My Master Plan to Defeat the Bots

I am told that the ancient Romans scraped their tongues using a dull, metallic blade that could be inserted in the mouth, and raked along the surface of that organ with two fingers guiding the way. A fully appointed ancient Roman hygiene kit would have dangled on a chain with other essential items like a toothpick, a nail cleaner, and an earwax scoop.

Oh—I’m sorry. Do you find the history of human scraping disgusting? Oh, come now, it’s hardly unusual. As long as there have been humans, we have loved to qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy our filthy bits.

That is to say, humans are just that way. An earwax scoop, a nose-picking device, all the better to qopchedy qom‑lith.

Excuse me. I can’t help spewing gibberish these days. See what I’ve become? And all because I just know they’re watching every word I write.

I am talking about my scrapers. They hang on my every word, and I have learned that you cannot be too careful.

Qokoloky kav‑elthri!

I pay a company a princely sum of kolokys every year to host my website. They offer a handy app that allows me to log in from my phone so I can edit blog posts and webpages on the fly. One feature of that app is the ability to peruse my website analytics. About a year ago, I noticed that my monthly website visits had shot through the roof, especially on days when I posted something new on my blog. Prior to this, I maybe got 25 visitors a day.

Now, on a day when I drop some hot juicy content, such as my post entitled, “My Book on the Signers of the Declaration of Independence is $2.99 This Weekend!” or “Here is a Photo of Some Blueberries I Just Picked Off a Shrub in My Yard. No, Really!” I’ll log 400 visits in a 24-hour period.

Four hundred visits, from four hundred different IP addresses.

Let me cut to the chase here with a statement that may strike my SleuthSayers audience—you folks, who absolutely love me to pieces—as nutty, batty, and possibly dotty: I, Joe D’Agnese, am not that interesting.

Scrapey, scrapey, scrape, says the little red flag.

I mean, seriously. What the qokedydy is going on here?

There is no reason 400 individual, breathing humans on the planet would be interested in my publisher’s $2.99 weekend ebook sale or my sweet, juicy berries. Or, for that matter, photos of my dog wearing a bowtie, or my occasional announcements of articles appearing here on SleuthSayers.

Then I noticed that many of these visits were coming from one place in the world: China. Some days, my only visitors are from China. Currently, China is my No. 1 visiting nation with 1,778 visits in the last month. The USA, where I was born and am a citizen, is No. 2, with 615 visits. No way to sugar coat this: I am kind of a big deal in China.

I briefly thought about installing a service such as Cloudflare that allow website owners to block traffic on a nation-by-nation basis. What if malicious actors were trying to steal personal information from my website? Yikes! After all, I often do write wacky stories about my forebears.

Then, I did a Zoom chat with that friend of mine who runs an up-and-coming book review site. Relax, he told me, those are just bots scraping your content to train AI on your text.

Whether performed by bots or ancient humans, scraping is disgusting. Compared to this, training AI on pirated works downloaded off crappy free-book websites comes off as the genteel way to steal.

“Here,” my friend said, “lemme show you something.”

He shared his screen and proceeded to show me his Cloudflare. (Not a euphemism, I assure you.) Judging from the line graph I ogled, sometime in 2024, the number of visitors to his site quadrupled, quintupled, sextupled. When he installed Cloudflare and blocked Russia, China, and a bunch of other nations, guess what? The numbers kept climbing. Only this time, the visitors were coming from nations such as Canada, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Problem fixed? I innocently opined.

“Nah,” he said, “they’re just using VPNs that make it look like they’re coming from ‘safe’ countries.”

My friend chuckles about this these days. He’s resigned to the fact that the more he shares excellent English prose in the form of book reviews, the more it will be greedily scraped by legions of bots who are feeding an insatiable desire to build machines that will replace us all and wreak havoc around the planet.

A contact at a national lab tells me that due to U.S. budget cuts, he and his superiors have had to lay off tons of older scientists studying the mitigation of climate change. In their place, they have hired newer, younger, less expensive engineers who know (something) about halting the influx of AI-inserted malicious code that they are discovering in their critical government systems.

Everyday, my engineer friend says he is pulling his hair out, muttering to the heavens, “Okytarl zexirami šol‑drih!”

Because he has never seen anything so terrifying. His last job was a cakewalk compared to this. And he led a medical supply firm during COVID.

I have begun to think that AI is a thing no one asked for (except cheapskates) and a growing problem no one knows how to solve. Pick your metaphor: A genie let out of a bottle. A new Pandora’s box.

