[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

And on whether the writer is a good poet who knows what he/she/it is doing, or not.

It knows what it is doing. Yes...it does, my precious....

[John Whitworth]

Re formulas, have you ever watched Bluebloods with Tom Selleck?It is very restful.

[Norman Ball]

“What if we could predict? Right now, our data is limited, we really only have five data points: our own view of our own poem (now, there's a messy dataset!), audience reaction at readings, placements in journals, books, anthologies, etc., honors and awards, and the evaluations of our colleagues.”

What a ghastly yet predictable new academic enterprise. If literature reveals itself entirely to Big Data algorithms then it is by definition formulaic. Now the race is on to trap the final turtle in a dataset. Infinite turtles means infinite grants and theses. So perhaps there are no flies on the Digital Humanities crew.

In fact, that may be a better nub of the issue. All you need to know about everything under the sun is available on a Youtube lecture. When Youtube obtains accreditation (Youtube U. can’t be far away, can it?), it’s all over for the brick and mortar Usury University model. MIT is doing what Carly Fiorina did at HP: essentially dissolving the institution and living off the fumes of a venerable name. David Packard has to have turned over in his grave. Look at MIT Opencourseware and edx. There are virtual MIT grads in our midst minus of course the coveted accreditation and degree. What’s the remaining shelf-life of this institutional covetousness?

If you don’t self-immolate, the market’s gonna light you on fire. So you might as well control the timing of the match. However short-term windfalls are Corporate America’s version of nihilism. You can only sell the factory once.

Courtesy of Mario Pita (on The Thread I dare not resurrect), we discover from cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman that:

“Belief in object permanence remains firmly entrenched into adulthood, even in the brightest of minds. Abraham Pais said of Einstein, “We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that on one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it” (Pais, 1979). Einstein was troubled by interpretations of quantum theory that entail that the moon does not exist when unperceived.

Belief in object permanence underlies physicalist theories of the mind-body problem. When Gerald Edelman claimed, for instance, that “There is now a vast amount of empirical evidence to support the idea that consciousness emerges from the organization and operation of the brain” he assumed that the brain exists when unperceived (Edelman, 2004). When Francis Crick asserted the “astonishing hypothesis” that “You're nothing but a pack of neurons” he assumed that neurons exist when unperceived (Crick, 1994).”

https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY

http://journal.frontiersin.org/artic...014.00577/full

Bishop Berkeley was always good for a snicker in philosophy class. Turns out the radical empiricists were right. The room, the data, the turtles, the campus and the brain –none of them are there. “All Poetry existed before time was” (Emerson). Thus time-series analysis can never capture poetry. This object permanence thing is costing us a fortune. The mind is a terrible thing to waste on revolving credit. However Big Data is not going to snap us out of it. It’s the exact wrong direction.

[Ed Shacklee]

Oh, I don't know, I suspect there's a grain of something to it -- something, not everything. Let them tilt at the windmill: whether their notions are silly or not, it's easy enough to pick out whatever is useful and discard the rest.


By standing stones the blind can feel their way,
Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight,
Beggars assist the slow to travel light,
And even madmen manage to convey
Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

- W.H. Auden, from "The Quest"

[Norman Ball]

Of course it will tantalize with some predictive/explanatory power, then quickly become another brick in the wall.

[James Brancheau]

Tom Selleck and Bluebloods, John? Wtf was that? Probably the funniest thing in the thread... I dunno, Erik, but finding your own voice is always it. It's not as much about contemporary or archaic. Thank Christ it's not that simple. You need to spend a lot of time with intelligent assholes. And get old and appropriately bitter. It'll come.

[Nigel Mace]

I'm with much of your analysis, Norman - and with Ed/Auden's spirit... and the existence of your promulgations tends to show that the Ed/Auden position has something to be said for it.

However, data to 'create' poetry worth the reading? I think not.