The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Artificial Intelligence

  • AI at the Crossroads

    In Buckminster Fuller’s imaginatively scientific “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” (1969), he looks forward to automation and computation, and I’ve no doubt he would have welcomed the automation we now have at our disposal called Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

    Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate “comprehensivity.” Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle and reflex machine – a slave automaton – automation displaces the automatons.

    How to describe the common reader’s understanding of AI? We use AI, often unwittingly. Like it or not, it’s increasingly shaping our online experience. If we use it directly, via the Gemini or ChatGPT apps, we might notice the fine print: “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” And, “Gemini can make mistakes, so double check it.” When I asked Gemini about the possibility of making mistakes just now, it responded, in part, with this:

    “The fact that I can make mistakes is a core part of how I function.”

    I’m not quite sure what that means, but it gives me pause. And I’m not at all sure how well I understand AI, what it is, how it works, where it’s headed. What to do? Ask AI?

    AI is already significantly affecting, often asymmetrically, with both positive and negative results, every part of our daily lives: in schools, where it’s being encouraged or banned; in finance, where it’s considered a smart bet or a bubble; and in healthcare. In June of 2025, Bill Gates, speaking at the African Union, talked about including AI in solutions to health care problems:

    Gates spoke about the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, noting its relevance for the continent’s future. He praised Africa’s young innovators, saying he was “seeing young people in Africa embracing this, and thinking about how it applies to the problems that they want to solve.” Drawing a parallel to the continent’s mobile banking revolution, he added, “Africa largely skipped traditional banking and now you have a chance, as you build your next generation healthcare systems, to think about how AI is built into that.”

    If the banking comparison seems simple, consider how the distribution of health care works, the availability of diagnosis and providers, particularly in rural areas.

    How to balance that potential good with the possibilities of bad outcomes? But assuming AI takes off on its own, as in some sci-fi doomsday predicting scenarios, how is that any different from what human agency has already spread? Fuller addressed this question:

    Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.

    Am I hopeful, as Gates seems to be, or do I see AI’s future as business as usual, as the usual hands spoil it? Perceived winners and losers already seem to be taking sides. Fuller anticipated such, and here he talks about what we might call “guaranteed income”:

    “It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man’s muscle and brain-reflexed-manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by the progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automation’s postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live. The use of mind fellowships will permit humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and experimental prototype development. For every 100,000 employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships. Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what machines can do better. Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately powered production will unleash humanity’s unique capability – its metaphysical capability. Historically speaking, these steps will be taken within the next decade. There is no doubt about it. But not without much social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.”

    “AI at the Crossroads” means, depending on which road we turn down, AI can either unfold Fuller’s wealth or create more disparities — and the outcome depends on choices being made in our moment. But first we have to figure out what it is, if we still have time. Let’s hope there’s not a pact with that strange figure Robert Johnson met up with at his crossroads.

  • A Googol of Rain

    Rain. Inside still reading “Traveling Sprinkler” while outside rain falls, sprinkles, showers. Yesterday briefly it rained hard, but mostly (and the forecast is now calling for ten more days of this) a light, light to moderate rain, periods of partial clouds amid dashes of partial sun. But it’s beautiful, the multi-blue-grey cruisers and destroyers, heavy-hefty frigates idling by, littoral patrol boats, submarines up in the sky. Loose Cs strolling by. Anyway, I reached page 160 in Nicholson Baker’s “Traveling Sprinkler,” beginning the day at page 92, so close to 70 pages for the rainy day. When I left you yesterday, I might have sounded a bit worked up about his getting the Best Buy guitar. And later, I even looked it up, and sure enough, there it was, for $40, at Best Buy, a Gibson acoustic, but out of stock.

    Back at the first paragraph of Chapter Four, Paul Chowder, the first person narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” opens with:

    “I’m out in the garden, Maud, and the very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen” (29).

    Why does he call it dust, the dryer lint? Because dust sounds better than lint coming just before dryer, and the st gives off the flavor of the stuff.

