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. 

"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

Bedeviled.

 

This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.

I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")

That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."

I like the word bedevil. It's vivid, perhaps too vivid. Are we to picture devils? Does anyone think of Jeffrey Epstein as literally The Devil? I know JD Vance seems to think the UFOs are devils — "I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:

"In his satirical 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'... Flaubert offered up a range of definitions embodying the stupid notions that silly people too readily accept."

"...  'Art': 'Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker?' ... 'Bird': 'Wish you were one, saying with a sigh: "Oh, for a pair of wings!" This shows you have a poetic soul.'... By mocking these thoughts, we push ourselves past them. From this perspective, our sense that we’re getting stupider may simply reflect our determination to be smart."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are We Getting Stupider? Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think" (The New Yorker).

"Dictionary of Received Ideas' — link goes to full text — is one of the few books that has its own tag on this blog: here. It's long been one of my favorite books, and you may have noticed my various proposals for entries in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas. If you get Flaubert's idea, maybe you can help me write this volume for my shelf of Unwritten Books. 

Actually I don't think Rothman conveys Flaubert's idea accurately. Here's a new New Yorker piece from 2013 (by Teju Cole), which explains the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" like this:  "What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight."

Anyway, what's Rothman's point about our possibly becoming stupider? He writes: 

Be the Zeppo.

I thought Variety's "100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time" was pretty well done, but what I liked best about it was the way it inspired me to write one of my unwritten books. Look:

To my mind, this still from the movie establishes a proposition I've long been aware of: Zeppo was the funniest Marx Brother. For the uninitiated: Zeppo is second from the left. 

Now, for those of you who don't want to read anything written by A.I., it's time to leave. Here's the prompt I took to Grok: "Is it true that in the opinion of those whose opinion counts most Zeppo was the funniest Marx Brother?"

The answer is yes.

First, Groucho said it, repeatedly. Grok writes: "He described Zeppo as having the best natural comic timing and delivery in real life, a dry, deadpan wit that killed in a room, but that Zeppo simply didn’t care enough about performing to push himself forward on screen. Groucho claimed Zeppo could have been the breakout star if he’d wanted it."

Then there was George S. Kaufman, co-writer of "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers," who "reportedly said Zeppo was the funniest of the brothers in rehearsals and in person." Other authorities who said the same thing included Steve Allen, Woody Allen, and Billy Crystal.

So Zeppo was given the “straight man/romantic lead” role until after "Duck Soup" he quit movies altogether and "became a successful theatrical agent and inventor (he held patents related to the cardiac clamp used in open-heart surgery)."

I was motivated to say: "If the other brothers saw him as the funniest, they had something to strive to excel. Zeppo was maximizing the comedy by performing that role and he didn't have the motivation to excel anyone. He was secure."

Skimming Grok's somewhat lengthy mirroring of what I'd just said, I got a new idea: "I want to expand this into a larger life lesson and write a self-help book — in the manner of 'Let Them' — that would be titled 'Be the Zeppo.'"

1. By "write a self-help book," I meant write a blog post that would earn the tag "Unwritten Books," that is, the blog post you are reading now.

2. Of course, Grok immediately outlined this book for me, replete with subtitle options — like "The Power of Radical Non-Competition" — and 10 chapters — including "The 'Anything Further, Father?' Principle/One perfectly timed sentence beats a ten-minute monologue. The power of strategic silence."

3. Here, you can read everything Grok said.

4. Here's Mel Robbins, the author of "The Let Them Theory," quickly explaining the whole book to Bill Maher. 

5. Anything further?

Help me flesh out this idea for a self-help book.

The idea is that you reframe your problems/emotions/challenges/relationships as if they were a scene in a Broadway musical and find a way to sing the song (well, get AI to write the song and sing it for you). So, for example, you are brooding about growing old and not having achieved any of your real dreams, though others don't even notice you haven't, and you're left with this last shred of life and nothing in particular that you even want to do with it. You make that into a song. So, first, make the song for me. Second, outline a book that would be full of ideas like that.

***

It would be easy to promote, to write in parts, doing bits of songs on TikTok. But I'm not trained in Broadway singing or even talented in that kind of performance. I'd need to work with someone funny and charismatic and musically fantastic.

***

I just need a Broadway song about this idea and how, ultimately, I'm not going to do it. It's just another of my "unwritten books" — read about the rest here — and add that to the insanely long song.

