Mania

 August 25 Word of the Day: Mania

 

Comment on Eureka Street this week, in response to the article ‘To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books’: “Scanning books for digital purposes has been a mania of publishers and even librarians for some decades now. This latest manifestation of the mania is directly related to the unquestioned attitude that readers have a right to read the text (any text) in every available format. Claiming though that this wholesale, indiscriminate ripping off of prime text is somehow creating a Borgesian library of all books is a pretense, a front for making money and controlling who gets access to this library of all libraries, while feeding a mindless amanuensis. Be assured, it will not be a free public library. In fact, there is no real interest in libraries at all to judge by the practices now underway: wilful indifference to authorship, physical destruction of the original books, placing silos for manipulative purposes, &c. This becomes even more serious for books pre-ISBN (i.e. 1968), where the only way we can be sure the original is the original is by reading it in a genuine library. Some of the main reasons for rare books libraries are precisely to salvage books from permanent loss, to confirm that an author really said what they said, to authenticate literature and publications against fradulence, to provide the researcher with the genuine article. Scanning itself is a dodgy business, as anyone knows who orders print-on-demand post-Gutenberg rarities. Scans flatten the text, magnify the blots and alter lettering by their very nature. To scan a book and throw away the print original is complete stupidity, a sin against the makers of the words and of collective memory.”

 

Link to the original article: https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/to-build-claude-anthropic-needed-to-destroy-millions-of-books

 

Odyssey

August 24 Word of the Day: Odyssey

 

Will he ever get to the Ithaca Theatre, its promises of fulfilment and money well-spent? He could kill for a good night out, but the enticing translator Calypso says the story’s all told wrong. This, and old wounds, do his head in so he drops a couple of lotuses. The one-eyed screen keeps him enrapt until poked off with his finger. Reviews are a Scylla and Charybdis of whirlpool opinions, cliched toppling towers here, comely cameos there. A week spellbound by the new Sirens release, he almost forgets the Ithaca, its friendly doggy smell, unsuitable clientele, and bygone matinee repeats. 

Century

 August 23 Word of the Day: Century 

Letrilla: The days of his century were numbered

 

[15^th]

She composed visions botanical

Their print fate pressed mechanical

Their colour butterflies’ capers

Their fade into cloth-head paper

The days of her century were numbered

[16^th]

He took words from everyone’s larder

Scarcely noticed the Armada

Saw how we want and let sin in

We are double inside a twin

Made light of dark with feathered wands

Joked he was more lasting than bronze

Dropped manuscripts upon the floor

Left friends to complete the restore

The days of his century were numbered

[17^th]

He ate the fruit and changed his suit

Kept changing sides and staying mute

All things to all men women too

Thought a pioneer of the zoo

The days of their century were numbered

[18^th]

He spelt out an all-mind God

Rhymings even but he stayed odd

His arguments made perfect sense

Based on assembled evidence

Versions went through ten editions

Deity through mass revisions

Back home his wig got a brush-up

Revolution the gig was up

The days of his century were numbered

[19^th]

She went to Paris, went to Rome

Somehow neither of them was home

Married once but it all went wrong

Married again and got along

Landscapes floated by like subplots

Loose ends then were tied up in knots

Her garden of azaleas

Her brother in Australia

The days of her century were numbered

[20^th]

She enumerated rewards

For all the objects she adored

The Moon that once was walked upon

Telephones that were talked upon

She marvelled at brisk energies

The sights of electricity

And for the persons she revered

Or at least that’s how it appeared

Portraits made of wishful thinking

And the levels she was drinking

The days of her century were numbered

[21^st]

He made sentences it-and-a-bit

Bitten off and chewed by an It

A cud of suddenly phrases

Without readers or their praises

Still he composed against the tide

Going along for the next ride

The days of his century were numbered

 

 

Source of the letrilla line: Osip Mandelstam, quoted from a critical essay about Aleksandr Blok, ‘Blok is described as a man of the nineteenth century who knew that “the days of his century were numbered.”’ In, ‘A history of modern criticism 1750-1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism, 1900-1950’ by René Wellek, Yale University Press, 1991, page 296.