Guédelon
A pandemic obsession of mine has been the castle of Guédelon.
Look, how frigging up my alley is this? There is a castle in France that is being built right now, using only methods available in the 1200s. They have a good-enough media team so they produce good videos and photos, AND you can go volunteer there.
I made the kids watch all four hours of a BBC special on it called Secrets of the Castle (which is silly in places but super interesting throughout). I watched their short web series called Les Feux de Guédelon.
This is the sort of thing that’s either self-recommending to you or not. Do you want to learn about medieval stone masonry? How they lifted really heavy stuff to build castles? Woodworking? Blacksmithing? Food? Weapons?
The incredible part really is that people are doing this NOW. It’s one thing to read about how this worked on a plaque in a museum. It’s another to see people who are taking years to develop skills and create a microeconomy of everything you need to build a castle.
Yes, I get that there’s a real dorky historical-reenactor thing happening here, but they’re not just camping out in old clothes. They’re making stuff! I ate these videos up, and if there weren’t a pandemic on I would be seriously looking at booking flights to go visit. My consolation is that they will probably still be doing this for ten more years, so I’ll have a chance.
Little Profits
One of my New Year’s Projects (resolutions are Stupid, but time-limited projects are Great) is to memorize a bunch of poems. I have a pretty bad memory, which I chalk up to being a future-oriented person. But I love poetry, and have often wished I had more at my fingertips. So in 2020, I’ve been learning a few poems by heart. Trudy is participating too! There are a few poems she’s learning separately, and some we’re learning together.
January’s poem was Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I’ve always loved this, and gosh it is a fun one to say out loud. It’s long, though, and was a difficult start! The best most helpful tool was finding that there are readings of this poem on SPOTIFY, so I could practice this on a commute or bike ride. Really helpful! I have very much enjoyed having this memorized now - it’s got so many great turns of phrase. Plus it is so dramatic! It’s a real barn-burner.
Next up for February was a shorter but weirdly more difficult one, God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins is fun to recite but with tongue-twisty bits and unnatural phrasing, so it took more brute-force memorization. Very satisfying to get correct though, and also audio versions were very helpful. This isn’t my favorite Hopkins but I was intimidated by his phrasing, and limited myself to something that I could find an audio version of. In retrospect the way some of its word choices just don’t translate anymore make this a less valuable poem to have in my pocket. Modern usages of words or phrases undermine what Hopkins is trying to say, so it takes a lot of mental effort to track with. Valuable for what, Matt? I don’t know, it’s not like I’m pulling these out at parties. But when Hopkins says things like ‘it will flame out’ he means that sparks of light and heat will appear - not that it will end. But I do love the rhythm and alliteration: once you get the hang of why do men then now not reck his rod? it is just FUN to say.
March was The Sun says Yes by Adrian Mitchell; Trudy memorized this whole thing with me. It’s a favorite of ours from ‘A Poem for Every Night of the Year’ and we have written our own extra stanzas before, so it was great to work on this together - especially over our spring break road trip in Arizona, where T & I had a lot of hours together to practice.
For April I added the apocalyptic The Second Coming by Yeats, to go along with the world-shaking events of Corona Time. Turns out I don’t really like this poem! This was the first example that turned out not too hard to memorize, but unsatisfying all the same. It’s so well-worn that the coinage has lost its shine for me. Most of it feels trite.
May has been Billy Collins’ “The Country”, an old favorite and one that I have often wished I had at my fingertips. It’s a great story-poem, and one with a lot of humor that anybody could appreciate. Plus, Collins’ phrasing is so natural - it felt more like memorizing lines for a play compared to Tennyson or Hopkins. But I still found it useful to have an audio version, and I went so far as to rip an mp3 from a reading on youtube and load it on my phone.
What’s in June? I’m not sure, but I expect to do the St. Crispin’s Day speech around that time of the year, and somewhere in here Coleridge’s Xanadu, since I reference that all the time.
I am super into this project, and with five months in, it seems like a sustainable thing I can do for a year’s span.
(Little Profits?) The title of this note comes from the first line of of Ulysses, the poem I started this exercise with: It little profits that an idle king…
Machine Learning Enlightenment
As somebody who works in technology but is not really a programmer, I’ve been in a weird spot with machine learning. It’s obviously interesting and powerful, but I’ve never tried to do anything with it. Sometimes clients ask about it, but our work projects have never been great fits for it, despite the nice buzzword appeal.
