"Rachel Cusk... wasn’t planning on having this conversation about the novel, 'Life of M,' but other people have had a lot to say — about whether 'M' is actually Natalie Portman..."

"... and whether, by writing about an actor who so closely resembles a real celebrity, Cusk has committed some kind of artistic betrayal.... Cusk seems bewildered, and a bit distressed, to find herself caught in the harsh spotlight of fame and the kind of tabloid feeding frenzy she evokes in the novel, which features an author who writes about a famous actress."

From "How a Highbrow Novel Became Celebrity Gossip 'Life of M,' Rachel Cusk’s new book, has a protagonist with an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Portman. But in an interview, Cusk says she never expected it would cause such a frenzy" (NYT gift link).

Cusk says: "It’s very stressful, the thought of these things happening.... It’s taking the novel that I’ve created into almost a sort of courtroom or a factual fight.... What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness....

"If 'lore' is in part a word about treating fiction as a set of discoverable facts, it is also a word that imagines the hard facts of real life as part of a grand story...."

Writes Mitch Therleau, in "A Simple, One-Word Trick to Turn Everyday Life Into Grand Fantasy" (NYT gift link).

“Share a piece of lore about yourself,” goes one perennial prompt post on X.... The responses these kinds of posts elicit are not unlike the fun facts you might be prompted to share in an icebreaker activity.... Calling these unfun facts “lore” perhaps blunts the pain of the original experiences, rhetorically placing them in misty antiquity and sarcastically puffing them up into arcane secrets.... “Does your brand have lore?” asks Advertising Week... “Lore” is a hinge word, a threshold word. Fiction passes through it and becomes tangible fact; facts pass through it and become part of a grand story. Its ultimate trick is to make knowledge not embarrassing or useless, but a form of dark magic.

ADDED: This makes me think of the old Mothers of Invention song about becoming a hippie:

First I'll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band to go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore....

I hadn't used my "deeply" tag since last May.

It's a deeply bloggy tag, so it makes me want to do a post collecting recent iterations of "deeply." The first time I used it — in "Deeply... it's such a poser word" — I had a 12-point list. That was back in 2014. Let's see what "deeply" has been doing lately.

1. "The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed/As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames" by Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic, published today. Gift link. "But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?"

2. "UN rips ‘deeply troubling’ Iran for executing at least 56 people since start of war: ‘Has no place in our world'" — published today in The New York Post. "Several people were executed in the last two weeks alone, including a 19-year-old charged with 'enmity against god' for allegedly partaking in January’s protests. Two others arrested during the protests were also executed. And in July, two people were executed out of a group of 12 convicted of 'corruption on Earth' and 'enmity against God' over connections to four police killed in January."

3. "Ken Jennings Says He Cares 'More Deeply' About Trans Rights Than Any Other Issue" (Them, August 3, 2026). "Ken Jennings... recently got into a relatively minor back-and-forth on Bluesky with people who claimed his subscriptions to the New York Times were supporting an anti-transgender media organization.... Would I subscribe to the New York Times? No. Would I unfriend someone who did? Not necessarily.... Do I do the crossword puzzle? Yes, because nothing else quiets the anxiety I feel about living in our current reality quite like trying to find a five-letter word for boredom. Ah, 'ennui,' my old friend."

4. "The Woody Guthrie story you’ve probably never heard is deeply Jewish/A documentary recasts the folk singer’s legacy through the influence of his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 3, 2026). "The film ['Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie'] makes the case that Guthrie’s extended Jewish family was not incidental but integral in his artistic and personal evolution. It is a story that stretches from Oklahoma to Coney Island to the Yiddish literary world, and from the folk revival’s Jewish impresarios to one remarkable immigrant woman whose influence has largely gone unrecognized."

5. "Neil Shubin on Trusted Science in a ‘Deeply Partisan Age’/An eminent fossil hunter takes the reins at the National Academy of Sciences in a turbulent moment for American researchers" (NYT, June 2026). "As an institution, we are — by charter and design and history — nonpartisan. But we are in a deeply partisan age. Just by doing our work, we will be viewed in a partisan light no matter what. So our job is to double down on the science. We need to be a trusted source of data."

6. "'I Deeply Believe Dogs Have Superpowers and Secrets’/Prompted by a fierce attachment to his own pet, Paul Yoon wrote a harrowing yet hopeful novel, set during wartime, told from a canine perspective" (NYT, August 2, 2026). "Like his finest literary forebears who have written from a dog’s perspective — Virginia Woolf ('Flush'), John Berger ('King: A Street Story'), Jack London ('Call of the Wild') — Yoon pulls it off without being treacly or condescending.... It helps that Etna can understand everything that’s said by people around him. This was partly a practical choice, as Yoon explains: 'I wanted to create a bridge for the reader to experience this world and this journey.' But, he added, 'I deeply believe dogs have superpowers and secrets.'"

