Sunday morning Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… ‘The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013’ - NYTimes.com.

This is poetry written with a painterly hand, stroke by patient stroke. Walcott’s early ambition was to paint, to inhabit the “virginal, unpainted world” of the Caribbean and take on, like some latter-day Adam, the “task of giving things their names.” He learned the basics of watercolor painting, and it became his most serious pastime; his book jackets through the years have featured his gentle and competent paintings of tropical country scenes. But poetry was the deeper and more substantial practice. He brought the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems. They are great piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, often employing rhyme or slant rhyme, great layers of adjectives firming up the noun underpainting.

…  FYI: At Wiseblood Books.



… Neglected but magnificent: The Art Of Amateur Proofreadnig.



… Free Falling As If in a Dream.

Character rich, mordantly witty, and cunningly plotted, the first two novels are superb, but it is only when you come to this, the concluding volume, that you see what a brilliantly intricate contrivance the entire work is. The many characters' seemingly inconsequential actions and crisscrossing lives, laid down in advance, are pulled together in these pages as ingeniously and with as much finesse as the last step in erecting a ship in a bottle.

… Looking ahead: Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so…

When Kurzweil first started talking about the "singularity", a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist. He has been saying for years that he believes that the Turing test – the moment at which a computer will exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human – will be passed in 2029. The difference is that when he began saying it, the fax machine hadn't been invented. But now, well… it's another story.

Creeping fascism: