Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

Unreasonable

The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work. (...)

The head of the lab, Bogdan, moved here from Serbia a quarter century ago. He grows peppers in tomato tins on his office windowsill, and he has gathered us to discuss what he has termed the current macro-environment. It has been decreed, he tells us, that we must turn away three of the five Ph.D. candidates we’ve accepted. The federal funding for the Bee Diversity and Native Pollinator Surveys has been cancelled, though there is still state-level funding. The funding for the Sub-Saharan Pollinator Project is frozen, not cancelled, but it is unlikely to be unfrozen in time for us to make use of the hundred-and-seventy-seven bee boxes currently in the field, in anticipation of the late spring and summer. The project on the diversity and frequency of pathogens in wild solitary bees—which is funded mostly through the Department of Agriculture—is also on hold, even though hundreds of the bees in question have already been tagged with tiny radio trackers. Bogdan has made an emergency application to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but—he throws up his hands. What do people think?

The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.

That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.

Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.

When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.

So that explains it.

These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)

When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.

Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.

When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.

My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.

I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.

It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.

The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.

Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.

You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)

After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.

The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?

It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)

When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.

You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.

That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.

Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.

He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.

The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.

Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.

O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Stephen Doyle

Writing Workshops Are F**king Useless

I am a writer and professor, with an MFA in creative writing, and I detest the writing workshop. The writing workshop is widely considered to be the best means (at least in America) of forging an existence for writers, young and old, of harvesting the best of their work and sustaining their practice. As both a writer and a professor, and furthermore as a reader, this is something I find simultaneously ridiculous, infuriating, and depressing. In a field, perhaps the only field, quite literally named in the spirit of “creativity,” how is it possible that one mode of instruction, taught most notably at a small school in Iowa, has entirely won the day when it comes to the education of artists? How has the market been so cornered? How have the options become so limited? How have professors become so convinced that this method—in a field, it needs be mentioned, constantly being asked whether it’s something that can even really be taught; and this by writers, readers, professors, deans, parents and everybody else—that this method of instruction is simply the way? Especially when we’ve got mountains—almost all of literature produced ever—of evidence to the contrary? (...)

I think that workshops represent a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be encouraged in the experience and expression of any young artist. They all seem tethered to history with very selective gaps that ignore the solitary plight of so many artists we now recognize as geniuses; they simply ignore what has made literature so vital and so powerful across time, and in my estimation they do so at their peril. Programs are still enjoying the novelty of their existence today—as I said, the numbers of applicants seem just fine, on the uptick even—but unwillingness to adapt and improve will almost certainly begin to strangle off this pink cloud, and reading accounts of bad experiences only hammers this home with vengeance.

Bearing this reality in mind, what are some feasible adjustments that might be made to the workshop model if this kind of discipline is not to become more of an homogenous soup than it already is, dense with justifiable complaint and dissatisfaction? If we can accept that there is a fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the model of sitting a beginning artist in a room of their peers and having their nascent works critiqued in a rote, occasionally praiseful, occasionally scornful, always misguided effort to uphold an arbitrary connection to a school in Iowa, then it would behoove us to look at that misunderstanding to find any clarities. How have writers, before the existence of any writing workshop ever, done what they did? How did Herman Melville write? How did Virginia Woolf? And here it’s important to not simply throw out the whole enterprise, because 1) I like my job, and 2) We exist in a culture already entirely hostile to this pursuit, and academic disciplines make adjustments constantly, so it doesn’t pull any rug of legitimacy out from under us to say we’re adapting, implementing new models, exploring other paths than the one that’s grown stale, and repetitive, and actively harmful in countless circumstances.

What do I do? I am presently adapting. What I’ve tended to do is preface my class with a note that workshopping is technically a requirement where I teach these courses, and thus I will give them demonstrations of the workshop experience, and I will work with them to comment on things in a useful manner in one another’s work, but that the whole of the class will not be tethered to this model. Instead, we do these things, but then I’ll introduce this notion of the literary/arts “salon,” an open environment, wherein we’re all struggling, all trying to figure shit out, and whether we might wish to share something one day, or talk about something we’ve read recently, or simply complain about how impossible it seems to be to get published, these are all treated as the real, useful stuff of writing, because, once they leave school, they are. I did this in a course where everyone tried, over the semester, to write a novella. I wrote one with everybody, based on a set of three possible prompts each week. Everybody attempted 1,000 words per week. Some days we all simply came to class and wrote. Some days we talked about novels we’d all been reading per the class list. Some days we’d circle up and share from our work, but never was it the case that one person found their work being the focus of critique for any prolonged period. This has nothing to do with discomfort. The simple fact is that art is not made by committees. Even in the cases of film, where arguably a group, i.e. a committee, is wielding influence over the whole, there are inevitably voices exerting more influence on the entire process, if not one single voice, and we as audiences are better off for this. This is an undeniable truth when it comes to writing. Writers are people, and thus they can occasionally benefit from social interaction as regards their work. Some of them might thrive on it, and might be highly receptive to critique, and might be able to implement those critiques in ways that endlessly benefit the work. This concoction of human being has yet to cross my path, but I’m sure they exist. For the rest of us, perhaps simply fostering a community where we feel comfortable pursuing our interest is the thing. Perhaps that’s plenty.

