Virtual Eye vs. Virtual Ear

Lately, I’ve been self-indulgently going back through old blog posts to take a look at their structure… and (true confession time) to have an LLM generate a pod-cast on them. I’ve come to the conclusion that spoken analysis of some of my blog posts from an LLM feel less virtual than written analysis. Also, I’d say that there’s still some garbage-in/garbage-out going on in the analysis: since I’d fed it fifty different posts, the LLM doesn’t quite know how to deal with the wide-ranging topics, and defaults to statements about personal blogs being like a diary or a lexical exploration of how to live one’s life. My sense is that if I focused the source documents around just one topic, the output would be less general.

The virtual podcast is fairly amusing — the male voice sounds a little like A Martínez from NPR, the female voice sounds like the character Roz Doyle (from the sitcom Fraiser), and the script seems like it was lifted from a Radio Lab show. Occasionally, filler phrases like “totally,” “one-hundred percent,” “exactly,” “absolutely,” “of course,” “fer sure,” and “I’m here for it,” become obtrusive. Probably the more jarring moments are when one virtual host will talk about “clicking through the posts”: which you know couldn’t have happened because they don’t have a body.

I’d also say that two virtual hosts speaking about what I’ve written — at least when they aren’t looping through the same script for the third time — somehow feels more validating than reading a generated analysis. I’m pretty sure the hosts have been primed to offer emotional judgements (e.g. “he’s so vulnerable writing that,”) over the textual analysis. And the synthetic voices have fairly good (if sometimes glitchy) tone and inflection.

Jane Yollen was right, the ear and the eye are different audiences.

Equinox Ornithomancy

I spent the weekend of the Autumn Equinox recovering from my latest COVID vaccination (not so bad, I guess, but I could do without the fever and chills).

Between naps, I quickly read two saucy man-on-man murder mysteries set in a magical Victorian England (the “Charm of Magpies” series, by K.J. Charles) and finished up a re-read of “The Mists of Avalon” (which says less about imagined British Paganisms and The Goddess than I’d recalled, and could be paraphrased “Morgaine and her certainty are the common factors in all her failed, betrayal-filled relationships.”)

So this Equinox there was no dancing in a magic circle, nor harping under moonlight, nor meditating while incense floated around me.

However, on the Equinox, Mark and I did go for a long walk along the Willamette River and to Delta Ponds. As we were walking along the gravel path between the two bridges on the south end of the Ponds, I looked out on a strip of water running between two marshy beds of river grass. It was a little after the sun was in its meridian. A dark egret stood on the eastern bank, facing a white heron on the western bank. The two birds facing each other put me in mind of the Middle Kingdom hieroglyph for the horizon 𓈌 , although I believe two animals back-to-back more commonly hint at it in Egyptian art. Still, it was a striking image — almost like a tableau from tarot card — that seemed to signify the Equinox. I stopped to pay better attention to it; fixing the curving the shining water between the green grasses, a shadowy neck, white wings, narrow beaks, and the symmetry between the birds in my mind.

And like the tarot, it was telling me something I already knew: the day was the day when the balance of the season would shift into shadow.

Song and Magic

I’ll confess that I watched the first two episodes of “Agatha All Along,” and now I’ve got the “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road (Sacred Chant Version)” playing in my head (written by Kristen Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez, the same folks who brought you “Let It Go” and other Frozen songs).

It starts out in A minor, which is obligatory for that old time Child Ballad feel. It steers away from simple arpeggios just enough to keep you guessing, and there are accidentals and parallel fourths thrown in to break it out of a rigid pentatonic structure. The lyrics scan, with (mostly?) iambic hexameter in a rhyme structure AA (BB)C (DD)C for the verse and EEE(FF) for the chorus (which lends itself to a round of “down down down down / down the witches’ road”), flirting in 6/8 between a waltz, a conga, and a polka while still staying a chant.

The words mostly work. Since it’s a soundtrack from a work of fiction grounded in a Marvel franchise/Disney show, it’s not exactly a hymn to the Goddess nor a aria to the seasons and Earth processes — even if it does reference “Maiden, Mother, Crone” — I’m trying to decide if the folk references in the song constitutes cultural appropriation or not… and I think the chant is geared toward moving a story with Marvel/Disney magic in it more than stereotyping real-world magical practitioners.

At least it’s better than "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” And so far, there haven’t been any references to “Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth.”

To be honest, I wish more of the traditional NeoPagan chants and poems I’ve encountered were half this good, and I can easily imagine using re-tooled variations like “down the autumn road.”