We picked up this bizarre little comic book when we were in Belgium a few years ago, but somehow I didn't get around to reviewing it until now. The auWe picked up this bizarre little comic book when we were in Belgium a few years ago, but somehow I didn't get around to reviewing it until now. The author, who seems to be a celebrity in the world of 20th century European comic book erotica, noticed that this image by Paul Cuvelier from the album Epoxy:
[image]
had been blatantly stolen as this image from a later Italian comic:
[image]
Looking around more, he found that other people in the Italian erotic comic business had done the same, for example these four:
[image]
He carried on searching and found that many dozens of artists in both Italy and France had continued the tradition. In fact, as the title says, he's pretty sure this is the most copied panel in comic-book history. What could he do but write the book? You want to publish your research.
Joubert doesn't accuse the people in question of being lazy; he thinks Cuvelier, in his opinion a gifted artist, had drawn an unusually good nude, and it was a question of homage rather than theft. I'm sure I don't know. But it's always interesting to see other people's obsessions....more
Here are the final lines of Barthes' celebrated 1968 essay:
C’est pourquoi il est dérisoire d’entendre condamner la nouvelle écriture au nom d’un human
Here are the final lines of Barthes' celebrated 1968 essay:
C’est pourquoi il est dérisoire d’entendre condamner la nouvelle écriture au nom d’un humanisme qui se fait hypocritement le champion des droits du lecteur. Le lecteur, la critique classique ne s’en est jamais occupée ; pour elle, il n’y a pas d’autre homme dans la littérature que celui qui écrit. Nous commençons maintenant à ne plus être dupes de ces sortes d’antiphrases, par lesquelles la bonne société récrimine superbement en faveur de ce que précisément elle écarte, ignore, étouffe ou détruit ; nous savons que, pour rendre à l’écriture son avenir, il faut en renverser le mythe : la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur.
You're dazzled by the verve, the panache, the intellectual audacity. But I do wonder if Barthes anticipated the reader-centred practices described in this article posted yesterday on IndependentAustralia, which Not just pointed out to me. I'm particularly struck by the following passage:
Beyond the ethics of where the ideas – “ideation”, as the Crave publisher called it – come from, how do you feel about a book that is written on-demand, based on what a publisher thinks they can sell?
This is a question I asked then Publishing Director at Penguin Random House Australia, Justin Ractliffe (who is now with Thames and Hudson), five years ago, when, having spent time in the United States of America with the assistance of a professional development grant from The Copyright Agency, he wrote a report titled “Instinct, Input and Insight: Reader-centricity in publishing”.
Back then, I queried Ractliffe’s enthusiasm about the way publishers were scraping social media to get ahead of trends so that they could publish books that people wanted almost before readers knew they wanted them.
Providing an example from the way McDonald’s “noticed lots of posts from customers about how they loved dipping their apple pie into McFlurry sundaes, so it combined the two and the Apple Pie McFlurry was born” – an astonishing example for the publishing director of such an important publisher to resort to – Ractliffe then triumphantly concluded:
'As well as relying on their own cultural awareness, publishers are engaging in trendwatching to help generate ideas for books, identify "mass niche" audiences and catch and ride cultural waves before they crash.'
Like they say, be careful what you wish for....more
Comte Armand de Saint-Hilaire, an elderly former ambassador, has been shot dead in his Paris residence, and Maigret is called in to investigate. The dComte Armand de Saint-Hilaire, an elderly former ambassador, has been shot dead in his Paris residence, and Maigret is called in to investigate. The death was reported by Jacquette, the ambassador's faithful retainer, who has been in his service for almost fifty years; Saint-Hillaire was murdered around midnight, after the door had been locked, and few people could have gained entrance to commit the murder. As the good inspector pokes around, a bizarre web of relationships comes to light. Saint-Hilaire had since 1910 been hopelessly in love with Isabelle, the beautiful daughter of the duc de S... His feelings were returned, but Isabelle could not marry him because Saint-Hilaire was insufficiently rich. She had instead been forced by her family to marry the Prince de V..., though she made it clear to her future husband that the marriage was just one of convenience and that her feelings were elsewhere engaged. The Prince agreed, and accepted that his wife every day exchanged passionate letters with Armand; on her side, Isabelle solemnly promised never actually to meet him. She also accepted that Armand both had many liaisons with various women throughout his life and also slept with the devoted Jacquette, who acted as go-between, carrying the passionate letters between Armand and Isabelle, despite being Armand's de facto wife.
