MikeBVaughn
Why does art and the attempts at interpretation thereof have to be useful or warranted? Festive chicanery sounds delightful to me. I would like more of that in my life, please.
> In other words some works of writing often fiction but not necessarily are just elaborate exercises in getting away with balderdash.
> In other words far too many mediocre works of the past still get top billing, than they rightly deserve largely because no one called out their bullshit.
> HN should buck this trend and not join in adulation.
Do you have some concrete examples of works that fit these claims?
[Full disclosure: driveby quoteposting with no extra content or contextualization is one of my most deeply felt pet peeves]
E1: Well, it worked the first time. Now the "AI Librarian" API call 403's out on me, according to my browser's web inspector.
E2: Oh, wait, you totally can do the "what to read after <X>" flow, you just have to click the "what to read after..." field in the top left.
This is the better URL to get there:https://whattoreadafter.xyz/
It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and I'm convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.
If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.
Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.
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Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.
Though, that context does explain why the article contains the current front-runner for my least favorite sentence in the English language:
> They deserve to be greeted with a tailed-tux and clean palette, chewed with the utmost mindfulness, spat out onto the table to rest for five minutes, licked off the table to savor the flavor of oxidization, digested over a four-hand stomach massage to increase circulation, vomited out Roman-style, spread over the genitalia so that the most sensitive part of the body can gain a tactile appreciation, ingested for a second and penultimate time, passed out quickly with laxatives to preserve the fibrous quality, and cooked in a slow-roast paste to capstone the feast.
On the other hand, they also have no real obligation to be honest about the service they're providing. If they're already publicly claiming to be doing crimes, then being dishonest about the security and safety of the services provided is a drop in the already-quite-full bucket. My guess is that unless they're extremely principled about their specific view of free speech, the risks inherent in the venture mean they don't believe this necessarily has, say, decades-long sustainability as a business model. If so, then maximizing near-term profit by cutting corners or abusing access to customer data is probably a very tempting option.
Looking at the angles, I have a hard time seeing who'd want to use a service like this.
"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler is absolutely a "translation aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones."
From the preface to Butler's Iliad: "It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written." (source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)
I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context of a translation of a 7th Century BC text, particularly in terms of the notion of making the text 'accessible' to a modern reader.
If anything I'd argue that Butler's prose translation does far more violence to the original text. The idea that e.g. Lattimore is more accessible than Butler is remarkably strange to me. In particular, you mention that contemporary translations tend to avoid 'difficult' language, which is flat wrong in the context of Lattimore - his syntactic constructions, because they need to fit the poetic meter he uses, are frequently quite complex and nested. Nor is the vocabulary particularly simplified; I think Butler is much more watered-down in this regard.*
Can you elaborate on which 20th/21st century translations of Homer you are referring to?
*(That is not to say there aren't any possible criticisms to be made of Lattimore in terms of anachronism - when Helen talks about her own conduct in the Iliad, Lattimore inserts some fairly harsh 20th-century gendered insults that are, as far as I can tell, in no way attested to by the original Greek)
Interestingly, (and apropos) McCarthy's last, Stella Maris, I think, did a much more eloquent job of exploring the same themes. Stella Maris is astounding, it's cosmic horror without the 'supernatural.' Instead there's only Gödel and Metzinger.
Question 1: Example, please?
Question 1.5: In what way does the example not make sense grammatically?
Question 2.0-2.(n): To what degree does grammar 'matter'? Is conformance to some prescriptive view of grammar essential to 'good' writing? What is the function of grammar - precision and disambiguation? Are there contexts in which grammar can or should be subservient to other linguistic effects, such as prosody? Are there other phenomenological effects of reading to which grammar may or may not be relevant?
An exercise for the motivated reader: Read 'A Carafe that is a Blind Glass' by Gertrude Stein. What does it feel like? What does it evoke? What are we doing mentally when we read it? What are we doing when we read?
Between that and the "is the thing I really want to watch available or not?" queue lottery, I got fed up a few years ago and ditched them completely. The general streaming experience has become so awful that I'll just go to Youtube or Amazon and pay $4 to get precisely what I want for 48 hours, instead of googling to figure out who the hell currently has 'Heat' or whatever on their streaming platform.
It's amazing, we've looped around to 1999. You have to surf around to see where and if what you want is even available - people even make aggregate guides to tell you what's on where (a TV Guide, if you will). A decent amount of the time, depending on your tastes, the thing you want probably isn't available on a platform you're currently paying for.
Tragically, though, you don't get the irreplaceable experience of talking in person with a full-bore, unfiltered Video Store Guy.
I agree that modern copyright law is atrocious and stifling, but the whole "I have sympathy for artists, but..." thing is just grimly exhausting and depressing at this point. I feel nothing but despair. I've spent a lot of time interacting with ChatGPT and image models, and when people say this, all I can do is wonder how other people interact with art and literature.
