America I would like to visit you but I have a fear of repeatedly feeling déjà vu having seen your treasures and tragedies over and over on big screens and small I have come to absorb through books and films and blogs – those love-children of Letter From America some understanding of your ways.
It is only my personal view others see you quite differently from The Land of Opportunity to The Great Satan. I also, of course, know real Americans both in the flesh and in the virtual world and even have relatives a whole branch of the family. Since my grandfather’s brother emigrated before the First World War he and his descendants have demonstrated the positives the opportunity to make good – it might have been less opportune if he had not been white.
Now I understand the wealth of America could not have been so great without the dispossession of the previous occupants or the relocation of millions of slaves who even after emancipation worked a different kind of bondage in the factories of Chicago.
I cannot preach we British have no right… just this week I read a supplement of The [Manchester] Guardian on how Manchester’s cotton wealth was the fruit of slavery just at one remove and the Guardian famously liberal did little to recognise even its own failure to comment until now.
America so much is squeezed into your great cities each pressure-cooking a distinct language which is so much more than mere accent but in between, the vast wildernesses still exist free of graffiti the poor of the cities not banned but excluded from access nevertheless by lacking the means to get there
And so America you are a land of opposites of natural beauty and urban ugliness of obscene wealth and unforgivable poverty of liberal tolerance and extreme hatred. Maybe this is true of all countries but America – You proclaimed yourself to be the Great and the Good to be the World’s Policeman but all your policemen carry guns and so therefore do the bad guys and the poor and the rich by inalienable right.
America Dorothy has pulled back the curtain and the little man revealed does not match up to the rhetoric or the dream.
We travelled twice to Crete once was a holidayof two weeks once was something different for six months. The first time we stayed with my sister-in-law and her partner who gave up their bed for her sister and I.
We hired a car and left him to his work and her to hers rescuing cats thankless by Cretans and we travelled that corner of Crete the lofty coast road south to Sitia great banks of flowering shrubs in their pomp painting our way giving glimpses of the empty sea blue below. Returning, the sunset meal above a dizzying drop down to the sea and opposite the entrance the coolest water flowing silently into a trough out of the heart of the mountain. We gazed in awe at the Ha Gorge where only younger people in wetsuits might slide down from pool to pool and then not without risk to life and limb.
In the year of the pandemic in September, the disease settling in for the long haul and we periodically locked down made an escape before borders clanged firmly shut at the sister-in-law’s suggestion because Crete had no cases and the winter would be warmer than that in England and we could keep company installed in a winter vacant flat next door. Two weeks in Crete locked down with a decisive severity at odds with England’s ‘s Boris led shilly-shallying silliness even though Crete was almost Covid free and England certainly was not!
The winter, as promised as warm as an English summer as befits a country a mere stone’s throw from Africa with only the occasional storm thundering around the many mountains. Oh! We had a grandstand view from our apartment in Elounda the sun bursting up across the bay the evening light rendering the mountains purple and gold so crisply shadowed you felt you could reach out across twenty miles and touch their roughness where they fought a losing battle against the elements solid slabs descending into slopes of scree.
But when all was said and done we were trapped in a gilded cage on a short leash at best allowed to local shops suitably masked and sidestepping others in a semblance of social distancing but longer trips forbidden more living but less sightseeing.
And yet… on my solitary exercise walks down to the two town supermarkets I watched the tiny Cretan olives ripen to purple-blackish bloom the family bubbles spread the nets beneath the trees and mechanically flail the harvest to the ground afterward – pruning-burning bonfires raising columns of smoke all over the island and eventually I saw the tiny olive flowers blossom to make next year’s crop sights you wouldn’t see on a two-week holiday.
My reward when I reach the town a masked conversation with the supermarket’s owner at her checkout an unexpected Pink Floyd superfan telling of a last ticket last minute flight to see the group play an ancient Athens amphitheatre whilst I exchange a treasured memory of the week I worked for the group in the run-up to the premiere of The Wall my bucket list never saw that coming! I add the memories and many photos to my store.
