Still Educating Sam Hasler: Saturday Morning - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick!

Up early and questioning what I am about to do now that I've gone through the morning's readings.

Last night, very early this morning, I found accidentally a site having Indiana case law dating back to the 1800s. What I have been trying to get at with my trips to Indianapolis was right there. I got the cases I needed to be downloaded, so not going out of town on Monday. But I am still sleepy.

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard (The Guardian)

Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped). What I’m pointing out is what is lost, or changed, in a Nolan–Hollywood–Homer crossover, and why that matters. As Nolan himself has said: “I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories.” So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices. I’m here to think through what an epic hero and his world looks like to Nolan, and to Hollywood. And that is a really telling ride.

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In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.
Emily Hauser is an ancient historian, broadcaster and Times bestselling author of Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out of It.

Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover

Did Homer dream of androids? (Engelsberg ideas)

Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad 18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20 devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’. This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then ‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too – is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace, bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they happen to be.
It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’ splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel to behold’.
In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally, intelligent.

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Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and ‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of ‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.
An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē. But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.
This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.
An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē, its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives, its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do we really know now?

‘A revolutionary act to watch it’: the film India’s censors do not want you to see (The Guardian)

Trehan describes the ordeal of trying to get Satluj released as “dystopian” and decries “undemocratic censorship” and alleged political interference under the Narendra Modi government re-shaping India’s film industries. He claims Indian cinema has been widely co-opted as a propaganda arm for the government’s rightwing, religious nationalist agenda, where there is “only room for one kind of story to be told”, particularly in mainstream Hindi films.
“It is clear to me that there is no creative freedom in India today,” says Trehan. “When you see the level of censorship happening, films getting blocked by the film board and banned from release, it makes you question: does democracy exist in this country any more?”
Even today, discussions of Punjab’s separatist movement – which raged in the 1980s and 1990s, fighting for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, before it was crushed by the state – remain highly sensitive for the Modi government.

The Common-Law mind and the renewal of America (Engelsberg ideas)

The history of the Anglo-American Common Law is a history of renewal, restoration and reinvigoration that is grounded in practicalities and tangibility. It does not try to answer ‘what is Justice?’ deductively. It searches for justice inductively, case by case, precedent by precedent, and roots itself constitutionally in the community’s capacity for self-government. Not without an endearing sense of grandiosity, Winston Churchill was still right when he said in his sweeping history of the English-speaking world that the claims and disputes across its vast stretches obtain according to the Common Law, at least in theory, and not uniformly. Lincoln the lawyer was dealing in the same terms and, naturally, he had a ‘Common-Law mind’. His life on the judicial circuit showed he understood that the real gem of the Common Law was redress and remedy, not revolution. In its deepest working sense, even the most ordinary, granular case could distil the most fundamental political question there is: what sort of government do we want? Better yet, what sort of government does our history of cases and precedents point us toward?

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It is by asking and answering such questions that America rediscovers and regenerates itself. Lincoln saw and understood this, which lent him both wisdom and his remarkable belief in the American constitution. America at 250 should remind us of its capacity for self-rediscovery and its durability because of the instincts of the Common Law deeply woven into its DNA. It should remind us, as Lincoln the Common Law lawyer understood, that American democracy is a renewable charter.

Mark Kermode reviews The Odyssey