Second Balcony

On a Rough Couple of Years

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:19:00 -0400

I think that to survive you needed to consider yourself selfish rather than defeated, and that I accepted yours as the authoritative point of view and started seeing myself as betrayed rather than as defeated. (In my language here now two people can be both defeated by the limits of their interaction but selfishness involves a winner and a loser.) And it’s time for me to recalibrate but it is fucking hard because you’ve moved past your old guilt — which you chose to like pay in instead of in grief way back when — and when I try to like evoke a mutual grief to take the place of your old guilt and my hurt you resent my trying to evoke again the guilt that you already payed in. So you can’t help me and I have to recalibrate alone in my own head and it is hard and lonely and does not feel real. I still have daydreams where I just like ask ‘were you in too much pain to stay together?’ and you say ‘yes’ and like a peace settles over the land.

But then again I want you to feel guilty for stealing all the guilt and leaving me with all the hurt. Guilt is ego-affirming and hurt shuts a person down. Then again when we were together I was guilty all the time and you hurt all the time and it was two years that we were together and it’s been two years since then so maybe it’s an allegory. (Like a Fortune’s Wheel thing I mean.) And the lesson of these four years is maybe that guilt that doesn’t turn to empathy is not guilt but a trick to fend off a more helpless kind of pain. At least mine was.

And still I don’t know what to do about the fact that when we actually talk about it you cite moderate pragmatic reasons for you leaving and also insist that all of the out of control emotional intensity of the relationship wasn’t playacting. It really is one or the other here, considering how things were when we were together — you either left defeated or you left a liar. But you can never agree to be either, and I can’t hold on to a narrative about you all on my own. I can never believe anything about you if I can’t get you to approve it, and you can’t approve anything, and my mind’s stuck, and I am tired and I can’t let go. I love you very much and hope that we’ll be good friends all our life! When do you want to hang out we can watch a movie and then maybe you either break down in tears apologizing or break down in tears talking about the pain that you were in and then we’ll do fun friendship things.

IDK

Wed, 29 May 2013 13:45:00 -0400

Cultural politics discourse is not a truth-directed discourse and we all agree that this is ok/necessary/bad-to-fight-against (pick one or all), right? But, like, the painful question is does there also need to be a truth-directed discourse on the empirical and modal subject matter that features in cultural politics discourse — like, claims about causal connections between social and economic and cultural phenomena and about what movements and reforms and revolutions can effect what changes — and if so what relationship it should have to cultural politics discourse and can that relationship be anything other than bitter to all involved.

A Worry That I Have

Tue, 28 May 2013 02:43:55 -0400

I have too many fits of metaphysical anxiety to do super well at anything where I can’t use them.

Don’t got many thoughts nowadays but I did get a shout-out at the Paris Review for my piece on...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:02:00 -0400

Don’t got many thoughts nowadays but I did get a shout-out at the Paris Review for my piece on conceptual writing. Let’s read it again?

The Tomer-Peli Tragicomedy Hypothesis

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:28:00 -0500

Tragicomically deluded characters (like Michael Scott, Hank Kingsley, Gob) are defined not by having a belief that some false proposition p is true — they don’t, at least not in the sense of acting so as to maximize expected utility given p — but by their policy of acting so as to maximize the chance of eliciting confirmation that p is true while keeping the chance of eliciting a conclusive refutation* of p at near zero.

*There’s an ‘absence of evidence is evidence of absence’ issue here, but we can say that they ignore each instance of sufficiently week negative evidence, so instances of ‘I could have received confirmation of p but didn’t’ don’t stack up.

The Best Sentence I Read in 2013

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:16:00 -0500

‘The rage of Caliban seeing the photo of someone who looks a bit like Caliban.’