We do not look back on it as a holiday more time served under lockdown albeit in a beautiful cell and though we can say we lived in Crete for six months it was not life as we know it…
Ask a baker for a dozen rolls and he may give you out of the kindness of his heart thirteen a baker’s dozen so with the Poets Pub you go there not merely to read and listen to poems but for that bit extra…
This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning – why not have a go yourself? Challenges are to writing, what scales and arpeggios are to those learning musical instruments, they exercise the faculties, but unlike scales, this challenge is most enjoyable, teasing out as it does, the connections, at a thinking level, between books…
In Time Sheltera 2020 novel by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, Gaustine, a psychiatrist, creates a clinic for people with Alzheimer’s disease in Zürich which works by immersing patients into rooms containing articles from past decades and stimulating their memories of that period. The narrator is tasked with collecting the artefacts with which the rooms are stocked and travels throughout Europe to complete his mission. But soon the clinic is attracting healthy people who also want to escape a mundane present reality and return, nostalgically to other decades.
This rang a massive bell with me because some thirty-five years ago, I came into contact with a charity called Age Exchange in London, propelled by Pam Schweitzer MBE who pursued funds with the indomitable spirit that is ideal for such a role. They did exactly what the fictional clinic did – trained reminiscence workers to assist suitable dementia patients in recovering memories from the past using a library of artefacts gathered by the charity in Blackheath. The Exchange part of the charity’s name arose because they gathered reminiscences on various themes such as “Can we afford the Doctor?” and turned them into plays (that one was about Britain before the National Health Service) and performed them in schools thus recycling memories through the generations!
Time Shelter is a satire on nostalgia, populism, irony and melancholy and though I had not read it, I have ordered a copy…
Timequake is a 1997 novel by Kurt Vonnegut Junior (yes – him again!) in which he makes the world relive a decade of their lives with no possibility of change – a study of determinism in which he asserts that people have no free will. As so often with Vonnegut, he weaves personal and family history into the tale with the wry humour which is his hallmark. I think I read this book so long ago that it was back when I still used libraries to source my reading material…
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (such a Wagnerian-sounding name!) is a book that I had read before watching the film adaptation and although it was a faithful adaptation of it, I still prefer to imagine a story as told in its original form. This book takes further the idea of not being able to be in control of one’s destiny. The eponymous wife is powerless to know when or for how long her husband will disappear into the past or future including her own any more than her husband who is at the mercy of a genetic mutation that plucks him in and out of his timeline at random, each know things about the other’s past and future at different times, often uncomfortably so. This book is a thought experiment, a “what if” but like much speculative fiction, it ultimately reveals more about how we as human beings are than how we might be in the unlikely event that time travel is possible…
A Connecticut Yankeee at the Court of King Arthur by Mark Twain is a satire about monarchy and feudalism. We meet another hapless time-traveller – a Yankee engineer called Hank Morgan who awakes after a bump on the head, to discover that he is in the past at the court of King Arthur. He decides to use his skill to improve the world with his modern knowledge so the book also celebrates Hank’s homespun ingenuity and his sense of the rightness of democracy. Although he ultimately fails (darn that determinism), the book marked a move by Twain from portraying the America of the Gilded Age, to more progressive values.