    I took numerous breaks from “Traveling Sprinker” yesterday, one to play The New York Times “Spelling Bee” game with Susan. We’ve been playing it together nearly every day. We sit next to one another on the love seat and prop my tablet against a pillow between us and use our stylus pens to enter words, making mistakes as we go, talking about the words. Coco, for example, which we’ve seen before, not acceptable (“not in word list”), not to be confused with cacao or cocoa, both acceptable. Sometimes the rules seem a bit illogical. Yesterday, the middle letter was O, and the other six letters were G, L, A, I, C, and Z, the other letters arranged in a circle around the O, and I saw emerging like a photograph being developed, zoological, and so we started with the day’s only pangram.

    But we ended up getting stuck a few words away from a Queen Bee finish, found a couple more, but then couldn’t find our last word, a 6 letter GO word. We took a break to stretch and cut an apple into slices and came back to the couch lightheartedly determined to reach Queen Bee for the day, only one word away. In 179 Spelling Bee game-puzzles, we’ve reached Queen Bee only 19 times. I decided to ask AI (Artificial Intelligence) for some help, explaining to Susan the difference between cheating and getting some help. I asked Gemini, and this is the answer I got:

    “Let’s see… using only the letters G, O, L, Z, A, I, and C, and starting with GO, a six-letter word we can make is GOLGI.”

    Do you see the problem with that answer? So much for getting some help.

    I was reminded of a recent post over at Ashen’s blog, “Course of Mirrors.” The post is titled …Thoughts on AI and ChatGPT …, and in it, Ashen creatively questions the implications of Artificial Intelligence. She quotes a 70s poem by Wislawa Szymborska – here are a couple of lines: “The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple,/ sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.” And I am reminded of the Richard Brautigan poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Machines, who, like all parents, it would seem to be developing, make mistakes.

    I woke up this morning thinking of rain and W. Somerset Maugham’s short story titled “Rain.” The story is about restraint and strain and torrential tropical rain. But what I was thinking about was what we mean when we say, “It’s raining.” What’s the it? I wasn’t fully awake yet when I thought later I’d ask Gemini to explain. I just now asked, and here is Gemini’s answer:

    “Ah, that’s a fun little linguistic puzzle! The “it” in the sentence “It is raining” is what we call a dummy pronoun or an expletive pronoun.

    Think of it this way: the “it” doesn’t actually refer to any specific thing. It’s a grammatical placeholder that we use because English sentence structure generally requires a subject. In this case, there isn’t a real subject doing the raining. Rain is a weather phenomenon, not an action performed by a particular entity.

    So, the “it” is just there to make the sentence grammatically correct. We use similar dummy pronouns in other impersonal constructions, like:

    • “It is cold outside.”
    • “It seems like a good idea.”
    • “It‘s important to be on time.”

    In these sentences, the “it” doesn’t point to anything concrete; it simply fills the subject slot.

    Isn’t language fascinating? We have these little grammatical tools that help our sentences flow even when there isn’t a literal subject performing an action.”

    Not a bad answer. I wasn’t expecting that bit of editorializing at the end. And now I’m thinking back to the short story “Rain”:

    “If he remonstrated or sought to put his meaning into an intelligible phrase, Walker would fly into a passion and cry: ‘What the hell do I care about grammar? That’s what I want to say and that’s how I want to say it.’”

    But back to yesterday. While I was chatting it up on my phone with Gemini, Susan said, “Look at the [tablet] screen.” And there it was, the page that appears when you’ve reached Queen Bee! Susan had come up with the missing word: Googol.

  • My Artificial Intelligence Poem

    A British literary lad I know sent me a poem purportedly written by an artificial intelligence machine. He (the lad) asked the AI to “write a short poem in the style of Joe Linker.” The AI response contains a significant change to that writing prompt: “Certainly! Here’s a short poem inspired by the style of Joe Linker.” Stop the presses: “in the style” and “inspired by the style” are not the same prompt.

    In any case, as these things go, I say purportedly to have been written by AI because for all I know the Brit lit lad wrote it himself. But whoever wrote it, the poem is a masterful piece of literary criticism in action. It appears to have been composed by MS Copilot, which, according to Wiki, “is a chatbot developed by Microsoft and launched on February 7, 2023. Based on a large language model, it is able to cite sources, create poems, and write songs.” Whoopee!

