11 April 2025

A fortuitous find

We went to meet our youngest son in Penrith today. He is leaving for a trip with his girlfriend to Japan on Sunday, who is about to have a birthday, so we said we’d meet him at Harry Hartog, the best bookstore in Penrith, to buy her some books off her long wish list he keeps on his phone.

Apart from buying her some books, I also had a mission of my own. I reviewed Pat Barker’s second book in the Women of Troy Trilogy in February, and I’d like to read the third book, The Voyage Home. But Harry Hartog, so far, only has the trade paperback and I want the three books in the series to match in the smaller paperback format I have the first two volumes in. The new format is supposed to be available sometime this month. I forget exactly which day, and the thrill of the chase is more satisfying than googling the information.

Naturally, Harry Hartog’s shelves are being rearranged and not even one of the store attendants could find a shelf in the semi-illogical mess that currently exists in some of their collection until they’re finished. But I eventually found Pat Barker, saw the same trade paperback version of The Voyage Home I don’t want, but then discovered a book right next to it: An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco. It’s a retelling of The Iliad through the eyes of 21 of Homer’s characters. It was originally published over 20 years ago in Italy and was translated into English 2 years after publication. I’d never heard of it, but I thought it might be interesting to read it after I finish my Iliad pages for the Homer and the Epic Cycle project. At only 158 pages, it should be a fast read.

Only this morning I was saying I wouldn’t be getting any more books this year, except for a few, like the Barker book, I planned for. Bookshops are such treacherous waters to sail in!

We also bought the books for our son’s girlfriend, had lunch with our boy and then wished him well for his trip.

- bikerbuddy

9 April 2025

The International Booker Prize Shortlist for 2025 Announced

It’s that time of year again. Booker season starts. This morning I saw the shortlist for the International Booker Prize. Since 2016 the International Booker has been awarded to authors and translators equally for the best book translated into English. We have an ongoing long-term project to review all the Booker and International Booker Prize winners since they were inaugurated in their current format. That means since 1969 for the Booker Prize, when the Prize first began and since the prize was awarded for a single translated work for the International Prize, rather than for a body of work.

Given that, I always like to put up the shortlists each year. I’ve taken descriptions for each book from the Booker website. You can view this year’s International Booker page on the official site by clicking here.

A Leopard Skin Hat by Anne Serre

Translated by: Mark Hutchinson

Original Language: French

A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

Translated by: Deepa Bhasthi

Original Language: Kannada

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style.

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

Translated by: Barbara J. Haveland

Original Language: Danish

She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday. She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand – the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband’s surprise at seeing her return home unannounced.

But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain. As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can’t shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there’s a way to escape.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Translated by: Sophie Hughes

Original Language: Italian

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s 24-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media.

But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix

Translated by: Helen Stevenson

Original Language: French

Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by: Asa Yoneda

Original Language: Japanese

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings - but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

- bikerbuddy

3 April 2025

New Evidence for the Trojan War

Followers on Neocities and those who receive our Newsletter may be aware that I have been making some effort to prepare more pages for the expanding project on the Trojan War. I’ve now completed 19 of the 24 books of The Iliad, and I have designed template pages for The Odyssey and the lost books of the Epic Cycle as well.

Yesterday, Victoria sent me a link to a newly published article about the Trojan War, ‘New Hittite Tablet Reveals Luwian Songs on the Fall of Troy’ by Oguz Buyukyildirim. The site of Troy is generally thought to have been established in the 19th century of Heinrich Schleimann and archaeologists who succeeded him. There is a wide belief that while the events of The Iliad may be poetic and include mythical elements, that the conflict described may also have some basis in real history, the details now lost to us. Buyukyildirim’s page seems to have drawn information from another website, The Archaeologist, which in turn has drawn its information from a published translation on 1 April 2025 by an academic from Oxford, Michele Bianconi. The subject of her paper is a Hittite clay tablet known as Keilfischurkunden aus Boghazköi 24.1. In this tablet a writer speaks of troops that have been sent and ends with a poetic flourish that seems to make reference to the destruction of Troy.

If you are interested enough to follow the links above, it will only take about 5 minutes to read the articles. If you are interested to see Michele Bianconi’s paper upon which these articles are based, you can click here, but you will have to answer several questions and easily opt out of a subscription, if you want to do that, before you can download the paper. However, the paper only includes a drawing and translation of the new text, and its contents are pretty much entirely covered by the two articles, if you want to save yourself the trouble. Because these websites have already published what amounts to Bianconi’s entire paper, I thought I’d at least put a drawing of the clay tablet here:

And because I’ve given links to the articles, I won’t detail the discussion about what the tablet says and its historical import. If you’re interested enough, you can easily follow the links above.

