The Bluestocking, vol 304: Cowardice and AI crime fiction
rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides
Happy Friday!
This week at the Atlantic, I published the result of my trip to Ghent in December—a profile of the Swiss theatre director Milo Rau. He has one of the strongest artistic visions I can think (no straightforward classics, multiple languages on stage, one production a season rehearsed or performed in a conflict zone).
For the past five years, Rau, 47, has been the artistic director of a theater known by its Flemish abbreviation, NTGent. A public subsidy of 3.4 million euros ($3.6 million) a year allows the theater to take risks and keep its ticket prices low. (In the U.S., the maximum grant for theater projects from the National Endowment for the Arts is $100,000.) NTGent’s best seats are about 28 euros, or $30—less than a tenth of the cost of the top-price weekend tickets for Hamilton on Broadway. Those affordable prices turn a theater trip from an annual blowout—with all the risk aversion that entails—into a regular part of a city dweller’s cultural life. That, in turn, helps sustain an artistic community. “We do have the playwrights,” Arthur Miller wrote in 1947, in a doomed argument for the U.S. to follow the European funding model.
‘What we don’t have is a Theatre … The difference between a Theatre and theatres is the difference between the factory buildings of the Ford Company and its personnel, pooled know-how and common production aims. If an automotive engineer worked in the plant only six weeks every two years and had to spend the rest of his time totally disconnected from the process of production; we would soon discover that “there are no engineers.”’
I don’t get the chance to write much about theatre these days, but I’m very glad I got the chance to do this. Here’s a gift link that gets you past the paywall—if you want me to be able to do offbeat stuff like this, then do subscribe to the Atlantic.
Helen
The Great Fiction of AI (The Verge)
“On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon’s Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks.
[…] Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test.”
I absolutely defy you to find a bleaker article about what has happened to publishing than this story about a woman who has to use AI prompts to be able to churn out one paranormal cozy mystery every 6 weeks, and the hustler who teaches courses on how to generate a “minimum viable book.”
It is objectively funny that the AI keeps trying to make Lepps’s characters unsheath swords, though. And the phrase “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides” is a peach. Give that AI the Booker.
Biden’s Age Was Always Going To Become A Problem (The Atlantic)
“As an outsider observing the U.S. presidential election, I have been wondering for months when Joe Biden’s age would become a thing. Biden is 81 already—the oldest person ever to occupy the White House—and is seeking another four-year term. He is older than George W. Bush, who stopped being president in 2008, and older than Bill Clinton, who gave up the job in 2000. He is older than the hovercraft, the barcode, and the Breathalyzer. And he looks it: Biden’s likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a mere debutant at 77, is possessed with a bronzed, demonic energy that makes him seem vigorously alive, even when his words make no sense. Joe Biden looks like he is turning into a statue of Joe Biden.”
Me again! I am very nervous about the idea of an 81-year-old being all that stands between America and a second Trump term.
ChrisTheBarker tweets: “All this talk of bringing back national service and the home guard and whatnot made me wonder which actors today are roughly the age the Dads Army actors were when the show started for some reason”. Also, RIP Ian Lavender.
Quick Links
Christie’s is auctioning the contents of Elton John’s house in Georgia, which he is selling because he’s retired from touring and no longer needs a base in the American South. Hard to pick a highlight, but the the diamond necklace spelling. out ARSEHOLE is probably it.
“The real story here is not that it’s hard being an MP. The real story here is that, all of a sudden, within the last year or so, someone earning a six-figure salary couldn’t afford to pay his mortgage. And another way of telling that story is: oh boy.” Tom Hamilton on George Freeman’s mental blog post (Dividing Lines, Substack).
“I finally got my 10 minutes face to face with Blair in a hotel in Southampton harbour on 15 April - two weeks before the big day. I don’t remember much about it except the sense of extraordinary energy that he was giving off at the time and the feeling of generational connection. The hippies had inherited the world. “ David Aaronovitch remembers the 1997 campaign trail (Notes from Underground, Substack).
“When I tell you I was the film critic and a senior entertainment writer for The Messenger, you’ll have to take me at my word. The website is a blank white page now — the most terrifying image for any writer — with just the company’s name and an email address.” The Messenger launched last year with the ambition to be a centrist news site with huge reach. Sadly, it ended up being an SEO farm, and it just went bust. Here’s an account of the last days of a doomed media outlet (NY Magazine).
If you wanted to grow a story in a lab to excite the rightwing media, it would be this: a California primary school “struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.” Children will be taught to ask questions like “if the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Some of it I just left alone. The other side is, I wanted to blow it. I wanted to have fun.” On a similar note, this WashPo story about mothers given a lump sum $10,000 might very well prompt a judgemental kneejerk from you (it did from me). But one of the hardest things about poverty—something Orwell wrote well about—is the way it narrows the horizon. If you’re sure you’re going to go right back to being poor again after this lump sum, maybe you would spend it on a holiday or a really great Christmas?
“If something happens in Moscow, say, they should just get Steve Rosenberg on the line to talk to for 28 uninterrupted minutes. Again, that would definitely add more value than a quick, 5-minute two-way followed by turning to hear what Quentin Letts and Ash Sarkar think about it.” James O’Malley on how to save Newsnight (Substack, £).
“I bridled at being told what to think and say when it came from one faction, and I bridle at it now.” A few weeks ago, I implored someone to write on the GC split so I didn’t have to. Sarah Ditum has risen, majestically, to the challenge. I endorse this.
See you next time! Plus, if you enjoyed this email, do forward it to a friend, or share it by hitting the button below:
I remember a really good Cracked article from way back (not a listicle - I think) about why some poor people don't save money in the same way rich people do and the upshot was: some poor people spend money as soon as they have it, because otherwise it would just get spent. IE.... it would get 'lost' on bills etc and be in many senses worthless. But if you spend it on something that does have worth (in everything except the monetary sense) - holidays, cosmetic stuff - it doesn't get 'lost' in the same way. That made a LOT of sense to me and I still think about years later.
I’m guessing it’s older Daily Telegraph readers most excited about ‘getting these lazy kids off their backsides and in the army’ with this stuff coming up about national service and the draft , so I have a simple offer
It’s going to cost a lot of money to pay for hundreds of thousands of young people to be drafted or otherwise serve in the army so this should be paid for by a tax on property and ending the Triple Lock, this way all generations can play their part