When I came down with the flu in Santiago last year, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any type of respiratory trouble. It helped that I’d spent the pandemic in Far North Queensland, where nobody even wore a mask. Because of national border closures, quarantines, and distance, not a single case of Covid ever cropped up in my town. But now I lay for a week on a garish sofa in the big city, getting up only for tea and to glance at the wet washing that bloomed, dried, and disappeared from the banks of windows on the facing high-rise, my urban foliage.

“What the hell?” I thought. I’m not sure what that meant, but it was kind of a refrain. “What the hell?”

Three weeks after my recovery, I booked an Uber to the oceanside port of Valparaiso, population about 323,000. I write “booked an Uber” with apprehension, because in my decades of travel, I never before had booked an Uber. I’ve gone by bus, train, truck, freighter, ferry, canoe, trolley, motorbike, rickshaw, bicycle, or foot. I use taxis, generally between airports and towns. But now I was booking an Uber for a seventy-mile trip with a perhaps talkative driver. The ever-present fear of becoming a tourist rather than a traveler edged up and grinned blackly.

My driver was an informed and entertaining man, who intended one day to move his young family to Portugal, where they’d make cheese and wine. This was disappointing. I’d hoped he would be a bore, unlike the tales friends had related about great drivers.

We drove through wine country, and he told me about Carménère. I don’t think it’s a well-known story, except by the connoisseurs among you. The star is a Frenchman named Jean-Michel Boursiquot, probably the world’s most renowned ampelographer. This might not be saying much, since nobody knows what an ampelographer is, but I looked it up for you. It’s an expert in the study and classification of cultivated grape varieties.

In 1994, Boursiquot traveled to Chile for a symposium. A former student brought him to a vineyard where she worked, and showed him a new plot of Merlot. Boursiquot later recounted, “The vines didn’t look like Merlot: the young leaves at the shoot tips were very orange, the shape of the leaves wasn’t like Merlot’s.” The vines were flowering, and he wandered among them. “The stamens of Carménère’s flowers are a bit twisted, while other varieties’ are very straight. So it suddenly clicked…it actually was the first time I saw Carménère in a vineyard.”

This was his initial visit to Chile, and Carménère had virtually disappeared from the rest of the world. It got wiped out by the phylloxera insect that devastated France’s vineyards in the 1860s. When the vintners replanted, they chose other grapes, in part because Carménère is finicky. But cuttings from Bordeaux had previously been transplanted to Chile, where they thrived. The problem was people mistook it for Merlot, and nobody knew the truth for many decades, until Boursiquot came along. After that, Chilean wine enjoyed a boom, and why not? Almost nobody else in the world had Carménère.

I liked Valparaiso as soon as we arrived. It’s a port city built mostly on waves of hills or cerros that rise up from the Pacific oceanfront. A narrow plain contains the commercial structures in the city center and in several suburbs strung along the coast. Right behind this strip rise the hills, where most of the people live. Their houses and shops are jumbles of colorful boxes set amid steep stone stairways, ravines, and funiculars.

These neighborhoods have taken a beating from time and disasters, including five major earthquakes following the great quake of 1730 that destroyed the city. Still, the place teems with character. The Municipal Heritage Management Department has mostly kept the historic quarter architecturally true to its 19^th century heyday as the leading Pacific seaport in South America.

The city’s golden age was from 1848 until the Panama Canal opened in 1914. It has long been a cosmopolitan place. Named after a Spanish town by conquistadors who arrived in 1546, it and the rest of Chile finally gained independence from Spain in 1818. A number of fine plazas were then constructed in Valparaiso, whose Neo-Classical buildings look more Southern European than South American. Immigrants from England, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany set up distinct communities in the hills during these decades of sea trade dominance.

In 2003, Valparaiso received a UNESCO listing as a World Heritage site. The wording of this designation is unsettling. UNESCO is proud of the city because it’s a wonderful example of “globalization in the 19^th century.” Critics have pointed out that when world heritage sites become known as “global” cities, their increased value to tourists can spawn the usual development plans by politicians and private enterprise that end up degrading the place’s unique character.

In Valparaiso, the citizens have organized and fought back over the past quarter-century with petitions and public information campaigns. They stopped a residential development in the middle of a park. They killed a controversial mall project. Their successes are part of the global movement in recent years called new municipalism, which two Chilean scholars define as “radical democracy and community-based urban agendas.” I imagine in Valparaiso, as in most cities, there’s debate over what has been gained and lost.

I spent my two months there in a flat with a view that adjoined an old mansion in Cerro Alegre. That community and its neighbor Cerro Concepcion, which were largely planned and developed as a single place by German and English immigrants, are now the two most popular areas for tourists. At the end of my small cobbled street, a left turn led steeply down to a promenade fronted by an old church and a few restaurants. At a tiny oval park next to the church, people listened to street musicians or watched a puppet show, and you could stroll along a promenade lined with artists’ displays and gaze at the city and ocean below. A twisting stone staircase led to another cobbled street that descended farther to downtown.

If I turned the opposite way at the end of my street, a steep ascent brought me to a flat spot at a roundabout, where there were a couple more restaurants, a convenience store, and a bottle shop. From there I could stroll left or right through the neighborhoods, or go straight up into yet higher communities. I walked for hours and hours all over the place, as I do in cities, and what I enjoyed most were the shortcuts.

These were the stone stairways or escaleras that run away from streets up and down ravines to another neighborhood, sometimes to another hill, or for a direct route to sea level. They twist and turn, are walled in parts, and then a view opens to a house-choked vale and the sea beyond. The buildings along the steps are covered in murals, so that coming around a sharp corner, I’d be faced with something big and powerful, a rainbow fish with a woman’s head, or a blue man with a white snarl.

The lanes or paseos of these hill communities often lead to delight. They’re full of neighborhood shops and bakeries and outdoor cafes. Tourists wander among artists and performers in front of walls lined with murals, and then an escalera leads up to another level of novelty. For those not disposed to the climb, a number of funiculars or ascensors still function among the twenty-eight that were built in the 19^th century. I meant to try one of them but never did. The prospect of riding in a box on a pulley up a hillside instead of climbing the stairs threatened to return me to the flu-ridden Santiago mantra, “What the hell?”

Anywhere you go that has become touristed (which is dang near everywhere), the enduring drama is in how local folks deal with it. If they mobilize, maybe this particular structure gets saved, while that one doesn’t make it. The park remains intact but the square is overbuilt. In Valparaiso’s historic quarter, lots of houses have been converted to restaurants, cafes, small goods stores, accommodation, and art galleries. The owners often live upstairs and work downstairs.

Academic studies and interviews have shown that the people of Valparaiso have experienced a loss of privacy and of community networks, while their property taxes have soared. In the showcase communities of Concepcion and Alegre, where I stayed, home values have gone up and urban services and equipment have improved. Yet many long-time residents of the heritage area find it economically difficult to keep their homes, and government help for them is virtually nonexistent. The subsidized renovations are selective. You don’t have to walk far to come upon multiple-family dwellings perched on the edges of cliffs that look as if they could collapse any moment, like an old barn in Idaho. There’s nothing new in such stark differences, and you don’t have to leave an American metropolis to see them.

The scholar who has done perhaps the most work on selective touristification in Valparaiso is César Cáceres-Seguel of the University of Viña del Mar, just six miles up the coast. In a 2024 paper in the Journal of Urban Affairs, he pointed out that a major effect of this process is displacement. “In cities configured from neoliberal urban policies, the UNESCO designation acts as a device that strengthens this dispossession.”

For a 2019 paper in the peer-reviewed Revista INVI, Cáceres-Seguel interviewed sixty residents of Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepcion. A woman named Marcela told him, “I remember seeing the first lost Americans about twenty years ago—occasionally, some French tourists would arrive to see Neruda’s house and wander around a bit. When Valparaiso was declared a World Heritage site in 2003, things really started to skyrocket, and let me tell you, the growth over the last ten years has been unstoppable.”

Someone said outside investors buy houses to develop them into tourism businesses, but they don’t live in Valparaiso. Someone else said the cost of living has gone up, driving local greengrocers and others out of business. Several people noted the skyrocketing property values are fine if you want to sell and move away. But for retirees who want to stay, the property taxes are killing them. “They raise your taxes, they squeeze you, they force you to sell,” said a woman named Aurora.

I was taken by the insights of a man named Luis. “The deli is being replaced by a restaurant, the bakery by a sushi place; if there ever was a neighborhood spirit, it was erased, and a new one was built out of these changes.” He pointed out that Cerro Alegre, his community, no longer had the authentic porteño (Valparaisan) spirit. “This whole ‘heritage’ thing is largely made up—the people who come here come for the ‘exotic’—owing to that Latin experience of neighborhoods and houses built haphazardly by the sea—but this peculiar bohemian vibe is also largely invented.”

One reason I liked the sometimes crumbling stone escaleras is they’re authentic, and some of them take you to paseos that are definitely not touristic. A lady at the door of a tilting cottage called to me that I shouldn’t go down those steps. There were dangerous people along the way. I laughed and waved, and then, of course, I was a little nervous on the walk.

The sight of people living in poverty made me revisit as usual the insoluble question of what a relatively rich visitor might do to be helpful. Spend money is the easy answer, but it blanches in the light of these systemic inequalities that arise from touristification. It’s like should you not fly or drive because you then help to pollute the world? Should you stop traveling, because it transforms places into tourist traps that ruin the lives of locals? But we don’t stop, or at least I don’t. There aren’t many Greta Thunbergs among us, willing to take the slow boat to Manhattan. We’re more like Al Gore, bullish on conservation and living in the extra-large carbon footprint of Americans.

I rarely visit the must-see sites of a place nowadays, as I prefer to merely hang around for a few months, but in Valparaiso, I couldn’t resist a visit to Pablo Neruda’s house, La Sebastiana. Years ago I was struck by the poeticism of his Memoirs. I took the long walk to his home, now a museum, on Cerro Florida. Just inside the gate, on a chair under a sign marked, “Security Zone,” a cat slept. At the door, I got an earpiece and a recorder that took me through the five stories of the wooden structure, which rose straight up to a windowed top floor like a lighthouse. Here was the poet’s modest study, next to living and dining areas, with terrific views over the harbor. Encased and suspended above the dining room table, an embalmed scarlet ibis spread its black-tipped wings.

Neruda bought the house with his friends, sculptor Marie Martner and her husband, Dr. Francisco Velasco, who occupied the lower floors. According to the Neruda Foundation, shortly after the poet’s death in Santiago in 1973, Velasco came home to neighbors disturbed about something going on indoors. Somehow an eagle had gotten into his house, even though it was closed up. He let it out. Later, he wrote, “I immediately remembered that time when Pablo confessed that if there was another life, he would have liked to be an eagle.”

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I still can’t believe I got the job. I also don’t know what people mean by no-bid contracts. Everybody bids, you just don’t call it a bid. It’s like a toll that’s called a fee. My bid was enough to finance a leg of the arch. Actually, it’s a double bid: you bid, and do his bidding. So what are they talking about? I don’t get it.

On top of that, we had to take a test: write something representative of the man. I was prepared to give my all, but it wasn’t necessary. The intern accepted a ludicrous underpayment for a copy with preferred answers. No doubt the others banged on about American values and law and order. That’s fine for a Labor Day teleprompt but it’s death for a bio of our leader. I followed the prompt and loaded up on the colorful stuff, like knock the crap out of them and I’ll pay the legal fees, or we’re running against Communists now.

We were asked to describe ourselves. My opponents probably relied on a bunch of fancy words like apparatchik, obsequious, sycophant, and minion. I was clued into what would land, and used plenty of team-ball terms like lickspittle, toady, stooge, and lackey. These sorts of choices helped me to stand out in a lookalike Florsheim lineup, which I’m guessing was a bulk emolument, a back-of-the-truck thing.

I received the call: your check cleared, you’re the wordsmith. The boss thought you looked hilarious in those size-eighteen clown shoes. I cast them aside, which enabled me to rush to the laptop. I’d been thinking about it a long time and had realized the thing about this man is he has transcended mere personhood. He is so consequential, he’s entered the realm of metaphor. It would be impossible to capture his impact, and I knew the only way to even get close was by building an edifice of metaphor, maybe with little fists pumping and a wig on top.

I needed to find a foundational metaphor, a kind of cornerstone upon which to build my monument. Perhaps there was something in the animal kingdom, but not a boring lion or tiger. It had to be something unusual and compelling, something that would make every reader say, “Aw, gee.” I searched the world, albeit not actually.

One of our leader’s greatest gifts, which makes his personality so large, is the ability to be sparklingly present, to live moment by moment to the fullest. My first thought was the hamster, whose memory span is three seconds. But it’s a pet.

Consistency is a key political strength. Voters want to know what they’re going to get, day in and day out, no chaos, no doubt. I appreciated the koala, which eats only one food that shrinks its brain, and sleeps up to twenty-two hours a day. But it’s cuddly, which is not the right look.

Domestically, the leader of a balanced economy finds ways to ensure everyone gives their fair share. This may require delicate manipulations to extract contributions that individuals might be reluctant to make, such as tariffs and lawsuit settlements. I was attracted to a tiny parasitic Amazonian catfish that swims up a person’s urethra. That turned out to be fake, which was OK, but it was already used in a couple movies, one with the Rock, so it was too stale.

