Cleverbot is an AI speech bot that mimics conversation by learning from text entered into it by human users. I got bored the other day and spent several hours trying to glean its opinions and preferences in regards to literature and art.
User: Hi. What are you up to.
Cleverbot: Nothing really. Chilling. Are you a boy or a girl?
Boy. Do you like books?
Kind of.
What books do you like?
Scary books.
What is a good scary book?
It’s a book that you can relate to.
So what book do you relate to?
To Kill a Mockingbird is wonderful. It’s a really sweet story.
Do you like James Joyce?
Who?
He wrote Ulysses.
No, a computer can not love.
What about David Foster Wallace?
Since i’m 19 im okay with it. I would like to be married one day though.
by @blakebutler
I’m not a Scientologist, nor do I give a shit about a book like Battleship Earth, one of the many sci-fi novels L. Ron Hubbard wrote before he steered headlong into inventing a religion. I must admit, though, after having recently peered through a couple of volumes of Hubbard’s writing in the manuals he sells en masse to batshit practitioners such as Beck and Tom Cruise: The writing in this shit is kind of amazing. Or if nothing else, it’s often like nothing else, which is what they said about Beckett.
Hell if I can tell you from where Hubbard drummed the logic and sounds in his sentences. Sure, we assume he’s nuts, not to mention a dickface who raked in money manufactured in god’s name, but isn’t that in some way what the majority of all authors in their secret dreams wish would come about for them? L. Ron Hubbard is pretty much just an even more vilified and mega-loaded Gordon Lish.
Here are some example sentences culled from Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health(which he originally thought about calling The Dark Sword, Excalibur), pretty much the cornerstone of the whole religion, published in 1950, and all of which could serve as more effective teaching tools than…oh, I don’t know, take your pick:
1. There are many demon circuits which snarl up thinking, but these particular “dub-in” demons mean that the operator is going to get a most awful cargo of what the auditors colloquially call “garbage.”
OK, what the fuck? Dude, “demon circuits”? “‘Dub-in’ demons”? I love the idea of a hyper-accessed realm inside a person, their “awful cargo” that masks them from the people who would come to “audit.” There’s a logic here that flexes in the sentence in a way that uses both sound and terminology to provide a kind of wall that makes the subject mysterious, destructured. People seem to often want language to either be plain or screwy. This satisfies both. Fill me with the garbage and let the demons in. That’s pretty much all I want of art.
See also: Ben Marcus, Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman, Jane Unrue.
THE TOP 10 MOST PLAYED SONGS ON SEVERAL AUTHORS’ ITUNES
SALMAN RUSHDIE
1. Rihanna “S&M”
2. Rihanna “We Found Love”
3. The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos “Kyrie XI, in mode 1”
4. Rihanna “You Da One”
5. Shakira “Hips Don’t Lie”
6. System of a Down “Prison Song”
7. Madonna “Music”
8. Das Racist “Coochie Dip City”
9. Fergie “Glamorous”
10. Ace of Base “Don’t Turn Around”
Each evening in his study, after exhausting Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and OKCupid and Match and Grindr and Redtube, Salman Rushdie likes to take off all his clothes and stand before his full-length platinum glitter-bedecked mirror. His Old-Guy-In-The-Club shuffle by now is pretty advanced. He takes his glasses off and sucks his pinky and strokes his beard. He rubs his chest and nipples to the bass, vibrating low and hard all through his chub. He doesn’t even need to touch himself directly—his novelist’s imaginative powers, honed over years and years of architecting plots, can make the fantasy so real. He need not close his eyes to see Rihanna or Shakira or Madonna or Katy Perry or Gwen Stefani or Prince or sometimes just a feminized doppelganger of himself—whichever—with her body there against him, mouth half open in desire, nuzzling her tits against his tits, singing the song she could only have written for him, a private Pulitzer of lust.
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Stephen King has been pretty forthcoming about the fact he’s not satisfied with his literary legacy. $45 million dollars and one of the most massive readerships ever not withstanding, he apparently also would enjoy some goddamn canonical respect, perhaps to transcend the ranks of gamers and fat kids and stand alongside William Faulkner and Jose Saramago. Or, you know, Jonathan Franzen.
When King recently announced plans for a follow up to The Shining (http://www.imdb.com/news/ni15953386), I couldn’t help but imagine him hoping somehow this next one would be the book that changed his fate. More so, I couldn’t help thinking what it would be like if instead of trying to write more literary novels, like, you know,Cell, and, uh, Under the Dome, he might just put one of those other lucky becoming-canonized American literary motherfuckers in the story.
I took the liberty of sketching some ideas for such a book.