If Hank’s time travel left him in the service of King Arthur, then our next hapless hero is forced to become a king having descended, albeit distantly, from Charlemagne. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck sits on my bookshelf in a very battered state having belonged first to my father as a young man – it was published when I was just two years old. In a kind of false flag operation by the French communist party, Pippin Héristal, an amateur astronomer is proclaimed King of France (in order that the French people may have something to rebel against – which they eventually do!). Like Hank Morgan, Pippin Héristal tries to make the best of what has been thrust upon him by doing what he thinks might make a difference but fate is already against both of them…
In the next link, another man is tested, this time by two different and opposing societies – in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the world of Urras is a capitalist society divided into two competing superpowers – so much like our own world. The habitable, but resource-poor moon of Urras, is Annares and 200 years before, the rebellious factions of Urras have been sent or volunteered to go there where they have formed a society based on anarcho-syndicalism. Given the lack of resources and the inefficiency of the societal model, Annares is not exactly a thriving place to live. The leading character is Shevek, who Le Gin identified as being based on J. Robert Oppenheimer – often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb” and who regarded his involvement in the Manhattan Project as that of a physicist and on seeing the first test of the Trinity bomb, said he thought to himself “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”. Of the subsequent use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told President Truman he felt he had “blood on my hands”, which did not go down well. In The Dispossessed. Shevek has a similar quandary when he tries to develop a General Temporal Theory and is blocked by a jealous superior and frustrated by his obligation to contribute manual work to society. He decides to go to Annares where he is welcomed because the capitalists see in his work, the opportunity to develop a spacecraft that will make crossing to the stars possible. But while capitalism thrives on his work, Shevek becomes involved with a new revolutionary underclass… Once again, Ursula Le Guin gives the lie to the writing maxim that “big issues are dead weights” – you just need to be a brilliant writer to incorporate them into the right story!
After such erudite stuff, the last book of my six may seem a little frivolous in style, but it contains all the elements we have seen on this journey, a man thrust out of his own time and/or place, into a different world in which he must try to do his best to survive, thrive and even contribute what he knows to the betterment of the society he finds himself in. A Princess of Mars (Barsoom) – is a genre-busting novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, and in his Barsoom series, he gives us – planetary-romance, fantasy, sword and planet, and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction from before those terms were even minted! This is not a science fiction book that depends on technology such as spacecraft since the hero – John Carter – transitions to Mars without explanation when in a tight spot on Earth and later returns, again without any control on his part. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ works are full of violent action and derring-do, but the breadth and depth of his imagination made him a huge influence on many later writers – Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, James Cameron, and George Lucas to name a few.
Finally, what links A Princess of Mars back to Time Shelter, is nostalgia – just as the “healthy” people in Time Shelter, are drawn to use the retro rooms of the clinic because they are fed up with their contemporary lives, so A Princess of Mars harks back to a rose-tinted view of American past – the frontier life when the good were good, you knew who was bad, and men were men and women swooned –” “the good old days”…?
A life together does not begin with a clean slate There is baggage.
The amount of baggage is not measured by how many pieces of furniture or the number of bags and boxes you each bring on moving in together day.
The amount of baggage is not a direct correlation to how old either of you are a short life can contain as much trauma as a longer one not that trauma is the only kind of baggage Past loves and joys form a special category of baggage and never forget that guiding light “Comparisons are Odious”
If you have not gone through the dating phase of looking deep into each other’s eyes swapping life stories comparing notes whilst spilling the beans rest assured it will happen and unpacking baggage the literal kind will turn up who knows what…
A negotiation will take place as to what goes where what is precious too precious to risk being out in in the breakage zone what is distasteful to the other and which they would rather you hid away if indeed in extremis it must not actually be thrown away.
Getting rid of the literal baggage does not even begin to alter The inner baggage which may or may not be lying around like still unpacked boxes and bags more or less waiting to be tripped over not even labelled with their contents sometimes it will be years before this baggage gives up its secrets
Framed photos will be hung and you may recognise your new partner at a younger age and with a cast of other players yet to be introduced but don’t mistake recognition for comprehension – that will be a long time coming however much you think you already know
If you are just a couple you are lucky to bring only your own set of baggage just imagine when children are to be blended into a household hopefully a family More baggage external and internal a metaphorical minefield of boxes and their contents to trip over many of them marked fragile for all the good that does
And so at the end of the first day with the most important most obvious and bulky baggage provisionally assigned a place in the scheme of things to bed
It will take weeks more to finally unpack that literal baggage but then the real work and the fun begins to know the other inside out if possible and to learn what it means to share a life…
What is a spy if not a cursed liar Who for love puts hand in fiercest fire But not the love given to a sweet woman The love of country is inhuman.
