Ripert flipped through a book of leather designs and nixed the Louis Vuitton logo. “It’s a little over the top,” he said. “Like, ‘This guy’s coming to cut fish!’ ”

The New Yorker article about Eric Ripert’s new knife case is charming and pairs well with the set of photos he himself posted on Facebook.

One game we played when we were kids was spotting black Volgas that sped by the playgrounds. To procure one of these cars, especially for free and with a driver, one had to be not just a ranking official, but a ranking official with the right job in the right city. The rest of us plebes got a Zaporozhets. So as kids, we’d run after the Black Volgas and scream and keep daring each other to flip off the passenger. And when the car disappeared, we’d cough up its dust and someone would say that she’d really done it this time, that she’d flipped off the Volga. “Yeah, right,” we’d say. “Well, I did. Behind my back,” she’d tell us. At the end of the day, the girl who saw the most black Volgas won.

Of course, to an American visiting USSR, these cars looked dated. I’ve heard many of them say that all the cars looked ancient. The truth was that some of the vehicles were brand new, but they still looked old to a foreigner. Unlike in the West, in the USSR the car manufacturers did not offer a new and improved (and expensively redesigned) model every year. Year after year, they just kept making the same car.

This was why, as I tried to figure out what the Volga looked like in 1970 this morning, I half expected it to look just like it did when I was a kid in the 1980s. So what I found was a little surprising.

BEHOLD: a souped up Volga manufactured especially for the KGB.

Looks just like a Volga 21, doesn’t it? I gather they used the Volga model for camouflage, then gave it some muscle with a better engine, a 195 horsepower V8 that could get one of these babies up to 100 mph and from 0 to 60 in 16 seconds.

What’s that? That doesn’t sound quite like the super-powered, James Bond car you imagined KGB would be driving? Me either. Then I remembered that the car I drive today, in 2011, has a 115 horsepower engine. So in a drag race against my little Nissan Sentra, the KGB would still win.

My father, by the way, pulled a similar trick on his used Zaporozhets. He tinkered with that car until he was back to being able to overtake any other automobile on the road.

TANGENT: apparently, a few year ago, a Moscow oligarch had a Volga look-alike custom-built using BMW chassis and engine. Helloooo, gorgeous. Do you come in a hybrid?

I doubt that I need to issue a spoiler alert to write that the preponderance of the philosophical evidence here requires a reader verdict for the atheists, at least as far as logical arguments are concerned. But Goldstein avoids the simplistic shrill paradigm of the New Atheists who deride religion as a moral outrage. Instead, she paints religious worship as one of many ways in which we all flail towards answers to the necessary and universal questions about life’s purpose and meaning. The answers, Cass tells us, may not exist. We are not entitled to them existing. But we have to look for them anyway.

This universal search for meaning is the adventure of Goldstein’s characters’ lives. They are people who live mostly in their heads and to whom ideas matter. They base life decisions on the truth, importance, and joy of understanding abstractions like rigid designators, theodicy, and game theory equilibriums, and—incredibly—Goldstein makes all this completely believable and then wisely leavens this thick mix of ideas with a dash of dramatic irony. There’s an absurdity to a life filled with overthinking everything. In one scene, Cass is so mystified by a cryptic note from a classmate that asks him to meet at the “view from nowhere” that he enlists the help of a reference librarian. She finds a philosophy book with that title, and Cass gratefully peruses the volume for clues—only to discover, hours later, that the View from Nowhere is the town dive bar.

Still, in this book, philosophy and theory are the focal point rather than decorations, mere names and allusions artfully arranged throughout for atmospheric effect. I’m not quite dogged enough in my pursuit of substance, I suppose, because I skimmed a few parts. I discovered that despite choosing to read this book for its promise of a smorgasbord of ideas, I can’t, despite my best efforts, muster enthusiasm for every shiny new thought excavated from the bowels of a university library. Yet Goldberg’s wit, erudition, and craft are thrilling. In the end, I wouldn’t recommend this novel for everyone. But given to the right person at the right time, this book will astound with its brilliance.

1. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

2. Carolina Chocolate Drops

3. Frightened Rabbit

Emily Howell isn’t stealing creativity from people, he [David Cope, the programmer] says. It’s just expressing itself. Cope claims it produced musical ideas he never would have thought about. He’s now convinced that, in many ways, machines can be more creative than people. They’re able to introduce random notions and reassemble old elements in new ways, without any of the hang-ups or preconceptions of humanity.

At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

-”Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”

A few reactions:

1. I wonder if in a decade or so, we humans will be creating compositions that are flawed on purpose—music and sculpture and stories that are just a little unpolished, that show a touch of human frailty in face of robotic perfection, like exaggerated stitches and buttons now in fashion on etsy to stress that something is homemade. In ten years, will writers make type-os, switch tenses, and dangle clauses on purpose because a computer would not?

2. The most fascinating question for me here is the question of authorship. The creative process through which the music is produced relies on David Cope to offer his program an idea—a musical structure, perhaps, or a series of notes. The machine works this idea into a piece according to the rules that Cope had coded, then produces a few thousand of these workups in the time that Cope has a cup of coffee or takes a shower.

