Get a load of this guy

Did the West learn the right lessons from the Holocaust? Or much of anything? One would like to think so, but it's unclear at best.

After World War II, as the camps were liberated and the world found out what the Jews of Central Europe had suffered, it was inevitable―and probably necessary―that antisemitism would be a major focus for the civilized world. The problem is that we seem to have gotten special pleading and nothing else. It should go without saying but still needs to be said that persecuting Jews for being Jewish is wrong. The obvious corollary, both logical and moral, is that the same should hold for any other ethic and/or religious group. And the past few months have made it obvious just how many people just can't make that leap.

Germany is where this gets most bizarre. The government is investigating the two filmmakers behind the documentary No Other Land for being antisemitic and overly sympathetic to Palestine, despite one of the two being not only Jewish but Israeli. In fact the Deutsch have clamped down on criticism of Israel all over, and dissident Jews have been disproportionately targeted.

Germany has a rich history, has made many contributions to poetry and music, etc. But if they think sending the Unteroffizier out to reeducate those they find guilty of Jewish self-hatred is any kind of path to redemption, they're fooling themselves.

It came from the drawer

 

The concept of trompe-l'oeil ("trick the eye") is a well-established one, popular during the Renaissance, which you can bet also means it had precedent in Ancient Greece. But it underwent another huge revival in the nineteenth century. This time out the objects seemed to be presented for their own sake. The idea of painting as straightforward narrative was breaking down. 

The painting above is "Time and Eternity" by American artist John Haberle. Who certainly had a way of painting realistic wood grains. It almost seems to invent surrealist anti-narrative. 

What's wrong with this picture?

I'm not going to stop you if you want to have a good laugh at Google's Gemini fiasco. It's both embarrassing and funny that it proved almost entirely unwilling to create images of white people, even where appropriate. A search for "America's founding fathers" returned a George Washington who looked like Barack Obama in the middle of a wig party (not to be confused with the Whig Party.)

But I have to ask, what even is the purpose of this thing? Assuming they get the bugs out, what then? An AI-generated image isn't informative in the same way a photograph is, because it doesn't focus on an object outside of itself. It's not in and of itself art, although an avant-garde artist could conceivably use it in a larger piece. 

If this is going to be treated as a big deal, it sounds like an admission that flesh-and-blood human beings are giving up on creating anything themselves.

Can you dig it?

This list of theme parks doesn't have a date on it, so I don't know how long it's been hanging around online. It's got some color to it, though.

Dickens World is certainly a specific twist on the living museum. It's got Dickens-themed animatronics as well. One hopes none of them forget Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Diggerland is the one that really tickles my imagination. Who's the absolute visionary who thought up letting young visitors drive around in construction vehicles? At this point it's a hard-to-find sensation.

Dog days of winter

I don't have firsthand experience of pregnancy and childbirth, certainly, so I can't testify to how uncomfortable they can be. Saw something to put this in perspective, though. Today when I ran out for a quick trip to the grocery I saw a lactating pit bull. Now I can only imagine that having everything hang down like that when you're so low to the ground to begin with could make you grumpy. She seemed to be handling it pretty well, which is good, because pit bull.

Schroederific

One question that has been asked many times over the ages is, "Can you play jazz on a toy piano?" I decided to investigate on YouTube. This couple-minute video is actually pretty encouraging on the topic.

I also confirmed that some of my recommended videos are things like "The life and sad end of X" where X is a person who's still alive. AI obituaries, gotta love 'em.

Form/Function

I've read some contemporary mystery novels in recent weeks., in large part to reassure myself that writing about mysterious crimes is still possible. And there's something I've noticed in regards to their narration. 

There are two big types of third party narration. One is third person omniscient, in which the narrator seems to have a godlike perspective on all events, statements, thoughts, etc. The other is third person limited, where the narrator is separate from any character but limited to describing things through their perspective.

A popular way of writing murder mysteries now―possibly the default―is to use third person limited, but rotate it. That is, the perspective switches from character to character with each chapter.

This seems to me a counterproductive way to write a whodunit. Say you just killed someone. You'd probably be thinking about it quite a lot, right? But in order to not give away the solution, a writer using this model will have to make sure their killer doesn't think anything in the privacy of their own head that wouldn't give everything away if they said it out loud. I'm not sure that works.