"The blizzard struck on Friday evening, coinciding with China’s eight-day National Day holiday, a peak season for hiking and tourism in the area."

"Trekkers had flocked to the Karma Valley, a high-altitude trail at over 4,900 metres (16,000 feet) that leads to the Kangshung Face, Everest’s eastern approach, making rescue efforts particularly challenging."

From "Blizzard traps nearly 1,000 hikers on slopes of Mount Everest/Rescue effort under way for trekkers stranded on mountain following sudden snowstorm" (The Telegraph).

I read this headline out loud to Meade whose response exemplified what human minds can do that A.I. will never do. He said that Hillary Clinton should get herself in shape and climb Mount Everest. I knew where that came from and said we need to write a political satire in which Hillary Clinton, returning to her "Politics of Meaning" roots, gets in touch with the spirit of Sir Edmund Hillary, her (supposed) namesake, and trains to climb Mount Everest.

Normally, I would give this post my "unwritten books" tag and move on, ever onward and upward, but I yielded to the temptation to prompt Grok to outline the book.

So is it to be all about the plinth?

That's the last line of the previous post, the one about the possibly oversized statue of Trump and Epstein, which got toppled yesterday. (I thought statue-toppling was the signature of the left, but apparently not.)

I got the feeling plinths have loomed large enough in the archive of this blog to want to prompt Grok to review all my plinth-related posts and to structure the material for me to write a long essay — or book! — about the last 21-years of notable plinths. Giving this post my "unwritten books" tag, I will reprint Grok's outline of my long years of plinth observation [below the jump].

ADDED: I was able to find all the relevant posts. I had a distinctive search word, "plinth." Grok was able to summarize all the posts individually. That wasn't too helpful, because the posts were relatively short, and I wrote them, so I'd rather rely on my own writing that to decipher the machine's paraphrasings. But Grok did not discover any mysterious interconnections among the various plinth-related incidents — plinthcidents, if you will. 

"Write another version with the focus on the Trump character, fictionalized. He's old, too old for the burdens of the presidency, and weary of the usual politicians, and sad..."

"... to have his last campaign over, and he latches on to the Musk character, who is complicated and highly energetic and realizes he can override the preferences of those who voted for Trump and reenergize and redirect the man into something that will be absolutely brilliant for the country and the world."

I wrote, prompting A.I., in the midst of a conversation that began with a reading of the NYT article "How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep/For much of the period since Election Day, the billionaire has been staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago, giving him easy access to the president-elect."

I'm expending my last free access link of the month — of the year! — on that so you can begin where "we" — A.I. and I — began. My original prompt was: "Does Elon Musk avoid buying a house for himself and if so, why?"

"Cozy, whimsical novels — often featuring magical cats — that have long been popular in Japan and Korea are taking off globally."

I'm reading "In Tumultuous Times, Readers Turn to 'Healing Fiction'... Fans say they offer comfort during a chaotic time" (NYT).

[Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,”] — set in a magical cafe in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time while their coffee cools — centers on ordinary people struggling with loss and regret who wish they could change the past....

Recent releases of cozy Japanese novels include Mai Mochizuki’s “The Full Moon Coffee Shop,” set in a magical coffee shop run by talking cats.... [There's also] “The Travelling Cat Chronicles,”.... “The Goodbye Cat,” and... “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” [and] “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat”....

Cats are such a staple in healing fiction that Kawaguchi’s publishers in the United States and Britain added a fluffy brown cat to the covers of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” even though, in a break from tradition, cats are not central to his novels....

No mention of Trump (or Vance) in this article, published yesterday, but it's featured at the top of the home page like this... 

... so it's pretty obvious that the NYT is offering this Japanese fantasy material as self-care for its readers suffering from the Democratic Party's blistering defeat. The election that's come to such a bad ending for them featured cats — Trump said "They're eating the cats" and Vance had said "childless cat ladies." So maybe cat offers some charming help for the suffering Trump haters, some balance for that awful squirrel that controlled the American election from the afterlife (as depicted charmingly in a cool fantasy novel to be counted among my unwritten books).

And, yes, I see the headlines on the left-hand side of the page. They're really important, but I'm not blogging in order of importance.

ADDED: I love the framing of Donald Trump inside the coils of barbed wire. It's all that's left of the dream of imprisoning him.

"It is a violent spectacle, blood-spattered, brutish and brawny."