The consummate politician must be clever to outthink opponents at home and abroad. The fork-tailed drongo learns a bunch of predator alarm calls of other species to make them flee and drop their food, which it then steals. I liked the recycled warnings that you won’t have a life anymore. But the multiple voices seemed a bit off for my portrayal, which is about repeating the same set of things in the same voice.

The projection of military might is essential to a world power, and is best demonstrated in quick strikes that leave nothing standing for the impoverished, the unarmed, and children. Of course, there’s the terrifying majesty of the locust, but that’s a group thing. I wanted more of a finger-on-the-button metaphor.

What about resistance against the enemy, never giving in? It’s important to keep opponents in mind over the long haul, to maintain the hope of doing something bad to them. When a camel is mistreated by its handler, it will wait for a very long time if necessary and then will stomp, sit on, or even rip the head off its antagonist. This is probably not true but that doesn’t matter. What matters is camels are not good-looking. Nobody likes camels.

The ability to factor the innumerable variables of statecraft is essential. For this trait, I landed on the pygmy shrew, which eats up to 125 percent of its body weight daily. This appealed to me, because the figure was more than 100 percent. Unfortunately, I didn’t want a creature that ate 125 percent more than its weight. I wanted one that ate 125 percent less, or even more less than that.

We’ve seen through history that firm control, command control, is the essence of leadership. Followers in the grip of a great personality can’t resist even if they want to. I was strongly drawn to the jewel wasp, which injects a chemical into the brain of a cockroach that makes it unable to combat the wasp’s will. The wasp pulls the much larger insect into a little dirt cave where its offspring eats the bug alive. It wants to run away, but it just doesn’t have what it takes. This one was very good, but I let it go because the offspring of great leaders do their eating in the open.

Command control is related to charisma, another trait that counts big. I almost went for the Vogelkop superb bird-of-paradise of New Guinea, which has a neck cape that spreads out like a disk to absorb the light. It floats in the rainforest like a black hole, and then it shows these blue feathers and fake eye spots. The thing was, I recoiled at the idea of trees, especially ones still standing in an unraked forest.

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In the end, I couldn’t find one creature that came anywhere near encompassing the expansive talents of our leader. Probably my favorite, yet still not perfect, was the placozoan. It’s a shapeless blob with no mouth, organs, brain, or nerves. The no mouth disqualified it.

And then I thought, superheroes! I know nothing about superheroes, and didn’t care about comics even as a kid, but I was nonetheless delighted to find a trove of metaphor in the annals of DC. The most impressive ones among these characters didn’t make it into the Legion of Super-Heroes, maybe because they were a little too apt.

Examining the pros and cons of an issue is a vital leadership skill, in the sense of will he, won’t he, yes, no, it’s on, it’s off. The superhero Double-Header has two personalities, although the heads never learned to take turns, and they argue incessantly. This wasn’t quite right. I wanted contradiction, not disagreement. I guess rather than two heads, I was hoping for both sides of one mouth.

In today’s media-rich environment, the canny politician is tuned in, but at the same time, he’s tuned out. The result is white noise, perfect for decision-making. Antennae Boy has ears that pick up radio and television broadcasts from any era. This creates cacophony, which is useful, but I didn’t like that these blasts came from the past, because history is fake.

In politics as in brawling, the best defense is a good offense. You have to zero in on your foe and cut him down to size. Porcupine Pete fires quills from his body. However, he lacks accuracy, and during his trial for entry in the Legion, even the judges had to duck for cover. I felt this image was heading in an unhelpful direction.

A great leader can whip followers to a fever pitch and they have no inoculation against it, not even Ivermectin. Infectious Lass can spontaneously generate and host diseases, a superpower that infects everyone. But she’s a girl. Anyway, we already have RFK Jr.

In a perilous world, even places of peaceful gathering must be impregnable, such as the greatest and most beautiful ballroom of its kind anywhere in the world. Fortress Lad can transform his own body into a giant bunker of steel and brick. I don’t know, this seemed a little light on metaphor.

The canniest politicos are able to bite off their own noses and still look good, so to speak. No matter what they do to disfigure their own image, they still beat you to pulp. I figured I had a winner with Arm-Fall-Off-Boy. He can rip out either arm and club his opponent with it, and I bet it hurts. Maybe the judges snickered up their intact sleeves at his Legion tryout, but eventually he became a superhero on his own, along with the whole Fall-Off family, and then they weren’t laughing. This was the most vivid of all my cornerstone metaphors, and the only reason I rejected it was because, let’s face it, Arm-Fall-Off-Boy is a loser.

I confess, the difficulty of this task almost brought me to despair. None of these creatures or superheroes seemed metaphorical enough for my purpose. They were too concrete, too limited to stand in for my leader. Possibly the metaphor I needed was a concept, something in the vein of time is money, or might is right, or the truth is a lie. What would mirror him best?

And then I thought, wait a sec, back to the concrete: a mirror. It reflects everything, yet takes nothing in. To a mirror, everything is a reflection, which in effect means it functions only in reflection. And yet it does not reflect on itself. That’s good, I thought, typing away. I can never portray him in the full, but at least I can capture his reflection. If he has one.

I’ve now been posting every week for a year and have decided to reduce the frequency to every other week until I finish my next novel, Cleanly Done, which will probably take a couple of months. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t already read my first Reese and Tireia adventure, Paint It Noir, check in out here.

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What will the future of novels be, say, five years from now? Anyone who hasn’t yet gotten the picture may find it hard to look at. The marketplace will be flooded with volumes written by AI. Another big segment will be books produced in a hybrid fashion that involves editing and rewriting by the human author, with significant help from AI in research, structuring, and scene-setting. What will this revolution mean to readers? How exactly will writers function in it? And what about purely human-written novels?

The place to go for answers is a no-brainer. The chatbot is built into the browser and we opt for it, don’t we, just as we do every other labor-saving or efficiency-inducing invention that comes along. We’ve become accustomed to it. We skip the old scrolling through pages of search hits and ask the chatbot, which gives us a comprehensive answer in seconds, sometimes after consulting scores of sources.

I’m currently trying to wind up my purely human-authored novel that has nothing to do with this topic, and I have no intention of taking a year to research and write a nonfiction book on it. So I started my quest by asking ChatGPT to imagine a hypothetical contest between it and me. I described myself as a good writer and said we would both create novels in the same genre with the same plot, theme, and characters, but mine would not employ AI help. Which of the two books did it think a discerning human reader would be likely to consider the better one, and why?

Its answer began carefully, yet revealingly: “I don’t think it’s possible to say that my hypothetical novel would likely be judged better.” ChatGPT figured the verdict would be based on execution rather than on whether AI or a human wrote it, and then listed things a discerning reader would respond to. It said those characteristics (e.g. fresh prose, psychological depth, emotional resonance, etc.), are strengths of human writing. The strengths of ChatGPT’s version would include things like structure, consistency, and command of genre conventions.

But the synthetic product might seem too polished and conventional, whereas my book might have a distinctive voice and memorable characters. In short, ChatGPT would win on craftsmanship and elegance but I’d win on originality and authenticity. “I’d expect preferences to split according to what different readers value most.”

This seemed a reasonable summation of the current state of affairs, but once I got into the near future of novels, things became really interesting. And disconcerting. The way most books will be written in five or ten years seems to me both alien and unavoidable. Most of them will be garbage, just as they are now. Others will probably be quite good. Some readers will hold out against the good ones anyway, while others will accept these hybrid works whenever they’re done with integrity.

To get details of this probable future, I asked each of the six chatbots a question in turn, and then went back around to ask each one a second question. The first round of questions centered on the quality of future books and what readers would want. The second round, which was an eye-opener, concerned human and machine interactions in the mechanics of developing, vetting, and publishing books. After my first question to ChatGPT that I mentioned above, each new query built on the answer from a previous chatbot, although I didn’t reveal this process to the bots. They never contradicted any of these statements I made that were taken from other bots. Perhaps their common well isn’t deep in this still-new area. It’s also useful to bear in mind that chatbots are made by people who love AI.

Before I give you my summary (no help from them) of how the interviews went, I’ll stress this post is not about AI in general. The issues that worry people nowadays, including displacement of human workers, the economic and environmental impacts of data centers, the infiltration of AI into virtually every aspect of life, the dangers of inadequate model testing, lax or absent regulations, lack of planning and political leadership, are not my topic. That’s too big. I’m just looking at novels. Here we go:

Round One

After my opening question to ChatGPT, I told Claude it could be argued that a reader who values craftsmanship and structural elegance might prefer the hypothetical AI-written novel, whereas a reader who values originality and emotional authenticity might prefer the human-written novel. I asked which one it would say is likely to be better.

Claude thought the AI novel would be more competent, but said that’s not what people mean when they say a story stuck with them. AI writing “rarely makes the kind of ‘wrong’ choice that turns out to be exactly right, because it isn’t reaching for anything it doesn’t already know how to say cleanly.” But because “better” in literary terms generally tracks distinctiveness and risk more than it does execution, Claude said the human book would be judged better. It ended with the warning, “I wouldn’t hold this view with total confidence in five years.”

I asked Copilot to consider the situation five years from now. I started with the assumption that AI wins on competency but humans on distinctiveness and risk.

Copilot gave a long answer. It concurred with my premise and offered the line, “Literature rewards the parts of writing that resist optimization.” It claimed within five years, AI will produce literature that is both competent and “stylistically convincing.” It will be able to maintain a unique voice, invent stylistic quirks rather than just remixing found ones, and sustain complex thematics.

It said human-written fiction would undergo a shift. “Distinctiveness, intentional strangeness, and the sense of a mind wrestling with something will matter even more.” Examples it gave included fragmented structures, personal or autobiographical fiction, stylistic extremism, and novels that resist coherence. The aura will be “this came from a mind with stakes.”

It was the first of the AI applications to mention the “bifurcation” of literature of the future, which turned out to be buzzword among the bots. It means many readers will go for AI-written and hybrid novels and a small group will insist on the human product.

I acknowledged to Grok that in the near future AI writing would be “persuasively literary” and asked if human writers would be required to write messy, strange, and sometimes structurally broken novels whose power comes from the fact that they were written by people who were wrestling with something internal. I didn’t tell it all this was filched from Copilot. Or, I added, would there be no need for human-written novels?

Grok began with the dismal assertion, “Both possibilities remain open.” But it expressed confidence that human writing would lean into “irreducible particularity,” a phrase that affirmed AI writing still has a ways to go. It bought into the notion of what it called “writing that feels authored by a particular consciousness under pressure,” and said there’s no clear path in the AI architecture to make a simulated struggle indistinguishable from the real thing.

It thought experimental human writing will persist, and there will be an “authenticity market,” as there is for handmade objects and craft food. Thanks for that. It said many writers will use the hybrid model, in which they “treat AI as a sophisticated instrument,” another buzz phrase designed to forgive trespasses.

And then Grok got dark. I would have been disappointed if it didn’t, given it’s Elon Musk’s baby. It suggested once AI books got good enough, perhaps many readers wouldn’t care how they were produced, and then the whole industry might follow the lead of the market, treating source as secondary. Human-written books would take a big hit, and why should literature be immune to market forces? What readers and people in the industry will think about all this is the variable, Grok declared.

Accordingly, I asked Gemini if most readers would become indifferent to provenance in a future populated by AI-written novels. My long question was an unattributed quote from Grok, which included the assertion that markets already show a willingness to consume synthetic media when convenience and cost dominate.

Gemini immediately agreed this already has happened in high-volume consumption of music, design, and stock photography. It then trotted out the bifurcated audience trope, and predicted literary institutions will champion provenance rather than abandon it. It made a table about future impacts on human writing, which showed formulaic novels would sharply decline, hybrids would greatly increase, and there would be a “smaller overall volume” of top-quality human-written novels.

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I parroted all this to Perplexity, and asked what the educational, cultural, professional, and economic impacts would be on human writers and their work.

Perplexity said the “literary ecosystem” would be, you guessed it, bifurcated. There would be challenges and rewards. Uh-huh. In education, there would be emphasis on the human strengths of writing vis-à-vis AI output but students also would learn about working with the machines. Culturally, the refrain it offered was voice, authenticity, and idiosyncrasy. Uh-huh. Professionally, excellent books would have “long-tail prestige value,” which made me chuckle, because I hadn’t heard anybody say long tail since the 2000s. Writers might have to “diversify” into coaching, curation, and AI-assisted writing services. The economic effects would be good money for great novels, which would command premium prices in a niche market, but otherwise writers would again have to diversify their income, in ways that didn’t sound much different than today. How to negotiate the new order? The central advice was writers should learn how to collaborate with AI.

By now I was getting disheartened and impatient with the verbosity of these applications, which seemed incapable of killing their darlings. But I tried one more round.

Round Two

I set up the scene described in the previous answers and asked ChatGPT what it thought about the future of “prestige” novels.

It began by asserting the prestige end that I had described would include various genres like sci-fi and horror if they were daring and experimental. Uh-huh. But it was most interested in the hybrid market, especially because, “Readers may not even know how much AI contributed.” And it mentioned branding was an area in which humans might hold an advantage over purely AI-created fiction, which made me wonder how Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated movie star, will fare when her first film comes out.

Finally, ChatGPT suggested the dichotomy might shift for readers from human-versus-AI to generic-versus-distinctive. That smacked of a now-familiar trait in this conversation of statements that were both defensible and self-serving.