We watched a French, great tragedy conclude Where agents of The Bureau were deluded Believing they could steer their star-crossed fate Clinging to the happy ending till too late.
For once your life is built on falsehood complex The web you weave the fates will always vex And you must pay for secrets stolen, finally No matter how handlers and bosses rally
The cause of saving hapless agents’ lives Is hard on lovers, colleagues, friends and wives All pawns in what is known as the Great Game The spy is destined for a life without fame
And if their life of infamy be revealed Be sure the fates no happiness will deal.
This poem was written in response to a challenge from Posted by Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Poetry Forms on dVerse – The Poet’s Pub, to write a Heroic Sonnet in iambic pentameter – you can read about it here.
My partner and I have been binge-watching a five-series drama made by the French company Canal called The Bureau. Since the French are famed for their interest in love, this drama, whilst being a cracking, edge-of-your-seat tale of the life of spies, also examines the philosophical implications for the loves of those who make their living by living a lie – can they find happiness? Since the poem might be spoiler enough, I will say no more…
This is the first time I have attempted a Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter – something I vaguely remember being taught in school but had to resort to Wikpedia for the finer points, including all the exceptions to the rules which make lines memorable – I hope I have done it justice. I guess that we many of us have this poetry form flowing through our veins with so many great poets and playwrights having embraced the form.
When successful singer and writer of songs Harry Nilsson schmoosed his foray into the Great American Songbook he little knew it would ruin his career.
A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night was a decade before such sentimental standards would slip down easily sumptuously with the richness of a cocktail knowingly too sweet but too delicious to pass up.
The ninth album following a trail of hit songs embedded in each one nothing prepared his fans for this shift in pace and orchestrations that out Hollywooded Hollywood.
Frank Sinatra’s arranger sewed the songs together slipping seamlessly from track to track in a welter of schmaltz that should make us sick but succeeds In pulling at our heartstrings.
All the emotional tricks of film scores with swooping glissandos of silvery strings dramatic pauses and sudden quietening that make way for heart-rending lyrics.
I can’t recall When or where Nilson whispered pure emotion in my ears or the joy of rediscovering this iced gem decades after Nilsson bombed his career.
Wikipedia told me the sorry tale but I was too awash with the joy of rediscovery to truly sympathise and if there is a heaven then he is surely there and I hope he hears my tribute and my sincere judgement that this beauty was simply ahead of its time…
Intro Lazy Moon For Me and My Gal It Had to be You Always Makin’ Whoopee You Made Me Love You Lullaby in Ragtime I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now What’ll I Do Nevertheless (I’m in Love With You) This is All I Ask As Time Goes By I’m Always Chasing Rainbows Make Believe Trust in Me It’s Only a Paper Moon Thanks for the Memory Over the Rainbow Outro
Written for a musical evening over at dVerse – Poetics – The Poet’s Pub where tonight the theme is Musical Muses, hosted this evening by msjadeli…
Today I am Wearing denim and a cotton shirt both are faded naturally by sun and age and wear
The jeans are now for DIY the front of the thighs covered with finger wipe marks not as many colours as when I was a signwriter and other substances too grittily mixed in
The rips are fashionable but not fashioned to be so nevertheless my grandsons have dibs on their genuine distress!
The grandfather shirt collarless also faded with age to a soft, pale blue is frayed at the cuffs and relegated to work rather than repair too late to turn these cuffs
I will walk to the supermarket and I hope someone will appreciate my look like women who dress their best though not looking to pull.
