A tooth for an eye (no really)
I’ve always thought that nothing good can come out of the idea of “eye for eye, and tooth for tooth”. Looking through history, this sentiment mostly seems to check out.
That aside, though, I also always thought that the expression itself was weird. Apparently, the list of body parts in the original was longer. But when I first heard this (I must have been quite young), I always wondered what an eye had to do with a tooth.
But now I know. This is the most unbelievable story I have read in a while (which, given what’s going on in the world right now, is no mean feat): You actually can take out someone’s tooth, put a lens into it, and then use it as an eye.
I don’t want to make any assumptions, but I am guessing that many of you will not believe me. Well, here is an article that explains everything:
“Brent Chapman can see again after doctors pulled out one of his teeth, flattened it, drilled a hole in it, placed a lens inside and implanted the tooth in one of his eyes. It seems bizarre, but the complex operation — informally known as tooth-in-eye surgery — can help restore vision in patients with the most severe forms of corneal blindness.”
The article comes with receipts (pictures). Honestly, I have seen a lot of weird pictures, and I’m not particularly squeamish. But the actual photograph of the eye that formerly was a tooth, now embedded in the eye socket — that’s something else.
Speaking of bodily sensations (and crazy sounding news articles), “Japanese food and beverage maker Kirin on Tuesday started selling the Electric Salt Cup, which uses electricity to enhance the perception of the salty taste and umami in food”.
They also have an electric salt spoon.
We don’t know whether androids dream of electric sheep, but the folks at Kirin apparently dreamed of electric salt cups.
Meanwhile, the world of “AI” is doing the exact opposite of using technology for the betterment of all of us. For example, “An international network of spammers are posting AI-generated images of Holocaust victims on Facebook, a BBC investigation into "AI slop" has found,” or “Supposed images of fallen Australian soldiers have been created or manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI), introducing errors and distortions to the historical record.” (source)
If you don’t even want to deal with any of that — I can’t and won’t blame you. However, you still might want to click on the link to the article about the dead Australian soldiers to see comparisons of the actual photographs and the “AI” slop.
So there are two different aspects at play here: the first invents images where none existed before. Depending on the context, this can be really bad (such as when we’re talking about the Holocaust). The second invents images where actual photographs already exist. That’s also bad, but in a different way.
Speaking about actual photographs, there was a long article about Sally Mann in The Guardian, which is worth your time. Mann has a new book out, which kind of sounds interesting to me.
Alas, I wasn’t too enthused with the writing in her earlier book. What people think of as Southern charm doesn’t quite work with this North German turned New Englander. That’s on me, obviously.
Anyway, there’s an excerpt from the book here.
The New York Times had a long article about Kara Walker’s re-working one of those Southern monuments that had come down a few years ago. They don’t actually show you the end result (the exhibition it will be in opens in October this year), but the article is absolutely worth your time anyway.
Lastly, Marci Shore wrote about a literature festival she guest-curated:
We titled one event on the festival’s second day “Muttersprache/Mördersprache,” inspired by the incandescent poetry of the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who wrote in German, the language that was both mother tongue and murderer’s tongue to him. Chernivtsi, now in Ukraine, was Celan’s hometown. His mother was shot to death in a camp in Transnistria. What Celan did with the German language after that no one had ever done before. The Odesa-born American poet Ilya Kaminsky, who was with us at the Arsenal, described Celan as having “broken” and “reclaimed” German, wrecked the language to wake it up. The Ukrainian translator Jurko Prochasko described Celan’s poetry as revealing German as a language capable not only of murder but also of suicide, a language with the potential to destroy itself.
Where I live, we so far had a really good early fall. It’s cool at night, but it warms up to really pleasant temperatures during the day. The geese are flying overhead again — mostly in the mornings and late afternoons. There are processions of trucks filled with potatoes (it’s a big business), and trailers stacked with corn. I don’t know why they use rickety trailers for corn — a whole bunch just falls off, resulting in corn lying on or near the roads.
Meanwhile, a little while ago, Stereolab released a new album. I was a big fan thirty years ago, but I had not followed them much since. The new album is really good. It’s a bit like an old friend coming over that you haven’t seen in a long time, and you re-connect immediately.
And with all of that said, thank you, again, for reading and following along!
Be well!
— Jörg