“The Odyssey”
(Knopf)
In the winter of 2011, 81-year-old retired college professor and mathematician Jay Mendelsohn enrolled in Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer, an undergraduate seminar taught by his son, Daniel, at Bard College. In this insightful, tender book, the younger Mendelsohn gracefully marries literary criticism and memoir to describe how that class launched an intellectual and personal journey that becomes one of profound discovery for both men.
Father and son are unlikely traveling companions as they embark on this odyssey. Daniel acknowledges an antipathy to the world of hard science to which his prickly father devoted his life, while Jay approaches Homer’s revered work with skepticism born of a conviction that Odysseus was something less than a real hero. “This is going to be a nightmare,” Daniel worries, after his father violates a pledge not to speak even before the first class session ends. But by the time the semester concludes and the Mendelsohns depart for a cruise that retraces Odysseus’ difficult homeward trek, they seem to have reached a well-earned truce, born of their deep engagement with the classic work and their respect for each other.
Daniel is an artful storyteller whose skills are equal to the task of weaving Homer’s poem into his own life. Most impressive are his transitions from scholarly consideration of “The Odyssey” to intimate stories of his family life, as when the class discussion of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife, Penelope, at the end of his 10-year voyage home from Troy flows effortlessly into a magical moment, witnessing Jay as he offers a heartbreakingly beautiful tribute to his wife of more than six decades. Daniel writes, “You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.” That’s only one of the many wise lessons to be gleaned from this lovely book.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
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Artificial Intelligence Writes Horror Fiction
Neel V. Patel
CEBU, Philippines — Scientists working on A.I. development are at least trying to make sure the future machine overlords aren’t subject to the same flaws and negative habits that plague flesh-and-bone humans. But there are some grotesqueries of the human mind that people might like A.I. to emulate – for art’s sake.
It turns out that machines can be pretty damn good at spinning up a tale of murder, dread, despair, and supernatural terror. At least one is– Shelley A.I., a horror-writing robot created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, debuting just in time for Halloween this year. Named after “Frankenstein author” Mary Shelley, the little horror-author-that-could is a deep learning algorithm that reads stories published in terror-inducing nosleep and trains itself to write its own horror fiction.
It works. Here are some particularly creepy passages.
#MIRROR: “I slowly moved my head away from the shower curtain, and saw the reflection of the face of a tall man who looked like he was looking in the mirror in my room. I still couldn't see his face, but I could just see his reflection in the mirror. He moved toward me in the mirror, and he was taller than I had ever seen. His skin was pale, and he had a long beard. I stepped back, and he looked directly at my face, and I could tell that he was being held against my bed.”
#BABY: “When I heard the phone ring again, I ran to the stairs. As I was running down the stairs, I started to hear crying. I shone my phone around the corner of the staircase and saw the crying baby getting closer. I crawled over to it and kicked it as hard as I could. The crying from the stairs turned into a soft metallic sound.”
#COMETOME: “She fell to the floor from her cries and muttered a soft 'Come to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’.”
(That last passage is a pretty good lesson in how to make something scary: make it short, but piercing.)
Like any artist, Shelley does best when primed with some inspiration. The developers say that Shelley “takes a bit of inspiration in the form of a random seed, or a short snippet of text, and starts creating stories emanating from her creepy creative mind.” Horror-loving citizens of the internet can help her churn out nightmarish stories by submitting their own sentences to compositions-in-the-making on Twitter. Like a digital game of “exquisite corpse,” Shelley will take those sentences forward to create a complete story (and in the process, take “exquisite corpse” to a more macabre level).
That last point is important – while A.I. are capable of generating artistic works in many instances, it’s a false assumption to think these are wholly original creative works. The algorithms, like Shelley, still require human-made works to teach themselves how to create phrases and sentences from words, how to generate drama and rising action and climax, how to access a lexicon that delivers the right sort of tone and purpose, and more. As Dan Rockmore and Allen Riddell wrote in Slate last year, “Narrative is difficult to articulate in an algorithm.”
This might be why an A.I. seems better equipped to write horror than dabble in any other kind of fiction genre. Horror is a form of writing that requires chilling scenes of anxious tone, blood-curdling language, characters that remain nebulous and mysterious, and fast action.
An A.I. doesn’t need to deliver a ton of exposition or flesh out a backstory in order to create a good horror story. It doesn’t have to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It just needs to induce immediate shock and fear. And it turns out this is just another way that A.I. excels in inducing fear in the hearts of mere mortals.(www.slate.com)
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