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Julio Cortázar - Hopscotch
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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Now, I have read it through in the first order, Chapters 1 through 56, and found that there was still a third of the book yet to be read.
It's not a slender book, at some 600 pages, and it's not an easy read, for the most part. This is a good thing, the language and references are dense and there's a great many things I should be looking up. Words like Maldorors, Pataphysics, Melmoths, Octave Mirbeau's "The Torture Garden", there are innumerable, overwhelming cultural references of which I recognize only a few. When last I read books set in Paris, Hemmingway, Maughm and others, there was no internet, you knew the reference or you didn't and if you were lucky you got a footnote that explained it.
Now, now I have the internet, and I'm - not forever, but often enough, setting it down to go down some rabbit-hole suggested by the author. Not all pan out, but enough, enough.
A Sampling, googling the protagonist's encounter with Berthe Trepat - who turns out to be a fictional pianist, looking up on YouTube to find that in fact there's been music composed in her honor - in this twist of modernity, had a footnote been around some 30 years ago when last I did this sort of reading she would merely have been a fictional character, now, in the age of the internet, fiction becomes reality...
Her description, on page 106: "There was something moving about that face of a burlap-stuffed doll, of a plush turtle, of an immense nitwit stuck in a rancid world of chipped teapots..."
Now, I have finished it in the first order, now to read it again in the order prescribed by the author which will fill in for all the missing chapters and pages.
In the beginning, a little annoyed, "too soon", but the prose has a lyrical quality, a poetry, intensity, that reading it again I'm finding new ways to understand it.
An excellent book.
Cookies VS Google
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 710
And, since the advent of Chat GPT I've noticed Google "upping" it's game, to little avail. YouTube for the most part recommends garbage, and my "Personalized" news feed on Google is mostly dubious sources reporting on shit like MMA and Hockey and Basketball, none of which I've ever searched in my entire life.
I notice, however, how well other sites do with their cookies. For example, my "Line drawing in the style of ...." request to Dall-E has resulted in 1stDibs showing me a ton of line drawing prints. I wouldn't think a cookie was set for that, but I'd be wrong. And other queries generate similar things, write a post on my blog and - coincidence by coincidence - there will be something advertised very close to what I searched for, sooner often than later.
If you were superstitious you would think it's magic. It is, it's the magic of AI governing the internet.
Anyways, a long day today bent double in the field picking up mostly nothing and a few good pieces, good to get away from Nelson, but my back is hurting from all that stooped searching and time now to read my book and go to bed...
IN Which Nick Cave takes a dim view of Chat GPT
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
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As the headline states, readers of his blog have been using Chat GPT to send Nick songs in his own style.
He's not too impressed.
I get it - we'll all be redundant soon, but here's his take on it:
Link: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/
Artifacts & Artifancies
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
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Not in the mood for Nelson today, weather grey but warm, i headed out to Balfour to spend the day searching for flakes.
Lots of flakes, not a lot of worthwhile other finds:
a flake in the sand, got me excited, it was big, but - on pulling it out - just a flake.
The days take. Bottom left - a knife - flaked on one side only, above it a couple of worked flakes, a few of which may have been small arrowheads. In the center next column a worked bit of chert on both sides, but no sharp edges, presumably abandoned. The big pieces are "blanks", larger pieces of chert from which arrowheads & points would be knocked off as needed. And to the right, lots of flakes, many still razor sharp. Some show a bit of serrating along a particular edge, so were probably used for scraping, the rest, the natural detritus of tool creation.
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