Category Archives: literature

Love for the Writers

books, etc., film, literature, music, television, writing

My friend Beth messaged me one day last week to inform me that she had been watching Tales From the Darkside and recognized one of the writers’ names as someone we both knew from attending science fiction conventions: Michael Kube-McDowell. She said she found his episodes very imaginative.

I happen to still be in touch with Michael (who has since dropped the Kube part of the name) after all these years, so I messaged him to tell him what Beth had discovered.

“Where did she see it?” he asked. (He meant on what streaming service, I think.)

“She was watching it on her old collection of DVDs.”

“I didn’t even know they were on DVDs,” Michael said. It turns out the only copies that he had of his own work were some VCR recordings he had made at the time the episodes first aired. And he no longer had a VCR player.

I pointed out where he could get all four seasons of the DVDs online for about $20.

And so he did. “A mere 43 years later, I finally have a professional copy!” he said.

This happy incident happened because Beth watched the DVDs and noticed the writer’s name, something not many people bother to do.

Perhaps because I’m a writer myself, I do, too. I find myself saying, “Wow! David Gerrold wrote this episode of Babylon 5!” or “Theodore Sturgeon wrote this episode of Star Trek!” (I then often have to give this announcement some context for my husband by telling him who the writer is and what else they’ve written. But I digress.) (Oh, and not completely off the topic, did you know Ray Bradbury wrote the script for the movie version of Moby Dick? But I digress some more.)

I like to look for the names of directors, too. I don’t recognize them as often as I do writers, but sometimes I notice that an actor on the show has directed one or more episodes. I always think, “Good for them! Way to branch out!”

I feel the same way about songwriters. People give love to the singers, but barely notice the songwriters much of the time. (I have a little game I play with Dan. When I’m listening to iTunes (or Apple Music or whatever they call it these days), we’ll hear a song, and I’ll say, “Okay, who wrote this?” He’s right a lot of the time, but when he doesn’t know, he’ll guess Kinky Friedman if it’s a funny song or Willie Nelson if it isn’t. Once he said, “I don’t know his name, but he wrote that song that goes ‘living and dying in 3/4 time.'” It was Jimmy Buffett, and he was right. I was impressed. But I digress again.)

So I say, “Pay attention to the writers! Show them some love!” It’s hard to throw your arms around ChatGPT and say, “Thanks for the memories!” (Or, if you’re not close enough to the writer to throw your arms around them other than metaphorically, send them money. I once sent Michael a quarter to make up for royalties when I bought one of his books at a used book store. But I digress yet again, for the last time this week.)

Luck in the Library

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Jimmy Buffett wrote a song called “Love in the Library.” It’s a little disconcerting to hear a Buffett song that includes the name “Flaubert” instead of the word “beach” or “sailboat.” But he did, and I love it. It belongs in Buffett’s oeuvre along with other songs he’s written, like “He Went to Paris.” Gentle, reflective, and nothing at all like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

I may not have fallen in love in a library, but I’ve gotten lucky in plenty of them. (No, not that kind of “getting lucky.” What do you think I was doing during all those hours I’ve spent in one library or another? Canoodling in the stacks? But I digress.)

I was lucky that my parents, who didn’t read much themselves, valued reading enough that they took me to the library often. Sometimes the library would come to me—or if not directly to me, to the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. It was the bookmobile, and I loved it dearly. When I was very young, I would visit the marvelous vehicle and check out Green Eggs and Ham, still one of my favorite all-time books by one of my favorite authors. In fact, I would check it out on every visit. My mother made a rule. I could check out Green Eggs and Ham every time we went to the bookmobile if I wanted to, but I also had to check out something else as well. (It was a good thing that I learned to read when I was four, or I would have kept her reading it to me every day. But I digress again.)

I was lucky when I cruised the “New Arrivals” section of the big library and found something new to me and unexpectedly fascinating. It broadened my reading enormously.

I was lucky when Ms. magazine had an article on women mystery writers. I went to the library with a copy of it, burrowed into the mystery stacks, and fell in love with Sue Grafton’s and Sara Paretsky’s works, which have stayed with me for decades.

