Friday Fotos: Cosmic Ray Gun

When I was six or seven I had the idea that the world was a movie that God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. I guess I’d found those stories they told in Sunday school so entertaining that I figure the Baby Jesus enjoyed them as well. A year or three later I had an idea which I described this way in a rather long and complicated article about the Self:

When I was seven or eight I was given a toy which we can call the COSMIC RAY GUN – I forget the real name. It had the shape of a pistol, but it didn't shoot toy bullets or even make toy noises. Rather, it was a device for projecting short film-loops on the wall. Each time you pulled the trigger it would advance the film one frame. This toy came in a box and the box cover had some lettering which proclaimed the toy's name, COSMIC RAY GUN, a picture of the toy itself, and a picture of a boy holding a box. The boy's box had some (somewhat smaller) lettering, COSMIC RAY GUN, a (somewhat smaller) picture of the toy itself, and a (somewhat smaller) picture of a boy holding the box. This regress went as far as the resolution of the image would allow, but I was just clever enough to be able to imagine it going on and on and on without discernible end. That is to say, my brain was somehow able to imagine that each representation could itself become the object of a representation.

Last night I presented that paragraph to ChatGPT along with a request for it to draw a picture of the box. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so having it draw the same image in various styles. Here’s some of my favorites.

How I spent part of the weekend

Hot off the presses! Claude 3.5 Sonata explains how Shakespeare is like all-purpose flour.

In what way is Shakespeare like all-purpose flour?

What an intriguing and creative comparison! Let me think about this...

Both Shakespeare and all-purpose flour are remarkably versatile foundational ingredients that can be transformed into countless different creations. Shakespeare's works serve as a base material that can be adapted into comedies, tragedies, sonnets, modern retellings, or experimental interpretations - much like how all-purpose flour can become bread, pasta, cakes, or pastries depending on how it's used.

Both are also "processed" versions of something more raw - Shakespeare took the raw materials of human experience, language, and earlier stories and refined them into something that could be used universally, just as all-purpose flour is wheat that's been milled and refined to be suitable for many different uses.

Additionally, both have an amazing ability to bind things together - Shakespeare's works unite themes of love, betrayal, ambition, and justice, while flour literally binds ingredients together in recipes. They're both such fundamental ingredients in their respective domains that we often take them for granted!

What made you think of this particular comparison? I find it quite thought-provoking.

Thought provoking indeed. Let me count the ways... No, seriously, give me ten examples of how Shakespeare has been used as a foundational ingredient in popular culture back to, say, 1956, when The Tempest was the basis for a classic science fiction movie, Forbidden Planet.

Let me take this chronologically, focusing on some fascinating transformations of Shakespeare's works:

1. Forbidden Planet (1956) - As you mentioned, this pioneering sci-fi film reimagines The Tempest in space, with Dr. Morbius as Prospero, Altaira as Miranda, and the invisible monster as Caliban, born from the dark side of human consciousness.

2. West Side Story (1957/1961) - Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's masterful transformation of Romeo and Juliet into a tale of rival New York street gangs, with the Jets and Sharks standing in for the Montagues and Capulets.

3. Throne of Blood (1957) - Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth into feudal Japan, demonstrating Shakespeare's themes transcend both culture and time. The famous ending with Washizu (Macbeth) being shot full of arrows by his own men is particularly memorable.

4. Kiss Me Kate (1948-1968) - Cole Porter's meta-musical about a production of The Taming of the Shrew, where the backstage drama mirrors the play itself, had an incredibly successful Broadway run and multiple revivals.

5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) - Tom Stoppard's brilliant reframing of Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters, turning Shakespeare's tragedy into an existential comedy about free will and destiny.

6. The Lion King (1994) - Disney's animated adaptation of Hamlet, with Simba as the young prince, Mufasa as the murdered king, and Scar as the usurping uncle. Even includes a Yorick-like moment with Mufasa's skull.

7. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) - A teen comedy version of The Taming of the Shrew set in an American high school, with Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles bringing Shakespeare's sparring lovers into the modern era.

8. She's the Man (2006) - Twelfth Night reimagined in a high school setting, with Amanda Bynes playing Viola disguising herself as her brother to play soccer, rather than serve in a noble household.

9. Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014) - The entire series is structured as a modern Hamlet in a California motorcycle club, with the protagonist's father murdered by his uncle, who then marries his mother.

10. Something Rotten! (2015) - A musical comedy that imagines Shakespeare as a Renaissance rock star while two competing playwrights try to write the world's first musical, incorporating references to dozens of Shakespeare's plays.

What's particularly fascinating is how these adaptations don't just transpose Shakespeare's plots - they often use his themes and character dynamics as a foundation to explore contemporary issues, just as a baker might use all-purpose flour to create entirely new recipes while relying on its fundamental properties.

Would you like me to explore any of these adaptations in more detail? I'm particularly intrigued by how some of them, like Forbidden Planet and Throne of Blood, completely transform the setting while keeping the psychological core of Shakespeare's work intact.

The Lion King.

Ah, let me delve deeper into The Lion King's Shakespearean DNA!

The parallels to Hamlet are both obvious and subtle. The core story mirrors Hamlet's plot: a young prince's father is murdered by his uncle, who then takes the throne and marries (or in The Lion King's case, becomes the dominant male of) the former king's wife. The prince goes into exile, haunted by his father's ghost who urges him to take action.