(Via)

An Exercise in Coarse-reading

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:10:00 -0500

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

(John Ashbery)

I think the ‘idea’ expressed in a work of art is often of the form ‘a bunch of things not previously known to be related are related.’ One way to express an idea of this kind is to eloquently lay out one’s thesis re: these things and their relation. Another way to express an idea of this kind is to create a text that the reader can relate to each thing in the bunch of things with surprising ease. Take ‘At North Farm’, which is equally close to being a reversal of Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, being a retelling of Kafka’s ‘A Message from the Emperor’, being a description of waiting for Santa Claus (cf. leaving out milk) as a child (cf. having no agency + having your material needs super provided for in mysterious ways), being a description of waiting for love as an adult living in a city (cf. again having no agency + having your material needs super provided for in mysterious ways), and being a ‘the ambassadors’ style memento mori where the traveller is a grim ripper thing which you are hiding from amidst the worldly riches. And, relatedly, the poem also plays on all these shared structures between something being very habitual and something being super eschatological — with the glass of milk connecting to casually leaving out some milk for the street cats that come by at night or for your house cat, connecting to Santa Claus, connecting to folk-religion things of leaving out food to appease/distract spirits that might come during the night —, and the way that things done for the sake of some eschatological hope or fear end up sort of indistinguishable from normal minor daily habits after enough iterations of the eschatological thing not happening.

Let's Dance

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:41:00 -0500

The (partly real, partly fake, partly vague) prog-rock/art-rock* divide as a guide to the (partly real, partly fake, partly vague) American Postmoderns/avant** divide. Core for each pair I think is the latter side’s rejection of complexity as a sufficient condition for high art*** in favor of not-fitting-known-schemata as a sufficient condition for hight art. So, two version of what Modernism was.

*Art-rock = Bowie-Eno-Reed-Cale-Nico-Wyatt-Ferry et cetera, unto proto-punk unto post-punk unto noise-pop/freak-folk

**The American kids who are into L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Delany and Tan Lin and Kathy Acker will fuck with Pynchon or Gaddis but not with the rest of them

***Insisting on these terms cause the right side in each pair considers the left side as middle brow even if good at it

Age as Mundane Formal Analogue for Gender

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:06:00 -0500

Age might be a useful mundane formal analogue for gender: everyone is clear that you can’t disentangle the roles age plays in our life (in structuring our choices, shaping our desires and our self-perception, and placing social onuses implicit or explicit, playful or severe) into the strictly ‘voluntary’ and strictly ‘coercive.’ No one has the need to play dumb about why it is that people ‘act their age’ — it’s sitcom common knowledge that it’s a clusterfuck of habits, urges, fears, internalized expectations, narrative-building vis-a-vis self, narrative-building vis-a-vis others, and cold hard PR.

Say

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:30:00 -0500

Are all mid 20’s friendships sublimated crushes? Haven’t made a male friend in five years*. Think people can’t get motivated to get out the house our age unless some quasi-libidinal force is at play. (I do get sublimated crushes on guys plenty but they’re sort of dead-end socially — the ‘bromance’ model only authorizes quasi-libidinal giddiness in making a new best friend.)

*I’m a mid 20’s straight male human

Best Rapper Alive

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 01:07:00 -0500

Melnick’s A Pin’s Fee is the best book of poems by a living author. Go make up for years you spent not knowing this.

Lost Email on 'Vibe'

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:22:00 -0500

I am trying to work out (for PhD) a theory of ‘mood’ or ‘vibe’ as the thing most really good art’s actually ‘about.’ It’s so weird because, like, I think that implicitly everyone knows this but explicitly it comes up mostly in turn-of-the-century German philosophy.

Wes Anderson really experimented with the line between story and vibe. The thing that fucked me up about The Royal Tenenbaums when I was 14 was how characters communicated by just vibing at each other — I think that’s what’s behind the whole notorious thing with Wes Anderson characters constantly saying “I know” to each other. Like, what there is to be said has already been vibed out thoroughly. Like, what there is to talk about is why things generally are behaving the way that they are and the vibe is its own explanation better than the things the characters could say explicitly about the vibe. I think the way Wes Anderson made that almost explicit was a first and is the reason we all got so flipped out about him in the turn of the century. Alice gregory (otherwise never wrong) says Tumblr made Wes Anderson redundant, but I think it’s cause she doesn’t have the liberal-arts-aspergers personality type that experiences drama through vibes better than through narrative.

