Alphabetology Vol.15
Posted: 13 May 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
It is not impossible for a person to pose falsely as a disc jockey, even to pose as a named one, just to get into Wikipedia
- SergeWoodzing, Wikipedia talk page for [Disc jockey]
Lest we all be tricked by people pretending to be DJs so that they can get their photos onto Wikipedia, here is this week’s iss`ue of Alphabetology.
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Books
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
Phenomenology
The Past, the Future, Copyright, Roko’s Basilisk
Music
* Hail the Sun
Chon
I Met a Yeti
DJ Koze
Art
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No art this week but I’m going to write a little about Andy Warhol next week.
Books
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Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
t. Steegmuller [1]
Charles Bovary is the ultimate buffoon and this is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Here is a list of things that happen to Charles:
He wears a silly hat to school as a child
He thinks back on life with his first wife and laments how her feet were icy cold in bed
He goes to a big fancy ball, a change from his usual provincial life, watches men playing cards for six hours, and leaves saying he didn’t understand the game at all
He takes his wife Emma to the opera and pesters her throughout asking her to explain what’s going on as she shushes him
He’s not the protagonist! He’s just my favorite. My second favorite is over-the-top evil guy Rodolphe, who upon meeting Madame Bovary, goes home and immediately starts plotting how he will seduce her and ruin her life. I’m not exagerrating or filling in blanks, this is explicitly narrated. When it’s time to abandon her, he writes a letter with a bunch of made-up nonsense and, after some thought, signs it “your friend.” Incredible.
Absolutely everybody in this book is an absolute menace. Some characters are relatable, but nobody is likeable. Homais’ entire deal is being an annoying guy. He ruins everyone’s schemes and he gets rewarded for it at every turn. Our heroine Emma Bovary’s struggle is sympathetic but her behavior is selfish and rooted in fantasy. Her husband Charles is my favorite lovable fool but he’s completely blind to her suffering and almost non-existant in her life. León and Rodolphe both have their trysts with Emma, lead her on, and leave her when she starts becoming inconvenient. Emma’s wetnurse harrasses her for coffee beans. Their maid steals. Lheureux encourages her and Charles to take out unreasonable loans. Everyone is constantly avoiding people and trying to get other people to leave them alone. Nothing really good happens.
It’s a timeless book! Everybody is miserable, but in their misery, we relate to them on a baser level. It could have been easy to write Rodolphe off as an ass when he tells Madame Bovary that her showing up at his house all the time is unsightly, but she makes it hard because she’s cheating on her doofish husband! I don’t want her to get caught either! He abandons and lies to her, but on some level, what he does makes sense. I can tell Rodolphe behaves poorly, but I can also understand why he’s making the poor decisions that he’s making. We know or can easily imagine people acting the way he does in the present day. In so much literature, my immersion breaks when I don’t understand why a character suddenly behaves poorly. Here, even the cartoonishly debased Rodolphe is still human. There are no silly miscommunications. He makes sense. That is a rare treasure.
Madame Bovary made my heart race, it stressed me out, it made me laugh out loud. It’s a marvel of a book and an absolute pleasure to read. I can’t recommend it enough.
Phenomenology
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The Past, The Future, Copyright, Roko’s Basilisk
I stumbled across this copyright license online, called the MODIFIED RADIOACTIVE PUBLIC LICENSE. If you read it, you give up any copyright rights to any of your works, past, present, and future. It’s very cool, check it out here:
https://dcrs.xyz/copyright.php
I think it’s obvious that this is an artistic statement more than a seriously legally binding document, but there’s a lot I like about it. I like that it starts off by stating
By CONSUMING this WORK, your timeline has been ALTERED
Causing a theoretical split between people who have alterered timelines and people who don’t, à la the Mandela effect. [2]
Generally though I’m really tickled by the idea that having a private thought can permanently change how you exist in the world. This is a hard idea for me to explain because written out like that it sounds obvious. We have thoughts about what we sense and we go from there; thinking things shapes how we interact with the world. Duh. You can think something like “I was a selfish child” and all of a sudden see all of your childhood memories through a darker lens than ever before. Ta-da! You have changed the past.