This poem was not done to any prompt or challenge – I know – unbelievable! However, since I have been exploring AI (see previous posts), I decided to see whether I could produce a suitable image and below is the nearest to what I imagined. The prompt was “a gently smiling late middle age man seen full-length wearing a faded blue collarless shirt with frayed cuffs and faded denim jeans with paint marks and rips down the front shopping in a supermarket –ar 4:6” and I then cropped the image in Photoshop. As you can see, the AI bot didn’t understand collarless, and in this iteration did not make much of the distressing of the jeans. I guess it shows that in this case, a picture is unnecessary since the poem says it all and allows the reader to imagine their own image but I decided to include it as part of my AI exploration. And by the way, it doesn’t look anything like me – far more handsome…
During the month of April this year, whilst participating in the A to Z Challenge, I was privileged to encounter the work of Misky whose blog It’s Still Life, showcases two distinct things, poetry written by Misky and illustrated using Generative Artwork created by Misky using the Midjourney AI app. So amazing were these images to someone who is in part, a visual artist, that it inspired me to make an exploration of Generative AI for myself. At the same time, AI has been hitting the headlines big time and mainly for its use in text generation and the impact it might have on jobs and since writing is another thing that I do in my day job, I was also intrigued to see whether AI might be of any use in a company such as I work for. (I am the gradually retiring General Manager of a food manufacturing company). It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery and to cap it all, lying awake at 4 o’clock this morning, I found myself listening to “The Conversation” on the BBC World Service and what should be the topic, but AI with special reference to the involvement of women. So – mind on fire, I am going to draw this series together, although I freely acknowledge I have but dipped my toe in the waters of AI and I may return to the topic in the future…
To recap the three articles I have already written:- In the first one, I tried out ChatGPT to see what it research and write about one of the topics from my A to Z and immediately encountered the phenomena of AI hallucination – the ability, in fact tendency of AI to make things up. I also “showcased” my first attempts at visual collaboration with the Midjourney bot . In the second report, I compared ChatGPT to Writesonic which produces more lengthy articles – testing them against a typical (for me) work assignment. In the third report, I looked at the most controversial assertion about AI – that AI might in the future, eliminate human beings – Terminator-style and referenced articles that thoroughly refute the need to worry about that particular outcome – go re-assure yourselves! However, there are many things about our present and future use of AI that do bear looking at and these were raised in the episode of “The Conversation” that woke me up this morning. The programme, presented by a woman, featured two women working in the field of AI, one a philosopher and one an expert in data analysis and as well as the general concerns that need addressing about AI, they highlighted the general lack of representation of women in the field of AI – only one CEO, qualifying women failing to get jobs in the industry and so on. They did however point out that one of the changes to AI itself in recent times, has been the accessibility of use – no longer do you need to have a degree in computer programming – you could make your first interaction with ChatGPT in the same time it would take you to query something on Google. Which brings me back to Misky…
Misky was not only the inspiration for my (deepish?) dive into AI, but was extremely helpful and encouraging to me at the outset, itself a reflection of how women tend to be more collaborative, good team players – a fact which the contributors to “The Conversation” suggested is a good reason for women to me more involved in AI companies, in reviewing the implications and in forming the regulation which is undoubtedly necessary around AI. A few days ago, I was delighted to meet Misky face-to-face on a Zoom call after many text interactions online and one of the things that she shared in our too-brief call, was that she had had some push-back from certain readers of her blog, about the use of AI images. I would like to talk to her more about these issues, but the participants in “The Conversation” raised the issue of how artists, whose work has been studied by AI to create new images “in the style of”, are being short-changed. You may have been wondering about the image at the top of this post – I created in Midjourney by prompting it to “imagine” Knaresborough railway viaduct “in the style of Hokusai” – a master of Japanese woodblock prints. I have used this subject as my test piece for exploring what Midjourney can do as you will see in the previous post. Now Hokusai is long dead and so the issue of compensation is hardly an issue, but another group of more recent artists might object. I am working on a spoof post – “How to Make a Body” a tale of human reproduction in the style of an Internet recipe ad although, like Misky, the writing is all my own, I wanted an illustration to fit with the tone of the piece and prompted Midjourney to “imagine” a woman in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby and with her husband leaning in “in the style of a Ladybird book cover”. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ladybird books, they were written for children starting in the 1940’s and running until the 1980’s and they feature a distinct style of illustration.