"A fighter from California named Kevin Holland and a fighter from Poland named Michal Oleksiejczuk beat each other to a pulp inches from Mr. Trump’s face. The former president watched with interest as the American got the Pole onto the ground, secured his right arm and appeared to yank it out of its socket. ([Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C.] described it as an 'absolutely beautiful' moment in his post-match commentary: 'The arm clearly, at the very least, dislocated and possibly snapped,' he said.) Victorious, Holland emerged from the octagonal ring, walked over to Mr. Trump, bent down and shook hands, leaned in to hear the former president tell him something and clapped his left hand on Mr. Trump’s right shoulder...."

From "After Verdict, Trump Revels in Embrace of His Most Avid Base: Male Fans/The former president’s appearance at a U.F.C. fight in Newark on Saturday night showcased his hypermasculine appeal, and his defiance" (NYT).

This is just a little article about Trump going to the UFC fight right after the 34-felonies conviction. I had to look elsewhere for more on the broader topic of Trump's "hypermasculine appeal." A sprinkling of what my search turned up:

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

"I was so angry and just irritated at seeing man after man — you know, typically, male politicians — grandstanding about abortion."

Said Gabrielle Blair, quoted in "Gabrielle Blair Would Like a Word With Men/After 16 years of making a name for herself as a blogger and home decor expert, Design Mom has written her manifesto — about reproductive health" by Kase Wickman (NYT).

The NYT article seems to be a reaction to the fact that a book Blair created out of a 64-post-long Twitter thread has debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’s paperback nonfiction best-seller list.

Here's the Twitter thread, and here's the book: “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.” 

Now, my readers may be saying tough luck for Althouse. She could have written a book called "Don't Be a Splooge Stooge," but Blair got to the best-seller list first. Of all my unwritten books, that's the one I'm least sad about not devoting a year of my life to.

"[T]he 'Lebensborn' program — meaning wellspring or fountain of life... created in 1935... provided luxurious accommodations for unwed, pregnant women."

"Part of the program’s attraction was that unwed pregnant girls could give birth in secret. In 1939, about 58 percent of the mothers-to-be who applied to the program were unwed... by 1940, that number had swelled to 70 percent. Often, the homes were converted estates decorated by Himmler himself, using the highest quality loot confiscated from Jewish homes after their owners had been killed or sent to camps. Girls who were already pregnant or willing to be impregnated by SS officers had to prove their Aryan lineage going back three generations and pass inspections that included measuring the size of their heads and the length of their teeth. Once accepted, they were pampered by nurses and staff who served them delicacies at mealtimes and provided a recreational diet rich in Nazi propaganda...."

From "A new novel tells the story of Nazi birthing farms" by Kathleen Parker (WaP).

The new novel is "Cradles of the Reich" by Jennifer Coburn.

Here's the article in the Holocaust Encyclopedia about the Lebensborn program.

I found that as I was looking for photographs showing how a place "decorated by Himmler" would look. Here's a propaganda photograph with a caption that translated into "Everything for the healthy child":

 

 

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia article:

"I'll madly live the poems I shall never write."

It's too complicated to explain how I arrived here, but I encountered this cool poem by Aldous Huxley:

Complaint of a Poet Manqué

We judge by appearance merely:

If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

So I grew the hair so long on my head

That my mother wouldn't know me,

Till a woman in a night-club said,

As I was passing by,

"Hullo, here comes Salome ..."

I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,

And, oh Salome; there I was—

Positively jewelled, half a vampire,

With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily

Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire

Over the brink of the crag of sense,

Looking down from perilous eminence 

Into a gulf of windy night.

And there's straw in my tempestuous hair,

And I'm not a poet: but never despair!

I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

"Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability. He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw..."

"... just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.... I have asthma, so I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest."

Mary Trump has a new book, quoted in "Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book says/Mary Trump’s new book The Reckoning, seen by the Guardian, describes a national trauma worsened by her uncle" (The Guardian).

What is the value of Mary Trump's writing? The writing style isn't horrible, but she didn't have access to him. She was just watching him on television like the rest of us, right? Purporting to know the workings of his mind makes her less credible than those of us who would add phrases like "I think" to assertions like "he was afraid" or who would change that "was" to "looked." 

There are other efforts to bolster her authority. In that brief passage, I note "just as my grandmother did" and "I have asthma." Let's examine those 2 notions. 