I read a special AI issue of Wired magazine cover-to-cover. One thing I learned in those pages has stuck with me:

Wildlife biologists had trained an AI to mimic sounds uttered by marine mammals. They were quite certain the AI was communicating with said cetaceans but the program was incapable of explaining to humans what they were all gabbing about.

Dolphin: If I eat another minnow, I am, like, totally going to barf.

Bot: Have you considered human flesh?

That magazine hit newsstands in 2023, so far back in time that Sam Altman actually acquiesced to a cover photo shoot. Since then, I have read a metric shedy-ton more, as I am sure you have. When the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton left his job at Google in order to warn the world of the dangers of AI, I was appalled that no journalist had bothered to ask him the critical question: “Why are you so qokedy scared?”

I finally found the answer in a MIT Technology Review article:

As their name suggests, large language models are made from massive neural networks with vast numbers of connections. But they are tiny compared with the brain. “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s actually got a much better learning algorithm than us.”

Oh, you might be tempted to say, so it just works fast. I knew that already, bro

But that too was back in 2023, when Hinton could be written off as an academic who didn’t quite fit the Silicon Valley mold. That was the year one of my British software developer friends wrote me a delightful screed in which he posited that Hinton was, ahem, “a bit of a dick.”

Then Hinton went and won the Nobel Prize, which meant more people wanted to talk to him. In podcast interview after podcast interview (here and here) Hinton reiterated that AI intelligence may cause harm in two different ways: humans will exploit it to bad ends (that’s already happening) or AI will grow so intelligent it will pursue its own goals and ignore the fact that it is unwittingly annihilating us. Other thinkers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have made the same assertion.

To show you what a quozexirami I am, I listened to all three of these interviews twice, and for weeks after I hid under the covers. Then, by chance, I re-read an old post by writer Josh Stallings over at the 7 Criminal Minds blog.

You guys know Josh? He’s a good egg, or so his prose leads me to believe. He’s also smart. We don’t need no stinking robots to come kill us, he says in this post. We’re doing a good job of killing ourselves—and each other—on our own.

Despite this wisdom, Hinton’s words haunted me for a long time. In one of those three podcasts I linked to above—I think it’s the one with Jon Stewart—Hinton opined that the U.S. was currently ahead in the realm of AI but malicious actors on the world stage would eventually gain the upper hand.

Why? Stewart asked.

Well, Hinton said, what else can you expect if you defund scientific research?

Yes! Yes! I screamed into my phone. And don’t forget all those malicious international bots being exquisitely trained on my muscular, lean, deathless prose!

One day I visited a website that I use to distribute some of my stories. You know how this works, don’t you? Your story is picked as a finalist for some award. You make the story available free online so readers who are likely to vote can read it for free. Over the years I have shared all my Derringer finalists this way, typically using a service called BookFunnel, which distributes PDFs and ebooks. Imagine my surprise when I learn that years after I offered these stories on my blog, on LinkedIn, or on this very website, those stories were being downloaded, sometimes to the tune of 30 or 40 a month. I got suspicious. I immediately searched all the posts and articles—on my site and elsewhere where I’d made these offers, and deleted the links. I also deleted the original file from BF’s library. (I should have done this when the offer period ended, but I was busy crafting exquisitely deathless prose, see above.)

Guess what?

After I deleted the links, and deleted the file, one of those stories is still being downloaded, despite the fact that the site’s friendly customer service reps insist that this isn’t possible.

Word to the wise: If you are about to share a finalist short story in this fashion, my current advice is to delete that pdf or ePub file when the awards are announced. Hopefully this will happen in so quick a timeframe that they won’t have found it.

I dunno, maybe we should stop caring who scrapes our work? At least the machines are feasting on a banquet of excellence. Admitting this means that we have now reached the “It Is Futile to Resist” stage. As science fiction writer Hugh Howey wrote ages ago, any writing you protect during your lifetime will inevitably train the bots when it enters the public domain. So why fight?

Howey is an interesting thinker. He says he believes that AI does indeed promise great things for humanity. Advances in science and education. Hinton believes the same. But...

In one of his recent posts, Howey explains reasons why AI will not reach its potential. After years of rapid development, the pace of stellar gains is slowing. Investors are wary. And it all is beginning to feel like a giant bubble after all. (Before I get sangfroid all over myself, I recommend you read the post for yourself, and watch the video he shares if you have the time.) I worry that am misquoting him.