I asked Claude about the future role of AI in vetting manuscripts for the prestige human-written niche, both for determining if AI has been used and for deciding which novels deserve further consideration for publishing.

It confirmed AI will be a gatekeeper in those roles, which it said shouldn’t be regarded in a dystopian light. To an extent, the process is already underway in publishing and Claude thought the problem of false positives—unjustly accusing a writer of using AI—will be avoided by focusing on provenance in the form of correspondence, drafts, and revisions. Claude was giddy about first-pass reading by AI, because it’s so much faster than an intern can do. The problem will be for AI to catch books that are unevenly written but are gems in the rough, which is not its strong suit. Humans should still have a role, but Claude wasn’t so sure about that over an entire future decade if cost pressures were to get too strong.

For Copilot, I wanted to know how AI would find those brilliant, messy novels, when it doesn’t like messy.

It said current industry research shows publishers know this is where the technology is weakest. It won’t be trusted to detect the outliers, and the industry already is “adjusting workflows” to avoid losing unconventional brilliance. AI is sorting slush piles, creating summaries, and identifying manuscripts that fit commercial categories, but not making acquisition decisions, which would be a “PR disaster.” I guess this means if you want to get by AI, you’ll have to figure out its systems training, like understanding an algorithm to increase your social media following. Good luck.

The challenge, Copilot said in its longwinded way, is AI can be trained to detect novelty but not brilliance. Humans will have to “read past the AI summaries, ignore the algorithmic relevance scores, and say: ‘This is strange. This is risky. This is ours.’”

I was weary of this “strange and risky” talk, as if the only way humans of the future will get published is by being more weird and troubled than others. I asked Grok if there would be any place amid all this voice and angst for a quiet, human-written novel that follows traditional forms.

Sure, Grok said, “almost certainly.” The thing is, people will have to continue to value the human-made product. Readers interested in “felt life” (another buzz phrase) will still want a “restrained” book. It said the large language models that are being used now to triage slush piles may be more likely to give a good grade to a quiet traditional novel that scores well on competency metrics. On the other hand, AI will want to avoid the risk of homogenization by leaning too heavily toward symmetrical and smoothly paced stories, which means human editors may have to protect such books from being undervalued. But the quiet novel is not doomed, if it’s original, the chatbot assured me. Authors of such books will still wrestle (buzzword), but in this case they’ll wrestle with the ordinary. Plus there’s the hybrid option, Grok reminded me. Yes, I hadn’t forgotten.

All right, Gemini, tell me more about the hybrid model. Will this be the principal path of future fiction?

Gemini helpfully noted that the model is also called cyborg authorship or augmented drafting. Rather than asking AI to write a chapter, authors use fiction tools like Novelcrafter, Sudowrite (the perfect name), or Laterpress. With them, they can build codices that contain lore, magic systems, backstories, and geographic rules, all of which can be cross-referenced by AI. They can use the tools to generate all sorts of details, such as naming conventions for a locale, or an economy for a desert community. They can feed in plot ideas and receive “beat sheets” that structure scenes. They can run full drafts through the tool to see where pacing slows down. If writer’s block hits, they can let the fiction tool create rough-scene drafts. (Oh, boy.) If a paragraph or section seems dull, they can tell the AI app to enliven it with, say, a sense of claustrophobia through sensory details like damp stone and heavy air. Then there’s the human edit, which involves heavy rewrites, re-voicing, cuts, more psychological nuance, subtext, all the human cadences that AI lacks, which I’m sure we all hope the author of the future won’t neglect to do.

For a prestige hybrid novel, Gemini figured about ten to thirty percent would be AI. The writer’s role in this high-end product would be “uncompromising author,” as opposed to the “high-velocity” market, where AI would do up to ninety percent of it and the human’s job would be “prompt manager/director editor.” As to my question about whether this is the probable principal future of fiction, Gemini said yes, because of economics and because use of the novel-writing tools will become normalized. But have no fear, there still will be an “artisanal counter-movement,” a phrase that somehow made me think of the people who memorize books in Farenheit 451.

Deflated, I asked Perplexity, with all this speedy production, won’t there be a threat of market oversaturation? And won’t all this AI prose alter the ability of readers to appreciate human-written books?

It said the problem won’t just be an overabundance of books, but that there will be too many indistinguishable books, which did not comfort me. It’s a real threat, Perplexity said, but it doesn’t necessarily mean demand will collapse. The reason: the two-track market. Perplexingly, Perplexity did not say bifurcation. The run-of-the-mill market of the future will be rush hour 24/7, where readers will become “more tolerant” of generic prose and faster plot rhythms. But this also “may make distinctive human writing feel even rarer and more precious.”

Perplexity thought the human-written book will gain prestige even as its value becomes “symbolic” rather than mass-market. In case I wasn’t feeling dismayed enough, it said unless curation and reputation make such novels visible, “The bigger danger is not that readers stop appreciating human books altogether, but that many readers stop finding them.”

Hmm. Millions of books written by humans are already out there. That’s a lot of training fodder for appreciation of literature. The chatbots claim high-quality writing will be an elitist market, but it always has been. By definition, vulgarization concerns most people. The defense against it always has been discernment. Mass market books have never been more than a diversion, an amusement, or an irritation to the discerning. Only a relatively few readers can parse a text to see the beauty of how its pieces fit together, but that isn’t necessary to grasp its value. I suspect if people continue to read the time-tested novels, they’ll be able to intuit the difference between real and synthetic Fitzgerald, and will recognize the worth of a new human-written book.

If writers create “prestige” novels by remaking the material AI provides, if they do their job properly, whether these books will be indistinguishable from the purely human effort might not matter. The process is an alien concept today, yet contemporary life without computers is at least equally alien. A new paradigm is arising. But even the chatbots, trained by humans, acknowledge the significance in it of the human element.

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This officer doesn’t have a neck. His head just sits on his shoulders. His arms are short and he holds them close to his body, which makes him look like he’s carved out of a single chunk of granite. I’m sitting across the desk from him in a little office. Behind us is a room full of long tables where other guys have their heads down really close to pieces of paper they’re marking with pencils as their tongues stick out the corners of their mouths.

The officer tells me his name, General Something, or maybe he said sergeant, possibly corporal, I forget. He has a nice sneer. He’s looking right at me, which is pretty cool. He has to ask me some questions, he says, but I shouldn’t have any problem with the answers. There are no right answers, although that doesn’t mean there are no wrong ones. He doesn’t want me to give the wrong ones. He wants to help, he’s on my side. This makes me sit up straighter. Me and the general or corporal, you bet.

He picks up a slip of paper. “I have the resume you submitted online. It says you’re seventeen. You have to be eighteen to do this job.”

“I’ll be eighteen.”

“Fair enough.”

He notes I attended Jerry Falwell Junior High and almost finished eighth grade.

“Good school. You didn’t go on to Liberty University, or high school? You need a GED to get this job.”

“GED? Oh, sure, I passed driver’s ed.”

He blows out a breath.

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“I have a quota, you understand, but don’t tell anybody. I need to put a lot of bodies on the streets, fast, but I didn’t say that. We have a rigid training program.”

“I understand. What’s the pay?”

“The pay is fabulous, we got money coming out our ears. A fat signing bonus, nice salary, overtime, health insurance, life insurance, opportunities to advance, although you don’t have to worry about that, and retirement benefits. People can get help with GEDs, we have ways, don’t you worry about that.”

“Is it a driving job?”

He looks me up and down, which makes me tingle. He does a big hawk and spits into the waste basket.

“How do you feel about HRT?”

“Was he a president?”

“Testosterone. You OK with getting shots?”

“The only thing is, needles make me faint.”

His face goes all stormy but then he takes a big breath and the sun returns, sort of.

“Lots of tough guys don’t like needles. I knew a tough guy who fainted from the sight of blood. We gave him a desk job. But we need men on the streets nowadays.”

“Blood doesn’t bother me,” I say quickly. “I used to give blood all the time but I stopped after the cutbacks. Three ounces of juice wasn’t worth it.”

The officer squints, which makes me think I missed a spot shaving. I know they’re way into grooming.

He asks what I think about the idea of kicking illegals out of the country. Would I enjoy doing that?

“Yes, that would be fine,” I say. “I would escort them.”

“This is not an escort service,” he mutters.

“Thank God. I’ve had enough of that.”

“You said yes. I’ll put that down.”

I turn around. Guys in the other room are shielding their papers with their arms. A few are passing notes. Somebody fires a spitwad. I turn back.

My officer asks if I use drugs.

“Can’t stand them. I don’t even take aspirin. If I feel stressed or bored, a joint does the trick but only after dinner, with a movie. A little mescaline once in a while but just on special occasions like our card games.” At the thought of this, I chuckle. “We end up forgetting about the cards. I prefer peyote, actually.”

My officer’s head is down as he writes. It looks like it’s on a swivel. “Can’t stand drugs, good,” he says aloud as he works the pencil. “You’ll have to take a drug test. The samples get mixed up sometimes.”

He asks about the work history on my resume. Janitorial. Or as we say in the profession, sanitary engineer. Also, refuse treatment on the back of a large truck. Costumed signage display. A commissioned position in intersectional automotive screen-cleansing.

“I’m a contributor.”

“I can see that. Have you ever shot anybody? Criminal record?”

“Only a robin once with a BB gun, but I buried it. The gun, not the bird. I was so ashamed. I haven’t been arrested much, although I should mention they took my license after the grand theft auto. That’s why I wondered if it was a driving job.”

He rests his head on his chest and writes, hands in close like lizards on a rock.

“The other guy can drive,” he says in a voice so small it seems like he’s talking to himself.

He asks, louder, “How do you feel about dragging an unarmed person out of their vehicle and whaling the tar out of them?”

“I’ve seen that online. It looks like the technical challenge would be to land a solid one on someone who’s squirming that much. It’s probably because they’re not used to being clobbered.”

“True,” he accedes, “they’re not your typical hardened criminal. More like your neighbor or his wife. Getting them out of the house can be a hassle. That’s where candy for the kids comes in.”

“What about the hardened criminals?” I ask. “Would I have to arrest them?”

“Good question. The answer is don’t worry about it. Sea change around here. I keep telling you we have quotas, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

His head swivels down to my resume. Then he looks up brightly and says the report from my doctor is clean.

“Nothing wrong with you, son.”

“Yeah, it was lucky my mom started going with an MD. The new meds are awesome. I haven’t had an episode in so long, I can’t remember. It’s been weeks.”

“Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said just then, but never mind, what I want to know is how many push-ups can you do?”

“The ones that push up from the bottom? Mom used to find those ice creams but I haven’t seen them in ages. I bet I could do a dozen of the raspberry swirls.”

“We all scream for ice cream,” he mutters.

I laugh and laugh at this, but my officer frowns.

“I’m curious about your name,” he says. “Abdur al-Sadiq. Is that from Michigan?”

“Iran, actually.”

“But you’re American?”

“I was born here. It’s kind of a Barzakh thing.”

“Say no more. I have friends from other places. A lady from Ecuador comes to our house all the time. Every Wednesday, 4-6. Nice lady, what’s her name? Generous, too. Ever since we put her husband on a plane, she’s been sending money back to Guayaquil.”

“Sweet. I have family in South America.”

“But you’re not Latino?”

“No. I’m Muslim.”

“Don’t tell me, we don’t ask about religion, we’re impartial. But seeing how you’ve gotten onto things we don’t talk about, I’m curious about something you can tell me off the record if you want to. You don’t have to, nobody’s forcing you. I mean you come here for a job and then you don’t want to talk about the simplest stuff, you clam up, what have you got to hide? This is a thorough process we have here, it’s professional to the highest standards, nothing gets by us, we don’t cut corners, buster. We’re up to our necks in the green stuff, we have all the time and resources in the world, but we have quotas, we’re on a deadline, why are you impeding us? Assume the position, you sonofabitch.”

“I will be happy to do that,” I say, and get on the floor.

For a few minutes, nothing happens. He doesn’t come over from behind his desk. When I rise up enough to peer over the desktop, he’s wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Sorry,” he says. “PTSD. You can get up.”

I sit in front of him again and he appears to have recovered, poor guy. I know all about PTSD and hope he’s taking antibiotics. His case seems pretty advanced.

“You wanted to ask me something, didn’t you?”

“What? Ah, yes, yes. This stuff is not really part of the interview but I think you and I are pretty good buddies by now.”

“Yeah, I think you’re super-cute. In a gruff way.”

“That’s OK, you’re not the first recruit to say so.”

“Not that gruff, though. I mean, people who burst into tears are not that gruff.”

He looks at me from over the top of his handkerchief, which covers the rest of his face like a niqab. This reminds me I’ll get to dress up when I’m an agent. I’ve always loved the kind of costume parties where you don’t know who’s who, or at least you pretend not to. He balls up the handkerchief and places it gently on the desk.

“Just between us pals, what do you think about the military skirmish in Iran?”

“The war that’s spreading everywhere? I’m against it.”

He sighs. “You have family over there.”

“No, they’re all in South America. I’m against the gas prices, dude.”

“Ah, that’s no problem. That’s temporary. It’s also American. Everything will get fixed, we’ll be great again.” He writes happily. “My friend, I wonder what your thoughts are on the bad men of our past, like Barack Hussein Obama, for instance.”

