The Oddity

I keep telling you that the satellites are following me.  This illustration comes from this morning's N.Y. Times Book Review supposedly reviewing new historical fiction, but here you can see one of my "hidden" themes in the Lonesomeville series--the analyst's couch.  Oh, people, I was into something much deeper than you may have at first imagined.  

I'm certain they read the blog. This, too, from today, an article on A.I.:

I am a scientist and a writer, and I’m happy to use A.I. to do my job better: I’ll let it write code, fetch articles for me to read or flag errors in statistical analyses for me to investigate further. A.I. is a tool. Its purpose is to serve our purposes. If it does that well, it might be worth the water and electricity it consumes.

I refuse to let A.I. evolve from a tool into a partner. I won’t let it write my sentences. I don’t share with it my fears, hopes or dreams the way I would with a friend or lover. I don’t trust its factual claims unless I can check the sources myself. I ignore it when it praises my ideas, since it can’t tell the difference between insight and nonsense.

It should be humiliating to choose A.I. friendships over human ones. It should be cringe to willingly consume computer-generated slop. Trying to pass off a large language model’s words as your own should be seen not just as cheating but also as loser behavior.

Seriously--where have you heard that before?  Duh.  

Small victories.  That's all I have.  That and epic tales of my heroic past.  They may not go over so well with the GenZers, though: 

Nolan’s nearly three-hour master work, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”

As Q wrote: "Oh, good. I can’t wait to see it. Finally, A Christian take on the Classics!" 

Dowd also writes that the Gods were left out of the movie which is, as I have read in another article, blasphemous to some Greeks.  Nothing in Greek literature happened without the Gods.  

"The Odyssey" is a best seller again, I have read.  I've had to read the classics. Not all of them, of course, but enough.  I'd be thrilled to know how many people who buy it will actually make it through all 12,000 lines.  I have a feeling they will prefer the movie.  

C.C. tells me he preferred the Cohen Brother's version. 

I come from a time when literature and what you read of it was like a sexual currency at social gatherings. 

"You remember that section of Dante's "Inferno" where. . . What?!?  You must!  How can you understand something like Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" without. . . I can't even talk to you.  Hello, there. . . what's your name?"

Now, I understand, people stay up to watch Trump ramble and prattle about the White House Press Corps. How can you fully understand or appreciate him, really, if you have not read "The Odyssey"?  He is our modern day version of the Cyclops. The Cohen's version.  Big Dan Teague.

I watched "Napoleon" last night.  What a terrible movie.  It was long and boring, and I will never get that time back.  It tried to be an epic in the old Hollywood sense, I think, but it didn't have the fury of William Wilder's "Ben-Hur" or the gravitas of Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus."  

Now. . . let's talk about me and my grand existence.  I have no one to talk to day in and day out for months and months, and now three people come to town.  

I had lunch with T yesterday.  He moved three months ago.  Time flies when you live in a vacuum.  I felt dull.  All I could report was what someone said at the gym.  I felt quite dull and doltish.  After an hour, he said he had to go.  I couldn't blame him.  

I will go to lunch with Red today.  She booked a day in my own hometown in the historic hotel on The Boulevard just to see me.  So she says.  I've already told her she will have to regale me with tales for I have nothing.  I have no doubt she can.  

And my mountain buddy from Cali is here, too.  Like everyone else, he wanted to have dinner.  It doesn't matter what I say or how I say it, people don't understand my predicament.  I think it is because they knew me when I lived a grander, bigger life, or at least the way I tell it.  They don't hear the quiet hum of my current existence.  

I feel OK today, though.  The trees look good and the Xterra seems to be alright and I found my wallet that I was convinced I had dropped on the floor at lunch yesterday.  I drove back to my house to look for it after dinner with my mother.  It was odd to be out after eight in the soft light of the ending day just as people were finishing their Friday night cocktails and settling in for a the evening repast.  It stirred something in me, but I shoved it down deep and stayed happy enough that I hadn't lost my wallet.  I did, however, being home at such an hour, wish to sit on my deck with a cocktail and hor's d'oeuvres at the very minimum.  

O.K.  My mother needs breakfast and I need to eat now so that I can eat again at lunchtime.  And then, I will fix dinner for mother.  Three meals three days in a row.  

Let's end with a little bit of "The Odyssey" soundtrack.  I mean. . . I'm a man who can't get home.