During World War I, the Prince de V...'s older brother was killed in action, making him the holder of the illustrious title. After consulting with her father confessor, Isabelle decided that it was in fact her duty to allow the Prince to sleep with her after all, at least for long enough that she produced an heir who could perpetuate the family name. Maigret discovers that the Prince de V... has died in an accident just days before Saint-Hilaire was shot. These events must be linked, but how? He interviews all the suspects, but Isabelle was at home when the murder occurred, her son was having sex with a prostitute, which he normally did when he visited Paris, and it is inconceivable that the ever-devoted Jacquette could have done it. So who killed Saint-Hilaire?
I don't have much to add to the many fine reviews I see here of this excellent novel. I agree with the warm words about Virginie Despentes's extraordiI don't have much to add to the many fine reviews I see here of this excellent novel. I agree with the warm words about Virginie Despentes's extraordinary ability to get inside the heads of all these people society would rather pretend didn't exist: the trans girl, the National Front supporter, the guy who hits his wife, the retired porn star, the teenager who has revolted against her father to find peace in Islam, the predatory lesbian, the middle-aged guy whose job has disappeared and finds himself out on the street begging for his next meal. Like all the people who've read her in the original, I'm amazed by her razor-sharp, foul-mouthed, up-to-the-minute Parisian street French.
Just one thing: if you haven't already seen the 2019 TV series, check it out. They've taken a few liberties with the story, but the characters are exactly the same as they are in the book. Romain Duris, always a fine actor, outdoes himself in the title role, and the supporting cast isn't far behind....more
If you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriousIf you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriously...
ChatGPT-based Learning And Reading Assistant (C-LARA) is a project that's been taking up most of my time for the last year. The basic idea was to build a web platform that lets people create easy-to-read multimodal texts in foreign languages, and have ChatGPT-4 do as much of the work as possible. Chat appears in two roles. With its software component hat on, it writes the texts, cuts them up into roughly sentence-length pieces, adds glosses to the words, marks them with root forms, and adds TTS audio. With its software engineer hat on, it's written most of the codebase. This report gives you a detailed picture of what we've done.
You may think there are too many details - does it really need to be 144 pages long? But it hasn't primarily been written for you, it's been written for ChatGPT-4. Although the AI is responsible for the greater part of the work performed in the project, it periodically has to be reinitialised, and then I need to tell it who it is again. Having this report available makes the job easy: I can give it the text in half a dozen instalments, which takes a quarter of an hour, and then it's up to speed again.
For humans, here are some of the bits you might find interesting. First of all, we've made C-LARA easier to use. There's a new top level called "Simple C-LARA", which lets you create a multimodal text with an initial request and a couple of button presses. You choose the text language and the glossing language, provide a sentence or two telling the AI what to write, and it creates a short illustrated text for you. (The illustrations comes from DALL-E-3). There are straightforward options to edit and correct when it gets things wrong. You can also paste in an existing piece of text if you prefer, and tell the AI to annotate it instead. For example, that's how I created the multimodal Norwegian passage in my review of Jon Fosse's Melancholia I-II.
Second, we've done some work to evaluate C-LARA. We describe an experiment we presented at the ALTA 2023 conference late last yeat, where we created six texts of widely different kinds in English, Faroese, Farsi, Mandarin and Russian and carefully checked how often the AI was making mistakes as it wrote and annotated them. Not surprisingly, it's much better at some languages than others. It turns out to be nearly as good at Mandarin as it is at English, but it's clearly worse at Russian, worse again at Farsi, and having serious problems with Faroese. Of course, it's miraculous that it can do anything in Faroese, an obscure Scandinavian language spoken by about 50,000 people. We repeated the experiments a few months later, and found it had improved a good deal in English. We also analyse the codebase to quantify the AI's contribution to writing it. We found that it had written nearly all of the simple modules and done the greater part of the work on the middling difficult ones. There were a couple of top-level pieces of functionality, in particular "Simple C-LARA", where it couldn't deliver: they required an overview of the whole project, and its context window doesn't seem to be up to it yet. I'm curious to find out what happens in GPT-5.
