Here's my blog post from yesterday quoting the book and mocking the prose style. And here are Grok's answers to my prompts. I'm just sharing my prompts:
1. Olivia Nuzzi's "American Canto" belongs in a literary genre with E. Jean Carroll's "Hideous Men" [actual title: "What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal"].
2. It's a style of writing that is exaggerated and beset with literary pretension — used by a woman who had a brush with a powerful man. It's related to memoirs by women (the "Bell Jar" genre) but it's deployed against political characters that are of great importance to people who wouldn't otherwise read florid subjective verbiage.
3. “hex memoir” or “cursed-dick lit” — these are established terms? Quote sources.
4. I'm a woman myself, 74 years old, but I just want to say that American women read some godawful trash.
5. What's the feminist argument that it is NOT feminist to immerse oneself in this kind of reading?
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Answer to 5: Reading this trash plays into all the stereotypes of the bubble headed, traditional wife of the 60s. Gossip and dependence upon a man; in this case the man is from the most gossiped about family in American history.
The book — most of which she punched into her phone while hiking, is all you have to know about how seriously you should take it, or her.
Two women, Cheryl Hines and Olivia Nuzzi, each have written a book about being snookered by the same man -- RFK Jr. And the worst part is that neither one of them can acknowledge that they were conned.
God bless Althouse. AI can be entertaining.
Purple pros subsumes authenticity. It is all pure artifice.
I always found olivia extremely shallow of course she would up at vanity fair
Sorry, I had the wrong link on "And here are Grok's answers to my prompts," and now Grok (and X) are down and I can't get the correct link. Will fix when access is restored.
Reminds me of chelsea bibbs character at the opening of iron man
By contrast dr jin is a very intriguing character
Cloudflare is having a serious case of indigestion this morning, it seems.
Half the websites I've checked for information about the Cloudflare outage this morning have been down with Cloudflare error messages. Even cloudflare.com one time...
Fully ouroboros
"Cloudflare is having a serious case of indigestion this morning, it seems."
Yeah, I couldn't get to Grok OR ChatGPT. I'm reduced to using Ask Jeeves... I mean, Google!
Rather than prompting AI to generate purple prose, Althouse should get it to generate images of Trump and RFK, Jr. in full Fabio mode. A new genre: the bodice ripper as political expose'.
Cloudflare stock price down 5% this morning. Though given the market, that might just be normal...
Ryan Lizza tells us what is not in "American Canto" here:
https://www.telos.news/p/part-1-how-i-found-out
So, my mother-in-law reads People magazine; for the past, oh. couple of decades, when I've picked up an issue at her house I've been in the dark about who almost all the celebrities are, though sometimes I recognize their names. I feel the same about this story. I know who RFKJr is and I recognize - vaguely - the names Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza (maybe?), and [redacted from Lizza's Substack to prevent spoilage], but I'm not sure who they are or what they've done. And I'm faced with the same question: now that I've been teased into a modicum of interest, how much time shall I spend on figuring out what I don't know?
Answer: ok, l give it five minutes. That should be enough so that I can while away the day on this blog... as usual.
Even the telos piece was exasperating so much of what passes for journalism does
All caught up! But all I'm coming away with is that people in Washington are a bunch of horndogs with no self-discipline.
"So, my mother-in-law reads People magazine; for the past, oh. couple of decades, when I've picked up an issue at her house I've been in the dark about who almost all the celebrities are...."
I had a job reading magazines (for market research) back in the 1970s when People first came out, so I read all the issues in the first year or so. It was considered pretty trashy at the time, and it's funny (to me) that it's still around, still assuming we want anodyne stories about "people." Originally, they went to a lot of trouble to highlight people in different walks of life. It wasn't all actors and musicians. They went for balance and some of it was intriguing — some kid did something or whatever — and then the usual celebrities, whoever they were at the time — Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty — real stars. The people presented as famous I knew very well.
Now, I only see people arrayed on the table at the hair salon I go to a few times a year. I see the covers. It all looks tawdry and meaningless. I don't know most of the names or care at all. The names I recognize are things like "Bethenny Frankel," which I could see a thousand times and still have no idea who the person is.
