John Crowley's Blog, page 37

US v. AI

 Haven't posted in a while, w/w [netspeak for "what with"] the Helen Keller project reaching critical mass, 100 applications for my Intro Fiction class next semester, and a hard-drive failure (the computer was owned by Yale, which is providing a new hard drive and recovering the data, yay, which I had saved to MozyPro but not adequately).  When I asked the techie at Yale why the hard drive had failed, she said "It died."   I thought this was a sensible answer.  

Meanwhile many deep thoughts and whimsical remarks have passed into oblivion that might have been recorded here for the Internet equivalent of all time.  

All that by way of preface to this clip --

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/i-b-m-supercomputer-watson-to-challenge-jeopardy-stars/ 

--about the IBM "Watson" Jeopardy matchup, which you know about, valuable not for the info but for a hilarious string of comments, of which my favorite was from a doctor in Oakland:  "Can't be too long before a "Blade Runner" Sean Young lookalike droids controlled with t.v. like remote will free men from the tyranny of women."  Anyone care to parse that?  

Me and Harry Mulisch

 The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch has died recently.  I haven't read his work, but I was involved with him in one of the odder incidents -- so unlikely as to be positively dreamlike -- of my writing life.

When my book The Translator was published in Italian, it was given a Premio Flaiano, a prize named for the writer, journalist, screenwriter (collaborator of Fellini's) Emilio Flaiano, and awarded for work in translation.  My Italian publisher brought me to Italy to take part in the finals of this prize, in which all the winners of the prize would be up for a Super-prixze.  (There was real money involved -- $5000 for the prize, and another $5000 for the winner of the Superprize.)  The ceremony was held in a rundown Adriatic resort where Flaiano had lived, up the coast from Fellini's home town, and still resembling an early Fellini film.  The whole show was televised, shot live in an outdoor arena, with joky TV co hosts.  Prizes were first given out for film and screenwriting and broadcasting.  Then -- well, as it turned out the Superprize was to be awarded on the basis of votes cast by many people throughout Italy to whom ballots had been sent -- critics, teachers, librarians, I don't remember who -- and I suddenly realized that the ballots would be counted live on screen.  All we writers were in the audience, in fact in the first rows, where the camera could pick out out anxious or yearning or indifferent faces.  I was seated next to Harry Mulisch, up for The Discovery of Heaven;  there were five or six other nominees,and my publisher had warned me that an Italian was among them, and would probably win.  The votes were counted by being drawn one by one from the ballot boxes by the judges, who would announce who it was for, and a tabulation board would record in a bar graph who was ahead.  The Italian took an early lead.  Now and then Mulisch and I would glance at one another (each of us in a summer white suit) and smile.  Then the voting turned:  the Italian woman, and a historical novelist, and a couple of others fell behind.  Harry Mulisch and I began getting the majority of the votes.  As each one came from the box the name would be called out:  Mulisch.  Crowley.  Crowley.  Mulisch.  Our faces loomed over the stage on the big screens. We were neck and neck, sometimes he ahead a few and then me catching up.  In the end I hit a streak and won.  He regarded me with distant interest -- who is this person? -- and I believe I offered a handshake, but anyway we parted without a word.  I had to go up on stage and speak -- about translation -- to the giddy gal host..  As I say, like a dream.  

Me in DC

 I had no idea I was so beloved as to have been elected to Congress, but I certainly agree with myself on this topic:

health.change.org/blog/view/dems_tell_gop_to_walk_that_walk_and_give_up_federal_health_benefits

Who not to be in Las Vegas

 

Am I wrong or do I recognize the man in the Hawaiian shirt?

www.concierge.com/ideas/hotspots/tours/501083#

But what happened to me then?

 

No follow up as to whether I was charged with this murder or not.  I feelI remember this incident, as full as a long bad dream of futile attempts to make things come out all right and the growing horror of having done something dreadful that can never be made better.  

www.bobmackreth.com/blog/

Speaking of Facebook

 

My daughter Z, whose movie opinions I sometimes share here, has long been an athlete -- with some gap years -- and has been a swimmer on the US Junior Paralympic team, a swimming coach, and a kayaker.  Z uses a wheelchair and has always been interested in methods that will help her participate in outdoor activities.  She worked with the kayak club at her college, UMass, to develop a means of helping her get down to the water and into her kayak.  That has led to meeting the following challenge.  Here's the info from her group:  

