Speak the Speech

 "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue."

-- Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

And I wish I could still pull that off at a significant level. Alas, were it so. But it just "ain't so, no mo'." And that is a somewhat recent and strange development. It is not that I am aphasic, or have developed a stutter late in life, it's just that I am not as glib as I used to be. Let me explain.

Words have always been incredibly important to me. I suspect it is a genetic thing, as my family was always awash in words. Books seemed to frame the home in which I was raised. Reading at the dinner table was not required, but was blithely tolerated. Later, I swear my older daughter popped out of the womb talking. The words were not quite there, but an endlessly babbled string of syllables was. Today she is a lawyer. Need I say more?

It is not surprising then that my life has been molded by the word spoken or sung - and occasionally written. During my high school years my major activities were drama and choir. We had a less-than-stellar athletic program, so I never tested those extra-curricular waters. I appeased my father’s athletic expectations instead by running gym classes weekends at the local Y. Left me more time for our spring musical, class plays, and choir concerts and contests.

As a undergraduate I was a theater major at Kalamazoo College - doing mostly acting. So learned a lot about character make-up and costume design. Kind of a klutz as a techie. Had a cool scene design class. My master's degree focused on sharing words and action via the then hot medium - TV, with a touch of film tossed in. The Ph.D. - in the then "speech communication" department at Wayne State - culminated in a dissertation that sought to test whether we think in words or pictures. It featured many words that drew a mostly uncertain conclusion. Still a fun study. I then spent about a half century lecturing in various university classrooms, 42 years in the Communication Department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

So singing, composing and "speaking the speech trippingly" dominated much of my life. And for the most part it was done well enough to receive a slew of the teaching awards available at NC State. I don't report that to blow my own horn, but rather to emphasize, and bemoan, the fact that the glib ad-libbing prof of days gone by is more than a little rusty these days.

It is the speaking part that seems on the wane. The words are all still there - there just seems to be a bit of a log jam between the composition and the articulation. The cluster of appropriate words is there, they just no longer naturally assert the best choice. So "spatula" becomes "the pancake flipping thingy." And "drive-in movie" becomes "big screen place you went to in your car."

Perhaps you can now better understand why, despite my having done online lectures at State for 4 or 5 years, The Wall has no podcast partner. Talking to a camera back then was not really all that different from doing a live lecture. Except, of course, you did not see the students dozing. Nowadays I fear that a video version of The Wall might contain "those weird glitches that happen when you can't find just the right word" yeah, "pauses."

So should we actually have the opportunity to converse face-to-face, and I tend to take a bit of time to respond, do me a favor: Pretend to think I am processing what you just said, and not trying to find just the right word to express my inclination to disagree - "balderdash,” or agree, “bravissimo!”

Of Lines and Colors

It is an issue of continuing concern - this whole question of coloring and lines. You give a kid a bunch of crayons and a piece of paper and they soon become little Jackson Pollocks. Wild swirls of color, well, sometimes they color over colors until everything fades to black. But that's to be expected- a lot of Pollock's stuff was heavy on the black.

But eventually the whole idea of "lines" comes into play. Often in kindergarten - or "pre-K," a concept I have trouble with. Sort of like students who graduate with a "4.6 gpa on a 4.0 scale." How does that work anyhow? But I digress. Back to lines. They often start as simple "coloring pages." Simple line drawings of a house, a pony, cat, dog. You know what I mean.

Initially it is fine if our young Picassos scribble over the entire page, but eventually they are encouraged to "color inside the lines." So that dog, cat, etc., take on more of the aspect of the critter in "real life." And so it goes for a number of years until perhaps in an art class, or an intro to business seminar, one is encouraged to "color outside the lines" the more artistic version of the prosaic "think outside the box." But I'm concerned with lines, not boxes - and the effect of lines on drawings.

I have mentioned before my inability to "do" realism on paper. I suppose I could have been taught at least the basics of that skill which I still see as magical. But alas, in my formative years if it didn't get applause I was not interested. So theater won out. Then later, lecturing to more captive audiences in the classroom - the applause there was rare, but meaningful when it occurred.

But through all those years I continued to "doodle." And what is doodling? Well, basically just putting lines on paper in a way that reflects our thinking regarding the current presentation - or boredom with same that drives our pen or pencil to facilitate our escape. But - and this is the important part - they are our lines!

