Stephen King helps J.K. Rowling with the mathematics of fuck-giving.

I think you may mean "not giving a fuck squared." The square root, I believe, would mean a *smaller* amount of giving a fuck. I could be wrong. https://t.co/7lzylpInVV

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) July 17, 2024

Help me with the math here. Seems to me, if you don't give a fuck, you're already at zero. Rowling is talking about the smallest possible amount of fuck-giving and being silly about the math. King admits he could be wrong, and isn't he? She doesn't want more than zero, and zero times zero wouldn't give you more than zero anyway. But she wants to go smaller. 

Ah, wait! Rowling writes back: "But I was going for a fraction of a fuck. I barely give a tenth of a fuck. So I stand by my square root. What we really need here is a certified fuckologist."

 

Perfect. JK won. Reeled him in and won. Good for King, though, for expressing his idea with respect.

ADDED: Actually, JK's explanation — that she was talking about fractions (and not 0, as I assumed) — put King in the right. As Matt says in the comments: "King is correct. The square root of 1/4 is 1/2. For numbers less than 1 the square root makes it larger. 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4." 

The best-seller list is "a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression."

"Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence. I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept. I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular."

Said the literary agent Andrew Wylie, quoted in "When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job" (NYT). The NYT interviewer, David Marchese, had prompted him to talk about A.I. 

I'm amused by Wylie's blithe snobbishness: That's got nothing to do with those of us who deal in literature.

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in the style of Salman Rushdie and assigned a topic — the subject of the previous post on this blog — home schooling. Here's the result, which I presume Rushdie would find hilariously inept:

Elon Musk is "personally" paying for blue check subscriptions for LeBron James, William Shatner, and Stephen King.

The Verge reports.

Now you know who are the truly elite of this world.

The sportsman, the actor, and the writer.

Not politicians and journalists. And certainly not every sportsperson, showbiz character, and creative scribbler.

Just these very grand characters — James, Shatner, and King.

Musk tweets: "I’m paying for a few personally."

I'd like to see the full list. Or maybe not. If he shows the list, others will say, I belong in that set. But James, Shatner, King — who can say "I'm with them"?

"The government had a high-profile witness on its side with the author Stephen King, who testified that the merger would be especially harmful..."

"... to writers who are just starting out, and took a contrary position to his own publisher, Scribner, which is part of Simon & Schuster. On Monday night, Mr. King said in an email interview that he was 'delighted with the outcome.' 'Further consolidation would have caused slow but steady damage to writers, readers, independent booksellers, and small publishing companies,' he said. 'Publishing should be more focused on cultural growth and literary achievement and less on corporate balance sheets.'...  The Justice Department’s focus on author earnings, rather than harm to consumers, marked a shift in how the government applies antitrust law. Antitrust policy has largely been guided for decades by an effort to prevent large corporations from imposing higher costs on consumers, rather than focusing on the impact a monopoly might have on workers, suppliers or competitors.... 'The Biden administration wants to be aggressive to protect the overall market, and not necessarily to just protect consumers,' said Eleanor M. Fox, an antitrust expert at N.Y.U. School of Law...."

From "Judge Blocks a Merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster/The government’s case blocked the merger of two of the United States’ largest publishers and reflected a more aggressive approach to curbing consolidation. It was closely watched by the publishing industry" (NYT).

"We have every reason to believe a Trump memoir would be primarily misinformation, ungrounded opinions and flat-out lies."

"Don’t pay him to do it and don’t give him the legitimacy of a contract with a major publishing house. If you’re going to set yourself up as a gatekeeper, you have a responsibility for what goes through your gate"

Said Celeste Ng, a best-selling novelist, who says she'd protest if her publisher (Penguin Random House) was going to publish a Trump memoir — quoted in "A Trump Memoir Would Sell. Will Publishers Buy It?/Some publishing executives worry their authors and staff might rebel, but they say their bigger concern would be ensuring the book’s accuracy" (NYT). 

But Stephen King, who hates Trump, took the free-speech side: “Anything he wrote would be a pack of self-serving lies, but I believe in the freedom of people to read what they want, and I hate censorship... Let him publish, if he wants. I hope my publisher won’t be the one to do it, but in any case I can’t wait to see the critics take him apart.” 

Notice that the free-speech position denies your opponent the glow of victimhood and gets the speech out there where it can be attacked.

Anyway, obviously Trump will get his book published. The president of the conservative publisher Regnery is quoted saying,  'I’m hoping [the other publishers] will stand by their principles and not get involved... so we have a better chance of picking it up!" And everyone knows Trump could self-publish his book... like he self-publishes his tweets.

