Grey

 

It’s funny how grey is not most people’s ideal colour for hope, isn’t it? They wish for nothing but blue skies from now on, a fund of yellow to warm the cold earth and raise those countless greening stems. Yet grey is all there is up there of water, horizons full to the brim moving in our direction. Grey is about the sum of it really, whether soft or hard, fluffy or daggers, clouds as ordinary and indescribable as ever, as morning does it again. The grizzles that greet drizzles replace the complaints that meet heatwaves, and where will it all end? Hopefully, with more water-laden skies, wouldn’t you say? It’s good to know where our next drink is coming from. Such train embankment thoughts move rapidly from those ones to these ones. It was more than a passing thought bubble, as they say, that got this morning this hot air balloon up there. 10% aspiration. 90% perspiration. Yet, for all that, the grey matter takes full responsibility, as the balloon (any colour except grey, or black) proves physics correct one more time and sightseers enjoy the entire map of early morning colours below. It’s funny too to think that the brain must be kept well-watered, the most stupendous grey cloud, up there, that never experiences the full light of day, floating on its own stem in the sepulchral half-light afforded by its dome. Grey matter is a fountain requiring, like the rest of us, more water than we can imagine, and are we grateful? More than we think, who are composed of over 50% water and rely on bone density to walk around, cared for by gravity, and a decent drop. Train windows are ideal frames for such passing bubbles, thoughts seeming set on staying on the move, first hovering on first principles, next moment wafting like so much hot air over a brewery, then evaporating it sees only to return like an autumn shower at some unlikely moment. 10% inspiration. 90% repetition. It’s funny, isn’t it, how for a short time people leave their city down below, where grey brick is the new cream brick, free to exercise their landmark skills or squat in the corner like a basket case. Abbotsford never looked so picturesque, so original, as from a balloon. Heritage tin roofs are painted green and red. Apartment towers crowd for attention, fifty shades of grey. Or rear like thunderheads from the ground down there in condominium satellite suburbs. It is well that the rain holds off, the uplifted sightseers think, hope springing eternal for the duration of the trip. While others, here below, sit in the Jolimont express, a carriage-load of Whistler’s mothers in surgical masks, watching the dapples and greys pass their windows: sunup and clouds and apartments and grassless grey lots and funny-looking inflatable structures the brain invented way back in the Enlightenment sometime.

Blue

 

It’s curious, isn’t it, living across the street from our local topiarist. On fair days he steps out along the footpath, setting out secateurs, small saws, pruners, and so forth near the fence where no one will put their foot on them. That would be a nasty accident. His desire to turn the stretching branches of the trees and shrubs in his garden into figures of geometry is one of nature’s paradoxes. It’s hard to imagine when clipping a tree went from the need to produce more fruit to an interest in how round to make a tree that was already fairly round. Perhaps I should google it. Sometimes we sit with our Spode teacups on the verandah bemused, watching him getting rounder and rounder with the various excellent exotics he planted equidistant from each other, presumably for this very purpose, too long ago to recall. He makes hand measurements from the nature strip against the sky, artist of all he surveys, before setting to at a fair clip. This, we observe, nibbling anzacs, is a Sisyphean task when it comes to the cootamundra, which no sooner is rendered round than it redoubles efforts at shooting fresh fronds of blue in all directions, geysers of turquoise, impossibly disinterested in the spherical or polygonal. We ponder also the eucalypt, another tree that goes to extraordinary lengths to escape the rigours of topiary, being more accustomed to the rigours of intense heat and cold. Living in the Heidelberg District, we question if our neighbour is not trying to return his trees to the European forms of artists before Withers and Streeton. If so, then clearly with only partial success. Blue, though what blue, becomes the subject as we marvel in our minds at how Roberts and McCubbin paid proper attention to the blue of blue gums, a dusty blue the same more or less on certain days as the Blue Dandenongs we observe most days from the ridge, a blue shared with the imported cootamundras that many locals call weeds. The frilly leaves may be pale green and soft blue and edged with purple in the light, blue being the shade we agree upon, though dissenters say more greenish, others a mauve at certain times and in a certain mood. A book probably has some technical word. Our neighbour certainly sees the form beneath the foliage, we agree, he smooths it all out with scissor precision, but for how long? Much longer than tea time? Fairly surely we are not expecting a patch of forever England, are we then, given the native tree’s race against time means streaking out in all directions. Not that this ever deters our neighbour for a moment. He will be out again on the next fair day, beautifying the view with his latest renderings of the conical conifer, undulant hedge, and right-angled variegated. He collects his implements till then, even as we take inside the remains of our tea things and our snip-snap chit-chat.