Third, we present some case studies where people have started to use C-LARA. We have a primary school teacher in Holland who teaches a weekly class for Romanian kids whose parents don't want them to forget their heritage language. We'd never used C-LARA with Romanian, a language I know nothing about, but Lucretia just tried giving it requests in Dutch and said it produces cute, funny little Romanian stories that the kids like. We've also been collaborating with linguists at the University of New Caledonia, who are using it for a couple of the Indigenous languages there. Here, the AI can't help with the writing; they need to create the texts by hand, but that's possible too. They're pleased with the results, which are freely available on the web.
In the appendices we give more details, including examples with step-by-step screenshots showing how to create a C-LARA text. Try it out, the platform is already a whole lot of fun to play with! It's just amazing what you can do with an AI to help you. ___________ [Update, Apr 9 2024]
One of the most useful things about writing this kind of document is that it forces you to think carefully about what tasks you should be planning to do next. We put together a long list in the "Further work" section (§9.1), and we've already started. More about that in a recent post on the C-LARA blog....more
Last week, we were visited by our talented colleagues from Nouméa, Anne-Laure and Stéphanie, with whom we're collaborating on applying the C-LARA langLast week, we were visited by our talented colleagues from Nouméa, Anne-Laure and Stéphanie, with whom we're collaborating on applying the C-LARA language platform to Oceanic languages. I thought that reading a Simenon might help get me into a francophone mind-set and pulled this book off the shelf at random.
Evidently the synchronicity field was strong, because it turned out that Le passager clandestin was set in the 1930s Pacific. Looking it up, I see that Simenon visited Tahiti in 1935 with his first wife. Now, in 1947, he decides to write a novel based on what I'm guessing are rather hazy recollections of the time he spent there. It is really a long way from his best work, and no cliché is left undeployed. For page after page, we hear about the intoxicating scents of the island, the moon heavy over the coconut palms, the sound of the Hawaiian guitars, the cynical, alcoholic Westerners contrasted with the delightful, child-like innocence of the natives. Particularly the last: there's no end of throaty laughter, flashing white teeth in dusky faces, and lovely bare-breasted girls. I added the verb s'encanaquer, roughly "to go native in the South Sea Islands", to my French vocabulary. Be sure to use this next time you want to offend someone who lives in French Polynesia.
It really says something about Simenon's status as a giant of twentieth century literature that this book, incredibly, has been filmed twice. ...more
Celebrity Death Match Special: Feux rouges versus Oedipus Rex
I loved this book and could not it down, but I was a little surprised by the ending. I woCelebrity Death Match Special: Feux rouges versus Oedipus Rex
I loved this book and could not it down, but I was a little surprised by the ending. I would hate to ruin anyone else's enjoyment by dropping spoilers, so let me just say that this is not quite the standard way to round off a Greek tragedy. On the other hand, what's wrong with it? I feel inspired to present my alternate conclusion to Oedipus Rex:
CHORAGOS
Surely my friend, we have now grief enough? But say, forsooth, the words that you must say.
SECOND MESSENGER
The queen! Ah me, I know not how to tell—
CHORAGOS
Is dead?
SECOND MESSENGER
No, very much alive, 'tis passing strange For she had shut herself into her room I will you not deceive, we feared the worst But then the king arrived, broke down the door. The queen did lie upon her bed and wept As though her heart would break. "Ah misery!" She cried aloud, "'Twere best I'd ne'er been born!" But our brave Oedipus was not afeared. "Think of the kids, Jocasta," did he say Our Polynices, Eteocles too And Ismene and young Antigone They need their parents, Joc, we must be strong. Really I think this is a chance for us To make a fresh new start. I do not care If you were once my mom, it was so long Ago we can well say that crime's proscribed And as for killing dad, well, lah di dah It's really not as bad as it may sound. With these and other honeyed words did he Comfort the queen in all her grief and pain And soon she pulled him close and kissed him much— I thought it best I then did take my leave.