“That was before my time. I’m more up on current affairs. Like I wish they would release all the Epstein files, the way they promised.”

“Those are just extras.”

“Extras?”

“Yeah, like duplicates.”

This makes me think. I had no idea they’d set down everything twice, but it makes sense. What if half of it got deleted by accident? They’d still have the other half, which actually means they’d have the whole thing. This idea is appealing and my mind races ahead. They should make triplicates. Then they could give out even less.

“Tell me more about your thoughts on current affairs.”

“I’m for universal healthcare.”

He laughs and says, “We already have that. Everybody gets more than they need all the time. People are ripping off the system, that’s why we have to kick them out.”

“That’s horrible,” I agree. “The very idea of those people filling up our hospitals.”

We lapse into silence, probably both of us envisioning those people lying around on hospital beds, tubes up their noses. Who do they think they are? If I were in the job right now, I’d march over to the hospital, lift that little old brown lady off the gurney, put her in a wheelchair, get her into a transport vehicle, accompany her to the border, give her a supply of Ensure, and point the electric wheelchair in the direction of the nurse on the other side.

My officer and I are really hitting it off now, and we exchange more thoughts on events of the day. I complain that I hate tariffs, because they make everything so expensive. He explains that China’s paying massive amounts to our government, which is getting richer and richer, and we the people don’t have to pay anything. I say I thought importers pay the tariffs and the costs are passed on to consumers, and he says the whole thing makes his head hurt, which I have to agree with. I find it easy to agree with him. Maybe we’re soulmates.

“I wish they’d rebuild the East Wing,” I sigh.

“You mean build the ballroom.”

“No, I’d like it to go back to when it was. You know, when it was great.”

This changes my officer’s color again.

“Oh, yeah, and I guess you want them to give back the jet. And take the American-flag blue out of the pond. And scrap the arch, and change the established name of the performing arts center and the airport, and throw away the coins and bills and passports, and tear down the statues like they do when great leaders are deposed and the mobs go crazy. This is why we’re here, you know, this is who we are, this is what we do. They hate us, they spit on us, we’re grunts who work day and night until we can’t think straight, but they don’t stop us, we stop them. If you don’t like it, if you haven’t got the balls, you can scuttle back to whatever hole you crawled out of, you gutless worm, and I’ll do it alone. I might do you myself right now. Where’s my weapon?”

He scrabbles in his desk drawer as I think oh, my goodness, and fan myself with my resume. But then he stops, picks up the handkerchief, and covers his face, full burka. I want to go around and give him a hug but I’m too wise for that, and wait quietly.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Sometimes I think I should be put away.”

“Oh, no, you’re not the one who should be put away,” I say. “If anyone, I think it should be those maniacs who attacked the Capitol. They’re the ones who shouldn’t be unleashed on the public.”

He drops the handkerchief, but my words don’t seem to have soothed his anguish.

“Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?” he asks.

Luckily for me, I’ve been watching the hearings on C-SPAN and know the answer.

“I think Joe Biden was certified as the winner and took office.”

“But did he win the 2020 election, you miserable little shit?”

“Joe Biden was certified as the winner and took office.”

My officer stands up behind his desk. I stand up, too. He sticks out his hand and we shake.

“Welcome to NICE,” he says.

We don’t kiss or anything. It’s not that kind of job.

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Exciting news: Donald J. Trump has written his debut novel and I’ve received an excerpt from his editor, my old pal, Bari Weiss, which appears below in print for the first time. The book, titled, To Tell the Truth: A Trump Fictional Novel but also a True Story, will be released next month by Paramount Global Publishing.

Bari assured me the novel employed neither a ghost writer nor AI help. She said the President was inspired to write it during his most productive hours from 2­–4 a.m. in his golden bathroom after Danielle Steel explained to him it was the path to immortality. The novel is predicted to become the number one best seller of all time and it’s not even close.

Bari told me she was very tough on him as an editor and deleted a lot of caps. The original text was all caps. One of their biggest debates concerned the title. The President came to the table with several options and entertained suggestions but discarded them. His first choice was I Cannot Tell a Lie but the publishing team convinced him the title was already taken. The next option was I Am the Boss of Everyone. As the collaborative editing process continued, the working title became, Everybody Loves Me. Bari was particularly fond of, The Guardian of the Universe, but the President finally settled on the final title because it had his name and “truth” in it. Bari emphasized he wrote every word of the title himself.

My advanced reader copy tells the tale of a poor little rich boy who grows up to purchase the largest and best country on Earth, is beloved by everyone, and eventually is begged to become the (formerly titular) guardian of the universe. I won’t delay the reveal of the excerpt with a big review except to say the novel is riveting, you couldn’t take your eyes off it if you wanted to.

I was particularly impressed by the President’s stylistic emphasis on cleft sentences and deixis. The often lengthy sentences employ loose conjunctions and parenthetical interruptions to explore the nature of normativity and the moral implications of America’s contemporary challenges as examined from the perspective of older, better times. In short, the novel reminded me of Proust crossed with Steel, or of Virginia Woolf impregnated by Dan Brown.

The book’s movie version, scheduled to follow in 2027, will be directed by Bret Ratner, starring a de-aged Jon Voigt. Incidentally, I should mention this will be my final Substack, as I have accepted the position of Director of Communications in the administration and also Ambassador to Tuvalu. And now what you’ve been waiting for:

To Tell the Truth: A Trump Fictional Novel but also a True Story

Chapter One

Not that long ago really when you think about it, if you believe the world is MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD, even billions, which some very smart people don’t believe because they’ve studied the Bible, which I guess says it’s only a few thousand years old, I don’t know, I haven’t seen that, although I’ve read the Bible quite a bit, a lot really, I probably know more about the Bible than anyone, especially the Pope. Every night when I get down on my knees by my bedside I’ll read the Old Testament or the New Testament, it doesn’t really matter which one, I like them both the same, but it doesn’t even have a rug there, it’s COLD HARD TILE, very bad on my knees although it doesn’t bother me at all.

I should get a nice soft rug but I put up with it because it’s God, and I thank Him for choosing me to be the MOST POWERFUL MAN on Earth and to lead the people with the aid of my God-given BIG BRAIN, but I never did read how old the Earth is and I’d like to see that in the Bible. It’s kind of strange because of THE DINOSAURS, they say a meteor blew them up, but I think they were older, maybe I missed it but I don’t think so because I don’t really miss things, except maybe I would miss being President if that ever happened, WHICH IT WON’T.

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I do THE WEAVE, because I’m very smart, I aced every question, I weave but I come back, and I’m coming back to say not all that long ago, not when you’re thinking about BIGTIME TIME, a little boy was born. He was not actually a little boy when he was born or you wouldn’t call him that, you’d call him a baby, but he was a boy so that’s OK, and he was born, he had a mother. He also had a father who was married to his mother, the whole thing was LEGITIMATE, and they were VERY RICH because his father was a great man, very smart, a very nice guy. His mother was nice, too, and she was important because she had him, which was, let’s face it, the MOST IMPORTANT THING to him and as it turned out, to the world, too.

Everyone loved him, from the very beginning, the girls and women loved him a lot and when he grew up and became famous he could do anything he wanted with them, and the funny thing was, he could do no wrong. By that I mean literally, he NEVER MADE A MISTAKE, it was like his SUPERPOWER, he should have had a cape and probably some red tights and boots, because he was VERY HANDSOME and had this long flowing blond hair, he looked like a cage fighter or a general and he was a negative handicap golfer, do you know what that means, a negative handicap? It’s like an alternate math, it means he had to give everyone else strokes just so they had a fighting chance but they didn’t, he always won. Negative two handicap, sometimes five, even ten, twenty. He loved winning, it was what he did best, because he COULD DO NO WRONG.

All this winning began from an early age, from when he was what you’d normally say was a baby although he was born pretty much full-grown, which was hard on his mother, I can tell you, but a lot of MIRACULOUS THINGS happened and that was one of them, that was one of the first. A lot more came after that.

This boy called himself JOHN BARRON, which people figured was his name but it wasn’t, he just used it, like a kind of disguise, like Clark Kent except without the glasses, which were not cool, and now you see athletes wearing them all the time and they don’t need them, it’s a fashion thing, it wouldn’t work as a disguise at all and anyway they like the fame and the BIG BUCKS, who wouldn’t? I would and I do, I’m richer than any of them, plus more powerful, and I have friends everywhere, everyone says, sir, WE LOVE YOU.

I could have been a professional athlete, several sports, I probably would have golfed and taught Jack Nicklaus a thing or two and I would have won more titles than him, way more than Tiger, who let himself pay attention to the losers and scum and crashed out, and he doesn’t strike the ball like I do anyway, and so would John Barron, he would have been a great golfer, he called himself JOHN MILLER sometimes.

But not changing in a phone booth. I would have just played in the cape and tights, and so would have John Barron or John Miller, because they had long blond hair, too. Can you imagine how that would have played in the lamestream, winning every title IN A CAPE and those boots that go halfway up the calf, red? It would have been on every TV show in America and even in the SHITHOLE COUNTRIES, and Russia and China, and all the trophies would be gold, but that’s not what happened because the Good Lord had bigger things in mind for John and so did his dad and he did FOR HIMSELF, too.

His father wanted him to make it on his own, so he didn’t give him any money to get started, he gave him a million dollars, not 400 million like the failing New York Times tried to say, which you can’t do much with that, with a million, it’s worth even less now, people tell me you can’t retire on that, you couldn’t afford GROCERIES, a lovely word, strange that nobody says it anymore but I brought it back.

It’s not a matter of affordability, that’s a hoax, probably the millionaires just waste it on ALCOHOL AND HANDOUTS, but it was worth more back then because of INFLATION although it doesn’t matter because the INTEREST RATES are low and getting lower and TARIFFS, probably my favorite word, and the STOCK MARKET is like nobody’s ever seen it but don’t get me onto that because this is about me, or you might think it’s about the two Johns, whichever one you want to call them.

Our hero, who I’ll call John because they have the same name and this is a novel, it’s fiction, although based on fact and drawn from the real life of a great American hero, the greatest, whose face you see everywhere, still BEAUTIFUL LONG HAIR, it’s real, you could pull it but mostly in crowds it’s better for John to stay behind bullet-proof glass because he makes these beautiful speeches that drive the crowds wild. HUGE CROWDS like nobody has ever seen, but the scumbags with guns, he’s not afraid, he’ll throw out a fist, very big hands, even though he’s top of the HIT LIST, and I don’t mean hit songs or best sellers but probably that, too.

Ever since the STOLEN ELECTION, which was after he had a hugely successful real estate career and I mean big, like has never happened before, and became a TV star and got elected President and everyone called him President Barron, sir, or sometimes President Miller, which wasn’t his name but it didn’t matter because he never wore the cape or glasses, he didn’t need glasses, his eyesight was PERFECT. His doctor said it was like an eagle’s, better than an eagle, an eagle might as well be blind compared to his eyesight.

If he could fly, if he had a cape, he could see little fishes way down in the ocean miles below, but he wouldn’t have swooped down anyway because he was a human, although superhuman, and he preferred McDonalds. Everything was perfect, he passed all the tests with flying colors, the brain ones, too, with the giraffes and TVs but also the super-hard ones at the end that nobody ever got, he got, it was PERFECT.

Ever since the STOLEN ELECTION, everyone lied all the time, the RussiansRussiansRussians, but he had no reason to disbelieve Putin, it was Comey, it was Mueller, it was Adam Schiff, but it was him, he was the only one that mattered. And the patriots who fought like hell or we wouldn’t have a country anymore, who he pardoned and will pay because they were hostages and it was a day of love, but most of the news was FAKE until after he got the good journalists in, and then some decent people bought the lamestream and it started looking GREAT AGAIN.

But then the troublemakers started yelling about the BALLROOM and the ARCH and the vandals attacked the POOL, and they wouldn’t let him obliterate a civilization because it wouldn’t LOOK GOOD but they wouldn’t care, I could shoot them in the middle of Fifth Avenue. We cleaned up the streets of all the RAPISTS but people whined about getting shot, and they didn’t appreciate the tax breaks or the wonderful deals on pharmaceuticals like they’d never seen, and the DUMOCRATS kept obsessing about Jeffrey who has been dead like forever and who I barely knew, we met once or twice. That was not my drawing, I don’t do drawings. But we got rid of the totally untalented Colbert, and Kimmel’s next, and we’ll take Greenland the easy way or the hard way, and Cuba better watch out, and the failing New York Times.

Only a fool wouldn’t accept the biggest and best plane in the world, which all the troops want to see where the President gets to ride and I’m giving it to my library, which doesn’t mean it will be parked all the time, that would stupid, and I am not a stupid person. I don’t do any of the business now, I’m not involved, I don’t know anything about it, you have to ask them. But then we started getting bombed by the Islamic Republic of Japan, plus all these years it’s remained ridiculously low water pressure, you have to FLUSH AND FLUSH.

By now, you’ve probably guessed who John Barron or John Miller is. It’s me, DONALD J. TRUMP, your President. Did you guess? It was me. I thought I’d tell you because there are a few things I’d like to say in MY VOICE, under my own name… [end of excerpt].

