps one of the few members of that obscure class of objects.

[Image: Daniel Spoerri's (1964) Utiliser un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser (Marcel Duchamp)]

On the MadeUnReady

 

Duchamp is famous for inventing the concept of the ReadyMade: an ordinary industrial object (a coat hanger, a wine bottle rack, a shovel, a bicycle wheel, a urinal) that is re-conceptualized as art simply because the artist chooses to designate it so. In his notes to The Large Glass (another name for The Bride  Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even), Duchamp also discussed the Reciprocal Readymade: "Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board". Many of Duchamp's original ReadyMades were lost, with the result that many that do still exist are 'reproductions' by the artist: stand-in ordinary objects, pressed into service to stand in for the original ordinary object. We might (though Duchamp did not) call them the ReadyReMades.

There are other possible classes that Duchamp didn't discuss.  One class I call the MadeUnready, defined as an object that previously functioned as art but has since been damaged so that it no longer does. The most famous example is perhaps Robert Rauschenburg's Erased De Kooning, subject of an earlier blog post. The Reciprocal MadeUnready is a previously-destroyed piece of art that has been fixed so that it functions as art again. The Large Glass itself is a perfect example, having been shattered in 1926 and then painstakingly put back together by Duchamp into its current state. If de Kooning had drawn another drawing on the paper that had been erased by Rauschenburg, that would be another example. Following the structure above, we can go on to define the ReMadeUnready, which would be a damaged piece of art that has been fixed to function as art and then damaged again so that it no longer functions as art. Although the category may seem strained, I think a lot of children's art falls exactly into this category. A child makes something that gets damaged and is then carefully restored by a parent. Ten years later no one cares about the childish piece anymore and it is discarded as a ReMadeUnready. 

[Image: Photograph by German photographer Martin Klimas, via Slipcast- The Ceramics Blog]

On Being Obsessed and Chocolate

I was amused and pleased to see my novel listed on http://www.fishpond.com.hk (Hong Kong) among 'Chocolate Obsession Books'. This is totally correct, as the book concerns two obsessive men who go on a road trip to buy a very expensive chocolate grinder, very much like the one pictured above (or this one).

[Image: Marcel Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder (No.1) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]