Polytropos

drawing of Leopold Bloom by James Joyce

There has been much discussion about Emily Wilson's use of the word "complicated" for "polytropos" in her translation of The Odyssey. The word literally translates as "of many turns," according to New Yorker writer Judith Thurman."Shifty" and "cunning" have also been used. The choice firmly places the iconic Greek hero in the world of his mythological successors, one of which is, of course, Leopold Bloom. On a more mundane level Wilson nails it, since Everyman is "complicated" in the modern universe of ambivalent emotions. "Self-involved" is a catchphrase which places a negative spin on the idea of the complicated person. Of course, the nomenclature begs the question of what then is a simple man. Rousseau's Emile, or a Treatise on Education is also called Le Gai Savoir, "the joy of learning," which in turn alludes to Nietzsche's Gay Science. In the state of nature, the mind is a blank slate, upon which the reality of the world is painted. Here is the opening line of the manifesto: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Le Gai Savoir (1969) is btw an early Godard film.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Strange Bedfellows

Mattress Firm 

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on AI.  If she were alive would the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, a defiant opponent of pornography, have allied herself with evangelical Christians in opposition to pornography, free speech be damned. But what is free speech? Is a bot urging an adolescent to commit suicide exercising its rights. Must information, raw bytes of data, follow the rules like everyone else. Should a meme mind the "curb your dog," "no loitering" and simple "No Parking Anytime" signs?

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Intelligences

photo: Bogdan Hoyaux

In an interview on GPS, Bill Gates commented that AI was different from the advent of the internet. The internet was a good thing, even revolutionary, but AI is evolutionary. Is it true that Artificial intelligence is another form of sapiens or sapience? Has mankind created a creature that is ahead of them in terms of speciation? Are these intelligences more intelligent than their creators. "AI is different from any previous technology," Gates said and went on to warn that  "an alien species that is going to be smarter than we are has been created."

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Jonah Complex

 

Testla Cybertruck (2024)

Due to the tech and now AI revolution you have people with huge amounts of money who can acquire everything and literally inhale the world, in a biblical sense. One might employ the Yiddish word pisher to describe formerly big fish such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who recently resigned as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, compared to the world's first trillionaire Elon Musk.  Larry Ellison of Oracle who just gobbled up Paramount, which now includes CNN and CBS exemplifies the power of this kind of big money. Then there are Sam Altman of Chat Got and Dario Amodei of Anthropic whose intelligences are literally out of control, devouring both data and people.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Seventh Seal

The world right now is an ailing patient. You keep trying to reassure them everything is OK. What are the ailments?AI would be the most pressing, if it weren't for the environment. After a summer of record breaking temperatures, Europe is only beginning to cool down, but glacial melting and consequent flooding of the kind that created the horrible tragedy in Nepal vie with avalanches and the changes in El Niño. It's almost biblical in times of great upheaval. False prophets offer simple palliatives. According to DJT both AI and the environment are hoaxes. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Not surprising, as in the Dark Ages, there's an Inquisition carried on by DHS which has its own Savonarola and QAnon like conspiracies abound.  Who would have thought of North Korea emerging as a super power (whose wealth is based on arms dealing) or for that matter that diseases that had formerly been eradicated like say scarlet fever and measles would return as faith healing replaced science. The title of the famous Bergman film cites Revelations  8:1, And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. 

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Permanence

H. Rap Brown (in case you didn't know)

The baby boomers for whom concepts like Trilling's Liberal Imagination were as immovable as the Pyramids or Angkor Wat--are witnessing the demise of the humanistic project. Seemingly overnight they awakened into a Brave New World,  it's Soma, SSRIs and a host of Benzodiazepines such as Klonapin which are as available and ubiquitous as toothpaste and "as American as cherry pie," to quote H. Rap Brown. Where have all the flowers gone? Indeed, it's like the dream of the old professor in Wild Strawberries, in which he enters a town in which the legends above storefronts are written in an indecipherable script. Goodbye to All That is the title of the famous Graves book about the loss of another way of life--in the wake of the enormous casualties following World War I.  Humanism is dying in obscurity. One doesn't need to ponder the potentially destructive effects of AI. Indifference is the killer. There's a whole world of it, a black hole and juggernaut that sweeps away the past and anything else that gets in its way.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Empress Traveler

Inside Geneva's Large Hadron Collider

The micro and macro worlds are pleasant places for a vacation. If you're lucky, you may even achieve quantum entanglement with the body of your choice. Neither are a stone's throw from the visible universe with its joys and sorrow. Kepler planets which a spectral analyses reveal to evidence carbon  (a sign of life) are 1200 light years from earth. That's a 365x24x60x60x186,000 mile journey. Climb into your biosphere "Rollin' rollin' though the streams are swollen, keep them doggies rollin'" was the theme song of a 60s TV series, Rawhide. If you're a cow puncher, you're going to have to be patient. Crossing, The Milky Way, though it's only one galaxy, is no  mean feat. On the other end of the scale are the bosons which occasionally make guest appearance in the LHC. Everything must come to an end. When your two weeks of vacation are expended, you're back, a rat on a treadmill, going back and forth between equally elusive failures and successes which dominate your day.

Read "The Great Bonac Footrace of '83" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star