But Disney made some fascinating adaptational choices:

• Simba is a child when Mufasa dies, unlike the adult Hamlet. This shifts the story from one of indecision to one of growth and accepting responsibility
  
• Timon and Pumbaa serve as a lighter version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but they're genuinely loyal friends rather than the king's spies
  
• Rafiki combines elements of Horatio (the truth-teller) and the gravedigger (philosophical wisdom wrapped in eccentric behavior)
  
• Zazu maps loosely to Polonius, as the fussy royal advisor
  
• Nala takes on elements of Ophelia but is given far more agency - she actively seeks out Simba and fights alongside him
  
• The hyenas serve as both Claudius's corrupted court and as a broader representation of how Scar's poor leadership destroys the kingdom

Perhaps most interestingly, while Hamlet ends tragically with most of the cast dead, The Lion King transforms the story into one of renewal and restoration. It keeps Shakespeare's themes about responsibility, betrayal, and the relationship between political and natural order, but reframes them through the lens of "The Circle of Life" - turning Hamlet's existential questioning into a more affirmative message about finding one's place in the grand scheme of things.

What do you think about this transformation? I find it fascinating how Disney managed to make a children's film that keeps so much of Hamlet's thematic richness while completely changing its emotional trajectory.

Yes. Some time ago I coined the term “universal kid space” for that aesthetic region where we find the best animated films, accessible to and enjoyable by children, yet rewarding to adults as well. Seems like Shakespeare is firmly ensconced in universal kid space.

That's a brilliant observation and term! The "universal kid space" concept perfectly captures how works like The Lion King, or even more directly Shakespearean adaptations like Gnomeo and Juliet, operate on multiple levels simultaneously.

Shakespeare himself worked in a kind of "universal human space" - his plays were enjoyed by groundlings and nobility alike, mixing high philosophy with low comedy, complex political machinations with slapstick humor. His work naturally lends itself to this kind of multi-level adaptation because he was already working in multiple registers.

The themes that preoccupy Shakespeare - love, jealousy, ambition, family loyalty, betrayal, growing up, finding one's place in the world - are fundamentally human experiences that resonate across ages. A child can understand Simba's grief and guilt over Mufasa's death while an adult might see deeper parallels to Hamlet's existential crisis.

This might also explain why Shakespeare works so well in animation - the medium's ability to move fluidly between reality and fantasy, to externalize internal states, to shift scale and perspective dramatically, provides a perfect toolkit for translating his theatrical magic into visual storytelling that works for all ages.

Would you say the "universal kid space" concept applies equally well to all of Shakespeare's works, or do some translate better than others into this space?

Some notes on how I discovered formal structure in some literary texts, Part 1: Four cases

What is intelligence? How does it work? Those and related questions have been with us for a while, but their salience has been amplified in the wake of ChatGPT, which is given us a demonstration of machine intelligence, whatever that is, that is accessible to anyone with access to the web. Those questions have ceased to be of interest primarily to psychologists, philosophers, and AI researchers. Now “everyone” is interested in them.

Perhaps the single most pressing issue is: While machine intelligence ever reach, or even surpass, human intelligence? The concept of intelligence is so obscure, however, that it’s difficult to produce compelling answers. Earlier in this year I decided to take another crack at the problem, AI, Chess, and Language 1: Two VERY Different Beasts. That post has, in turn, led to a series of posts on chess and language.

More recently, I did a long post centered on analogy, Intelligence, A.I. and analogy: Jaws & Girard, kumquats & MiGs, double-entry bookkeeping & supply and demand, and another in which I talked about wanting an AI that could determine the formal structure of literary texts, What do I personally want from an AI? [as soon as possible, too, NOT in the distant future]. Neither of those posts says anything about chess, but they’re certainly on the language side of the ledger. That’s led to the idea of reflecting on what I’ve had to do to discover formal structures in texts.

I’ve done a lot of this. Which texts should I use?

Kubla Khan

“Kubla Khan” is the most important example. That’s where I started, and it’s the most richly developed example. Furthermore, I’ve published that work in the formal literature and I’ve already written quite a bit (informally) about how I came to do that work.

Here's the articles about the poem:

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan", Language and Style, Vol. 8: 3-29, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, November 29, 2003, https://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind

These papers have background:

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life, November 2015, https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, Working Paper, February 2015, pp. 20-27, https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_L%C3%A9vi_Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

I originally published the “Touchstones” piece in a journal edited by one of my teachers in graduate school, the late Art Efron: Paunch 42–43: 4–16, December 1975. It’s about my years at Johns Hopkins and how I came to do a Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan.” I’ve linked to a version which I’ve updated with notes that I’ve inserted into the text, notes commenting one what’s happened since then. The Lévi-Strauss piece is generally about the intellectual significance of his work on myth while the section, “Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through ‘Kubla Khan’” is specifically about how Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism guided my approach to the poem.

Three Shakespeare Plays

This is about three Shakespeare plays, a comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), a tragedy (Othello), and a so-called romance or tragi-comedy (The Winter’s Tale). In each of these plays a man wrongly suspects his beloved of betraying him with another man. Consider the following diagram:

Along the left I've listed five dramatic functions which some character must play. In the columns for each play I've indicated the character that takes these functions. The point of the diagram as the we move from one genre to the next (in this order) one function seems to disappear. Othello has no mentor, but he has a deceiver; and Leontes has neither a mentor nor a deceiver. What I think is going on is that functions are, in effect, being absorbed into the protagonist. At the play's opening, Othello is senior enough in the world that he has no need of a mentor. Leontes is king in his world, so there is no one higher. As for being deceived about his wife, he does that to himself, no external agent required.