In recent years, a series of spoof books in the Ladybird style and aimed at those who had grown up with the original series, have been vert successful, for example…
I had no idea whether Midjourney would be able to fulfil my prompt, there are lists of artists’ styles you can use with Midjourney but I hadn’t seen this one – I was not disappointed!
I am keeping my powder dry as to the final image I chose but this first set of four (Midjourney shows off by producing not one, but four attempts in under sixty seconds) – which was done to the prompt of “A new mother in a hospital bed with her husband leaning in as she holds their new baby in the style of a Ladybird Book Cover” has misunderstood my intention and the mother is holding a magazine rather than a baby – though the graphic style is very Ladybird book-like. I acknowledge that I am still only a beginner in my use of prompts with all the forms of AI I have tried so far and there is undoubtedly an “art” to getting it right which is why I said “I created in Midjourney”. Although I am a competent watercolourist, screen-printer and other forms of illustrative art, I could not produce images such as the above and certainly not in sixty seconds. So, how much of this creation is my prompt, how much is the brilliant programming behind Midjourney and how much is owed to the various artists who could produce the illustrations of the Ladybird books? I cannot begin to answer that question but it does raise an issue which needs considering in formulating regulation around the use of AI. Meanwhile, like Misky and I, jump in and have a go and get a feel for yourself of the answer to the god-like feeling of creating with an AI tool…
Much of the debate around the consequences of the rise of AI, is around its impact on jobs and the potential losses and gains. As I described in my first report, the development of computer spreadsheets swept away the lowly positions in Accountancy but opened up many more jobs at the high end of the profession and although this might be the hope for AI, that it liberates us from the menial and allows us to create new roles – roles which might be beyond the capability of AI to imagine, at present, it is not just the menial tasks that are being threatened by bots like ChatGPT, but some roles higher up in various industries. Having said that, given the tendency of AI’s to hallucinate, I wouldn’t trust an AI’s writing without an experienced human checking the output of any writing before sending it out! Also, when you are a creative individual yourself, then trying to get AIs to produce exactly what you have in mind is tricky. In my 2021 A to Z challenge, I was trying to complete a science-fiction novel and the exercise gave me enough momentum to indeed finish it a few months later. Then I set about creating a book cover for it – to feature the final denouement – a tense scene set in a space-elevator on the edge of space. I prepared the background view by Photoshopping some NASA photographs looking the length of the Red Sea towards Palestine, painted in a great river estuary as per my planet, and then superimposed some 3D elements which I drew up in AutoCAD and finally added the title and my name. You can see this below, however, I felt that the result was not quite up to the standard of artwork commissioned by big sci-fi publishers and imagined that in the unlikely event of the novel being published, an improved version of the cover would be substituted for my “sketch”.
Back to today, and naturally, I thought it would be a good test of Midjourney to see whether it could be used to produce a better version of my cover. Well, the first attempts were brilliant style-wise, but nothing like the image I wanted and many attempts followed to no avail…
My prompt read “space lift arriving at 300 miles above Earth like planet over Sahara like region array of cargo containers spread out in one layer small spaceship approaching“Midjourney couldn’t understand Space lift and I had to change lift to elevator, it couldn’t understand “array of cargo containers” but it did have all the sci-fi style I wanted. So then I decided to create a space view background without the lift and substitute it into my own cover illustration. Bingo!
Still I hanker for the crisply detailed images of the elevator that Midjourney is capable of if only I could prompt it correctly – so a work in progress… What this exercise does show, is that it is possible to use AI for the things it can do better in combination with human talent.
In Conclusion…
This exploration of AI has felt like a marathon and it is just one person’s experience and I am really only at the beginning of my exploration, I’m sure I will find both text and image-generative bots to be of use in my future work and play. I urge you all to experiment for yourselves, form your own judgements (and please share your results by linking in the comments), join the debate over the regulation of AI, and explore other artists, in particular, Misky, who began this journey…
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