Too often the debate over inside or outside the lines blithely ignores the fact that the lines were made by someone else. In the pre-K example the lines were supplied by the teacher handing out sheets copied from some source or another. In the adult - more metaphorical - example, the lines are the result of policies dictated by some CEO, priest, potentate, or president who expects you to "color within the lines" or face some sort of blowback for your failure to "toe the line." But again I digress. Back to lines on paper, and the coloring thereof.

When attempting to draw "realism" the subject to be drawn brings with it the preferred lines. Even in a Bob Ross video where "there are no mistakes, only happy accidents," Ross teaches us tricks and techniques that allow us to fool the eye and make our "mistake" look like the "real" tree, or fence, or reflection in the water. I suggest we move beyond tricking the eye into seeing that which is real and, rather, to draw the lines that allow us to create the thing we wish to represent. Let's go back to the image I shared in the last post, "Toasting the Roses."

In that image you can see my drawings of how I want the roses, bottles and glasses to appear. The lines are my lines. Nobody told me what they were supposed to look like. So since they are my lines the proper treatment is to color inside the lines.

Now let's take a look at a close up of the bottles over at the right of the image. Here you can see the three steps. Moving from left to right you can see the simple outline of the bottles, and next the bottle with the designs drawn in - again, my lines. And then finally the bottle with the designs colored in. My lines, my colors.

So, that is the point. Create your own lines. But here are some thoughts on how to go about creating those lines - for those of us beyond pre-K into more mature phases of life. Just as the policy, political, corporate, religious and philosophical structures within which we function in the real world impose their lines upon us, we can create our own lines - and art - that reflects or "colors" our own metaphysical reality.

My 76, creeping up on 77 years, of life have led me to two primary aspirational states. i.e. Goals I wish to achieve but, with which I still stumble.

The first comes from my email signature. [My words. Not a quote.]:

"Who we are is a quality of the moment. What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise. So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you." 

The second set is more specific:

"Foster harmony." or strive for cooperation, not confrontation.

"Enable beauty." Write, draw, speak, move, so as to create the artifacts that make the world, or at least your space in it, more beautiful. Lines and colors. Dance?

"Distill complexity." Try to pierce the web of words, positions, policies, etc., that surround us in a way that clearly reveals the central, true, meaning. Speak, write clearly. [I hear you laughing. But I really do try.]

"Oppose harm." I realize this is in many ways simply a restatement of foster harmony. But maybe I need the emphasis.

So go, make some lines on paper. Color them with colors that make you happy.

Four Faces and More

Those of you who were at the recent Schrag Reunion saw an interim version of this image. The title reflects my ambiguity about the image. The actual Four Faces really took far less time to complete than the more complex design elements that surround them. Here is the

completed image:

Four Faces and More

(Apologies for the strange cropping. Working on iPad)

Back in April I put up a post in which I claimed Compressionism as the moniker that defined my art. Four Faces presents an interesting ripple in that "school of art." It would seem that no matter how much I strive to compress a variety of visual impulses into a single image, some will assert themselves. Human faces seem one type of these powerful images. Hence the dominance of the simple faces imbedded in a more complex set of compositions.

To carry on a bit. I had planned my next image to be based on a photograph of a metal sculpture of a carriage that sat on the kitchen table nook in Raleigh. And had begun the laborious task of removing all the extraneous parts of the photo to create the black and white "cartoon" that will serve as the basis of the composition. Here is the photo:

But then we got an opportunity to "house and dog" sit for family. Being hopeless dog lovers who realize we are no longer ready to be "real" dog owners, we gladly accepted.

The problem was I obviously could not go a week or so without an image to work on and "carriage" was nowhere near ready for use. So I hopped back onto my multi-terabyte external hard drive for another option. Happily I came across a b&w image from a decade or two ago that I called Toasting the Roses. [I now wonder if I had created the image around the time my older daughter married and legally became a Rose. Who knows? She and her husband are free to claim it!] Anyhow, I had never "finalized" the image with color. So I had the helpful guys at Staples print me out a 24x18 version that I am happily now working on. Here is where I am on it:

Carriage will just get bumped down the queue a notch.

