Odd Week, That
So apparently, Anthropic's AI used my collection, Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories, to train itself. Granted, it falls among a lot of texts, but it's an odd sort of compliment and an affront. In an American lawsuit, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion in damages to authors whose books they scraped from pirating sites for the purpose of training their generative. The settlement only applies to American authors, but a Canadian lawsuit may follow. My sister Jo (whose book Just Gone was also among those scraped, along with one of her academic papers) and I have both filed our names, in the event of a Canadian settlement coming through within our lifetime.
The American settlement (which would amount, reportedly, to about $3,000.00 for each book used) has already encountered obstructions.
And then there was my passing encounter with "Canada's second-greatest rapper," my online entanglement with a celebrated best-selling author, and my trip to a small con and jazz festival while unsettling developments continued across the globe.
Also, what did Brenda Lee get up to during her junior year?
Passing Encounters with Fame
Okay, the rapper-related one really goes nowhere. I substitute-teach sometimes at nearby schools. One of these has a common high school name. If you live in North America, there’s likely some version of a Central Secondary near you.
Brenda Lee—not the pop singer whose career started when she was 12—but the titular heroine of Chuck Berry's 1964 breakaway B-Side, attended a Central High. The song follows her academic career, from ninth grade, to soph year, when she's second in her class, to her successful final year. She leaves with the promise of great future success. Reporters take pictures of her walking out of Central High! Whether her "handsome guy" died in 'Nam, or she ever recorded hit songs, as her famous namesake did, remains a mystery.
So does her junior year. But we'll return to that.
I was at a Central High on Monday. So was Shad, the man CBC once called Canada's "second greatest rapper." Some might consider the designation fishy. I don't know about his following outside of this country. He seems, thus far, to have ducked the level of international fame and controversy of Drake.
In the late 1990s, he attended Central High, and had returned to his alma mater for a photosession.
I passed him in the hall.
Anticlimax.
But then, that very night, I received a message from a noted internationally best-selling author. She had given Live Nude Aliens a perfect 5/5 score at Goodreads, and sent me a personal message! As much as I appreciated it, I recognized a bunting of red flags. Her comments resembled an AI-like assemblage of existing online commentary. Some of what follows has been excerpted, modified, and redacted from my side of our actual conversation, and that wasn't the one at Goodreads.
I contacted her through her official website and her Instagram. She replied the next day to my email, from her official site.
She thanked me for bringing the hijacking of her account to her attention, and asked for some details.
After the five-star rating, I went to the author's account. I noted that the it had just that day listed around sixty books that she, supposedly, had read. They were from a bewildering range of genres, and included many by lesser-known writers. Some of them had just friended her, suggesting that they, too, had received messages.
The message to me ended with a question, the answer to which would be known to anyone who had actually read the book. Out of curiosity, I responded with an innocuous answer, after notifying the author's site and her Instagram account.
Back at Goodreads, "she" replied to my innocuious answer with a message that was in an entirely different style. It sounded like a real person, and was curious about my activity.
By the time the actual author responded to me through email, her Goodreads account was back under her control, and its recent history, expunged.
I have no idea what the hacker's game was. A long-term catfishing plan? Loneliness? Mental instability?
Noted Best-selling Author said that I should message her if we're ever going to be at the same convention or event, and that a friend of hers, a different Pulitzer-Prize-winning author with whom she was hanging around at the time, loved the title of my collection.
So, no five-star review, but an interesting interaction overall.
That's Not What Dante Alighieri Meant by "Comedy"
Friday my wife and I attended a performance of Dante's Inferno, redacted, and some other bits from and commentary on Divina Commedia, one of those essential but frequently problematic texts.
It features Daniele Bartolini, an artist and actor from Dante's home town, reading the selected pieces in medieval Italian. It was subtitled, but even someone like myself, who has been exposed to contemporary Italian but cannot speak it, recognized quite a few phrases. He read with operatic intensity, which, given some of the passages, became unsettling, disturbing. Try to read Dante's description of the Torre della Fame without growing uncomfortable. Nancy wished he had been more nuanced, with more variation in tone, which seems to me a fair response. As a soprano, she is keenly aware of the criticisms sometimes made of classical singing.