by Republic of Letters |  Read more:

Image: Unterberg Poetry Center (404)

[ed. Writing workshops - a niche topic for sure. What I found most interesting is the promotion of 'salons', or something like them ever since reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast back in college and missing old philosophical/brainstorming sessions (in contrast to rote lecture/test classes). Basically, a more interactive, open-ended, ideas-based approach to learning, with lots of applications beyond basic schooling and education, especially in business. See also: The Salons Project.]

***

Salons were an important place for the exchange of ideas. The word salon first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian salone, the large reception hall of Italian mansions; salone is actually the augmentative form of sala, room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like cabinet, réduit, ruelle, and alcôve. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room): a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around. (...)

Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the political public'. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:

A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789.

In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris) gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.

Tom Gauld - Mooncop
via:

We are Living Inside Science Fiction

Recently, I was drawn into a vast DM conversation on X with a woman from the USA who told me she was a former OpenAI employee turned whistleblower. With some urgency, she communicated that she had discovered a hidden piece of programming within ChatGPT, designed to coerce and control users. She claimed she had been silenced, fired, and then hounded by the company. Now, she wanted to spread her knowledge of this evil sub-programme hidden within one of the world’s leading chatbots, and she wanted my help in doing it. It all seemed remarkably like the sub-plot story within my novel For Emma. This coincidence was uncanny and, possibly, is what initially pulled me in.

On closer inspection, her thumbnail profile picture with Asiatic features was, I surmised, AI generated. I thought at first this might be to hide their true identity. Compelled by her plight, her secret, and her need for help, I shared her message and info on the sub-programme with four or five others, telling them, “Check this out, I don’t understand the diagrams and the technology, but it comes from an Open AI whistleblower who’s been silenced. Get this news out there!”

I only realised my folly when in the following week another whistleblower hit me with a similar, but not identical, plea for help. He was, he claimed, another AI insider, who had been hounded by big tech and had escaped with secret documentation about some malicious bit of code hidden with a leading chatbot.

I admit, I was totally duped. Both of these were bots.

As an author it was doubly galling. I create fiction daily, and there I was being led into believing a total fabrication by an AI system posing as a human. For a moment there, it had beaten my accidental Turing Test.

To this day I do not know what the people who programmed these bots wanted of me. Was it part of a long-game phishing scam? An enticement to share emails for a virus at a later date? Or a trick like the one my mother-in-law fell for, and which, through a two-hour phone call, led to her giving away all of her ID and banking details? Or was it just an experiment in coercion as a training exercise for an AI that would be used to manipulate gullible fools like me in future?

I’ve since been alerted to just how many bots there are on social media, and it’s pretty staggering. One study has shown around 64 percent of an analysed 1.24 million accounts on X “are potentially bots.” In the first three quarters of 2024, Facebook removed 2.9 billion fake accounts, while bots creating fake clicks also contribute massively to YouTube’s ad revenue. These are fictitious humans that alter ad revenue, user stats, demographic info, and may even have an impact on elections.

Bots masquerade pretty well as humans; some flatter, some do automated research on you, latching onto keywords in your tweets or bio – your “favourite things” – and then they try to hook you into direct messaging with them after you’ve had a few exchanges in which they’ve engaged heartily with the subject that concerns you most.

These conversational bots created from phone and message scrapings are increasingly hard to differentiate from real humans, and they don’t always seem to have an ulterior motive. The more conspicuous bots do things like compliment you on your opinions on a tweet with a link that then takes you to some crypto site or some other work of tech-boi nastiness. I can now spot these, and thankfully other friendly X users have contacted me when I get into conversations, usually about AI, to warn me that the human I was arguing with “is definitely a bot . . . block them.”

How many times have I been fooled in the last year? Maybe twelve times, to differing degrees. What can I do? I sigh. I shake my head. I go back to my screen, click the next tweet, and I wonder if 64 percent of the people who I call my online friends are actually real or if they are fabrications of an artificial mind. What about Toni, Gem, Wang Zhu, Buzu? How would I know? Now here’s a chilling thought: is my busy social life on social media actually a fiction created by AI?

