“Want a Miracle? Wish for It, and Be Ready to Bear It”
What do your Christmas and our Christmas have in common? This holiday goes far beyond the commercial, the feasting, the exhausting bustle. It is a state of mind, a meeting of past, present and future. It sounds impossible to gather the many vivid faces of the holiday in one place. Yet that is exactly what the recently published anthology Nashata Koleda (Our Christmas) does. In it, Zachary Karabashliev brings together stories by some of the most popular authors of different generations, genres and worldviews. “The anthology is like an apartment building on a cold, snowy December evening, here to remind us that miracles are possible,” the cover reads. This book is the reason we meet on the eve of the warmest of holidays, to reflect on the past and the future in a conversation we will, it turns out, continue in 78 years. About miracles, about the new beginning of the Nativity and the doors it opens. About the meaningful stories that have gathered us around the family table from prehistoric to digital times.
02What Heals the Wounds of History?
Today history unites and divides us, inflames and stirs us as never before—not least because “who controls the past controls the future.” In his latest novel, Rana (Wound), Zachary Karabashliev turns to Bulgarian history and to some of its most dramatic and important moments: the wounds the past inflicts on us, and the ancestors whose path we continue. We met again to talk about the past, its powerful stories, its lessons, and what brings us together and what drives us apart.
03Quiz: How Well Do You Know Bulgarian History? Will ChatGPT Trip You Up?
15 widely accepted claims about Bulgarian history and 15 invented by artificial intelligence. Can you tell them apart? Which is historical fact and which is nonsense?
04How DALL·E “Read” Beloved Bulgarian Books
The Chukchi is no reader, he’s a writer, as the old Soviet joke goes. But what about ChatGPT? Time for another fascinating experiment to show what today’s algorithms can do, both at creating images and at understanding context. I will ask DALL·E 3, part of the paid version of ChatGPT, to illustrate classic works of Bulgarian literature from different periods. Why is this interesting? It will show how well the large language model works in Bulgarian and how far it recognizes some of our undisputed classics. And, not least, because… might it show us some unexpected, different, striking points of view? Could we speak of some form of collective unconscious? Will the pictures overlap, at least in part, with the images each of us carries in our head for these books?