There's more to the pattern than that, but that’s enough to give you an idea about what’s going on. The analytic point is that this is a pattern which becomes visible only when you compare texts. That’s something that Lévi-Strauss did in his work on myth.

Here's the article I published about that:

At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3): 259-279, 1998, https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation

Metropolis

I’m talking about the manga originally published by Osamu Tezuka in 1949 and not Fritz Lang’s movie of the same title. As you know, manga are Japanese comic books, or graphic novels. I’m including this as a case in the first place because it is an example of ring-form construction, which I depict in the following diagram:

Notice the numbering at the left and the descriptive labels at the right. I’m including it in the second place because it is the first time I used to whole-text table to conduct an analysis. The diagram is reduced from that table.

Here’s the article:

Tezuka's Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable About Art and the Cosmos, in Uta Klein, Ktaja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. mentis Verlag GmbH, 2006, pp. 527-545, https://www.academia.edu/7959634/Tezuka_s_Metropolis_A_Modern_Japanese_Fable_about_Art_and_the_Cosmos

Here's the analytic table:

Descriptive Tables for Tezuka’s Metropolis, A Note on Descriptive Method, Working Paper, 2016, 8 pp., https://www.academia.edu/27370076/Descriptive_Tables_for_Tezukas_Metropolis_A_Note_on_Descriptive_Method

Heart of Darkness

It turns out that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also a ring-form text, or a close variant. Consider the following chart:

Each bar represents a single paragraph in the text. The length of the bar corresponds to the number of words in the text. The bars are arranged in the order they exist in the text, first to last, from left to right.

Notice that there is one paragraph that is noticeably longer than all the others. It has 1502 words. It is the structural center of the text. There’s much more to be said about that paragraph and its place in the text. But this is not the place to do it.

You can find those discussions, and others, in this working paper:

Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 3, Working Paper, August 9, 2018, 49 pp., https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_3

I have two main reasons for including this case as an example of discovery. In the first case, that chart depicts something that is clearly an objective fact of Conrad’s text. It’s not something I conjured out of the mist through interpretive wizardry. I make the same claim about the formal structures in the other three cases. That’s why I’m calling them discoveries; they’re as real as a vein of gold in the Klondike.

And the process by which I discovered that structure in Heart of Darkness was, if anything, more serendipitous than a gold strike. The prospector who gets a gold strike was looking for gold. I wasn’t looking for a ring-form pattern in Conrad’s text. Not only that, but charting paragraph lengths is not something one normally does with literary texts or, as far as I know, any other texts. I did it on a whim. While I did have a formal reason for looking at that particular paragraph, it didn’t have anything to do with ring-composition. While examining that paragraph I noticed that it seemed unusually long. Perhaps it was even the longest one in the text. So I decided to take a look. Out of mere curiosity.

But I’ve said enough about that so far. I’ll say more later. Here’s the point at issue: How do you construct at AI to discover something of a kind that it didn’t know exists? That’s what I did in this case and in “Kubla Khan” as well. The pattern I discovered across those three Shakespeare plays is arguably related to the sort of thing I’d seen in Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, though quite different in the details. As for the ring-composition in Metropolis, ring-composition is well-enough known, though not much studied by literary critics. I was alerted to it by the late Mary Douglas. 

The importance of visualization

I don't see how I could have done any of that work without visualization. I could have spotted that something was going on in the Shakespeare case, and maybe, just maybe, I could have made an argument without that simple diagram. But the fact is that that's not how I did it. More precisely, I might have imagined the argument I ended up making without drawing that table. But I can't imagine trying to write it up without making the table. The table allows you to see the structural phenomenon at a glance.

In the other three cases diagrams were an essential part in seeing the phenomenon at all. Since I didn't include any diagram from the "Kubla Khan" work in this post, I will here explicitly state that diagramming was essential to my "Kubla Khan" work from the beginning.

All of which is to say that in each case, two distinctly different methods of thought were important. What does that imply about the possibilities of artificial intelligence?

The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka's Mighty Atom

9.9.23: I'm thinking about the impending AI Apocalypse. It's time once again to remind myself that the Japanese have a different view on such things.

7.7.20: I'm bumping this to the top of the queue more or less on general principles, and to remind myself about it. And robots are cool.

* * * * *

Here's two more posts from The Valve. These are about Osamu Tezuka's use of robots in his Astroboy series. Coming at these stories from the perspective of Western SF, where crazy anti-human robots and computers are an important theme one is struck by the fact that that theme is almost entirely absent from these stories. Why? What's Tezuka using his robots for?

The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1921. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese (Frederik Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom, 1990, p. 29). A Japanese ten year old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in 1938 and thirteen years later he created the most famous robot in Japanese culture, Tetsuwan Atomu, Mighty Atom, aka Astro Boy in English. Čapek’s play was a response to industrialization; Tezuka’s manga was a response to the Allied occupation of Japan. Čapek’s robots were not electro-mechanical devices; they were organic, but constructed, like Frankenstein. They were created to serve humans as workers, but they rebel and, in time, kill all humans save one. Tezuka’s conception is quite different; his robots are electro-mechanical, but many of his stories center on social tension between humans and robots.

