On the recent Peacock series "Mrs. Davis" —
"The algorithm is known as Mrs. Davis … and is
the all-seeing, all-knowing, not-quite-all-merciful
manifestation of artificial intelligence to whom
humanity has plighted its troth in this eight-part
manifestation of real intelligence from creators
Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof."
— John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal ,
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
For The Algorithm , see last evening's Michaelmas post and . . .
For a different Mrs. Davis, see . . .
|
From Tom McCarthy's review yesterday of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Martin Davis reportedly died this year on New Year's Day.
This journal on that date —
