Infelicity

A Brief Note

Take the L train (or any train, I don’t know, I saw this on the L train) and you’ll be met with the latest advertising from an AI company called Clay. So far as I can tell, the company takes both first and third party data (i.e., your data), mixes it around in a cauldron and, as if by alchemical magic, produces “deep customer research,” which allows clients to accelerate their “go to market” strategy. The company’s AI co-pilot is named Sculptor. Sculptor! Sculptor “takes your business context and guides setup, recommends enrichments, answers questions, and provides instant insights based on your table data — all using natural language.” Here is the ad campaign, which appeared in the banners on the L train:

“Every artist has a medium. GTM has Clay.”

“Michelangelo had marble. GTM has Clay.”

“Mozart had a piano. GTM has Clay.”

“Monet had paint. GTM has Clay.”

“Dickinson had poetry. GTM has Clay.”

This series of propositions would never make it past an editor for the very simple reason that while marble and paint may be mediums of their respective arts, a piano is an instrument, and poetry is decidedly not the medium of poetry. That is all I would like to point out. The aggressive philistinism implicit in the ad campaign is obvious. Basic literacy is hard to come by these days. Also, they could have mentioned Marianne Moore in order to keep with their “M” idea. Missed opportunity.

(Quick inventory. Between 1498 and 1499, Michelangelo released from a block of Carrara marble the Pietà. T. S. Eliot is said to have collapsed on his knees before it. Mozart never finished his Requiem. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise helped to introduce Impressionism to the world.)

Susan Howe has written at length (first in My Emily Dickinson and then in Birth-mark) about the persistent institutional and editorial attempts to domesticate Emily Dickinson. Her poetic discoveries had first to be put through innumerable orthodox scrubbings before they could be published. Susan Howe: “The issue of editorial control is directly connected to the attempted erasure of antinomianism in our culture. Lawlessness seen as negligence is first feminized and then restricted or banished. For me, the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson represent a contradiction to canonical social power, whose predominant purpose seems to have been to render isolate voices devoted to writing as a physical event of immediate revelation.” Emily Dickinson wrote more than 1,000 poems that were never published in her lifetime. Emily Dickinson is nowhere present in “Dickinson had poetry.”

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much - how little - is within our power

(Dickinson, #1292)

Source: Emily Dickinson Collection, Frost Library, Amherst College.