Le Havre New York[er]

þe norse farce [re-explained]

As I was quizzed about the meaning of þe norse farce logo (on both my tee-shirt and my laptop) at a recent workshop (and as befits the day!), let me recall here it is a multilevel pun mostly centred at myself and neither at a famous outdoor brand or at Norsemen! It started with my wearing apparels from said brand often enough to attract jokes from colleagues and with my misreading its logo as a Viking helmet, rather than the iconic Half-Dome in Yosemite I visited years later. Following several attempts at creating a logo that drifted oceans away from the original trademark, I drew the above from a figurehead near the Oseberg ship in the Vikingskiphuset and with the help of a few friends, ended up with the above, where absolutely no component (font, color, text, logo) was pilfered in the process! I also took advantage of one of the numerous make-your-own-tee websites to create a Norse Farce shop(pe) for afficionadas and  afficionados..!

Doug’s scared…

Following a link from a NYT editorial, I came upon a transcribed interview of Douglas Hofstadter on his fright about the current nature of AI and in particular of the impact of (surprise, surprise!) ChatGPT. When the French translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach came out in 1985, it became an immediate success, I read it, enjoyed it and recommended to my inner circles. To the point of my superior in the Navy (during the year I was drafted in the French Navy) saw the cover (for I was also reading it in the Navy office!), browsed through it and asked me to… reproduce the sculpture (a 3D ambigram) for the logo of his own company (for he moonlighted several days a week at an hologram company he had created). Which proved rather straightforward (but I ignore if the result was ever exploited). While I am now much less reserved about the book, which I feel is quite pretentious and self-congratulary, without delivering a particularly deep message, I can related to my earlier self excitement when faced with a scientific book involving many themes of interest for me, pleasant and easy to read, if sometimes mired in heavily making a point. This is obviously a personal view and others, like the science vulgariser Marcus du Sautoy launched a celebration for the 40 years of the book. (Coincidence: I had a chat & a beer with a former high school teacher of his’ in Normandy a week before writing this post.)

“it almost feels that way, as if we, all we humans, unbeknownst to us, are soon going to be eclipsed, and rightly so, because we’re so imperfect and so fallible.”

“it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon”

The tone of the interview is hilariously super catastrophic, foreseeing the replacement of humans by their “successors” within a few years, nothing less. There is no deep argument in the discussion, only that AIs are now playing chess and Go better than humans, can provide apparently reasonable answers to many questions, at a speed surpassing human faculties, including poetry or coding. Which proves such a reducing modelling of what constitutes a human being and the meaning of consciousness. (The last line of the interview “YouTube transcript cleaned up by GPT-4 & checked against audio” is hilarious, whether it is intended to be so or not.)

art brut

a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read my very first Annie Ernaux piece and it was in English, in The New Yorker! A very short piece on a short visit to her mother. Beautifully written, carrying the bittersweet feeling of the impossibility to reconnect with earlier times and earlier impressions. I was much less impressed, however, by her Nobel discourse and the use of Rimbaud’s race (and Galton’s and Fisher’s…) in such a different context. A constant projection/fixation on her background and class inequalities, supplemented by an ethic of ressentiment, does not sound enticing, the more because auto-fiction has never appealed to me. (Sharing similar social and geographic [Rouen!] backgrounds sounds precisely as the wrong reason to contemplate reading her books.)

Cooked weekly butternut soups, red cabbage stews and squid woks as these are the seasonal best offers at the local market, along with plentiful Norman scallops, not yet impacted by inflation. Also restarted making buckwheat bread, with the side advantages of temporarily heating home (and a pretense to add the rice pudding dish in the oven!).

Watched Trolls, Wednesday (only on Wednesdays), and Decision to Leave. Apart from the Norge exposure, the first is terrible, esp. when compared with the earlier 2010 tongue-in-cheek Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren).Wednesday is a television series that centres on Wednesday Addams, the dead-pan daughter in the Addams family. I found the series hilarious, even though intended for YA audiences. The quality of the episodes varies, those from Tim Burton usually coming on top, but the main character (Wednesday, in case you are not paying attention!) is fantastic. (The fact that, Christina Ricci, the actor playing Wednesday in the 1991 movie is also involved in the series is a great wink to the earlier installments of this series.) And, final argument, a series where the heroin pogoes to a song by The Cramps cannot turn all bad! The Korean Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심) is a masterpiece (except for the ridiculous climbing scenes!) in deception and ambiguity (with a very thin connection to Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Far from his backup role in the stunning Memories of Murder, Park Hae-il is fabulous as a policeman torn between his duty and an inexplicable attraction for the main suspect, brilliantly played by  Tang Wei, who manages the ambiguous character till the very end.