"Bernadette" and False Endings

Oddly enough, I'm reading two novels in a row that mention/discuss the song "Bernadette," by the Four Tops.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (this is in the infamous PowerPoint chapter, so I can quote the text but not the formatting):

Right now, [Lincoln's] obsessed with rock songs that have pauses in them.
Songs with Lincoln's Comments:
"Bernadette," by the Four Tops: "This is an excellent early pause. The voice tapers off, and then you've still got 1.5 seconds of total silence, from 2:38 to 2:395, before the chorus kicks back in. You think, Hey, the song didn't end after all—but then, 26.5 seconds later, it does end."

From Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann:

The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.

Bernadette. People are searching for—
the kind of love that we possessed. 
Some go on searchin' their whole life through
And never find the love I've found in you.

"Do you know the lead singer's name?"

"Levi Stubbs," Mark said matter-of-factly.

I reached for his sleeve. "Listen," I said, adding his name, "Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name. Bern—a—dette."

I sighed. "I'll never be loved like that."

He shook his drink, looking into it. "I doubt that."

I couldn't recall ever hearing "Bernadette" and had no idea that it was so widely known for its false ending/mid-song pause.  So I looked it up. Here it is for your listening pleasure:



The trouble with listening to songs on YouTube or an iPod is the little bar that indicates how long the song is and how much more of it remains, meaning that the false ending can't surprise you the way it could on the radio or an LP record. False endings and hidden tracks are becoming a thing of the past. Music is more convenient than ever (I mean, how nice that I could look this up on YouTube instantaneously!) and yet less able to surprise us.

Then again, when you read a book, you always know exactly where you are in it and how many pages remain, and that doesn't ruin your enjoyment of it. Why should it be any different when you know exactly how many seconds remain until the end of a song?

And now this is making me think of the "Aria with Diverse Variations" dialogue in Gödel Escher Bach where the Tortoise and Achilles discuss exactly this problem.

Tortoise: You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories--but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels.

Achilles: Padding?

Tortoise: Yes; what I mean is, a lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book.

Achilles: I see. So a story's true ending might occur, say, fifty or a hundred pages before the physical end of the book?

Tortoise: Yes. This would provide an element of surprise, because the reader wouldn't know in advance how many pages are padding, and how many are story.

(And then, because this is Gödel Escher Bach, it all gets very meta.)

I don't have a Kindle, so I'm curious to know: on an e-reader, do you know exactly how much of the text you have remaining, or is it left mysterious? Wouldn't it be funny if the iPod caused this problem for music (of always knowing how long the work of art is) but the Nook or the Kindle eliminated this problem for books?

"The Most Human Human" and the Most Human Playwright

For my dad's birthday last month, I gave him a copy of the new book The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, by Brian Christian. When Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, called the book "terrific" and "one of the rare successful literary offspring of Gödel Escher Bach," I knew that this would be a perfect gift for my computer-geek, philosophically inclined Dad. Upon further research, I liked how the author, Brian Christian, has degrees in computer science, philosophy and poetry, and was born in 1984. He's an overachieving Millennial, in short, and it makes me proud that my generation has reached the point where we are writing erudite books that get rave reviews in The New Yorker and can be given to our baby-boomer parents.

So I purchased the book, read the introduction for kicks, and was sufficiently intrigued that I ended up reading the whole thing before giving it to Dad (I knew he wouldn't mind).

As the New Yorker comparison to Gödel Escher Bach would imply, The Most Human Human is a difficult book to sum up and covers a wide range of topics. Fundamentally, it is an investigation into what intellectual processes humans can still do better than computers, and how that can help us to understand our place in the world and get the most out of being alive. If our humanity does not lie purely in our intellectual capacity, where does it lie?

I should note, for those of you who are put off (rather than encouraged) by the comparison to Gödel Escher Bach, that The Most Human Human is much shorter than Gödel Escher Bach and probably more accessible -- it will make you think, but does not require you to understand symbolic logic. In addition, The Most Human Human has a moral-philosophical-humanistic component that I don't remember being present in Gödel Escher Bach. (Some indication of Brian Christian's tone can be discerned from the fact that one of the book's epigraphs comes from David Foster Wallace and Wallace is quoted several times in the text. How Millennial of Christian!) It's a warmer and more inviting book, I think.

The Most Human Human covers a lot of ground, so people with a wide variety of interests and concerns are likely to get something out of it. Clearly, one of the big themes of the book is human verbal and non-verbal communication -- and clearly, that's something I also think about a lot, because I write plays. Christian even cites the work of playwrights in his text -- discussing David Mamet, for instance, in a section on how human dialogue tends to be far more circuitous and discursive and filled with interruptions than computers are capable of. I love the fusion of art and science!

The Most Human Human, therefore, has given me some ideas on how to be a better playwright -- not just a better human being. In one fascinating section, Christian explains that chatbots these days excel at "stateless conversation," that is, conversation where their response depends only on the last thing that you said. But they're not so good at taking into account the overall arc of the conversation, and even worse at taking into account the conversation they had with you yesterday.

One of the earliest chatbots (late 1980s) was MGonz, which was designed to be verbally abusive, belligerent, and argumentative -- and succeeded in fooling a lot of people into thinking it was a human being.

"As becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts, argument is stateless," Christian notes. "I've seen it happen between friends: 'Once again, you've neglected to do what you've promised.' 'Oh, there you go right in with that tone of yours!' 'Great, let's just dodge the issue and talk about my tone instead! You're so defensive!' 'You're the one being defensive! This is just like the time you x!' 'For the millionth time, I did not even remotely x! You're the one who...' And on and on. A close reading of this dialogue, with MGonz in mind, turns up something interesting, and very telling: each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. The friends' conversation has become stateless, unanchored from all context. [... Thus] there's a sense in which verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of conversation."