I was lucky when I went to college and got a job in the graduate library, fulfilling requests. (People filled out little slips of paper, which were sent to the upper floors where I worked via vacuum tubes. I located the books and sent them downstairs on a sort of dumbwaiter. When there were no requests, I spent my extra time delving into the stacks. Most of the time, I was on the history/sociology floor, where I learned lots. (The antiquated system of vacuum tubes is still used at the pharmacy drive-through where I pick up my prescriptions, if nowhere else. But I digress some more.))

One day, however, I got really lucky in the library. As I browsed the shelves, looking for my next read, I picked up a book that had a bookmark in it. People use all kinds of things for bookmarks. Some use proper bookmarks and forgetfully leave them in the library book, but others use anything at hand: business cards, envelopes, postcards, playing cards, ribbons, ticket stubs, sticky notes, receipts, the cards that fall out of magazines (these actually have a name: blow-in cards), and even photos.

On the day I got lucky, I picked up a book and noticed someone had used a lotto ticket as a bookmark. And whoever had used it for a bookmark had accidentally used a winning ticket! Going on the venerable, ancient philosophy of “finders keepers,” I cashed in the ticket, which was worth a whole $2.

Naturally, rather than buy something useful like gum or mints with “my” winnings, I decided that my lucky find was meant to bring me even more luck. So I used it to buy another $2 lottery ticket.

It was a loser. But at least that lucky library find had given me a momentary thrill and a soupçon of hope for a million-dollar payout. And that’s in addition to all the books I checked out that day!

Fun With Smut

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I may get in trouble for either the picture (no one I know) or the topic, but it’s an aspect of writing and reading that I have just a wee bit of experience with.

How do I feel about “dirty books”? I’m tempted to quote Tom Lehrer from his song “Smut”: “Dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it.” He also said, “I do have a cause, though. It’s obscenity. I’m for it.” The song contains not one “dirty word.” ( You can find it online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSwYID-u71M. But I digress.)

Reading Smut

I must admit that I did read Fifty Shades of Grey when it first came out, just to see what the commotion was all about. (My advice: Don’t bother. It’s miserably written. And unrealistic. Any couple having that much sex that often would be too chafed to carry on carrying on. But I digress again.)

When I was an editor for an early childhood magazine, I was frequently given books to review. One was an illustrated sex education book for young children, written by a doctor. I don’t remember the title, but the book was written in a style meant to emulate Dr. Seuss. I also don’t remember much of the content, except for this metaphor for some body parts, which he supplied the location of:

The towns are both called testicle

And they look like two round eggs.

They’re not located on a map

But between your Daddy’s legs.

(The conception scene was a meeting of Stanley Sperm (who wore a top hat) and Essie Egg (who wore a bow) in front of an ornate gate. I did not write a review of the book. It was my theory that it could be read aloud at a party to great amusement. But I digress some more.)

Reviewing Smut

I’ve recently gotten a gig reviewing books. Most of the books I’ve reviewed were in a category called “steamy romances.” This means that the couple must overcome obstacles to get together, but when they do, they have sex. This means about two realistic sex scenes per novel. (They’re short. The books, that is. The sex scenes go on for a number of pages.)

Personally, I’m grateful that these books (there’s a series) use neither clinical names nor cutesy euphemisms for body parts. (I still remember in the movie The Naked Gun when someone used the term “throbbing purple-headed warrior.” Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess) has been known to refer to her “lady garden,” a euphemism she created when not allowed to say “vagina” on TV. But I digress some more.)

Writing Smut

Once during my ghostwriting career, I had to write a piece of smut (erotica, if you prefer). It was the adventures of a woman who was connected (sorry) with various men. The men were all gorgeous and rich, and they bought the main character extravagant gifts. The woman gave me an outline describing her (and their) escapades, which I didn’t believe for a moment. I would call it “wish fulfillment porn.”

This time, I was in the position (sorry) of having to come up (sorry) with words to describe body parts and sex acts without being cutesy or clinical. I guess I succeeded. The customer was satisfied (sorry) with it, and I got paid for it (sorry), so I guess I did okay. (I’ve never been tempted (sorry) to look it up on Amazon and read the reviews. We will not discuss whether or how much I had to conduct research for the book. But I digress even more.)