"A trainload of Republicans on their way to a pricey retreat hit a garbage truck. My friend Russ calls that karma...."

"Of COURSE sorry the truck driver died.... A rather thoughtless tweet from me concerning the train-truck crash, for which I apologize (if one is necessary). It should be pointed out, too, that those Republican politicians, who can be heartless when they vote, immediately got out to help."

Stephen King tweets and then tries to right himself with an apology "if one is necessary," which perhaps it's not, since word is the truck driver did not die, but is merely injured.

But you've been using violence against women (and children and men) to entertain people for half a century.

Trump thinks hitting a woman with a golf ball and knocking her down is funny. Myself, I think it indicates a severely fucked-up mind.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) September 17, 2017

Maybe this is a takes-one-to-know-one situation, but I can barely think of a person who is more implicated in the popularization of the use of images of violence for the casual amusement of the American people.

And if you want to talk about men making entertainment out of terrible things done to  women, look at Stephen King's new book (co-written with his son), "Sleeping Beauties," reviewed here (in The Washington Post):

“Sleeping Beauties” takes place in the little Appalachian town of Dooling, W.Va., which for no apparent reason becomes ground zero of a worldwide gyno-epidemic, known as the Aurora Flu: The moment any woman falls asleep, she’s immediately covered in a sticky white cocoon, like a full-body cotton-candy wrap. What’s worse, terrified family members who break open these cocoons find that their mothers, sisters and daughters have transformed into bloodthirsty killers. “It’s, like, the ultimate P-M-S,” one yahoo says....

But I'm sure King would argue that he's not sexist. He's showing you bad guys who are sexist.

What’s... surprising is the novel’s grim gender politics. The Kings tell us that “hard right conservatives on talk radio were proclaiming the Aurora virus as proof that God was angry with feminism.” 

The right wing, over there, they are bad, like bad old President Trump, laughing about the golf ball.

We’re made to understand that that’s ridiculous, but the story doesn’t do much to supply an alternative interpretation. Despite having a female police chief, Dooling is a town under a dome, a place with little sense that we live in an era of rapidly changing attitudes about sexuality and gender roles. The novel’s theme feels just as essentialist as the spooky virus that always gets its gal. And the Lord-of-the-Flies battle that consumes the final half of the story reinscribes every worn-out trope about peaceful, constructive women and violent, destructive men.

I think that means King wants to be considered pro-woman. Fine. I assume he means well. But President Trump also claims to be pro-woman. He just also enjoys some laughing at a woman knocked down by a golf ball, and King enjoys 700 pages of women knocked out of consciousness and bound up by a sticky white substance. How could only one of these things be indicative of a severely fucked-up mind?

Hey, the WaPo reviewer, Ron Charles, made a pretty funny video about struggling to stay awake to read the 700 page tome:

"But one controversial scene from King’s novel has dogged the book and subsequent adaptations."

"After defeating It, the kids get lost in the sewer tunnels on the way out; this is attributed in part to the fact that they’re losing their 'connection' to one another. The solution is to bind them together, which Beverly — the only girl in the story’s main group of protagonists, called 'the Losers' — says can only happen if each of the boys has sex with her. Where they’re timid and unsure, she’s confident and maternal.... The sex is a 'consensual' gang bang, with each of the boys losing his virginity, and thus entering manhood, through Beverly. The ’80s was a bonkers time, but the orgy scene in particular has aged poorly.... A Reddit reader from last year simply asked, “WTF?” and generated over 500 comments. For almost ten exhaustive pages, King describes each of the boys having sex with Beverly and their orgasms as a version of 'flying.'... Beverly’s desires are positioned as a way for her to overcome her own fears around sex, but mostly the narrative centers on how the boys literally enter adulthood through Beverly’s vagina."

From "How Does the New It Movie Deal With Stephen King’s Orgy Scene?" (New York Magazine).

The top-rated comment at the Reddit "WTF?" link quotes King's explanation of what the fuck was:

"I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."

The new movie — spoiler alert — replaces the gang bang with:

BEVERLY
Guys, stop it. Focus.

Everyone turns to Bev. Their muse. Their light.

SHE TAKES EDDIE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES STAN’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES RICHIE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES MIKE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES BEN’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES WILL’S FACE IN HER HANDS

Not sure what's more important: Stephen King criticizing people complaining about Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize or Fiona Apple's anti-Donald-Trump Christmas song.

1. Stephen King says: "People complaining about his Nobel either don't understand or it's just a plain old case of sour grapes. I've seen several literary writers who have turned their noses up at the Dylan thing, like Gary Shteyngart. Well, I've got news for you, Gary: There are a lot of deserving writers who have never gotten the Nobel Prize. And Gary Shteyngart will probably be one of them. That's no reflection on his work. You have to rise to the level of a Faulkner if you're an American."

