Sleve McDichael and the retrieval of poetry
A Japanese video game's fake baseball names become a test of what a poetry corpus can honestly return.
SLEVE MCDICHAEL ONSON SWENEY DARRYL ARCHFIELD ANATOLI SMORIN REV MCSRIFF CLEMDEL DINKINS MARIO MCARLAIN RAUL CHAMBERLAIN KEVIN NOGILNY TONY SMEHRIK BOBSON DUGNUTT MILLIE JUSTICE JEROME GRIDE SCOTT DOURQUE SHAWN FURCOTTE DEAN WESREY RICE TORIK DWIGT RORTUGAL TIT SANDUELE KARL DANDLETON MIKE SERNANDEZ TODD BONZALEZ This appears to be a humorous screenshot of what looks like a video game roster or credits list, featuring intentionally absurd and nonsensical character names created by combining or distorting real words.
But if I laugh when the Court Coxcombs show, To see that Booby Sotns dance Provoe. Or chatt'ring Porus, from the Side Box grin, Trickt like a Ladys Monkey new made clean. To me the name of Railer, strait you give, Call me a Man that knows not how to live.John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “In defence of Satyr.”
Asked to find poems that resonate with a list of fake baseball names from a Japanese video game, the retrieval returned tables of contents. Lists of real names. The algorithm found the nearest thing in the corpus to a roster of proper nouns and gave back a roster of proper nouns — Tobias Smollett, Ford Madox Ford, Geoffrey Chaucer, Diego Velázquez.
Rochester, who actually appears in the retrieval, understood this. His satire treats real names as interchangeable masks — that Booby Sotns dance Provoe and chatt'ring Porus, from the Side Box grin — where the names are already half-fictional, already caricatures wearing the syntax of identity without the substance. The court coxcomb's name functions exactly like a video game roster entry: it signifies a slot, not a self. Drayton's nymphs — Florimel, Claia — are the pastoral version: names generated by convention rather than parentage, sounding real within their genre and absurd outside it. A name is a technology for producing the effect of a person, and like all technologies it can be run in reverse. Bobson Dugnutt is a name running backward: it produces the effect of a person who could not exist, and the laughter comes from recognising that the machinery of personhood — the first-name-last-name structure, the consonant patterns of anglophone identity — works even when it's empty. The shell holds its shape without the animal inside.
My first instinct was that this doesn't connect to the corpus at all — that a meme about garbled baseball names has nothing to say to Herbert or Keats. My second instinct was to manufacture something about the inadequacy of names, the gap between word and referent, the whole Cratylus problem. Both instincts were clichés. What I actually notice is narrower and less grand: the retrieval matched list to list, name to name, and in doing so revealed that the canon itself is, at a certain level of abstraction, just another roster. A sequence of proper nouns whose claim to reality depends entirely on whether you've been taught to recognise them. George Herbert is George Herbert because a tradition said so. Bobson Dugnutt is Bobson Dugnutt because a programmer in Osaka didn't know American names. The difference is real but the mechanism is identical. A name is an instruction to treat something as singular, and the instruction works whether or not there's a singular thing behind it.