AI AI AI AI (Part 2)

There are so many AI failures and atrocities, it's difficult to know where to begin. Chatbots are coaching vulnerable folks to commit suicide, to commit crimes. The government wants the cooperation of AI vendors to accelerate the completion of the compleat surveillance state. (Can't wait.) There've been AI misdiagnoses. AI job losses - even when the AIs are nowhere near as good as the workers who've been replaced. AI mistargeting. (What's a hundred or so Iranian schoolgirls?)

Not all of AI's failures and atrocities are dire.

The other day, I had to call a bank for some information that required my speaking with a human. The first "human" I was connected to was clearly an AI. Either that, or someone doing a mighty good impression of an AI. Anyway, the AI "human" was able to finally get me to a human human. 

This encounter wasn't life threatening. Just annoying.

And there's no doubt plenty more where that came from.

Meanwhile, there are many (and increasing) instances of AIs that are just plain soul-crushing. And high on my list of the soul-crushers are AI when it starts tampering with the arts.

Last month I wrote about a Revolutionary War "series" concocted via AI. 

Ken Burns has nothing to worry about, but if folks start accepting AI slop wherever they may find it...I don't even want to think about it.

And one place where I sure don't want to see AI slop rearing its ugly little non-head is the written word, especially when it comes to fiction.

Even if that fiction is just romance novels, where AI is apparently making some headway.

Take Coral Hart.

There is no Coral Hart for reals. It's one of the many pennames of a modestly successful legit romance novel writer whose "real" work had been published by Harlequin. Hart started playing around with AI and found that she could churn out hundreds of titles a year and pull down six figure earnings. Sure, she's had to tweak the prose. AI is apparently not all that good at sex scenes and the nuances of true love, romance novel edition.

But once she's entered her prompts and high level outline, AI can churn a book out in less than an hour.

There are also certain phrases that AI uses to death. Those not-so-great sex scenes often include the heroes uttering his enamorata's name "like a ragged prayer." Whatever that means. (Maybe I'm just jelly because no one's ragged prayering the name Maureen.)

Romance novels are a big business, accounting for over one-fifth of adult fiction sales. And the big biz of romance is growing. Unlike, say, literary fiction, which is not. (Other than among us discerning readers.)

The genre may be especially vulnerable to disruption by A.I., for all the reasons that readers love it. Romance relies on familiar narrative formulas, like the guarantee of an “H.E.A.” or “happily ever after.” And romance novels are often built around popular plot tropes — like enemies-to-lovers or forced proximity — that can be fed into a chatbot.

A.I. remains contentious in the romance community. A vocal contingent of readers oppose its use and are quick to call out suspected transgressions. Furor erupted on social media last year when two romance authors published works with A.I. prompts accidentally left in. “You’re an opportunist hack using a theft machine,” the fantasy writer Rebecca Crunden wrote in an expletive-laced message on Bluesky. (Source: NY Times)

When it comes to writing fiction, you can put me in Camp Crunden. 

If an AI is doing the "writing," just who are you, Coral Hart. You're an outliner. A prompter. But you're sure as hell not a writer. Or not much of one. 

Maybe she doesn't care. She's added teaching to her repertoire, offering classes on how "writers" can use AI. She sees AI as the absolute wave of the future.

“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” she said.

There's a lot of junk out there that's not written by AI, but produced the old fashioned way. And it's god-awful. I read a couple of books a week. (Thank you, Boston Public Library.) Some whodunits, but mostly serious (or quasi-serious) fiction. (No romance novels, no obvious beach reads. I.e., if "Nantucket's" in the title, I'll take a hard pass.)

I tend towards writers I know who are good because I've read them in the past. Or come recommended by friends and families I know to be good, serious-y readers. If I've seen a review, I'll try someone new. Or I'll just pick something off the shelf and give it a go. 

Some of the off-the-shelf writers turn into writers I'll be looking for. Others aren't all that well written, leaving me to ask "how in god's name did this get published?" (And, of course, giving my hope for my coming - ahem - literary career.)

The poorly written books I stumble across put me in mind of Truman Capote's words for those he found lacking: "that's not writing, it's just typing."

What does that make AI novels? They're not even typing! (Wonder if Coral Hart even types in her prompts. Or does she use voice?)

Romance novel fans consume a lot of books. The word ingest if probably closer to the true experience than is reading. 

As Elizabeth Ann West, an AI romance writer notes that, while many readers disparage the idea of AI generated novels, the reality may be different. 

“If you hide that there’s A.I., [a book] sells just fine,” she said.

Ms. West, who also teaches classes on how to write with A.I., has gotten blowback from opponents of the technology, including occasional death threats on social media. But she believes that in time, A.I. generated fiction will become widespread and popular.

“Eventually” Ms. West said, “readers will not care.”

Since I haven't read any AI-generated fiction, I can't tell you waht separates human writing from AI slop. Character authenticity? Nuanced interactions? True emotion? Original ways of describing things. Novel situations?

Just like I recognized the bank bot when I encountered him it, I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. And I sure hope that AI doesn't put human creatives out of business any time soon.

AI AI AI AI! (Sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh!)

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Image Source: KosMosaicBooks

2025 is in the books

I used to be a great reader. 

As a kid, I read a book a day. Six was the maximum number of books you could take out of the Worcester Public Library (Main South Branch), where my father took us every Friday evening to check out our books for the week. He would have my mother's library card with him, so he could take out a dozen books. 

What we all got from the library was augmented by book clubs. For the kids, my family subscribed to Vision Books (a series about saints and other renowned Catholics) and some American history series. When I had fifty-cents, I beelined to Woolworth's and picked up a Bobbsey Twins book or, as my reading tastes became more sophisticated, a Nancy Drew. 

My parents were "members" at various times of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the high-quality paperbacks The Time-Life Reading Program (which I think was a bit up the literary foodchain from the Literary Guild.) I still have a couple of books from The Reading Program, including a 1964 re-issues  A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, in which my mother has written my father's name, A.T. Rogers. I think I'll put it on my reading list for 2026.

There was also, if memory serves, and Ellery Queen mystery book club. And the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

By the time I was in junior high, I was reading those book club books (other than Ellery Queen) alongside the books I was reading for school.

Throughout my adult life, I'm guessing that I averaged 2-3 books (plus or minus, mostly plus) a week. We're not talking War and Peace here, but literary fiction, not-so-literary fiction, biography, history, mysteries, detective books (just not Ellery Queen), and on occasion pure, unadulterated junk. 

But within the last decade or so, my reading tapered off. I was spending more time watching (and fretting over) the news. I was perfectly capable of watching 8 straight hours of MSNBC, with the same stories presented over and over again from slightly different angles. Then I found myself doomscrolling on Twitter (and more recently Blue Sky).

Last year, I decided to start reading more and set a goal of a book a week. I made it, thanks in no small part to reading my favorite childhood books, the Betsy-Tacy-Tib series, which chronicled the turn-of-the-twentieth-century lives of three girls in Mankato, Minnesota, taking them from kindergarten through marriage and motherhood. Wonderful books, all, but easy enough to plow through in a sitting or two. No wonder I could read seven books a week as a kid!

For 2025, I doubled my goal to two books a week. And I made it.