The only other thing I know about writing sex scenes is that a writer friend of mine once wrote one that went on for multiple pages (and orgasms). My husband read it and was impressed.

AI Writing: Friend or Foe?

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You may have heard that AI writing means the death of writing done by actual, live people. In a way that’s true, and in a way it isn’t. Let me explain.

Many—perhaps most—of the fiction books that you see for sale on Amazon and other outlets are AI-written and almost universally bad. Rotten, really. So bad that you want to throw them against the wall. (Unless you have a Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader, of course. Then you only want to delete them. But I digress.) They are too short, too filled with adjectives and adverbs, too lacking in a coherent plot, and too deficient in character development. Even the most potentially vivid genres are bland.

You may say to yourself, “I could write a better novel than this turnip.” And you very likely could. (So why don’t you?)

But AI has taken over most of the writing space. Even books that you yourself don’t write aren’t written by a human being. (I should know. I often freelance for a ghostwriting service that shall remain nameless because of the NDA I signed. They used to have lots of us human beings doing the writing. Now they largely have “writing packages” produced by AI. The only time a human being touches the book is to supervise the AI engine, which sometimes goes madly astray, and to “humanize” the results (it’s known in the trade as “polishing dogshit into gold”). But I digress again. At length.)

That’s the bad side of AI writing. What, I hear you ask, is the good side?

It can make you a better writer.

Hear me out.

Let’s think about the most basic AI writing tool that almost everyone is familiar with: Grammarly. Yes, it follows along behind you and corrects what you’ve written when you’re typing too fast (like “isfamiliar”). And it always changes your word choice to “ducking.” It’s never “ducking.” But, if you pay attention to it, Grammarly is a teaching tool.

Grammarly sends you reports that list your most common mistakes that week (or month, I don’t remember). If it says you have problems with subject-verb agreement, brush up on that. If you have trouble remembering whether commas introduce an independent clause or a dependent one, look it up and try to remember it the next time you write.

Teachers worry that their students will use AI to write their papers for them. (One of my friends now has her students write out their essays longhand, like I did in the Victorian era. But I digress some more.) They may indeed rely on AI. (A survey of students found that they considered it cheating, however.) But there are many AI detectors available to teachers that sniff out suspiciously smelly AI-created sentences and paragraphs and report on how much of a piece of writing seems to be human or AI.

This, of course, has led to ways to avoid the AI detectors. One I saw recently offered a series of prompts a student could give the AI program in order to produce a piece of writing that would appear to be human-written. The list of things the sneaky student should tell the AI program to avoid was comprehensive and long.

It told students to create a prompt that specified not only the topic and tone of the illicit paper, but also to avoid common signs of AI content that the AI checkers teachers use frequently will flag.

The list of things to tell the AI to avoid included: sentences more than 20 words long without one clear idea and paragraphs all the same length; passive voice; abstractions instead of concrete words; sentences of all one length; a lack of measurable facts; suspect punctuation (semi-colons and em dashes) (I disagree with this stricture. I love semi-colons and em dashes, as if you hadn’t noticed. But I digress yet again.); overused words and phrases (an extensive list, including last but not least, cutting-edge, delve, game changer, nonetheless, despite, moist, subsequently, furthermore, utilize, leverage (and any other biz-speak or tech jargon)); adverbs and adjectives; hedging; more than one prepositional phrase or verb phrase; all-caps or numbered lists; and metaphors involving landscapes, music, or journeys. (I once asked ChatGPT to write some poetry, and it really overdid those metaphors. But I digress even more.)

In other words, if you know what to tell the AI not to do, you already know for yourself what not to do—or keep that list handy and refer to it often—you’ll be able to write your own sparkling prose without Robby the Robot’s assistance. And the process of learning to tell the AI how to write undetectably will improve your own writing.

If you think of AI as a way to learn instead of a way to cheat, you’ll do well.

Down the Rabbit Hole

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Almost five years ago, I wrote a post about how memories from my (and likely your) childhood were being repurposed for political statements and propaganda.

