Why does art and the attempts at interpretation thereof have to be useful or warranted? Festive chicanery sounds delightful to me. I would like more of that in my life, please.

> In other words some works of writing often fiction but not necessarily are just elaborate exercises in getting away with balderdash.

> In other words far too many mediocre works of the past still get top billing, than they rightly deserve largely because no one called out their bullshit.

> HN should buck this trend and not join in adulation.

Do you have some concrete examples of works that fit these claims?

[Full disclosure: driveby quoteposting with no extra content or contextualization is one of my most deeply felt pet peeves]

E1: Well, it worked the first time. Now the "AI Librarian" API call 403's out on me, according to my browser's web inspector.

E2: Oh, wait, you totally can do the "what to read after " flow, you just have to click the "what to read after..." field in the top left.

This is the better URL to get there:https://whattoreadafter.xyz/

It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and I'm convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.

If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.

Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.

---

Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.

Though, that context does explain why the article contains the current front-runner for my least favorite sentence in the English language:

> They deserve to be greeted with a tailed-tux and clean palette, chewed with the utmost mindfulness, spat out onto the table to rest for five minutes, licked off the table to savor the flavor of oxidization, digested over a four-hand stomach massage to increase circulation, vomited out Roman-style, spread over the genitalia so that the most sensitive part of the body can gain a tactile appreciation, ingested for a second and penultimate time, passed out quickly with laxatives to preserve the fibrous quality, and cooked in a slow-roast paste to capstone the feast.

"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."

Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus in many ways quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.

I'd argue that Butler's translations are absolutely "translation(s) aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones," by his own admission.

From the preface to Butler's Iliad:

> It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written.

And later

> I very readily admit that Dr. Leaf has in the main kept more closely to the words of Homer, but I believe him to have lost more of the spirit of the original through his abandonment (no doubt deliberate) of all attempt at stately, and at the same time easy, musical, flow of language, than he has gained in adherence to the letter — to which, after all, neither he nor any man can adhere.

(Oddly, unlike the Odyssey, the PG text of the Iliad does not have Butler's preface. I had to track it down elsewhere. Source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)

I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context of a translation of a 7th Century BC text, particularly in terms of the notion of making the text 'accessible' to a modern reader.

If anything I'd argue that Butler's prose translation does far more violence to the original text. The idea that e.g. Lattimore is more accessible than Butler is remarkably strange to me. In particular, you mention that contemporary translations tend to avoid 'difficult' language, which is flat wrong in the context of Lattimore - his syntactic constructions, because they need to fit the poetic meter he uses, are frequently quite complex and nested. Nor is the vocabulary particularly simplified; I think Butler is much more watered-down in this regard.*

Can you elaborate on which 20th/21st century translations of Homer you are referring to?

*(That is not to say there aren't any possible criticisms to be made of Lattimore in terms of anachronism - when Helen talks about her own conduct in the Iliad, Lattimore inserts some fairly harsh 20th-century gendered insults that are, as far as I can tell, in no way attested to by the original Greek)

Interestingly, (and apropos) McCarthy's last, Stella Maris, I think, did a much more eloquent job of exploring the same themes. Stella Maris is astounding, it's cosmic horror without the 'supernatural.' Instead there's only Gödel and Metzinger.

Question 1: Example, please?

Question 1.5: In what way does the example not make sense grammatically?

Question 2.0-2.(n): To what degree does grammar 'matter'? Is conformance to some prescriptive view of grammar essential to 'good' writing? What is the function of grammar - precision and disambiguation? Are there contexts in which grammar can or should be subservient to other linguistic effects, such as prosody? Are there other phenomenological effects of reading to which grammar may or may not be relevant?

An exercise for the motivated reader: Read 'A Carafe that is a Blind Glass' by Gertrude Stein. What does it feel like? What does it evoke? What are we doing mentally when we read it? What exactly are we doing when we read?

Between that and the "is the thing I really want to watch available or not?" queue lottery, I got fed up a few years ago and ditched them completely. The general streaming experience has become so awful that I'll just go to Youtube or Amazon and pay $4 to get precisely what I want for 48 hours, instead of googling to figure out who the hell currently has 'Heat' or whatever on their streaming platform.

It's amazing, we've looped around to 1999. You have to surf around to see where and if what you want is even available - people even make aggregate guides to tell you what's on where (a TV Guide, if you will). A decent amount of the time, depending on your tastes, the thing you want probably isn't available on a platform you're currently paying for.

Tragically, though, you don't get the irreplaceable experience of talking in person with a full-bore, unfiltered Video Store Guy.

I agree that modern copyright law is atrocious and stifling, but the whole "I have sympathy for artists, but..." thing is just grimly exhausting and depressing at this point. I feel nothing but despair. I've spent a lot of time interacting with ChatGPT and image models, and when people say this, all I can do is wonder how other people interact with art and literature.

Every iteration of ChatGPT I've seen is an astoundingly bad prose stylist. At a sentence-to-sentence level, everything that burbles forth from ChatGPT's maw is joyless, flavorless garbage. It's an undifferentiated slurry that has all the verve of a corporate onboarding manual, mated with a self-help book, written by Reddit's gestalt consciousness.

Statistically aping surface form is low-hanging-fruit. Even if you just want (ugh) 'content' in the raw sense of the word - stuff that fills time between when we're born and when we're dead - I am skeptical current Large-Whatever-Models will get there. Everything they do is wholly divorced from being an agent in a physical reality. This is why image models can't even do (what-do-you-call-them, oh yeah) hands. There's a difference between regurgitating variants on two-dimensional representations of hands and drawing hands. I am similarly skeptical that a large-text-model can ever do anything that captures inner experience in a truly novel way. I just firmly do not believe that a text model trained on works written prior to Faulkner's career - regardless of how much goading you gave it - could produce "As I Lay Dying."

Wake me when a GPT model can write a thriller that delivers the rainsoaked weltschmerz and dread of Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.' Until I see an AI put out something on par with "Move. Once you stop, you never start again: there is a special stage-fright that can make you dry up and walk away, that burns your fingers when you touch the goods and turns your stomach to water. Move," I will fear the idea of AI being pushed as any sort of salvation from the overreach of copyright law.

If it does end up being the solution we get, I worry we will have to augment the free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech axes with free-as-in-dumpster-diving.

What armitron said was, "it's not explicit, you have to synthesize it." The verb 'synthesize' implies the exact opposite of what you've construed them as saying.