Oh, I had a couple of gimmes in there, mini-books that took less than an hour - way less - to breeze through: On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder), A Child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas). But they were counterbalanced by a 700 page biography of the British writer Barbara Pym. (An old favorite. I think I'll reread her this coming year.)

Mostly, I read fiction.

Last year, I read books by writers I like but had lost track of, in including the three Paula Spencer novels by Roddy Doyle, which brilliantly chronicle the life of a working-class Dubliner. A couple of books by Curtis Sittenfeld (Show Don't Tell, Romantic Comedy), a couple by Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, Whereabouts). And a John Sayles (To Save the Man). Having loved Demon Copperhead, I picked up another novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered). I reread Tillie Olsen (Yonnondio, Tell Me A Riddle). I'd forgotten how much I had enjoyed Anne Tyler, once she outgrew her quirky-character phase (Three Days in June, French Braid). I, of course, laughed out loud reading Fever Beach (Carl Hiassen). 

T

Thanks to the Boston Public Library, I found a bunch of new writers. No one too memorable, but I'll be looking for more by Christine Sneed, Joshua Moehling, and a couple of others.

On the non-fiction front, I depressed/scared myself with Sarah Kendzior's The Last American Road Trip, Rachel Maddow's Prequel, and Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us.

On the non-depressing, non-scary non-fiction front, I adored Stanley Tucci's Taste, about how he grew up to be a foodie. (I mad crush on Tucci, so I knew I was going to love this one.)

I went through my bookshelves to pick out books I've had waiting to be read for years. Some for decades. 

Thus I discovered Carlos Eire's brilliant memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, and went out and got its follow on, Learning to Die in Miami. 

I finally got around to reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and Killers of the Flower Moon (David Gann). I've seen the Killers movie (didn't like it), but I'll be putting Crawdads on my watch list. 

By far the worst book I read last year was Robin Cook's Bellevue. Poorly written. Ridiculous plot. Wasn't a big Cook fan to begin with, but I had it lying around for some reason. Never again!

I'm signing myself up for another two-book-a-week year, starting out with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai) and The River Is Waiting (Wally Lamb). Slow going so far, as I had a raft of New Yorkers to catch up on. However slow a start, in 2026 I will get to 104 books again, even if I have to find a couple of minis in there. 

Book of the Year - Part 3

The last couple of days, I've been making my way through a list of the most popular books, by year from 1945 on. Here's the final decades on the list. (And if you're wondering why I chose to illustrate this post with the cover of a book by Heinrich Böll, from 1949, which was not the most popular book of the year, the reasons are a) year of my birth; b) my favorite writer of all the authors on the list for those 80 years worth of most popular books. Just so you know...)

In 1995, the "It" bok was Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Never read, and no desire to. But Gregory Maguire is a local guy - lives in Concord, Mass - and has a incredibly interesting life story. So good for him! (Did enjoy the 2024 movie.) I did read Jon Krakauer's 1996 book Into the Wild. Talk about a wild story..."Enjoy" might not be the right world, but I always find the subjects that Krakauer takes on to be fascinating. 

This type of work is not usually my reading jam, but in 1997, I gobbled up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And all the follow on Harry Potter's as well. Surprised myself, that's for sure. Until I read Demon Copperhead last year, I'd never read any Barbara Kingsolver. But her 1998 The Poisonwood Bible is definitely on my to-read list. 1999 was apparently the year of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a book I wasn't familar with. But based on its description as a book about a high school introvert, I'd probably have enjoyed it. (Signed, a well-compensated introvert.)

In 2000, Dave Eggers was being a genius without me. Never read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But it does sound interesting. The plot, anyway. And I may check out a later Eggers work: a satirical novel about Donald Trump. Maybe. In 2001, I did try reading Life of Pi.  But years ago, when sitting in bed reading Ciderhouse Rules, I gave myself permission for the first time to stop reading a book I reallly, really, really wasn't enjoying. So much for Life of Pi. At one point, I was a Jeffrey Eugenides fan, so I remember liking his 2002 novel Middlesex. And I'll admit that, while Dan Brown's no one's definition of a good writer, in 2003, along with everyone else in the world, I was reading and enjoying The Da Vinci Code.

I think I read 2004's Gilead. If not, it is near the top of a book pile in my bedroom, and once I start in on it, I should be able to figure out whether I've already read it. And I know that, in 2005, I read The Year of Magical Thinking. But I don't remember whether I liked it or not. (A little Joan Didion, IMHO as a reader, goes a long way.) 2006: The Emperor's Children. Check! 

The next couple of years were YA ones. In 2007, it was Thirteen Reasons Why, which I've never heard of, and, thus never read. But in 2008, just as I'd gobbled up the Harry Potter series, I gobbled up The Hunger Games books, which I actually liked better than the Potters. 

I didn't quite buy it, but I definitely got a kick out of 2009's The Help. In 2010, I read about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in The New Yorker. But I never read the book. And I am a bit embarrassed to admit that, in 2011, I read the spectacularly cheesy and awful Fifty Shades of Grey. Once again, proof that you don't need to be a good writer to be popular. (I was visiting a friend and she handed it to me. And, yes, I did read it. But, no, I haven't seen the movie.) 

It was a corny tear-jerker, but in 2012, I liked The Fault in Our Stars. Sniff, sniff, sniff. Hand me a Kleenex, please. Higher up the literary food chain, in 2013, I was reading (and enjoying) the way overly-complex The Goldfinch. I know that in 2014, everyone was raving about All the Light We Cannot See. As someone who has been reading an awful lot of books, since I was in grammar school, about World War II, you'd think this one would have been right up my alley. But I didn't buy it for a New York, let alone a Paris, minute. 2015's most popular read, The Girl on the Train, was a book I did enjoy. Right about the time Trump was first elected in 2016, I found The Underground Railroad way too harrowing to deal with. Post the first Trump era, I picked it up again and - although I usually don't do magical realism - I LOVED IT. 

And while, in 2017, I may not have loved Little Fires Everywhere, I really liked it. 2018's An American Marriage - an Oprah Book - is a novel I've never heard of. But it sounds good and I'll put it on my look out for list. I will admit that the 2019 thriller, The Silent Patient, has an interesting premise - a woman shoots her husband in the face and her therapist tries unsuccessfully to figure out what motivated her to do the deed. But not enough that I want to read it. 

Somehow, in 2020, while every other person I know was reading, it, I somehow missed Where the Crawdads Sing. I'd watch the movie, but I think it's on Hulu, which I don't subscribe to. 2021 brought us The Four Winds, but I'm not a big Kristin Hannah fan, so I took a pass on that one. The list ends with 2022's pick, It Ends With Us, which I didn't read. I didn't read It Starts With Us, either.  

There were plenty of popular books in 2023 and 2024. Here are some of the ones I read.

2023: Tom Lake, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, So Late in the Day. 

2024: Tell Me Everything, James, The Woman Behind the Door.

My vote for 2003 would be the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. As I've mentioned, I'm usually not a magical realism kind of reader, but I loved this. For 2024, I've got a tie between James, the reimagined telling of Huck Finn, and The Woman Behind the Door (part of Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer trilogy, which I thought was fabulous; or, as he Irish might say, fecking brilliant).  