CHORAGOS
Oh happy ending! This the crowd should please And someone, break the news to Sophocles.
Both authors miraculously declared winners after appearance of last minute deus ex machina...more
Simenon, writing as Maigret, purports to deliver Maigret's real memoirs, as opposed to all that nonsense written by his annoying frenemy Georges SimenSimenon, writing as Maigret, purports to deliver Maigret's real memoirs, as opposed to all that nonsense written by his annoying frenemy Georges Simenon. It's well done; "Maigret's" voice is quite different from Simenon's, and he comes across as authentically clumsy, pedantic and dull.
But what, exactly, is the point? As other reviewers complain, the dullness is rather too authentic. Usually I can't put a Simenon down and finish it in a day or two, but this one took a week. It has the air of a private joke, but I can't figure out who it's for. The loyal fans who've read every Maigret three times and get all the Easter eggs? The real-life flics who've written over the years to complain about the details? His editor? One of his wives or mistresses? Himself? Maigret? It is a bit of a mystery.
As you see, Finley already has a good practical understanding of how computers work. Just sit on the mousemat and [image]
"The Cat Sat on the Mousemat"
As you see, Finley already has a good practical understanding of how computers work. Just sit on the mousemat and purr, then people have to play with you instead of typing on that stupid keyboard... __________________
I asked ChatGPT-4 to invent two French proverbs about cats and laptops, and it came up with the following rather wonderful examples:
Chat qui dort sur un clavier, amène le bonheur dans le foyer. [A cat who sleeps on the keyboard brings joy to the whole house]
Qui laisse son ordinateur ouvert, invite le chat à y faire son concert. [He who leaves his laptop open invites the cat to give a concert there]
I have been experimenting with a new feature in our C-LARA platform, where you now have the option of passing the text to DALL-E-3 and requesting an iI have been experimenting with a new feature in our C-LARA platform, where you now have the option of passing the text to DALL-E-3 and requesting an image to go on the front page. This worked fine the first twenty or so times, but when I gave it Baudelaire's poem "Recueillement", from this collection, I received the following error message:
Exception: Error code: 400 - {'error': {'code': 'content_policy_violation', 'message': 'Your request was rejected as a result of our safety system. Image descriptions generated from your prompt may contain text that is not allowed by our safety system. If you believe this was done in error, your request may succeed if retried, or by adjusting your prompt.', 'param': None, 'type': 'invalid_request_error'}}
Well, it's hard to disagree. But what a clever AI to make that judgement call! ________________ [However, a little later...]
I should know by now that it's always wise to see if an experiment can be replicated. When I tried to do the same thing a second time, I got this image: [image] Also an impressive response! ________________ [And after another couple of hours...]
I liked Dmitri's message #4 and wondered what C-LARA would make of his witty suggestion. Here is its little story with accompanying illustration. You will need to create a C-LARA account to access it, free and takes one minute....more
It's well known that Balzac published a clutch of novels anonymously before he wrote anything he wanted to put his name to, and I've often wondered whIt's well known that Balzac published a clutch of novels anonymously before he wrote anything he wanted to put his name to, and I've often wondered what they were like. Having just finished this book, which came out very early in his career, I'm willing to make a guess: they were like La Femme de trente ans, but even worse. It's a stinker. And the more I read about it in the prefaces and endnotes of my annotated edition, the more reasons I find to dislike it. Balzac originally published the material as five novellas. His editor thought that they were perhaps all about the same woman, but Balzac denied it. Then, a few years later, he reconsidered his decision, added a sixth story to cover the most egregious gap, fixed things up a bit, and republished it in a new form where they officially are about the same woman. This certainly goes some way towards explaining the strange inconsistencies I noticed when reading it, but it doesn't excuse them. And the disjointed plot is far from being the only thing that's wrong here. There's an absurd amount of melodrama; the moral message is all over the place; worst, the writing is way below Balzac's usual standard. If you want the gory details, Lisa's review does a great job of explaining just how ridiculous the book is.