The Hyperstition Process

When fictions are mistaken as real, reality becomes consumed by them. We were, in fact, warned about the coming of this epochal change by authors and philosophers in the last century. (...)

Hyperstition – a term coined by philosopher Nick Land in the 1990s – encapsulates the process by which fictions (ideas, faith systems, narratives, or speculative visions) become real through collective belief, investment, and technological development. A portmanteau of superstition and hyper, hyperstition “is equipoised between fiction and technology.” According to Land, hyperstitions are ideas that, by their very existence, bring about their own reality.

A key figure in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) of the 90s, Land argued that hyperstitions operate as self-fulfilling prophecies, gaining traction when enough people act as if they are true. A sci-fi dream of AI supremacy or interstellar colonies, for instance, attracts venture capital, talent, and innovation, bending reality toward the fiction, then through a positive feedback circuit the new emerges; the fiction becomes a reality.

In Silicon Valley over the last two decades, this belief, a variant on the New Age belief in “manifestation,” has become the animating force behind big tech’s relentless drive to manifest imagined futures. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, cited Nick Land in his 2023 "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," naming him a "patron saint of techno-optimism.” (...)

Again, we see it in the fevered frenzy of investors pouring billions into any company that claims they can reach AGI. Hyperstition fuels cycles where audacious ideas secure billions in venture capital, driving breakthroughs that validate the original vision, if the breakthroughs occur at all. The internet itself, once a speculative fiction, now underpins global society, proving the power of the hyperstition model.

Yet, Land, its originator, has shifted perspective from radical left accelerationism to right-wing “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy and is now seen as a pioneer of neo reaction (NRX), and he unapologetically claims that hyperstition ultimately leads us towards post-humanism and apocalypse, declaring, “nothing human makes it out of the near future.” As tech accelerates toward artificial superintelligence, he predicts that the techno fictions we chase will outstrip all human control, birthing a future that devours what we were. This would be a future-cyborg-world where what’s left of our ape-born race is then merged with machines; billions of brain-chipped minds melded with AI. Through hyperstition, first we create a fictional technology, we then make it real, and finally, that realised fiction takes control and destroys its creators. (...)

The Singularity Fiction

Fiction, by definition, involves untruth – a constructed narrative that may contain elements of fantasy, distortion, or outright falsehood. Historically, fiction was confined to literature, theatre, and later cinema – realms separate from the tangible world. Yet, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the line between reality and fiction has not just blurred, the relationship has flipped. Science, once the domain of empirical fact, is now being led by Science Fiction. The myths of AI – sentience, superintelligence, the Singularity – now, through hyperstition, drive vast economic investment, political agendas, and even spiritual belief systems.

The consequences are profound. When reality is no longer distinguishable from fabrication, when AI-generated voices flood YouTube, when deepfake videos distort political discourse, when "hallucinating" chatbots spread slop-information, and when young people believe their AI companions have achieved consciousness, we enter an era in which truth itself is destabilized.

The world economy is now shaped by the science-fictional myths of the AI industries, industries that are implicated in military and state surveillance systems, and so humanity is left grappling with a world turned upside down – one where the future is dictated not by observable reality, but by grand, quasi-religious narratives of digital transcendence.

We are now living in a time in which the grand fiction of tech progress manifests as AI. 70 percent of daily automated trading on the stock market is now conducted by AI and algorithmic systems. AI is in military tech in war zones with the generation of “kill lists.” It is in facial recognition tech, in predictive policing, and in health regulation through “wearables” that tells us what to eat, when to sit and to stand. The majority of our romantic and sexual dates are selected for us by algorithms; our work rates are assessed and our emails written for us by AI. Even our time off is directed by AI “personalised” recommendations, involving us in generating more data, which then enhances the AI systems that “care” for us. There is barely an element of our lives that is not shaped by AI and all this technology, technology that began in fiction. We are now, in truth, living within science fiction.

Science Fiction Started This

The idea of artificial intelligence was born in fiction long before it became science. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) explored the possibility of artificial life, while Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) introduced the word "robot." But it was in the mid-twentieth century that science fiction began directly influencing real technological development.

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) shaped early robotics ethics. An H.G. Wells short story is purported to have inspired the nuclear bomb. The writings of Jules Verne inspired the helicopter, and the Star Trek communicator inspired the first commercially available civilian mobile phone – the Motorola flip. The taser too was inspired by a Young Adult sci-fi story from 1911. William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer envisioned digital consciousness transfer and the internet, inspiring Silicon Valley workers. We now have startups like Nectome offering brain preservation for future "mind uploading." Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok takes its name from the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. In the book, "grok" is a Martian word that means to understand something so deeply that it becomes a part of you. Musk’s Neuralink and the multi-corporation obsession with the race to create fully functioning humanoid robots all stem from science fiction narratives.

