#187 Tu (12/27/22) - glass bead game with ChatGPT

Had a chat with ChatGPT about the glass bead game which I described as "concept association."

Thought that rather than a hard push in November, it might be better to set aside some time each week with the goal of writing 52 short stories of about 1500 words, one each week.  This would be 75,000 words at the end of the year.

Using Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium, I thought about a conversation in, among and between books in a place like the Library of Babel.  Each story could be a synopsis of a book, idea, story or manuscript, or a biography of its purported or actual author, or a comparative interpretation of its significance, its precursors or descendants, or even an adventure about the history of the book object itself and its provenance. 

M.R. James devotes a fair amount of space to describing esoteric books and manuscripts and their Latin inscriptions, etc.  His characters are often catalogers of ancient collections, Cathedral chronicles, or other abstruse sets of books, much like his own experience cataloging the collection of Medieval manuscripts at King's College and elsewhere. I like that he has a penchant for acrostic, anagram or steganographia ciphers in his manuscripts.  (In just the last few days, I rewatched/read Martin's Close, Tractate Middoth, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Count Magnus, Mr. Humphrey's Inheritance. All of these are very good and even better than the BBC adaptations, or in some cases, very similar).

I should read Manguel's The Library at Night.  I have been working on his A History of Reading and A Reader on Reading, in addition to Curiosity.  He is a very interesting writer.

I took out all of the Bantock books at UFL again, but I find when I start looking at them, the are more tactile, visual objects that explicitly interesting texts. The text often feels a bit secondary to the main purpose.  The Venetian's Wife or The Museum at Purgatory sound appropriately evocative, but are slightly underwhelming.  I think perhaps because all of these are aimed at recreating the feel of Griffin and Sabine as none of them fail to remind you on the cover, By the author of... Found two other similar writers, Barbara Hodgeson (The Sensualist, Hippolyte's Island and The Tattooed Map) and Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Paris Out of Hand, A Wayward Guide), in which the extensive illustrations tend to overwhelm the text.  Also revisited House of Leaves with it extensive and bifurcating use of annotations, marginalia and footnotes.  Reminded again of Ship of Theseus by VM Straka (JJ Abrams, book puzzle object) - surprised to discover that there is an audiobook of this!


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