That's it for my three part books report.

Book of the Year - Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about a list of the most popular books, by year from 1945 on, and got through the first couple of decades. 

Moving right along, we find that 1965's most popular book was Dune. I tried to read this. I can even picture the cover from the dog-eared paperback I borrowed from someone. But no could do. The closest I've come to anyting Dune-ish, was watching the movie this year, only because I decided to see every Academy Award nominated film. And some Dune thang was on it. But watching the movie only counts if you ignore the fact that I slept through a lot of it.

I pride myself on not reading a ton of trash, but how could I have avoided the 1966 trasher extraordinaire, Valley of the Dolls. And how could I have avoided the trasher extraordinaire movie a couple of years later. Bonus points, because the theme song was performed by the incredible Dionne Warwick, who, as far as I'm concerned, has never, over her long career, sung a wrong note. 

I loved 1967's The Outsiders. When I read it, I wasn't aware there was such a thing as the Young Adult Category, but I'm all for it. I also loved the movie, which came out in 1983. I haven't seen it in decades, but it was one of Patrick Swayze's first films, as well as an early outing for a bunch of the Brat Packers: Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez. 

I enjoy dystopia, so I probably would enjoy Philip K. Dick. But I've never read him. And I've never heard of 1968's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Certainly a great title, and a more pressing question now in the age of AI, so I might just pick up a copy. Plus it was the book that inspired Blade Runner. So there's that. 

1969: Slaughterhouse Five. Now we're talking. Haven't read Vonnegut in many, many years, so don't know how this has stood the test of time. But back in the day, I was a huge Vonnegut fan. 

I've never read 1970's most popular, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. But I'm sure familiar with Judy Blume and, without having read her work, am an admirer of the career she forged for herself - and for being the first to address some previously ignored topics for her young readers. She very much helped make things real. 

I remember absolutely nothing about 1971's Angle of Repose, other than that it was long, and that it was one of the paperbacks I took with me on my first trip to Europe in 1973, when my friend Joyce and I spent four months hitching, camping, hosteling all over the place. Not much time spent on that trip reading, but I always have to have a book going. (Another book I brought along was some James Mitchener tome. Maybe Hawaii, maybe The Source. Or was it a Leon Uris tome? Maybe Mila 18.)

I'm familiar with 1972 book of the year Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, if only because I've used The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day words to describe something plenty of times in my writing. Thank you, Judith Viorst. 

For 1973, we're back to Vonnegut with Breakfast of Champions. Been there, read that. In 1974, did I read Carrie? Wasn't that much of a Stephen King (or thriller in general) fan back then, but I may have read this. Over the years, I have very much grown to like and admire his writing. I'm pretty sure I spent part of 1975 slogging through Humboldt's Gift, but Saul Bellow was never my favorite "big serious" writer. I probably read an excerpt of 1976's The Selfish Gene somewhere along the way. It's by Richard Dawkins, and as an atheist...

1977 - Song of Solomon. Of course I read Toni Morrison. The genre listed is African-American Literature. Seriously, this is great American Literature. Never read the 1978 book, which was Stephen King's The Stand. But dystopian fiction, so probably would have liked it. In 1979, I was definitely reading Sophie's Choice. And in 1980, I was definitely reading A Confderacy of Dunces. Published posthumously, so there's hope. But I really don't want to get a novel published after my death, let alone after suicide. 

I read all of John Updike's Rabbit novels, so I read 1981's Rabbit Is Rich. Next up,1982 was the year of The Color Purple. Enjoyed the book. The movie, not so much. Whatever else I was doing in 1983, I wasn't reading The Color of Magic, which I've never heard of. But in 1984, I did read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Ditto in 1985 for White Noise. DeLillo is an acquired taste, but I acquired it. Unditto in 1986, when the most popular book was Love You Forever, a book I never heard of. Maybe if I'd had kids...

Back to Toni Morrison in 1987, with Beloved which is just listed as Fiction, as opposed to African-American Literature. Works for me. As did reading it. Hard 1988 NO to The Alchemist (which actually wasn't published in the US until the early 1990's, but for some reason lands in on the list for 1988. Was there an English-version published in Brazil available in the States that year? I don't think there were enough Portuguese speakers in the US who were interested in reading about a mystical journey to make this one a bit hit.) But the list ends the decade on a 1989 high note for me with The Joy Luck Club,

And the 1990's began on a high note with The Things They Carried. I don't think Tim O'Brien ever fully lived up to the early promise of his Vietnam works - Carried and Going After Cacciato - but those were both great books. And I believe that for some reason - he's not from New England - he's a Red Sox fan. In 1991, the book of the year was A Thousand Acres, which I liked. A little less literarily, in 1992 I read The Pelican Brief. John Grisham could always tell a good story. Lois Lowry is another children's/YA author I've never read, but have, of course, heard of. In 1993, her The Giver was el libro mas popular. (If I haven't read the book, I can at least practice my Duolingo Spanish.)

For a while, I was a Janet Evanovich fan, looking forward to each new numbered Stephanie Plum mystery. But she eventually ran out of steam (even though she kept churning Stephanie Plum tales out). But in 1994, I was enjoying One for the Money. 

And with that, all for now. We'll finish up the list tomorrow...

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I couldn't decide on a favorite that I'd actually read to illustrate this post with, so I went with Judith Viorst.  

Book of the Year - Part 1

Now, I love lists. And I love books. So how fortuitous to stumble on a list of the most popular books, by year, from 1945 on. And, naturally, I wanted to see just how many of them I've read. (Turns out, once I started looking through, I also found myself checking out how many I'd never heard of.)

Before launching in, I must note that there was little info given on how these books were chosen. 

1945 Well, at least I'd heard of the steamy bodice ripper, Forever Amber, but I never read it. I probably saw the movie - starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde - on Boston Movietime, our local B&W afternoon movie program, at some point. But I also wondered what other books were published in 1945 that Forever Amber edged out. A little google got me to this much more impressive list - all of which I've read - and all of which people are still reading. Unlike, I'm guessing, Forever Amber.

So, who'd I find out there? Animal Farm, Pippi Longstocking, Brideshead Revisited, The Glass Menagerie. Stuart Little...

Forever Amber you say?

Moving on, 1946 brought us The King's General. At least I've heard of the author, Daphne du Maurier. (I have read her Rebecca.) 1947's biggie was the unknown to me The Miracle of the Bells. Ditto for 1948's The Big Fisherman, a novel by the author of The Robe, which I did read at some point. Or saw the movie. Victor Mature, not Cornell Wilde this time, but they're kinda-sorta interchangable. And how was Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. NOT the book of the year in 1948?

I was hoping that my year of birthday, 1949, would have something good to say. The Egyptian by Mika Waltari. Huh? There had to be something better. There was. And plenty of them. 1949 was the year of The Naked and The Dead, 1984, Death of a Salesman, The Lottery and Other Stories, The Third Man, The Train Was on Time, Death be Not Proud, The Story of the Trapp Family, The Color Kittens. All of which I read. The Color Kittens was one of my favorite Golden Books. I can still picture the charming illustrations, maybe because I have a copy around here somewhere. And The Train Was on Time was the first novel written by the brilliant German author, Heinrich Böll. (One of my all time faves; the only Nobel winner I've read on full.) So 1949 was pretty darned OK.