TV shows turn vibe into an objective entity, keeping them as trade secrets passed to the initiated like the recipe to Coca Cola or the Budha-nature or something. Like, no one person’s mind had ownership over the early Simpsons vibe, even though it was a super subtle, precise vibe, but rather a few dozen people who’ve been trained knew how to manifest it when they wrote a Simpsons episode. In this sense vibes as a property of art are really similar to vibes as properties of places and people and cultures — you can be trained in early-Simpsons vibe by coming up in a Simpsons writing room in the early 90’s like you can be trained in having a Jewish vibe by growing up Jewish.

What I think is really interesting, also, is that people have a massive tolerance for pure vibe in lyrics — people get profoundly attached to e.g. Dylan, Belle and Sebastian, Wu Tang, Nas, Dipset lyrics without really knowing what per se is going on except on a vibe-level.

To C, in Bitterness

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:31:00 -0500

It’s only love if after you break up ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ is the only thing that’s making sense for the next year. A love that doesn’t leave you grieving for your schizophrenic possibly-imaginary twin who’ll never live again to walk with you at night is garbage.

Prospectus Approved!

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:26:00 -0500

Prospectus Approved!

'There Will Be Blood,' Kafka, and Dogs

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:08:00 -0500

I submit that ‘There Will Be Blood’ was sort of like a film of Kafka’s ‘A Report to the Academy,’ the story of the monkey that learned how to talk for purely instrumental reasons. Plainview’s basically a feral dog that figured out how to do things with words:

Excepting that one conversation with his brother, Plainview never once makes use of language for its stated purpose of communicating an interior state. Like, the default story about language is that we use language to give voice to our state of mind. He uses language like a complicated digging tool.

While instrumental-Plainview’s having complicated business talks real-Plainview can grasp only single phrases like ‘take care of your son’ or ‘Union Oil,’ responding to them as immediate context-independent triggers. Like a dog who can pick up on words (‘walk’, ‘bath’), but not on syntax.

Real-Plainview cannot cognize people as existing independently of their relation to him. So he e.g. can’t comprehend that the Standard Oil guy who said the thing about his son a year before has no idea what Plainview’s ‘proving’ to him at the restaurant. The phil. of mind distinction (cf. Peacocke) between human comprehension and animal comprehension’s often drawn in terms of the detachability of objects of cognition from our immediate experience of them in human comprehension, and the lack thereof in animal comprehension.

The parenting we see Plainview do is, like, grooming-massaging-holding-humming. It’s given an external narrative justification but come on. Also when Plainview’s son say’s he’s leaving the company Plainview physically growls at him for half a minute after saying ‘you’re my competition.’

Like, come on, in the last scene he is sleeping in his mansions on the floor and chewing on a steak bone.

Plainview by the end starts needing to use language to give voice to his own self but not communicatively but (as Lexi called it) ‘purgatovely’, venting his soul into these individual barked mantras crudely matched-up to the situation (‘draaaainage! draaaaaaainage!’). Like nothin’ but a hound dog cryin’ all the time.

Say

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:55:50 -0400

Anybody else remembers having basically no thoughts or feelings till turning fourteen or so?

Project

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 09:12:00 -0400

Computational aesthetics, super-short.*

Jürgen Schmidhuber’s Theory

Jürgen Schmidhuber, an AI theorist and theoretical computer scientist, has proposed a computational account of aesthetic judgments. On his view, a stimulus is judged to be beautiful or attractive by a subject T to the extent that the stimulus is compressible for T. Schmidhuber’s notion of compressibility is taken from algorithmic information theory, but concerns actual rather than ideal compression: it refers to the actual # of bits in T’s mental representation of the stimulus, bounded and fallible as T may be. Beholden to the limitations of T’s computational resources, two kinds of stimuli should be the most compressible: stimuli with evident internal structure (e.g. fractals or a chessboard), and stimuli with noticeable similarities to stimuli already stored in T’s history^¹ (e.g. English words or a the sight of a friend’s face). Experimental psychology supports both a preference for stimuli with internal patterns and a preference for stimuli with a similarity to past stimuli.