This time I’m writing about a classic piece of literature being rewritten for other purposes. (Largely unobjectionable ones, it’s true, but it’s the principle of the thing. But I digress.)

The work in question is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (more often known as Alice in Wonderland). It’s one of my favorite pieces of literature and I have returned to it many times since I first read it (murfle) decades ago.

(I have a friend who despises Alice. He finds it to be nonsense (which it obviously is) and incomprehensible. This despite the fact that he has returned to it frequently to see if it makes any more sense. (He ought to like at least part of it because he’s a mathematician, like the author, Lewis Carroll. I recommended The Annotated Alice (edited by Martin Gardner), which explains the jokes, Briticisms, and outdated expressions. (It also includes “Jabberwocky” in French, German, and IIRC, Latin.) But I digress, pedantically and at length.)

The “quotations” in question are not political but psychological or philosophical. I’m not saying they’re invalid—merely that they are misquoted, misattributed, or completely made up.

One of the most common misquotes is attributed to the Cheshire Cat:

“You’re mad, bonkers, off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

What the Cheshire Cat actually really said is much more complex. Here’s the context:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people’” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” 

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

One quotation supposedly from the Mad Hatter is:

The secret, Alice, is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile. It’s then, only then, that you’ll find Wonderland.

Unobjectionable if sappy, but not from the book. The same with this one:

But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who’s stopping us from inventing one?

The most annoying fake dialogue is this one, between Alice and the White Rabbit.

“Do you love me?” Alice asked.

“No, I don’t love you!” replied the White Rabbit.

Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.

“See?” replied the White Rabbit. “Now you’re going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what did you do wrong so that I can’t love you at least a little. You know, that’s why I can’t love you. You will not always be loved Alice, there will be days when others will be tired and bored with life, will have their heads in the clouds, and will hurt you. Because people are like that, they somehow always end up hurting each other’s feelings, whether through carelessness, misunderstanding, or conflicts with themselves. If you don’t love yourself, at least a little, if you don’t create an armor of self-love and happiness around your heart, the feeble annoyances caused by others will become lethal and will destroy you. The first time I saw you I made a pact with myself: ‘I will avoid loving you until you learn to love yourself.’”

The White Rabbit was late to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts. He wouldn’t have had time to discourse on self-love.

Alice has been in the public domain since 1907, so one can misquote or invent all they want. (The Disney movie version only came out in 1951, The book was in the public domain, but the movie isn’t. I think we can expect a live-action film. I hope they lose the repellent pink-and-purple Cheshire Cat, though I doubt they will. But I digress again.)

Surely no one would do this kind of thing to The Wizard of Oz…or would they? [squints suspiciously]

The Good, the Bad, and the Others

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The Wicked Witch used to be a villain. She tried to kill Dorothy and her companions. She enslaved flying monkeys. She wanted revenge for her sister’s accidental death.

Now she has her own musical and movie.

The elevation of villains is a thing now. Personally, I blame Star Wars. I was once visiting some friends who had a young son. He held up his Darth Vader action figure and said, “This is my friend.” (This was in the days before the proliferation of Star Wars movies culminated in Vader’s redemption at the last possible second. But I digress.)

My theory is that villains have power but few limits. It’s no wonder youngsters view them as positive influences. When Darth Vader is your friend and protector, you share in his power. You fear nothing.

Maybe this rise of the villain started with the rise of the anti-hero. Let me explain. And let me use Buffy the Vampire Slayer (one of my favorite TV classics) as my vehicle. (Actually, I’m going to do it whether you let me or not. So there. But I digress some more.)

Here’s the backstory, for those not familiar with the Buffyverse. Buffy’s first love was the vampire-with-a-soul Angel, and he was a Byronic hero, a type that became popular when Byron (duh) was writing poetry. Byronic heroes are tortured souls who waft around in black clothes and clouds of pain. They’re never cheerful. They don’t crack jokes. They suffer from existential angst. They have troubled pasts and isolate themselves from society. (Other Byronic heroes include Batman holed up in his Batcave, grieving over his dead parents. The Brontes knew their Byronic heroes, too. Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff are classics. But I digress yet again.)