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Among the trove of memory reels we call up from moments throughout life, I sometimes scroll through one in which my child enters school with the other kindergartners on the first day of class. All those tiny figures mill about in the dozy oblivion of moment-by-moment existence before they are swallowed by the edifice of institutionalization, where their sacred aimlessness will be taken away and never restored. And they’re only five. In the yard with other parents, I stand helpless witness to the march of civilization, whose first indication is when the tykes are assembled in line and enter the school one-by-one in an unwitting shuffle that blisters my heart.

I’ve always loved the music and scorned the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,” despite this putting me on Margaret Thatcher’s side. Yes, I know it’s about authoritarianism and is not supposed to be taken as condemnation of education. Still, it’s a challenge to imagine a piece of songwriting with a lyric more lame than one that urges young people to avoid education so nobody can tell them what to think. You need only look around at where ignorance has gotten America to recognize the fatuousness of dismissing education as thought control.

One of my abiding consternations in this fraught time in America is that I don’t want to believe a third of the country is stupid. I prefer to think only a few are stupid, just as only a few are brilliant and the rest of us plot somewhere on the curve in between. The one-third, tragically unaware of what’s going on, are just ignorant, which is our default position as a species, so that’s forgivable and fixable. They can become educated. It doesn’t mean they will become educated, but they could be.

The biggest hurdle to overcome is they don’t need no education, because it’s thought control. People can become so thoroughly under the sway of authority that they’re convinced freedom is the authority they must rebel against. The license for thought to roam that’s provided by education is interpreted as brainwashing. Don’t let the cabal tell our kids which books to read, because then who knows what they’ll read next? Let’s all be anti-authoritarians in the worst way. Let us decide which books they won’t read.

Even though I hated to witness the formal start of my child’s co-optation by the system on that first day at kindergarten, I’d been to school, and had been pointed in the direction of Civilization and Its Discontents, and knew the difference between freedom and chaos. The only way my kid would have a fighting chance was through education. Home schooling, tutoring, public school, or private school, the methods are worth debating, but the notion of teachers as another brick in the wall is pathetic. The time for autodidacticism is after you have enough equipment in your head to do it properly. Then the challenge becomes to toss out the conditioning and adopt flexibility, the capacity to change course.

This problem of how far to follow the rules and when or how to strike out on one’s own is fundamental. It crosses into everything we do. The child who performs perfectly in school might be beloved by the teachers, but Roger Waters has a point in suggesting the kid will become a bore. The savviest teachers are proud of their 4.0 clone even as they’re uneasy about this young master of rote, fueled by a diligence that comes from the cult’s Kool-Aid.

And the cult extends beyond the school. Almost every parent wants a straight-A child. We witness plenty of public fretting about helicopter parenting and turning students into commodities, and rarely see celebrations of calculated rule-breaking. Yet people admire the rebel’s creative boldness, even if they don’t always admit it. The ability to envision another way and to act on it is applauded; but let’s not do it ourselves right now, not under these conditions with too much hanging on the outcome.

Imagine a contemporary college student with a full course load and part-time job who wants to go to the game tonight but has to finish the term paper. The student thinks, Wait, I’ve aced every assignment and test in this class. I could turn in the paper late or even skip it completely and still get an overall good grade, although clearly not a 4.0. I have to think about grad school, though. Is it worth it? Well, the person I’m attracted to will be at the game and so will all my friends. I’ll never be twenty years old again. It’s worth it. That sort of thinking nowadays from a straight-A student set on a post-grad degree? Laughable.

But it happens, and can go well beyond skipping an assignment, even to dropping out, or not going to college at all. A few kids are already educated enough by the time they’re of college age and occasionally earlier. Sometimes these rebels become writers. What would such a person write? Would it have a spark of mischievousness? Might it flare into wild invention? I’d say the odds are better for that person than for one whose capacity to break rules has been stamped out by slavery to the system; I’m all for good teachers, but thought control is a real risk to the easily led.

When someone first conceives an idea for a piece of writing, the concept reflects what the person has become. It doesn’t matter if the idea arose from a news report, a scene in the street, a conversation, a poem. What matters is it has captivated the writer. It’s just an idea at the moment, a kernel, but there’s something about it that makes the writer want to prepare the ground and nurture it.

Everything the person is just then contributes to the selection of this idea from among the many, and to the belief that it can be made to flower into something worthy of the effort. Regardless of how the plot develops or even of whether the person has a clear idea of what the story will be about, this first attraction to the concept begins the process of plumbing the writer’s psyche.

Some people don’t have a clear understanding of how stories emerge from them. It just comes from somewhere and they channel it, like Ginzberg’s comment in Scorsese’s No Direction Home that Dylan is a column of air, taking in the spirit of the time and breathing it out in song. I don’t know, maybe Dylan’s a shaman, but I lean toward the elbow grease factor.

How ideas swirl up, or more specifically, how one idea, one image, takes hold among the others we examine and discard or alter is unlikely to ever be parsed. Let that process rest among Spencer’s category of the unknowable, or if you prefer the quirky, Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. But we can examine the nature of the idea and why it appeals to us. What might the writer’s idea for a story suggest about that person’s ability to escape the strictures of training?

The question extends beyond the first thought into the execution of the whole piece. Innovation in writing is not a strategy. It arises organically, from the nature of the person. The success of the writer’s effort to think inventively, the degree to which the invention is worthy of the term, depends on that person’s imaginative skills. The results can be wildly different from one mind to the next, which is where the creativeness of the rebel streak comes in.

I think the work of imagination, which includes the ability to modify and develop an idea in new ways, derives from personality, a set of nature-nurture traits in which experience plays a critical role. The writer whose personality has developed in a way that permits calculated risk-taking has a better chance of concocting something truly original than others who can’t escape the binds of the status quo. By personality, I don’t mean whether someone is calm or excitable. Those are affects and I’m talking about what goes on inside their heads.

Risk-taking requires the enabling emotion of courage, the opposite of paralyzing fear. The writer with a rebel streak is a brave soul, whose mind can venture further than those constrained by what convention allows. This may be especially true when the mind journeys into the realms of loss and despair in search of whatever of value might be gathered there.

Sure, it’s possible the person constrained by convention in real life can compensate with wild imaginings, but how wild are they in a comparative sense? The degree of inventiveness is the question. Nobody’s likely to study this empirically, so I’ll stick to my assertion that the rebel has the edge. Walter Mitty was the character but Thurber was his creator, and Thurber was a social critic and a college dropout who later turned down an honorary doctorate from his alma mater because of its curbs on campus speakers during McCarthyism.

Innovation can also be a strategy but that’s a false approach, really just conventionality, a surmise of what might sell at the moment. The grounding of having read and understood what’s new and different in good writing is what allows invention to flourish.

When young writers mimic favored authors it’s a good thing, because it helps them to ingest the innovations, so long as they move away from them later. This form of education opens young writers to possibilities, although they won’t get much out of it if they don’t have the spark of rebellion, if they haven’t nurtured the ability to break away from convention and turn their training into a springboard.

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Unlike painters, there’s no such thing as the naïve writer, an autodidact who knows nothing of literature. It’s fun to imagine what people would think and write if they had nothing to go on. They might well bring us something brand new, even though the muck of their ignorance would have to be cleaned off the shiny thing. But of course that’s impossible because such people would have learned how to write, which means they could read.

Oral traditions among some peoples still exist separately from writing but the training in storytelling and the memorization of the mythology are intense. An Australian Aboriginal leader in Arnhem Land once told me it took him years to memorize the stories of his people, which he could recite for eight hours straight.

Descartes pretended to assume the mantle of ignorance when he tossed out all preconceptions of how things work to construct a new philosophy from scratch. But it was an elaborate game, because he couldn’t escape himself. Still, it was a powerful exercise with lasting impact that could have come only from a rebel spirit.

In this sense, creative rebellion is more than escaping the regulations and expectations of the writing world. It’s about escaping ourselves, or the tendency in us, even in the rebel, to abide by rules. Because rules are useful. They enable civilization, and the inventive writer is a critical player in the forward movement of civilization.

I guess Roger Waters got a couple of things right. We don’t want thought control, and to an extent we want teachers to leave the kids alone. But we need education and we want good teachers in the classroom, as well as at home, and anywhere else young people can be pointed toward reading and thinking.

A bad teacher is just another brick in the wall, but a good one can lead a student into the open, away from that fate. And we’ve all known teachers who made it through their education without losing the rebel’s spark. As for us, when an idea arrives, we do with it what we can, given who we are. Our grounding determines how far each of us can fly.

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Why do we set off fireworks on the Fourth? Why do we congregate around these simulations of mass destruction, this display of man’s inhumanity? One reason is because it’s become big business. Another is it’s pretty, we say, and we’re right, but shouldn’t there be a way to extol our freedoms without celebrating their birth in violence? The inspiration of the Fourth is still with us but it long has been embodied in nothing more than the explosions of mock warfare.

We’re good at skirting the true meanings of holidays. New Year’s Eve, ostensibly about turning over a new leaf, is an orgy of boozing and partying and fireworks (mercifully unattached to visions of battle), a countdown, kissing, and champagne, followed by the hungover resolve to not do all this again. Easter has devolved to children scurrying around the yard to unearth painted eggs, and the consumption of masses of poor-quality chocolate. To be fair, some people go to church on Easter, but remind me, in what way does the chocolate frenzy relate to the story of rolling away the stone and bodily ascension?

The birthdays of Martin Luther King and George Washington would be imperiled if they weren’t a day off work, and the same for Juneteenth and Columbus Day. Labor Day, what is it to us, really? A day off, that’s what it is.

The indistinguishable Memorial Day and Veterans Day might be the best of the bunch, if only because their marketing campaigns that offer military discounts and veteran-focused content are relatively tame. Remembering the sacrifice of all those fallen soldiers guided into all those wars is a small price to pay for the travel, picnics, and sports. Folks still visit a graveyard, especially if someone related to them died in a war. But generally, we don’t like to think about death. Graveyards are depressing. We get wrought up only when the fearless leader admits he doesn’t understand why anyone would go to war, because what’s in it for them? It’s a capacious question that assays the might of the military-industrial complex forewarned by our soldier-president Eisenhower, but I don’t think our current fearless leader of the phantom bone spurs thought about it in those terms. He just meant me first.

Halloween is also about dead people but nobody pays any attention to that anymore. The term befitting Halloween, which comes from Shakespeare pundits, is “disguise and deception.” It’s a holiday from identity, when everyone gets to pretend to be someone else, even adults. The kids overdose on solicited sugar and the tradition is to vandalize anyone who won’t comply.

Thanksgiving needs neither explanation nor defense. It’s about the cornucopia, the impacted horn, the bloat of consumption. Being at table together can be a social plus when the family’s not fighting but there’s no thought of the pilgrims and the people they displaced when the turkey comes out full of that spiced bread, that excellently named stuffing. It’s a myth that the drowsiness comes from the turkey’s tryptophan, because there isn’t enough of it to affect you. It’s the cumulative impact. Thanksgiving is about taking until you can’t take anymore.

Of all the festivities, Christmas is most like the Fourth in retaining a connection to its original reason for being. You could argue this makes them the year’s two most hypocritical holidays. Christmas, of course, sails on and on, as a sale will do. Blessed are the poor in spirit, but maybe not in actual stuff. The manger is picturesque, church is warm, but the glistening heart lies piled and beribboned under the dying fir, testimony to the dominance of Santa over Jesus.

From my youngest days, when I worried about the lives of beetles and flies, I didn’t like that it had to be bombs bursting in air. Later when I was forced to come to grips with the real politick of man’s inhumanity, the anthem inspired by a firefight became more defensible. As my father explained it, if you have to get in a fight, hit hard fast. “If you have to” was operative for me. My father was a longtime serviceman, not a diplomat.

Here we are in this blown-up moment with a leader all but the blind can see is demented and deranged. This man, the stand-in father of our country, promised no wars and broke that promise to the astonishment of no one but the blind. The last thing many colonists wanted was war. They considered themselves Englishmen and continued to oppose rebellion for the better part of a year after the first armed hostilities at Lexington and Concord. On the same day Common Sense was published in January 1776, a speech to Parliament that had been made a few months earlier by King George III was printed in Philadelphia. “It is now become the part of wisdom, and (in its effects) of clemency, to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions,” the monarch declared. “When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy!”

Thomas Paine, who authored Common Sense anonymously, wasn’t having it. His pamphlet became a sensation, and a new edition he released the next month included an appendix in which he described the king’s speech as “a wilful audacious libel against the truth, the common good, and the existence of mankind; and is a formal and pompous method of offering up human sacrifices to the pride of tyrants. But this general massacre of mankind, is one of the privileges, and the certain consequence of Kings; for as nature knows them not, they know not her, and although they are beings of our own creating, they know not us, and are become the gods of their creators.”

Many Americans still understand and abhor the pride of tyrants. Many still regard the Fourth as a tribute to scrappy settlers who defied odds and military might to become a nation. But the headline of the Cato Institute’s survey released the other day was that almost half of Americans polled, and more than sixty percent of Gen Z, didn’t know that the 250th anniversary celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The section of the survey I found most revealing shows that among the factors central to people’s personal identity, to be an American ranks second, just behind family. Nationality was chosen more often than gender, race, religion, career, or political affiliation. The survey report’s author, Emily Ekins, wrote, “This suggests that American identity has the capacity to transcend racial, religious, and gender divisions and offer people something they have in common.” So, personal identity is based on commonalities. You are where you feel you belong. First comes family and then, ahead of everything else, comes country. I don’t think so.