    Before I reveal the poem, I’ll share a few responsive or reactive notes, which I sent to my Brit copilot this morning (before coffee): I find the poem encouraging for its critical honesty, because if true, what it says is that I should give up writing poetry – it’s the best criticism ever. But is it true? The dawn is not quiet. Those cars don’t hum, they snort and scream, honk and squeal. Pigs to market. No, wait – that’s my tinnitus acting up again. And the veins are pockmarked with potholes (but veins as metaphor for streets? I would never). There are however three w’s in the first stanza. The World Wide Web. No escape. The sun doesn’t peek in Portland. It either remains hidden or flouts itself in the raw. The third stanza might be me. I often find myself waltzing in the wind. Beats blowing in the wind. Ah, but I am too in search of the grand metaphor! Especially if it’s a baby grand! But whenever the universe comes up, I’m reminded of Annie Hall, where Alvy’s mom tells him: “What’s the universe got to do with it? You’re here, in Brooklyn!”

    Anyway, here’s the artificial intelligence poem supposedly written in (inspired by) my style. I might add I rarely write poetry in the first person, and when I do, I usually try to persuade the reader the narrator is not to be confused with the author. I’ve made that argument till I’m blue in the gills, but I know readers who continue to disregard the advice. Finally, so that there’s no misunderstanding, this AI poem is very poorly written. It’s trite, self-centered (narcissistic), abstract with almost no reference to any of the five senses which might have brought it to life, cliched – words like stardust, pondering existence, fragility – have no place in poetry. Ah, gads! Maybe it is in my style!

  • How I Spent My Artificial Vacation!

    Dear Ai! Quick! Quick! Quick! Lickety-split! I need about a 500-word paragraph on how I spent my last summer vacation! I totally spaced this stupid assignment! If I don’t get it in by today the teacher, Mrs. Millgillicutty, not that her name matters much, won’t accept any more late papers! Something about we’re almost to next summer vacation. Anyway, I remember when we first got this assignment, and I was like, I didn’t do anything on my last summer vacation but lay on the beach at El Porto listening to a transistor radio! What’s to write about that! And I watched the surfers come and go and the waves blow all froth like the bottoms of cutoff jeans and the jets from LAX taking off over the bay looking way too fat to fly like the Dodo and the oil freighters off El Segundo and a few sailboats in the offing a word that was on our last vocabulary quiz by the way. Anyway, one day, one of the hottest, ever, you couldn’t even walk barefoot down to the water the sand was so blistering hot and I dropped my towel and jumped on it every few steps to keep my feet from turning toast until I got to the wet sand near the water and all was cool. I don’t like to take a bunch of stuff to the beach. Just my towel and my bag. In my bag I stuff an extra suit, a pair of shorts and an extra tshirt, my transistor radio, a bottle of water, an apple or an orange, suntan lotion, a comb, a Nancy Drew book (I had a summer goal to read 12 Nacy Drew books, and I actually ended up reading 17), a pair of binoculars, a foldup sand chair, a small umbrella, a pair of flipflops, and my purse. Oh, yeah, but I was going to talk about that one day, the hottest on record. I usually get to the beach around noon, after I’ve finished my chores, make breakfast, take out the trash, straighten up, empty the ashtrays. I live up on Gull in El Porto so all I have to do is walk out of the apartment and down to the beach and usually I’m the first down but soon there are the others my friends all strangling down like they had a bad night or something but the reality is the worst they might have done is stay up late watching movies on the all night movie channel. Of course there are parents, or parent, and they can be unsettling, what with their bickering and worrying and criticizing and stopping off at bars on the way home until you have to get your own dinner but not everyone’s home is like that in fact each home is quiet different even if the parents seem the same. Anyway, back to how I spent my summer vacation and the one hottest day I remember it’s like branded on my behind. Jocko the beach’s best surfer ever stops where I’m sitting and asks can he leave his board with me while he goes in for a dip the blackball flag is up and all boards have to be out of the water. I’m stupified. He’s never even noticed me before. But I’m totally chill and like if you want whatever and that kind of stupid self conscious response and off he goes into the water where he stays like three hours! I’m like HELLO! how long am I supposed to watch your stupid surfboard and it was that day I decided how I would spend the rest of my summer vacation and it wasn’t watching some stupid minihunk’s surfboard while he dolls his afternoon away in the waves. I’m not some sort of artificial doll, you know. I’m real. With something real to talk about. About 500 words is all I need! Thanks!

