"That should be the title of my autobiography: Stop Me If I’ve Told You This Already . And we’ll print the entire text twice." — Lorenz Hart Robert Kaplow; Blue Moon Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. Shakespeare; Hamlet Dialogue for Unaccompanied Shawm Shawm: Pardon me, but have we met before? I feel like I should know you, but I can't quite make the connection. Shawm: Ah, well now, that's a question that lands rather close to home for me, I'm afraid. Pardon the pun, but with my blasted face-blindness, half the time I can't even ...
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson); Through the Looking Glass "Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?" "My dear Doctor, they're all true." "Even the lies?" " Especially the lies." Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (episode written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe) Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (which I presented last week) is often cited as one of the "greatest films ever made". I'm not normally a fan of describing things in superlatives like that (I consider it the worst thing ever!) but it has to be said that when social anthropologists name an entire psychological phenomenon after your movie, it's a cinch you're in with some pretty exalted company. You don't hear them talking about the " Jaws Principle" or the " Dr. Strangelove Proposition" or the " Godfather Assertion". ...
Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
Earlier this month, the New York Times conducted a little experiment. They provided a series of writing samples in various styles and genres (Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Fantasy; Poetry etc) and presented readers with two extracts in each category. One of the two passages (we weren't told which one) was written by a human, while the other was generated by A.I. We were asked to choose our preference. Crucially, the test did not ask us to guess which one was human; it simply asked us to judge which was the better piece of writing. The response from readers was fascinating, to say the least. Many commenters angrily denounced the experiment as "unfair" or "meaningless". "I don't really understand the point here." grumbled one contributor. "It asked me which I preferred. It didn't ask me 'which one is the human'." Others were angry with themselves because of the choices they had made. "This is uncanny and downright ...
Let me tell you a little story about my friend Sheldon (his name is Sheldon). Sheldon. Sheldon lives in the East End of London, but he grew up in the US and moved to England with his family about forty years ago. Even though he has lived here for most of his life, Sheldon knows that he will always be something of an outsider in the UK, which is one of the reasons he loves living in London. Quite apart from the genuine thrill of a big bustling city with its crowds and traffic and chaos (Sheldon likes to say that you can trust the air in London because you can see it) Sheldon loves living in a city where millions of people from diverse cultures and backgrounds have deliberately chosen to live together in a messy, sometimes futile attempt to create a cohesive, functioning community. Like Sheldon himself, almost every Londoner has an "origin story"; something that brought them on a path from wherever they were, and led them to London. They may not share a religion, an ethnicity,...
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