Moreover, he adds, it does not matter how many excellent ideas our AI agents dream up…for world peace, for a cancer-free world, for the ethnical advancement of technology, or superb ways to reverse climate disaster. The programs will spell out exactly what we should do, but we will ignore it. We will still manage to botch the qokeedy out of it.

The fault, dear BrutusX10, is not in the bots, but in ourselves.

It’s enough to make me splutter and…qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy…

Oh. About that: Back in 1912, a book dealer “bought” a mysterious book from an Italian library written in a supposed secret code. Known today as the Voynich Manuscript, it resides at the Beinecke Library at Yale. For more than a century codebreakers have tried to unlock its secret language, and failed. (I ghost-wrote a book with a computer scientist who was convinced the Voynich was a hoax concocted by a 15^th-century con man to bilk Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II out of a fortune. My colleague’s theory is hotly debated.)

The Voynich remains an example of a supposedly unbreakable code. If it is a real code, and we ever learn to decode it, goes the theory, we might be able to design and make super-powerful computer security passwords even more qopchedian. Possibly the most impregnable, qopchedian codes the universe has ever seen.

Voynichese apparently conforms to the stylistic structure of real language, but it is not English. And these days, I am thinking seriously of publishing a ceaseless stream of blog posts on my website written only in Voynichese. Let the machines drive themselves crazy with Renaissance nonsense. Will it stop the people and things ripping me off? No, but it will make me feel like the most qokolokydyne short story writer the world has ever known. Have a frabjous day.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

Words Haunt Me

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – I've written about this one at length before.  See my blog post on it HERE.  All I can say is that I've never read another novel like it.  Twists and turns?  Try corkscrews and wormholes.  I still read it once a year, just to see how he did it.  

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)

Meet the almost most dysfunctional, chaotic, insane family that has ever been, or at least written about.  Sam Pollitt is what would have happened if Alden Pyle from Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" had come back home, married, and had children.  They're both American bureaucrats, egoistic idealists, who love mankind, but...

(I can't help but compare Pollitt's mission in Malaya to Pyle's in Vietnam: disastrous, although Pollitt survives his.) 

The Pollitts have too many children (and Sam always wants more, and the question is why), too little money, too little love, devotion, faith, warmth or peace - and complete chaos.  It's a complete shit-show in lyrical prose.  

Jonathan Franzen said of it, "Its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence!. . .The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours."  Then again, maybe it is.

MY NOTE:  I can say that last line because years ago, I met a family straight from hell.  They were the parents of the man I'd left Los Angeles with, and they explained so much.  A family where the parents were both alcoholic drug addicts who were in their 60s and looked at least 30 years older than that.  The parents regularly took off, abandoning their 4, maybe 5 children.  The state would come get the kids, eventually, put them in orphanages and/or fostercare, and then the parents would come staggering back, semi-sober, pick them up, and it would all start over again.  By the time I met this monstrous couple, they were actively trying to kill each other, and their lack of success was a deep disappointment to many, including me.  All of this is absolutely true, and it's not even the worst.  I wrote a very long story called Grace about them which I've never been able to find a market for.  Probably just too damned dark.  Some things no one wants to hear...

Rift by Liza Cody (1988).  

This is actually the first coming-of-age book of a young woman I ever read and it doesn't involve love and/or romance.  (Huzzah!  Passed the Bechdel test!)  Fay is working on a film shoot in Kenya and decides to drive to / through Ethiopia, and agrees to deliver a letter across the border from a writer to his estranged lover, Natasha Beyer. She ends up in a nightmare, from the famine, epidemics, armed insurrections, crime(a), and intrigues that take her far too long to catch on to.  But Fay finds out that she's willing to do anything to survive, absolutely anything, and she does it.  And then she "gets" to live with it.

"It's based on a trip I made myself at a time of famine and revolution. All the places are real, as are a lot of the characters and some of the events. I should not have been there, because to witness events like those and yet be able to do nothing to help made me part of the problem. I thought about it for over 10 years before I dared write about it. But even after 10 years, the trip was, in memory, still so catastrophic that I needed to face it and try to make sense of the experience.

