My Dog Can Do Calculus, a thought related to AI

A few years ago, I read a thread on twitter or bluesky from a PhD mathematician working as a professor. It went something like this: 

"I was playing fetch with my dog the other day, and it occurred to me that the dog knows with a high degree of precision where the ball will end up with no more information that seeing it come out of my hand--sometimes he can grab it mid-air without looking. Of course, the world functions in a regular and observable way, so the description of the ball's trajectory is determined by calculus. My dog must in some way be able to do the calculus necessary to find the ball. Therefore, my dog must be smarter than I'd previously thought."

Flawless logic, and wrong. Calculus describes how the ball moves, but the ball being thrown and the dog running to get it are natural processes that happen regardless of whether anyone knows the math. And a good thing, too: if you count from Euclid to Leibniz or Newton, that would be 2000+ years the world would have had to go not knowing where balls were going to land. Nor does knowing the math really help you, either: if an outfielder needed to do a differential to catch a fly ball, we could just give up on sports altogether; no one can do the math that fast, and it's not clear how it would help even if you could.

(It also says something about something that it took 2000 years to accurately describe what a puppy or a toddler can learn to do in an hour, or less.) 

Reflections on a few years of reading 20th century German-language literature

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
    Doktor Faustus
    Buddenbrooks
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Joseph Roth, Radetzky March
Lutz Seiler, Star 111
Clemens Meyer, While We Were Dreaming
Christa Wolf, City of Angels
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
    Life of Galileo
    The Good Person of Szechuan
    The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance vol I and II
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
    Transit 
Heinrich Böll, The Train Was on Time
    A buncha short stories
Herta Müller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
    The Appointment
Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers
Thomas Bernhard, The Old Masters
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
    Austerlitz
    Silent Catastophes
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

...probably some others I'm forgetting over the last few years (I think none of these are more than five years old, and most are from the last year or two when "read modern German-language literature" became a project)

 

I didn't like The Tin Drum. As with many books I don't like while I'm reading, I played some metafictional games: perhaps Oskar is actually normal sized? Perhaps he's such an unreliable narrator that none of it happened? But I settled down into the idea that it's just a novel with a magical realist premise and an insufferable protagonist. I'm legitimately unsure whether this is intentional, and will need to peruse the secondary literature.

The most flattering reading I can give: Oskar is the average German citizen. He's perfectly aware of what the Nazis are for and do, he's heard of the concentration camps but knows not to ask any follow-up questions. He will support the army if it gets him out of Danzig for awhile, he's fine to go lay on the beach each weekend. Leaving Danzig at the end of the war doesn't bother he because he has a place to go, he's glad to accept the German economic miracle in the West despite not doing anything to deserve it. He is passive in the face of history, contains no outrage over anything but his romantic misadventures, and stumbles into a happy ending he does not in any way deserve.

*****

I've been reading in German and Austrian literature for a few years now. It is dispiriting and compelling at the same time. There are so few of these books that I really love--at a pinch, only Anniversaries--the widened circle including The Rings of Saturn, The Aesthetics of Resistance, City of Angels and Mother Courage. But Mann and Musil and Grass all left me cold. I could appreciate but not love Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that's mostly Günter Lamprecht's fault, and that Fassbinder could make his miniseries after the war. But most of it is formal and correct and perhaps a little lifeless, like you're looking for a heart that simply isn't there. 

And yet, I keep on, and will continue. One is inclined to ask: why?

*****

Spanish language literature will explain things to you, if it does nothing else. The most apolitical or right-wing writers must acknowledge colonialism, and capitalism; political instability and the tricky interrelations of Europe and native cultures. (You might have the politics of Octavio Paz, you're still going to hate Europe a little.) Spain gets off no easier than the Americas, wrestling centrally and constantly with what it means to have experienced fascism for such a long time and then tried (and failed) to forget it.

Japan has a central organizing myth in Godzilla and the million things that refract from it: a retelling of the trauma of how WWII ended for Japan, the primal fears that it raised. (I am quite sympathetic to the alternate view that Godzilla is an attempt to overlook Japan's actual role in the much longer war and their various atrocities and focus only on the tiny sliver of that experience that makes them the victims, but this counterreading is very much in the text already--Godzilla attacks Japan for a reason.) The forced modernization and economic miracle that faded; one can pretty simply hop from the Meiji Restoration to the post-1970 economic boom and find all the parallels one might want. And all throughout it people are writing all sides of it.

Germany... does not do any of this. There is the Exilliteratur, but none of those people really know what happened in Germany because they mostly weren't there. The people who were there remain largely silent. Upon the division of the country, the GDR has its own set of problems, and the West now needs to be integrated into western Europe and so the pesky question of what exactly someone did in the war needed to be forgotten. Then there's the economic boom which... how to say this charitably... convinced a number of people in the West that there was some sort of inherent German business genius as opposed to boring structural economic reasons for such advancement so quickly. Moral accounting was then unneeded, God had signalled his approval of the hardworking German people. And when moral accounting is not needed, very few people will be interested in doing it.