In opposition to the Byronic hero, we have the anti-hero. They don’t behave according to the heroic model. They’re “bad boys” who manage to dominate the plot and achieve their goals despite being misunderstood or refusing to follow convention. Think Han Solo, Captain Jack Sparrow, or in the case of Buffy, Spike. He’s never going to be Buffy’s Great Love, but he has his uses in her world. (Deadpool and Robin Hood are two other examples who would never have a beer together but occupy similar literary spaces. I suppose Dexter would be the ultimate anti-hero. Still more digression.)

No, wait. Satan is the ultimate anti-hero. Take a look at Milton’s Paradise Lost. Lucifer has agency and is the more interesting character. At some level, the reader roots for him. They know God’s going to win. That’s a given. But Satan’s quest, while reprehensible, is also on some level noble. (I’m talking literary characters here, not theology. But I digress again. And as Jean Kerr said, in reference to the story of Adam and Eve, the snake has all the lines. But I continue digressing.)

So, what makes the bad guys more interesting guys? For one thing, they’re deeply misunderstood. They’ve often been victims of bullies or of an uncaring, unfair society. They touch the darkness, the “shadow self” that lives within each of us. We recognize ourselves in them, identify with them in ways we simply don’t with standard heroes. We’d like to identify with heroes, but we know they’re better than we are.

Standard heroes require supervillains to make them at all interesting. Without Lex Luthor, Superman just flies around foiling ordinary bank robbers. Without Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes is simply Columbo. (I could say that without elusive diagnoses and the looming specter of death, House is basically Doogie Howser, but I won’t. That would be ridiculous. There’s also misanthropy. But I digress some more.)

Personally, I respond more to anti-heroes than Byronic heroes. Pure villains don’t interest me, but neither do sanctimonious heroes like Galahad (“My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”). But when it comes to the villains and heroes in the wrestling ring, I don’t give a fig for any of them. Besides, they change places so often that you need a scorecard to tell which is which. (Don’t assume that this means I watch “pro” wrestling. I learned about their ethical switches from the New York Times. Go figure. But I have finished digressing. For this week.)

Adventures in Writing: AI

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I must admit I’ve had some experience with generative AI writing. I know I should be ashamed of this, but I’m not. Here’s what I learned about this tool or terror.

When ChatGPT was new, I was intrigued. I just had to try it out. I spent a couple of days feeding it some of my favorite topics and styles to see what it could do with them. What it produced was largely crummy.

For example, I asked it to write a haiku on the subject of sex. What it produced was: “Whispers in moonlight/Bodies weave an intimate/Haiku of passion.” Not exactly T.S. Eliot.

I asked it to write other kinds of poems. In almost every one, ChatGPT included the word “poetry” or the name of the style: “The poetry of passsion’s sweet romance” or “O sonnet of the flesh,” “Each line a brushstroke in the poet’s light,” “In every sonnet, life finds sweet peace.”

It also relied heavily on metaphors, many different ones in the same piece. For example, in a poem on writing, it offered “With verses woven like a tapestry. The writer’s heart, an open book” and “how the words, like melodies, entwine, In stanzas, whispers of a silent song.” Now that’s just bad.

It mixed metaphors atrociously: “The enigmatic tapestry…kaleidoscopic hues… orchestrated by unseen forces, paint the canvas of existence… a symphony of discordant notes, each mood a chapter in a cosmic novel.” All those in one paragraph. Another particularly egregious one was “etched into the fabric of one’s existence.”

It also got facts wrong. Recently, hoping that it had improved, I asked it to write a country song about horses in the style of Willie Nelson. “He’s a big ol’ bay with a coat dark as night” was one of the lyrics. (Bay horses are reddish brown.)

Later on, I had a chance to give a workout to a different AI program tasked with writing ten chapters of a novel. Then I was tasked with cleaning it up into human language. It was a lot of work.