Dante scholar Donato Santeramo, the show's Virgil, provided context and commentary in English. A musician, Andrea Gozzi, looking very much like a club DJ behind their station, underscored the performance with instruments electric and acoustic.
Hell is on tour. I recommend it, assuming you have some interest in Dante's work.
Full Colour Jazz
Saturday I headed to Guelph, Ontario. A small con and a jazz festival were running the same day. In particular, I wanted to see Jason Loo, since I'd missed him at the Toronto Fan Expo in August.
The venue looks great. Mostly, though, this is a seller's market and an industry and indie meet 'n' greet.
Signed purchases: The fourth TPB of Jason Loo's Pitiful Human Lizard, and Loo and Zdarsky's The All-Nighter, Emilia Strilchuk's Be Yourself... Not Like That! (a gift), and Kevin Mutch's Fantastic Life. By the time I made my way back around to the Mutches' booth, they'd sold out of their new work, a Victorian/Edwardian-type SF/Fantasy adventure, minus the colonialism, racism, classicism, and sexism. I also discovered Strawberry McFluffin Makes a Friend, a home-made comic sold by the young daughters of a woman with a craft booth. They charged $1.00 / copy. I bought two and would later put one in the Little Free Library on our street.
I also listened to some street jazz in St. George's Square, across the street from the convention.
Brenda Lee wandered back to mind. Did she get pregnant in her junior year? In the early sixties, that would have been a public disgrace. Perhaps her parents send her to tend to a sick aunt, which was the sort of thing put about when a young woman left town to live in the schools designed to house and conceal pregnant teens until after they'd borne their child and handed it over to adoptive parents.
Likely, Berry just had to keep the song short to meet the expectations for a hit record, pre-1968, and didn't write or removed any account of the eleventh grade.
Things have multiple causes and effects, and judging too quickly leads to further grief, especially in difficult times.
The State of the Globe, Seriously Abridged and with Highly Biased Commentary
A month ago, I went to Nepal. I found the people friendly, the city fascinating, and the monkeys cute, but annoying. I am glad that I am not in Kathmandu now, in the wake of last week's riots.
Things in Gaza are, most decidedly, not settling down. Neither are Russia's attacks on the Ukraine. Literal wars represent one of the few times where I fully endorse the killing of one's political opponents. Aerial bombardment and tanks aren't opinions.
Opinions can be dangerous. People should expect to be challenged. No one should die for expressing them.
While I attended a small convention and listened to jazz in St. George's Square, two rallies took place, with similar themes, on different sides of the ocean. London, England saw over 100,000 people gathered to oppose immigration (or, at least certain kinds of immigration) to England, in a far-right event stoked further by the digital appearance of supervillain Elon Musk. At least 5,000 people turned up to oppose them. Twenty-six police officers were injured, some of them seriously.
In Toronto, a similar rally occurred in Christie Pits park. The organizers' choice of locale had to be deliberate. Christie Pits, a pleasant place where families gather, friends play games, lovers walk.... you get the idea... is the site of a notorious race-based riot in 1933.
Short version: in 1933, the recently-formed Swastika Club had been causing trouble for anyone deemed insufficiently white. They started a conflict at a baseball game being played in Christie Pits between an Italian and a Jewish team. The situation erupted into a full-scale riot, with the pro-Nazis on one side and the Italians and Jews joining forces on the other. Others became involved. It's an ugly one that most Canadians would like to forget but should not. That said, I find one thing in it that makes me smile. Two groups of people, organized on ethnic grounds, out to beat each other at baseball, joined forces against people who didn't consider them real Canadians.
Pay attention to early warning signs.
On Saturday, those gathered in Christie Pits wanted less open immigration and called for mass deportations like the ones happening in the U.S. A few dozen of these protestors encountered a few hundred counter-protestors.
Police arrested at least ten people.
And nothing can be said about last week without including mention of the probably-political murder of a controversial figure I really didn't like, but who had the right to voice opinions I find offensive without losing his life. I would go even further here: Charlie Kirk wanted to talk to his political opponents, which is more than can be said about the current American president.