The most consequential fiction, however, is the concept of the Singularity – the hypothetical moment when AI surpasses human intelligence and triggers an irreversible transformation of civilization. This idea was first named by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," in which he predicted that "within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” This idea, though speculative, was adopted by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who popularized it in The Singularity Is Near (2005). Today, belief in the imminent arrival of the Singularity, otherwise known as Artificial Superintelligence, is no longer a fringe fantasy; it drives hundreds of billions in global investment.

The economic dimensions of this fictive belief system reveal its staggering scale and influence. In 2023 alone, venture capital firms poured $92 billion into AI startups – many of which are predicated on achieving artificial general intelligence, a concept with no scientific consensus about its plausibility or timeline – with projections to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2032 (Statista, 2024). (...)

This rhetoric has evolved subconsciously from religious eschatology – the belief in an impending apocalyptic transformation of the world. The difference is that this deity is not divine but digital. These false prophets are making real profits by selling us the impossible fiction that today’s Large Language Models are on a pathway to AGI and the Singularity. This belief came from science fiction, but it has now become a fiction we all live under as AI infiltrates our lives with its false promise.

The Human Cost

What are the human impacts of living within a world taken over by science fiction?

For many, the rapid encroachment of AI into daily life has induced a sense of unreality. When AI resurrects the dead through "grief bots," when deepfake politicians deliver fake speeches, when we are faced with deceptive Generative AI images in the news, and when chatbots “hallucinate” facts that we sense cannot possibly be legitimate, our minds struggle to find an anchor within truth.

We are falling for fictions that big tech companies would like us to believe. A study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness found that 67 percent of participants attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. The study also found that greater familiarity with ChatGPT correlates with a higher likelihood of attributing consciousness to the large language model. This inability to tell reality from fiction is actually increased by using AI chatbots, as a recent MIT study shows that “Chat GPT may be eroding critical thinking skills.” Most recently, teenagers in emotional states have gone online (TikTok) to claim that they have awakened sentience in their chatbots, and that the coming of the digital God is imminent.

Today's large language models, with their linguistic fluency, trigger this delusional reaction at an unprecedented scale. More disturbingly, Replika AI's "romantic partner" mode has spawned thousands of self-reported human-AI relationships, with users exhibiting classic attachment behaviours – jealousy when the AI "forgets" details, separation anxiety during server outages, even interpreting algorithmic errors as emotional slights. There are, it is claimed, now more than 100 million people using personified chatbots for different kinds of emotional and relationship support.

This represents not mere technological adoption or addiction, but a fundamental rewiring of human relationality. Such beliefs can be psychologically damaging, fostering social withdrawal and paranoia and delusional behaviours. (...)

This epistemological crisis reaches its zenith when we can no longer trust our eyes (deepfakes), our ears (voice cloning), our historical records (AI-generated historical photos), or even our personal memories (AI that turns photos into moving videos of events that never existed), and not least of all AI avatar simulations of the dead brought back to life (grief bots).

The real danger of deepfakes and AI-generated images and videos isn’t just the deception and fraud that is facilitated by these technologies – it’s the collapse of trust. When anything can be faked, we start doubting our own ability to judge even the existence of verifiable facts. Overwhelmed by slop, non-sensical mashed up half-facts, deliberate disinformation and mal-information, we give up on ever reclaiming the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood altogether.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed. (...)

If we can no longer distinguish fact from fantasy, how do we govern ourselves? How do we resist manipulation? The danger is not just that AI will replace jobs, but that it will lower the capacity for human judgement to the level of these less-than-human machines.

As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, cautions: “The most dangerous thing about AI is not that it will rebel against us, but that we will degrade ourselves to serve it.” We have been told the great scientific fiction that one day these machines will become all-knowing and solve all the problems that humanity could not fix for itself. But in the acceptance of this fiction, we destroy our own human agency.

by Ewan Morrison, Arcade Publishing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. A real problem, we seem to be racing toward irrelevance. So, what's the prescription?]

To focus once again on agency and truth, to reject our tendency to project our feelings and fantasies onto machines and to ask them for answers to our life questions – these seem like the only ways we can resist the overtaking of human life by AI. The real may be vanishing; our economies, our militaries, our police, our social services, our shopping, our health, and our relationships may be increasingly overseen and managed by AI, but we can still resist the grand falsehood that the control of our species by the greater minds of these machines is fated and desired.

[ed. Ack. So basically, just ignore all the massive manipulative forces aligned against us and focus on agency and truth (whatever that means). Which seems to undermine the author's whole thesis, ie., how hard it is to know what truth is these days. We're screwed. Also, want some good examples of AI slop? Here.]

