What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake.
But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It’s superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is that it’s more persuasively Sinatra than almost all cover artists could aspire to be.
However, unlike almost any human singer, it’s soulless. There’s no attempt to convey or interpret the emotion of the original, because the emotion is the one singular component that the AI cannot aggregate or understand.
It makes a better fist of the Doors, perhaps because of much closer musical, chronological and cultural proximity. But generally, as more and more of these AI covers make their way into the cultural arena online, it’s becoming clear that, as Simon Pegg recently explained, AI is a mediocrity machine.
Ten whiskeys. Five dictators. Three US Presidents. Two African Despots. Multiple Koreans called Kim.
It’s back, after almost a decade on the 2nd of May in Budapest! It’s the long-awaited return of Drink Like A Dictator Night!
For one night only, you too can learn how to drink like a dictator. Discover the Scotches that fuelled Saddam and the Bourbons that built democracy.
During this light-hearted, heavy-drinking evening of political satire and commentary, you’ll discover which whiskey is the choice of most totalitarian leaders, which dictator created his own whiskey to promote the idea that he was king of a far-off nation, who accompanied their dram with some hippo sushi, and what became of the single malt forgotten by Boris Yeltsin.
According to the unnamed critic, the Wake takes place (in the same way Bloomsday does – in a fictional alternative history which lives on the page and in our minds) on the night of the 28th of March 1938.
It’s not an especially memorable date in actual history. A couple of weeks after the Anschluss, Hitler gave a speech in Berlin. For a further sense of the era, Westminster was debating both the cinematographs bill and a civil aviation bill.
I’m not sure how we’d celebrate Wakenight. I’m not sure Joyce entirely foresaw people strolling in Dublin each June dressed in boater hats and munching gorgonzola sandwiches either. So I guess it’s up to us to choose our own modern and secular rituals for our own post-religious deities.
Bloomsday.
My modest suggestion, in keeping with the source ballad, is that we all drink whiskey until we collapse as if dead. Who’s in?
Speaking of the ballad, let’s have a quick round of it now, courtesy of the inimitable Mark Wale:
I refrained from posting anything about the Depp-Heard hearings because I don’t know these people and they don’t impact my life at all.
In the obscene orgy of public cheerleading on social media, it became evident that many people were overly engaged and inappropriately so, treating it like a sports game which required a colosseum audience.
Surface image =/= Reality
It’s clear also in the aftermath that the media itself was also culpable of partisan viewing and foregone conclusions. Amid the many hamfisted attempts to map the peculiarities of this case to ALL women, ALL men, the most salient point, for which I thank both Heard and Depp, was almost totally ignored, which is this:
Hollywood takes desperate narcissists and feeds them vast wealth, public platforms, and stimulants, resulting in lives which while idyllic on the surface prove later to be beyond appalling.
Ordinarily we must wait for such people to be long dead to discover the horror of their existences. We owe Heard and Depp our gratitude for lifting the veil so comprehensively on the truth of their sordid and horrifying marriage.
I caught a head cold on a recent trip, and after a day immersed in reading about ancient Mesopotamia, I decided to take a restorative nap.
The ancients of course attributed all sorts of meaning to dreams. They considered many oneiric communications to be messages from the gods, or prophecies of future events, communications in short which appeared to hack time lines and causality.
One wonders whether the still obscure processes and purposes of dreaming might not have in fact inspired the religious impetus among humanity.
Anyhow, in my feverish dreamstate, I was having dinner with a friend, who in reality possesses an indomitable intellect, and who in this scenario was a world-renowned expert in the discipline of Invernetics.
A google search upon waking produced only a handful of results for the word, mostly typos of Internetics. My basic Latin education parses the term as the technology of winter, or the technology of inducing winter (perhaps a good technology to develop in an age of global warming?)
If the ancients considered such dreams as ontological intrusions into our reality, might we not do likewise, especially given the dearth of solid research into why we dream of what we do? Given the current popularity of multiverse theories, I am inclined to consider my fever dream as an intrusion from another timeline, wherein the science of Invernetics is a well-developed academic discipline.
