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, 22 November 2023→Digression: Nietzsche, Blake and the Camden Cat
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{{Quote|''The Birth of Tragedy'' sold 625 copies in six years; the three parts of ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra'' sold fewer than a hundred copies each. Not until it was too late did his works finally reach a few decisive ears, including Edvard Munch, August Strindberg, and the Danish-Jewish critic Georg Brandes, whose lectures at the University of Copenhagen first introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to a wider audience. | {{Quote|''The Birth of Tragedy'' sold 625 copies in six years; the three parts of ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra'' sold fewer than a hundred copies each. Not until it was too late did his works finally reach a few decisive ears, including Edvard Munch, August Strindberg, and the Danish-Jewish critic Georg Brandes, whose lectures at the University of Copenhagen first introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to a wider audience. | ||
:—''The Sufferings of Nietzsche'', Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018 | :—''The Sufferings of Nietzsche'', Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018 | ||
When Shakespeare wrote, almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate — probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast, there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? | The [[Bayesian priors]] are pretty damning. ...When Shakespeare wrote, almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate — probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast, there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? | ||
:—[[Sam Bankman-Fried|Sam Bankman Fried]]’s “sophomore college blog”}} | :—[[Sam Bankman-Fried|Sam Bankman Fried]]’s “sophomore college blog”}} | ||
[[Sam Bankman-Fried]] had a point, though not the one he thought. [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] died in obscurity, as did William Blake and Emily Dickinson. | |||
For these geniuses, the improbability engine worked its magic, even if not in their lifetimes. But how many undiscovered Nietzsches, Blakes and Dickinsons are there, who never caught the light, and now lie sedimented into unreachably deep strata of the human canon? How many ''living'' artists are currently ploughing an under-appreciated furrow, cursing their own immaculate “[[Bayesian priors]]”? How many solitary geniuses are out there, right now, stampeding towards an obscurity a [[large language model]] might save them from? | For these geniuses, the improbability engine worked its magic, even if not in their lifetimes. But how many undiscovered Nietzsches, Blakes and Dickinsons are there, who never caught the light, and now lie sedimented into unreachably deep strata of the human canon? How many ''living'' artists are currently ploughing an under-appreciated furrow, cursing their own immaculate “[[Bayesian priors]]”? How many solitary geniuses are out there, right now, stampeding towards an obscurity a [[large language model]] might save them from? | ||
(I know of at least one: | (I know of at least one: rockabilly singer [[Daniel Jeanrenaud]], the [[Camden Cat]], who for thirty years has plied his trade with a beat-up acoustic guitar on the Northern Line, and once wrote and recorded one of the great rockabilly singles of all time. It remains bafflingly unacknowledged. Here it is, on {{Plainlink|1=https://soundcloud.com/thecamdencats/you-carry-on?si=24ececd75c0540faafd470d822971ab7|2=SoundCloud}}.) | ||
Digression over. | Digression over. | ||