7. "The Deeply Human, Complexly Queer Animated Animals of 'Bouchra'" (autostraddle, August 3, 2026). "In Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s bold film Bouchra, an NYC‑based lesbian filmmaker... tries to process her relationship with her Moroccan mother through a semi‑autobiographical meta‑fictional drama stemming from a coming‑out letter she sent nine years prior.... It’s told via anthropomorphic animals in a hyperrealized backdrop.... [E]ntirely animated in Blender, Bouchra’s experimental animal‑filled approach takes some getting used to."

"Ms. Prabhakar... said the point of assigning 'Bettering Myself' was to challenge students in her introductory reading and writing course."

"As part of the assignment, students had to read first-person stories told by other unlikable narrators — like 'Cathedral' by Raymond Carver — to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit. In colleges, such materials 'take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas and provide opportunities for growth and intellectual maturation,' the suit said...."

From "Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says/South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing" (NYT gift link).

That article links to a review of the story collection, "In Ottessa Moshfegh’s Stories, Fringe Figures Make Feckless Attempts at Connection" (NYT gift link):

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"The big-picture reality is that many novels are poorly written."

"They can still succeed with readers because fiction, like music, is a forgiving art form. Just as a good song can have a groovy beat but a predictable melody, so a piece of fiction can work on some levels but not others. Partial success can be enough, as long as readers find something that moves them—suspense, beauty, realism, fantasy, even just a sympathetic protagonist in whom they can recognize themselves...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Is It Wrong to Write a Book With A.I.? The nature of authorship isn’t as straightforward as it seems" (The New Yorker).

"As a kid, I was part of a youth theater repertory... this intense acting coach came to class, and after I performed a scene she told me with this terrible sneer..."

"... that all I’d ever be was funny and charming. It took me until I was 35 to realize that: (1) I wasn’t that charming; (2) I was also a whole lot more than charming; and (3) it takes an especially miserable adult to tell a child what he can and cannot be."

Says "Grant Ginder Read One Novel 7 Times While Writing His Own/James Salter’s 'Light Years' had a big influence on 'So Old, So Young,' his new book about college friends drifting in and out of one another’s lives" (NYT).

I liked his answer to the old question "You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?"

I’m supposed to say Jane Austen, Sophocles and a Finnish novelist no one’s heard of, but actually the literary dinner party I want to attend already happened. It’s the one mentioned in a recent Times article where Joan Didion refused to give Nora Ephron her recipe for Mexican Chicken. I’d die to see that.

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Wrote Henry James, quoted by retired book editor Gerald Howard, in "The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction" (NYT).

Howard writes: "Substack essays and chin-pulling opinion articles galore agree that literature is not only in the doldrums, but even in danger of extinction from, take your pick, a declining attention span, a disappearing audience of people educated enough to understand and appreciate it, or a near-future technological onslaught (see: novels written by A.I. entities). The sense of a possible ending is palpable. But what the discourse leaves out are things like historical perspective and the blind faith and, from the purely practical and economic points of view, sheer illogic of the literary enterprise...."

"Now and again I would feel a bit of relief when I realised, to my mind, that it wasn’t a good book and I would stop reading."

"But [then it would] happen twice in a row and I started to feel a bit low because this is not what I have signed up for. I want to read good books."

Said Roddy Doyle, author of the Booker Prize-winning "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha," quoted in "Booker prize chairman laments poor quality of entries/A former prizewinner heading this year’s jury said many of the 153 novels submitted were not worth discussing as judges whittled down the list to six contenders" (London Times).

There are regularly more than 150 “literary fiction” titles in contention for the prize. New novels by all previously shortlisted authors are entered automatically, and some publishing houses are allowed several entries each depending on previous success.... 

Doyle said the number of books they all had to read was "daunting." He said that such were his reading responsibilities, one day he recorded only 17 steps on his pedometer "and it took eight steps to the kettle from where I was sitting."

That's why I consume my "literary fiction" in the form of audiobooks, but I guess Roddy Doyle is too virtuous to take shortcuts. And yet he does take the most obvious shortcut and stop reading at the point when he realizes — "realises" — that he's reading a book that hasn't got a shot. I guess it's annoying to see so many bad books presented to him as in contention for the prize. Depressing even, especially if you're not getting your usual walks.

"It is the idea that we all contain the world and the world disappears when we disappear. There’s a word for that and I can’t f***ing remember what it is."

"That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of that happening to me and every time that I can’t remember a word or something, I think, 'This is the start.'"

Said Stephen King, quoted in "Stephen King on dementia — ‘I’m afraid of that happening to me’/The bestselling author, 77, talks about why he writes every day — and says each time he can’t remember the right word he worries: 'This is the start'" (London Times).