There's political violence and an attempt to refocus the issue of Nazism in the 70s, but it mostly fails. The Die Wende, reunification, and yet another economic boom: the people are finally ready to look somewhat honestly at what they did. As with all such historical reminiscences, it helps a lot that many of the most responsible people were already dead in the mid-90s. But Die Wende is also a time of human economic, artistic, and personal flourishing, so attention is at best divided. (I don't mean to downplay it: the circumstances of division were traumatic, and reunification really was a time of new and exciting possibilities for almost everyone.)

The end result is that you can read and read looking for an accounting, a serious moral reckoning, and find nothing. The Exilliteratur will tell you that everyone in Germany knew and understood the bargain, and were more or less happy to go along with it as long as it was providing dividends. The retrospective work will tell you that, too: one assumes this is part of Günter Grass' motive in The Tin Drum. But to write of this at all suggests that you have misgivings, and most people kept their own counsel.

*****

So you go into reading a literature hoping--expecting, more like--to find some revelations and instead find none. A curious silence or an omission. Why did we begin this project in the first place?

Well, you know why you didn't see anything, you've read Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and know all about Metaphysical Ketman, the idea that you can keep some secret interior personal space your own. When faced with horrors, you can comply or say and do the things you need to do to keep yourself safe and your life normal. But as Milosz will tell you--or Christa Wolf, who was an informer for the Stasi for a couple of years and just forgot about it--maintaining a double life is psychologically stressful and most people just can't do it for any length of time. The division will collapse and the outer person--the one who complies--takes over. How can you write honestly about what you experienced when your entire continued existence requires you to lie to yourself about what you knew, what you did and didn't do? 

And me, looking for clarity where there could never be any.

*****

But those of us in the US live here, now, with the reality of our own horrors. One might have been able to look away in previous decades because the horrors mostly occurred in places far away from us. Now they are home and visible and difficult to ignore. But the example of Germany can and should show us that people will find a way to ignore what is happening so long as it doesn't disturb them and their lives. 

You know very well what will happen if you sit to the side and hope for the best, and don't pretend that you do not. The point is not to interpret what will happen, but to change it. 

 

Currently Reading, Wrestling With A Giant edition

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems
It was a Patricia Lockwood LRB article that did it, as it often is these days. I read The Bell Jar as a callow youth in 8th or 9th grade, with little or no sympathy and less understanding. (I didn't hate it, for the record.) I never pursued her poetry or anything else about her. So I come to her work in something like total ignorance, but having pieced together some of her contemporary milieu in my reading in poetry over the last few years.

Look, I'll be honest: I mostly don't like it. She has a flair for observation and image, and any poem that begins with "I was going on a walk the other day" or a near equivalent will be worth your time. She is open and experimental in tone and form in ways that are really admirable: it seems clear enough that she has something she wants from her writing and goes right for it. 

The obsessions are right there on the surface, too: she uses the n-word far more than I expected. She has a fascination with the Holocaust that I think is of both the "I will look unflinchingly at the worst people can do" variety (sister, I can relate) and of the "the fetishism of bodies and body parts is not really so far removed from the treatment of bodies, especially female bodies, in post-war medicine and psychiatry, especially when those bodies are considered to be 'wrong' in some way" variety. But it's very unsettling. Suicide is everywhere; from the safe remove of 60+ years I wonder how no one saw it or did anything about it. It is all, as charitably as I can put it, deeply unpleasant to read. (Her beekeeping poems are this in miniature: brilliant. horrifiyng.)

But: that's surely the point. She is a great mind and an exceptional woman who is trying very hard to be a particularly narrow idea of a "normal" wife and mother, surely the mind rebels at all points, and at the men who enforce the system (father, husband, doctor) most especially. I am precisely the person who should squirm in reading them, and rush to reassure myself, as I did, that I have nothing in common with Ted Hughes. (For many reasons.) And she shuts herself off from the Adrienne Rich option of analyzing her condition with an eye to change it--a poet with a similar background who is sometimes awkwardly personal or embarrassingly political but does sometimes train her eye on me, the skeptical male reader. The world of poetry I inhabit is a lot of things, but it is not essentially and unrelentingly negative. But it's an honest word, honestly come by. I don't think it matters how I feel about it.

I come back to the thing Lockwood comes back to in her essay: Sylvia Plath was once the most boringly normal postwar American girl, and then she was a great poet. But there's no spur, no demarcation point, nothing in the biography or in the work you can point to as the reason she goes supernova. Lockwood, as a writer, mostly focuses on the implications of this for writers: what does your method, practice, training, slow improvement mean when someone can just show up and do that, and not even really be able to explain how it was done? (And distressingly: is it because she was crazy and suicidal? Must I be crazy, too?) A singular writer who leaves no path to follow, and did in a few years more than you will in a lifetime.

But it seems to me that Sylvia Plath works the other way, too: the normal woman who wanted very much to be normal until it couldn't be stifled anymore. Maybe she wasn't really special, she just lucked into a situation that allowed her genius to come out. How many more Sylvia Plaths are out there across all the areas of knowledge, beauty and excellence, now, trying to be normal? 