1. "just as my grandmother did" — This must be a reference to Mary's grandmother who was the mother of Donald Trump. Mary has observed her grandmother and perhaps knows a style of holding her mouth and can say that Donald Trump's mouth has the same look. She implies that there are family mouth positions and other members of the family know what they mean. So Mary has special expertise at watching Donald Trump on television.

2. "I have asthma" — Mary claims a sort of medical expertise: "I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe." Really? You're aware of "what it looks like"? No, you're not looking at yourself when you are having an asthma attack. You are acutely aware of what it feels like, not what it looks like. Unless you do your asthma attacks in front of a mirror.

ADDED: I could write a book about Mary's book, in which I use Mary's approach to observational expertise against her. I would go through the book paragraph by paragraph and find every turn of phrase that I can characterize as evidence of the traits that she finds in Donald Trump and I would repetitively bolster my points by reminding the reader that Mary and Donald belong to the same family, so we can presume these are family traits. Whatever she says about him I can observe in her, and the only evidence I will need is her own book.

"John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today. I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories..."

"... of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980. Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here." 

Writes my son John (on his blog). Here's his old post, written in 2008, which links to his father's post, written in 2005, and to my post, also written in 2005. 

I wrote: 

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article.... 

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

Looking back at that reaction, I realize I was influenced by the shame I'd felt in 1977 when I showed my feelings about the death of Elvis Presley. Did I ever blog about that? It's something I've thought about lately, as I've reflected on my life. It turns out I blogged about that in 2005 — August 2005:

"Publishers Fret Over Obama’s ‘Failure to Perform’/Michelle finished her book. Why is Obama having trouble living up to his part of their lucrative contract?"

Headline at American Spectator.

Contracts that come with a reported $65 million advance, such as the one signed by Barack and Michelle Obama in February 2017 with Penguin Random House (PRH), will inevitably include [a "failure to perform" clause].... At the time the Obama deal was made in early 2017, insiders were telling Publishers Weekly that books by both Michelle and Barack would be released in fall 2018. Michelle’s book, Becoming, was released by PRH’s Crown division on schedule in November 2018 and has exceeded expectations. Barack’s book will be released at least two years behind schedule with no publication date in sight....

Proposed book title: "From Caring to Karen: A Woman's Journey."

I thought of the title. It's writing prompt for you. What's the story?

"Fire and Fury" author Michael Wolff says he's working on "nothing" — he's "embracing" "obsolescence."

... although this piece itself (in the UK Spectator) is something:

[I]t is hard not to be fatalistic if you are a journalist. Every magazine I have ever worked for, and I have worked for them all, is dead or will die shortly. For another thing, Donald Trump is the one consuming subject, sucking all views and opinions into his void, and on this issue I have nothing left to say. Still, even with the collapse of so many journalistic enterprises, many of my former colleagues still go on at great and constant unpaid length on social media or, scrambling for a pay-per-appearance contract, as desperately willing pundits on cable television. Why? People are afraid, it seems, to say nothing. I’m looking forward to trying.

You know what I say: Better than nothing is a high standard. It's good that (if?) Wolff realizes that the endless barrage of ranting against Trump is worse than nothing. But he can't get everyone else to stop doing it, and one man's silence can't be heard when everyone else is talking. He clearly knows that, which is why he is talking. Talking about how other people need to have the courage to shut up.

Alas, I have a four-year-old. So there will have to be some form of exchanging words for dollars in order to provide for the next 20 years of her education. But really I am not sure how, if I were doing gainful work, I would be able to perform all the duties necessary for applying to kindergarten. I have older children, all of whom have been successfully educated, but our daughter is my wife’s first and she has cast a wide net among Uptown, Downtown, public, private, traditional and progressive schools....

Wolff is 66 years old and publicly whining about his current wife's spending habits and the difficulty he's having making a living in his field that has gone to hell. Retire! You're 66! But somehow, you have a 4 year old, and you're on the hook for the next 20 years — that is, until you are 86.

[My son is] a stand-up comedian... A surprising number of my contemporaries have children who are stand-up comics. Could this have something to do with the disappearance of a certain kind of journalism?...

Could it have something to do with seeing your own father as some kind of joke?

ADDED: I have the feeling that Wolff really does have a writing project, and it's the story of his adventures in fatherhood, with a 4-year-old daughter and a standup comedian son. He's struggling with his own mortal decline and the decline of his profession. It's unlikely that he's honest or talented enough to write a book I'd care about reading, but if a great writer would steal this idea and write a novel titled "All My Friends' Sons Are Stand-up Comedians," I'd love to read it.