Since gaining temporary membership of the golf reporting community recently, thanks to events in Doonbeg, I have been attracting a whole new kind of press release.
Typical of the genre is an email from a company in Boston, headlined “Shane Lowry’s win – what his equipment says about shaft fitting”.
It goes on to ask if I might be interested in interviewing the firm’s experts on such issues as “why shaft weight and profile can mean as much as the clubhead”, “what a 130-gram X-flex set-up tells us” and how to “balance launch, spin, dispersion, feel, and swing speed when matching a player to a shaft”.
Fascinating as that all sounds, it’s of limited use in my line of work. The chances of me becoming a full-time golf correspondent at this stage are minimal. Beyond a youthful flirtation with pitch and putt, in fact, I’ve never even played the game.
Strange as it seems, Doonbeg may have been the first time I ever stood on a full golf course – at least since I was a schoolboy, and that had nothing to do with golf.
Back then, I used to help a greyhound-training neighbour, my jobs for whom included the occasional impersonation of a hare. Every day before school, we would drive with his two racing dogs to the local nine-hole golf course. There I would sprint up the fairway of a par-five while, after giving me a good start, the neighbour would release the hounds.
Luckily, they never mistook me for an actual hare, although there may have been some lingering post-traumatic stress disorder when I saw the first tee in Doonbeg. As for Shane Lowry’s equipment, my non-expert opinion is that he was in such a vein of form that weekend, he could have played with a golf bag full of hurleys and still won.
Back in the mailbox, meanwhile, around the same time, I also received a more typical invitation, from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). And yet, remarkably, it turned out that the two emails were not unrelated.
This one was from David Stifter, professor of Celtic studies at DIAS, drawing my attention to a new edition of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (St Brendan’s Voyage), translated from the ninth-century original, and to a daylong conference accompanying publication where academic specialists will discuss the book.
On the face of it, it seems a very different subject from that of Shane Lowry’s equipment at Doonbeg. But there is a link because, as revealed by my colleague Ronan McGreevy on Monday, this book was part of the equipment used by President Catherine Connolly when teeing up Donald Trump’s two-day twist.
Mystery now surrounds the question of why she chose it as a gift for a golf-obsessed US president who doesn’t read much.
It weighs 700g and may or may not have an X-flex set-up, but after an event that involved more spin than a Shane Lowry bunker shot, it has now joined the general discussion about who won the presidential head-to-head and who if anyone got shafted.
As for the book’s own merits, those are said to be very great. Stifter predicts it will become the standard edition of what is “perhaps the most impactful text ever written in Ireland, widely surpassing, for example, Ulysses …”
Speaking of James Joyce’s influence, it was somehow no surprise to read in recent days that he is now increasingly affecting the way AI thinks and writes.
According to researchers in New York, as reported by the Guardian, AI models have started to communicate “in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between [Joyce’s] Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon”.
A language expert quoted in the piece also named another Irish novelist as part-model for the new lingo. It’s “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien”, he said. “There’s an Irish surrealist quality to all this.”
The dialect used by AI included constructions such as the following: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.”
Demurrage, we’re told, is a kind of wealth tax (a demurrage of inconvenience for some). But what the rest of that sentence means is anyone’s guess.
I’m reminded of a joke the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper once made about another new dialect, “Globish”, the limited form of English now used to conduct business meetings around the world.
Its tiny, dry vocabulary has no room for colourful or eccentric speech. So being a native English speaker is not always an advantage at such meetings. Or, as Kuper put it, “Nobody understands the Irish.”
Still, surreal or not, it seems harsh to lump Flann O’Brien – who wrote in simple if comically weird English – with Finnegans Wake.
Maybe while mimicking the latter, AI will eventually be able to tell us what the book is about. In the meantime, O’Brien could have been describing the Wake when he had the bewildered narrator of The Third Policeman say to Sergeant Pluck: “Your talk is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”