But! I finally dipped my toe into this via RunwayML, a more consumer-friendly wrapper for Machine Learning projects, that bills itself as ML for Creatives. I downloaded it a few months back and just now got around to messing with it. Reader: HOLY CATS, it is fun.
Now, a disclaimer: I am really only dipping a toe here. This is very much ‘kindergarten-level’ machine learning, but still: FUN. Adam was right.
There was real learning curve, and I had to watch several tutorials to even understand what the interface was supposed to do. But within a couple of hours I had trained a GPT-2 model on Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, which is a series of short devotional paragraphs from a priest / poet in the 1600s.
I actually find this book deeply meaningful. I have given copies to people, I once started a tumblr and twitter account to repost the meditations one at a time. In short: it’s a personal favorite. But it’s got a very singular style, and is made of these short defined units of text, that it seems ready for parody (and therefore machine generation?). The content of the meditations is also very consistent: Traherne’s big thesis is Extreme Optimism: it is easy and delightful to exist in the world, if you attune yourself to the inherit goodness of the created universe.
So.
I gave the thing the original text, set a super-low training cycle, and it’s just: good enough already, in like 15 minutes. After the model is trained, you give the system a text prompt and a desired length of output. It generates a number of attempts at completion.
There are hundreds, thousands, an infinite amount of new texts that are already indistinguishable from real Traherne. Lots that descend into gibberish, but lots that are… pretty good.
Examples
Here are some examples of real Traherne, from Centuries of Meditations.
Real Traherne:
Is it not easy to conceive the World in your Mind? To think the Heavens fair? The Sun Glorious? The Earth fruitful? The Air Pleasant? The Sea Profitable? And the Giver bountiful? Yet these are the things which it is difficult to retain. For could we always be sensible of their use and value, we should be always delighted with their wealth and glory.
Real Traherne:
Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than willingly be guilty of their error…
And here are some Machine-generated Traherne. In this attempt, I started it with the phrase ‘I have found’
Machine Traherne:
I have found that in all worlds the Laws of Nature are the best that shall be. Had men been made amiable by the desire of the Soul, they would have been made guilty of covetousness. The Laws of Nature contain the power of Loving, Imitating, Contemplate, and Loving. It giveth pleasure to the Soul that enjoys it, and delighteth in the Creature more than He is.
Machine Traherne:
I have found that the Sea of Joy is the end of all Happiness! Is not that because of its endlessness endless? Well, that the Sun and stars are the gates of Happiness, that your soul may be filled with Delights, Honour and Peace! But it is because God dwelleth in seeing them. And here His love hath made this place aflame: which it hath done with all His love: in making it open into many hosts: and manifesting Himself to innumerable other enjoyments.
Yes, there are some that just get stuck in a kind of probability loop, and repeat a phrase over and over.
I have found by the very things that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him that are in Him [ed. I just cut twenty lines of that] that are in Him that are in Him tha (saith of the Lord this Sunday) being fulfilled
And some that are absurd enough to delight.
I have found that the In-laws are conspiring to seduce you, seduce you with lies and trick you into insatiable love and devouring you: to make you to despise them, and to see you impure and enslave you.
The original text is also so old-fashioned with long complicated grammar, that it’s easy to get lost in a sentence - which makes it a pretty good match to how the GPT-2 sentences spin out. If the grammar falls apart towards the end of a long sentence, my brain immediately draws the conclusion that it was me, the reader, who misunderstood this. I think this charitable stance towards older authors helps the machine-generated version get an easier pass here.
This whole exercise is just so FULL of potential. I want to spin up a ‘lost Traherne manuscript discovered in dusty attic’ scam or something.
But wait
A weird, unexpected follow-on here: some of this machine-generated text was… kind of meaningful? I found there are real moments of poetry and insight in these. Several times I stopped and thought: huh, yes, that’s true.
Maybe that’s not surprising? Look, I fed a machine 500 mini-sermons that I find pretty resonant, and it spit out mini-sermons that I still find pretty resonant. But they were written by a machine! Five minutes ago!
My initial reaction was to say, ‘haha, nothing a computer generates actually means anything’, and of course, that’s true in the sense that there is no authorial intent. The author here didn’t mean anything by this text. GPT-2 simply spits out text that is statistically likely to match the model of the training text.