Perhaps in that timeline, they likewise dream of us, and chuckle to themselves at the preposterousness of a Donald Trump presidency, Leicester City winning the EPL, or the strange prominence of pronouns?
Dreams may be brain froth, as most neuroscientists insist. But perhaps, like pronouns, they might carry more semantic weight than we acknowledge.
One looks forward to the day when the role of dreaming may be more accurately understood and developed. And one also now looks forward to the day when we develop Invernetic technologies to address the gradual heating of our planet.
Earlier this year, I started working on a project looking at manifestations of the Jewish state in alternative history literature. The seemingly intractable weeping wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, of course, a product of history, but a history which seems increasingly without any obvious resolution, or rather, one in which the much-vaunted two-state solution appears to satisfy almost no one.
After working on Science Fiction and Catholicism for some years, it seemed obvious to continue that work by examining Buddhist futurism. A book on this will, in the fullness of time, emerge, but for now readers will have to be satisfied with the sole tangible output to date, an article on Buddhist reception in Pulp Science Fiction. (Another on Arthur C. Clarke’s crypto-Buddhism, and one on the Zen influence over Frank Herbert’s Dune are also due to arrive in public shortly.)
But a second offshoot from that work on Catholic Futurism began to take shape in relation to Israel. Specifically, I wrote a chapter in that book on the cultural anxieties revealed by how Anglophone writers dealt with Catholicism through alternative history. The other timelines imagined by those writers were uniformally negative, envisaging retrograde Catholic empires crushing all science, innovation and progress under its clerical jackboot heel, which runs rather counter to the significant amount of support Catholicism has tended to offer to scientists historically.
Indeed, it says much more about how Anglophone writers, and specifically how ENGLAND perceives Catholicism – not as a cultural taproot but rather as a kind of fifth column infiltration which threatens their survival in an existentialist sense. This sentiment, I sometimes feel, is the archeological origin of things like opposition to the EU and the Brexit campaign.
Anyhow, when I began examining alternative history as a mode for exposing such cultural anxieties, it became quickly evident that the alternative timelines different cultures are drawn to evoke are a little like Rorschach blot tests, identifying their cultural anxieties in very clear ways.
As a test case, I chose Israel, primarily because it is in one sense a new nation, in another a very old one. Also, many writers of alternative history are culturally Jewish and this mode of artistic exploration is one that they are often drawn to. I was not disappointed by the results, and have been incorporating this work into my broader research project examining speculative geographies in literature.
Alternative histories about Israel reveal a series of cultural anxieties, from the obvious fear of Jewish annihilation (in early history at the hands of the Babylonians, Pharaonic Egypt or the Romans, but also during medieval pogroms in Europe, and obviously arising from the holocaust), as well as imagined reversals of such annihilation (particularly the fantasy of Judaic global dominance, sometimes by converting the Roman Empire).
There is a particular phylum of these alternative histories which explores other geographic locations for a Jewish ethno-state. This is also real-world history, as the Zionist Council under Theodor Herzl did indeed consider locations other than historic Palestine for the creation of such a state. Actually many locations were seriously considered, by both Zionists and non-Zionists, and some territories were even offered by certain nations, during the interim between the emergence of Zionism as a political movement in the late 19th century and the creation of Israel in 1948.
I’ve been examining the literary manifestations of these real-world alternatives, to see in what way they unveil cultural anxiety about both the conflict with Palestinians and the Jewish relationship with Europe (from whence many current Israelis, especially the Ashkenazim, derive much of their cultural inheritance). This work has identified a strong sense of determinism about the current location of Israel which interestingly is secular and not predicated upon the religious diktat of the Old Testament (though of course the Promised Land of Eretz Israel remains a significant cultural driver within Israel itself, especially among the Orthodox community.)
I hope to publish something on this soon, when I get a moment. But for now, all I can offer you is a slide or two (above) from my latest conference presentation on the matter, which took place at the Specfic conference at Lund University in Sweden last week.
Temporary decloaking continues apace, in order to acknowledge the existence of David Graeber’s final meisterwerke, which is no less than a history of everything. Alas, it’s only volume one, and he is no longer with us on this plane of existence to expand into the envisaged volumes two and so on. This makes it all the more valuable, in a sense, and there remains the faint hope that his co-writer will assume the mantle.