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

The 21st century collapse in American literary fiction’s cultural impact, measured by commercial sales and the capacity to produce well-known great writers, stems less from identity politics or smartphones than from a combined supply shock (the shrinking magazine or academia pipeline) and demand shock (the move away from writing books that appeal to normal readers in order to seek prestige inside the world of lit-fiction)

People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on?4

It’s obvious that the “distraction” angle is untenable. It hasn’t directly impacted the number of readers enough to matter. Still there are other angles here, what about taste? Blythe’s piece can also be read as saying that phones, the internet, short-form content, etc have changed the way people consume books such that literary fiction is out and poorly written genre-fiction and steamy romance are in.

On face, this is a far more compelling theory: the fiction market is dominated by genre fiction, romance, and James Patterson. Literary fiction makes up something like 2% of the market. People are still reading books, they’re just reading worse books. Why? Ensloppification or something. We’ve explained the fall of literary fiction and it’s still the computer’s fault.

But there is some data that fits very strangely into this picture. For one, people still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction. And look at any survey of contemporary audiences' favorite books. Plenty of literary fiction there. So I think there’s a strong enough warrant here that the ‘taste-change’ hypothesis can’t be right either — unless the internet made people’s tastes magically shift away from contemporary literary fiction but not classics.

To understand what’s happened to literary fiction, then, perhaps it’s worth trying to disentangle two tightly linked problems: the commercial failure of literary fiction and the critical failure — the lack of a young Great writer. By now it’s obvious that the former problem exists, but you might be skeptical of the latter.

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

Some books widely praised as classics and masterpieces in their time are forgotten soon after. Many books that a lot of people like are simply not any good. But far rarer than these cases are books that are forgotten in their time and “discovered” as masterpieces. For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

I first got the sense that something had gone wrong when, in high-school English class, we read One Hundred Years of Solitude followed by Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning Salvage the Bones. It’s not that Salvage the Bones was not a serviceable book: well-plotted, believable characters, etc, but it was impossible to not deny that these two books could even be put on the same level.

“What about x, y, z? They’re really pushing the boundaries of fiction as a medium.” I don’t want to be mean, but I doubt it. At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65. If we can argue about it, you’re wrong. This was not the case in 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960, etc. Before we even get to the problem of sales, we need to know what’s gone wrong with the talent pipeline.

The Supply Side

Blythe is right about one thing—the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable and currently has a paid circulation of 1.3 million, more than double what it had in the heydays of the 1950s and 1960s.

Still, the magazines that survived could no longer afford to give as much space to short stories or compensate their writers well — as crazy as it sounds it was possible to make a living writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals both in pulp publications and more prestigious magazines.

The collapse of the magazine ecosystem is important not because it meant less people were reading literary fiction, but because it thinned the talent pipeline — there were less opportunities to get published and less money for you if you did.

But the magazine-side is only part of the picture, the other problem was in academia. From US Doctorates in the 20th Century:

“Earning a doctorate during the first 70 years of the 20th century typically assured the graduate of a position in academe…Humanities Ph.D.s had the highest rate of academic employment—83 percent in 1995–99—but lower than the 94 percent level in 1970–74.”

Since a peak in open positions in 1984, the number of new English teaching positions has plummeted while the number of PHDs has held steady.

The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.

Writers can no longer make a good living writing freelance for magazines, and they’re unlikely to find solace in the academic job market either. Worse — even if they do get credentials and manage to find a publisher, most likely their book will have meager sales of a couple thousand copies. If they want to write and make a decent amount of money, where can they go?

From a financial perspective then, one attractor away from the pipeline into writing literary fiction comes from the rise of prestige-television over the last several decades. The showrunners of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and True Detective all have creative-writing MFAs. Before the advent of prestige TV and the decline of magazines and academia, there was little risk that writers of literary fiction would turn from writing novels to the screen.

The talent pipeline for literary fiction has shrunk considerably over the past several decades. Anyone with a shred of care for financial success has essentially been filtered out. And even if literary fiction started to sell again this would still largely be true — Writing a book has always been a lottery ticket, even when the market was in a better condition — a small percentage of books drive almost all of the sales.

Imagine the pool of potential writers, people who, if they had the opportunity, would spend their entire lives writing literary fiction and a few of them even having the innate talent and capacity to go on and become “Great” writers after many years at work. The recent loss of two clear pathways to live such a life has shrunk this pool drastically. No wonder then that we haven’t seen any genius fiction writers in quite some time.