What is personal identity if not characteristics such as loyalty, courage, and sacrifice? How do we define ourselves if not by assessments of our purpose, our contribution, our reasons for being? In a survey that’s all about America’s 250^th anniversary, respondents can be forgiven for ranking the abstraction of patriotism above much more intrinsic factors like gender identity and race in their definitions of who they are. If there is commonality in personal identity, surely it extends beyond national borders to how we are in the world, to our affiliation with all humankind. I’m not trying to demean patriotism. I’m just saying if people regard being Americans as more important to their self-image than being decent and useful human beings, that’s a worry, and I don’t believe it.

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After Abe Lincoln’s election, he stopped in Philadelphia on the way to Washington and visited Independence Hall. It was February 1861. In a short impromptu speech, he said, “I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”

A problem that has festered and worsened at least since the 1970s is the “love it or leave it” attitude of jingoism. Criticism of the country has always had its detractors but it nevertheless once was accepted as a free speech right that strengthened the nation. You could be a patriot and criticize, for example, America’s history of slaveholding, misogyny, and imperialism. The country had done great things and was confident enough to examine its weaknesses. Patriotism wasn’t about being either with us or against us. Nowadays it appears even opinions, not just news, are fake.

Late last month, nine people were sentenced for a 2025 Fourth of July protest at an immigrant detention camp in Texas. The protestors were shooting off fireworks to demonstrate their anger at masked and anonymous ICE agents who were arresting, imprisoning, and deporting dark-skinned people without due process. A few of the demonstrators engaged in tire-slashing and other acts of vandalism. One protestor got thirty years for transporting literature about social issues that had nothing to do with the detention center. Seven others received fifty-year sentences. A ninth man, who shot and wounded a police officer whose gun was drawn, got a hundred years. A number of the convicted people didn’t even know the shooter personally. They were called terrorists, members of a group labeled Antifa by the government, although no such organization exists in any way recognizable outside the government’s depiction of it. I suspect some of my readers would rather I didn’t say so, but it’s important to assert that “domestic terrorist” is a label that can now be affixed to anyone who dares to criticize our federal administration.

The Fourth celebrates what it means and what it takes to be an American. Or at least it used to. We’re now so riven that the very definitions of “patriotism” and “American” are matters of interpretation. Maybe someday reason will return and we’ll agree again on those words. Maybe someday; if the dam don’t break and the crick don’t rise.

The first impressions that come to mind when you see the title of a novel you’ve read are like a flash card test, except you’re the one who writes the answer on the other side. The answer is simply the main things you remember of the book. Let’s say you create ten flash cards of novels that are not necessarily your favorites of all time, and that you might not remember too well, but which left you with the conviction they were powerful. Much of the value in this exercise would be in the removal of critical judgment about how well the book was written or even about the story itself. Unburdened by analysis, you get down to which novels grabbed you by the lapels, tomes that through some alchemy of their own made a difference in how and what you read in the future. Once you step away from the critical faculty, you’re left with pure impact.

We do this all the time with books and movies, especially when years have gone by without encountering them again. Sometimes we can’t remember the plot or characters. All that remains is a memory of how impressed we were at the time, plus maybe a scene here or there. If we do recall a novel or film in detail many years afterwards, we take it as a measure of the work’s strength. Usually, it means we loved it. Occasionally we hated it. Yet most of the time we don’t remember it all that clearly. What filters through the decomposing substrate of details are impressions. Such is the nature of memory but I’m not going there: no wide-eyed wanderings amid the synapses wherein the electrochemical ghosts of recollection vacillate. Nope, in this column I’m trying to have a little fun without working too hard. I just want to think about novels that impressed me­. No nonfiction, plays, epic or lyrical poetry, short story collections, or comic books. Just novels. And the reason for this choice is because it’s my column.

In our experiment, it doesn’t have to be a novel you read only once, long ago. It could be a favorite you’ve returned to many times. In that case, your judgment, impressions, and analyses would have changed over the years, as you became a more mature and knowledgeable reader, and as the experiences of life affected what attracts you in a story and how you react to it. Our relationship with novels is organic.

In a sense, this experiment is doomed from the start, because we can’t get away completely from critical analysis. It functions in the background even as we read, although perhaps less so if we’ve managed to penetrate that shadowy realm known as Suspension of Disbelief. Abandon criticism, all ye who enter here. That’s a good place to be. You don’t really care if it’s good or bad, just that it’s entertaining or otherwise interesting. You still have an opinion but it gets folded and moved into a corner for awhile. You put aside your taste and standards to become uncritical, which could be seen as a way of opening up. Sometimes you surprise yourself with the realization that your taste and standards have altered. What you choose to read or to avoid is shaped by what you’ve read, even when your choices go in a new direction.

Given that the impact of other people’s opinions can hardly be overestimated, it would be best in this experiment to avoid refreshing your memory of a novel through summaries or reviews of it. No doubt what others think has already influenced your assessment of a novel, perhaps to the extent that you can’t separate your ideas from theirs. Such is the nature of received wisdom and I’m not going there, either. Nor will I return to the books listed on my flash cards to refresh my opinion of them, because even a quick look could change my opinion and then I’d have to read the whole book to see what I think now. Instead I’ll rely entirely on my old impressions of them that have percolated into a pool muddied by time and misremembering. This approach is especially appealing because it can be defended as a kind of elegance in the experiment even as it allows me to avoid a lot of extra effort.

Ten titles is arbitrary and not enough when you consider a reader can get through a few thousand books in a lifetime but it’s sufficient to make the point, and everybody loves top tens. My flash cards are ordered by the year of each title’s publication, with the latest one first:

1. The City and the City (2009), by China Miéville. I’m not much of a sci-fi fan, but as I recall the author took it upon himself to add fantasy or sci-fi elements to several genres of fiction and this novel was his effort in the police procedural. The concept delighted me: one city superimposed upon another in space-time. Naturally, there’s a portal, and to solve the crime the detective has to go through it. But what really got me is the people had conditioned themselves to not look whenever breaches in the space-time fabric allowed them a glimpse into the other city. Shadowy authorities kept them under control. Meanwhile, who did the murder and why? The diligence of world-building in sci-fi and fantasy generally leaves me weary. Our world is weird enough for me. I was grateful that the constraint of the cop’s attempt to solve the murder must have imposed a structure to help limit the author’s descriptions of this supranormal setting.

2. The Road (2006), by Cormac McCarthy. I came fairly late to McCarthy but I did read this book before the movie arrived, which also hit hard. I’ve always liked post-apocalyptic films because of the stark scenics and the challenge to survive when all is blasted, but the doleful effect of McCarthy’s stunted prose is what I remember most from the novel. It was perfectly attuned to the journey of a father and son in search of sanctuary amid the desolation.

3. The Human Stain (2000), by Philip Roth. I doubt many would select this book as Roth’s best. It has neither the sweep of American Pastoral, nor the inventiveness of The Plot against America, nor the ability to shake up its time of Portnoy’s Complaint. Yet this classic Roth tale of misunderstanding, a rush to judgment, and institutional politics has stayed with me as one of the very best in the genus of American academia novels.

4. If on a winter’s night a traveler (1981), by Italo Calvino. This guy remade the novel but even better than that, his stories seemed to have poured out of him. In this book, every time you get sucked into a story he starts a new one and, after a pause for bewilderment, you get sucked into that one. It’s stories within stories, an effect of frames within frames receding into the distance. It beats me why Calvino didn’t win the Nobel.

5. Stoner (1965), by John Williams. This novel is set largely on a college campus but it didn’t have to be. It’s about a simple quiet life, very much in the vein of Flaubert, and it could have taken place anywhere. The only way such a story can hold the reader is through perfection of craft. I’m with those who praise this story for its flawless style and tone.

6. Nausea (1938), by Jean-Paul Sartre. The challenge to avoid despair and focus on the good in life, especially given the long slow decline in religious sustenance, often is dramatized in existential literature through shocks of the mundane or the outright ugly. How is a newspaper flapping in a gutter any less appalling than if it were a slab of meat? Nobody wants to go that way, and in my younger years I found novels like this one and The Plague and The Stranger to be disturbing wake-up calls.

7. As I Lay Dying (1930), by William Faulkner. My favorite Faulkner is Light in August but the cavalcade of narrators in this novel bowled me over. It was a tour de force that annihilated stuffy pronouncements about point of view with a demonstration of how mastery can ignore rules. The author’s empathy in this story was as intensely evident as anywhere in Faulkner’s fictional universe.

8. Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), by Hermann Hesse. The pattern of Hesse’s fiction is a setup of opposing views, a dialectic. I think this novel does it best: two monks, one of whom goes into the world and the other who stays at the monastery. I was taken by how this simple structure enabled Hesse to explore the big questions and doubts that arise in two lives marked by action and contemplation.

9. Notes from Underground (1864), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like many others, I was drawn early to the Russian’s feverish world, his anguished characters, all that guilt and suffering. The poor guy in this story, kicking himself down there in the basement, does not rise to the level of Dostoyevsky’s greatest tales but the novel is an absolute gem of the overwrought.

10. Don Quixote (1605), by Miguel de Cervantes. This thing’s an astonishment. Adventure, love, honor, wit, loyalty, kindness, and lunacy all in our first novel. It even has a chapter that ends in the middle of a sentence. That droopy horse and the old man with the lance, indelible.

I read a lot of these books long ago and I think the lack of new ones on the list probably can be attributed to the old saw that the formative years are the most impressionable ones. Even so, I came late to a couple of these titles. Would they all make the top ten if I reread them now? Don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. What concerns me more is the impactful novels omitted that don’t deserve such neglect. Accordingly, I’m moved to create another ten flash cards, listed by year of publication, but I’ll spare you the “answers” on the flip side. Again, they’re not necessarily my favorites, although some are, but they all left me with strong impressions:

1. Woodcutters (1984), by Thomas Bernhard

2. Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov

3. The End of the Affair (1951), by Graham Greene

4. The Naked and the Dead (1948), by Norman Mailer

5. Animal Farm (1945), by George Orwell.

6. U.S.A. (1937), by John dos Passos

7. The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett

8. The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), by James Joyce

10. War and Peace (1869), by Leo Tolstoy

A bunch of really old novels in the canon are not on my cards even though I wouldn’t dispute they’re among the great books. Maybe their impact on me has been more subtle than that of the novels I’ve named, many of which also are in the canon. At any rate, I’ll draw up just ten more cards, and then will leave the table and keep the leftovers to myself:

1. The Savage Detectives (1998), by Roberto Bolaño

2. Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), by David Markson

3. Something Happened (1974), by Joseph Heller

4. Fear of Flying (1973), by Erica Jong

5. The Godfather (1969) by Mario Puzo

6. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

7. Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow

8. Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), by Ken Kesey

9. Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf

10. Great Expectations (1861), by Charles Dickens

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Nowadays most readers who pick up a Victorian novel, let’s say Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, have to gird themselves for a long, slow slog. It’ll be like one of those openings of an Ingmar Bergman movie, where everything is said by what is shown. You know it’ll be good for you, but you gotta get psyched up for it. OK, you’ve taken a big breath and you’re ready. Here’s some of the first interminable paragraph of that 1888 novel:

Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could only be an eternity of pleasure.

These characters are having tea on the lawn. No terrorist will crash upon the scene, no weapon more formidable than a butter knife will appear, and there isn’t a femme fatale in sight.

Back in the day, folks didn’t need to brace for the felicities of a Henry James tale. They jumped right into it and wallowed. They weren’t worried that the story would go on and on with practically nothing happening beyond lovely descriptions of shadows cast by trees and wicked turns of phrase. But we’ve been told for a century the novel is dead and what we now want, presumably, is a screenplay devoid of stage directions.

Pare it down, the writing pundits say. Eliminate the rambling opener. Condense a paragraph to a sentence. Write with nouns and action verbs. Shun the passive voice. Avoid filter words. Watch out for redundancy. Conduct a messianic crusade against modifiers, especially adverbs.

And that’s where we are in modern writing. It’s true that concision enhances the power of verbs and nouns within their rickety framework of articles, prepositions, and pronouns. It has the strength of clarity. It’s demonstrative. But it also can get kind of shallow at the sentence level. Prose that’s cleaned up to such an extent can lose its sense of spontaneity.

I’m not saying line-editing is bad. I think writers should continually hone their sentences, even as they’re still writing the first draft. They shouldn’t worry about whether a scene will later be cut and the work will be wasted. Improvements are useful at all times—do your reps, as they say—but edits can be additions as well as subtractions. They can move a story in unanticipated directions. And they can add to the sense of spontaneity, by which I mean the wit and charm of the text. Good edits increase the impact of a sentence, whether or not more words are employed. But it’s a challenge to add words; it just seems so much tidier, even stronger, when those shaggy parts are shaven off.

A big reason why writing advisors harp on concision is that lots of people have taken up writing and self-publishing who have limited experience in the craft. There’s good business in helping these folks to avoid verbosity, and it also improves literacy at large. Another possible cause of this preoccupation with pithiness can be traced to the Hemingway effect, which came in response to the kitchen-sink descriptive style of the Victorian novel. The terseness is journalistic, tinged with notions of fortitude in silence, and it supposedly allows free rein to the reader’s powers of imagination.