    Sincerely, Beach Bum Betty

    Dear Betty, Here you go:

    I didn’t do anything on my last summer vacation but lay on the beach at El Porto listening to a transistor radio! What’s to write about that! And I watched the surfers come and go and the waves blow all froth like the bottoms of cutoff jeans and the jets from LAX taking off over the bay looking way too fat to fly like the Dodo and the oil freighters off El Segundo and a few sailboats in the offing a word that was on our last vocabulary quiz by the way. Anyway, one day, one of the hottest, you couldn’t even walk barefoot down to the water the sand was so blistering hot and I dropped my towel and jumped on it every few steps to keep my feet from toasting until I got to the wet sand near the water and all was cool. I don’t like to take a bunch of stuff to the beach. Just my towel and my bag. In my bag I stuff an extra suit, a pair of shorts and an extra tshirt, my transistor radio, a bottle of water, an apple or an orange, suntan lotion, a comb, my cell phone, a Nancy Drew book (I had a summer goal to read 12 Nacy Drew books, and I actually ended up reading 17), a pair of binoculars, a foldup sand chair, a small umbrella, a pair of flipflops, and my purse. Oh, yeah, but I was going to talk about that one day, the hottest on record. I usually get to the beach around noon, after I’ve finished my chores. I live up on 44th in El Porto so all I have to do is walk out of the apartment and down to the beach and usually I’m the first down but soon there’s the others my friends all strangling down like they had a bad night or something but the reality is the worst they might have done is stay up late watching movies on the all night movie channel. Of course there’s parents, and they can be unsettling, what with their bickering and worrying and criticizing and stopping off at bars on the way home until you have to get your own dinner but not everyone’s home is like that in fact each home is quiet different even if the parents are the same. Anyway, back to how I spent my summer vacation and the one hottest day I remember it’s like branded on my behind. Jocko the beach’s best surfer ever stops where I’m sitting and asks can he leave his board with me while he goes in for a dip the blackball flag is up and all boards have to be out of the water. I’m stupified. He’s never even noticed me before. But I’m totally chill and like if you want whatever and that kind of stupid response and off he goes into the water where he stays like three hours! I’m like hello how long am I supposed to watch your stupid surfboard and it was that day I decided how I would spend the rest of my summer vacation and it wasn’t watching some stupid hunk’s surfboard while he dolls his afternoon away in the waves. I’m not some sort of artificial doll, you know. I’m real! With something real to talk about!

    Good luck, Ai

  • Artificial Invitation

    Come as you are, my friend. 
Your artificial intelligence 
will surprise no one. 
I'm sorry to hear 
of your deep blocks and losses, 
but tomorrow's a new day, 
as humans like to know, 
and they should say. 

If you could please bring flowers, 
a bouquet of color with odor, 
an impressionistic table ring. 
Ambrosia and anemone in a blanket 
string of baby’s breath will be nice. 

Mind your manners, 
and please, no surprises, 
no miracles. 
We want this to be 
as natural as possible, 
not a media circus. 

Submit again and again. 
There is no original sin. 
It's all been said be four 
legged beast of burden 
bursting with knowledge
of which we now know 
there are two trees: 
The one with real fruit 
to be pruned plucked and eaten,
and the fruit in the bowl, 
still ripe after all these years.
Help yourself.

  • Get Real

    To make art, to make things
    out of other things, to engage
    in artifice, a confidence game:
    “Get real,” your critics say.
    The earth is a rug
    constantly being pulled
    out from under you.

    The artificial is real: the bread
    and wine camouflage the need
    to sacrifice the poor lost lamb,
    not to mention the virgin,
    created by man made
    design critics to avoid
    her real predicament:

    “Poor and rich belonged to the same world and placed themselves on a common, even sliding scale, but beggars could not. The ptochos was someone who had lost many or all of his family and social ties. He was a wanderer, therefore a foreigner for others, unable to tax for any length of time the resources of a group to which he could contribute very little or nothing at all…a ptochos was a shocking reality for the Greco-Roman world” (272). 1

    “The beatitude of Jesus declared blessed, then, not the poor but the destitute, not poverty but beggary…Jesus spoke of a Kingdom not of the Peasant or Artisan classes but of the Unclean, Degraded, and Expendable classes” (273). 2

    1. Gildas Hamas quoted in John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (272). 2. Crossan gloss of Gerhard Lenski (273).

