"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas"
The story of a 40 year book-quest and of its remarkable ending
And about goblins and Christmas; the perils of ChatGPT; and the real value of librarians and so on
Substack https://emptycity.substack.com/p/twelfth-night-till-candlemas
Personal blog https://davidallengreen.com/2024/12/twelfth-night-till-candlemas-the-story-of-a-forty-year-book-quest-and-of-its-remarkable-ending/
The story of a 40 year book-quest and of its remarkable ending
And about goblins and Christmas; the perils of ChatGPT; and the real value of librarians and so on
Substack https://emptycity.substack.com/p/twelfth-night-till-candlemas
Personal blog https://davidallengreen.com/2024/12/twelfth-night-till-candlemas-the-story-of-a-forty-year-book-quest-and-of-its-remarkable-ending/
Comments
Someone I know tracked down a copy of a book online they had in their childhood and when it arrived they recognised their own handwriting inside the cover…
As a former librarian I'm not about to disagree.
#libraries
#archives
Now I'm going to have to wait until later to read this, when I can have a suitable seasonal drink at hand, as instructed.
I knew about both events having seen them at the time, it was the manuscript that got me.
Makes you feel good about people in these bleak times.
...but it was always "ghosties and ghoulies" and not the way it's written here...
Is that another mistaken memory?
A funny coincidence - Ruth Cecilia Paine looks a bit like one of my greatest heroines: Cecilia Payne, who taught Sunday school for many years of her life (but was much less into religion generally, being a great astronomer).
I am so very glad I did - as a fellow lover of folklore, and of the depth in childrens' tales we could sense but not describe when we were children, this has made my day. 1/2
And my late grandmother's voice spoke to me again over 30 years since her death: 'From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us'.
2/2
She often muses that she doesn't do anything useful or meaningful
I point out that in 20 or 30 years there will be someone in a library somewhere remembering the happy friendly librarian that got them interested in books when they were a kid
Priceless reward
Recently a lady came in asking if they 'have any books by the crispy lady'
A number of questions later it turns out she was asking for Agatha Christie
Maybe one day Ruth C. Paine's stories could be collected and published together, in her memory & recognition.
https://somerville66.blogspot.com/2016/01/odhams-encyclopedia-for-children.html
ChatGPT uses one of them, a Large Language Model, aka LLM, aka glorified autocomplete, aka stochastic parrot, aka bullshit machine.
It knows only how to string words together.
Happy Christmas Andrew
They have no concept of "truth" or "fact".
They don't lie or hallucinate, they (per Frankfurt) bullshit.
This paper and article may be of interest to @davidallengreen.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/andrewkerr9000.bsky.social/post/3lehk7wphsc2d
Also - have you ever read Hobberdy Dick by Katherine M Briggs. It is on similar themes....
https://transdiffusion.org/2002/01/01/arne/
There's a third lesson too - for all its evils, social media can still work magic and make connections that were impossible in earlier times. Not everything is worse, as we so often feel it to be.
PS - we still celebrate Candlemas at Magdalen.
I did have a passage about the positive power of social networks, but it felt a bit self-congratulatory - and it perhaps took away from the Noble Professions point. So I cut it.
I foolishly leant my original to someone and they never returned it. I have the two others from the omnibus but cannot find the first book anywhere.