A month and a half ago the University of Massachusetts Outing Club (UMOC) came upon an interesting proposal. Polartec, a long time leader in recreational outerwear issued a challenge "The Polartec Made Possible Challenge" to the nation’s outdoor enthusiasts offering 10,000 dollars and 40,000 dollars worth of merchandise for the most worthy outdoors related project idea. Resolving to enter the competition, UMOC leaders decided to create a proposal to start an adaptive recreation program at the school hoping to give students with physical disabilities the resources necessary to join their compatriots in numerous club activities including kayaking, canoeing, hiking, rock climbing, and more. Two weeks after submitting their video proposal the club became one of four finalists nationwide narrowing the gap in the competition for Polartec’s 10,000 dollars. Today, students are rallying to make this project dream a reality. For the next three weeks (until November 30th) Polartec will be soliciting votes on facebook, allowing facebook users across the country to cast a maximum of one vote a day for whatever challenge applicant they support.

More information follows about the club's program. Most importantly though -- if you are on Facebook, go vote early and often for Z's group, UMOC, University of Massachusetts Outing Club. Of course you are free to vote for another project, or none, but don't.  Here's the link: www.facebook.com/Polartec

For too long, people with limited mobility have been excluded from the adventures of our outing club because we lacked the technology needed to assist them. Now, with innovations like mountain wheelchairs, adaptive climbing equipment, and river portaging gurneys, individuals from all different backgrounds can experience new and incredible challenges.

Membership to the UMASS Outing Club is open to the local Five College network and everyone in the Pioneer Valley community, not just students of the university. With the help of the Polartec Made Possible grant, UMOC will truly be open to anyone who wants to join.

UMOC will elect a new officer to head the development of the Integrated Adaptive Recreation Program and to take initiative to raise awareness of these amazing opportunities. Polartec’s grant money will be used to purchase adaptive outdoor sports equipment as well as fund adaptive technology research at UMASS and Hampshire College’s Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center. Additionally the grant will be used to enable further fundraising. By ensuring an ongoing financial base we will keep the UMOC Adaptive Recreation Program viable and growing! Receiving this grant will not just improve our own club; it will allow us to honor the principle that people with disabilities deserve the broadest sense of freedom possible.

The University of Massachusetts Outing Club is committed to taking people into the gorgeous outdoors around us! We want to make the activities we explore - hiking, canoeing, white water rafting and kayaking, backpacking, and rock climbing among them - accessible to every student and community member in the Pioneer Valley. Our mission is to be actively mindful of varying degrees of physical mobility. We hope that Polartec will "make it possible", through their generous offer of funding, for us to run fully integrated and accessible trips by purchasing and developing adaptive outdoor sports equipment. With their help and yours, we can do it!

Me Hurling

www.sarsfields.ie/index.php 

Actually I haven't done a lot of hurling since I gave up drinking Old J.T.S. Brown bourbon in college, so the award is unexpected.

crowleycrow @ 2010-11-16T16:41:00

C.F., the artist who will be (actually, IS, right now) illustrating the Small Beer issue of The Chemical Wedding, is touring and stuff for his new book, Powr Mastrs 3 [sic].  This is very cool.  


picturebox.createsend1.com/t/r/l/echll/dtttddlty/b

Oh well, or Goodbye to all that

 Zadie Smith has a fine article in the new New York Review of Books about "The Social Network," Mark Zuckerberg, Generation 2.0. and all.  (She admits to being Gen 1.0, and says she texts in full sentences, with punctuation.  I am so 1.0 I can't even text; I forget how many times you have to press the little numbers to get the right letter, and I didn't even know that punctuation exists.)  She goes to a screening, and observes the mostly Zuckerberg-aged or younger crowd enjoy the whole thing immensely if a bit ironically. She notes:  "At my screening when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia) the audience laughed... I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal."  

So I will just go wait back here till Mark Zuckerberg arrives from the obsolete present, laughed at by Gen 3.0, if they laugh.

RLS

 Today is Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday.  Like Jorge Luis Borges I am an admirer of Stevenson, and have written about him.  Treasure Island is one of the few perfect books I know of, not a sentence in it wrong, the effects of motion, light, aliveness so strong and delicate.  N.C. Wyeth's illustrations can almost (nto quite) do it justice:  that aquamarine sky, that sea-light that pales colors.  

But read if you haven't The Suicide Club for an exquisitely constructed story, The Pavilion on the Links for a model thriller, all polished to gemlike gloss.  Wiothout for a moment being precious in the other wrong sense.

Tomorrow:  Why We must all abandon LiveJournal, alas.