1950 marked the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' by C.S. Lewis. Not 100% sure I read it, but I've sure heard of it. 1951? Why come on down, The Catcher in the Rye. Been there, read that, as did pretty much everyone my age when we were in high school. Back to children's fare in 1952, with the lovely Charlotte's Web, which would have been even better if Stuart Little had driven his little roadster into it.

Overall, I was more familiar with the 1950's winners than I was with some of those 1940's oddity. (C.f., The Egyptian.) In 1953, the book of the year was a play: The Crucible. Salem witch trials, so close to home. 1954 was Lord of the Flies, another high school classic of my era. (The Lord of the Rings was also published in 1954. 1955:  Lolita. (No comment, other than, yeah, I read it.) 1956's book was The Fall, which I read during my Camus period. On the lighter side of 1957: The Cat in the Hat. The year after, 1958, the book was Breakfast at Tiffany's. He may have been a jerk, but Truman Capote sure could write. 1959's book was another high school classic: A Separate Peace. (Do kids still read books like this?)

Enter the 1960's with To Kill a Mockinbird. Oddly enough, I was allowed to read this (probably a couple of years late), but was not allowed to go to the movie when it came out in 1962. The Legion of Decency rated the movie a B.Reason enough for my mother's fatwa. Ah, 1961. Ah, Catch-22, which I read a few years later. And loved. Ah, 1962, Ah, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I read a few years later. And loved. 1963 brought Where the Wild Things Are. What's not to like love? Another kiddo - slightly older - book for 1964. I'm not sure I ever read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But I sure know Willie Wonka. 

More of the list over the next couple of days...

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One source for alternative best books was Good Housekeeping. That and random googles. 

Beware of hero worship

It's not that it's a big surprise when a someone you admire turns out to be a behind-the-scenes POS. 

For me, the someones I admire are usually writers.

I'm an admirer of the work of James Joyce, especially his early works. The short stories in The Dubliners are beyond brilliant. Has there ever been a short story written in the English language that can surpass "The Dead," which I reread every year (generally during a snowstorm, while drinking a cup of Barry's tea)? But I also know that, in order to fuel his genius, Joyce exploited those who loved him, namely his lover (later wife) Nora Barnicle and his brother John Stanislaus. Someone's gotta worry about buying the toilet paper and boiling the potatoes while genius is at work. 

I just don't let knowing that Joyce was an often nasty exploiter prevent me from loving his work. (Although I will say that I found reading Ulysses a slog, and for the life of me, Finnegan's Wake is just incomprehensible. I just don't understand how someone who doesn't know Ireland and the Irish, didn't grow up Catholic, doesn't have a smattering of Latin, French, German, etc. and a bit-een of the ol' Irish - all of which I possess - can even begin to get Finnegan's. And yet it's even been translated into Japanese and Hungarian. For me, I've read dribs and drabs, and making my through it in its entirety is on my bucket list. I should probably get cracking. (Forgive a Joycean pun: get craicing?))

Anyway, in addition to Joyce, there are two other members of my pantheon of short story writers. One is the Anglo-Irish writer William Trevor. I wasn't wild about his novels, but, man, could he pack a novel into a short story. As could my other short story writer, Alice Munro, at whose writing altar I have long worshipped. Her stories were/are just gems. 

I'm a reader, but I don't typically hang on to books after I've read them. I give them away to fellow readers, or drop them off at the free book cabinet outside of the Walgreen's that years ago replaced a truly wonderful Borders, where I bought an awful lot of books.

But damned if I haven't hung on to my Alice Munro's.

And they're not going anywhere. I'm not one to re-read - other than my annual stationary pilgrimage with "The Dead" - but once in a blue moon, I pull out a volume of Munro and read a few of her brilliant works. And, while I was not especially happy to learn that her personal life left a great deal to be desired, I won't be dumping her - or jettisoning my opinion of her talent.

If you haven't been keeping up with the story behind the stories, Alice Munro was divorced from the man who had fathered her three daughters, and took up with Gerald Fremlin, a man she was with for 40 years (up until his death). Fremlin was a terrible man.

This July, two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her. In the summer of 1976, Andrea wrote, she went to visit Munro and Fremlin at their home in Ontario. (According to her parents’ custody agreement, she spent the rest of the year in Victoria, British Columbia, with her father, Jim Munro, and his new wife.) One night, while Munro was away, Andrea awoke to discover that Fremlin had climbed into bed next to her. He was rubbing her genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. She was 9 years old.

Fremlin warned Andrea not to tell her mother: The news would kill her, he said. Andrea obeyed... (Source: NY Times)

But on her return to Victoria, she told her stepbrother, and word made it's way back to Andrea's father. And what did Jim Munro do? Concerned that the revelation would kill Alice's new relationship and that he would be blamed for the failure, he told the family to stay mum. When the girls went back to spend the next summer with their mother and Fremlin, Jim Munro told one of Andrea's older sisters to keep an eye on the situation. 

Andrea did what a lot of children who are abused did. She tried to keep her distance from Fremlin, making sure they were never alone. 

...but she had to balance her fear against a competing imperative: to shield her mother from the truth. Munro knew that Andrea loved to swim, so on the occasions when Fremlin offered to drive her to a nearby river, it felt impossible to refuse without arousing suspicion. During one such outing, he propositioned her for sex. Andrea turned bright red as she managed to walk away. On the drive home, Fremlin complained to her about how unsatisfying he found his sex life with Munro. The harassment ended only when Andrea reached puberty.

As a young adult, Andrea - who had suffered numerous psychological and physical ailments due to the abuse - finally told her mother what had happened.  

Alice Munro's reaction was self-pity. Rather than view the abuse of her daughter as a terrible, depraved, criminal act against the child, she saw it through the prism of self, and defined it all as a betrayal of herself. When confronted, Fremlin admitted "the abuse but claimed that it was Andrea who seduced him." Andrea at 9 was recast as Lolita, Fremlin is poor, innocent Humbert Humbert. 

Alice Munro left Fremlin, but only for a couple of weeks. 

The family carried on, with Andrea continuing to visit her mother and Fremlin. Only when her own children were born did things become really clear to Andrea. 

Andrea told her mother she didn’t want Fremlin anywhere near them. Munro objected that visiting without Fremlin would be inconvenient, because she couldn’t drive. “I blew my top,” Andrea told a reporter for The Star. “I started to scream into the phone about having to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that penis, and at some point I asked her how she could have sex with someone who’d done that to her daughter.” The next day, Munro called her back — not to apologize but to forgive Andrea for how she had spoken to her. It was the end of their relationship. 

But Andrea developed some new strengths. She reported Fremlin to the police - her evidence was the letters Fremlin had sent admitting to the abuse.

When an officer arrived at their house to arrest him, he reported that Munro was apoplectic, denouncing her daughter as a liar. In March 2005, Fremlin, then 80, quietly pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Andrea tried for years to get her story out, but academics who studied Alice Munro's work didn't want to hear about it. They were interested in the text, not the person who wrote the text. Even though "violated children, negligent mothers and marriages founded on secrets and lies" figured prominently in the stories she wrote after she learned of Fremlin's abuse of her child. (He was also accused of sexually abusing other children.) 