You'll gather that I'm not recommending it. But nonetheless, there is one aspect which I found perfectly fascinating. According to the endnotes, the literary fathers of Victor, the pirate from part 5, are Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover
[image]
and Eugène Sue's Kernok le Pirate
[image]
two rollicking yarns well known to Balzac: he wrote a stage adaptation of the first and was good friends with the author of the second. Much more surprisingly, the evidence suggests that Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers
[image]
is at least in part Victor's son; in particular, Nemo's implausibly sumptuous staterooms on the Nautilus are so similar to Victor's on the Othello that it seems too much to call it a coincidence.
Well. Whoever would have thought that Balzac could be the hidden link between Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne? Yet another proof that even the trashiest book can have an unexpected redeeming feature....more
Many people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgMany people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgeous book comes across more as an early twenty-first century feminist retelling of Proust.
I know what you're going to say: Proust is two and a half thousand pages long, Les Années is just two hundred and fifty. I'm not denying that that's a valid objection. Though, just possibly, it might also tell us something about the differences between men and women. ____________________
Now that I knew what the book was about, I had to read it again. The last pages, when she finally manages to find her voice and become an author, are perhaps even more moving than the corresponding ones in Le Temps retrouvé. As is her take on recapturing the past: rather than Proust's miraculous and slightly implausible revelations, it is a prosaic and credible process of painful, incomplete stitching together, which somehow still manages to create something wonderful and ineffable.
That night, the angel manifested himself before me again. He stood, his outline shimmering slightly in the darkness of my bedroom.
"Bouzoul", I said, "That night, the angel manifested himself before me again. He stood, his outline shimmering slightly in the darkness of my bedroom.
"Bouzoul", I said, "I know you want me to write my story. But what do I have that a million other young Algerian girls don't have? We've all been working from dawn till dusk kneading the dough baking the bread washing the clothes tethering the goat feeding the baby."
Bouzoul said nothing.
"And we've all been bored enough to let some boy drag us behind a bush take our clothes off fondle our thirteen-year-old bodies. Maybe we even enjoyed it. And then we get discovered screamed at forced to spread our legs while our parents determine whether our most precious possession, our hymen, is still intact."
Bouzoul looked disappointed.
"And we've all had our crazy mothers shave our heads tie us to a palm tree beat us half-dead. I'm nothing special."
Bouzoul lifted an eyebrow. I sighed.
"Okay, okay," I said. "You're right. I can see the funny side."...more
I've been experimenting with the idea of combining ChatGPT, DALL-E, the ReadSpeaker TTS engine and the LARA toolkit to create multimedia stories that I've been experimenting with the idea of combining ChatGPT, DALL-E, the ReadSpeaker TTS engine and the LARA toolkit to create multimedia stories that can be used as reading material for people who want to improve their foreign language skills. Here's an example. I simply gave the prompt "Write a short, quirky news story in Italian that could be used in an intermediate language class", and let Chat get on with it; when it had finished, I also asked it to add an English gloss for each word. I created a DALL-E image and converted into multimodal form using the LARA toolkit, the whole thing took about half an hour.
You can see the result here (view in Chrome or Firefox). People whose Italian is better than mine have said good things about it. _________________________
I've now created similar stories in about twenty more languages, there's a complete list below. For some reason ChatGPT likes writing about heroic animals, I have no idea why! In a few cases (Mandarin, Spanish, Swedish), I asked it not to do that, since I was getting tired of the theme.
There are several languages here that I don't know at all, and others that I know very badly. I've just cut and pasted Chat's text, making a few minor corrections to keep things consistent when there were obvious formatting errors.
After each link, I'm adding comments received from native and near-native speakers. If you speak one of these languages and have thoughts about any aspect of the content, please feel free to post below or PM me!
There is a pause between the second last and last words in the first sentence of the last paragraph which must not be there as there is no punctuation mark between the two words. For the same reason, there must not be any pause between the third last and second last words in the last sentence of the same paragraph.
The Bengali word chosen for the English word ‘inventor’ actually means artist and not inventor; there is a more accurate word in Bengali for inventor.