There are obvious problems with this account if we take it as a full account of beauty. A chessboard, while very simple, would rarely be called beautiful. Moreover, it seems that the most profound aesthetic experiences often come from complex stimuli: the city of Rome, the philosophy of Plato or Wittgenstein, art by Picasso, Joyce or Stravinsky. Schmidhuber argues for explaining beauty as compressibility, but it may be better to identify compressibility with attractiveness, pleasantness, or niceness. Schmidhuber explains the lack of strong preference for very simple stimuli by their not being interesting. Schmidhuber gives interestingness a simple formal analysis in terms of compressibility. Whereas beauty (or attractiveness, etc.) is the subjective compressibility of a stimulus, interestingness is the rate at which the subjective compressibility changes over time as T processes the stimulus:

Beauty (etc.) of stimulus S for subject T = -# bits in T’s mental representation of S

Interestingness of S for T
= rate of change in the # of bits used to represent S by T over time

= d(Beauty) / d(Time)

Extending Schmidhuber: art, compressibility, and ‘compressiveness’

I think that ‘interestingness’ puts Schmidhuber on the right track, but that considering a stronger property relating a stimulus to compression progress can further contribute to our understanding of aesthetic objects in art, math, philosophy and music. Recall that (if you accept Schmidhuber’s basic approach) when a subject T encounters a novel stimulus S, T searches for ways to compress S. Could this search have implications beyond determining the length of T’s representation of S? I believe it can: If T’s search reveals multiple different effective ways to compress S using (respective) different objects in her history, this maygive T indication that she can use S to improve the compression of her extant history^². In the strongest case, it may indicate that T should use S to encode the various objects that could have each been used to encode S. More modestly, it may indicate that there is an unexploited compressive relationship between the various objects that could have each been used to encode S.

We can define a property called ‘compressiveness’ to formalize the above idea.^³ Vitanyl et al. present a metric called the normalized information distance (‘NID’) between two strings, defined by

NID(x,y) = max{K(x|y),K(y|x )}/max{K(x),K(y)

where K(x) is the Kolmogorov complexity* of x. Let us define SK(x) as the subjective complexity of a string x, s.t. SK(x) is the length of the subject’s actual program for generating string x. Let us now define a subjective normalized information distance, SNID, by replicating NID in terms of SK. We can now use SNID to define compressiveness:

Compressiveness: A stimulus z is compressive for a subject T if it violates the triangle inequality SNID (x, y) ≤ SNID (x, z) + SNID (z, y) for some objects x, y in the subject’s history.

The idea is the following: Because the triangle inequality always holds for the objective NID (Vitanyl et al.), if T detects that her SNID violates the triangle inequality for z, T learns that there are unexploited patterns in her history, and that z is the ‘key’ to these patterns. Compression gains reducing SNID (x, y) to SNID (x, z) + SNID (z, y) or below follow under plausible assumptions. (Prima facie, compressiveness is a stronger property than Schmidhuber’s ‘interestingness’: exposure to compressive stimuli constitutes a net reduction in the absolute # of bits used to represent one’s history.)

Informally, a novel stimulus S is ‘compressive’ for T if S is tractably (for T) related to multiple other objects whose relation to one another was not independently tractable (for T). We might think of compressive stimuli as previously undiscovered ‘prototypes’ for objects in T’s history of stimuli, allowing the construction of new prototype-based concepts that cluster previously disparate objects together. (Compare with Poincaré: “The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a mathematical law… They are those which reveal to us unsuspected kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another. … Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart.” Also see Caramello on ‘bridges’.)