The article isn't entirely about the fear of your own brain pre-deceasing you. It's about other fears, including the fear of AI. King says:

“I don’t really care about AI. My sons [Owen King and Joe Hill] are both writers … and they’re all hot to trot about AI and how awful it is for writers.... I just think that it’s a foregone conclusion that people are going to write better prose than some kind of automated intelligence.... I think that once there is a kind of self-replicating intelligence, once it learns how to teach itself, in other words, it isn’t going to be a question of human input any more. It’s going to be able to do that itself. And then … have you ever read The Time Machine by HG Wells? In it, a Victorian scientist travels to the year 802,701...

I like how he has the precise year, down to the 1, still in his mind and worth saying as a challenge to the fiend, Dementia, that wants to infiltrate and destroy.

"Perhaps such tortuous, jargon-clotted prose is the best way to capture our benighted age... Even for those fluent in edgelord and incel, though..."

"... here are diminishing returns to yet another parody of a supposed white ally acknowledging that 'baking needs to diversify,' frequent references to cancellation, and more than one Trump/Covid-19 piece.... I didn’t have much lulz reading 'Whites,' but then again, America isn’t too fun these days, either. It’s exhausting to be so exhausting. In our extremist political climate and celebrity-book-club-oriented literary one, I’m glad this collection — and daring, pyrotechnically gifted, berserk-confronting authors like Doten, a vanishing breed — exist to do the real work.

Writes Teddy Wayne, in "What’s Wrong With White People? A Story Collection Counts the Ways. Mark Doten’s new book examines a contemporary American culture that routinely defies satire" (NYT).

The book under review is, indeed, titled "Whites."

I'll just offer this link back to yesterday's post about whether book reviews can function to keep us going in the dream of a thing called Literary Fiction... and this survey:

 

America isn’t too fun these days...

Actually, it's very fun

It's fun for me

I can't have fun until everyone's having fun

It's not fun and if you think it's fun, it's my mission to make it so that you won't have fun

 

pollcode.com free polls

"But without reliably insightful book reviews, literature risks becoming 'an unweeded garden that grows to seed.'"

"We’re left depending only on the whisper network of our own clique, exchanging the same tuna casserole back and forth. I realize this wobbly jeremiad reeks of self-interest: After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else. But if journalism is still, at least partially, a public service, then book reviews are one of its most eloquent contributions — one we should defend until the very last page."

Writes Ron Charles, in "The future of book reviews looks grim/The Associated Press will no longer produce book reviews, though it will pursue stories about the publishing industry" (WaPo).

Let's talk about the tuna salad and the unweeded garden. The unweeded garden is in quotes, but there is no attribution. We're talking about literature, and if you're one of the last remaining Americans who care about actual literature, you're presumably supposed to know "an unweeded garden that grows to seed." But we can all google and find the attribution. I know I did.

I've sat through "Hamlet" a few times in my life — and read it too — and the first soliloquy is familiar to me: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" I know some other lines: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!" But I didn't recognize "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed...."

And what of the tuna casserole? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the tuna casseroles of this world! The tuna casseroles are those books your friends and internet contacts talk about. The comfort food, the genre novels. Bleeh. Makes Hamlet the Book Reviewer want to kill himself. "O... that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!"

That it should come to this! No book reviewers! If there are no book reviewers, there will be no literary fiction. Ron Charles spent 30 years "summarizing the plots of literary novels." Well, AI can summarize the plot of any novel. That can't be the function of a book review, at least not anymore. It must be that the reviewer is supplying some special discernment, choosing what to elevate to the high plane of literature and convincing us that we should aspire to be the kind of people who read things like that.

By the way, I find it hard to trust a writer who dresses up the word "nothing" with the dreadful intensifier "literally" and plunks the phrase a few words away from "literary": "After 30 years of summarizing the plots of literary novels, I can do literally nothing else." He's defending his own livelihood. That counts against his opinion. What am I to think of Ron Charles anyway? Here he is, 14 years ago, displaying himself as "totally hip," opining on an author who is, if nothing else, truly striving to produce literary fiction:

"The Salt Path, and its recent film adaptation, told the story of a couple who decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home is repossessed."

"The Observer alleged [the author Raynor] Winn had misrepresented the events that led to the couple losing their home. Rather than losing money in a bad business deal, as the book described, the newspaper said the couple had lost their home after Winn had defrauded her employer of £64,000. According to the Observer, the couple borrowed £100,000 to pay back the money Winn had been accused of stealing, and it was when this loan was called in that their home was repossessed...."

From "Penguin says it did 'all necessary due diligence' with The Salt Path" (BBC).

I hadn't heard of this controversy until I listened to the new episode of a podcast I like, "Giles Coren Has No Idea." From this week's episode, "The Salt Path Crumbles":

"Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses."