Why They Call It Artificial Intelligence

Careful [Trigger warning: This post started out wading around in the shallows, but somehow strayed out into some rather deep and murky water. So you might want to grab a flotation device. . . . water wings, a surfboard, a martini, whatever, as they say, floats your boat. I was tempted to break it into chapters, but opted to go with the whole magilla! 😁]

I think I can trace the beginning of this particular post to the time a few days ago when I started to re-read the Amos Decker mystery series by David Baldacci. [Aside to fellow addicts: There is an 8th book coming! Date a little fuzzy.] Yeah. "Re-reading." I have written before about the addiction I share with my sister for mystery series. But I do need to clarify: They need to be good mysteries. And that, unfortunately, is a rather high bar.

I do regularly troll Kindle Unlimited and my library sites for new mysteries. I start them - some of them I finish, but it often feels like having to eat your vegetables. "I started this and maybe it will get better, so I will clean my plate." But after awhile I have to cleanse my palette, so I come back to talented authors like Baldacci, who is better reheated than other "wannabes" served fresh off the presses.

I mean the guy is amazing. He has written some 38 novels, and counting - across seven different series. Which got me thinking. OK, Google tells me that the "average length" of Baldacci's books is about 450 pages. For 38 books, that comes out to about 17,000 pages. JK Rowling clocks in at about 5000 pages, but that is only the Harry Potter series. If you include her mystery series written under the pen name Robert Galbraith and featuring protagonist Cormoran Strike she racks up an additional 5000 pages, and even that doesn't include a few stand-alone kids books. So call her output about 10,000 pages.

So together they have generated about 30,000 pages of quality writing. At say 10 inches a page, that comes to about 5 miles of printed pages laid end-to-end. Yeah, I ran those numbers, and even if you ignore the quality issue, I had to ask myself how do you generate that amount of text? At 250 words a page that is about seven and a half million words. How do you think up that many words? How can anyone even type that fast? Fill up that many pages, even if you are using some "talk-to-text" app? You still have to go back and correct the app errors. All questions that bring us to the elephant in the room - artificial intelligence, aka ai, or AI. AI, running 24/7, could easily spew out that many pages.

I no longer grade student papers so am, thankfully, largely ignorant of the current classroom crisis of attempting to determine which essays were actually written by the students as opposed to those generated by ChatGPT or other apps of its ilk. But I imagine there are not all that many lines of code between "write me a four-page, high school senior essay on the poetry of Robert Frost" and "write me a 325 page mystery with a special ops protagonist in the style of David Baldacci." I think about that as I write prosaic emails and grocery lists smoothly aided by my email and generic text apps.

But I really think that it will not be that easy for the "chat bots" to fool us, no matter how many purloined novels they are "trained" on. My optimism has to do with "strings." Not as in kite strings, or yo-yo strings, or even violin or guitar strings - although there is some overlap there. Rather it has to do with the strings as in the "string theory" that some physicists use to explain the universe.

I'm going to try to rein myself in here, but it will be difficult. Many years ago I wrote a book called The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart. Some of you have copies. Some of you read it. For those of you who have escaped that occasionally dense slog, let me give you the bare bones.

String theory [Brian Greene's book The Elegant Universe, is a fairly clear exposition, if you want to play along.] asserts that the universe and everything in it - planets, galaxies, mountains and mole hills - are, at their most fundamental level, composed of incredibly infinitesimal tiny tiny [add as many "tinys" as you want] vibrating strings. In The God Chord I assert that vibrating strings, no matter how tiny, make music. Hence the universe and everything in it - including us - is made of music. Not metaphorically, literally.

So, since we are made of music, it is not unreasonable to assert that our DNA, and RNA - anything that marks us as a totally unique individual - contains, reflects and projects our unique "chord", composed [again, literally] by the unique strings that make our DNA/RNA. Think about all the "cop shows" we watch or read. What enables the protagonists to nail the bad guys? Forensics. The traces of the perp's DNA. In today's world those markers are determined by chemical testing. Again, I would assert that somewhere down the road, we will develop the technology capable of "hearing" the strings that make up this all pervasive "music of the spheres." So we, and cops of future mysteries, would be able to hear the specific music that makes each of us unique, and allows us/them to nail the perp anywhere in the universe.

I recently read an article about an oncologist who had actually recorded the sounds that individual cells make, and how those sounds differed from the sounds emanating from cancerous cells. The process is called sonocytology, and a quick online search says "This emerging field uses extremely sensitive instruments (like modified atomic force microscopes) to detect nanoscale vibrations on cell surfaces." So, maybe nudging towards listening to the music of the spheres?

