24 December 2022. Computers | Christmas
Thinking about The Computer’s First Christmas Card.// Songs of the season
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish three days a week. Comments are open.
This is probably the last edition of the year, and I expect to be back with the next Just Two Things on Friday 6th January, but may get bored on a long train trip and write an edition next week.
All the best to my readers for the season.
1: Thinking about The Computer’s First Christmas Card
I wrote here earlier this week about Robert Cottrell’s long and intriguing Browser letter about AI, large learning models, ChatGPT, and how they coped with apparently meaningless inputs. (I have since discovered that it is available online). If you didn’t read that piece, the answer is that it didn’t cope well.
One of the things that came to mind since (because computers, poetry) was Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’, and written in 1965, as computers were just starting to come into the mainstream. The image shows the original, written on a fixed space typewriter (computer outputs were fixed space at the time) although you can find a modern version online.
(‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’. 1966. (C) Edwin Morgan.)
Morgan was in his 40s when he wrote it, although he lived long enough to become the first Scots Makar of modern times, in 2002, following devolution.
Without labouring the lit crit, the poem makes us laugh because it has a punchline, and the punchline makes a point. It’s a reminder that computer programs produce outputs by processing, even if large learning models like ChatGPT can also synthesise what they process.
Would it matter if we were told that ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ had actually been written by a computer? I think it would, because I think intent matters in art, although there’s not enough time or space to explore this here today.
(It’s a curiosity, at least, that although Morgan’s work is informed by a keen interest in science and technology and its impact on society (for personal reasons I am particularly fond of his sequence ‘From The Video Box’), he never used a computer himself.)
By the mid-‘60s, there was both curiosity and concern about how the computer would change our lives, although the microprocessor hadn’t quite been invented yet, nor the protocols that defined the internet.
The computers were still the big floor-to-ceiling mainframes you see in films of the time, on which you had to book time to run your program (and come back next week if you had a coding error).
Often you see the signs of these changes in culture before you see them in organisations, as I’ve written about before:
The Hollywood comedy, Desk Set, in which Spencer Tracy is sent to automate Katharine Hepburn’s library, dates from 1957. The Berkeley Free Speech movement, in 1964, proclaimed "We are not punch cards."
Around the same time, from an article about the history of the computer punch card, there’s a drawing from an advertisement for a computer dating service.
(Figure 6. Drawing from advertisement for computer dating, from The Daily Californian, October 18, 1966)
Morgan’s computer also wrote a second Christmas card, also in 1965, but this time there were gremlins in the works. The computer was struggling a bit. It wasn’t such a jolly experience. And somewhere in the space between these two poems, published more than fifty years ago, is a lot of the discourse we have had ever since about the social impact of computers and computing.
(The Computer’s Second Christmas Card’, 1968, by (C) Edwin Morgan, published in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1990). Via The Edwin Morgan Trust.)
2: Songs of the season
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m mildly obsessive about Christmas songs (in 2021, here; in 2022, here). So you can imagine how my heart leapt when I saw a post by Jon Elledge, outside of his Substack paywall, headlined ‘Every dumb thought I have ever had about Christmas songs’.
It does exactly what the headline says: it lists some dumb thoughts he’s had about the mainstream Christmas songs that we can’t escape from in December.
(At the World Santa Claus Congress, Copenhagen, 2013. Photo by Leif Jørgensen. CC BY-SA 3.0)
I’ve pulled out a few of these here. By way of the easiest Christmas quiz you’ll get all year, do identify them from the description. (The answers are in the footnotes1).
(4) Actually, there will be snow in Africa this Christmas time, mostly in the Atlas mountains which stretch for around 2,500km across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Closer to the location of the 1983-5 famine, December is also sometimes a snowy season on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. This is probably not the most problematic thing about Band Aid, if we’re honest, but this is a reminder that Africa is not a country, but a continent, containing at least 54 of the things...
(6) The snow man doesn’t bring the snow. The snow man is a product of the snow. Roy Wood and Wizzard are thinking of rain man...
(9) Despite the fact that ***** **** ********* has been filling Noddy Holder’s bank account for nearly half a century now, there is no version of the Santa story in which fairies keep him sober for a day. Santa doesn’t have any fairies. He is quite famous, indeed, for having a staff composed entirely of elves.
(10) I’m not sure where Paul McCartney got the idea that the children practice singing Christmas songs all year round? That sounds like it would be hellish for both parents and teachers...
(13) A spaceman did not come travelling to visit Bethlehem in any of the four gospels. What’s happened here is that Chris de Burgh has confused the New Testament with the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken...
(16) In my notes I have an exhortation to Kate Bush that “December is if anything more magic now than ever”. I think what I was getting at here is that our modern conception of Christmas is the result of an unholy alliance of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, modern mass media and the Coca Cola Company, and that until not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, December wasn’t really that magical at all. But perhaps, given the last two years, Kate was actually on to something.
All of which gives me an excuse to mention my annual ‘off-centre’ Christmas playlist, now in its fifth year, so definitely a Christmas institution.
'Off-centre’ comes with groundrules: no sentimental Victorian carols, no Christmas standards, and no Xmas chart hits, at least unless they are mutilated, mangled, or re-interpreted in an inventive or interesting way. All other seasonal songs, including songs about being cold, are welcome.
It is, I hope, the sort of thing an algorithm might struggle with. In fact, Spotify demonstrates this every time it suggests songs that I might like to add to the playlist.
And: Merry Chrysanthemum!
j2t#410
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4. Band Aid, Do They Know It’s Christmas: 6. Roy Wood and Wizzard, I Wish It Could Be Xmas Everyday: 9. Slade, Merry Xmas Everybody: 10. Paul McCartney, Simply Having A Wonderful Xmas Time: (13) Chris de Burgh, A Spaceman Came Travelling: 16. Kate Bush, Christmas Will Be Magic Again.