Dublin Up

Another post from the airport today as a little later I’ll be boarding a flight up to Philly, and from there will be heading to Ireland for the European Poker Tour Dublin festival.

This’ll be a first trip to Ireland for your humble scribbler. Closest I’ve ever gotten before has been London (several times), so am definitely excited not only to visit a new place, but to go somewhere I’ve focused a decent amount of attention on over the years thanks to degrees in English and many years studying and teaching literature.

The Irish authors I’ve read, studied, and taught the most over the years were undoubtedly Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce. W.B. Yeats, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Beckett, and C.S. Lewis come to mind as well, although I don’t believe I ever taught anything by them except for one valiant attempt at carrying a group of undergrads taking World Lit through Waiting for Godot.

Was fascinated by Joyce for a time, reading up through Ulysses and starting Finnegans Wake (though like many, never finishing). I taught several stories from Dubliners over the years, and still have moments from “The Dead” randomly occurring to me as a result.

With Wilde I had a more casual acquaintance, reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Dorian Gray and duly appreciating his many one-liners. I remember De Profundis as well and becoming very interested in his imprisonment and relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas for a time. I taught Earnest a few times, which went over pretty well I recall.

Having focused on Restoration and 18th-century literature for the doctorate, Jonathan Swift is probably the one Irish writer whom I’ve spent the most time with over the decades, routinely teaching Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books and, of course, “A Modest Proposal.” I even had students reading some of the Drapier’s Letters and a bit of Martinus Scriblerus here and there.

Beyond just appreciating his artistry and wit, the Swiftian world view has probably influenced me as much as the view of any writer I’ve seriously studied. (Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the only rival.) I’m referring to a perspective that looks upon practically everything that we experience with a skeptical eye that at once seizes on flaws (causing irritation and pain) while also appreciating the humor and even absurdity of what is being witnessed (causing amusement and pleasure). That includes the various “systems” (especially political ones) on which Swift comments, but also just to human nature itself.

Sometimes when taking care of the horses here on the farm and “communicating” with them as I do, I think of Gulliver at the end of Book 4 who by then has decided horses (or the Houyhnhnms) to be much preferable as companions when compared to the hopelessly flawed, irrational humans (or Yahoos). I don’t go as far as to agree with Gulliver’s conclusion, but I’ll admit I find myself understanding his position sometimes.

I’m constantly thinking of episodes from Gulliver’s earlier voyages, too, to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the Academy of Lagado. There’s so much truth in all of those fictions.

It’s with a literary frame of mind, then, that I travel to Dublin. Will report back once there, hopefully with some stories that entertain and edify.

Image: “Dublin is located in Ireland,” NordNordWest. CC BY-SA 3.0.

On “Roboreporting”

This morning my friend and fellow poker scribe Brad, a.k.a. “Otis,” drew the attention of his Twitter followers to a post by Derrick Goold titled “The Robot that wants to be a Sportswriter.”

Goold’s piece is itself drawing his readers to another article, one by business writer Steve Lohr that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. Lohr’s article, titled “In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Article,” is about a tech company called Narrative Science that focuses on creating computer-generated content, with their latest advances including writing programs that can actually produce full-length articles.

In his tweet, Brad specifically addressed “poker writers and publishers” to take note. And if you follow the links above, I think you’ll readily see why he did.

Goold points out how in Lohr’s piece the article given as an example of computer-generated copy happens to be a sports story. Not coincidental, thinks Goold.

“Sportswriting is the natural place for the roboreporters to start their revolution,” says Goold. “Games are easy to distill into numbers, right down to the integers that are the very definition of sport -- the final score.”

Goold goes on to share how even though the articles produced by “roboreporters” are “formulaic,” “stilted,” and “rely on cliché,” there is already evidence to support that such articles are drawing more Web traffic thanks to their successful negotiation of all-powerful SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

You can see how all of this might be of relevance to those who write about poker. Or to those who pay those who write about poker.

These new article-writing programs remind me of that bit from Part 3 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado and is shown what is in essence a book-writing machine.

It’s a huge contraption, “twenty feet square” and made of wires, blocks of wood with paper pasted on their sides, and iron handles. The professor responsible for the machine shows Gulliver how his students turn the forty handles protruding from the machine’s sides, thereby altering the arrangement of words written on the pieces of paper.

Gulliver is told how whenever phrases of more than a few words were created, scribes took them down, and eventually the results were published in book form. As the professor explains, those volumes “he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials, to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences.”

Swift is of course spoofing the idea of such short cuts to knowledge and/or the production of literature, kind of exaggerating the position and/or approach taken by some of the “moderns” of his day -- a group that included both writers and publishers. It’s a position opposed by Swift and other “ancients” in the “battle of the books,” the conflict’s name supplied in the title of another of Swift’s satires.

To get back to poker reporting, it obviously wouldn’t be hard to construct a program with which one could enter names, numbers, and other data and thus -- by pressing a button (rather than cranking forty handles) -- produce reports of results and even key hands such as knockouts, hands resulting in significant exchanges of chips, hands resulting in new chip leaders, and so forth.

In fact, I think there’s probably a not insignificant percentage of people -- among readers and even some writers -- who’d prefer such “roboreporting” from poker tourneys.

For me, though, it has always been the stories and characters that not only make poker fun to play and/or watch, but which give it value that goes beyond simple calculations of ROI. In other words, the human stuff that the hands and pots and bustouts and triumphs help demonstrate.

But getting to that stuff that takes time. And effort. And, well, money. And there’s not a lot of any of that, not here in the modern world.