In short, I’d like Graeber to be right. It might offer us some routes (roots?) out of the post-Enlightenment “progress”-ratcheting one-way road to Hell we are now quite advanced along. And I think the politics of the time (and Graeber’s untimely death) mean this book will be enormously welcomed, in itself probably a net good, whether his theory is true, half-true, or not at all.
You Are Here ———————————————————————————————–^
I suspect, though, that the established big histories, as popularised by the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and of course Yuval Harari, are far from entirely defunct just yet. Furthermore, the undoubted impact of those existing grand narratives gives them a certain momentum which will hardly be slowed by the late intervention of Graeber.
(Full disclosure: I am complicit in such momentum, which I consider to be a positivist intervention/disruption in the current thanatocentric vector of humanity, as I am working with Sapienship, Yuval Harari’s educational vehicle. From what I can discern, the great insight of Homo Sapiens – that humanity’s tendency to collective fictions brought about an explosion of mass collaboration – does not appear to be challenged by Graeber’s work.)
Does Graeber offer us something new? He appears to be offering us a more complex picture, crucially one that suggests a greater sense of choice and agency for humanity writ both small and large. Is this itself a net good? Probably yes, even if his arguments transpire ultimately not to hold much water. We need hope, goddammit. Choice, even the illusion thereof, is a form of hope.
I’ll know more when I read the book, of course, which is all I want for Christmas (apart from world peace, an end to hunger, climate stability and Irish reunification.) Or let me rephrase – I look forward to reading the book and finding therein some antique answers to current questions with the same degree of utopian optimism that I apply to resolving war, climate change and the intractable identity politics of the island of Ireland.
We exist today in coercive macro-societies afflicted by gross inequality and inhuman scale, which limit human potential and freedom. It will come as little surprise to know that, at times past, Graeber was all over that too – see his work on the perniciousness of debt or his theory about “Bullshit” jobs. If our macro-history was a series of choices rather than some kind of inevitability, the Whiggish ratcheting ever forward towards an often illusory or treacherous progress, then perhaps we still have the chance to choose otherwise. That’s why I hope he’s correct.
Big history always brings us, or at least me, back to a futurist perspective of course. What can we learn from the past to arm us in the face of the existentialist threats currently facing humanity? One of the most evident and positive truths in narratives like Harari’s Homo Sapiens is the miraculous similarities we share as a species, being the ingenious survivors of a series of genetic bottlenecks and previous existential crises.
Perhaps in identifying some roads not taken, or insufficiently taken, Graeber’s last sigh may prove to be a singular intervention we can apply to our own approach to the future. Perhaps. I’ll find out at Christmas, if Santa Claus is good to me.
Once again serious trouble and violence has erupted between Israel and Palestinians. Elswhere there is no end of discussion and commentariat media and social media prepared to offer their speculations and insights into why this is currently occurring.
Also prevalent are the ideas many people have about how to resolve this seemingly intractable problem. Two-state solutions, Eretz Israel solutions, walls… all these and more are being argued across the web.
I’m not intending to replicate any of that. Instead I will simply offer a solution that would work and yet at the same time will never take place, except of course, in another timeline, where it already has.
Next month at the SFRA 2021 conference, I’ll be talking about the Jewish states that Zionism pursued and failed to implement, for one reason or another, and how that has manifested in alt-history literature.
For now, though, all I can do is offer you the frontispiece from my talk:
It’s a compelling idea. So many outlier events, both the scary Black Swan-type that N.N. Taleb writes about as well as the simply unlikely, seem to be regular occurences all of a sudden.
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s election as US President, the Brexit referendum, a global Coronavirus pandemic, or even just Leicester City somehow winning the English Premier League football title a few years ago, the world seems to have taken a turn into the unpredictable, the unstable, and the frankly bizarre.
And if we are in a uchronic timeline, is there any way back? We probably aren’t going to be able to reverse time, but perhaps we can leverage the idea of alt-history to understand and manipulate our own reality going forward.
