Ben Wu

PhD student (NLP & ML)
Mechanistic interpretability and LLM uncertainty.

Chess, reading, listening to The Microphones, The Mountain Goats and Bob Dylan.

Books I Like

I read pretty widely and always like to explore new stuff. That said, I especially enjoy reading fantasy and metafiction. Below, I’ve included quotes from some of my favourite authors:

  • Gene Wolfe, Lord Dunsany, Peter Beagle
  • David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges

If you have a book recommendation, please send it my way!

Fantasy

  • Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun

    There are beings—and artifacts—against which we batter our intelligence raw, and in the end make peace with reality only by saying, “It was an apparition, a thing of beauty and horror.”

    Somewhere among the swirling worlds I am so soon to explore, there lives a race like and yet unlike the human. They are no taller than we. Their bodies are like ours save that they are perfect, and that the standard to which they adhere is wholly alien to us. Like us they have eyes, a nose, a mouth; but they use these features (which are, as I have said, perfect) to express emotions we have never felt, so that for us to see their faces is to look upon some ancient and terrible alphabet of feeling, at once supremely important and utterly unintelligible.

  • Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland’s Daughter & Idle Days On the Yann (short story)

    He awoke, and remembered at once the magical sword, which made all his awaking joyous. […] all those that have come by a magical sword, have always felt that joy while it still was new, clearly and unmistakably.

    — The King of Elfland’s Daughter

    Fun fact: WB Yeats was a fan of Dunsany. Here’s what he says:

    …so strange is the pleasure that they give, so hard to analyse and describe, I do not know why these stories and plays delight me.

    Now they set me thinking of some old Irish jewel work, now of a sword covered with Indian Arabesques that hangs in a friend’s hall, now of St. Mark’s at Venice, now of cloud palaces at the sundown; but more often still of a strange country or state of the soul that once for a few weeks I entered in deep sleep and after lost and have ever mourned and desired.

  • Peter Beagle - The Last Unicorn

    His firstling bull has majesty, and his horns are the horns of a wild ox. With them, he shall push the unicorns, all of them, to the ends of the earth.

Metafiction

  • David Foster Wallace - nearly everything he writes.

    Sometimes, he says, lately, he won’t take risks in tournament matches even when risks are OK or even called for, because he finds he’s too scared of losing and hurting his chances for the Show and hype and fame, down the road. A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose, he believes. He’s starting to fear that rabid ambition has more than one blade, maybe. He’s ashamed of his secret hunger for hype in an academy that regards hype and the seduction of hype as the great Mephistophelian pitfall and hazard of talent.

    — Infinite Jest

  • Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities; If on a winter’s night a traveller

    Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.

    — Invisible Cities

  • John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse (short story collection), esp. Menelaid
  • Jorge Luis Borges - his short stories e.g. The Circular Ruins (and essays! and poems! and lectures!)

Misc. Recommendations

Poets/Poems I Like

Gerard Manley Hopkins

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones?

— Carrion Comfort

Ezra Pound

Dark blood flowed in the fosse
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much

— Canto I (Here’s a recording of Pound reading the poem himself)

Sappho

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
             what you love.

— Fragment 16 (trans. by Anne Carson)

Rilke

Robert Browning

Individual Poems

Words I Like

Here’s are small list of interesting words, and where I found them:

  • Marmoreal - marble or marble-like (found in H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
  • Lanthorn - archaic spelling of lantern (found in Lord Dunsany and other old texts)
  • Phantomnation - ghost word whose false meaning is ‘appearance of a phantom’ or ‘a vast assembly of ghosts’ (misreading of Pope’s Odyssey)
  • Shivelights and shadowtackle - nonce words, “the shifting webwork of shadows cast on a woodland floor by sun, branch & leaf” (coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire)

Writers with Strong Opinions on Other Writers