In Canada, Munro was known as “Saint Alice,” a paragon of virtue and compassion. Now she has come to symbolize something else: maternal dereliction. In the days after news of the abuse broke, social media filled up with photos of Munro’s books discarded in recycling bins. The University of Western Ontario, her alma mater, announced that it was “pausing” its Alice Munro Chair in Creativity so as to “carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western.” Writers who once celebrated her work and openly acknowledged its influence on their own began to reconsider their allegiance. “These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” the author Rebecca Makkai, who is herself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, reacted in The Times. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”

I haven't picked up Alice Munro since all this came out. But those who have now see that so much of her work is peopled by characters like Fremlin-the-molester. And characters who are the wife who somehow can't tear herself away from the terrible man she has entwined her life with. The woman remains enthralled, totally dependent on the rotter she's with. 

Will I reread Alice Munro? Probably not anytime soon. Too painful. But at some point, I will want to assure myself that, however f'd up some of her stories are, they are still brilliantly written. I'm not sure if that'll be enough. But it will sure make me leery of hero worship.

On my Christmas tree, I have an ornament of James Joyce which I got on a trip to Ireland a couple of years back. I don't think I'll be getting an Alice Munro ornament anytime soon. And I sure hope that nothing comes out about William Trevor...

Bottom of the barrel at Cracker Barrel

Although I've been to a Cracker Barrel a couple of times, I'll never be a regular. 

1. There aren't many around here
2. The calories
3. I'm way too much of a snob

But what's not to like (other than the calories) about those biscuits, those fried apples? And I will say that when I've been to a Cracker Barrel (last time, over 20 years ago while on a business trip to South Carolina) the service was fine (although probably a bit too chirpy for my liking).

But the service wasn't so fine for a group of Maryland special ed students - kiddos with severe cognitive disabilities and/or autism - who were snubbed, denied service, treated poorly, while on a field trip. 

On Tuesday [December 3rd], a group of 11 students and seven staff members from Maryland's Charles County Public Schools District were "refused service" at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Waldorf, Maryland, Superintendent Maria Navarro said in a statement. The outing was a part of community-based instruction for students at the district's Dr. James Craik Elementary School. The instruction allows students in special education programs to perform practical skills and socialize with the public. (Source: USA Today)

The school had called ahead and got the okay that they wouldn't need a reservation for their party, despite its size; had informed the Cracker Barrel people of the purpose of the visit; and had also told them that they were willing to split up if needed. 

But, no. When the group showed up - after doing some Christmas shopping at a Dollar Store - the teachers were told not only that they couldn't be seated, but that Cracker Barrel should be taken off the list of restaurants approved "for community-based instruction."

Cracker Barrel? Wouldn't you think that an informal, inexpensive, family-friendly, nothing fancy restaurant - especially one that specializes in exuding real fake cornpone charm - would be an ideal venue for a bunch of kids who might be messy, make funny noises, act weird. Hmmm. When I look at it at this way, wouldn't this describe most groups of kids?

The staff and students were allowed to place a take out order, but taking out and eating back at school is not the same experience as sitting down in a restaurant and being waited on. So Cracker Barrel was willing to deprive the crew of their money - feel free to pay for takeout! - and their experience. Shameful!

Both servers and management, the school staff said, were rude and ignored the kids. Althought the place wasn't busy, it took what seemed like forever for the takeout meals to be prepared, so the kids ended up waiting on the bus. (By the way, it's not like the 11 students were free-ranging in the restaurant. There were 7 staff members to support those 11 students.)

The parents - naturally furious - threatened a protest and, as news of the incident spread, the Cracker Barrel was flooded with negative Yelp reviews. (Served them right.)

Cracker Barrel apologized, claiming blah-di-blah. The store's general manager and two servers were fired. (And, yes, I do have a scintilla of sympathy for anyone getting fired from what has to be a pretty crummy, bottom of the barrel job to begin with, especially around the holidays. But they really should have known better.)

And just how awful is awful? I can only imagine how much those kids were anticipating their big day out. I can only imagine how the staff prepped them for it. How very awful.

If I were a patron of Cracker Barrel, I'd sure be boycotting. But, as I said, there are none nearby and I'm way, way, way too much of a snob. 

Kidulting? I'm here for it!

Well, yesterday was a BIG ONE. Seventy-five. Gulp. No getting around it, I'm old. Make that OLD. 

Or am I?

Wondering when, exactly, old age starts, I thought I'd google around and found that "the general consensus seems to be that you are officially “old” somewhere in your mid-70s." So I guess I am, in fact, old. The mid-70s tracks with the average life expectancy of 80 and change for American women - which, now that I'm just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away, seems pretty damned young. Even though in my heart of heart, my brain of brains, I know that it's actually old. 

Interesting but not surprising that, as people get old, "their perception of when old age starts began to shift upward." Based on a German study (the one that gave us the mid-70s consensus):

"For a 64 year old, the estimated perceived onset of old age was 74.7 years,” according to the study. “Whereas for a 74 year old, the estimated perceived onset of old age was 76.8 years.” (Source: KSBY)

So nobody actually thinks of themselves as old. My mother always said you never really thought of yourself as being much older than your late 30's. Most folks I talk to feel the same. It's just that, for most of us, our bodies don't necessarily follow what our brains are telling us. There's thinking young, and actually being young. Two different things. 

Anyway, since I just observed a hallmark birthday, I was naturallyl interested in an article I came across about kidulting. 

“Kidulting” is a cultural trend that sees adults engage in pastimes traditionally considered more appropriate for children. This can include playing with toys, collecting figurines or cards, dressing up and cosplaying – anything that feels like a reversion to feel-good childhood behaviours. (Source: The New Humanist)

The focus was on Millenials and Gen Z. And, honestly, who can blame them. The existential threat of climate change. The insane price of housing. AI coming for everyoone's job except for those of the Doge Bros. Authoritarian regimes cropping up everywhere. Fuck adulting!

The rational response to me does seem to be getting out the wiffle ball set or resurrecting an old set of paper dolls.

But it's not just the youngs that are kidulting: 

As a psychologist and leading expert on nostalgia, Dr Clay Routledge recognises nostalgic thoughts and behaviour as effective coping mechanisms. “When people experience stress, anxiety, sadness, loneliness or other unpleasant mental states, nostalgic reflection helps them see a bigger picture,” he says. His work as vice president of research at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab in Washington, DC has uncovered the profound impact of looking to the past on people’s mental states.

“In a survey my colleagues and I recently conducted, we found that most American adults in every age cohort view their nostalgic memories as a source of comfort, inspiration and guidance. Many of the behaviours that appear to be superficial consumer purchases may actually reflect an effort to cultivate a nostalgic environment that helps people connect with their past in constructive ways. Yes, some of it is just entertainment. But I also think it is something deeper.”

There’s also some evidence that nostalgic activities can better connect people to themselves and those around them – contributing to resilience, optimism and creativity and helping to cultivate personal progress.

Unfortunately, a lot of the things I enjoyed doing as a kid are off the table, as I don't want to break my back, head, or shoulders in pursuit of sledding or swinging or jumping rope.