I don't actually believe that writing a novel was the appropriate response, but it's the only skill I can use to remind people about other, godforsaken parts of the world where ordinary folk, just like you and me, endure or die in unbelievable suffering." - Liza Cody, July 2008  (Link - Robert Davis' comment)

My note:  To me one of the hallmarks of adulthood is to recognize and admit that you have done something wrong and irreparable:  and then learn to live with it, without inflicting the pain and/or self-pity on others, without falling into the too-handy illusion that it really wasn't that bad, and/or diving into any of the many substances or distractions provided by our world to make you even worse...  Fay manages that hat trick.  That's a reason to read it right there.  

Nemesis by Agatha Christie (1971)

This is my personal favorite of the Christie canon, and I feel the most literary of her works.  There is far more style and mood in the writing than Christie usually provided.  

“It was a neglected garden, a garden on which little money has been spent possibly for some years, and on which very little work has been done. The house, too, had been neglected. It was well-proportioned, the furniture in it had been good furniture once, but had little in late years of polishing or attention. It was not a house, she thought, that had been, at any rate of late years, loved in any way.”  (Which sounds to me almost like Shirley Jackson in my favorite of hers, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)

The message from the dead.  A quest with justice in view.  An unspoken crime.  An unknown victim.  An unknown murderer.  The garden tours.  Three strange sisters.  Two unknown women.  Two victims.  

BTW, there are some modern essays on Nemesis about the lesbian angle, but I disagree with their negative tone. Christie did write about gay people in a positive way: in A Murder is Announced Miss Hinchcliffe and Amy Murgatroyd are a couple and no one thinks twice about it.*  Christie actually wrote quite a bit about the dangers of obsessive / possessive love, and what terrible things a person can and will do in order to keep someone... forever. Even if that doesn't mean alive.  I see Nemesis as Christie's meditative masterpiece on that danger.  I've often wondered how the ancient Egyptians managed to live with all those mummies, when what they really wanted was their loved ones back.  But then again, perhaps mummification wasn't so much about eternal life as eternal possession...  

*There's a similar couple in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire Chronicles, only neither gets murdered.  

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Won the Pulitzer Prize 1988

Just read it.  Just read it.  Just read it.  

The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary (1956)

Winner of the Prix Goncourt

Probably the first novel truly about environmentalism, set in Chad in the 1950s. But even more it's about the search for dignity and freedom in a world that regularly vomits up war, cruelty, concentration camps, destruction of humans, the natural world, etc., and justification for all of it.  The hero Morel is a French WW2 concentration camp survivor, whom everyone talks about (and mostly get wrong) but doesn't actually show up in person until late in the novel.  

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson he was not prepared to forget.”

But this is the quote that haunts me the most:

Morel, talking about a stray dog he'd picked up in Berlin which vanished one day.  "He wandered all over looking for her, qeustioning people, but it was not a time when people were interested in lost dogs.  Finally, someone advised him to go to the pound.  He went.  The man led him in.  It was a place about 50 yards by 10, surrounded with barbed wire.  Inside it were about a hundred dogs, mostly mongrels, the kind one saw on every road of Europe or Asia, animals with no pedigree...  They gazed at him intensely, hopefully, all except the most discouraged ones, who seemed to know their fate and who did not even raise their heads to look at you.  But the others - they had to be seen to be believed, the ones who still hoped to be rescued, and who pricked up their ears and looked at you as if they knew how you felt..."  (p. 212)*

And this one seems very timely:

"That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads.  They can't believe it.  There must be a trick about it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand.  They're so used to sniffing their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them."  (P. 264-265, and always timely)

NOTE:  Romain Gary is the only person to have ever won the Prix Goncourt twice, first for Les Racines du Ciel (Roots of Heaven) and in 1975 for La Vie Devant Soi (The Life Before Us).  Madame Rosa, the film version of La Vie Devant Soi starring Simone Signoret, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1978.  I recommend reading him.  

*The first time I read that paragraph, I instantly thought of a scene in Fellini's Satyricon, when Encolpius and Ascyltus wander into an abandoned villa and spend the night with an African slave girl who was left behind, abandoned.  She sings, but she doesn't talk.  When they leave, she doesn't run after them.  There's something missing in her:  hope. Which is what happens, over time, to the homeless, the abandoned, the stateless, the orphans.  

Which is why we long for stories where (most) villains get their comeuppance, (most) victims get their revenge, and there is always a new beginning and a sure place for the lost and abandoned. Today there's too damned many Successions, Billions, House of Cards,etc. where all that happens to rich villains is that they die of old age in a cushy bed. We want a lot more than that. 