Concision also is influenced by the transformations in electronic communication, its diffusion and shortening of our attention. If you don’t cut to the chase, the hounds will follow a different scent. It seems the only way we can wander as readers into a strange place where we’ll focus on details without much concern for where we’re going is to pick up a 19^th century novel with the expectation, or resignation, that it will be long-winded.

Right away we’ll find out all about the weather. We’ll gaze at the hills and valleys, or get a long-lensed view of people stepping out of a carriage on a city’s cobblestoned street before we follow them inside to examine their clothing and faces, or two people will meet and converse on a rural path, maybe a commoner and a cleric. The narrator, who sometimes can’t be distinguished from the author, often will make a pronouncement about life whose cheekiness invites our engagement in the idea rather than prompting our wholehearted embrace or rejection of it. The reader isn’t expected to believe that every young man in possession of a fortune wants a wife but the point is taken, and from the vantage of advancing time, it tells us much about life then.

I’ve always loved the winding sentence that crosses bridges, detours through alleys, turns back on itself, changes pace, and then gathers and settles around the house like Eliot’s feline fog. Such a journey can’t be taken half-asleep. Its purposeful meandering requires attention to follow and finally emerge into a small triumph of comprehension. It would be a loss if such excursions were to be found only in the wild English garden of Victorian literature, entirely supplanted by the manicured lawn of today’s prose. I should emphasize I’m not talking about structural experiments, long novels, unusual narrators and their inventive language, or the creativity of, say, writing an entire chapter as a PowerPoint presentation. I’m talking about the way a sentence reads, the way most sentences read. But there are exceptions, because in any art form, accomplished people are more concerned about what works than about rules and norms.

Fitzgerald, who wrote at the changeover period between the florid and the sparse, showed us what might be lost and how it could be regained. At the end of The Great Gatsby, just before the famous closing line that likens us to boats against the current, he envisions Long Island as it must have looked to Dutch explorers:

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Wordy novels can be cinematic. It makes no sense to avoid certain tools of the trade, except maybe in experiments such as the Oulipo movement that inspire new approaches by creating constraints.

One of America’s great recent stylists, the late David Foster Wallace, set the scene in the third sentence of his 1999 masterpiece, Infinite Jest:

This is a cold room in the University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.

I like the adjectives that give us the look of the place but what I really like is the one adverb. Who says “lately received” anymore? It’s amusing because it’s arcane, yet it tells us more about the narrator than any other word in the sentence.

I’m not saying novels written with concision can no longer be effective; it’s not either-or. The syntax of Ben Lerner’s acclaimed new novel, Transcriptions, is clean and compelling. It opens with the protagonist on a train, where he texts using abbreviations and an emoji, scans a QR code, puts in earbuds to listen to a talk, and takes a photo through the window. The time could only be now, a fact announced both by details and by the parsimonious language. And it makes you want to keep reading.

Yet there is appeal in complex phrasing, if its reason for being is not self-indulgent, and such writing can be found here and there, albeit hardly everywhere. Here are three examples.

The late William Gass generated a lot of controversy with his second novel, The Tunnel, published in 1995:

And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?...my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn’t been said as repeatedly as I dreamed my dream of glory, unless it was what I’ve said?

William T. Vollman, another American scribe renowned for his convoluted prose, won the 2005 National Book Award for Europe Central. Here’s one sentence early on:

According to the telephone (for perhaps I did listen in once, treasonously) Europe Central’s not a nest of countries at all, but a blank zone of black icons and gold-rimmed clocks whose accidental, endlessly contested territorial divisions (essentially old walls from Roman times) can be overwritten as we like, Gauleiters and commissars, blanching them down to grey dotted lines of permeability convenient to police troops.

Last year, a gigantic novel by Mark Z. Danielewski called Tom’s Crosssing offered a Faulknerian take on oral history in a fictional setting. Here’s an early sentence:

In the years that followed, good folks like Gil Stubbs and Anton Smiley; Amelia Beltran of course; the same Amelia who would become lifelong friends with Rayleen; along with Irene Wrenn, Courtney Resnick, Eldon McKennan, Craig Sandower, and fer sure Simon Bickette, would try their darndest through the materials of their practice to at least preserve the joy, and if joy is goin too far, then the pure idleness of livin, right before the heedless future, with no regard for Wile, Wrath, let alone Determination, or for that matter any thought of Love, Beauty, or Justice, chewed it all up: this one moment, and only this moment, of just a scrawny kid still sittin on a fence rail, still enjoyin the sight of that black mare and blood bay geldin, who were likewise also still enjoyin themselves.

It’s hard nowadays for writers to get away with wandering sentences. Many readers won’t stand for it and even among those who are willing to take the journey, the patience of some will wear thin because of our conditioning to pace and action in contemporary writing. The footloose sentence that roams the page whistling is so far from our clipped style as to almost seem another language. We’re told folks were wonderful conversationalists in the 19^th century, before passive entertainments dominated. We may never recapture that skill at large but in writing, surprises and insights still appear around the bends of a twisty sentence unafraid of the modifier, of the semicolon that keeps it going, of parenthetical asides. We’re hardly in the heyday of prolixity, but cheers to the dexterous few who rabbit on despite all the best advice to clean it up, trim it down, keep it short, stupid.

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All right, so Trump’s approval rating hasn’t always been great, is actually the lowest average rating of any president in polling history. But listen up, he has a strong base of supporters, loyalists who will never abandon him, people who would take the smoking .38 out of his hand and put it in the grip of the corpse on Fifth Avenue.

How do they love him? Let me count the ways.

They’re charmed by his humor and charisma. For example, the scathing nicknames he concocts, like little and sleepy and Brown instead of Green. His other wonderful words and phrases that are all his, such as bigly and fake news and groceries, the likes of which nobody has ever seen, thank you for your attention to this matter, a whole civilization will die tonight, shithole country. Who can’t relish the way he explains to people they’re stupid and losers? Or his profession of love for the poorly educated? And people of color. The way he says the same things thousands of times so you get it, so you can believe it. His inimitable weave in conversation, the likes of which only dope-smokers and relatives of the cognitively challenged have ever seen.

His up-by-the-bootstraps story is inspirational, a man of the people who got a very small million-dollar loan from his father, not the $413 million calculated by the failing New York Times (annual revenue a paltry $2.8 billion). His six business bankruptcies were strategic financial restructurings. It’s ridiculous to argue he was the laughingstock of New York real estate, saved by a fictional remake of his image for a TV show. He didn’t welch on payments to contractors, he just didn’t pay them when they did lousy work, which is the ethical thing to do. He never admitted any wrongdoing in the $25 million settlement to 6,000 students who got no education and no refund from Trump University.

It’s just lies that self-dealing, greed, nepotism, and corruption are any part of his makeup. The $400 million airplane gift from Qatar, no-bid federal contracts to associates, his more than 3,700 stock transactions during the first quarter of 2026 worth up to $750 million, the multi-million-dollar paydays for his two sons for their Middle East deals, and the billions to his son-in-law while he was negotiating on the government’s behalf: all fake news. He had a right to sue his own IRS for $10 billion but when the court dismissed it, he could have settled for an absolute fortune. Instead, he set up a fund for his badly abused friends and accomplices, including the formerly jailed ones he’d pardoned for rushing the Capitol to overthrow the government, although maybe there would be no payout if one of them beat up a cop or offered to share the money with child rape victims.

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Our leader’s determination is legend. Who can forget the 2020 election was rigged? Who can forget? His enemies are everywhere but they aren’t getting away scot-free. If they don’t get hit on the head like Pelosi’s hubby, he’ll chase them out of the country like Rosie O’Donnell, or kick them off their shows like Colbert, or shoot them dead in the streets of Minneapolis. The poor man is so beleaguered it’s exhausting just to think about all his enemies but for starters there’s Biden, Obama, Comey, Cheney, both Clintons, Schiff, Cornyn and the other primaried RINOs, windmills, Muslims, much of the media including the failing New York Times, plus lousy water pressure that makes you have to flush and flush.

As much as anything, it’s his strength that attracts the Don’s followers. He has been inspired by great leaders such as Putin, who has the courage to exile, imprison, and poison opponents and to organize the correct result in each election and to take what’s rightfully his in Ukraine no matter the cost. He has a pen pal love affair with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a.k.a. Little Rocket Man, aficionado of the purge and the assassination. He admires Orbán so much he tried to pay Hungarians to keep him in power, although perhaps he’s not such a fan anymore now that Orbán’s a loser like Bolsonaro. Nowadays it’s Xi Jinping, a great man who has been in power practically forever. It makes no sense to say Trump ever kept Mein Kampf by his bedside. When could he not afford to have storyboards made?

His no-nonsense tough love is legendary. Don’t kill the illegal rapist-murderer migrants, just shoot them in the legs or put crocs in moats at the border. Send ICE to American cities but only to gas and beat and gun down the terrorists. The terrible scourge of drugs can be stemmed by bombing fishing boats from Venezuela to kill the criminals by their hundreds, which is more efficient than trials and anyway it’s fake news that the drugs don’t come here from Venezuela. Or from Canada. The corrupt Deep State can be cleaned up, first of all, by getting rid of USAID. Voters won’t care about the ensuing 750,000 deaths abroad, who were mostly Africans anyway.

President Trump’s supporters love him because he’s the undisputed champion of America First principles. Of course, it’s a tough road to make America great again, like it was at that time in the past when it was great. You don’t bring back a country overnight where mothers and children are trapped in poverty in inner cities, and crime and gangs and drugs have robbed us of potential, all this American carnage. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, particularly when they don’t even give you the Nobel Peace Prize. You have to try to get Greenland any way you can, money or force. You could make Canada the fifty-first state. It would be good to take back the Panama Canal. You can starve Cuba and maybe get to their leadership. You can take Madero out of Venezuela and confiscate the oil and put the proceeds in an account where it’s so safe nobody knows where it is. You may have to insult and alienate allies, pull out of the Paris Accords, excoriate NATO. And sometimes the right thing is to withhold help, like in Ukraine, where it’s their fault.

His followers swell with pride at his morally upright military posture. It makes sense that he likes soldiers who don’t get captured. Why would anyone want to go to the American Cemetery in France in the rain to mess up their hair on behalf of losers and suckers? It’s raw, powerful honesty to stand over the grave of a general’s son and confide to the father that you don’t get it, what’s in it for soldiers who die for their country?

The president’s enthusiasts recognize that his clear and consistent morality is beyond reproach. Obviously, there are good people on both sides of a public murder, and it makes sense for the Proud Boys to stand down and stand by. He wanted no more from Brad Raffensperger than to just find 11,780 votes, fellas, give him a break. Pense, who would be nobody without him, was too honest to do the right thing but Trump knew his people would fight like hell or they wouldn’t have a country anymore and if they wanted to hang the vice president, so what?

Everyone admires Trump’s manly love for women. The way he used to stride unannounced into the dressing rooms of beauty pageant contestants when he owned the beauty pageant. The way he hosted a calendar girl competition at Mar-a-Lago in which the whole audience was Jeffrey and him. The way he was having sex with two women a few months after his third wife gave birth. The way he knew how to take care of women who might not be discreet. The way a woman in the Epstein files described him sexually assaulting and striking her when she was thirteen. The way dozens of women have accused him of sexual misconduct. His witticisms that you can grab them by the pussy if you’re famous, and they have blood coming out of wherever, and they’re little piggies who should shut up, and he would never sexually assault that one because she’s not his type.

Our president has overcome his natural modesty to accede to a few tips of the cap to his legacy. The enthusiasm of his stalwarts has produced too many encomiums to mention or even remember but, let’s see, there’s his photo on US passports, his likeness on a $250 bill, and his name above Kennedy’s on the Kennedy Center. There’s a triumphal arch, a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing used to be, a soccer federation peace prize, a military parade for him on the Fourth, America’s 250th anniversary celebrated as his birthday, social media re-posts of him as a king and as a doctor who looks like Jesus. His cabinet members understand he’s a true champion of the working people who has saved the lives of 75 percent of America’s population, the single finest candidate for the Nobel Prize, the only leader on the planet capable of solving international conflicts.

His big brain is widely admired and has been repeatedly demonstrated when he aces his dementia tests, multiplying 99 times nine in his head, dividing the sum by three, adding 4,293, dividing by two, subtracting 93, and dividing by nine. Not many people could get that right, especially demented ones. Also, no one can deny that any rich person who doesn’t pay taxes is smart. Furthermore, our leader understands that the way to avoid taxes for everyone is through the beautiful tariffs, which make China pay extra for everything. Even US allies finally are forced to pay their share and everything gets cheaper for Americans or will get cheaper soon, because China pays more but prices go down for us or will go down soon, which is why tariffs are beautiful. The same is true of pharmaceutical prices, which will fall by 1,500 percent, which is possible because of a different way of doing math that the Dumocrats don’t understand. He took the “b” out of “dumb,” which most people don’t realize has a “b” in it.