His murder has had a variety of responses, many of them unhelpful, unhealthy, and dangerous. I do not celebrate the murder of people merely because I disagree with them. Nor should you. But neither should their assassination become an excuse for disingenuous actors to move the west further towards fascism.
Look, this terrible culture we have created means that every event will be marked by online twits making cruel comments, sick jokes, and inflammatory calls to action. But pretending that online "left-wing" or the "right-wing" (a simplistic dichotomy that, I've argued elsewhere and often, have outlived their uselessness) trolls can be taken to represent entire swathes of the political spectrum or specific political parties helps no one.
Elected officials making cruel comments, sick jokes, and inflammatory calls to action, is another manner entirely.
The current incarnation of the American Republican party had markedly less to say in June about the assassination of Minnesota Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, in her own own home, than they have about the recent murder of a political activist. Hortman's death prompted more than its share of incendiary, stupid, vicious comments online, without the broader outrage we're seeing at present. President Trump made no demand for lowered flags. Utah Senator Mike Lee, who mourned and expressed understandable outrage over the assassination of Kirk, responded to Hortman's death with an offensive joke and unfounded conspiracy theories. Kirk himself initially posted a quip about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband by a hammer-wielding lunatic, though he soon thought better of the post and removed it.
Florida representative Anna Polina Lunaposted that "EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS"-- that is, murdered Kirk.* Apparently she doesn't consider that viewpoint protected, even though it pales beside decades of elected Republican politicians and right-wing influencers calling her political opponents Satanists, pedophiles, and murderers. Or equating slight left-of-centre views, socialism, Marxism, Soviet-style communism, National Socialism and therefore, yes, Fascism, and using these disparate ideologies as political cudgels. They're demon-crats, right?
Again, we're not talking about the usual dumbasses, smartasses, and trolls online. We're talking elected officials and the individuals who have their ears. And that's a very different thing.
The current American president—the person who should most be calling for calm reflection on the state of things—once expressed the opinion that "Second Amendment people" should deal with Hillary Clinton and, more recently, that right-wing extremists only want law and order. Really? Like they did in Oklahoma City in 1995?
And sure, Not All Republicans. Senator Thom Tillis has called out and condemned people who are misusing Kirk's death to incite hatred and violence. The governors of Utah and Arizona pleaded for calm, and, of course, the bringing of the killer or killers to justice. On these specific points, they earn my applause.
Those giving into their darker angels follow patterns that should be chillingly familiar.
Weaponized, misplaced outrage became a key tool of the historic fascists. **
Dante damned his ideological opponents to his graphically-detailed Hell.
From There to Here
I've recently watched documentaries on the crack epidemic and how people in government and media misled the public,*** on the rise and fall of Jerry Springer, who now repents his hit show, and a third on the rise and fall of Girls Gone Wild. Of this specific media juggernaut, I only knew the commercials and always thought, "oh yeah, the video series where drunk college girls flash their breasts." Turns out that it became a far darker scene than I'd ever imagined.
All three shed interesting and uncomfortable light on the past and the present—but light nonetheless.
Maybe there will be a doc series that will make sense of our times that we can catch on our screens in 2042.
Perhaps the tale will be told in cave paintings, or by an elder teen reciting from atop the mashed metallic guts of a 777X engine.
By then, Brenda Lee's hypothetical love-child, if alive, will be turning seventy-nine.
Hell, the Canadian branch of the AI lawsuit might even be settled.
.
*She then went on to make a number of hateful and offensive comments about Democrats. This seems a little off-brand for her post. How come she gets to abuse her opponents, but they cannot? Finally, opinions and facts are two very different things. One should be based on carefully considered evidence. The other requires it.
**There has been some movement away from canned outrage as a smokescreen for our worst political impulses. Heats can break, but heads can cool. Perhaps it's the walking-back on some statements about the suspect, whose apparent motives remain unknown. Some of the evidence against him seriously muddies preconceived notions about him or why he may have acted as he did. But again, reality is messy.
***Of all of these documentaries, the one I recommend the most is Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy. See it. The other two may be of interest, if only for how not-fun the ride turns out to be.