But I think my interest in this is closer to something to do with “dangerous” thoughts? Thoughts that once thought, cannot be unthought, and change how others interact with you. They are both private and not private thoughts. Thought viruses, in a way. This license is an example of this, explicitly stating that reading it terminates any copyright you have and will ever hold. Just thinking it doesn’t do anything until someone else tries to use your good ideas. Thoughts like this are somehow dangerous to have.
Another “dangerous” thought like this is Roko’s basilisk. If reading that license above has caused you serious psychic damage, you should skip this part, because it’s worse.
There’s an online community of eggheads who came up with this thought experiment, which went on to be called Roko’s basilisk. The thought experiment goes as such: Imagine one day in the future, a very powerful AI is created. And this AI is a real bastard. It wants to punish anybody who knew or was aware that it would one day come about, but didn’t help bring it into existence. Presumably this will be done with some sort of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” torture machinations.
That’s it. I don’t know what the experiment part of the thought experiment is. But now that you’ve read that, and you are aware that this AI might one day exist, if you don’t put all of your time and effort into working to create this AI, it is going to torture you when it is eventually created. Sorry.
This seems kind of like a joke when you first read it, like the nuclear license above. I think it’s interesting for similar reasons: just having had the thoughts, just knowing that it’s possible for this thing to one day exist, is worse for you than not. It doesn’t matter what you do with these thoughts and whether you act on them or not. Simply having them is enough for them to work their magic and change how you exist in the world.
For what it’s worth, this entire premise is kind of silly, and Roko’s basilisk is a lot sillier than the license. The license is making an important statement about copyright, and it’s pretty clear in that it is active as of right now. The basilisk relies on a hypothetical “well, one day this thing might exist,” which is where it falls apart. I think there’s an xkcd comic that makes fun of it by imagining a different possible AI that tortures anyone who heard about Roko’s basilisk and didn’t make fun of it. Really though, you can imagine anything you want. You can write up your own license that says it undoes the effects of the radioactive public license. You can think something like “if I have this thought I have to wear sandals for the rest of my life” if you feel like it. Private thoughts aren’t binding.
Maybe “big secret contract” is the best way to think about this stuff. I like the idea that you can enter an agreement with someone just by seeing something they wrote, like a trap. There is a secret club and you enter it by reading a contract. We get used to having our physical agency limited (you can’t go there, you can’t touch this, etc.) but not our mental agency (you can’t think this, you can’t think that). We take our mental agency for granted. It’s novel and interesting to engage with and question how much control we really have over our private thoughts, and what that means.
Music
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* Hail the Sun - New Age Filth (Post-Hardcore/Prog Rock)
For some reason it didn’t click that I could seek out and listen to proggy post-hardcore until listening to this band. I like At the Drive In, The Mars Volta, Coheed & Cambria, MCR — these are all bands with similar epic/symphonic feels to their guitars and screams. There are more like them! Hail the Sun is one of these bands and they rock. I love this album. It ebbs and swells in just the right places. My favorite songs are “Slander” and “Made Your Mark,” which I think has a really cool chorus :o).
Chon - Grow (Prog Rock)
I like the idea of prog rock like this or Animals as Leaders, I admire the bands and their musical talent, but I have a tough time getting really invested in the music when there’s no singing to accompany the more violent rock sounds (drums, math rock guitars). It doesn’t stick with me the same way.
I Met a Yeti - Camp Yeti (Emo/Prog Rock)
This was cool and I like a lot of the sounds and ideas I Met a Yeti have, but it seemed a little unrefined. I’m looking forward to future releases by this band to see where they wind up going with their music.
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[1] There are more translations of Madame Bovary than you would expect. Take a guess. Answer below.
There are 13 translations of Madame Bovary into English. Also, check out how many movie adaptations there are, including my purple link for the 2014 one which I clicked to see if I recognized it at all:
There are (at least) 8 movie adaptations and 2 television adaptations. I think this is the most movie adaptations I have ever seen of the same source content.
[2] lol
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That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, have a great day.