But we are not there yet, and part of me hopes that we never get there, as that technology could conceivably mimic the chords it hears and in so doing produce a true "re-creation" of an artist's work. An assertion that is sort of a sneaky way of backing into my major issue, which is the current fraught relationship between artists and AI.

That relationship is currently getting the most press as writers raise concerns about AI replacing the human beings who now craft the words spoken by the myriad faces who appear on our screens. I do think that AI will find increasing spaces in the generation of rote communication. Think, "Step back. The doors are closing." or "Your call is very important to us. A representative will be with you shortly. There are currently three hundred callers in front of you." OK, maybe that last bit is a tad much, but you know what I mean. AI will increasingly move into those spaces - replacing some humans, perhaps like my former student who is currently the voice of an assistant coach on Madden NFL 26. But I don't think AI will move successfully into truly creative fields, the fine arts such as music, literature (as opposed to rote writing), poetry, painting, film, video, dance, etc., etc.

But, and I am sorry, my reasoning here jumps into a blend of string theory and quantum mechanics, sort of Einstein meets Mozart.

OK, from string theory let us take the idea that each of us is made of music via those tiny vibrating strings in every particle of our being. Furthermore, given that our DNA is unique from all other humans, our personal music - our chord, if you will - is also unique.

Now let's hop over to quantum mechanics and the idea of entanglement - or what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." Basically what happens in entanglement is that two or more particles become linked in such a way that they share the same quantum state, regardless of the distance separating them. So say  "particle thing A" here on Earth, is entangled with "particle thing B" on Mars. Entanglement says that if we change something about earthly "particle thing A" - color, temperature, whatever - here on Earth, "particle thing B" on Mars will instantly change in exactly the same way. See why Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance?" Whew. OK, hold that thought.

So how do particles get entangled? Specifically in the realm of the arts? Here is where we can bring in CSI. How do the good guys find the bad guy's DNA on the victim's sweater? Transference! The bad guy touched the victim's sweater so their DNA was transferred to the sweater.

The next leap is to assert that artists "transfer" their chord onto, or into, their artworks. They carve the sculpture, smear the paint, mold the clay, touch the paper, play the instrument, speak the speech, even manipulate the data points that enable digital works in unique ways. Thus is the chord transferred, and it is that transference that makes the work totally unique, immune to imitation.

Sadly, I am unaware of any particular instance that would prove that assertion. But somewhere in the backyard of my mind is a reference to a painting that was authenticated by the artist's fingerprint within the painting. If the recollection comes forward I will share it with you. Which would be kind of similar to, but a stretch for, authentication via strings. Instead, let us look at a backwards approach to supporting the assertion by looking at the things we haven't been able to do - attempts at replicating the creations of past.

First let us consider the ongoing search for the "secret" of a Stradivarius violin. Every year luthiers [makers of stringed instruments, violins, violas, cellos, etc.] gather at Oberlin College in Ohio for the Oberlin Workshop, partially in an attempt to "re-create" the famous Betts Stradivarious made by Antonio Strativari in 1704. The Betts instrument has been measured, scanned, and imaged across any conceivable dimension in attempts to duplicate it. The workshop has produced some excellent instruments, some of which are actually preferred over the Betts instrument by professional violinists. However, none of those violins seem capable of exactly reproducing the unique sound of the Betts instrument. Something was missing.

Similarly during WWII Han van Meegeren forged a number of paintings purported to be "missing masterworks" by the acclaimed Dutch Golden Age artist, Johannes Vermeer. The forgeries were sold at "masterwork prices" to museums and "expert collectors" including infamous Nazi leader Hermann Göring. But in the end - in the course of a rather spectacular trial - Van Meegeren had to publicly paint "a Vermeer" to avoid conviction on charges of colluding with the Nazies, a far more serious crime than forgery. So the fakes were finally revealed as such. Again "close but no cigar."

Another set of attempted "recreations" has been getting a lot of press lately. Colossal Biosciences, a biotech company asserts that it has recreated "dire wolves" by extracting some genetic material from the remains of the long extinct species and enabling the expression of those genes in contemporary grey wolf pups. Critics respond that the critters in question are not dire wolves at all, but rather grey wolf puppies who have been genetically engineered to mimic a few physical characteristics of dire wolves. I would say, instead, that the chords inherent in the ancient DNA have either been overwhelmed by, or incorporated into, the dominant chord of the contemporary species. Colossal, undeterred by the criticisms, have now set their sights on the equally extinct flightless bird, the dodo.