Snow show

The blizzard we got on Tuesday felt something like the Main Event. Just about everything was closed. I did go out for a bit, but not entirely without regret. The thing is, if your insulated boots don't keep the water out, the insulation doesn't do you a hell of a lot of good. And walking through deep slushy snow, nobody's boots are waterproof. 

Today the temperature dropped, below freezing most of the day. That meant that the snow solidified, so it wasn't as likely to get your feet wet. You just have to watch out for those treacherous shiny bits on the sidewalk.

The New Old Normal

2020 will stand in history as a great playtime for our news media. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 had allowed them a greater-than-usual degree of self-dramatization. With the post-George Floyd reckoning and "mostly peaceful" protests a number of them now went full leftist guerrilla...at least within the confines of their own skulls. And on the other side of the political spectrum some of the people who made hay on being anti-Covidian or gender critical weren't really putting anything on the line if you looked closely.

As of now it's no longer 2020. Playtime is over and it's back to work. Part of this work is selling the Israeli line on their Gaza war. But it doesn't end there.

It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

On the subject of cozy mysteries I would say that Otto Penzler is half right. By and large they do suck, although I'm sure there are exceptions. But it's not because they're mostly written by women. It's because the formula encourages authors to make little variations like which state the small town setting is in and what kind of quaint business the amateur sleuth runs, while not taking creative chances anywhere else.

On the larger question of what to do with someone like Penzler, the obvious answer is "nothing." If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you believe that being an artist means you should never have to deal with people who disagree with you, you won't be a very good one.

Rosenfield notes that when Penzler was bounced from editing the Best American Mystery series he  started his own anthology series that immediately outsold theirs. The man knows what he's doing. You want to keep people like that around.

Wrong move

Over the past couple of years this country has trying to rally its people together by playing up the rightness of its foreign policy. I could say "Biden" but really it's a number of politicians and politician-adjacent people in both parties. And regardless of party or stated ideology, it seems like a counterproductive step. 

I have my opinions on the Middle East and on the Ukraine. Other people have theirs. One problem with interventionism is that it declares to your own native population (and everyone else, of course) that you've thrown in with a foreign government or faction. If you want national unity, even just to the extent of people getting along with each other, the last thing you want to do is pressure everyone to agree on some other part of the world.

Forbidden

How pervasive is racism? And can you repress it out of existence?

I recently had occasion to see a couple of training videos meant to educate new employees away from prejudice and harassment. The very white, 1950s-sounding VO narrator and the very 2020s multiethnic actors seemed to be in competition who could be more stilted. 

Beyond that, think about this.

In the middle of the twentieth century, everyone in professional life had to wear a suit and tie whenever they were out in public. A backlash counterculture rose who believed that t-shirts and grease-stained jeans were appropriate for all occasions. They eventually won.

Around the same time and a little later politicians and men in respectable trades had to be family men with doting wives, children preferred if not absolutely necessary. But of course a hundred gay and lesbian and "queer" subcultures bloomed. 

So if you make racial guilt and constant apologies a condition for employment, what will the downstream effects be?

Totally cyber

In a recent issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine I read a story by Erica Obey featuring characters of hers that have also appeared in a novel. These are librarian Mary Watson and Doyle, the latter being an AI she created to write mysteries. Needless to say, the pair get involved in real crime cases somehow. 

While this sounds like a cutting edge 2024 idea, oddly there's a precedent for mystery series featuring AI detectives. In 2011 Dave Zeltserman published a collection called Julius Katz & Archie, featuring a lazy investigator (as the wiki article notes he has a Roman emperor first name and an animal themed last name, so spot the parallel) who has an AI assistant loaded into his tiepin. And way back in 2002 there was Turing Hopper, an itinerant AI detective created by author Donna Andrews.

Truth to tell this is not the kind of fiction I would write myself. The idea of artificial intelligence solving crimes sounds a little too much like something they'd dream up at Davos. But I do think it's interesting that "AI as crime solver" appears to be an established subgenre going back to the beginning of the century. With roots that may extend even further, including some stories by Isaac Asimov.

Snowy scene

This picture bears the name "Snow in New York." Did you really doubt that was the setting? It was painted in 1902, and already the buildings are vertiginous. 

The painter is Robert Henri, an artist originally from Cincinnati. And yes, he was of French descent, but he pronounced it "hen-rye." He was associated with the Ashcan School, who focused on urban realism. That doesn't describe everything he did―he painted portraits, although they looked more spontaneous than other portraits―but seems to have been a good foundation for him.

On balance I don't know that he was fond of winter.