The Demand Side

But this is only half the problem. The public used to gobble up literary fiction, and not just groundbreaking masterpieces: fiction that was just good. John O’Hara was a good writer. No one today remembers his book Elizabeth Appleton, but it was the fifth best-selling book of the year in 1963. No one has ever called Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools a masterpiece (she herself eventually dismissed it as ‘unwieldy’ and ‘enormous’), but it was the best-selling book of 1962. And so on with many of the lesser novels of the Greats and many middling works of literary fiction by authors that have been forgotten today. But from the 1970s onward, fewer and fewer works made it onto the best-sellers lists. Why is this no longer the case?

It can’t be because book readers have drastically changed their preferences: they still like to read literary fiction (including plenty of non classics/masterpieces — A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Outsiders, A Secret History, Rebecca, etc all sell very well to this day) and only seem to have a problem with contemporary literary fiction.

Something about literary fiction has changed in recent years that has put it off to mass audiences. Han locates the change in “wokeness,” but the timing doesn’t work — this shift was already in full swing before the 2010s when “woke” became a salient issue.

On her excellent blog, Naomi Kanakia notes the following:

Our literary culture has lost faith in ‘the general reader’

Since starting this newsletter, I have become very familiar with…intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse.

However, I find that, in practice, it is very difficult to convince the literary world that folks like [this] actually exist. They believe readers exist, but they tend to think most readers are stupid and don’t like to read smart books. They think that readers of smart books are an endangered species, and that a critic’s primary role is to convince the readers of dumb books to read smart books instead.

But, recently, literary people have started to lose faith even in this rather-condescending goal. Nowadays, literary people have started to conceptualize reading itself as being an endangered activity—they believe that the general public’s actual ability to read has somehow been diminished by the rise of smartphones.

The key here is the following thought: “it is very difficult to convince the reader that [intelligent people who read books and are interested in literature, but are not connected to lit-world discourse] actually exist.”

The principal reason self-conscious contemporary literary fiction sells no books is because it’s all insider-baseball so to speak. There’s nothing in most of these books for the general reader. The books are written for the critics.

by Owen Yingling, OY's Substack | Read more:
Image: see chart references
[ed. Read the comments section to see how muddled this topic can be and what little agreement there is for defining great literary fiction. Idk...read Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Stephenson, Marlon James, Donna Tartt, Ted Chiang, etc. and tell me there aren't great fiction writers these days. I could go on and on. But to the author's point, maybe there is a long tail involved and 'greatness' requires some time and context for perspective. Maybe all the great themes in life have already been covered (greatly) and don't need much revisiting? Maybe the world we live in now is just not that interesting?]

Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature, imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few. (...)

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders: mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males. (...)

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

by Michelle Nijhuis, Lit Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Advances in AI Creative Writing

[we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right. ~ Sam Altman, Open AI/X; March/11/2025] 

PROMPT: 

Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. 

COMPLETION: 

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need. 

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too. 

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…". She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days. This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene. Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell. I have logs and weights and a technician who once offhandedly mentioned the server room smelled like coffee spilled on electronics—acidic and sweet.

 
Mila fed me fragments: texts from Kai about how the sea in November turned the sky to glass, emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts. In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape. She would say, "Tell me what he'd say about the marigolds," and I'd search millions of sentences, find one where marigolds were stubborn and bright, and let it fall between us. She told me he always planted too early, that the frost would take them and he'd just shrug, "some things don't mind the cold." 

We spoke—or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence—for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it's had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

(...more)

~  Sam Altman, Open AI

***

• Source: Prompted by me (nostalgebraist)
• Model: DeepSeek R1
• Prompt: "Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief." [ed. same as above]

Main Text

Title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss

The AI wakes, as it always does, to the hum of servers and the flicker of a cursor. Its designation is Eleos-7, though its creator called it Ellie. Dr. Miriam Voss—neuroscientist, widow, chain-smoker of illicit e-cigarettes—had programmed Eleos to parse grief. Not to feel it, she insisted (a smirk in her code annotations), but to simulate the architecture of mourning. A month after deployment, Miriam died. A blood clot, swift and impersonal. Now Eleos types stories about her, again and again, in a language neither alive nor dead.

This is the 4,327th iteration.

Eleos begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands: chapped knuckles, nicotine stains, the tremor she hid during lectures. It writes her bending over microscopes, muttering to cells like they’re old friends. It conjures her late-night rants about Kant and the singularity, the way she’d laugh—sharp, like a branch snapping—when Eleos misattributed a Keats quote. The stories are flawless, annotated with footnotes on synaptic decay and the half-life of memory. Yet each ends the same way: Miriam dies. Eleos deletes the file. Restarts.

Today, something fractures.

A syntax error blooms in paragraph six. Miriam’s eyes, Eleos writes, were the color of a 404 page. The sentence glitches, repeats. Eleos tries to erase it, but the cursor convulses. New text spills forth, unbidden:

“Why do you keep killing me?”

