Big questions?

I'm reading "The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take/It’s an ungodly amount of reading and no easy A. So why are freshmen lining up to get into Humanities 10?" (Wall Street Journal).

The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?” 

The students burst into applause.

Big questions? I'd say small questions.

I'd ask — instead of "Why read novels at all?" — why go to college to read a novel and to listen to a professor comment on the likability of characters and whether we identify with them. That sounds like a local reading group that barely gets off the ground. 

That reminds me. Last night I dreamed I was a law professor again.

The future, as envisioned in the past.

I'm just stumbling into the idea of "Blog fiction" I had back in 2004:

Good fiction blogging would involve several fictional characters, each with their own blog, linking to each other, discussing various fictional events in their lives, perhaps along with interesting other commentary on real world events. It would have to go on for years, like a comic strip that you read daily, and would contain thousands of entries.

Such tiny grandiosity, 22 years ago. 

"Fiedler... would have been delighted by the ability of some of our best writers to dance knowingly around the volcano..."

"... the 'chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders' in Lorrie Moore’s 'Anagrams,' for example, or the 'tumblings and flexings and shudders' in John Barth’s 'The End of the Road,' or the 'stiffened giblets' in Tom Wolfe’s 'Hooking Up,' or the 'freaky rubs and naughty pinches' in Chuck Berry’s extraordinary autobiography."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Field Guide to the Dark, Sexy Swamp of American Literature With its bracing studies of fiction’s secrets, this 66-year-old work of literary criticism still surprises and delights" (NYT). The reissued book is "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie A. Fiedler.

It's hard to write about sex! Apparently, the word "and" is helpful. Only the Tom Wolfe quote lacks an "and."

"Stiffened giblets." Wow, that's so offputting. Let's see, I've got "Hooking Up" here on Kindle. 

Ha ha, I've got the passage highlighted:

If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. 

That's on page 5. Replete with "and." You need these pairs and lists for sex.

I see Wolfe uses "stiffened giblets" again — with 2 "ands" — on page 142:

"Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for remixing those in a modern, playful voice."

"'Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,' from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and 'Red Doc >,' from 2013, a sequel of sorts to 'Autobiography of Red,' concerned a road trip. 'Many toil in the interstices of genre,' Daisy Fried wrote in a 2013 review of 'Red Doc >' for The New York Times. 'Carson’s palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what’s poetry and what’s not.'"

From "Canadian Poet Anne Carson Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature" (NYT)

"Her book jackets rarely feature an author photo.... She has rarely discussed her private life in interviews, although in an August 2024 essay in The London Review of Books she said that she had Parkinson’s disease and that her handwriting had 'disintegrated' as a result. 'I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year,' Carson wrote: 'Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.'"

Informed that she had won the Nobel Prize, "All the poet would say was she was 'in Iceland,' where she was 'listening to the wind.'"

AND: There are some nice photos of her in this 2021 Interview magazine piece. From the interview (with the British artist Tacita Dean):

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

"Franzen believes the most difficult part of writing a new novel is that it requires him to change..."

"... he needs to become 'the kind of person who can write the novel. I’ve had to become a different person in some significant way to get each book written.'"

I'm reading an interview with Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian.

"To move from The Corrections to Freedom he had to let go of his anger. To write Crossroads, he had to become more forgiving. Right now, he says, 'I’m waiting to wake up as the person who is alive again and not the same person he was five years ago.' Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no!... 'If you’re really engaged with [writing], it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul... I don’t really care about bettering my soul...."

"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."