2. Here's Fiona Apple with "Trump’s nuts roasting on an open fire" etc. etc.

http://fionaapplerocks.tumblr.com/post/154048464562

"Why don’t you drink your wine? It’s sitting right there, for Christ’s sake. Some of us can’t drink wine, we don’t have that privilege, but you can, so why the heck don’t you do it?"

That's what Stephen King almost walked over and said to 2 old ladies who were sitting near him in a restaurant about 27 years ago, not long after he gave up drinking for good. The ladies were allowing their "half-finished glasses of white wine" to sit "forgotten in the middle of the table" while they carried on an animated conversation.

He's reminded of that when he thinks about the way Donna Tartt — a great writer — has only written 3 books and Jonathan Franzen — also great — has only written 5.

The long gaps between books from such gifted writers make me... crazy.... As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane. Back then, in my 20s and early 30s, I thought often of the John Keats poem that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …”

"If you listen to something on audio, every flaw in a writer’s work, the repetitions of words and the clumsy phrases, they all stand out."

"As a writer, I say to myself, how will that sound?," says Stephen King, who's obsessed with audiobooks.

"But there's a fundamental problem with the latest Carrie movie and Carrie The Musical..."

"They both try to turn her into a heroine, and her story into one of female empowerment, and it's not."

Carrie does deal with empowerment, but it's something brand new and terrifying...

[T]his is key: Carrie's a victim, and while she may get revenge – on everyone, deserving or not – she never enjoys anything remotely approaching a feminist sense of liberation. She's bullied mercilessly at school and abused at home. The character was a composite of two girls – referred to by the aliases of Tina White and Sandra Irving – King knew during high school, both of whom eventually committed suicide. "There is a goat in every class, the kid who ... stands at the end of the pecking order," King once wrote. "This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day."

"Unemployed, Miserable Man Still Remembers Teacher Who First Made Him Fall In Love With Writing."

My post yesterday about Stephen King teaching English to high schoolers reminded a reader of that headline from The Onion.

"You paint a pretty bleak picture of teachers as professional writers. Teaching is, after all, a 'consumptive profession,' as a friend of mine puts it..."

"... and it can be a real challenge to find the juice for our own creative endeavors after a day at school. Do you still feel that teaching full time while pursuing the writing life is a doomed proposition?" Jessica Lahey asks Stephen King, who used to teach high school.

King answers: "Many writers have to teach in order to put bread on the table. But I have no doubt teaching sucks away the creative juices and slows production. 'Doomed proposition' is too strong..."

Lahey follows up with: "If your writing had not panned out, do you think you would have continued teaching?" Answer: "Yes, but I would have gotten a degree in elementary ed.... Here’s the flat, sad truth: By the time they get to high school, a lot of these kids have already closed their minds to what we love...."

"Actually, the Althouse animagus scared the crap out of me this morning..."

"... with the rant on [Stephen] King and the intelligent bow to Tyler Cowen who rejects the push-button of good v. evil stories for his preferred superior push-button of having a higher IQ, superior to schmucks frozen in hell with lower IQ’s. The higher IQ test (the end-all criterion for the real hot smarties) juxtaposed against the raw animalistic gaia rant really scared me – until I saw what I felt (I may be wrong about this) was the point, er the two points, er the three points, (I can’t count higher than three, so I must stop here) – expressing palpable bitchery (that had to feel primally good) to provoke exactly the binary good v. evil reaction that Cowen criticizes – whether Cowen is right or wrong is not the issue, because simple rightness or wrongness is not the test – when it’s not the test."

That's just part of what Naked Surfer said in the ice cave a few hours ago. You can't surf naked on Lake Superior, even when you're feeling superior, especially when its frozen, but I appreciate Naked Surfer's effort to understand what was going on here on the Althouse blog at 4:52 in the morning, when I accepted Stephen King's apology and grabbed his abandoned but unforgettable phrase "Palpable Bitchery" for my very own.

Stephen King wants you to "Just know my heart is where it’s always been: in the right place."

So ends his apology for his attention-grabbing Tweet — "Boy, I’m stumped on that one. I don’t like to think it’s true, and there’s an element of palpable bitchery there, but...." — which we were talking about here last night. My post is pretty much only about the instant-classic, unforgettable phrase "Palpable Bitchery."

I pause for a few moments at this point to create a blog called Palpable Bitchery. Feel it, read it.

