Anything happen this week that reminded you of something we've read or an idea we've discussed? If so, tell about it here. This blog will remain open for the remainder of the week--maybe a little longer.
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The Grotto is a place where students in The Grotesque in Twentieth Century Literature (351:393) can share ideas about common texts and issues. NOTE FINAL EXAM INFO ON SIDE -->
FINAL EXAM INFORMATION
Remember that the final exam is this Thursday (the 7th) at 8:00 in our usual classroom in Scott Hall. Look over your syllabus and review the works on which your memory may be a little foggy. See you there!
Talking of the minuteness with which people will record the sayings of eminent persons, a story was told, that when Pope was on a visit to Spence at Oxford, as they looked from the window they saw a Gentleman Commoner, who was just come in from riding, amusing himself with whipping at a post. Pope took occasion to say, “That young gentleman seems to have little to do.” Mr. Beauclerk observed, “Then, to be sure, Spence turned round and wrote that down;” and went on to say to Dr. Johnson, “Pope, Sir, would have said the same of you, if he had seen you distilling.” JOHNSON. “Sir, if Pope had told me of my distilling, I would have told him of his grotto.”
--Boswell's Life of Johnson
--Boswell's Life of Johnson
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I watched No Country for Old Men for the first time this week and my cousin and a couple of friends decided to join in on the viewing. Not even halfway through the film, my cousin remarks, “That’s stupid. The first thing I would’ve done with the money was switch it out into another bag.” Really? Was that really the first thing that that you would have done? It is uncanny how similar criticisms on art are, even when they’re made by different viewers in the real world. When Bond films flip cars through the air, viewers scoff at the disregard to the laws of physics; when movies mirror reality viewers think they’ve one-upped the characters with tricks they’ve learned from other movie clichés.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t know how to respond, so I just told him that I didn’t think that he would have. He was proved wrong anyway when the transmitter was found within a bundle of cash, “Oh,” he said. More of these comments went on and he found it “oddly coincidental” that Chigurh and Wells would find Llewellyn and each other at the same spots and at the same times. No, they are just very good at what they do. Eventually even my friends found his commentary unbearable and have since lovingly dubbed him “Buzz Killington.”
We watch movies for artistic expression, for entertainment, as lies that reveal something about the truth of the world and sometimes we forget it.
By the way, this same cousin is an avid comic book enthusiast. I just don’t understand.
And something that blew my mind, thanks to IMDB.com: In the novel (but not in the movie), Sheriff Bell says of the dope-dealers, "Here a while back in San Antonio they shot and killed a federal judge." McCarthy set the story in 1980. In 1979, in San Antonio, Federal Judge John Howland Wood was shot and killed by rifle fire by a Texas free-lance contract killer named Charles Harrelson. Actor Woody Harrelson (Carson Wells in the movie) is his son.
Today in my Computer Vision class we learned about an important algorithm called Eigenfaces. Essentially what computer scientists have done is developed a system with which a human face can be uniquely identified. A sample of images is taken for the people who need to be identified, a mathematical average is taken, and the images are then decomposed by order of the ways they differ significantly from the average. The collection of decomposed images are called the eigenfaces, and they represent the ways, in order of significance, that the collection of human faces tended to be different from one another. On a mathematical level, this is pretty elegant, but the eigenfaces themselves are quite grotesque. Here's a sample:
ReplyDeletehttp://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6011/1976/1600/eignface.1.jpg
What the computer program that recognizes you does is find the weighted sum of decomposed face images that best fits the new image it just took of you. In the recognition database, you are stored as simply a set of those weights- for example, Joe might be 10 parts Image 1 and 3 parts Image 2 and 5 parts Image 3, and so on. The entire process is straightforward, sterile, and requires no more computing power than you have in your iPhone.
Besides the grotesque nature of decomposing something as beautiful and complex as a human face into a sum of nonnons, the eigenfaces algorithm reminded me of the issues about transparency from Invitation to a Beheading. The eigenfaces algorithm can't deal with anything it hasn't seen before. Here's an example of recognizing a face that went into the decomposition set, that is, the algorithm takes into account the way this face is unique:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~sis26/Recognition_Section_files/image006.jpg
Heres an attempt of the same algorithm on a face it wasn't trained with:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~sis26/Recognition_Section_files/image010.jpg
Just like Cincinnatus's jailers, computer algorithms such as eigenfaces have no capacity for creativity. In the same way Cincinnatus made no sense to Rodrig and M'seiur Pierre because they had never encountered someone who wouldn't play the part of the stock characters they understood, eigenfaces makes no sense of a human face that isn't just like one it has seen before. Both Nabokov and Eigenfaces remind us that trying to understand other people as a weighted collection of their superficial features is bound to fail as soon as you encounter something new.
Pat H
This is by no means as interesting as eigenfaces, but over break my grandfather time and time again became Ed Tom Bell.
ReplyDeleteThe first weekend I got home he and I and some of my family went out to dinner. He'll talk to whoever he sits across from, telling stories he's told time and time again to whoever is in the unlucky seat... but I love him for it... and this time it was me. He told me this, and I'll try to get as close to his words as possible:
"About forty years ago on Christmas Eve I was comin' home from cards and in the midst of my divorce and I got to thinking and driving a little fast. And a cop pulled me over. State trooper. I knew some state troopers and I got to dropping names. And he looked at me and he said, 'I don't care who you know so stop talking.' So, I sat back and I said, 'Well, do you believe in Santa Claus?' And he said, 'Yes I do.' And I said, 'Well officer you'd be the best Santa Claus I ever knew if you didn't write me this ticket.' And then he told me to get goin' and slow down."