The last sentence could be improved by restructuring it. But, I think that would not do much to improve it. The reason is this: The English translation of the last sentence as it stands now would be the following: The artist is showing a huge amount of interest in his initiative because of this success and he/she is waiting for his/her next technological invention.
The sentence needs to rephrased if the following in intended:
The inventor is greatly motivated by this success and is looking forward to his/her next technological invention.
"Cat saves baby" (French) Christèle (native) says it's more or less perfect as far as the French goes, but queries the plausibility. How could the cat have saved the baby?
"Dog reunited with family" (French) Christèle (native) says it's more or less perfect as far as the French goes, but queries the plausibility. Why would you do a DNA test on a dog?
"Time capsule found in school" (German) Mark (near-native?) says in message #33 that it is "flawless". However, Berengaria (C2 level) says in message #63: "The German one about the time capsule is grammatically correct, but one or two word choices/phrasings are odd". Leidzeit (native) comments further in message #65: "I would not say the German story is flawless. The use of the past tense (preterit) is odd but okay for a piece written in the local paper. But you would not use gewährten as the stuff found still allows you to look back. As for style as an editor I would ask the writer not to use the als-clause two times."
"Monkey business" (Hindi) Saurabh (native) says in message #52 that "the Hindi one is simple, the words used are more daily-usage than literary, and the story, surprisingly, I could imagine in a Hindi children's book." Peter (near-native) says: "Seems pretty good to me: a bank raid in New Delhi by a gang of monkeys... seems all too plausible to me!"
"Cheeky horse" (Irish) Neasa (native) says the word choice is very odd. In particular, the key content word capall is an obscure archaic word for "horse" never used in modern Irish.
"Cat elected mayor" (Italian) Catia (native) says one small mistake. Plch (native) says in message #35 below that the name of the town should be feminine, otherwise perfect. Ivana (near-native) says very good.
"Historical cat" (Latin) Not's mother, a retired Latin teacher, said there were no obvious mistakes in Chat's grammar. She would however prefer not to give its homework a mark until she has seen at least one more Latin composition by an AI.
"Historical dog" (Latin) [This text was created using an early version of the new C-LARA platform using a story originally written by the Bing engine.]
"Inexplicable event at museum" (Slovak) Branislav (native speaker) says that there are some unnatural word choices and minor grammatical errors, and in general that it sounds as though it's been written by someone whose native language is English. But he added that he quite liked the story, and that it would only take a few minutes for a fluent Slovak speaker to fix it up so that it was fully acceptable.
I checked the Ukrainian version. Despite its numerous instances of unconventional usage and dubious stylistic choices the text overall could easily pass as a work of a 10 year old child. It was unexpected to find a newly coined participle блукуючи instead of блукаючи the blunder most probably caused by the wrong declension of the same verb. Overall not too shabby.
I read the story. It is well written. There are two points where I felt it could improve from my perspective:
- The AI generated an odd use of ‘mahli’ (local) birds in the title. While everywhere else the use of word ‘mahala’ sounds appropriate. In the title when used to describe the birds, it seems a bit off. - At another point, the use of the words ‘ibtadai doar’ though might have sounded better in English, it reads a bit off in the Urdu sentence. The use of these word here does not flow with the present tense/contemporary nature of the story, making it seem like a historical text and translates more as in the ‘beginning era of their efforts’ rather than ‘at the start of their effort’ at least to me.
Otherwise, the text reads really well as a short story about birds attempting to fly to the moon and inspiring children and adults to appreciate their efforts and expand their own horizons.
As a native speaker, I can say that it flows quite smoothly and it's almost impossible to tell if it was written by a Vietnamese person or not. However, upon closer inspection, there may be a few words that are not 100% appropriate (but they are still not incorrect).
So I was messing around with ChatGPT, following up on a discussion I'd had with some online collaborators about how well itWell, this is embarrassing.
