The Automation – Page 44 – Further Annotations

Doing some research to better understand those Automata-creatures that BLA created:

Posted on August 3, 2014December 13, 2014 by blablablaandgabbler

Reading Explorations in the History of Machines and Mechanisms by Teun Koetsier and Marco Ceccarelli (Editors):

“Automata make their first appearance in Homer, in a form that is strikingly similar to those described in On Automaton-Making. Hephaestus is depicted creating self-moving tripods to serve the gods on Olympus (Homer Iliad 18.373-381 [16]). This passage from the Iliad is the inspiration for the later automaton, when what was once impossible and divine becomes possible through the human application of mechanics [17]. Certainly, the form of automaton seen in Heron and Philon would seem to be a conscious emulation of this passage…The most likely context for the display of the automata described in On Automaton-Making, given their size, is that of a symposium, particularly in the case of the moving automaton described in the first book, especially considering its Dionysian theme. There is also a clear parallel created between the three wheeled automata of Heron and the tripods of Hephaestus [16] when they are presented in a sympotic context.”

BLA just gave a shake of the head and told me, “You want to know why some of Heron’s automata theories and musings don’t make much sense? Because Vulcan wouldn’t let such secrets be spread so easily. The exactness of machines now is nothing compared to what the gods once allowed. And I’m not talking about divine machines here. I’m talking about man-made things. Even if made from god-made secrets.”

And despite the profound and unsettling discoveries of modernism and post-modernism, and everything they show us about the unreliability of the narrator and the fallacy of omniscience, some of us still, when we read, are happy to accept that the narrative voice has the right to comment on a character, whether tartly or sympathetically, and the ability to go into that character’s mind and tell us what’s going on there. Do we ever stop to wonder how extraordinary it is that a disembodied voice can seem to tell us what is happening in someone’s mind?

From here/read the rest.

The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

Posted on July 14, 2014December 31, 2018 by blablablaandgabbler

The Great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.”

– Flannery O’Connor, The Grotesque in Southern Fiction. Bold face mine.

Novels ain’t nothin’ but a thang.