Though Tezuka hated WWII, he was a patriotic Japanese and expected Japan to win the war. Near the end of the war he created an unpublished comic in which Japanese and American comic strip characters fought one another (Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays, 2007, p. 27). After the war he continued his medical training while beginning to publish manga, publishing New Treasure Island in 1947, which is reputed to have sold 400,000 copies. He experimented with science fiction in Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. He introduced Mighty Atom as a secondary character in 1951, and then gave him his own title in 1952.

While he had some misgivings about whether or not his primary audience, Japanese boys, would be able to identify with a robot, those misgivings were groundless. Mighty Atom was a success. He published Mighty Atom stories continuously from 1952 through 1968, and a few thereafter. In the 1960s he created an animated TV series that was almost immediately exported to the United States as Astro Boy. During the 1980s he created fifty-two anime episodes in color, most of them based on stories in the earlier anime series or in the manga.

Tezuka set Mighty Atom in a future world with advanced technology. Space travel was routine, as was undersea and deep earth exploration. Mighty Atom was the size of a ten-year-old boy, more or less, but had a 100,000 horsepower atomic energy heart, an electronic brain, searchlight eyes, super-sensitive hearing, rockets in his legs, ray guns in his fingers, and a pair of machine guns in his posterior. He attended primary school, where he was often teased for being a robot, and lived with robot parents and a robot sister. He was particularly close, however, to two middle-aged men. Dr. Elefun was head of the Ministry of Science and created Atom’s parents and sister; he also repaired Atom. Mr. Mustachio was Atom’s teacher in school. Both men worked closely with Atom on his various missions and adventures and offered him sage advice.

The key point is that most, if not all, of the Mighty Atom stories involve tensions between humans and robots. I’ve already mentioned that Atom was frequently teased and bullied by his classmates. Since robots could not harm humans – that’s their nature – he had no choice but to put up with it. That’s a recurring motif. But consider a specific story, “Robot Land,” which exists in three versions, the manga version, and a version in each of the two anime series (I’m familiar with the manga version and the version in the second anime series). Robot Land is a theme park, much like Disneyland (and there are explicit Disney references in the story), except that all of the attractions feature robots. But that’s just the innocent surface. Underground, robot slaves manufacture weapons. All of the robots are poorly treated by the human owner. Atom, Elefun, Mustachio, and Atom’s classmates are all involved in defeating the owner and liberating the robots.

In “The Death Balloon” a criminal named Skunk sends Atom look-alike balloons into the air which then explode, injuring and killing people and destroying property. Skunk is doing this at the behest of a mayoral candidate running on an anti-robot platform. The story of the “Robot Stuntman” tells of a small robot who does all the stunts for a human actor, but is kept captive in a case and given no credit for his work. In “A Robot President” Atom has to protect the newly elected president of a foreign country from evil forces that want to destroy him precisely because he is a robot. In yet another episode, Atom comes to the defense and rescue of discarded robots. And so on and so forth.

Now, why did these stories prove to be so popular in post-war Japan? While the question demands a multi-faceted answer, I want to focus on only one aspect. Consider this passage from Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays (pp. 120-121):

Writing in the Tokyo shimbun newspaper in 1967, Tezuka explained that Mighty Atom was really about the chasmic misunderstandings and problems that might occur between man and robot in the future. “I never intended,” he wrote, “to create a story set in the twenty-fist century about a glorious scientific civilization.” He was, instead, inspired by his frustrating and humiliating experience at the end of the war, of having been beaten by a group of American GIs because he could not communicate with them effectively in English.

A biography of Osamu Tezuka

Brad Hawley, The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Must-Read for Manga Fans, Fantasy Literature, March 9, 2019. A review of:

The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime by Toshio Ban and Tezuka Productions and translated into English by Frederik L. Schodt. Stone Bridge Press, 2016.

Tezuka was a workaholic:

He was such a workaholic that he rarely left his office, where he often slept and usually ate his meals. Towards the end of his life, he even had multiple desks set up in his office with different ongoing projects on each desk: He would move from desk to desk throughout the day keeping multiple projects going simultaneously, often sleeping as little as three hours a night. He lived 60 years, and in this time period, his complete works became the largest publication of a single author’s output of all time.

And was known as "the god of manga":

Tezuka is Walt Disney, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Alan Moore rolled into one plus more. He artistically had impact greater than even what they accomplished all together. Like Walt Disney, Tezuka created loveable characters and cutting-edge animated films and T.V. shows that were for all-ages. Like Stan Lee, he created a universe of characters for all ages, many of them aimed at young men. Like Will Eisner, he paved the way for what sequential art could do and be, and like Eisner, he wrote intelligently about the art form. Like Alan Moore, but unlike Stan Lee and Walt Disney, Tezuka was far more mature, experimental, intellectual, and philosophical in many of his works, much of them coming from later in his life. When Tezuka is referred to as the “God of Manga” in Japan, they are calling him the God of animation and sequential art worldwide. And it is a fact that there is no other single creator of sequential art and animation worldwide who has had a bigger impact than he has. When people talk about the influence of anime on art and culture in the United States, they are talking about Tezuka’s influence. And that’s just a small example of his impact, years after he died.