Currently Reading, Katabasis Spoilers Abound, Proceed With Caution

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
I liked it quite a bit, but to be clear, it's more Foucault's Pendulum than The Name of the Rose: a perfectly enjoyable outing for academics who want to turn their brains off for a bit, not anything resembling a classic. It's also, to my surprise, more Piranesi than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: the plot machinations are few, it's mostly about the inner life of the main character.

[spoilers]

Of course, as soon as you can piece together that Alice is not going to die in Hell, you can be pretty certain Peter won't, either. And yes, it is stupidly obvious that they're in love with each other in the way that only grad students can muster--they both kinda know it to be a bad idea and it doesn't stop them. So it then stands to reason that Peter won't actually be dead at the end, and everything else kind of unspools from there. (It was also clear right away that Peter had no plans to sacrifice Alice, it didn't make sense in the arc of the story.)

I see the reason for the negative reviews: people don't want a happy ending. I also see the frustrations with the academic side of things, but I was once in a freshman philosophy class and fascinated by paradoxes--the topic of my first paper was the Sorites Paradox. So I'm clearly the audience for it, to grasp pretty much all of the references. 

Currently reading, Catch-up edition

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If I had to pick the least romantic thing in this book--there are many to choose from--it is our nominal hero taking for his last non-love-of-his-life sexual conquest (there were well over 600) a literal schoolgirl with braces whom he grooms for a year before trying anything. When this poor girl finds out she's being jilted, she kills herself, information which is communicated to our hero in a brief aside and never dwelt on.

The book easily reads as an anti-romance, but somehow I think that's not how it was intended.

 

William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
The book that briefly broke my reading system. Whereas your George Eliots, Charles Dickenses, your Dostoevskys and Tolstoys, etc etc, all break into nice little solitary units of reading, Faulkner demands to be read whole. There's something oddly compelling about the incantatory tone: not Proust, exactly, or Henry James; nor at the other end Thomas Bernhardt, where the long sentences are a kind of fugue repeating the same themes over and over again. Any particular piece of the writing will make next to no sense, but you emerge at the end of a chapter with a picture of the whole even so.

Not much to say about the plot except that if any one of the characters had hated black people less, none of it would have come to tragedy, but that's the American south for you. Well, that and the unwillingness to look a situation square in the face, or have an open and honest conversation.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners
A bunch of stories which are somewhere between perfectly fine and good, and then, wham, "The Dead". I suspect it plays better the older that you get, but even so, it's incredible to get ten versions of "this Irish father is drunk and sad" and then one of the high points of European literature.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Another one that hits differently because I am older when I read it. I think sort of astonishing for the author to get at such a young age what it is like to be an older person looking back.  

Lyric of the day

"[I] never let a computer tell me shit"

-Del the Funky Homosapien, "Things You Can Do", Deltron 3030 

Something for the season

Currently Reading, Recently Read Edition

Anna Seghers, Transit
There are plenty of war novels that traverse a familiar groove: the futility of war (Catch-22, The Good Soldier Svejk), the overwhelming scope of war (War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma), the radical expose of evil where it seems like there is none. Seghers' The Seventh Cross is an example of the last. We know, she knew, everybody kind of could have known that the Nazis were the bad guys, and they received important passive and active support from regular Germans with all kinds of motives. The Seventh Cross is notable in this respect because it was written and published during the war; people come to know the truth in all sorts of ways, and that novel was one of them. Important, but hammering home a point we all know.

Transit is instead a very weird novel, because it is about a German who refuses to leave Europe even though he has very good reasons to want to leave; more importantly, he has--through a series of misunderstandings--the ability to leave. But he doesn't stay for noble reasons, to resist the Germans or to rebuild Europe once it's over: he just wants to be a farmer and not leave. It's like Casablanca if Rick decided to stay but because all he really wanted in life was to run a casino. The novel is even more interesting because it is the exact opposite of the decision Seghers made for herself; it has strong autobiographical elements except that, well, everything the main character does is different than what Seghers did. And it this was it becomes an interesting book, but also a frustrating one: Exillituratur without the exile.

 

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections
I read the first three stories. Every one was brilliantly done. Every one twisted the knife at the end. I decided to abandon it.

 

Charles Portis, True Grit
One of the hosts of my favorite podcast made an offhand reference to Portis, whose The Dog of the South I had read and felt indifferent about several years ago; I saw this while browsing the library shelves and decided to give it a go. Iconic, perfect, inimitable. Hard to say a bad word about it, except the part with the snakes at the end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, though this was certainly the point.

 

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Reading this one day and then watching Wake Up Dead Man the next was a real exercise in--actually, you know what, going to blog this separately.

 

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I was required to read this in high school and did not especially like it, finding it to be well short of scary or horrifying. Maybe five years ago I read and enjoyed We Have Always Lived In the Castle, so I thought I'd give it another go. I don't dislike it as a book, but I also think I am not its ideal reader. One must believe something I don't to make the plot work, but I'm at a loss for what that thing might be. It moves along well until the wife and the other person show up and then there's just too many ideas trying to reconcile themselves in not enough space. Maybe I'm not really convinced that Eleanor was captured in any meaningful sense by the house?