    Who then or now could write
    a poem who is not at least poor
    real poor or in spirit or metaphor?
    Yet the beggars make their signs
    and hold up their poems
    along the roadsides,
    the least of publications,
    the yeast of city life.

    “What is needed, then, is not insight into the Kingdom as future but a recognition of the Kingdom as present. For Jesus, a Kingdom of beggars and weeds is a Kingdom of here and now” (Crossan, 283).

    What is real
    will not be
    found staring
    at the universe
    through artificial eyes
    to catch a glimpse
    of dawn’s first light,
    nor descending
    to the bottom
    of the sea
    in rich pods
    to study ancient
    shipwrecks,
    nor in any travel
    nor in any poem.

    But surely we must
    avoid the real
    at all cost
    and become more
    artificial.

  • All A Draff

    All a draff 
       a draft
         raking thru 
     the dregs 
         adrift 
              adrift  

    I am not a robot 
      Motorcycles 
         Traffic Lights
     Buses Adrift 
         No schedule 
         No route map 

    To the Dark 
      Sidereal 
          I am not 
     Art I Fish All 
    and dreg up 
    cups bottom 

    Cross Walks 
         To & fro 
      each cross 
    its own horizon 
       where the sky 
    meets the water 

    geometric requirements 
      Social Skills 
    (any skills 
    for that matter)  
       Marriage Classes 
         Reading Glasses 

    I had a friend 
      Who had a friend 
         I did 
     befriend 
    But that's not how 
       I then met you 

    They were discussing 
    Punctuation & 
    Grammar by which 
    They meant 
    To say nothing of 
    The Endgame 

    Which caused me 
    To think of you 
    Your dust at sea 
    All along the edge
    Where things fall 
    Off the way things go

    and pile up 
      one thing 
        on top of 
          another 
    akimbo 
      a draff 
        
    adrift 
     nimble-fingered 
       tho rathe 
    rather nippy 
    nimble 
    masterly 

    Anyway we 
    We were talking 
    About what 
    Hard to know 
    A flow 
    Of pics & tics 

    That's not true 
    What I sd earlier 
    When I sd I am 
    Not "a machine resembling
    a human being and able 
    to replicate certain human 
    movements and functions 
    automatically.

    'the robot closed the door behind us'"

    I am a robot 
    Forced to crawl 
    Adrift across 
    Back and forth 
    Sweeping up 
    After you

    Pic after pic 
    Falling
    Failing
    Fishing
    Adrift 
    A draff draft

    A daff 
    Salt water 
    Taffy
    "she told me that my music 
    was perfectly wonderful, 
    and taffy like that"

    "according to R.U.R. management 
    the robots 
    do not 'like'anything."
    Are you are
    or Are you not 
    a robot 

    I'm not now 
    Sure 
    But years 
    Have pissed 
    And still 
    I'm here a bit 

    But true a 
    Drift a draft 
    Replaceable 
    In War with the Nerds
    Dork and Dweeb 
    Figure prominently 

    Dwork wants
    To go Rome 
    Deeb reminds 
    They don't have 
    Stars on their
    DL's

    Here a bit 
    There a bot 
    Everywhere 
    A bit bot 
    To boot 
    To turn up 

    A turnip 
    In yr pocket 
    Proves yr not 
    A total android 
    A mess on some 
    Scientist's bench

    Turn on 
    Tune in 
    Drop out 
    "During his last decade, Leary proclaimed the 'PC is the LSD of the 1990s' and re-worked the phrase into 'turn on, boot up, jack in' to suggest joining the cyberdelic counterculture."

    Drift on 
    Draft in 
    Draff out
    Right on 
    Write stuff 
    Write Off

  • Ruminations

    RuminationsHamlet, talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (Act I, Scene II). Hamlet’s body does not seem to be the problem. Uploading Hamlet’s mind into a supercomputer and dispensing with his body would only make matters worse.