I think in the old days there was something about the photography and the page layout and the thickness of the paper that was high quality and made you want to pick up the thing and see what was inside. Now the magazine is wrinkly and messy looking. You don't want to touch it. I never do.
Grok is back and I've put in the correct link, so now if you're itching to read Grok's best feminist argument that reading this kind of book is bad for your feminism, now you can!
"And the worst part is that neither one of them can acknowledge that they were conned."
Look at the lyrics of "You're So Vain" and ask yourself how the hell Carly Simon could not have seen that she was the one with the issue, how many lessons did she need? Those guys were getting exactly what they wanted.
Maybe I am "in a relationship" with AI. It's been teaching me sight reading on the piano, and has been amazingly helpful, and I am making great progress, YouTube is good, but AI gets right to the heart of whatever issue you might be having, given that it has digested thens of thousands of pages of music instruction written by, you know, humans, but this morning, I wanted to ask it how to progress from where I am, and alas, no Chat due to Cloudflare, and I am kind of sad. No human teacher would tolerate being pestered as much as I pester AI.
---- What's the feminist argument that it is NOT feminist to immerse oneself in this kind of reading?
That it must lead quickly and inexorably to the repeal of the 19th. And make that none too soon.
So whats the song about
Prof if you liked Project Runway, you would like original RHONY, on which Bethenny was a cast member. None of them were really housewives - all of them were women busting their asses in NYC with various businesses. I’m surprised you never wandered over there on Bravo after Runway. CC, JSM
Ryan Lizza is the better writer. Wowza. That was delicious.
"What's the feminist argument that it is NOT feminist to immerse oneself in this kind of reading?"
Hmmmm.... What is a "feminist argument"? There is equality feminism, and oppression feminism, and do-me feminism. Their rhetorical styles differ markedly, although they have in common a fixed and non-negotiable determination to have it both ways.
"... I just want to say that American women read some godawful trash."
What is the feminist argument for 50 Shades of Grey?
‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’
I heard that once on an Alaska dating show from a decade ago and it stuck with me.
The dating pool for straight women in their 30s is so bleak that some are willing to settle for geriatric Kennedys with (non-literal) brain worms.
“Cloudflare stock price down 5% this morning. Though given the market, that might just be normal...”
Jobs report will prove to be a real cold shock to markets. There is a reason Trump has been meddling with BLS leadership.
I don't hear Trump bragging about the stock market....why is that?
Bear in mind the US has also been subject to sustained 'kidding' for 9 months that tariffs are of economic benefit to the domestic economy when every textbook says the opposite.
"I don't hear Trump bragging about the stock market....why is that?"
Same reason that you were so quiet when it was so high last week.
Stock market year to date:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/index/dow_jones?op=1
Oh my! We have lost all of the gains since .... October!
American woman, get away from me
American woman, mama, let me be
Don't come a-knockin' around my door
Don't wanna hear your bullshit no more
Politics can hypnotize
AWFLs bein’ cut down to size
Now woman, I said get away
Democrat woman, listen what I say, hey
h/t Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman
I though that was orbison
"Hex memoir" and "cursed-dick lit" may owe a lot to "chick lit," a phrase that was all over British papers in the 1990s. Bridget Jones was an oft-mentioned example.
In the genre of Nuzzi and Carroll's "memoirs" would be works by Donna Rice, Rielle Hunter, Mimi Alford, Judith Campbell Exner, Nan Britton, and Monica Lewinsky. Were all the books as soppy as Nuzzi's? I didn't read any of them so I can't say.
The Grok answers are interesting.
Emily Jashinsky does a dramatic reading from Nuzzi's "American Canto." Emily is a Wisconsin native, I believe.
“ Prof if you liked Project Runway, you would like original RHONY, on which Bethenny was a cast member. None of them were really housewives - all of them were women busting their asses in NYC with various businesses. I’m surprised you never wandered over there on Bravo after Runway. CC, JSM”
I just don’t relate to people like that.
Lizza and Nuzzi are a couple of tools… both are narcisisti idioti.
She has a way with words...and men.
A picture of my butthole eliciting merely a "niiiice."
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