But… what does it matter to me if a paragraph-length sermon came from a guy who lived 450 years ago, or a computer five minutes ago? There’s a different level of experience that happens simply between ME and the TEXT. If I find some revelation via real or fake Traherne, does there need to be any difference?
And if I accept that proposal, am I just one step from the kind of person who is into horoscopes and fortune cookies and looks for ‘signs’ in the world? I don’t know.
There is presumably a whole field of art criticism or literary study devoted to this question, cf elephant-made paintings or Dada in general. But man! It was really fun to experience this dilemma directly, and self-inflicted at that.
(pictured: the Traherne windows at Hereford Cathedral)
Arizona 2020
We went to Arizona for spring break! As usual, I’m marking down an overview of the trip because I have a terrible memory and need to write things down in order to remember them.
Felix is in fourth grade, and with his ‘Every Kid in a Park’ free pass to all National Parks, Lands, and Waters, we asked him to pick a National Park he’d like to see. He chose Grand Canyon*.
So: we combined this with Erika’s dream to try out that #vanlife. We flew into Phoenix, and rented a camper van. It was fun.
The whole trip was very weird with the coronavirus shit hitting the fan in the US, because we were in an international tourist destination but also camping without cell service or wifi. We’d drift into cell service, my phone would blow up with ominous news, and then we’d go back to the woods. I definitely had some small but nonzero worry that they wouldn’t let us back on a plane to get home.
Here’s the itinerary:
We stopped in Phoenix one night to visit my cousin (and had a great time), then drove up to the Canyon and camped for three nights.
I’d been once before about twelve years ago, and if anything it was more impressive than I remembered.
On Monday we did our big hike, which was just 3 miles down and back on the Bright Angel trail. That was fun, and the kids did great. It made me want to plan out a much longer hike.
One weird highlight: seeing an air rescue. Somebody fell on the icy part of the trail, and had to get choppered out of the canyon. It looked terrifying to get strapped to a stretcher and then dangled 50 feet below a helicopter OVER THE GRAND CANYON.
The next day we woke to heavy snow and clouds, which was beautiful and also made for interesting canyon views.
The cloud cleared enough that we got to see a tiny slice of the sunset knife into the canyon at a super low angle; it was really beautiful.
We packed up after three nights and headed south; we pulled over at Kaibab National Forest Campground because Trudy was feeling carsick, but it was unexpectedly a gorgeous park with literally nobody around; we stopped and cooked breakfast by the lake.
Then we spent lunchtime in Flagstaff, and spent the afternoon driving south on a scenic route thru the Coconino National Forest and the Tonto National Forest (State route 3 thru Happy Jack, 67 to Strawberry and Pine, then 87 south). This was a surprisingly pretty drive, through much more elevation and forest than I expected. There were a dozen places we wished we could have explored or camped at, esp Saguaro Lake. Apparently there has been a ton of rain lately, and everywhere was blooming with greenery and wildflowers.
We did camp at Lost Dutchman state park, (pictured at top), and that was another beautiful spot I didn’t expect. Arizona really has four new converts - there was so much more than desert to be seen, and it was all so interesting. Then again, we probably love anywhere when it’s 45 degrees and rainy. We probably would hate anywhere that’s 95 degrees and sunny.
Our last day was back in Phoenix: returning the van, lunch with my cousin again, and hanging out with our friend Richard, up from his retirement location in southern Arizona.
The verdict: America, man!
*Turns out: everybody says The Grand Canyon, but at the park it’s only Grand Canyon, no definite article required.
Tilman Meet World
One of the big objectives of my trip in Germany last spring was to visit the works of Tilman Riemenschneider, the late medieval sculptor. This was research for a new site project I was working on through 2019 - something to catalog his work in better detail, and provide a resource for anyone that wants to learn more about his work.
I’ve loved Tilman Riemenschneider since I first saw a piece of his in Lawrence, KS at the Spencer Museum of Art. They have a really striking Madonna and Child figure - sensitively carved but with a bit of the medieval stylization used for religious figures. I love this historic moment in art history, when artists can create true-to-live realism in their portraiture, but choose not to because of who and what they are depicting. I think this lends a weird sense of modernity to the enterprise, actually; there’s just a bit of anime exaggeration in the figures.
So anyway, I’ve made it a goal to see as many extant Riemenschneider pieces in person, and of course as I did this, I wanted to create a better resource for others. Thus: the new TilmanRiemenschneider.com.
I’ve also learned how to spell Riemenschneider correctly, about 85% of the time.