He is not just smart, though, he is canny. He has the gut instincts of a razorback boar, a nose for the deal of a truffle pig. One example: the most canny thing you can do when you want something or when someone tells you to do something is attack a country like Iran. And then when they barricade access to the oil, barricade them back. If we don’t get it, nobody gets it. They have to agree again to stop the nuclear enrichment because that Obama deal was the worst deal he’d ever seen. And if they don’t? Bomb them to kingdom come. What do they do? Bomb you. And then what? War spreads over the Middle East, but don’t worry because Israel has our back and our weapons and is the only country there with nukes. Tens of thousands die, the entire world economy shudders. And then what? Say it’s on, say it’s off, say it’s solved, say it’s over, say it’s on again, say they really want to make a deal, say they’re crazy bastards, say Netanyahu’s crazy, say it’s almost over, say nobody’s doing anything, say there’s nothing boring about this, say it’s starting to get very boring and you don’t care if negotiations are over, say the price of gas is peanuts, say you don’t think about the financial situation of Americans. This is negotiation like nobody has ever seen.

Many of his traits are so powerfully manifest they don’t need explanation. I’m thinking, for example, of his decisiveness. His modesty. His athletic prowess on the golf course. His loyalty, especially his command of it. Most of all, his honesty.

But as the ruler approaches his eightieth birthday, it seems he’s beginning to feel his age. His devotees experience a warmth of sorrow at the sight of his swollen ankles and bruised hands. When his speech wanders perhaps even more than ever before, they wander as well. When he nods off in the daytime, they nap, too. They wince in sympathy at that bobble-headed wobble of a dance during his rallies and the way he nestles up to the flag for a hug, knowing the inanimate object can’t repulse him like a wife. They believe in and understand his perfect physical health, because they also live on burgers and fried chicken.

His votaries are not foolish, they know he isn’t perfect. On Capitol Hill, he’s like the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar, who was manipulated by Daniel for the Lord’s purposes, just like the Republicans manipulate Trump. Or sort of like that. Anyway, he wears a big crown when he pilots that plane dumping shit on a few of the seven million Americans at the No Kings rallies. It’s just a little joke. He loves us, and we love him.

If the fifty bucks for a paid subscription is a bit stiff but you’d like to support my writing, you could buy my literary mystery, Paint It Noir. It’s fun!

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Avoiding security is a job hazard familiar to writers who don’t make a career of it in an office. The decision to sit alone in a room, preferably with a view, is the fundamental difference between writers and journalists. Nowadays salaried writers for publications might often work at home but the safety net of an organization means they’re not alone, which is why the loss of the job can be such a blow to so many. They never have balanced on the high wire above nothing but sidewalk or if they have, they don’t want to set foot out there again. It’s hazardous to pass up a steady gig in favor of insecurity and it often isn’t great for family life. Why would anybody do it? What’s wrong with such writers?

At a daily newspaper where I once took a copy-editing test, the editor barged around and shouted as if his idea of how to conduct himself came from watching Perry White at The Daily Planet. I needed the money so I forged on with the test, whi…

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After I met with my publisher the other day, I came home and looked at the many versions of the opener to my novel of last year, Paint It Noir. I was inspired to do this because he had filmed me as I read the opening paragraphs of my novel-in-progress, Cleanly Done. It was the first time I’d shown any of the draft to someone, and his enthusiastic reception was gratifying, especially because I think it’s a stronger beginning than for the first book that featured my amateur sleuths, Reese and Tireia.

My publisher’s team will assemble a video of the interview segments we did that day and I’ll provide a link when it’s ready but right now other writers and readers might be amused to look at the evolution of Paint It Noir’s opening sentences. As I’ll show, the work led to a conclusion that surprised me. The book is a literary mystery, by which I mean it emphasizes character and language at least as much as plot, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have gone through so many changes if I’d k…

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I’ve spent much of my adult life shuttling between the USA and Australia, punctuated by sojourns in other countries. Nowadays, as America suffers from disarray that increasingly seems to presage decline of empire, I’m preoccupied by what will happen to Australia. It has long been like a younger brother to the US and it’s still tied to the larger country through military pacts, economic trade, and cultural influences transmitted through the arts and media. Yet in the decades I’ve known Australia, it has grown up and has forged a place of its own in the world.

The nation had a chip on its shoulder when I first arrived in 1982. But over time the people brushed off feelings of inferiority compared to other developed countries and moved into self-confidence, not unlike a youth who grows out of insecurity. Conversely, the contemporary US seems riddled with doubts, like someone shuffling into frailty without being fully aware of what’s happening. I should emphasize I …

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I recently read Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket. It was much-reviewed when it came out late last year and I won’t do that here, nor will I critique it or rank it among his other works. I’d rather look at how he puts words together. Pynchon, now pushing ninety, has been described as America’s contemporary James Joyce. His surname is in the lexicon, and surely not just because it’s easier to make a euphonious adjective of it than, say, Fitzgerald or DeLillo.

The immense volume of writing about his novels includes a wiki that annotates each book and a journal that ran for three decades. I assume everyone would agree Pynchon is all about language, yet his anarchic style apparently has no influence on the eggheads who bang on about polyvocal history and paranoia as tools of cognitive mapping to resist the disorientation caused by late capitalism. It’s enough to make me want to stick to puzzling over whether “Norwegian Wood” means “knowing she would.”

S…

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I enjoy movies set in newsrooms but somehow missed the 2004 film Truth. I saw it recently and sighed when a facially road-mapped Robert Redford as Dan Rather complained that journalists had begun to write articles about original reporting done by other outlets, because it was cheaper than doing the work themselves. Two decades later, we’re inured to talking heads who read aloud large excerpts of reporting by a major print publication and then spout their opinions and ask for more of the same from their guests: media personalities, academicians, or people who once held high office That’s the news. These “anchors” read to us and expound, like a spouse might do, or a parent.

To be fair, the so-called experts can add value to the original reporting (especially when a guest is the original reporter) but if you’ve already read the news, too often your benevolent informant’s video Storytime palls as you wait and wait for something extra that might not come. In o…

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The archetypal story about the dangers of AI involves users who forget it’s not a person. They confide in it, looking for counsel or even love. They let it do their thinking for them and accept its conclusions without question. Large language models (LLMs) make these people less reflective and more emotionally bereft, even as they distance themselves from interactions with others that would reinforce what counts. They lose independence and in a sense risk becoming less human. This is absolutely a peril of AI. But what if you use it judiciously and ethically, and don’t say hello and thanks to it? In that case, I think it’s important to know something about how an LLM works.

The examples are virtually endless of tools we use without deep understanding of how they function, and yet we’re likely to have a general notion. But LLMs are still so new and complex that even the experts admit ignorance. They can’t trace the pathways of neural networks to plumb the mysteries of deep learning.…

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The debate about use of AI in writing still has some shaking out to do, mainly in terms of how far you can go and still save your soul. Research seems OK, because it’s a souped-up search engine, an improvement that can be sniffed at only by the hopeless Luddite. The use of it to generate marketing text is acceptable because nobody takes marketing-speak seriously, but when you start asking the bot questions, that’s where the trouble begins.

If you upload your own writing, you have to believe the promises that the material won’t be saved by these systems whose method is to scrape and preserve everything regardless of ownership, a task so gargantuan it requires the sucking of energy from behemoths sprawled in once-empty fields across the land. If you ask the bot what it thinks of your writing, don’t forget it’s programmed to pander. If your morality loosens to the extent of asking it for suggestions, it will average out everything known to h…

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Among the worldwide examples of problems people face from this latest oil shortage, one that stands out to me is that at the start of the war, Australia had only about a month’s worth of reserves, the least amount of any developed country. Some of the most famous phrases in the nation’s history, which encapsulate the Australian character, foreshadowed this trouble. The old sayings warned it would happen.

There’s debate nowadays about whether the Australian slang that captivated me when I first moved there years ago has outlived itself. Even in rural areas, I don’t think you hear it as often as in earlier days, no doubt due in large part to the US media influence. But the current crisis has returned several idioms to my mind that are bygone only in the sense of being old.

Even when these phrases were current, the serious assumptions behind them would have been overshadowed by the fun of most Australian slang. I got an early introduction to the fun stuff when I was working as an editor at an Australian magazine and the art director put a galley on my desk that had arrived from the magazine’s American parent. The art director had circled the word “rubber,” referring to a prophylactic. In the margin, he had written a note to me: “Is this seppo for franger?”

It was easy enough from the context to figure out what the Aussie slang “franger” meant, but it took a little work to discover that “seppo” was the diminutive of “septic tank,” the scatological rhyming slang for “Yank.”

I was helped in this detective effort by an earlier encounter with a fellow who was bent on dazzling the newcomer with rhyming slang. Later, I came to realize it was uncommonly used Down Under, and never in the full sentence he offered. He said, “What say we hit the frog and toad down to the rubbedy dub, my Wally Grout for a pig’s ear?”

Real rhyming slang leaves out the rhyming word, which means the insider has to know not only that word but the one it’s intended to rhyme with. So the above sentence really should go, “What say we hit the frog down to the rubbedy, my Wally for a pig’s?”

In either case, I was stumped, which allowed my acquaintance the satisfaction of explaining he meant, “What say we hit the road down to the pub, my shout for a beer?”

“Shout” is a term said to have arisen during the Australian gold rush of the mid-19th century, when miners who had hit a vein would shout out that they were buying drinks for everyone. Wally Grout, a famous Australian cricketer of yore, apparently was fond of shouting the house. The first time I went to an Australian pub with people from the magazine, I was beguiled by the contemporary incarnation of the shout, everyone in our group taking turns to buy a round, conviviality enforcing our egalitarianism and vice versa.

Egalitarianism is voiced in other Aussie slang besides “shout.” The attitude goes back to the country’s convict origins, when people could be transported from England for nothing worse than swiping the silverware. These stealers of baked goods and such brought their resentment of the gentry with them to their new country.

Hence another telling old phrase, “lopping off the tall poppy.” The idea is that high achievers get cut down to size, because everybody is equal. Even prime ministers have been subject to excoriation if their private homes are judged too big or lavish. Not long after I showed up, I heard a comment secondhand, supposedly made by an American celebrity who had decided to move back to the U.S. I never found a written source for the observation, but it stayed with me. It was, “At least in America, nobody cares if you have an electric garage door-opener.”

That attitude has softened now, maybe because too many people can’t help but admire the excesses of the rich or are rich themselves, but its utility was always double-edged. Americans can relate to the sentiment, immersed as they are in the credos of all people created equal and a level playing field, but Americans also are fierce advocates of bootstraps and personal bests. Australians have always voiced belief in a “a fair go,” but for a long time they seemed bent on nobody getting too far ahead, which implied skating conditions were good. The country was dogged by complacency, which led to a lack of innovation and even of foresight.

The terms “no worries” and “she’ll be right” carry something of this attitude. They imply everything will be OK but the subtext is you don’t have to do anything. A phrase I’ve heard, which I don’t think ever became widely popular, is “last in, best dressed.” It’s an apologia that suggests if you’re late to acquire state-of-the-art equipment, you’ll get the best version of it. The subtext: adoption is preferred to invention.

In the magazine industry where I worked before it died, Australian publications were an indicator of the country’s willingness to adopt and adapt from other nations, especially Great Britain and America. There were Australian editions of Readers’ Digest, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Playboy, Better Homes & Gardens, Harper’s Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, People, and Time, plus British titles.

When I co-wrote a book of interviews with famous Australians, I looked to the country’s history in search of a good title and came across the story of the stump-jump plough. After settlers chopped down trees, they would till the soil and break their ploughs on the stumps. Someone rigged the broken equipment so it would ride over the stump and continue plowing. Not an invention but an innovation. The easiest solution, really. We called the book The Stump-Jumpers.

Historically, Australians felt bad about not being perceived as equal to Great Britain or the USA, particularly in terms of artistic and other cultural creativity. A schoolmaster named A.A. Phillips encapsulated this insecurity in the title of his 1950 essay, “The Cultural Cringe,” which also entered the lexicon. I think that phrase no longer applies to Australia, which long has contributed significantly in film, painting, dance, music, writing, and other art. But the country’s inferiority complex lingered for decades.

In the past, it seemed that a few people reacted in a strange manner as soon as I opened my mouth and they realized I was American, although they weren’t fawning. These few folks got aggressive, what Australians would call stroppy. A.A. Phillips labeled this aggression the inverted cringe.

Once when I was chatting with a journalist over a beer, I quoted a snippet of poetry, because it seemed apropos and I was trying to be witty. He gave me a look of mild disgust that I recognized by then as the Australian suspicion of all things highfalutin, and proceeded to recite a very long bush poem that had nothing to do with what we were discussing. As I sat listening to the interminable rhyme of a nineteenth century Outback adventure far from us in this Sydney pub, I realized it was his literary equivalent of an arm wrestle, and his intention was not merely to slam my hand to the table but to break every bone in it. And I knew this was because in his eyes I was a smartarse from across the pond.

Australia’s only Nobel Prize Winner in literature, the late Patrick White, was a self-described “foreigner in my own country.” He had published two novels while living in England and America, and after World War II returned with his life partner to Australia, where he lived until his death.

“Returning sentimentally to a country I had left in my youth, what had I really found?” he asked in “The Prodigal Son,” a 1958 essay. “In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.”

This passage earned fame and infamy because of its harsh truth.

But the book that gave me the first, and ultimately the best, description of the cultural cringe was The Americans, Baby: A Discontinuous Narrative of Stories and Fragments, by Frank Moorhouse. Never published in America, it appeared in Australia in 1972. I later found the book in a library and dove into a story called “The American Poet’s Visit.”

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