Tag Archives: Rudyard Kipling

Music

Amelia sings ‘Recessional’

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You probably know about “Amelia,” the purple-haired AI girl created by the British thought police as a character in a propaganda video game. The idea was to present a despicable, bigoted character everybody would hate. Instead, thousands of people embraced her and elevated her to hero status in scores of blessed violations of copyright.

There’s a content creator called Epochalypse which puts Amelia to brilliant use. They’ve made her a singer, doing original songs (now and then), traditional British folk songs (more often), and arrangements of poems by Rudyard Kipling (to especially powerful effect). I, personally, can’t get enough of them.

Above, Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

And I’ll address a possible objection right here — Amelia is an AI creation. I am on record as a foe of AI. Is that not hypocritical?

My answer: Maybe. I’m certainly capable of hypocrisy.

But let me make my position clear: I have credentials in the AI wars. I’m a genuine wounded veteran, someone who lost his living to the technology.

But I try not to be ruled by anger. AI is a tool — a very powerful one, but still a tool. And when I see a tool well-used (as it is here), I reserve the right to praise the tool-wielders.

We will not win the culture wars by refusing to use the tools at our disposal. Feelings don’t come into it. Ethics yes, feelings no.

Have a good weekend.

(I hope I’m not out of line in adding an appeal for prayer. Our friend David Llewellyn Dodds, the Inklings scholar who frequently ornaments our comments section, is having health problems. If you’d lift up a prayer for him, it would be a good thing.)

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Kipling Didn’t Look Back

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How Kipling seemed to a brilliant contemporary is shown by the parody “PC X36” in Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912). The narrator’s policeman friend Judlip spotted an old man with “a hoary white beard, a red ulster with the hood up, and what looked like a sack over his shoulder” standing on a rooftop.

Ordering him down to the street, the constable grabbed his collar. “The captive snivelled something about peace on earth, good will toward men. ‘Yuss,’ said Judlip.

‘That’s in the Noo Testament, ain’t it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin’ for old gents an’ young ladies. But it ain’t included in the librery o’ the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old Testament – O T, ’ot. An’ ’ot you’ll get it. Hup with that sack, an’ quick march!’ ”

Beerbohm is right about the often annoying rendering of dialect and the petty violence, but he puts his finger on a more important feature of Kipling’s world: its rejection of Christianity. Kipling lost all that in the Southsea boarding house.

Christopher Howse describes the hard edges of Rudyard Kipling and some of the reasons he became that way. Like his rejection of the gospel, Kipling cut ties with his past repeatedly.