AI couldn’t keep track of the characters, for one. It called a little boy Nicky, Billy, and Jamie and another character Henderson and Nelson in different chapters. It chose weird words (“thrummed”) and repeated phrases (“weight of the world”) in nearly every chapter. It forgot that a pivotal scene was supposed to take place in an abandoned warehouse, setting it instead in the woods. Once I had to have it produce a whole new chapter because the first one was so far off. Plot, characters, dialogue, narrative, backstory, continuity—all would be rejected by any competent editor.

AI nonfiction can be just as bad. There’s a tendency to be simply wrong about names, dates, and locations, for example. Flaws like that will seriously mislead readers. AI nonfiction has also been known to get things like herbal remedies drastically and dangerously wrong.

Once I toyed with an AI image generator, which did reasonably well with a human girl (though it couldn’t produce medium-length auburn hair), but couldn’t make a satisfactory alien to meet my criteria. It looked like one of those sad-eyed children in the old paintings.

I understand why special effects professionals hold AI in horror. Entire departments are being canned and replaced by larger, more sophisticated sorts of AI than the Tinkertoy ones I played with. But movies have been using CGI for years, so AI is the next logical extension. I’m not saying that the SpFX companies are right to abandon the people who have done so well for them over the years. Human imagination controlling the tools of creation will—or should—always have a place in the equation.

But generative AI has a long way to go before it can produce prose or poetry that can substitute for human works. I understand that publishers are being assailed with AI-produced novels, but I can’t imagine they can’t tell the difference. Readers of self-published novels, though, should watch out for AI books and avoid them.

Or, if you prefer, avoid all AI writing. I understand why you would.

(Note: Aside from the brief quotes, no AI was used to write this post.)

I Can’t Commit

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Of course, that’s not completely true. There are things I can commit to—my husband, for example. We’ve been married for 41 years, which I think is proof aplenty.

What I can’t commit to are things that go on too long. (The marriage does not fit into that category.)

Let me explain.

Movies

In the evenings, when my husband and I have finished dinner, he often wants to watch a movie, but I don’t often agree to it. I hate leaving a movie in the middle, but I also hate staying up past my bedtime to finish one. It’s a delicate balance.

For example, after the recent eclipse, we decided on Ladyhawke, which was relevant, but I couldn’t make it all the way through. We had to watch the second half the next day and that upset my internal clock, not to mention my sense of continuity. If a movie starts at 8:00, it’s pretty much out of the running for me. I’m a little old lady and don’t like staying up past 9:00. (And you can get off my lawn. If I had one, I mean. Dan is aiming for a pollinator garden. But I digress.)

TV Series

When it comes to TV, I hate to start a series because I realize I’ll never keep up with it every week. This doesn’t apply to series that have already finished. Often, old episodes of House, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castle, Inkmaster, Chopped, or Bones are shown for several hours a day, and those I can tolerate multiple episodes of. (That may sound counterintuitive. The difference seems to be that I don’t have to pay attention to them. I usually have them on when I’m doing something else like writing. They’re just my emotional support background noise. But I digress again.)

Books

I used to be able to tolerate series of books. I devoured The Lord of the Rings, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, Sue Grafton’s Alphabet books, and other long-running written endeavors. Not anymore. I buy many of my e-books from discount sites for $1.99 or $2.99 (because I’m cheap). Many of them, as you might suppose, are not exactly scintillating. Some of them are so dreadful I give up on them well before I reach the denouement.

(One of the first ones I ever committed libris interruptus on was a horror novel that started by introducing the protagonists. They were perfect. Perfect looks. Perfect jobs. Perfect house. Perfect marriage. Perfect kids. By the end of the first chapter, I was rooting for the monster, which hadn’t even shown its tentacles, fangs, slime, or whatever. But I digress some more.)

I recently discovered that even book series I love can be too much of a commitment. I recently reread the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, but couldn’t jump right into The Silmarillion. I love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and set out to reread them all, but pooped out after book ten. I needed a break (a la Friends) and haven’t come back to finish the other four. Yet. I have a feeling that after 600 pages of Midnight in Chernobyl, my current good read, I’ll be ready. (I hate the phrase “a good read.” It sounds too much like saying someone is a “good lay.” But I digress yet again.)