My own interest lies in the tantalising glimpse the tablet provides into a wider history. It suggests further evidence of a major conflict in the region around Troy approximating to the time the Trojan War is meant to have taken place. It suggests what scholars already knew, that the conflict also involved allies who supported the city presumed to have been Troy. But this clay fragment also includes a poetic extract at the end, somewhat in the style of the opening of The Iliad. It suggests there might have been an Eastern poetic tradition around this conflict, too. If there was, it may have influenced the poetic tradition around the Trojan War in the West, or visa versa. For me, it’s a fascinating topic which I first became interested in when I watched Michael Wood’s BBC series and read his book, In Search of the Trojan War. I’d read E.V. Rieu’s translation some years before that, but it was Wood who really piqued my interest. If you would like to check out his seven part series it is currently available to watch on YouTube. Click here to see it.

- bikerbuddy

1 April 2025

AI and Books - Some Thoughts

The other day I received a message from a Neocities follower, ‘Bright Eyes’. In fact, it was the second time Bright Eyes had reached out to me to raise the issue of Artificial Intelligence, books and reading. AI is not a recent idea. Science Fiction has had computers talking back to us for decades. Remember Terminator? Remember Hal-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey? But Bright Eyes wasn’t raising the spectre of a future threat. Bright Eyes was speaking about how AI is changing books and publishing, and therefore reading, right now.

I’d had a conversation with some local authors last year on the same topic. They had artistic and commercial concerns about AI. I admit, I feel there is more reason for concern about the impact AI will have on the production of books and reading than previous technological innovations have given. When I received Bright Eyes’ message, I began to think about it and my thoughts went back to the late 1980s when I first began to consider how technology could change the reading experience.

Back in the 1980s I was completing a communications degree. At one point we were tasked with researching new communication technologies and to do a presentation of their likely impacts in the future. At the time I had only just begun to twig to the idea that Compact Discs – CDs – could store more than just music. And as I began to look at CDs more closely, it wasn’t just the idea that you could ‘burn’ lots of information to them that seemed significant. I think I might have first thought about this when I considered the import of a little electronic book for children – Just Grandma and Me – that I received as part of a package with a new computer I had bought. I was still at the stage where I was buying brand computers with preloaded software, which included games and other media like CD-ROMS. That was the 1980s for you.

I did some research and got in touch with libraries as part of the assignment because the potential to store information on CDs as an archival tool seemed to me most relevant in that sphere. I was realising that books produced electronically, especially non-fiction and specialist books, could be read in whole new ways, with the use of hyperlinks. And rare books could be preserved by scanning them, and thereby make them available to a wider range of people. Of course, the internet existed in some form at this stage, but it was not mainstream, and I can honestly say that no-one else in my tutorial group had the idea to introduce the internet as a significant form of communications technology that would soon change the world. No one’s minds – not the people I knew, anyway – were there just then. And the fact that librarians I spoke to for the purposes of the assignment were not talking about the internet or online storage as a means of distributing and preserving books, but CD-ROMs, says where things were at. My university library was still using a physical card system in the late eighties, just to be clear.

Even a few years later, when I watched and read about the events of the First Gulf War, the internet hadn’t yet caught my attention. In fact, TIME Magazine produced a CD-ROM about the war which I still have. After my university assignment I thought that that CD-ROM would be a great resource in the future: like the encyclopedia I received on a CD-ROM when I bought that computer; what was ever going to replace that?

By the time I saw Sven Birkets’ book, The Gutenberg Elegies (which I currently feature on my profile page on this website), I was attuned to the idea that computers had the potential to change the way we read. Birkets identified a change in our relationship with the written word. Things were going to feel different. Reading off a screen wasn’t going to be the same as off a page. There were physical characteristics that were different between books and screens, but screens allowed for a different kind of engagement. Somehow, the soul of reading would be lost, too, he seemed to suggest.

Bear in mind, this is well before smart phones. This is before social media and death scrolling through feeds and memes. Birkets was highly focussed on the idea of technology and its impact on reading, itself, but in the mid-90s he was kind of where I was at in the late-80s. It was hard to see what was coming and what would be truly significant. If his book is anything to go by, he didn’t have a clue what was going to happen, I have to say, as much as I loved it.

