Robert Bly and George Steiner, 1

I have been reading around in one of those innumerable books that I have been reading off and on for over a decade, but this time I am reading someone else’s annotated copy.

I have purchased Robert Bly’s copy of George Steiner’s Errata: An Examined Life—authentically Bly’s, judging from the handwriting, which matches my personally inscribed copies of his chapbooks from way back in the day. Bly found Steiner’s observations on music and language interesting enough to annotate, but not enough to keep on his bookshelves.
( Arghhhh! )

Robert Bly and George Steiner, 2

The problem with succinct summation of books that are already hyper-nuanced is that I (unlike a better writer) end up with extremely long sentences in which many of the adjectives have been treated as crucially important: I know a quick read would elicit an attack on my reference to the notion that “non-sentient natural sources” cannot generate meaningful sentences. The various pieces of technology that generate meaningful sentences are not “natural” even if there is increasing debate over whether they are sentient, except insofar as every human artifact is material and thus “natural.”

Steiner’s skepticism about machine translation is being increasingly belied by Google Translate: contrary to Steiner’s cherished belief in the quicksilver nature of language, our habitual practice depends so much on prior examples that once a felicitous phrase finds its way into the world’s literature, it tends to be imitated immediately. Write an algorithm that presumes that a specific quantity of slight variations on already known felicitous phrases means that a piece of text is “literary” and not “informational,” and it thus becomes possible to know how to instruct the machine to insert this word rather than that one, with the likelihood that the phrase will fit the context of a poetic novel rather than an instruction manual or a semi-literate self-improvement book. (It requires considerable knowledge of how a wide variety of novels and poems are structured to be able to discern the small variations from the workaday norm that make a phrase felicitously replicable rather than the preliminary version of a fossilized cliché—which itself is a phrase in which the metaphor “fossilized” is fossilized. Once you have that subtle verbal information internalized, you have to turn it into mathematics by way of statistical analysis. Simple word counts won’t do it, not unless you factor in dozens of different variables.)

Robert Bly and George Steiner, 3, or, and now for something completely different

The conclusions to which I came in the passage hidden by the LJ-cut in the first post, on which nobody clicked, illustrate why I believe it is past time for someone to write the 21st-century equivalent of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, more so than something like Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas, since the final volume would have to deal with literature, visual art, the symbolic dimensions of economics and sociology, and the various symbolic and literal dimensions of science and technology, not just with how the world of meaning was and is encoded in religious narratives and practices.

Anybody feel like stepping up to the plate? Not if you come from a culture in which the fossilized metaphors of American baseball are not a commonplace way of expressing the intention of setting forth to accomplish a task or putting yourself in a position from which to accomplish it.

an informal survey, just like the ones LJ loves to put out there

LiveJournal allows for the successive footnoting that isn't really possible in a more conventionally formatted website for essays like Erik Davis' techgnosis.com, but my senes is that fewer and fewer people read LiveJournal regularly. Many LJers have migrated to other blog sites, and I myself maintain largely dormant blogs on Blogspot and Tumblr.

I am uncertain whether my non-LJ readers who follow me here are able to comment anonymously (they should be able, given the amount of unrelated spam I receive) but if you have come to this site from my other life, you should be able to tell me by other means whether or not I should be considering a different way of communicating all this.