Now, I've heard that story a hundred times. He usually tells it the same way. But what he said next reminded me of No Country spot on. He said,
"Well... you can't get away with things like you used to. Now today you see on the news half the time a cop pulls somebody over they're liable to have dope on 'em or start shooting. That's all you see on the news anymore anyways. Dope and democrats. Makes me sick."
I just smiled and looked at him and told myself that one day we all become Sheriff Bell in our own way... whether we're the cop or the one getting pulled over.
-- Patrick Danner
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ReplyDeleteI’ve had a Cincinnatus-like observation. This week, working closely with my boss on a report, we can’t seem to hear each other. It’s not all bad, but some days are tougher than others.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn’t hear me, I struggle to pay attention to him. I can’t stay focused on his words; they seem to slip by me and I get distracted by other things. Since he doesn’t listen to what I say, I find myself (or my other self) saying things like “I guess what I’m saying doesn’t matter.” Like C. with the Warden flapping on and on. He seems to listen, and then disregards anything I say. Normally, I would feel that this is a case of bitching about my boss, but then, I started thinking about Cincinnatus.
What do we expect in our work and professional lives? We expect to have insights that matter: That’s why we are here. We want to affect the direction that our work will take: we want to have control and an impact. Some days it doesn’t work that way. There are those times when you come to realize that you are only providing a mirror for the boss, the client, the co-worker. You don’t really exist, you have no impact. They see what they were prepared to see, not open to a chance that there could be a new or interesting thought. Others probably see me the same way. It’s the nature of life, and not just work. It’s the routine.
Work, however, is most like the prison, because so many things are beyond our control. Work goes on monotonously, with a slight change in the jailer’s disposition and the characters around you. Office managers, clerks, temps, etc. They come and go, they change shirts or hair, but they begin to be transparent placeholders. Life in an office reflects this so well. It’s why The Office and Dilbert hit home to so many. I could be reading too much into this, but the best days are like dreams and the average day has no record. There is a quote about no one on their deathbed wishing they spent more time in the office.
- Tim Oswald
In my creative writing fiction class, my teacher invited the writer Wells Tower to read a bit of one of his short stories and talk with us, answering any questions we might have about his stories or about getting published, etc. I do not remember what was the question but it was about how or when he decides to write in grotesque detail or have something horrific happen to a character. In his response, he mentioned Flannery O'Connor and how she creates characters that are horrible people but that in the end of her stories she always "appears out of the clouds and smites her characters with a lightning bolt". I personally thought that was an excellent description of how her short stories end.
ReplyDeleteChrystal Yan
This event in no way demonstrates some deeper theme to the books we’ve discussed, but I found it kind of amusing, and have learned not to follow the example of the characters we read about.
ReplyDeleteFor weeks now, my roommate and I have been ignoring these annoying phone calls that we’ve been getting from an unknown number. This number has been calling at least two to three times a week, and they always leave the same barely decipherable message asking for a person named Gordon Reynaldo. Neither of us have any idea who Gordon Reynaldo is, and they never identify themselves in the message, so for little while we just learned to ignore any calls from that number.
A few days ago, I was sitting alone in the apartment and the phone rang. I anticipated that it would be the unknown number since they always call around the same time of day for some reason (and honestly they call us more often than our friends and family), but instead of letting it go to the machine, I decided to answer it for no good reason. So I picked up the phone and said hello, and the woman on the other end of the line predictably asked if she could speak to Gordon Reynaldo. Now I don’t know if this is because I was in the middle of reading City of Glass or if I just wanted to get to the bottom of these annoying phone calls, but I replied by saying “Uh, this is he.” Besides the obvious issue that I am not Gordon Reynaldo, I don’t think I sound much like a Gordon, but this didn’t seem to bother her.
I guess a little part of me thought that the call could be about something interesting like a detective job, but that’s not what I got. Instead she continued by saying that she was from a collection agency and apparently Gordon owed some money. She said all of this pretty fast and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, so I panicked and quickly hung up the phone. Now we get a call every day, and we’re thinking about disconnecting our phone.
Thanks Paul Auster.
- Kristen S.
Okay. This isn't as good as the other posts, but it still struck me as a moment that would be in City of Glass.
ReplyDeleteSo, I was reading the last few pages of City of Glass. Then I had a moment where I felt like Peter Stillman Sr. A guy walked in to where I was reading the book and sat behind me at a table. I turned around to look at him and turned back. I had seen him before, but I have no idea where or when. This happens all the time. But then a few minutes later I turn around again and he is looking at me and said "Hey", to which I replied back similarly and turned away. Then he just starts talking to me as if we were buddies.
He literally started talking to me, beginning half way through a conversation he had had previously (but I don't think with me). Anyway, this goes on for about ten minutes and then he started talking with an accent and talking about fish and chips so I left.
So the point is this— I have no idea who this guy is. All I know is that at some point I have seen him and spoke to him (as his voice sounded very familiar), but I have no idea where our previous interaction took place—if it even did! Literally, his face and voice I am familiar with, but where, when, how, or why, I have absolutely no clue. It was at that point where I felt a little like Stillman, or maybe Quinn, or maybe both.
--Stephen D Beeston
Great work! Post closed.
ReplyDelete