AI generated art I created for this blog post from canva.com

Bright Eyes wrote: “I've noticed over the past year or so that there are a lot of low quality e-books showing up on Amazon in particular - you can usually tell them because the author doesn't have a fantastic fiction page about them and their books, and they usually have a series of books which have a lot of books in them in an inconceivably short period of time.” Bright Eyes pointed me to an article, AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library. I was able to read the article in its entirety just over a month ago, but it now seems to be behind a paywall. Following the link will at least get you the beginning of the article. The article raised the issue of the mass of AI generated articles and books that are now being generated. This causes several problems for libraries and readers. First, it is difficult to curate quality material for readers, since the scale of the problem is so large and it is not always easy to distinguish AI from real authors. Sometimes it’s obvious when you read the material, but who has the time to read everything? Second, libraries pay for the use of subscription services to magazine and/or electronic books which are leant to library patrons on a per use basis. So, if readers are being served poor quality material that does not meet their needs, it needlessly costs libraries financial resources to supply that material. This can also be a problem on platforms like Kindle, too, for private users. Many Kindle owners now subscribe to Amazon to read books, but Amazon’s lists include many self-published and AI generated books, which can be a frustrating experience for readers.

Bright Eyes contacted me again just over a week ago to raise the issue that many authors’ works are now being used without permission to train AI writing programs. LibGen, it is alleged, is an illegal pirate site which has works illegally available which companies can access for this purpose. Legal actions have been taken against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using this material without payment. In my mind, this is a moral issue as much as a legal one. Companies wish to use the creative efforts of others for free so that they might supplant them in the future. I know that is a little on the hysterical side, since these companies might argue that their written products stand alongside human-generated works, or that they offer a different reading experience. In the case of Kadrey v. Meta, morality didn’t enter into the argument. Meta prevailed against the plaintiffs. The court determined that the plaintiffs would have to assert and prove that the output from the AI programs had directly copied or merely rewritten works that was being used to train the programs.

Even so, the use of authors’ works like this didn’t sit right with me. But assuming that training AI this way is perfectly legal and ethical, the idea of AI written books and articles feels horrific, anyway. Things are moving so quickly in technology that it feels to me that each new technological iteration produces that headspace of the late 80s or mid-90s: of being concerned about what’s coming next and what the impact will be. Even so, this iteration of technology feels far worse.

Like touching a hotplate that will burn you, I decided to create another AI image for this blog post

First, is the idea of the written word, itself. Technology has changed people’s tolerance for slow-moving and thoughtful works already. Reading is in competition with technologies that were the stuff of science fiction in my childhood. When I was in primary school a well-meaning teacher tried to promote the benefits of books. With a book, he said, you’ll never be bored. You can take a book anywhere. Imagine if your train is late or you have a long journey, he argued. You can take a book to entertain you. You can’t take your television.

Nowadays, of course, if a well-meaning teacher said that, they would, of course, be wrong. You can watch television programs and movies almost anywhere, and the technology is more portable than most books. But the problem isn’t just movies and television. Everyone knows smart phones, for instance, deliver far more than that. The problem is that the medium, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, affects the material that is produced. In the case of books, my nightmare scenario has publishers using AI bots to produce their next blockbusters while real authors give up because they are too slow and expensive to compete anymore. Publishing, after all, is an industry. Even though many publishers genuinely wish to publish quality material, it is hard to imagine in a marketplace warped by the gravitational pull of AI, of publishers best intentions not being affected on some level. Of course, the response to that might be that by that time AI will be producing the quality books we want to read. Maybe. But it won’t be human, or produced from unique experiences or truly original thought and writing. Will AI be able to innovate, or will it rely upon the past works it has been trained upon?

Will publishers focus on thrillers, action adventure and romance to compete with other mediums like film and video games? Will writing serve the needs of marginalised groups, focus on important but marginal issues or produce quirky material that isn’t generated from a template of other quirky books? Will the written word forego its more philosophical practices to maintain a shrinking cadre of eyeballs. And will what we discuss and obsess over as a society, given the high proliferation of AI generated content, not only become increasingly fractured and siloed, given the mass of material available, but the content becomes facile or essentially meaningless. It’s like the soul of reading that Birkets cared about, but now there is no soul at all. It’s all binary if you look in and in and in far enough. No where is there a spark of inspiration, joy or sadness, a thought or a desire, merely the ranked zeros and ones that coalesce into this and this and this, over and over, into the culmination of a momentary distraction.

Then again …

Maybe, fifty years from now, someone researching this period of the internet will find this blog post and chuckle, knowing with hindsight that market forces were always going to pull this back; that my fears were foundless.

That’s the thing about AI as I see it now. In twenty years, there might be something new to worry about and the threats I perceive around AI now might seem quaint to me. But right now, AI generated text, putting aside the morality of using real authors’ work to train it, is a soulless enterprise that has the potential not only to change the way books are produced, how they are marketed and distributed, but also change the quality of writing and the practices publishers may wish to engage in if they are to stay financially sound.

If you have your own thoughts about this, I invite you to leave comments on this page if you want, where other people will have access to them.

- bikerbuddy