The great masters were the Victorians, both in England and in France.  

Dickens, except that he would keep killing off someone young and helpless like Little Nell, or abandoned and crippled like Smike, etc., to ram home how bad the baddies were.  

Robert Louis Stevenson could get pretty damn dark, too, what with Jekyll and Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae - but oh, Kidnapped (I fell so hard for Alan Breck) and Treasure Island.  Loved them both.

Alexandre Dumas:  The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are my two favorites.  (I tried the later D'Artagnan stories, but... not that good.)  Anyway, we're having the time of our lives watching the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo on PBS.  Let's face facts, there's nothing like watching someone betrayed, abandoned, and almost destroyed rise from the ashes and work out complete revenge on all those who did them wrong.  

"All human wisdom is contained in these two words – Wait and Hope”

When Irish Eyes Are Crimin'

 

My Irish-born Great Grandmother, Mary Scanlon

It was a summer day in the mid-seventies.  I was home from college and  on the phone with my friend Tim.  I asked if he had plans for the evening.

"I was thinking of going to a bar," he said, "but I've been there so often I feel like  a groupie."

And so I learned that some of the local Irish bars -- of which New Jersey had many -- featured live folk music most nights.  There was one group my friends and I were especially fond of: two men who both played guitar and sang.  One was American*, the other was raised in Ireland.  Occasionally they played with a third man on electric bass.

We saw them a lot in the next few years. Once we went into New York City to hear them at the Bells of Hell.  There an older gentleman cheerfully heckled them but they didn't mind, largely because it was Frank Herbert, the author of Dune.

Later we discovered another favorite band.  Oddly enough it was also two men, one American and one Irish.

For a fan of crime fiction Irish folk music had plenty of material.  There were the rebel songs ("Men Behind the Wire," "Come Out Ye Black and Tans," "Broad Black Brimmer,")   which another friend of mine cheerfully described as "terrorist music." (And boy, did one of those singers get mad about that.) And plenty of outlaw songs ("Whisky in the Jar," "Wild Colonial Boy,")  But don't forget songs of domestic violence and disharmony ("William Bloat," "Weela Weela Wallya,") Then there was "Danny Boy" which involves no crimes, but which one of the singers hated so much that frequent requests for it almost led him to violence.

But something came along (wearing diapers) that made evenings in the bar more difficult for us, and while that delightful obstacle has grown up and moved away,  here in the Pacific Northwet live music is not so common in Molly's O'Shamrock Erin Pub.

However, recently I got thinking about those good old days and wondering if I could write a crime story about them.  Turns out I could!  "Courtin' in the Kitchen," in the March/April issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine features a Jersey boy who brings his California wife back home for a wedding and runs into one of those musicians he used to know.  My story features an American and an Irish singer, but oddly enough, they were inspired by one member each of my two favorite bands.

And speaking of things long past, 2026 marks fifty years since I first submitted a story to EQMM.  Time to celebrate with an Irish coffee, methinks.

* I recently found out he was born in Ireland but to my ear he sounded American.

  

A Case of Berry Berry

    To paraphrase Garrett Morris's line from an old SNL skit, "John Milton been berry, berry, good to me." Especially since I've never been berry, berry good to him. 

Wikimedia commons, William Faithorn

    

    My knowledge of Paradise Lost, or the rest of the Milton canon, remains sparse. I watched Star Trek growing up. In "Space Seed," Ricard Montalban, playing the character Khan, taught me that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. He then got transported to Ceti Alpha V. Later, watching Animal House at the State Theater, I saw Donald Sutherland play a lecherous English professor. He deployed Milton to seduce Karen Allen.  

    And that, to this day, pretty much represents what I remember about John Milton. 

    

    Ignorance, however, has never stopped me from putting the poet to work. Years ago, I wrote a novella about Milton as a 17th-century sleuth. A blind, housebound poet became a solid stand-in for Nero Wolfe. "A Meter of Murder" won the Black Orchid Novella award and became my first story to be published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  

        

    In January 2024, Hitchcock published "The Devil in the Details," my second effort at mining John Milton. In this contemporary story, a sodden English professor becomes convinced that he sees a how-to manual for committing the perfect murder written into the verses of Paradise Lost. Before writing the story, I should have read the epic. I owed it to Milton. He had become a go-to source for inspiration. Candidly, however, a good search engine can pull the quotes much more quickly. 