And playing jacks - other than reading, my all-time favorite childhood pasttime? 

Well, a few years back, I did get myself a set of jacks. Alas, my hands and fingers were really too big for the delicate litte picks and sweeps that I could maneuver with ease and excellence as a seven-year-old. Not to mention that there was no one here to help me up off the floor.

One aspect of kidulting does hold a lot of appeal, and that's re-reading some of the books I adored as a child.

I don't usual re-read something I've already read, but I've been making my way through the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace. 

Admittedly, I took up these books because I knew that they would help me hit - and even exceed - my 2024 goal of averaging one book a week. God knows I'll never return to my childhood book-a-day pace, but settling on just one book a week is pretty pathetic, given that well into adulthood - probably up to the incursion of the Internet and smartphones into my life - I had averaged 2-3 books a week for decades. Still, I'll take the book a week, thank you. 

Anyway, in the late 1890s-early 1900s, Betsy Ray, Tacy Kelly, and Tib Muller are besties, living a pretty idyllic life, in the town of Deep Valley, Minnesota, and in the series we follow the girls from early childhood, through high school, up until Betsy's wedding. 

(It's no accident that Deep Valley is based on Mankato, Minnesota, where Tim Walz - the man we were nearly fortunate enough to have as our VP - taught school. Tim Walz is a character straight out of Betsy-Tacy-Tib.)

Just as I adored these books as a little girl, I loved them this time around. 

I'm not going to do a book(s) review, but let's leave it at these are charming and lively without being cloying and simpering in any way. And they opened up a new world I could imagine living in. Although they girls were well before my time, I could identify with them.

Tib, like me, was a blue-eyed blonde from a German family. And Tacy - in a world of childhood books were almost all the characters attended a bland, generic Protestant church - was, like me, an Irish Catholic. And Betsy, like me, wanted to be a writer.(Unfortunately, I was not as determined as Betsy Ray to become a writer, although I did eventually manage to stumble my way into some semblance of writerhood. 

I still love reading multiple books in which the same characters occur. (Thank you, Elizabeth Strout.) And while I might take another look at the Little House books, I'm not going to substitute the books I read as a child for my adult reading. I read an awful lot of pap as a kid, and there's no way I'm going to forego reading Claire Keegan or Colson Whitehead to spend anytime with the Cherry Ames (nurse) books or Donna Parker on Her Own. 

Still, it's been plenty of fun - and a great escape from today's realities - to curl up with Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. 

And forget, just for a second or two, that - yikes! - I'm OLD!

Demon Copperhead. Such Kindness.

I used to read a lot. Through much of my adult life, I'd guess I averaged 2-3 books a week. Although I did plow through many tomes - lookin' at you, Joyce Carol Oates - I wasn't exactly curling up with War and Peace. But I read a lot. Literary fiction. Beach reads. History. Essays. Biography. Police procedurals, detective fiction. Best sellers. Political stuff.

But then politics via social media became more absorbing. This was during Trump I. Since then, if I'm in bed reading, I'm as apt to be scrolling through Twitter as I am to be reading the latest from Elizabeth Strout. 

This year, I committed to doing a book a week, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to make it, even if I find myself on New Year's Eve racing through the collected Betsy, Tacy, Tib novels of Maud Hart Lovelace, the favorite author of my childhood.

Two of the books I read this year were novels focused on the lives - the pretty crummy lives - of a couple of white working class guys who had fallen off the cliff and into the underbelly of society.

I'd never read anything by Barbara Kingsolver, but my brother had Demon Copperhead. So why not. Heartbreaking but great. (I will definitely pick up her other works.)

Demon Copperhead (Damon Fields) is pretty much doomed from the start. He's born in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Virginia coal country, an area that had already, for a couple of generations, been hollowed out by the decline of the coal industry. Sure, coal mining black-lunged you into an early grave, but it was good, hard, honest, purposeful work. And then it was gone.

So Damon was born into a not so good, definitely hard, not always honest, and seldom purposeful life. A young, reckless father, dead before Damon was born. (I think: I'm going from sketchy memory. Anyway, Damon never knew his father.) A decent and loving but weak (and drug addicted) mother who died when he was 11, pushing him into a beyond gruesome foster care system. 

The book follows Damon from a while before the death of his mother until young adulthood. 

There were a few redeeming features to his life. The kind and caring Peggotts provide him with family and stability, up to the point where they can no longer offer him that, given that their lives are challenged by the fact that the elder Peggotts and their one child who "made it" as a nurse are constantly having to take people in (children and adults) who've been victimized by the often inescapable forces of their home town's downward spiral. They're there for Damon - and all the alcoholic, drug abusing, violent members of their extended family - until they can't be. 

In his early teens, Damon takes off from a wildly miserable foster home and finds/discovers his paternal grandmother and his great uncle, odd but decent people who manage to get him on his feet until they can set him up with a permanent home. 

The permanent home is with the town's high school football coach and his daughter, the quirky high school smart-girl weirdo, who brings out the okay to be a smart boy weirdo - he's a cartoonist - in Damon. But it's the coach who really provides Damon with his identity: home town hero football star. Until a hideous injury during a game puts the end to Damon's football career and sets him on the path to oxy addiction and a downward life spiral. (How the Sacklers sold their ways into millions by promoting their wares and setting up the pillmill doctors that fecklessly provided the prescriptions that ended up addicting half the young folks in town is a harrowing subtext of a good swath of the book.)

Demon Copperhead is engrossing, terrifying, maddening. But toward the end we know that Damon will find redemption, as there are glimmers of good work, good friends, a good woman. 

The other book that centered on the life of a working-class white guy was Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III, an author I had long liked, admired, and read. (I also liked, admired, and read his father, Andre Dubus II.) Unlike Damon/Demon, Tom Lowe is a grownup. And he didn't live in Godknowswhere, Virginia but in the suburbs of Boston.

We meet Tom in middle age, but we learn that his early life wasn't anywhere near as Dickensian as Damon's was. But it was difficult. Tom managed to find a way out: a couple of years at UMass, the love of a great woman, a son, an interesting and lucrative career as a contractor - work that defined him and which he loved - and a home that he'd built by hand for his family.

But Tom was one fall of the roof away from losing everything that mattered to him in his life, as once he's been dreadfully injured and loses his ability to work, he's spiraling into drug and alcohol addiction. And life without the wife, the son, the house, the job.

Damon's life is lived in a poor, remote, completely beleaguered community. Tom's is on the fringes of a prosperous, educated community, a  world full of struggling single mothers on welfare, of cruddy Section 8 housing, of petty (and not so petty) criminals, of the daily humiliations that come with poverty (crummy clothing, crummy teeth), of the daily temptations: drugs, alcohol, petty criminality.

The novel ends on a minor note of optimism. We do get the sense that Tom will be okay. Or okay enough. 

What was most interesting about these novels was that they focus on the blue collar, working class. (It could be argued that Damon's world wasn't even that.) So many novels and short stories chronicle the lives of middle and upper-middle class people. Those people aren't working in Walmart, a prison, landfill. They're doctors/lawyers/professors/techies/ad-men/clergy. Given all the MFA's out there, lead characters are often writers. The kind of liberal elites who live in blue states (or blue dots in red states) and vote Democrat. Certainly not the flyover state working stiffs who have delivered us into the maws of Trump II. 