I hope I have emphasized enough how important to the world Tezuka is as an artist, and therefore, how much a biography worthy of him is needed. The Osamu Tezuka Story is that biography, and most appropriately, it is told in manga format by a man who worked with Tezuka for many years. Therefore, the style is very much in the Tezuka tradition. Toshio Ban has captured visually the fast-paced life of an artist, an artist who was followed around by editors waiting for their pages. In his younger years, Tezuka would hide out in different hotels trying to get work done without interruption from the many editors waiting for work from him, but he took on so many assignments, he could barely keep up with his deadlines. This biography captures the frantic life of a young artist who matured without giving up on his commitments right up until the end of his life, when he left multiple works incomplete, most sadly his life-long work The Phoenix, though multiple stand-alone volumes of this series were completed.

Notes on Place and Narrative Order in Three Texts

In the course of a recent Academica.edu session (about the nature of stories and the discipline of literary criticism) Per Aage Brandt brought my attention to his paper, Forces and Spaces – Maupassant, Borges, Hemingway. Toward a Semio-Cognitive Narratology, in which he outlines (to quote from his abstract) “a model of the constitutive architecture of narrative meaning as manifested by ‘good stories’, stories that make sense by conveying a vie& of the human condition.” In this model he proposes that actions move back and forth between “a canonical set of narrative spaces, each encompassing and contributing a significant part of the meaning of a story” and that these narrative spaces are typically “staged as distinct locations” in the physical space depicted in the narrative. He labeled these four spaces: Condition, Catastrophe, Consequence, and Conclusion.

That something like this is going on seems plausible on the face of it. As Brandt noted in a comment over at the session, “spaces and behaviors are regularly linked, in human cultures as in many animal behaviors.” Thus humans and animals typically has a nesting space or den where they sleep and a daily routine the moves through the same spaces in a regular circuit where they satisfy their various needs. I note further that, as all animals have to navigate through the physical world, the neural machinery for guiding us through space is phylogenetically very old, reliable, and sophisticated.

However, for the purposes of this post, I want to set the abstract narratology aside and simply concentrate on the physical places in a small set of narratives. Furthermore, those narratives share a common narrative form, known as ring composition. In the next section I describe that form with a simple example and then, in successive sections, consider three texts: Tezuka’s Metropolis, Honda’s Gojira, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A final section has links to other materials.

Let’s Take a Journey

Let us start with a very simple narrative, one with no remarkable features. It is a story about how I leave my apartment to get a quart of milk at the local King’s grocery store and then return to my apartment by the same route. This story, as you will quickly see, had the canonical form of a ring; that’s why I’m telling it.

Here is that story, told in a telegraphic way.

A: Leave Apartment

B: Exit Building, turn left to 13th St.

C: Walk East on 13th St. for a block, cross Hudson

D: Turn right, walk so many yards to the door of King’s

E: Enter King’s and purchase milk

D’: Exit King’s, turn right and walk so many yards to 13th St.

C’: Cross Hudson and walk one block on 13th to Washington St.

B’: Turn right and walk to the door of 1301 Washington St.

A’: Enter building and return to my apartment

This story has a center point, my purchase of milk, and the events in the story, such as they are, are arranged symmetrically around that central event.

That story interests me because the ring-form is incidental to my intentions in telling the story. In telling the story I didn’t intend it to have a ring form. All I intended was to tell the events as they happened or, to be more precise, as I remembered them happening. My memory stream has the events ordered one after the other and that’s how I told them.

Where, then, did the narrative symmetry come from? It came from the material conditions of the narrated events. The story was simple. I started at one place, when to another to do something, and then I returned to my starting point. Because returned by the same route I used when going to the goal place, the symmetry was a natural consequence of geography. Had I returned by a different route, the symmetry would have been broken.

Disney and Tezuka at 3 Quarks Daily

My most recent posts at 3 Quarks Daily are about two pop culture figures, Osamu Tezuka and Walt Disney:

Tezuka's Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and the Japanese Take on Robots (April 3, 2017)

Why Disney’s Fantasia is a Masterpiece (May 1, 2017)

Fantasia came out at the end of 1940, but, alas, failed at the box office, in part because by that time Disney had become dependent on foreign markets but those were closed to him because of the outbreak of WWII. Tezuka would have been aware of Disney by the time he began drawing manga in the middle and late 1940s, but he wouldn’t have seen any of Disney’s feature length cartoons until the 1950s, at which time they fascinated him. Both men have had tremendous influence on popular culture.

Form, Event, and Text in an Age of Computation

I've put another article online. This is not a working paper. It is a near-final draft of an article I will be submitting for publication once I have had time to let things settle in my mind. I'd appreciate any comments you have. You can download the paper in the usual places:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/27706433/Form_Event_and_Text_in_an_Age_of_Computation

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2821678

Abstract: Using fragments of a cognitive network model for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 we can distinguish between (1) the mind/brain cognitive system, (2) the text considered merely as a string of verbal or visual signifiers, and (3) the path one’s attention traces through (1) under constraints imposed by (2). To a first approximation that path is consistent with Derek Attridge’s concept of literary form, which I then adapt to Bruno Latour’s distinction between intermediary and mediator. Then we examine the event of Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney in light of recent work on synchronized group behavior and neural coordination in groups. A descriptive analysis of Obama’s script reveals that it is a ring-composition and the central section is clearly marked in audience response to Obama’s presentation. I conclude by comparing the Eulogy with Tezuka’s Metropolis and with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

CONTENTS

Computational Semantics: Model and Text 3

Literary Form, Attridge and Latour 8

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Performance 11

Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Text 15

Description in Method 19

 

Introduction: Form, Event, and Text in an Age of Computation

The conjunction of computation and literature is not so strange as it once was, not in this era of digital humanities. But my sense of the conjunction is a bit different from that prevalent among practitioners of distant reading. They regard computation as a reservoir of tools to be employed in investigating texts, typically a large corpus of texts. That is fine.

