The Universe of Discourse

Fri, 07 Mar 2025

Claude

My relationship with Claude has its ups and downs, and I'm still trying to figure out what to use it for and what not. It's great at rewriting my job application cover letters to sound less like an awkward nerd.

Last week I was in the supermarket and decided to try asking it something I've been wondering for a long time:

MJD: What is the song "Mercy Street” about? What is the connection with Anne Sexton? Who is "Mary"?

I thought Claude might do well with this. I had had a conversation with it a while back about Pixies songs, which I was satisfied with. But this time Claude let me down:

Claude: … The "Mary" referenced in the song is likely Mary Gray Staples, who was the name of Sexton's childhood doll. …

(I thought: What? Am I supposed to believe that

Dreaming of the tenderness
The tremble in the hips
Of kissing Mary's lips

is about a doll?)

MJD: Mary Gray Staples is an unusual name for a doll. Are you sure about that?

Claude: You're right to question this - I made an error. Mary Gray was actually Anne Sexton's great-aunt, not the name of her doll. … The doll references in Gabriel's song likely connect to Sexton's imagery in other poems, but Mary specifically refers to her great-aunt.

MJD: I don't remember a doll in Gabriel's song.

Claude: You're absolutely right - I apologize for the error. There isn't actually a reference to a doll in Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" lyrics. … The "Mary" referenced in the song is indeed Anne Sexton's great-aunt Mary Gray…

MJD: Are you sure? Wikipedia says that Mary Gray Staples was the birth name of Sexton's mother.

Claude: You're absolutely right, and I apologize for the confusion. …

Claude just flubbed over and over.

I wonder if the grammatical error in “Mary Gray Staples, who was the name of …” is a kind of a tell? Perhaps Claude is fabricating, by stitching together parts of two unrelated sentences that it read somewhere, one with “Mary Gray Staples, who was…” and the other “… was the name of…”? Probably it's not that simple, but the grammatical error is striking.

Anyway, this was very annoying because I tend to remember things like this long past the time when I remember where I heard them. Ten years from now I might remember that Anne Sexton once had a doll with a very weird name.

Merle Miller

A while back I read Merle Miller's book Plain Speaking. It's an edited digest of a series of interviews Miller did with former President Truman in 1962, at his home in Independence, Missouri. The interviews were originally intended to be for a TV series, but when that fell through Miller turned them into a book. In many ways it's a really good book. I enjoyed it a lot, read it at least twice, and a good deal of it stuck in my head.

But I can't recommend it, because it has a terrible flaw. There have been credible accusations that Miller changed some of the things that Truman said, embellished or rephrased many others, that he tarted up Truman's language, and that he made up some conversations entirely.

So now whenever I remember something that I think Truman said, I have to stop and try to remember if it was from Miller. Did Truman really say that it was the worst thing in the world when records were destroyed? I'm sure I read it in Miller, so, uhh… maybe?

Miller recounts a discussion in which Truman says he is pretty sure that President Grant had never read the Constitution. Later, Miller says, he asked Truman if he thought that Nixon had read the Constitution, and reports that Truman's reply was:

I don't know. I don't know. But I'll tell you this. If he has, he doesn't understand it.

Great story! I have often wanted to repeat it. But I don't, because for all I know it never happened.

(I've often thought of this, in years past, and whatever Nixon's faults you could at least wonder what the answer was. Nobody would need to ask this about the current guy, because the answer is so clear.)

Miller, quotes Truman's remarks about Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, “It isn't so much that he's a bad man. It's just that he's such a dumb son of a bitch.” Did Truman actually say that? Did he just imply it? Did he say anything like it? Uhhh… maybe?

There's a fun anecdote about the White House butler learning to make an Old-fashioned cocktail in the way the Trumans preferred. (The usual recipe involves whiskey, sugar, fresh fruit, and bitters.) After several attempts the butler converged on the Trumans' preferred recipe, of mostly straight bourbon. Hmm, is that something I heard from Merle Miller? I don't remember.

There's a famous story about how Paul Hume, music critic for the Washington Post, savaged an performance of Truman's daughter Margaret, and how Truman sent him an infamous letter, very un-presidential, that supposedly contained the paragraph:

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beef steak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

Miller reports that he asked Truman about this, and Truman's blunt response: “I said I'd kick his nuts out.” Or so claims Miller, anyway.

I've read Truman's memoirs. Volume I, about the immediate postwar years, is fascinating; Volume II is much less so. They contain many detailed accounts of the intransigence of the Soviets and their foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, namesake of the Molotov Cocktail. Probably 95% of what I remember Truman saying is from those memoirs, direct from Truman himself. But some of it must be from Plain Speaking. And I don't know any longer which 5% it is.

As they say, an ice cream sundae with a turd in it isn't 95% ice cream, it's 100% shit. Merle Miller shit in the ice cream sundae of my years of reading of Truman and the Truman administrations.

Now Claude has done the same. And if I let it, Claude will keep doing it to me. Claude caga en la leche.

Addendum

The Truman Library now has the recordings of those interviews available online. I could conceivably listen to them all and find out for myself which things went as Miller said.

So there may yet be a happy ending, thanks to the Wonders of the Internet! I dream of someday going through those interviews and producing an annotated edition of Plain Speaking.

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