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Taught this in a class on "ghosts in the machine" in Science Fiction, in order to supply some "real-world" ghosts and displace the hype-based idea of "AI" students are carrying around at present. Found this because one of the Internet's Great Sages, Cosma Shalizi, recommends Mitchell's writing on the subject. No surprise, I liked it; also (in hindsight) no surprise, Mitchell was Douglas R. Hofstadter's graduate student. She has a "fluid analogies" kind of perspective on intelligence, and writes well, in the popular-science mode, about developments in the field from the earliest days. Her examples of the failure modes of the various breakthrough neural nets are entertainingly compelling—and made a real impression on some of my initially AI-happy students. However, in the way of such things, some of her failure modes have since turned into (apparent) LLM successes, like Winograd schemas. She also maintains a level of calm in writing about "the Singularity" (while shredding the arguments about it) that I truly admire. Recommended for your students and/or your aggressive relations who want to tell you over the holiday table that the humanities are obsolete now.

(Trans. Kathryn G. Hansen.) Got this collection because I'd read that Renu's story "Smells of a Primeval Night" was a source for Amitav Ghosh's wonderful novel The Calcutta Chromosome, according to Ghosh himself. Actually this is the first Hindi fiction I've ever read, except for a couple of stories in Amit Chaudhuri's Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. "Smells" is a pretty incidental source for Ghosh's novel, as compared to Tagore's "Hungry Stones" which functions as something like a hypotext. But I enjoyed all these stories of post-Independence village life in Bihar, seen from the perspective of itinerant men on the margins (cart-divers, servants, musicians, debtors, etc.). There's a good amount of variety, tonally and narratively. I gather from the translator's introduction that Renu introduces quite a bit of regional "dialect" into the Hindi, but she doesn't try to reproduce that in English. She does remark that, in this Indian edition addressed to non-Hindi-speaking readers in India, she has left more kinship terms untranslated (but kept the glossary, which I certainly needed).

I think I'm old enough to be able to admit that I hadn't read this before now, though I should have when I was working on late James and aestheticism.

What is there to say? I continue to like late James better, but it's an amazing novel in its un-Jamesian-ness. In the microgenre of James-representing-lower-class-subjectivity, "In the Cage" is more appealing, kinder to its protagonist--perhaps simply because she's female. But also I don't think this novel's aestheticism sublates its snobbery in the way that later James does more reliably. More simply, Hyacinth is the wrong kind of implausible, and the melodrama, though suitable in a way, is not what I go to James for.

This Penguin Classics edition has truly wonderful notes by Patricia Crick. Very terse and helpful explanations are suddenly interrupted by a personal reminiscence of her going to a show in her childhood like one that Hyacinth and Millicent go to.

Though I think of myself as a pretty devoted Bourdieu fan, I didn't actually read everything here, and I punted and read in English. What I read was the opening 350 pp. with the text of his Collège de France lectures, stopping short of going through the unfinished MS based on those lectures, which appears to follow it closely. My excuse is that I may be a megafan but I'm not a cultist.

Qua fan, I particularly liked confirming that my own simplifications or reformulations of Bourdieu's ideas about historical context and text, and artistic form and habitus, matched his own informal summaries. Also, the lectures admit to a level of vulnerability and uncertainty which Bourdieu never permits himself in published prose. But also there are some sharp edges here, especially at the expense of TJ Clark (from whom he nonetheless learned a lot) but even more at the expense of "iconologists" (Michael Fried) and lectores. I loved the moments where he denounced the sheer EASE of producing interpretations based on your own clever associations, etc. Bourdieu says at one point that his method is "monstrous" in its demands on the researcher---or rather the research team---to know the field.

As a tour through Manet, who Bourdieu likes a whole lot more than I do, this is perhaps unsatisfying. The best parts, I think, show how Manet related to predecessors and rivals (Courbet, the pompier painters). The idea of a "symbolic revolution" doesn't, to me, rescue the notion of a modernist "break" as a historiography.

Also touching to see Bourdieu improvising and running out of time, week after week. At the end, in the final lecture, he rushes through discussion of a dozen canvases before stopping abruptly, a full hour after he was supposed to (according to the tragicomic final footnote).

Have been gradually administering doses of this series to myself for quite a while now, spacing it out so as not to blunt the empty-calorie thrills too much. This one doesn't even make a token attempt at the detective half of "magical detective" and continues the drift towards a bog-standard apocalyptic confrontation, messianic hero, etc. Even some family romance thrown in (spoilers! but really, I'm not the one spoiling the fun here). The always chauvinist representation of women gets a bit more chauvinist, but the thing that really irked me was that Murphy's Aikido expertise is once again underlined and once again Butcher has not bothered to finish reading the wikipedia entry on Aikido; he seems to think it's a kind of karate. I can suspend my disbelief for vampires, "soulfire" magic, fairies (I'm sorry, Sidhe), etc. but hands off my niche martial art. These extremely serious and probing criticisms aside, obviously, I raced through it and will be eagerly awaiting my next hit. How will Harry Dresden ever get out of his next scrape? etc.

Re-read this to chill out after the spectacularly unsatisfying ending of Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two. Herbert is just so GOOFY. I don't think I noticed when I read this in high school that it's barely a novel, more like a padded-out short story, and indeed it appeared in three parts in Galaxy. Since I just wrote my post on Ubik, though I read it a month or so ago (? who knows? It's all a blur) it strikes me that Dune Messiah is quite Dick-ian, as it blurs the line between the actual and Paul's visions, and especially when the bizarro figures from the Bene Tleilax---a villain who can be anyone! a kooky dwarf!---get thrown in the blender. For that matter, like Ubik this one constructs an elaborate life-after-death scenario too.

Also, this time around it's suddenly very obvious to me how closely Robert Jordan read Dune. Rand al'Thor borrows a great deal from Paul Atreides, visions, maimings, twin children, and all. I guess there are only so many ways your messianic super-powered hero / Mary Sue can get into real trouble.

Esprit de l'escalier: and of course the Aes Sedai are the Bene Gesserit translated into Fantasyland and making the grotesque sexism more fully explicit and (magically) essentialized---which is impressive, because it was already fully e and magically e. in Herbert. Are these epics of mass-market response to the organized feminist movement?

Taught this as the last act in my Anglophone Nobel Prizewinners course in the spring. Didn't know a thing about Gurnah until he won the prize. It's certainly a very good novel, reconstructing both a historical and an imaginary world of early-1900s Zanzibar + Tanganyika, using the Qur'anic story of Yusuf as a framework as well as reworking, possibly out of a kind of postcolonial-academic obligation, Heart of Darkness more or less without the Europeans (but not really). The thing that really distinguishes Gurnah, and I mean that sociologically, is that while there are certainly villainous colonizers and exploiters and compradors, their victims are just as compromised; identity is flagrantly constructed and hybrid. In G's telling, the millennia-long history of Indian Ocean exchange leaves no room for clear oppositions between virtue and vice. Even the protagonist Yusuf, unlike his mythic namesake, hardly comes off very well in the end. It seems very likely to me that Gurnah owes his laurels to being a technically accomplished postcolonial East African author who is not Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, whom he has criticized. This is quite consistent with the post-2000 Nobel's pattern of consistently privileging cosmopolitan skepticism and self-conscious political autonomy over the kinds of commitment (political, moral, and linguistic) that Ngũgĩ champions. I'll certainly read more Gurnah but I find his coldness…chilling.