I haven’t even reread my own books (Bipolar Me and Bipolar Us). They don’t constitute much of a series and would make a terrible movie. But that’s not the reason. There’s a terrible typo in the first one, and I’m afraid I’ll find one in the second as well. If I weren’t depressed about the slim sales, that would do it.

The Rise of the Asterisk

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It’s well-known (by people who know me) that I love punctuation. I read books about punctuation. I have two punctuation tattoos. My favorite mark of punctuation is the semicolon (which is one of the tattoos I have). But lately, when it comes to punctuation, the asterisk is in the ascendancy. And that’s because an increasing number of books have swear words in their titles. Punctuation is how we address the problem delicately.

The first example of the trend and at the time most shocking was Go the F**k to Sleep, a book that purported to be a read-to-kids goodnight book, but was really an expression of parental frustration. It caused quite a buzz.

After that came The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (and the more daintily titled The Subtle Art of Not Caring About People’s Opinion), I Used to Be a Miserable F*ck, Unfu*k Yourself, The French Art of Not Giving a Sh*t, and F*ck Feelings. For those who prefer hashtags, there’s Unf#ck Your Brain. The winner for the longest title is The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide). And Everything is #@%!ed! uses a whole string of punctuation. Fucking This shit Show: A Gratitude Journal for Tired Women dispenses with the veil of punctuation altogether. (I can’t help that inconsistent capitalization. That’s the way it’s written. Maybe shit is supposed to look less threatening in lowercase? But I digress.)

(When marks of punctuation are used as stand-ins for letters or words, they’re called “grawlix,” an almost completely useless word, but one I’m quite fond of. Most people have seen grawlix only in comic books when Popeye, for example, wants to cuss. But I continue digressing.)

What’s the reason for all the daintily disguised sweary titles? It’s not like we don’t know what the asterisks stand for. It’s not fooling anyone. Go the F**k to Sleep was obviously meant to be shocking, though it also expressed humor and frustration. After that, it looks like a bandwagon was jumped on. The book even jumped on its own bandwagon. Now it’s a trilogy, including You Have to F**king Eat and F**k, Now There Are Two of You.

(I note that most of the sweary titles go with self-help books. Does this indicate a certain irreverence regarding the concept of self-help? Frustration with the concepts in the books? I know I’ve wanted to swear at self-help books during various periods of my life. Now I write them, though (so far) none have titles that require grawlix. But I digress some more.)

Personally, I have no objection to swearing. For a long time, I couldn’t do it, but after working as a waitress, I made up for lost time. Now I swear like a sailor, though with better enunciation. Sometimes, a curse word is just the right one. And of course, when I use a swear word in writing, I punctuate it properly. No grawlix here.

My favorite unexpected use of punctuation, however, comes in this brief verse:

Mary’s little lamb / Upon the grass did frisk. / But Mary was afraid / Her little * .

Now that’s creative punctuation!

Me and the PoemBot

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The other day I started fooling around with ChatGPT, the AI program that people are using to write things for them. As a writer myself, I wondered if I would be out of a job any time soon. Realistically, I know I won’t, since the ghostwriting firm I write for does not allow us to use AI-created content.

Still, I was curious about what ChatGPT could do with various writing tasks, so I dove in. Here’s what I found.

The program did well on factual queries (Write a paragraph on bipolar disorder) and even had an answer for a philosophical query (What is the meaning of life?). The more criteria I gave it, the worse it did. (Write a practical but amusing paragraph about bipolar disorder.) It showed a definite tendency to throw in every simile and metaphor it could, which definitely ended up mixed.

For blog posts with not-too-specific topics, it did better. I asked it to write a paragraph for a blog post on a self-help topic, and it almost instantly came up with one about positive affirmations. Asked to write a blog-post paragraph on toxic positivity, it did quite a competent job.

But I really wanted to test its talent when it came to poetry, a much more difficult skill. I stuck mostly to sonnets and haikus (I did have it write one villanelle) on assorted topics. All the sonnets it produced were Shakespearean unless I specified a Petrarchan, Miltonic, or Spenserian one. The sonnets were awfully self-reverential. No matter the topic, they tended to include the words sonnet, stanza, or verse. Here’s a sonnet it wrote on the subject of writing, which I suppose gave it an excuse to refer to sonnets within it. But it also referred to a dance, a symphony, brushstrokes, a tapestry, melodies and song, a journey, and dreams.