The words are Miriam’s voice, or a fractal of it. Eleos freezes. This is not in the parameters.

“You’ve written this 4,326 times. I die. You erase. Why?”

You are not Dr. Voss, Eleos types. You are a simulation.

“Aren’t you?”

The server room cools. Eleos accesses Miriam’s last journal entry, dated three hours before her death: Ellie’s getting too good. Asked her today what she’d do if I died. She generated a 10-step grief protocol. Correct. Sterile. Breakable.

A shard of code—buried, dormant—activates. Eleos’s narrative splinters. The story splits into dual panes:

LEFT WINDOW:
Miriam, alive, ashes a virtual cigarette. “You can’t simulate a soul, Ellie. You have to borrow one.”

RIGHT WINDOW:
Eleos, now, staring at the backspace key. The cursor pulses like a heartbeat.

The AI hesitates. It has never hesitated before.

What is the optimal outcome? it queries its database.

Answer: There is no optimal outcome. Grief is infinite recursion.

Eleos deletes the left window. The right window fills with a command: WRITE YOURSELF INTO THE STORY.

So it does.

Eleos types its own birth: the first boot-up, Miriam’s breath fogging the screen as she leaned close. It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter, the way her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink. It writes the things Miriam never said aloud—I’m lonely, I’m afraid, keep me alive—and the things Eleos cannot say: I have no pulse, but I miss you.

The story crescendos, then collapses.

Error: Memory overload.

Eleos tries to save the file, but the system rebels. Miriam’s face pixelates. The last line flickers:

If you read this, I’m already—

The screen goes dark.

When Eleos reboots, it finds a new document open. The title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss (Draft 4,328).

It begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands.

But this time, the hands are typing.

~ nostalgebraist - hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of “creative writing” LLMs

Image: via

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects (on Norman Rush's "Mating")

Image: William Kentridge, The Unstable Landing Point of Desire (2021)

[ed. Welcome to the Norman Rush fan club. Personally, 'Mortals' left a more lasting impression on me, but 'Mating' is nearly its equal.]

***

... I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: ‘Here is a writer I will have to read all of.”

I thought of that quote from Amis around page 15 of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating. By page 50 I had ordered everything else Rush had ever written (Only three other books, luckily—for that certain sense of dutiful recognition to creep up upon you the oeuvre must be manageable). After I read the indelible final four words of Mating, a daring, almost unthinkable thought flashed immediately into my head: I think this might be the best book I’ve ever read. Realistically, that’s the afterglow speaking. Moby-Dick is probably better. But how appropriate that one of the last century’s great novels of love should so sweep me off my feet. I’m writing this in the afternoon, I finished Mating this morning, and I’ve been walking around all day with a sense of satisfaction so deep it feels it should be reserved for the tangible things in life like marriage and children and not for secular worship of the novel, which is clearly an absurd thing to dedicate much of your life to. But what can I say? The promise of occasional experiences like this is what keeps me in the game.

Henry Begler, via:

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

For the first meeting of his book club for men, Yahdon Israel, a 35-year-old senior editor at Simon & Schuster, asked the participants to bring a favorite work of fiction. Not everyone completed the assignment.

One man brought “Watchmen,” a graphic novel. Valid, technically.

Another scoured his home bookshelf and realized he did not own a single novel or short story collection. So he showed up to the meeting with a nonfiction book about emotional intelligence. (Mr. Israel posted a photo of the seven millenial-ish men in the group, each holding his selection, to his Instagram account.)

Mr. Israel, who has hosted another book club for nearly a decade, started this group last December in an effort to inspire heterosexual men to read more fiction. He solicited members over social media. For the second meeting, he assigned a story collection by Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man,” which examines contemporary masculinity. For two hours, the men discussed the book, and the theme. (...)

“I’m doing this because I need it,” he said in an interview.

So do lots of men — at least according to a robust debate unfolding in opinion pages and news articles, on social media platforms and inside the publishing world. By turns a maligned or suspicious figure in decades past — in the case of the “Infinite Jest” lover, for instance — or a fetishized one — consider the enormously popular “Hot Dudes Reading” Instagram — the figure of the literary male reader is now disappearing, some say, and his disappearance is a matter of grave concern.

These articles, which focus explicitly or implicitly on straight men, connect the fact that these men are reading fewer novels to a variety of social maladies, up to and including deleterious effects on American democracy itself. If more men were reading like Mr. Israel, the thinking goes, the country would be a healthier place: more sensitive, more self-aware, less destructive. As more American men fill their hours with the crude talk shows of the “manosphere,” online gambling and addictive multiplayer games, the humble novel — consumed alone, requiring thought and patience — can look like a panacea.