But, for whatever reason, digital critics have little or no interest in computation as something one enacts while reading any one of those texts. That is the sense of computation that interests me. As the psychologist Ulric Neisser pointed out four decades ago, it was the idea of computation that drove the so-called cognitive revolution in its early years:

... the activities of the computer itself seemed in some ways akin to cognitive processes. Computers accept information, manipulate symbols, store items in “memory” and retrieve them again, classify inputs, recognize patterns, and so on. Whether they do these things just like people was less important than that they do them at all. The coming of the computer provided a much-needed reassurance that cognitive processes were real; that they could be studied and perhaps understood.

Much of the work in the newer psychologies is conducted in a vocabulary that derives from computing and, in many cases, involves computer simulations of mental processes. Prior to the computer metaphor we populated the mind with sensations, perceptions, concepts, ideas, feelings, drives, desires, signs, Freudian hydraulics, and so forth, but we had no explicit accounts of how these things worked, of how perceptions gave way to concepts, or how desire led to action. The computer metaphor gave us conceptual tools through which we could construct models with differentiated components and processes meshing like, well, clockwork. It gave us a way to objectify our theories.

My purpose in this essay is to recover the concept of computation for thinking about literary processes. For this purpose it is not necessary either to believe or to deny that the brain (with its mind) is a digital computer. There is an obvious sense in which it is not a digital computer: brains are parts of living organisms, digital computers are not. Beyond that, the issue is a philosophical quagmire. I propose only that the idea of computation is a useful heuristic device. Specifically, I propose that it helps us think about and describe literary form in ways we haven’t done before.

First I present a model of computational semantics for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. This affords us a distinction between (1) the mind/brain cognitive system, (2) the text considered merely as a string of verbal or visual signifiers, and (3) the path one’s attention traces through (1) under constraints imposed by (2). To a first approximation that path is consistent with Derek Attridge’s concept of literary form, which I adapt to Bruno Latour’s distinction between intermediary and mediator. Then we examine the event of Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney in light of recent work on synchronized group behavior and neural coordination in groups. A descriptive analysis of Obama’s script reveals that it is a ring-composition; the central section is clearly marked in the audience’s response to Obama’s presentation. I conclude by comparing the Eulogy with Tezuka’s Metropolis and with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Though it might appear that I advocate a scientific approach to literary criticism, that is misleading. I prefer to think of it as speculative engineering. To be sure, engineering, like science, is technical. But engineering is about design and construction, perhaps even Latourian composition. Think of it as reverse-engineering: we’ve got the finished result (a performance, a script) and we examine it to determine how it was made. It is speculative because it must be; our ignorance is too great. The speculative engineer builds a bridge from here to there and only then can we find out if the bridge is able to support sustained investigation.

Descriptive Tables for Tezuka’s Metropolis, A Note on Descriptive Method

I've added another working paper, title above. It contains information supplementary to my article, Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos (PDF). You can download the tables from Academia.edu:

https://www.academia.edu/27370076/Descriptive_Tables_for_Tezukas_Metropolis_A_Note_on_Descriptive_Method

Abstract: This document contains analytical tables for Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis. The tables demonstrate that the text is ring-form as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4’, 3’, 2’ 1’. The outermost structure is a framing device while the innermost structure reveals a variety of “secrets.”

CONTENTS

Ring Form 2

Rings in Tezuka 3

Summary Table 4

Full Table 5

While I offer a few remarks on ring-form I do not say much about Metropolis itself beyond what you can see in the tables, though I have some remarks about why and how I undertook the analysis. While the full table does contain a good deal of the story, it’s not really in a form suitable for reading. At the very least I assume that you have read and know the story.

Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind

Edit (12.12.13): Jim Hoagland pointed out that my discussion of the basic symbol sets of arithmetic and natural language was wrong. I've corrected the problem (I think).

I was looking at Mary Douglas’s checklist for ring forms and realized that each item on it had a plausible interpretation in the domain of computation. So that’s where I’m going in this post. But that’s not where I start. First I want to talk a little about computation, then another look at Tezuka’s Metropolis, and then the Douglas checklist.

What is Computation, Anyhow?

If, when you think about computers and computation, you mostly think about numbers and arithmetic, then you’re likely to be puzzled, if not horrified, at the idea that literature is somehow computational. Literature, after all, is not about numbers – though the pages and chapters of books may be numbered.

But then, computation isn’t necessarily about numbers either. It depends on how you think of it.

“625” and “six-hundred and twenty-five” are strings of characters and each represents the same number. The first string is of the sort used in arithmetic calculation while the second is not, though not for any inherent problem. It’s a simple matter of convenience; the string of numerals is more compact, and hence more convenient, than the string of words. Note, however, that when “625” is read aloud it might sound the same as “six-hundred and twenty-five”, though it might also be abbreviated to “six-twenty-five”.