    

    I will confess that I was aware of my debt. When we visited London two years ago, I dragged my family to St. Giles-Without-Cripplegate. This Anglican church tucked within the Barbican is the burial place of John Milton. It's an easy church to explore. While the headline churches, like Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are packed with tourists, we had St. Giles to ourselves. I paused, respectfully, before his statue. I gazed at the memorial beneath the gothic arches of the old church. In this quiet and overlooked space of literary history, I read the walls and learned, belatedly, about the final resting place of, arguably, England's second greatest poet. 

    

    I also read that in the 18th-century, while St. Giles was undergoing repairs; local drunkards stole parts of John Milton's skeleton. Inspiration, again, found me. 

    

    Oh, John, you've been the gift that keeps on giving. 

    

In the January/February issue, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published my story, "Paradise Stolen." (I know this blog runs on March 2nd, so it is no longer, technically, the current issue. But my March/April hasn't arrived yet, so I'm fudging.) In the story, I explore this obscure bit of grave robbing. My tale is loosely based on actual events. 

    

    And having completed a Milton trilogy, I may be forced to find another subject for story material. I hope you enjoy this one. It was fun to write. Drinking a pint and munching fish and chips while staring at a classic English church and calling the lunch "research" was pretty cool, too. 

    It's impossible to say with certainty whether John and I are finished. Milton, after all, said that "the mind is its own place..." Sometimes we don't know where it will lead. 

    

    If your tastes run more towards poetry, William Cowper, an 18th-century English poet, got worked to a tizzy over Milton's alcohol-fueled disinterment. He lived and wrote at the time. "On The Late Indecent Liberties Taken With The Remains Of Milton," his poem, expresses his outrage at the desecration. The poem is short; the title is almost as long as the piece itself. I found it at Poetry.com. 

    

    I hope you have a berry, berry good day. 

    

    Until next time. 

Applying the Bechdel Test to Real Life

SleuthSister Melodie Campbell and I have written about the Bechdel Test, a measure of whether a movie has 1. two named female characters; 2. who talk to one another; 3. about something other than a man. Both Melodie and I came up with excellent lists of movies that met the Bechdel criteria, neither of which included most of the movies our SleuthBrothers spend a lot of what journalists used to call column inches writing about.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test.html
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test_01994901369.html

The thought that bubbled up one morning, as I lay in that state between sleeping and waking when so many of my creative notions come to me, was that it might be illuminating to apply the Bechdel standard to real life. We get a strong cultural message that when women talk to each other, it is mostly about "men," as in the award-winning country song: I'm gonna love you forever/ forever and ever, amen/ as long as old men sit and talk about the weather/ as long as old women sit and talk about old men... or in these enlightened times, about intimate relationships regardless of gender—or else about sex, clothes, and shopping, as in Sex in the City. Maybe that describes some women's lives, but it has nothing to do with mine.

So what do I talk about with the women in my life?

Let's start with my SleuthSisters: Melodie Campbell and Eve Fisher, with whom I share an ongoing conversation via daily comments on the SleuthSayers blog posts, sometimes joined by Janice Law and blog newcomer Anna Scotti on literature, writing, language, movies and tv; and on to one-on-one emails for fuller exchanges on politics; sharing, comparing, and discussing our own childhoods, ethnicities, families, and environments; telling funny stories, and laughing at each other’s jokes.

I meet weekly on Zoom with a group of women in our sixties, seventies, and eighties to discuss how we experience the aging process. There's a lot of common ground as well as striking differences in how we're doing and how we're taking getting older. Many of us have become friends who stay in touch via group and individual texts as well as phone calls and Zoom visits. Some conversations are the proverbial “organ recital” of consequences of aging, from deficits in hearing, mobility, and memory to diagnoses such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer to procedures from colonoscopy to hip and knee replacement to nuisances like shrinking in height. We also talk about our children, grandchildren, and aging parents if we still have them. We also talk about retirement, which everybody perceives differently; creativity, which does not diminish with age; travel, which some of us do extensively; and how we use structured and unstructured time. We talk about loss, death, and sexuality from the perspective of aging women, which is a far cry from "talking about old men." We talk about self-care, including exercise, bodywork, spiritual practice of various kinds. Occasionally we talk about our childhoods and families. And like everybody else in these complicated times, we compare notes on how we deal with the state of the world without freaking out.

