W ant to “make it” in the art world? Well, this is your lucky day. Turns out I have some advice for you that I’ve gleaned from several minutes of reading news articles on the web. First, if you’re a wildlife photographer don’t stage your pictures with stuffed anteaters. If you do, don’t deny it, just say you’re a wild life photographer not a wildlife one, or some such. Second, if you’re a curator at a museum, buy real art whenever possible. Last—and I can’t believe I have to say this, but I guess I do—if one day you become a second-rate photographer who marries someone important, keep your hands off other women and princesses. As someone somewhere on the Internet has said: “The day you think you’re the sh**, you may just be a piece of it.”
In praise of puns: “Puns are embedded in everything people don’t like—advertising, novelty menu items, morning news show banter, movie review headlines—and often delivered with a certain smirking expectancy. The point too often seems to be less about the clean feng shui of inventive wordplay, than the fact that someone has made a pun at all. The good news is that puns are also embedded in everything people do like, and in the right hands they are tiny word-shaped miracles.”
Is part of Hitler’s jawbone in a cigarillo box in Russia? Hard to say, but Jean-Marie Pottier explains why some people care.
Listen to the first recording of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at The Public Domain Review.
The city as character: Tyler Malone takes us on a tour of the cities of Joyce, Döblin, and Dos Passos: “Joyce said to writer Frank Budgen, as they walked along the Universitätstrasse in Zurich, that one of his goals in writing Ulysses was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” One can imagine John Dos Passos stating a similar aim with regards to his New York City novel Manhattan Transfer, or Alfred Döblin saying the same of his Berlin Alexanderplatz. These three novels are modernist city novels of the interwar period that move beyond story and character to build structures and trace movements, reconstructing modern metropolises that a world war would soon change forever.”
Who bought Sylvia Plath’s stuff? “Peter K. Steinberg, an archivist in Boston and an editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, paid $885 for her fishing rod.” An anonymous buyer bought a dragon pendant necklace for $14,178, “‘which is a lot for a piece of costume jewelry,’ said Matthew Haley, the head of books and manuscripts at Bonhams.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Atlantic, Sam Kean explains how optical-character-recognition (OCR) software may help the Vatican read 53 linear miles of archived documents. The main problem is that OCR is great at reading printed text but terrible at reading cursive:
“OCR can’t tell where one letter stops and another starts, and therefore doesn’t know how many letters there are. The result is a computational deadlock, sometimes referred to as Sayre’s paradox: OCR software needs to segment a word into individual letters before it can recognize them, but in handwritten texts with connected letters, the software needs to recognize the letters in order to segment them. It’s a catch-22.
“Some computer scientists have tried to get around this problem by developing OCR to recognize whole words instead of letters. This works fine technologically—computers don’t “care” whether they’re parsing words or letters. But getting these systems up and running is a bear, because they require gargantuan memory banks. Rather than a few dozen alphabet letters, these systems have to recognize images of thousands upon thousands of common words. Which means you need a whole platoon of scholars with expertise in medieval Latin to go through old documents and capture images of each word. In fact, you need several images of each, to account for quirks in handwriting or bad lighting and other variables. It’s a daunting task.
“In Codice Ratio sidesteps these problems through a new approach to handwritten OCR. The four main scientists behind the project—Paolo Merialdo, Donatella Firmani, and Elena Nieddu at Roma Tre University, and Marco Maiorino at the VSA—skirt Sayre’s paradox with an innovation called jigsaw segmentation. This process, as the team recently outlined in a paper, breaks words down not into letters but something closer to individual pen strokes. The OCR does this by dividing each word into a series of vertical and horizontal bands and looking for local minimums—the thinner portions, where there’s less ink (or really, fewer pixels). The software then carves the letters at these joints. The end result is a series of jigsaw pieces.”
Photos: Medieval abbeys
Poem: D. A. Powell, “Fledge”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.