When you learn arithmetic you learn the tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These tables consist of basic propositions about numbers and how they behave under those four operations. You also learn a handful of simple rules to be used in applying those operations to multi-digit numbers. What you are learning – and practicing, hour upon hour – is symbol manipulation, but symbol manipulation of a very restricted kind.

Ordinary language use, after all, is also symbol manipulation. And, while there are restrictions, and lots of them, the proper manipulation of the symbols of ordinary language is open ended in a way the arithmetic calculation is not. Perhaps the most fundamental difference has to do with the set of symbols used to spell the names of the entities.

For both arithmetic and natural language is finite and quite small. For arithmetic the set consists of ten numerals (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), four operators (+ - * /), and an equals sign (=). The symbol set for any natural language is complicated by the fact that, for written languages, there may not be a one-to-one relationship between the symbol set for the written and spoken versions. There we would have to have separate discussions for alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems. And in either case, the spoken language has prosodic features that are not well represented in the written language.

Consider written English. We have the 24 letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks. That’s finite and small. However, letter combinations are used to form words, but the way they are combined to do so is completely arbitrary with respect to what the words mean and how they are used. That gives rise to what linguists call duality of patterning; the fact that language is patterned with respect to sound (phonetics and phonology) and with respect to meaning (semantics and syntax).

That isn’t the case with arithmetic. There is a systematic relationship between how a number is spelled and the value of the number designated by its name. Thus the spellings tell us that, of “478”, “829”, and “321”, 829 is the largest and 321 is the smallest. But the spellings of “dog”, “dot”, and “elephant” do not tell us which, if any, are living creatures. In particular, of the two that have similar spellings, one is living, the other is not. The third (“elephant”) is also a living creature though its spelling shares no letters with “dog”.

Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

—Bruno Latour

...we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher...

– Plato

This post follows upon my earlier post, Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola, and presupposed knowledge of it. I want to discuss the method I employed in making that argument and, in particular, I want to argue that it is possible for the profession to obtain objective knowledge of such matters.

I am aware, of course, that objectivity has taken a beating in the past few decades. Nonetheless I persist. I do not think that objectivity is a matter of unmediated access to the world. That doesn’t exist. Nor do I think that a pure heart and a clean mind are adequate to the job.

Rather objectivity is a matter of proper method, of construction or, to use a word from Latour, of composition. Our picture of the objective world is one we compose. And I offer ring form as one of those conceptual objects that we can compose in an objective manner.

The simplest form of objectivity is simple intersubjective agreement. It was when critics discovered that they could not attain intersubjective agreement on matters of interpretation, of meaning, that we began to question our activity, to theorize the discipline. My suggestion is that we bracket meaning and concentrate on describing form. There is where we can attain intersubjective agreement.

That is what I did in arguing about center point construction in “Kubla Khan”, Tezuka’s Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. I note that in talking of description I am not asserting that description, unlike interpretation, is in some mysterious way, unmediated. Description requires its terminology, such as ring form or center point construction, such as center loading, and so forth. But that terminology is about form, not meaning. These statements are descriptive, not because they are unmediated, but, in effect, because that is all that they do: describe. One would, of course, like to know how it is that the mind constructs such things, and why the mind takes pleasure in them. Description will not provide answers to those questions. But I see little hope of constructing answers if we do not start with good descriptions.

Objectivity

Before getting down to it, though, I want to show that I really mean it when I say that I am not presupposing that description is equivalent to having unmediated access to our object texts. Let’s sharpen our knives on Stanley fish.

Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola

This one's going to take awhile; it's got 5800 words, plus several tables. You might want to have some snacks ready and make sure the cell phone's been silenced.

Yesterday I declared the psychological “revolution” in literary studies to be stillborn. Neither the cognitive poetics born of the so-called cognitive revolution nor the Darwinian literary criticism born of evolutionary psychology has yet delivered a new criticism. Nor, for reasons I explained in the post, do I expect them to deliver a robust and insightful new criticism any time soon. As currently constituted, those psychologies can tell us something about the bricks and mortar of our texts, but they can say nothing about the designs.

This post is about design, one particular design that I call center point construction. I describe it – and that’s all I do, describe it – as I’ve found it in four texts, four texts of very different kinds: 1) “Kubla Khan”, a lyric poem, 2) Metropolis, a Japanese manga narrative, 3) Heart of Darkness, a novella, and 4) Apocalypse Now, a motion picture. That the last two should share the same formal armature, to borrow a term from Lévi-Strauss, is perhaps not surprising. But the form I’ve found in both of them has not, so far as I know, before been described in either of them. That the same form can be found in two other texts that differ as much from one another as either in turn differs from Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now, that seems worthy of our attention.

A psychological model that could account for the same form in those very different realizations would thereby be one of considerable interest. For it would have to deal with radically differences in temporal scale and presentation medium. I am willing to leave the creation of such a model to the psychologists: evolutionary, cognitive, and neuroscientific. While they’re working on that I plan to be describing more texts, some having center point construction, but others based on different organizing principles.

After some preliminary throat clearing I go through the texts in order: “Kubla Khan”, Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. I’ve collected references to more detailed work on these texts at the end of the post.

Beyond “Kubla Khan”

As I’ve written in several posts, it was my early work on “Kubla Khan” that sent me down the path I’ve been traveling for the last four decades. However, I’ve always had a problem “selling” that work to others. “Kubla Khan” seems to be a one-off poem; there’s no other poem quite like it. Thus, however interesting its structure, it’s difficult to generalize from that work.

