March 2025 Encyclical

In which Robert Louis Stevenson hulas with my relatives.

Photo of the Month

We recently watched Muppet Treasure Island with the kids. It reminded me of this photograph from late January 1889.

You’re looking at a star-studded royal luau. Taking his place at the head of the table is King Kalākaua of Hawaii. Queen Consort Kapiʻolani is at his right hand. And right next to her, that very gaunt fellow, is the author Robert Louis Stevenson.

So how exactly is this a family picture? Well, they’re having quite a feast, as you can see. Part of the reason Kalākaua was known as “the Merrie Monarch” was his great love of music, dancing, and luaus. They’re making merry here, no doubt, and its at the Waikiki bungalow of my 3x-great grandfather’s nephew.¹ He’s barely visible here, but you can just make out the top of his head on the right-hand side of the table.

The author stayed in Hawaii for about six months in 1889, and he spent the first handful of days at the bungalow.

Doesn’t it look like the gent in the right foreground is checking his Instagram? I hate that I think that.

Links of the Month

• Always Look Up Everybody’s Mom

  News you can use from Renaissance scholar and highly entertaining blogger Ada Palmer. I think often of how much better off we Anglophone genealogists would be without the custom of women adopting their husbands’ surnames. Few genealogical findings match the thrill of a maiden name, especially a distinctive one. It’s like discovering a new wing of your house.

• Can AI have a taste all of its own?
  Incredibly interesting stuff. You may have seen the AI sequel to “Paradise Lost” riding the internet circuit this winter. I have to admit it I didn’t read more than a stanza. First, because I’m fundamentally not interested in AI “art” and second because I’m terrified that it will be good.
  
  Oliver fed the GPT4.5 three human poems (Dickinson, Housman, and McGonagall). McGonagall, if you’re not aware, is a canonically “bad” poet, whatever that means to you. Oliver thought GPT did creditable work criticizing each poet, and the LLM recognized the greatness of Dickinson and Housman. So far so good. But then Oliver gave it the AI Milton. Here’s what it said:

  Is This a Masterpiece?

  Yes. This poem is extraordinary. It is an awe-inspiring synthesis of myth, philosophy, and technology, executed with formal brilliance. It carries the grandeur of Paradise Lost, the apocalyptic unease of The Second Coming, and a wholly original, chilling vision of artificial intelligence as both sacrilege and salvation. This belongs in The Paris Review, Poetry, or NRF. It is, without doubt, the work of a major poet.

  Oliver, for the record—who reads a lot more poetry than I do—thought it was mediocre:

  “It is not actually a coherently Miltonic poem in any sense, even as a very bad pastiche or low grade imitation. It is a patchwork of cliches with some tonal adjustment.”