"When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, 'Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?' It seemed like a small and judgmental world. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable.... If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s...."

Writes David Brooks, in "When Novels Mattered" (NYT).

Brooks goes on and ends up with the prediction that the literary novel will make a comeback, but I can't figure out what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. Why wouldn't they have done it already? They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication.

ADDED: Something I found myself saying to Grok: "One problem is women do most of the literary fiction reading and wom[e]n today don't take the kind of low-level misogyny that used to power man-written literature."

"'Enjoy the simulacrum of actual learning,' Stella the Car said as she deposited them in front of the school."

"Now she was mirroring Daddy. Really, the key to being less odd was to develop your artificial intelligence. Daddy had once mentioned creating a computer program that would flash the most obvious next line of conversation right into your eye. You could go through the whole day thinking about important things and just letting the program prompt you every time you had to open your mouth."

I'm reading "Vera, or Faith: A Novel," by Gary Shteyngart (commission earned).

"I think the NYT has framed men as a problem. They're not thriving, they're not aspiring. We need to figure out what's wrong with them..."

"... maybe even empathize with them, because, after all, we do need them to function."

So I said, in the previous post. And one reason I said it was because I'd already opened a tab for a second article on the home page of the NYT today: "Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?"

This is a long piece in the NYT Magazine, by Sam Graham-Felsen, and like the article discussed in the previous post, it assures us that there's nothing gay going on here: "I never had sexual feelings for Rob, but there was an intensity to our connection that can only be described as love. I thought about him all the time, and cared, deeply, about what he thought of me. We got jealous and mad at each other, and often argued like a bitter married couple — but eventually, like a successful married couple, we’d always find a way to talk things out."

Graham-Felsen has had many other close male friends — "nearly a dozen other dudes — dudes I spent thousands of accumulated hours with; dudes I shared my most shame-inducing secrets with; dudes I built incredibly intricate, ever-evolving inside jokes with; dudes I loved and needed, and who loved and needed me...." 

But he doesn't have dudes like that anymore. Is that because he's older, and his contemporaries are absorbed in family and work, or is it because American men in general "are getting significantly worse at friendship"?

James Comey's now-infamous Instagram account is mostly about marketing his novel... which has a theme that's suspiciously close to his "8647" gambit.

At the top of his Instagram account (quoting Publisher's Weekly):

Thanks to Charlie Martin for pointing me at Comey's book: "So, now it turns out that Comey actually has a book coming out in a few days about a Mary Sue main character who investigates, arrests, and apparently convicts a conservative radio talker of inciting a murder by dog-whistling. Coincidentally."

I read Martin's post while I was still in bed this morning looking at my iPhone, and I quickly dictated this question into the ChatGPT app (I usually access A.I. by typing things into Grok):

"What is the argument that James Comey by showing a photograph of rocks in the shape of 8647 was really teasing a novel that he had written, which is about someone accused of inciting violence by giving out an obscure message and [Comey] will actually benefit from this new attention he’s getting from the right because people on his left will actually get excited about his otherwise incredibly boring book."

Yeah, that's the way I talk when I'm, essentially, talking to myself. Notice my lazy bias toward thinking everything is boring. Anyway, I had these follow-up questions:

1. "How smart is James Comey?"

2. "He would need to be smart in a marketing and media sense to have come up with the idea of posting that photograph as a way to gin up interest in his novel. He strikes me as someone who is too boring and staid to attempt such a flashy scheme, and he would have to be willing to do something different to expose himself to criminal accusations. It almost seems like something Trump would do ironically."

You can read all ChatGPT's responses here, but the bottom line is: "Your read—that he’s too boring and staid for such a risky, theatrical move—aligns far more closely with what we’ve seen of him than the idea of a QAnon-baiting media play."

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"My slightly, my slightly right wing view, I suppose, is that as time has gone on, there is less, less money in, in publishing and writing fiction..."

"... and young men forging their way in the world look at it and go, if you are a creative person, as a man, you're not gonna go and write fiction. You are gonna go and write computer games. So all the hot young literary creative guys who might have once written whatever, 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' they go and work EA games."

Says Esther Walker in the new episode of "Giles Coren Has No Idea."

"But the other side of it is to say, yes, men may have been put off writing novels by the hegemony of women," says Giles Coren, referring to the dominance of women writers (and women readers) in publishing.

For the record "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is not a novel. It's a memoir. It's a quarter century old at this point. 

"That branch in the water looks like some creature rising from the lake and reaching for the shore...."

Said Rusty in the comments to last night's café. He was looking at the sunrise photo I'd taken that morning.

And Meade had made a similar comment about the previous morning's sunrise photo. He commented pictorially, by text, picking out the detail...

... with the caption "The Easter Bunny."

It made me wonder — what are the horror stories involving rabbits?

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.