Anonymous

 

Iso-mandala No. 33, July 2020

How would a student reference online forms of AI if allowed to use them? What is the citation format? This was never a question until this year because this year is the lift-off, the launch without champagne breaking on the bow, of the chatbot. The chatbot generates human-like text prompted, we believe, by actual humans. Poetry, which makes what is plain, mysterious and what’s mysterious plain, reads of this invention with the same mixture of consternation and curiosity as other fields of human enquiry. While cataloguers, those pre-eminent practitioners of citation, ask the very pre-2023 question, who is responsible for the work in hand? Anecdotal evidence in these early stages of launch suggest that AI-generated texts are, at best, co-authored; the two authors being human and machine. This simple equation breaks down as soon as we see that the machine contribution may be drawn from any number of unknown and unacknowledged authors who produced their own sentient sentences decades or even centuries before they were chatbottled. Is the catalogue record going to include all of them? Is the thesis bibliography about to list single citations as long as your arm? The solution in the launch period is to cite the link, but what happens when link goes clink? Authorship is sacrosanct, certainly now since it is being found that its sanctity is under attack. When I apply AI to the sermons of John Donne, it would take a Donne-like ego to claim they were my words, or his for that matter. The one responsible for the work in hand (or screen, perchance) is the mysterious third person, or in fact non-person, that convention calls Anonymous. Chatbots are generating more anonymous material in a short time than every town crier and pamphleteer recorded in state libraries worldwide. Respectability, or simple honesty, might like to attach Pseudonymous to its text-based productions, though pseudonyms are one of a cataloguer’s most time-consuming rabbit holes. It’s quite enough trying to deal with the Revd. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s never-ending mathematical games with words anyway, without having to work out when or if he’s Lewis Carroll as well. Pseudonyms will proliferate, each more difficult to trace than the last one, until libraries will be required to advertise for a Pseudonyms Cataloguer, or similar. Chatbots might be in the honeymoon period, but ask not for whom the bell tolls. The anonymous chatbot cannot speak for you, but can only generate what it has been told. For this reason it is not a human with a name and the gift of knowing past, present, and future. Once a sentient human has used the pseudonym Frumious Bandersnatch for their co-authored chatbot essay, can anyone else use Frumious Bandersnatch, or will that cause a clash of name authorities?   

 

 

Grody (Zappa)

 Overture from the Mamas and the Papas.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgcdq3uceQ

One of the most sublime pop songs ever performed by the Mamas and the Papas, arguably one of their greatest, is a song about Valley girls called ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls are coming to the Canyon)’ (1967).   It was never a big hit. Oddly, the only Top Forty hit of the even more prolific Frank Zappa was an unsublime novelty song called ‘Valley Girl’ (1982), all about the idiolect of Valley girls in California, known as Valley Speak. For this reason, for some people, the most famous word in the Zappa lexicon is ‘grody’, used by Moon Unit Zappa near the end of the song in the line “Grody to the max.” When I first noticed grody over ten years ago I wrote innocently, “Grody has not travelled beyond the shores of North America. You will not hear this word in the streets of Melbourne, though gross is a close synonym.” At that time I quarried the Urban Dictionary, where the word was added as late as 2002, thus: “Nasty, dirty, disgusting, foul, revolting, yucky.” The example sentence: “Are you sure you want to eat that Chinese food? It looks all grody.” The compilers conjectured that it was an Americanised pronunciation of the British word grotty. The Free Dictionary traced usage to the mid-1960s, where grody was an adjective meaning “Repellent, dirty, disgusting, sleazy, seedy.” There is even the comparative grodier and superlative grodiest. Zappa’s lyric reaches for the superlative of grody, if not further. It’s a piece of social satire about indulged Valley girls that doesn’t bear relistening. Revisiting grody this weekend I find, to my surprise, that the Online Etymology Dictionary states it is a variant of grotty, then confusingly a slang shortening of grotesque. Grody “had a brief vogue in 1964 as part of the argot popularized by the Beatles in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’,” which explains a lot; we recall that Paul’s dodgy grandfather was a very clean man. Paul was possibly though unaware that the word “unconsciously echoes Middle English ‘groti’ “muddy, slimy”, from Old English grotig “earthy”, from grot “particle””, according to the Dictionary, which raises the question of when something is grotesque, a word derived from Italian not Old English, and when something is grotty. Ask a Valley Girl, I guess. She will tell you when the clothes from that shop are grotesque, or grotty, or both, and why having to wash the dishes for your mother, dishes with stuff that sticks to the plates and it’s like other people’s food and y’know it’s like grody, grody to the max.   

 

This is the second of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.