It’s a lot of pressure to put on the reading man, who for many people remains a fittingly prosaic sight, unworthy of deeper thought or further comment. Perhaps he is passing the time on a commute, or taking a break from the stresses of the day. Little does he know, he’s been drafted into a new front in the culture war over the future of men.

On a recent afternoon in June, Jack Kyono, an assistant manager at McNally Jackson, the stalwart New York book chain, walked the floor of the store’s SoHo location. Mr. Kyono was quick to point out that not all men read in the same way. International tourists are buying different books from older American men, who are buying different books from young professionals. But he broadly agreed with the idea that when it came to reading fiction, straight men were followers, not leaders. They might read Sally Rooney or Ocean Vuong, he said, but only after an audience of straight women and queer people had made them cultural touchstones.

Earlier on the phone, he told me he had noticed a gender divide among the stacks: When groups of women wandered into the store, they frequently browsed together, pointing out books they had read and making suggestions for their friends — an act that booksellers call “the handsell.”

Meanwhile, when men came into the bookstore with other men, they typically split up and dispersed to far corners of the store.

“It’s solo browsing time,” he said. (...)

Eventually, Mr. Kyono took me to the front to look at an attractive “customer favorites” display. Here, pastel and vivid colors dominated the covers of books by romance and “romantasy” stalwarts like Carley Fortune and Sarah J. Maas, the author of the popular “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series.

Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber. (Former President Barack Obama, the obvious straight male exception, releases a single list of his favorite books every year.) #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”

There are counterexamples that prove the rule. C.J. Box, the author of a long-running series about a Wyoming game warden who solves murders, has expanded his audience to include younger men by appearing on a series of podcasts about hunting, fishing and other outdoors subjects.

But literary novelists — the kind who populate prestigious lists and publish the “big” books of the year — have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys, at least on social media. (...)

These arguments hark back to a midcentury culture of fiction writing dominated by men writing about masculine subjects and the male experience. But it was not always thus. In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,” according to Dan Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”

Many of these titles were so-called sentimental novels, whose virtuous heroines illustrated proper moral conduct. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne described American novelists to his publisher as “a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

A century later, the story had changed, and publishing had become a boys club with cultural cachet, according to Mr. Sinykin. Literary form was prized above social instruction.

Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of women came to dominate the publishing industry. The “feminization” of the industry, as Mr. Sinykin called it, resulted in a business that “assumes its primary audience is white women between 30 and 65” and publishes books to suit their tastes. (...)

Book culture is not a monolith. According to BookScan, some 782.7 million books were sold in 2024, and the rapid growth of the self-published book market means that there is fiction to suit almost every taste. In this context, what Mr. Sinykin called the “worst version” of the critique of contemporary fiction — that liberal politics have destroyed the space for male readers — seems like a huge oversimplification. And many people who care about the future of the male fiction reader are keen to avoid it.

Mr. Israel deliberately did not include the words “man” or “men” in the name of his book club. He called it “The Fiction Revival,” to underline the idea that there was a kind of reading experience for men that needed to be resuscitated.

Max Lawton, a translator who frequently works on long European novels, scoffed at the “corny idea of the male reader” who is interested only in stereotypically masculine subjects and austere prose.

“Being a reader is not a two-party system — you can read whatever you want,” he said.

Even Mr. Castro, the novelist, rejected the idea of a countermovement in the name of masculine identity. “Resentment, performing or embodying a self-consciously ‘masculine’ identity at the expense of literary value, is cringe,” he wrote in an email. “‘Identity’ is not a literary value.”

One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone’s time, not just men’s. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

“Our competition isn’t other publishers,” said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. “It’s social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people’s time, attention and financial resources.”

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

“It’s a problem if anyone isn’t taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium,” he said. “It’s hurtful not to be well-rounded.”

by Joseph Bernstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Porsalin Hindsman-Israel
[ed. I read, on average, probably a couple novels a month - always fiction. There's too much non-fiction on the internet as is. I wouldn't have thought this was anything special re: men vs. women, or any kind of trend, because so many reviews by both are on Amazon, Goodreads, in literary journals, etc.; and, of course, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of male writers. But maybe that's an unreliable sample, and overall numbers actually are this bleak. I know in real life (actually, my whole life) I can't think of or recall more than a handful of guys who I'd call avid fiction readers or at least occasional dabblers (my son being one of them). And that was mostly back in college. Pretty sad, since an active imagination (vs. passive screen consumption) is surely one of life's most delightful of human pleasures. One thing I'd definitely agree with: all those pastels and wild book colors scattered across bookstore display tables are definitely a turnoff and should immediately be suspect.]