Now, all I want to say in this new post is: Isn't it funny, the big horror writer, caring so much about our knowledge of his good heart — heart in the right place — when we know that his writerly master mind would — in an instant — take a phrase like heart in the right place and mutate it into some crazy story about hearts in little children turning alien and evil and melting everything within their lovely little communities that he would imagine and describe just so you'd feel awful to see them destroyed?

But Stephen King would like to remind you of the 4 books he wrote — Carrie, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder, and Lisey’s Story — that demonstrate that "I have plenty of respect for women, and care about the problems and life-situations they face."  And he has the life story to reinforce this reputation for respecting women: "My single-mom mother faced plenty [of the the problems and life-situations that women face], believe me." Plus, he has "no sympathy whatever for those who abuse children." Can you really write novels about child abusers without inhabiting their innards and seeing it from their point of view? Leave that to the Nabokovs.  This is Stephen King. His evil is pure evil and his good is pure good. "I wrote about such abuse — and its ultimate cost to the victim — in Gerald’s Game." And presumably Gerald['s abuser] is nothing but a monster down to his core. Is there some reason why anyone would read that book?

Here's something Tyler Cowen said in a TED talk:

As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it’s, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don’t have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more.

Consider the palpable foolery of Stephen King. He needs you to know he's a good person. He detected bitchery, and The Grand Bitch Internet struck back. He's cowed. He wants to be loved. And that's why he cannot be a great writer. So give him the love he craves. Apology accepted. You are forgiven, Mr. King, you tiny little man.

It's 4:50 in the morning here in Madison, Wisconsin. Are you feeling the palpable bitchery? It exists, and it is real. And spectacular.

Stephen King weighs in on Dylan Farrow's statement: "There’s an element of palpable bitchery there."

Full quote: "Boy, I’m stumped on that one. I don’t like to think it’s true, and there’s an element of palpable bitchery there, but...."

Palpate any bitches lately, Steve?

What does "palpable" add? Is it just verbiage — meaningless padding — or is it a way to say that he feels it — he senses it? (It's his truth.) Or does it mean there's some substantial bitchery?

And what's with "bitchery" and "element... of bitchery"? That seems like a way to avoid saying that the woman is a bitch. There's some bitchery in the letter she wrote.

"A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid."

"Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."

Said Stephen King. 

Then there's this super-concise, possibly perfect aphorism: "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." That's the playwright Racine, who should be from Wisconsin, but he was French. And though that quote feels related to King's, I think it's quite different. King is talking about works of art and how hard it might be to crank them out, as he does in great volume. Racine is talking about how any given person might view life itself.

What do you think and feel? (Multiple answers allowed.)
	Thinking and feeling -- and tragedy and comedy -- are more alike than Racine lets on.
	King is letting on that he believes himself to be a bit of a fool and a blowhard.
	The concise quote isn't about art, but it's more artful than King's blather.
	King belabors the subject of art because he's afraid he's not an artist.
	King is secretly self-promoting if you read -- for comedy -- pop horror stories.
	Racine preens. He believes himself to be the thinking man.
	Racine is a bit sadistic, laughing at the shortcomings of those who are in pain.
	King means to deflate "serious" art and elevate things that don't get enough respect.
	King's statement is more insightful than Racine's aphorism.
	Racine's aphorism is more insightful than King's statement.
	Aphorisms are not about strict truth. Don't compare them to rambling remarks.
	It's best to elevate thinking over feeling.
	It's best to listen to feelings while thinking.
	The most powerful feeling is the feeling that one is thinking without feeling.
	The option above this one is a high-quality aphorism from Althouse.
	Oh, woe!
pollcode.com free polls

"8 Things Your Lawn Is Trying to Tell You."

Headline (in Popular Mechanics.

That feels like a challenge to write your own list, so here's mine:

1. "Get off me."

2. "I'm sick of this 'Get off my lawn business.' I am not your lawn. I belong to me."

3. "Why don't you go back in the house, sit down at your computer, and write a 1000-page novel called 'The Lawn' — some Stephen King type thing about a lawn that's trying to tell some guy something, gets a mind of its own, and all hell breaks loose."

4. "Alternate title: 'Mown.' Get it? Moan. I love puns. It feels so good to get mown."

5. "Grrrrr. Ass."

6. "I am the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

7. "The only reason men are alive is to take care of me."

8. "Fascist!"

"But, at the same time, there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, 'Well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar'..."

"... and you have to wonder about that guy's personality — the big guy's personality. And the thing is — I may have told you last time that I believe in God — what I'm saying now is I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts and I refuse to be pinned down to something that I said 10 or 12 years ago. I'm totally inconsistent."

Stephen King, elaborating on his choice to believe in God.