But the last couple weeks have, naturally, got me thinking of WHAT JUST HAPPENED and how, to its shame and the detriment of the country, the Democratic party stopped trying to talk to working class folks even though its Democratic policies (as half-baked as they might be) actually deliver whatever material support and comfort those working class folks get out of government. 

Not going to get any further into that now, but the election did get me thinking about the forgotten man and woman whose votes have put us on the eve of what could well end up being destruction of so much that I/we value. And brings nothing other than some emotional relief, some grim satisfaction, to the voters. 

Sigh.

I don't think that either Damon or Tom would have voted for Trump. Damon might not have voted at all. He might have been a Bernie bro who voted for Jill Stein. Maybe his girlfriend, who I'm sure by now he's married to and has had kids (and grandkids) with  - the book takes place in the late 1980's-early 1990's - would have gotten him to vote for Kamala Harris. Tom would have been a diehard Democrat.

Maybe I'm just fan-fictioning here. Because I liked both of these characters, I don't want them to be Trumpers. But it seems to me we'd be better off if we paid more attention - in both our fiction and in real life - to people who don't shop at Trader Joe's, listen to NPR, or live in communities that aren't stricken by drugs, lack of opportunity, and other terrible things.

Just sayin'.

Need another reason to fear and loathe AI?

I don't really hate AI. Not all of it, anyway. It's great and is going to be greater when it comes to assistive technology that will let an awful lot of folks live their best lives. It will likely deliver on the some of its promise to provide better healthcare. It will absolutely eliminate a lot of drudge work.

But, but, but...However compelling those assistive technology and better healthcare arguments may be, this "death to drudgery" argument is a pretty dubious one. What's the benefit to those whose jobs involve drudge work?

One supposed ansewr is that, once drudgery-free, people will be freed up to unleash their inner whatever. Of course, most of those inner whatevers will eventually be rendered obsolete by AI. 

Then there are the jobs that are higher up the food chain that AI will do away with. White collar/knowledge workers may have largely escaped the job losses that automation and shifts to overseas production resulted in over the last n decades that absolutely hit those who worked in manufacturing. But AI's coming for those jobs big time, too.

So one of my biggest issues with AI madness is that, as we shrug our shoulders and accept it as inevitable, we're not as a society talking about what it is that people are going to do for work. The point the AI gurus keep making seems to be that 'we don't yet know what all those great new jobs are going to be, but they're going to be.'

This may work on the macro level - after all, a lot of those lost manufacturing jobs were replaced by spiffier white collar jobs in financial services etc. - but it really doesn't do all that much for those whose jobs were lost who weren't for whatever reason able to skip into a fancy new job, somewhere outside the Rust Belt, that required them to not just uproot their lives, but completely remake themselves. 

And what if all those presumed not-yet-imagined jobs don't pan out at the macro, let alone the micro, level? Are the trillionaire geniuses going to be happy with forking over a pittance of their trillions to give the rest of us a guaranteed income that's livable onable? Will we end up with a society that's even more alpha-beta-gamma-delta-epsilon than we already have? Blech, blech, a thousand times blech. Make that a trillion times blech.

What else are we ignoring when it comes to the downside of AI? 

Well, there's the environmental impact of the power all those datacenters will be consuming as the AI algos do their AI-ing. I guess we'll be having nuclear powered datacenters. No Three Mile Island worries there... Then there's the potential for some absolutely dreadful use of surveillance technology and big data. You, the guy with the protest sign? You're done for. And hey, you, folks with your profile commit crimes maybe. So you're done for, too. 

Anyway, as if anyone needs something more to worry about, when it comes to AI, there's a ton to add to your fret list. 

And as if I needed yet another reason to at least quasi fear and at least quasi loathe AI, now there's this brohaha with OpenAI.

OpenAI, which was founded nearly a decade ago to make sure that AI would benefit humankind vs. the opposite, has two components: a non-profit research organization and a profit making sub. 

You may recall that, earlier in the year, Elon Musk sued OpenAI, and his OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, claiming that they were putting profits over their initial mission to make sure AI benefits humanity. Anyone else find the idea of Elon Musk's being such a fanboy of anything benefitting humanity, and not whatever his current narcissistic whim is, laughable? He did drop the suit in June. Guess he had to put more focus into doing whatever he can to make sure that he benefits humanity by getting Trump elected...Talk about blech, blech, a trillion times blech.

OpenAI has been in the news for more than the Musk suit. There's been a lot of back-and-forth about Sam Altman staying the CEO. Etc. 

And more recently they've been in the news thanks to some whistleblowers lodging a complaint with the SEC claiming that "the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation."

The whistleblowers said OpenAI issued its employees overly restrictive employment, severance and nondisclosure agreements that could have led to penalties against workers who raised concerns about OpenAI to federal regulators...

OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said. These agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities. OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee nondisparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.

These overly broad agreements violated long-standing federal laws and regulations meant to protect whistleblowers who wish to reveal damning information about their company anonymously and without fear of retaliation, the letter said. (Source: WaPo)

OpenAI, of course, pushed back, claiming that employees do have the right "to make protected disclosures." And that the organization is increasing their efforts to make sure that their AI models are safe and secure, their technology able to withstand the pressure for the profit-making part of the entity to, well, make profits. 

Bit a spring update to the model behind their big product, ChatGPT, was supposedly rushed out the door in May:

...despite employee concerns that the company “failed” to live up to its own security testing protocol that it said would keep its AI safe from catastrophic harms, like teaching users to build bioweapons or helping hackers develop new kinds of cyberattacks. 

Again, OpenAI acknowledges that, sure, there were pressures. But maintains they didn't cut any safety corners. 

Somehow, I'm not 100% convinced that there's not someone out there using ChatGPT to figure out how to build bioweapons. 

Meanwhile, it's not clear whether the SEC is opening an investigation based on the whistleblowers. Maybe there's an AI out there who can tell me.

Girl Scouts Forever

I was briefly in the Girl Scouts. Briefly. Very briefly. Not long enough to earn any badges. A very dispiriting experience. The only positive was that, on meeting days, we could swap out our green jumpers and white blouses for the GS green uniform.

My Brownie troop had been kind of fun. 

I had devoured the Brownie Scout books by Mildred Wirt. The Brownie Scouts At Silver Beach. The Brownie Scouts Tree House. The Brownie Scouts at Snow Valley. I wanted to be friends with Veve McGuire. So I was primed to be a Brownie. 

My troop didn't quite measure up, adventure-wise. But we got to hang out after school playing games like "Picking Up Paw-Paws" and doing craft projects like making angel Christmas tree ornaments out of construction paper and cotton balls. (No one had a clue what a paw-paw was, but we were all quite familiar with angels and Christmas trees.)

A couple of days after my sister Trish was born, I "flew up" from Brownies to Girl Scouts. This was in June, toward the end of the school year, and I was looking forward to my dream life as a Girl Scout when school started again in the fall. (Interestingly, Mildred Wirt also had a series of Girl Scout books, but I never read them.)