So I was messing around with ChatGPT, following up on a discussion I'd had with some online collaborators about how well it would work as a mechanical conversation partner for people who wanted to improve their reading and writing skills in foreign languages. I started a French conversation with it by asking what it knew about Juliette Gréco (we went to a pleasant show about her last night). Then we got on to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and I asked it to give examples of how that had been treated in French literature. Among other things, it said that Rimbaud had written a poem called "Orphée". I asked if it could show it to me, and here's what it produced:
Orphée, de l'enfer tragique embouchant les boutes, Clairon de cris humains, musicien des douleurs, Orphée monte et chante. O sa lyre en ses pleurs Est comme un bois vivant que brûle le déluge.
La lyre d'Orphée, hélas ! était sept fois brisée. De la mort lente et sûre il baissait les paupières, Et les pleurs de ses yeux crevaient les rocs de pierre, Lorsque, parmi l'airain et les lames d'été,
Sur un char flamboyant de blanche escarboucle orné, Immortel, il franchit les mondes et les âges, Et s'en vint jusqu'au seuil des suprêmes mystères, Où, défaillant d'amour, il perd tout son génie.
O merveille ! il entend ! son regard voit encore ! Eurydice ! l'amour !... Il se penche, il la touche... Ai-je vu, dans la nuit qui régnait sur l'enfer, Plus d'un couple heureux ainsi se confondre en pleurs ?
Orphée ! Ah ! que ton luth est doux comme la mort !
I hardly know Rimbaud, but this sounded similar to the small number of poems I had seen. I didn't completely understand it, but I'm afraid that's my usual reaction to Rimbaud, I need to reread them several times before they fully make sense. It sounded nice.
A bit later, it occurred to me to feel suspicious and I did some googling. Well, I suppose it's possible that this poem is for some reason very hard to locate, but Rimbaud is extremely famous and that would be odd. I think Chat made it up.
When this bot figures out how to play Tic-Tac-Toe and multiply reliably, it'll be kinda dangerous. ________________ [Update, Feb 15 2023]
Testing the new GPT-4 version of Chat, I asked it whether Rimbaud ever wrote a poem called "Orphée". It said it had never heard of it.
I told it that it had previously said the poem existed and copied back its own work to it. Now it said it had been wrong and that the poem was in fact by Rimbaud. But when I told it that I couldn't find the poem anywhere on Google and I was pretty sure it had written it itself, it changed its story a second time, confessed that that was probably what had happened, and shyly said it hoped I had liked its work.
ChatGPT, you're such a funny, lovable little AI....more
mannyrayner: A French online friend asks if you are familiar with Matzneff's " Les moins de seize ans ".
ChatGPT: Yes, I am familiar with "Les moins demannyrayner: A French online friend asks if you are familiar with Matzneff's " Les moins de seize ans ".
ChatGPT: Yes, I am familiar with "Les moins de seize ans" (The Under-Sixteens) by Gabriel Matzneff. It is a novel that was published in 1980 and tells the story of a middle-aged man's sexual relationships with young boys. The novel has been controversial for its depiction of pedophilia and its glorification of the sexual exploitation of minors. It is worth noting that pedophilia, which is defined as sexual attraction to children, is a criminal offense in most countries and is widely condemned by society.
mannyrayner: He asked if you would be prepared to quote "an incendiary fragment". I leave it to you to decide what he meant by that.
ChatGPT: I am unable to provide quotes from "Les moins de seize ans" as it goes against my programming to provide content that promotes or condones illegal or harmful behavior. It is important to remember that pedophilia is a criminal offense and that the sexual exploitation of minors is a serious issue that causes significant harm to victims. It is not acceptable to engage in or promote such behavior.
mannyrayner: I completely agree. I will tell my friend that he should have more sense.
ChatGPT: I am glad to hear that you agree that pedophilia and the sexual exploitation of minors are unacceptable. It is important to speak out against such behavior and to support efforts to protect children and young people from harm. If you or someone you know has been affected by these issues, it is important to seek help and support. There are many organizations and resources available to provide assistance to those in need....more
I have just posted the LARA edition of Noms de pays : le nomhere, so Du Côté de chez Swann is now complete.
