Quote One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. —Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
| Poem | Touch Me Stanley Kunitz Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that’s late, it is my song that’s flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave a music pour from such a small machine. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. One season only, and it’s done. So let the battered old willowthrash against the windowpanes and the house timbers creak. Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am. |
Conversation with Stanley Kunitz
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec00/kunitz.html
Wordplay A Google search on “Ars Magna” will yield the source code for at least one version of the Ars Magna software. The comments in it tell where to find out more about the design.
Artificial Intelligence
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/opinion/18morton.html
By MIKE MORTON and SABRA MORTON
WHEN we hear grumbling coming from the depths of our computer, we know that Ars Magna, the software program that always answers in anagrams, is awake and worrying.
This software sometimes can seem opinionated. Lately, for instance, it speaks happily of the Statue of Liberty as “built to stay free,” but when it hears the name George W. Bush, it’s likely to cry, “He grew bogus!” Ars is still angry about that C.I.A. leak.
So, Ars, it all began when Karl Rove, as he tells it, did not say the name of Valerie Plame. What do you think he was trying to do when he didn’t name her?
Reveal. Impale.
Well, then, what did he achieve by not naming Valerie Wilson?
Orwellian vise.
But Mr. Rove is President Bush’s key political advisor. Can’t we depend on him to be truthful?
Leaky; solicit avid pro.
By which you mean Robert Novak, who is believed to have helped him expose Ms. Plame? What’s Mr. Novak’s job in this affair just now?
Bark: “Not Rove!”
Lately, Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, likes to say at news conferences, “I appreciate the question.” What do you think he means?
Riot technique: appease it.
Ars, for more than two years we’ve heard accusations and denials and hours of commentary on this business. Do you have any idea what actually happened? Can you figure out who said what to whom, when?
Them want who? How?
What who? Now them?
Our thoughts exactly. But perhaps the full truth will be, uh, revealed. After all, Mr. Bush says he has instructed his staff that when the prosecutor comes calling, they’re to fully cooperate. How do you read that?
Leery: coup aloft.
In the past, Mr. Bush said that anyone in his administration who exposes a C.I.A. agent will be fired. What might he say now?
“I’d … well … brief …”
And if Mr. Bush is asked to fire Karl Rove?
“Karl … forever … I …”
What advice would you give Karl Rove today?
“Lark OVER!”
And what will President George Bush do now?
He ponders big gesture.
Ah yes, his nomination to the Supreme Court. We’ll get back to you on that one, Ars.
Mike Morton is a software engineer and the creator of Ars Magna. Sabra Morton is a writer.
Song I can’t get out of my head “Oronico Flow,” Enya.
neil693 
3 Comments
Conversation with Stanley Kunitz….I very interest read..thanks..” The poems, when they come with an incident from the immediate present, latch on to those images that are deep in one’s whole sensibility, and when that happens, everything starts firing at once. “…/N *
At this hour the only thing I can think to say is that I love the “song I can’t get out of my head” element. That really says it all, doesn’t it! Mind if I borrow it?
Mind if I borrow it?Go right ahead—it’s not really original to me