I suggest that compressive stimuli have a key role in aesthetics. A major part of modern aesthetic discourse concerns stimuli that ‘resonate’ with many previously disconnected things one has encountered, felt or thought, and in so resonating reveal new affinities between these previously disconnected things. One often praises an artwork for being ‘uncanny’ or ‘strange yet familiar’, or for being ‘richly evocative’, or for ‘concentrating a very great number of experiences’ (cf. Eliot) or ‘revealing the before unapprehended relations of things’ (cf. Shelley). These aesthetic merits are often understood to be closely related to the capacity of art to define new concepts via prototype (cf. Shelley, Coleridge, Carnap, Dilthey): when the novel affinities revealed by an artwork are sufficiently strong, one talks about an artwork ‘articulating’ a general phenomenon or pattern that is otherwise hard to pin down, or about an artwork serving as the prototype that defines a category that is hard to otherwise define. (E.g. ‘Kafkaesque experience’, ‘Pinteresque conversation’, ‘Orwellian society’.) The idea of compressiveness thus seems strongly implicit in certain aspects of modern aesthetic discourse, both in aesthetic theory and in the practice of literary criticism.

One sees a particularly strong connection to the role of indeterminacy and abstraction in Modernist art and literature: the ideal stimuli for ‘breaking’ the triangle inequality between two objects are the minimal — i.e. the most compressible — exemplars of a structure common to both objects (or of a structure closely resembling the respective structure of each object.) For example, it is often stated that Kafka’s short stories capture a structure of experience — the ‘Kafkaesque^⁴’ — that one finds in a range of disparate experiences (or conceptions of experiences), making a Kafka story equally evocative of e.g. the experience of going to the bank, the experience of being broken-up with, the experience of waking up in a daze, the experience of being lost in a foreign city, or the experience of a police interrogation. The story functions as a nearly-minimal concrete model of the abstract structure shared by the disparate experiences that fall under the predicate ‘Kafkaesque,’ allowing to group together experiences that embody structure at some level of abstraction.

(See dissertation prospectus for a literary-theoretical application. Also see two informal examples. For application to an avant-garde, rather than Symbolist/Romantic context, see here.)

______________________________________________________________________

1 We can define a basic ‘programming language’ L for T and then define the compressibility of a stimulus S as T’s shortest known efficient program (in L) for generating S given use of T’s stored history of stimuli, or we can regard T as constantly optimizing her ‘programming language’ to match observed probabilities and define the compressibility of S directly as T’s shortest known efficient program for generating S.

2 Of course, this only applies to imperfect compressors like humans. An optimal compressors would simply come up with S a-priori.

3 Notice that a drive to discover compressive stimuli is already implied by Schmidhuber’s ‘compression progress drive,’ which we accept as-is.’We differ from Schmidhuber in differently mapping the compression progress drive to aesthetics judgements of stimuli, by distinguishing compressive stimuli from merely interesting stimuli as the class of stimuli whose relation to compression progress corresponds to aesthetic beauty in the strong sense.

4 One might tentatively analyze the ‘Kafkaesque’ structure of experience as consisting in a breakdown in one’s model of the world in conjunction with the belief that a different, successful model is held in common knowledge by others.

Parts of the text are taken from shared work with Owain Evans, MIT.

Frisson

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 04:07:00 -0400

I used to regard the, like, blushing-buzzing-breathless agitation of the mind and body from a book or movie as peak aesthetic experience. I now think that’s a category error: it’s your body’s way of telling you your brain is reeling-in a real big fish, but all of this interoceptive ruckus hardly makes for a rich apperception of the book or movie. Like, I haven’t so much watched my first Godard film (‘Week End’) as just had two hours of euphoric nausea while my brain rewrote its source-code. It’s your second Godard film you actually get to watch.

Crossover!

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:34:11 -0400

“‘You are old, Father Ubu’, the young man said”

My Favorite Thing

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:49:00 -0400

My favorite thing is non-narrative genre fiction. Like, stuff that clearly involves a made-up universe with made-up characters and made-up events but doesn’t try to do anything too much like telling me a story about it. ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ comes to mind as the platonic form here, and also as the prototype of bitterness over non-narrative genre fiction losing out to the realist novel.