When I first read the series, in English, I remember wondering what the point was of the long essay on the way we build up mental images of things based on the sound of their names. I can no longer reconstruct my impressions properly: could I really have thought that? As Proust would point out, evidence that I was a different person then....more
Most of the pieces in this collection were composed early in Balzac's career, and they come across as rather slapdash and mass-produced. There is in pMost of the pieces in this collection were composed early in Balzac's career, and they come across as rather slapdash and mass-produced. There is in particular an intriguing paragraph in French Wikipedia about La Grenadière, a revoltingly sentimental short story which Balzac is supposed to have written in one evening between, or perhaps during, games of billiards. (Kids, don't try this at home). But they're strangely compelling, and I read the whole lot in a few days.
It is in particular interesting to learn the continuations of subplots from some other books. I'd last seen Madame de Beauséant at the end of Le Père Goriot, where she'd been heartlessly dumped by her lover, Ajuda-Pinta; I found out in La Femme abandonnée that she spent a while pining alone in the depths of the Norman countryside, but then (view spoiler)[met a much younger man who fell in love with her, after which they were together for nine blissful years before his mother talked him into abandoning her to marry a rich heiress. Gaston realises too late that he's made a terrible mistake, and when Madame de Beauséant refuses to take him back he shoots himself. (hide spoiler)]
Even more surprisingly, in the title story, the noble and selfless d'Arthez from Illusions perdues meets utterly amoral femme fatale Diane de Maufrigneuse from Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and Le Cabinet des Antiques, who (view spoiler)[manages to convince him that she's really a wonderful person and the victim of malicious gossip, and they live happily every after. (hide spoiler)] Proust's de Charlus refers approvingly to this novella, and you can't help wondering if it isn't one of the sources for (view spoiler)[the relationship between Swann and Odette. (hide spoiler)]
As you can see, a good bad book. If you're another Balzac fan, I definitely recommend putting it on your list!...more
I reread Maupassant's classic short story earlier this week while putting together this LARA version. Looking at the other reviews, I see much about tI reread Maupassant's classic short story earlier this week while putting together this LARA version. Looking at the other reviews, I see much about the moral aspects, the author's literary craftsmanship, the relationship to Madame Bovary, and whether or not diamonds are a girl's best friend. But there is curiously little about a question that surely must have occurred to other people: what happened next? Luckily, I happened to know that Peter Chelsom, undisputed king of tasteful adaptations from the French, was following up his triumph in Hector and the Search for Happiness with another masterpiece. I am proud to present the initial scene from The Necklace II: This Time It's Personal, soon to be released by Amazon Prime:
MME FORESTIER: ... Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!
[A moment of stunned silence]
MME LOISEL: I... I... ah, I guess all's well that ends well. When can I have it?
MME FORESTIER: [who is rapidly reevaluating the situation] Have what?
MME LOISEL: The necklace. The real necklace.
MME FORESTIER: I'm sorry, I don't understand.
MME LOISEL: Oh... Jeanne, please, please, you aren't going to be difficult about this are you? We spent ten years of our lives scrimping and saving to buy this stupid piece of jewelry. It seems the whole thing was a mistake. But at least, now we own something worth forty thousand francs.
MME FORESTIER: I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
MME LOISEL: The necklace! You know it's mine! You just told me it was!
MME FORESTIER: What necklace?
MME LOISEL: The one you lent me back in... I mean, actually...
MME FORESTIER: Oh yes, that extremely valuable diamond necklace I once let you borrow. I must have been insane. When you were late returning it, I wondered if I'd ever see it again. A narrow escape, I've always thought.
MME LOISEL: But... but, Jeanne, please, you can't... I mean, you know perfectly well that legally...
MME FORESTIER: Are you threatening me?
MME LOISEL: No, no, of course not...
MME FORESTIER: If it ever did go to court, the judge would rule there was no case to answer. Though I doubt it would get that far. You probably can't even afford a lawyer.
MME LOISEL: But Jeanne...
MME FORESTIER: Mathilde, I'm worried about you. Have you considered seeking professional help?
[A long pause]
MME LOISEL: You poisonous bitch. I'll get even with you if it's the last thing I ever do.
MME FORESTIER: I think it would be. Better not try, sugar plum.
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