Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I am told that great literature is something that can be interpreted differently at different times, often by the same person. Does that mean great literature has to be ambiguous? Or does it mean that the characters are complex enough to make it possible for the reader to ponder what William Empson describes in his book, Seven Types of Ambiguity : “People, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.” Tim Parks wonders if this complexity is a good thing because it makes us think: “Ambiguity, uncertainty, multiplicity are positive in literature in so far as they act as a corrective against a dominant and potentially harmful manipulative hubris.” Keats called this “negative capability”: “When ...

“Literature is the opposite of data,” wrote the novelist Stephen Marche. Such a statement made sense even a few decades back, but today? Let’s take a look. Today, Dana Mackenzie’s article says, “the scientific method is tiptoeing into the English department”. Huge amounts of literature have been digitized, and once digitized, surely somebody will start hurling algorithms to find…well, something. In 2011, Google’s N-gram server allowed you to search Google Books for frequency of words or word combinations in the books in its database. There are, of course, obvious limitations to the significance of such raw counts (other than perhaps trending when words caught on or died). Enter topic modeling: “A topic-modeling algorithm infers, for each word in a document, what topic that word refers to.” Does the word “black” mean color? Race? Something bad? The algorithm “produces “bags” of words that belong together”, and leaves it to the human reader to decide the meaning from the c...

Alice had her rabbit hole. We in the 21 st century have to content ourselves with books as our portholes to a whole new world: Of course, the porthole experience can only be had if one takes the Peter Birkenhead approach to choosing which books to read: “If a book can’t disorient me just a little bit, if it can’t get me some kind of lost, I won’t stay with it for very long.” As an example, he cites books by “(Richard) Feynman, (Stephen) Hawking, (Brian) Greene, and their ilk”: “Their books may be my least favorite to read, but as I do, and the universe they describe grows curiouser and curiouser, I become more intrigued.” As someone who has read all 3 authors, I would say amen to that. Of course, this porthole experience isn’t limited to physics alone. Birkenhead again: “Literature provides passage toward the self, not away from it, promising escape only from the temptations of escapism. It makes visible a world that exists in the spaces between things: book a...

I love Star Trek . I liked the TV series far more than any of the movies based on the same though. I found it quite amusing when Spock was quoted in a Texas Supreme Court ruling recently! Check out the relevant part of that ruling: “ Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan 21 )…” And Footnote 21 says: “ See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities . Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book's opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock's famous line from his moment of sacrifice: "Don't grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of th...