But according to the article, Emily doesn’t know which one of these thousands is the best. It (she?) can’t even tell if any of them are good at all because as a machine, at this stage of development, she can’t enjoy them. The discernment and taste are all Cope’s, and if we like a piece of Emily Howell’s, we like it because that piece is the one that Cope has selected. So who’s the author? If the music is in fact art, is it art created by David Cope or Emily Howell? Is Emily Howell just another tool for idea transcription? Is authorship possible without complete autonomy?

Here, of course, we come full circle, to the original assumption with which Cope started—that none of us are fully autonomous when we engage in the act of creation. That we create art through a synthesis of our influences, by plagiarizing and rearranging. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

With Emily Howell, however, the question is practical. She can’t evaluate her own work and she can produce a metric ton of it. So if we rely on her to create music, we are just trading one problem for another: instead of struggling to create, we’ll be struggling to select the one great piece from among thousands of pages of crap or, worse, mediocrity. And boy, as an occasional lit mag slush pile reader, do I ever not envy Cope that one.

3. The problem of selection might of course be solved by crowdsourcing. Imagine a web site where the work products of an AI get posted and then sifted by thousands of humans. If we let them claim whatever they found, it’d be like the new California gold rush. Would we offer thousands a new, previously inaccessible path towards the act of creation? Would we get more literature, music, and art, better and faster? And can you just imagine the flame wars?
]]> http://tree-killer.com/2010/03/12/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-robotic-overlords/feed/ 0 http://tree-killer.com/2010/03/11/links/ http://tree-killer.com/2010/03/11/links/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:21:53 +0000 A. S. Kolendo http://tree-killer.com/?p=3
• Dear Lazyweb, where do I find a whole web site full of these? LitKicks posts a literary puzzle.
• It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book that is popular must of necessity be overrated. Justine Larbalestier selects choice excerpts from one-star reviews of Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.
• Tomas Rozycki searched for his deported family’s old home in Ukraine. Everything was not illuminated, but the blog post does come with a poem.
• The Ransom Center acquires the David Foster Wallace paper archive. To see handwritten pages of Infinite Jest and DFW’s annotations of other people’s work¹, fans are setting up tent cities on the plaza to be first in line as we speak.

¹You know him. Footnotes everywhere…

The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers’ belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger’s dime novels.

On the last day of a three-day retreat for the top people at Xerox, Bob Taylor was asked to show the men the products of his Xerox PARC research team’s labors. And so he put on the stage the Alto, the first personal computer. The mouse, the Ethernet cord, an email system, a graphic display, and a laser printer were all attached–all in use at the Xerox PARC laboratories for some years by then and all shown to the men responsible for the future of the Xerox Corporation. It was the 1970s.

The presentation was followed by an opportunity for all of these titans of industry to test out the goods themselves, in an exhibition hall with little booths set up with the equipment. The men all stood around the periphery and chatted. The only people who approached the researchers’ tables were the businessmen’s wives. In Taylor’s account, the ladies had a grand time of playing with the gadgets.

Looking back, Taylor thinks that the man-repellents in his exhibits were the keyboards.* At the time, men didn’t type. Their secretaries did that. And many of the wives had come from the secretarial pool.

Which is perhaps why you did not buy your screen, your laptop, your Ethernet cable, your Internet service, and your mouse from Xerox. And why, in some alternate reality, Xerox is the largest company in the world and the dictionary entry for the word “xerox” continues for several pages.

* Alternative explanation: not enough lolcats.

Of course, as always with new online projects, what I want first is a new theme and a new domain name. My plans for pimpin’ my new web projects always precede plans for executions. Perhaps this explains why my sites usually see more theme changes than posts.

Now, in the same conversation where they go on at length about new revenue models and guerrilla tactics, marketing types mention that for an artist, a web presence should build name recognition. We all know of course that what I have is not a web presence but a web absence. What this blog here should be called is Waiting for Kolendo.

The point is that I’m coming around to the idea that my name, my real, phone-book-findable name, should have a starring role in my web adventures (or lack thereof) since I think–now that I finally no longer get carded when buying tickets to R-rated movies–I’m finally safe from being stalked by another pedophile.*

Which I suppose poses the question of which name to use. At my mother’s, I’m still Nastia Kolendo but no one else I know can pronounce it. Anastasia Kolendo is on diplomas and IDs, though I prevent so many mispronunciations nowadays by introducing myself as Ana that I should get a Crimestoppers Badge of Merit. And Anastasia is such a feminine name. I feel like people who have just the name to go on expect 5 o’clock tea involving cozies and forest creatures who come to braid my hair.

Surprisingly, for years, kolendo.com, kolendo.net, and kolendo.org were all taken. Though go-daddy, my former web host and registrar, of course suggested brilliant alternatives–like mysexykolendo.com.

Luckily, the inability to keep a blog seems to be genetic. The guy who used to own kolendo.com must have gotten tired of paying for hosting for an error page he had parked here for a few years, so now it’s my turn to do the same.
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* For those of you who haven’t heard the story, don’t worry. My pedophile was shy. After finding my address in the white pages, he dropped by unannounced to ask me “to go steady.” There were no attempts at inappropriate touching, though my parents will forever assume his behavior to be typical of American men.