Alphaville

 

My menu remote flicks through New Wave. Clicking the choose file I enter Alphaville. My identity links me to Alphaville. Already, Alphaville. A is for Eiffel Tower. His film noir mind is an artificial intelligence. Dark streets offer sanctuary to nameless walkers in search of their name below bright lights, big city. Everyone anonymous has a code name, an alias, a password, pin numbers to somewhere north or south they need. They think. Nothing much is explained. No one in Alphaville asks Why. There is only Because. Like watching Jean-Luc Godard, the black-and-white of the Present, Because, retelling the story of Alpha60 sixty years later. Like living with intermittent commercials on this streaming service. Colour bursts a random gunshot. Orange. A nice time to check the laundry cycle, something real, something moist. Only takes a few seconds. Then it’s back to the grainy future. Bright screen, sixties faces. Women here in Alphaville are shapes. They serve the servants of the supermind. Relationships do not develop. They stay in their lab coats. Prostitutes keep to their lines. Functionaries have one function. Like spies and technicians. I want to step away from this place. Away from a computer telling me in smoky basso profondo the story of my day. But then I would be before long keying in codes to reconnect with my very own Alpha60, its googlography, scamtecture and chatbotomies. If, I ask my bloggerama, Eddie Constantine were Agent 86 and Anna Karina  were Agent 99, would we enjoy Alphaville more? Is Professor Von Braun just the latest incarnation of a kooky Kaos ‘mastermind’? When he threatens you with death for feeling, is he being funny? Does his sentient computer system Alpha60 have complete Control of Alphaville the way my life is in the grip of Send-and-Receive? They are smooth and seductive, but computers may be kept at arm’s length. They return me, for all my efforts, an algorithm of appetites. I think. Perhaps 86 was right to delete Von Braun and his symmetrical spectacles. Now 99 can breathe again. She has learnt to say love, out loud, not sotto voce to an unfeeling camera. It’s a caution to us all. There is Why. Speaking poetry is a personal act of memory no computer can imitate. As 86 says, deadpan, “it is the immediate data of consciousness.” Streamatronics, interfacials, gambolygames, shapelishiftishimmerings, and all the other services of our own private Alpha60 cannot speak the data of consciousness to those we know and cherish. Or send a reply that at least tries, a compliment free of compliance. FIN appears romantically, yet as I remote End I stare a while at the black screen, its promise of endless information, artificial infinitude, a supermind my mind must choose to avoid.        

Letter

 

Dear A., it seems that after all these years of reporting about the present and covering multiple issues and pushing the envelope, yours ever until the next Dear A., our activities are deemed nigh redundant by the very Mercury who winged our every thought on its way over weeks and years, the postal service. It is true that letters take a week to arrive now, that once arrived the next day. I’m sure the postal service that has run down the delivery of letters so dramatically in recent times will find, when it completes its enquiry into this matter, that surprise surprise the postal service is seriously run down and delivery of letters has fallen dramatically. Something will have to be done! Predictably, this will not be a program to inspire people to write letters, thereby increasing revenue. It will mean further reduction of services and an increase in fluffy dolls and obstructive paraphernalia at post offices. Due to the massive increase in parcel delivery across the country, my first solution is from now on to send letters in parcels. Rapid connection is assured. Sending express post will be like sending a letter in the last century, with certainty of next day delivery. The illusion that letter-writing in general has decreased is, of course, just that, an illusion. Nowadays, we send letters by post, email, message, blog, and any old social media outlet. Which, transparently, is why sending letters by post has taken a fall. When we read fiction of one hundred years ago, the texts unaltered by a sensitivity reader, we learn that sending letters by the hour was the norm. Postmen (postpeople) and couriers would jet across town on the hour getting the vital words pronto to the vital person. Surely one of the values of interpersonal letter-writing has been, very precisely, that it is personal. We warm to the familiar handwriting, our correspondents’ classic turns of phrase, classic to them and no other, their news and views that will never be plundered by a hacker, or serve as details for identity theft. Their words are reread and replied to, recommended to the memory, dropped in a bottom drawer for future rereads. This, it seems to me, is not the way we treat emails and online messaging. I suppose some people spend the evening rereading old emails of personal value to them and no one else, I ‘m sure it happens every day. The fragility and transitoriness of such epistles methinks is more fleeting than paper and ink. Doubtless we ourselves will continue the habit of a lifetime, sending our letters in ever more elaborate express parcels to beat the dozy system, thrill to the familiar handwriting and wonder about the reality of personal life. But are children learning such habits, and if they are, how would we know, with only the screen in front of us to go by? Just some thoughts. What do you think? Hope you’re feeling better. Until next time I remain ever your most devoted scribbler &c. &c. With love, B.