So, the poem’s got an interesting structure, what of it? It’s only one poem fer chrissakes!

Things began to open up a few years ago. The late Mary Douglas got me interested in ring form, where texts are organized like so: A, B, C…X…C’, B’, A’. The last episode mirrors the first, the next to last mirrors and second, and so forth around a central episode. While the two movements of “Kubla Khan” are symmetrical about a mid-point, they don’t appear to have other features of ring form and the poem as a whole doesn’t have a ring form.

Then I discovered that Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Metropolis, has a ring form. And, though it is a narrative not a lyric poem, it shares an important feature with “Kubla Khan.” It has an emblematic ending. Just at the first movement of “Kubla Khan” ends with a line that is an emblem for the whole poem – “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” – so Metropolis ends with an image that can stand as an emblem for the entire narrative – the central character, Michi, in effect becomes transformed into a statue.

What if I analytically decomposed the form of “Kubla Khan” into different elements such that each element is a formal device that can perform certain functions? Maybe those different devices can be found in other texts.

Japanese Robots in Space

As I've explained in previous posts the Japanese have a different take on robots than we do: The Japanese and Robots, The Robot as Subaltern. They're not so much worried about a super-robot going nuts and attempting to rule the world as they are concerned about fostering harmonious social relations between humans and robots. Here's a vido of a robot companion the Japanese will be sending to the International Space Station in August (story HERE):

During its 16-month stay there, it will engage in “discussions” with astronaut Koichi Wakata, marking the first time conversations have occurred between a robot and a human in space.

H/t Tim Perper.

Questions of Context: Shakespeare and Tezuka

Vincent Barletta has made an interesting Arcade post about context in literary criticism. I respond here at New Savanna rather than there because my thoughts exceed any decent length for blog comments. First I offer passages from Barletta’s post, then I discuss an essay by Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” After that, two early modern texts from English literature (Pantosto and the Winter's Tale) and, at the end, robots in the Japan of Osamu Tezuka.

Barletta’s Post

Let’s start with the opening of Barletta’s post:

Focused as some of us are on medieval and early modern literature, the question of context comes up a great deal. Is our work sufficiently contextualized? Where and how do modern theories of language and meaning (our inevitable toolkit) fit into our work? Are we expected to bracket off ourselves (and our readers) from our work? Is it our goal to speak of, for example, fifteenth-century poetry in terms that only a fifteenth-century reader would understand (e.g., "According to Aquinas. . .")?

As I read those words my nose got chocked up with dust and I felt the chill of vampires rising from the crypts of ancient libraries.

Early in my career I’d heard rumors of scholars who didn’t believe one could properly use theories and concepts of a vintage more recent than the texts to which one applies them. No Freudian, Marxist, or Derridean analysis of Wuthering Heights, the Divine Comedy, or Oedipus the King. Now Barletta’s telling me that they still walk among us.

He goes on in the next paragraph:

These are extreme positions, and we mostly don't expect to write about medieval and early modern works in the same way that medieval and early modern writers did. Our readers, after all, have different expectations and needs. Modern theories and philosophies do have a place in our work, although we often have a very hard time defining for ourselves and our students (not to mention those anonymous readers who assess our work for publication) where the line that divides antiquarian fetishism and anachronism might be.

OK, that’s a little better, gives us a little breathing room.

To Copy is To Be, Not: Tezuka’s Book of Human Insects

Osamu Tezuka. The Book of Human Insects. Translated by Mari Morimoto. Vertical, Inc. 2011.

Originally serialized in Japan as Ningen Konchuuki in 1970-71, Tezuka’s The Book of Human Insects deals with themes and motifs that have been present in his work from the beginning, but presents them to an audience more mature than we normally associate with Astro Boy, though we would do well to remember than many adults eagerly followed Astro’s adventures. Just how mature, that’s a judgment call, but The Book of Human Insects presents us with genuine violence, with thugs, gang bosses, overly ambitious industrialists, and with explicit, though not pornographic, sex, including an encounter between two women. If I hesitate to call it lesbian or gay sex, well, that’s because what’s going on in that relationship is, well, not so complicated, but it doesn’t fit into neat socio-sexual categories either. Not American categories at any rate.

One woman in the encounter is the private secretary, assistant, and mistress of one of the above mentioned industrialists, Kiriri Kamaishi. She’s being fooled and exploited, and by a woman she’s supposed to watch and follow. That woman, and the party to sexual relationship, is Toshiko Tomura, Kamaishi’s new wife in a match that’s explicitly constructed as a competitive wager. Tomura is our protagonist. The wager takes the form of a marriage contract between them that places heavy restrictions on Tomura’s actions, but which also has one clause that Tomura herself added: “Any unilateral divorce will not be recognized. And if either spouse should happen to violate any of the these terms, all of their assets shall be transferred to the other.”

There’s a certain logic to fiction that pretty much betrays how this wager is going to work out. Further, the rather absurd nature of the covenant gives this segment of the story, “Longhorn Beetle”—the third of four—the feel of parable. But then, the whole story has that feel, a feeling that ebbs and flows as the story twists and changes. The point of this extended parable, however, is nothing so simple as a lesson. Of perhaps it is, and the lesson is: what is, is.