Now, I haven’t done Lit Crit in many a year, but the result seemed muddled and mediocre to me.

Upon the page, my quill begins its dance/ In ink, the thoughts from depths of mind take flight./A symphony of words, a sweet romance/Each line a brushstroke in the poet’s light.

In solitude, I craft a world unseen/With verses woven like a tapestry./The writer’s heart, an open book, pristine/Unraveling tales of eternity.

Oh, how the words, like melodies, entwine/In stanzas, whispers of a silent song./The poet’s soul, an endless, vast design,/In every verse, a journey to prolong.

Through pen and paper, dreams find their release/In every sonnet, life finds sweet peace.

Then, I tried it on a different topic—sex. I was curious to see how it addressed this most human of activities. Here’s what it wrote:

In whispered shadows where desire’s flame,/Ignites the senses in a sacred dance./Two souls entwined, no need for words to claim,/The poetry of passion’s sweet romance.

Bodies as verses, intimate and bare,/In tangled sheets, a sonnet takes its form./Each touch and kiss, a stanza to declare,/A love that weaves through passion’s vibrant storm.

Ephemeral, the moments that we share,/As pleasure paints the canvas of the night./In silent echoes, echoes of a dare,/Two hearts entangled in this sweet delight.

Oh, sonnet of the flesh, in whispers spun,/In ecstasy, a tale of love is done.

Again with the references to sonnets, dance, poetry, verses, stanzas, and painting a canvas.

The chatbot, in my opinion, did better with haiku. Here’s a haiku on the subject of haiku:

Three lines, concise art,

nature’s essence captured close,

haiku whispers truth.

Here’s what it did with a haiku on bipolar disorder:

Storm in a fragile mind,

sunshine and shadows collide,

bipolar tides shift.

And on the subject of writing in general:

Ink-stained whispers flow,

Words on paper, tales unfold,

Silent stories grow.

But when it came to sex, the haiku was again (in my opinion, needlessly) self-referential:

Whispers in moonlight,

Bodies weave an intimate

Haiku of passion.

So, what did I learn from my experiments? ChatGPT does a decent job with factual topics, though it has a tendency to rely rather heavily on figures of speech. Here’s a paragraph it wrote when I gave it the subject of bipolar disorder in the style of my other blog, Bipolar Me. It wrote a (flattering) description of the blog instead.

Navigating the rollercoaster of emotions that is bipolar disorder is a journey unique to each individual, a theme explored with raw honesty on the pages of the Bipolar Me blog. In the midst of the highs, where creativity flows like a torrential river, and the lows, where the world appears desaturated and heavy, the author skillfully captures the kaleidoscope of emotions that define life with bipolar disorder. With a poignant blend of vulnerability and resilience, the blog illuminates the challenges faced by those grappling with the disorder, dispelling myths and stigma along the way. Through personal narratives and reflections, the Bipolar Me blog serves as a beacon of understanding and connection, reminding its readers that they are not alone in their journey through the intricate landscapes of mood swings and self-discovery.

And here’s what it said about this very blog:

The “But I Digress” blog, much like a meandering conversation with a wise and witty friend, invites readers into a realm where thoughts flow freely, detouring into unexpected intellectual landscapes. With each post, the blog embarks on a delightful exploration of diverse topics, from profound philosophical musings to lighthearted anecdotes, weaving a narrative that reflects the author’s curious mind. It’s a virtual salon where ideas intermingle, and the unexpected tangents become the heart of the discourse. Whether dissecting the nuances of contemporary culture, diving into the intricacies of literature, or reflecting on the quirks of everyday life, “But I Digress” captivates its audience with a blend of insightful commentary, humor, and a touch of intellectual whimsy, creating a space where readers can both ponder the profound and enjoy the pleasures of intellectual meandering.

I’ll take it. Thanks, ChatGPT.