Every iteration of ChatGPT I've seen is an astoundingly bad prose stylist. Even Dan friggin' Brown is capable of more nuance and grace. At a sentence-to-sentence level, everything that burbles forth from ChatGPT's maw is joyless, flavorless garbage. It's an undifferentiated slurry that has all the verve of a corporate onboarding manual, mated with a self-help book, written by Reddit's gestalt consciousness.
Statistically aping surface form is low-hanging-fruit. Even if you just want (ugh) 'content' in the raw sense of the word - stuff that fills time between when we're born and when we're dead - I am skeptical current Large-Whatever-Models will get there. Everything they do is wholly divorced from being an agent in a physical reality. This is why image models can't even do (what-do-you-call-them, oh yeah) hands. There's a difference between regurgitating variants on two-dimensional representations of hands and drawing hands. I am similarly skeptical that a large-text-model can ever do anything that captures inner experience in a truly novel way. I just firmly do not believe that a text model trained on works written prior to Faulkner's career - regardless of how much goading you gave it - could produce "As I Lay Dying."
Wake me when a GPT model can write a thriller that delivers the rainslick weltschmerz and dread of Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.' Until I see an AI put out something on par with "Move. Once you stop, you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move," I will fear the idea of AI being pushed as any sort of salvation from the overreach of copyright law.
If it does end up being the solution we get, I worry we will have to augment the free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech axes with free-as-in-dumpster-diving.
What armitron said was, "it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it." The verb 'synthesize' implies the exact opposite of what you've construed them as saying.
I cannot tell you how much of a balm this is for my sanity.
Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not something I generally complain about with Stephenson. Even when he misfires, the result is usually entertaining. Being bland is a bigger sin, IMO, and not one he commits often.
I think the two go hand-in-hand for me. Having both is best, but I'll take either.
> but you seem you like your complex language constructs, so to speak?
Hah, my writing style owes to more to me not taking the time to edit that I should. Also ADHD. Probably both.
> English is a second language to me. I wonder if isn't also a factor.
Hm. I don't know! I could see some of the sections being a real slog, though.
> The ideas in Snow Crash where really the most important things.. next to brilliant writing style (the deliverator...).
I love the collection of ideas, it was a fun bit of sci-fi! I just felt like it was missing something to really make it fit together better.
I agree that the writing is a ton of fun in it too, I love the opening bit describing how the Uncle Enzo's Pizza company runs a whole battery of experiments to try and understand why people are so aggressive about late pizza. I think about this stretch and laugh very hard every once in a while: "... [Uncle Enzo's Pizza's researchers] studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn’t respond without committing a venial sin."
I'm a big Stephenson fan, and I find his post-Cryptonomicon stuff more focused (or at least more cohesive? Structurally cogent?) on a conceptual level. I revisited Snow Crash a few years ago, and liked it much, much less than I remembered - I wouldn't describe it as a disciplined novel. It's a baggy mess with the same maximalist bent of his later work. it's a discursive, meandering story that synthesizes disparate concepts in a very fun way. But, it never gels too well; it sort of feels like he lashed a hyper-globalized-strip-mall-hellscape dystopia to a parody of the cyberpunk aesthetic, and superglued both of those things to Julian Jaynes. It just happens to indulge his maximalist tendencies in a smaller page budget, and fails to get the best of either a short novel or a big messy "idea-novel."
Don't get me wrong, like you, I found the first reading of Snow Crash a formative experience as a SF fan. But I'd also never read anything like cyberpunk; I was solidly a Niven Kid in middle school, completely ignorant of post-New Wave SF. I think a lot of what I found special as a kid was actually done better elsewhere.
In terms of that "90's Retrofuturistic So-Cal Strip Mall Apocalypse" brand of cyberpunk, I think William Gibson's Virtual Light was far more satisfying to revisit. It's a more assured, contained novel, and to my surprise, I think the relative restraint yields a much funnier novel than Snow Crash.
Even beyond that, the general impression I get w.r.t stuff like supermaneuverability is that it's a much better use of money to ensure that most fights never even make it to the point where the stuff like the cobra seems like a good idea. Given the choice between 1) "marginally improving survivability in comparatively low-energy corner-case states" and 2) "increasing the odds that the fight never makes it to the merge," #2 seems like a much better choice in terms of money spent and pilots kept alive. (Though a counterpoint, I guess, based my my casual understanding, would be that making the judgment too heavily in favor of #2 was part of what hampered the USAF and Navy's air-to-air combat capabilities in Vietnam)
Edit: Also, that livery is an "aftermarket" custom one, and it is... something. I guess the dude really likes Räikkönen?