When I read Christian's invented sample of "stateless argument," I realized that if I read this same dialogue in a play, I would consider it terrible playwriting. I know this sort of thing happens in real life, but it seems to happen even more often in the work of bad or inexperienced playwrights. Being taught that "drama is conflict," some newbie playwrights confuse endless argument or bickering with genuine dramatic conflict. Their plays tend to consist of two relatively generic characters quibbling with and criticizing and insulting one another in generic -- in stateless -- ways.

But if you know exactly who these characters are, their relationship to one another and their prior history, the deeper reasons why they are arguing, you can write a good dialogue scene that doesn't degenerate into mindless bickering.

Good playwriting (and good chatbots) take prior conversation and prior history into account, the way that human beings do, unconsciously, in real life; bad playwriting (and bad chatbots) is stateless.

And that's just one of the many things that The Most Human Human made me think about.

Zephyrus

Even before I became involved with the San Francisco Olympians Festival, my family and I were naming our computers after Greek mythology (with one detour into the Hindu pantheon).

My first computer was Athena -- goddess of wisdom.

Then I had Sarasvati -- named after the Hindu goddess of art and literature, whose symbol is the swan.

Next came Orphée -- yes, you read that right, Orphée, not Orpheus. I used the French version of the name because I got the computer when I was in France (Sarasvati having sung her swan song) and was feeling inspired by Cocteau's quasi-mystical belief in the Orpheus legend.

But two weeks ago, Orphée descended into the Underworld and didn't come back, and rather than trying to resuscitate him, I decided it might be time for a new machine. Say hello to Zephyrus.

Zephyrus is a MacBook Air, and I think I'm in love. Who was it that said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?" (I remember being an imaginative little girl, wanting to believe that fairy tales were true, and asking my father "Daddy, do you believe in magic?" And, ever the computer geek, he would reply "Well, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...") With Zephyrus, it's easy to feel the magic. It's amazing that everything I need or want in a computer can now fit into a machine that weighs less than three pounds. I have visions of myself toting it everywhere, writing in every coffee shop in town.

And as for the name? There are several reasons behind it:

• The computer is a MacBook Air, and Zephyrus is one of the four winds in Greek Mythology.


• Zephyrus is the gentle and propitious West Wind, and I live in a city where the wind predominantly comes from the West (and is rarely gentle and often chilling, but oh well).


• One of our upcoming Olympians plays is about Zephyrus. It falls on the weekend I'm producing, and I'm super excited about it: it's Brideshead Revisited crossed with Greek mythology!


• It just so happens that I got this new computer in April, and as Chaucer teaches us, there is a link between April and Zephyrus:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes...

Seek and Ye Shall Find

For a long time, I have desired a search engine that would limit itself to searching sites that I had bookmarked. I get frequent "must learn everything about this subject" obsessions, which always make me curious to discover what my favorite bloggers and media sources have written about that topic. But it's tedious to search my favorite websites, one by one, to see if they contain any relevant information--and a basic Google search always turns up a lot of irrelevant stuff, e.g. innumerable websites that want to sell me DVDs of the actor that I was researching, rather than sites with intelligent commentary on the actor's films.

I convinced myself that a search-only-of-my-bookmarks was logistically impossible to program, or, if it were possible, it would entail such an invasion of privacy (because the program would have to look at my hard drive to see the personal bookmarks stored therein) that it would be too frightening to use.

But it's almost the second decade of the 21st century, so why be so defeatist? Naturally, the magicians down in Mountain View have anticipated the desire for a specialized search feature, and created a tool for it. I am notoriously behind the curve when it comes to technology, so most likely you already know about this... but if you don't, I present to you Google Custom Search.

It's not quite as simple (but much less privacy-invasive) than a program that would automatically know, and search, the sites in my Bookmarks folder. Instead, you have to give Google Search a list of the sites that you want it to check. But of course the explanation of how to manage your custom search engine is easy to understand, and the searches are lickety-split.

I'm now tweaking my own custom search engine--called "Marissa's Arts & Culture Engine," or MACE for short. It might be a dangerous tool, when it comes to encouraging my information-hungry obsessions, but I am glad to have it!

Overheard: The "Cyberspace is Taking Over" Edition

(In shuttle van from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. A middle-aged man from San Francisco is telling a young man from Israel what he needs to know about the Southwest.)

SAN FRANCISCAN: Santa Fe is really unique. It doesn't look like any other US city.

ISRAELI: Oh really?

SAN FRANCISCAN: No. Well, I guess these kinds of buildings might look familiar to you--you're probably used to seeing adobe houses, in Israel. But you don't really find them in the rest of the country.

ISRAELI: The material these buildings are made of--that's called adobe?

SAN FRANCISCAN: That's right, adobe.

ISRAELI: Like the software?

Our iPods, Ourselves

I am sitting here with a smile on my face, the proud owner of a new silver 80 GB iPod. And guess what I had engraved on the back?

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is."**

After all, you wouldn't expect me to engrave anything as simple as my name and phone number, would you? Seems to me that my whole generation prefers the quirky and personalized (Youtube, an obscure song, a funny quote) to the blandly utilitarian (contact info). We've all got our personas to keep up--and our iPods are a big part of that.

**From Noel Coward's Private Lives, dontcha know.