But overall something feels wrong in these attempts to duplicate creatures and masterworks from the past. Actually I would assert, something sounds wrong. And that is because the unique chord of the original is not entangled in the artificial imitation.

And it is this inability to touch and recreate a living chord that will forever [hopefully] prevent AI becoming anything other than merely artificial intelligence.

Something Old, Something New

 Hi all -

This post sort of falls under the broad category of "If you are bored and you are tired of streaming videos on TV and it is to hot to go outside here is something else to pass the time." 

I am working on an image that is proving more of a challenge than I originally thought and my hands are tired.  But I didn't want y'all to feel neglected so I am shooting you a few bits and pieces of stuff that I come across when scrolling through my old files. I sometimes forget what I was originally looking for and fall down the rabbit hole of all the stuff that ends up there. So - Something Old, Something New.

First the old. There are a couple of old images that I see everyday, but I am not really sure how I created them. Please excuse the strange cropping. These are really old images.

Now the mystery behind Iris is that I have no idea how I got those pieces of the image so tiny but so clear. The finished image is about the same size as a sheet of typing paper. My guess is that I went from my original photo of the flower - which is also on my backup drive - to my usual routine of "remove the photo spaces and draw designs in them, then color." But then I think I took that "finished image which was probably 24x19 and scanned it into photoshop and reduced the image to 8.5 x 11 while increasing the clarity and saturation and printed the new image out. Maybe, I dunno.

Same thing with this image of a "paper mulberry" which hangs on the wall next to "Iris":

Next an early Wall post circa 2010 - written in Raleigh.

Picking Up Stones

.
Last week, down the road from here a piece, over in Alexander County, a miner named Terry Ledford pulled a 310 carat emerald out of the dirt.  It reminded me of The Big Rock Show.

I am not sure exactly when Dan and I curated The Big Rock Show.  I suspect it was the summer of 1958, our tenth summer.  I pick that particular summer because in the summer of 1959 my family moved to Vienna, Austria, and shortly thereafter I became smitten with Patricia Miller – a green-eyed, fifth-grade temptress whose father had just been transferred in from Paris.  Hence, I choose 1958 because I recall it as a languid summer on the calmer side of adolescence and hormones, when girls were minor, future irritations on the road of life.

The Big Rock Show capped an extended exercise in suburban fieldwork.  Dan and I started out excavating promising gullies in the alley and exposed ravines in a local park in search of, well, rocks.  This entailed digging and other forms of manual labor that, as our later lives have made clear, were not skill sets destined for either of our futures. Hence, the enterprise lagged. However, we soon discovered that a local church had just resurfaced their parking lot with the very artifacts we sought – rocks.  Truckloads of rocks; flints, granite, maybe jasper, and the much-prized rose quartz with enclosures of garnet.  I do not actually recall how we identified the stones – but we were enchanted by the rocky rhetoric.

We hosed the dust off our finds, polished them as best we could with rags from the basement, and glued them onto large pieces of cardboard. These we displayed in the garage, appropriately labeled and priced.  The pieces too small for display were heaped in a plastic dishpan next to a sign: "Free Samples."  I believe we priced the larger pieces in a range from a nickel to a quarter, with the truly grand samples marked “Not for sale.”  I do not recall if we sold any.  Entrepreneurial success has continued to elude us.

But, we too, unearthed an emerald that summer. One that came from sunlight streaming through deep green leaves of maple, from fresh cut grass, and from time that meandered endless and forgiving.  We won no ribbons, no one videotaped our endeavors, and there was no “after The Big Rock Show pizza party.”  We just rode our bikes all over town in pursuit of the rare rocks of Springfield, Ohio, and ended the days drinking Frosty root beer as evening faded into night and lightening bugs lit The Big Rock Show.

And now for something new.  That same Dan Coyle of The Big Rock Show  (I mean when you are born 7 days apart and your parents live on two sides of a duplex, Fathers teaching at the same college, you are sort of fated to share much of your lives) who later went on to earn a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina - has created an fascinating internet presence. It is easiest to just share the link with you. To explain it precisely would require me to head down to "the old north state" and do my own graduate work over in the English department.

So here. Give it a try! Have fun!

https://compare-contrast.org/