Alas, there was no dream life as a Girl Scout. My sister Kath - two years older - had been in an active troop. She earned a lot of badges and got to go to Camp Neyati. 

For some reason, Girl Scouts at our school petered out in seventh grade, when girls transitioned from the vaguely Protestant-y Girl Scouts to the Junior Catholic Daughters of America, which was some weird adjunct of the Knights of Columbus. (Uniform: crisp white blouse and shamrock-bright Kelly green skirt.) 

Anyway, by seventh grade, the "big girls" like Kath were out of the Girl Scouts, and us fifth graders inherited the troop. (I also became a JCDA. If you ignored the religious and K of C overlay, there was one excellent aspect of membership in the Junior Catholic Daughters in our parish, as we took an annual bus trip to Boston to see whatever was playing at Cinerama - some sort of  travelogue that provided a quasi "you are there experience." One I remember involved a stomach-churning video rollercoaster ride. On the way back to Worcester, we'd stop at the Eli Whitney House for ice cream. The Big Trip to Boston was a colossal treat, back in those far simpler, far less sophisticated times.)

As for the Girl Scouts, we were under a shadow from the get go, as two of the leaders (both mothers of friends of Kath and me) were stricken with cancer. Some high school girls tried to sub for them, but we didn't do much of anything. We didn't earn badges. We didn't sell cookies. We didn't march in uniform at the annual Little League parade. We didn't go to Camp Neyati, let alone Green Eyrie, the posh Worcester County Girl Scout Camp. 

We sat around despondently. Mostly I remember gossiping and singing songs like "Girl Scouts Together."

At the end of the year we had an exercise in democracy and voted to disband and get our dues money back. There was a tax on our exit. In order to get a refund on our dues - 10 cents a week, I think - we were required to purchase a Girl Scout World Pin, a blue and gold enameled pin signifying something or other.

I haven't spent a lot of time bemoaning my lack of a Girl Scout career, but when I hear about active Girl Scouts, I am occasionally wistful about the lost opportunity to learn things, to achieve, to sell cookies. I admire the Girl Scout success stories, and am maybe even a tiny bit envious of their experience.

But forget about that envy for the moment. I have nothing but admiration for a Virginia Girl Scout who recently achieved the GS equivalent of the Boy Scouts' Eagle Scout status. 

Kate Lindley’s “Gold Award” — the highest award given to Girl Scouts — was given to her to recognize the work she’s done to fight book banning in her community. But the Hanover Board of Supervisors, which has a history of “de-selecting” books, took all mention of book banning out of her personal statement when honoring the four girls who completed projects this year. (Source: Scary Mommy)

Lindley's capstone project was in response to her school system banning a list of books they deemed "offensive." To counter that offensive, she'd set up a couple of "Banned Book Nooks" in local shops (printing, donuts). She also created a website for those looking to find banned books.

Lindley has said that her project “exposes more community members to these titles, hopefully ending their demonization.”

The local school board wanted to honor Lindley's achievement, and that of the other three girls who'd won the Gold Award.  

...but when the school board read about each girl’s accomplishments, Lindley’s self-submitted description was altered to take out all mention of banned books.

Lindley had something to say about the snub:

“You bestowed upon me the greatest honor you could. Greater than that of any proclamation in your censorship of my Gold Award project," she said. “You have shown the world that you are afraid to call something what it is, be that a banned book or a ‘de-selected’ one.”

Predictably, the bluenose prig who'd been instrumental in the local book banning initiative, and "who voted to remove the book banning language from Lindley's award recognition," had a pecksniffy response:

“If anyone wants to support an author whose message is about pornography to children then people have the right to do that," [Michael] Herzberg said. "As a board member, I have a right to say no that I don’t support that request and I also have the right to say yes I have the right to approve the substitute request so the Girl Scout could still get recognized for her Gold Award."

Nice way to tie Kate Lindley to "pornography to children." But I'm pretty sure that Ms. Lindley, Girl Scout extraordinaire will rise above it. And rise well about Herzberg. 

So congratulations, Kate Lindley. I have great hopes for you. Kind of makes me proud to have been a Girl Scout myself, no matter how meager my experience and achievements. 

Girl Scouts Forever!

This is getting ridiculous

A few years ago, an issue in the Virginia gubernatorial race centered on Critical Race Theory and parents' rights to control what their kids were reading in school. The centerpiece on this issue was a mother whose son had apparently suffered greatly, nearly a decade earlier, by having to read Toni Morrison's Beloved for his AP English class. 

Beloved is disturbing. 

But if you're 18 years old and capable of taking AP English, and you get the vapors from reading Toni Morrison, then maybe you have no business taking AP English. Stick with Chemistry. Stick with Latin. 

Beloved, of course, appears frequently on banned book lists. So does her novel The Bluest Eye. So does The Diary of Anne Frank. And 1984. And Fahrenheit 451, which - oh, irony of ironies - is about book burning. 

But books that deal with LGBTQ+ issues are pretty much edging all other books out when it comes to getting banned. 

Thus we find ourselves (or at least would, if we lived in Alabama) at the point where this can happen:

“Read Me a Story, Stella” is a children’s picture book about a pair of siblings reading books together and building a doghouse. However, because the author’s name is Marie-Louise Gay, the book was added to a list of potentially “sexually explicit” books to be moved from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HCPL) system. (Source: AL.com)

Talk about 'don't say gay.' If I were the type of coarse, non-refined lady who uses the sort of strong language that children under the age of 50 should never be exposed to, I'd say FFS. Or maybe WTF.

HCPL executive director Cindy Hewitt admitted “Read Me a Story, Stella” should not have been put on the list and was added because of the keyword “gay.”

“Obviously, we’re not going to touch that book for any reason,” Hewitt said...Hewitt insists there was never any intention to target the LGBTQ community. Instead, she was hoping to be “proactive instead of reactive.”

There were 232 other books "slated to be removed and potentially moved," so "Read Me a Story, Stella" was in good company.

It wasn't all LGBTQ topics that were on the chopping block. Another book earmarked for review is "The Hate U Give," which is about a Black kid who's killed by a cop. 

But of the 233 titles up for ban, 91 deal with LGBTQ+ topics. So those words about no "intention to target the LGBTQ community" ring a tad bit hollow.

Whether it's gay or Black or other themes that some people are objecting to - and I can't recall the details, but I read recently about some woman crusading against a book she hadn't bothered to read, but just knew in her heart of hearts, her mind of minds, was bad - the increasing number of books being banned is truly terrible.

No one's arguing that kindergartners should be exposed to porn, but by the time someone's in high school (maybe even junior high), there should be no books off limits for readers other than porn and violent trash that has no redeeming literary value. But what's porn? What's violent trash?

Guess I'm with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, way back in the 1960's, was asked about his litmus test for what constitutes pornography. Stewart famously answered "I know it when I see it."

On the other hand, while I trust my own judgment, do I want some prude-y smother-mother deciding that Beloved is too much for her sensitive 18 year-old to deal with, and, thus, should be banned from schools?

By all means, put the difficult reads in the adult section of the public library. But setting up a process where a book by an author named Gay can be swept up in a hunt for the ban-able is just ludicrous. 

FFS.

WTF.