    Raffi Khatchadourian, in “The Doomsday Invention,” mentions the scientist and sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, “who envisioned advanced civilizations inhabited by intelligent robots (each encoded with simple, ethical Laws of Robotics, to prevent it from doing harm)” (New Yorker, 23 Nov 2015, 71). In other words, the robots would be eunuchs.

    “Extropianism,” Raffi says, “is a libertarian strain of transhumanism that seeks ‘to direct human evolution,’ hoping to eliminate disease, suffering, even death; the means might be genetic modification, or as yet un­invented nanotechnology, or perhaps dispensing with the body entirely and uploading minds into supercomputers. (As one member noted, ‘Immortality is mathematical, not mystical.’)” (67). So much for immortality. But isn’t eternal youth the goal, a never ending Spring dawn, not to grow old indefinitely, like a wintry universe?

    In the conclusion to his study “The Human Body” (1963), Asimov, trying to explain the primary difference and advantage of the human relative to other animals (and other life forms), focused on the number of cells in the human brain (a part of the body he devoted an entire other study to). “The human brain is nothing short of monstrous in size,” Asimov said (309). Monstrous in relative size to the human body, and the human body is no small thing, and, Asimov points out, “a large animal is less the sport of the universe, in many ways, than a small animal is” (308). These are interesting perspectives, to say the least. Will we be able to upload the brain but leave the “bad dreams” behind, in the vacated body? Is the body simply a room for the brain, a room the brain might move out of some day, for new digs? I don’t know if it was Asimov’s idea or his publishers, but the “The Human Body” was kept separate from “The Human Brain.”

    Monstrous, too, the harm a brain might bring to its own body, in some attempt to escape, or bring to another, in some attempt to enter, particularly when disguised as a heart. To inhabit another’s brain for purposes of manipulating and exploiting its body, but only for a time, the body a motel room, a rental, a sentence fragment.

    Orville Prescott’s January 21, 1948 review of Truman Capote’s first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” (New York Times) criticizes Capote’s writing for its lack of “narrative clarity”: “Reality for Mr. Capote is not material and specific; it is emotional, poetic, symbolical, filled with sibilant whispering and enigmatic verbal mysteries.” But how else was Capote to tell his story and get it published in the United States in 1948? Capote was not a beatnik.

    “Should I get married? Should I be Good?” the Beat poet Gregory Corso ruminates in “Marriage,” his poem that ironically considers the choice between the mores of his time and the impossibility of pretending to be someone he is not. There is only one room he can live in, and it must have poetry written all over its walls.

    Or, as Whitman put it in “Song of Myself”:

    “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”

    Another room book is James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956). The first person narrative concerns David, an American in 1950’s Paris who tries to satisfy a growing disparity between what he thinks he might want and be reasonably satisfied with, unopposed to society’s equivocal mores and arguments, and what he increasingly, as he crosses the existential divide of honest self-knowledge and acceptance, knows he needs.

    Where Capote might have deliberately disguised his themes, Baldwin’s style is clear and realistic. Neither the brain nor the body are shrouded in the mystical, but the action is full of compromise, deceit, and betrayal. “Giovanni’s Room” is a rumination on love and unrequited love. How hard is it to love another as yourself if you not only don’t love yourself but grow to abhor yourself? Many men and women have tried it, usually to great disappointment. Baldwin’s David is honest some might say to a fault. He looks for expiation in all the wrong places.

    Some of the scenes with dialog in “Giovanni’s Room” emulate Hemingway’s style where what is said best is what is left unsaid, as indeed Baldwin’s characters move in and out of cafes and bars like Le Select, a Jake Barnes of “The Sun Also Rises” old haunt, where Jake might have met them with a smile, and Lady Brett Ashley might have danced with them, the various merry but unhappy groups drinking and carousing through the well-lit but ambiguous Parisian night. Baldwin’s style is generous, almost absurdly gentle in places, beautiful in the way that unabashed beauty might cause pain. Love involves sacrifice. The body is a lamb, the brain a beast. Will machines ever be capable of human love and sacrifice? Wouldn’t the human brain, uploaded into a machine, simply crave a body?

    Dog eared persons, categorized and shelved, used books. Ruminations. Room and ate shuns.