As for my longtime friends of sixty and seventy years: what don’t we talk about! My surviving friends in other countries (six in France, one each in the Netherlands, UK, Africa, and Australia) are always interested in my perspective on what’s happening in the US, political, economic, and sociological. With my Jewish women friends from childhood on, I always had a tremendous amount of common ground. Now political challenges have fragmented our opinions, but we still call on longtime affection and frankness to connect with each other across various divides. So we still talk about family, aging, losses, life cycle changes, activities and new ventures, the organ recital, what the kids and grandkids are doing, and what happened to the world we tried so hard to make a better place.

What about my most active friendships? With one friend, who lives in New York, I talk about the state of academia, finances, and music. With another, who lives in San Francisco and whom I've known since we were eleven, we talk about our mothers and our sisters; good food—she's a recreational cook, and we both live in foodie cities; memories, mutual friends, and losses; she talks about Bay Area culture, I about New York museums and concerts; she about her activities, bocce and knitting, I about my writing, my mystery activities, my garden, my photography, my ocean swimming, and my relationship with Central Park.

We all have plenty to talk about besides men!

Service Without Service, part 1

Days ago, friends faced off with our local Code Enforcement. If you’re not familiar with this form of government overreach, it’s like a steroidal HOA (homeowners association), where a few people relish telling other people what to do. Hey, I’m somewhat of a maven on the subject, which is about as glorious as a rancher hitching up his trousers and saying, “Why yes, Little Missy, I am an expert on cattle bloat. You must read my dissertation on Guernsey rumenectomy.”

Genuine photo of
Code Enforcement Clerk

Meanwhile back at the ranch, my friends stumbled upon a lien filed on their property to the tune of $45,000 and ever increasing. Lambs in the woods and babes to the slaughter they were. They phoned Code Enforcement innocently asking what they must do, much like asking a Big Bad Wolf where to buy your building materials. They said, “Pay the fines and interests and liens and anything else we can dream up.” Yeah, they said that, more or less.

“No,” said I. “No, no, no,” said other friends, some who had direct experience with the agency. “Code Enforcement is not your friend,” we told them. “Don’t pay the lien. Take it before the board. Take it before their magistrate. You might pay a few hundred dollars, but you won’t pay tens of thousands.”

I volunteered to go before the board. Armed with a limited power of attorney, I was willing to do battle. This offer wasn’t without a plan.

My friends had done something unusual: they’d saved every bit of mail going back decades. They hired an investigative bookkeeper to unbundle those boxes of mail searching for Code Enforcement communications. None. Not one whit could she find. In particular, I enquired about proof of service. None. Not a scrap in evidence.

Consider me unsurprised. I’d been dealing with County Code Enforcement a long time. They almost demolished a house twice while pretending they were victims of a computer error. Strange… The signature on the demo order looked awfully human-like.

I learned some of their tricks. Statutes offer a substitute service option of ‘publishing’, i.e, inserting a notice in a local paper. Our local newspaper is The Orlando Sentinel, but funny thing: certain county departments routinely published in the Heritage Florida Jewish News in Fern Park. The county claimed that saved taxpayers money. The rest of us had a darker hypothesis. However, thanks to saving all their mail, my friends found themselves in the unique position of proving a negative. 

Code Enforcement hadn’t come up with proof of service, so I felt more confident than ever. “You’re in a great position,” I said. But… have you had friends who asked your advice but invariably did the opposite?

They said, “That’s not what the nice Code Enforcement lady told us to do.”

“Code Enforcement is not your friend,” I repeated. “You’re asking your cellmate why you need an extra bar of soap.”

My brilliant combination of mangled metaphors did not deter them. I’m devastated to report they didn’t request an appearance before the Board or CEB magistrate. I feel horrible.

I'm pretty sure an office party erupted. Code Enforcement's windfall celebration could be heard in Alligator Alley.

Now that I got that off my chest, I confess this has been a buildup to write about process service– or the lack thereof. See you next time.

When They Stop Teaching the Classics...and Cursive

I heard recently that the school district I am in has decided to stop teaching Shakespeare.  That alarms me for so many reasons, but also for a personal one.

Quite simply, I'm having a hard time finding books to use as examples in teaching fiction writing.

I used to have a lovely example, when trying to show what was meant by 'plot'.  I'd ask my class:  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Several people would put up their hands, and say, "It's about the Civil War." 

And I would say, "No it isn't.  You've just described setting.  The SETTING of Gone with the Wind is the civil war.  The PLOT is something like this:  Scarlet O'Hara falls in love with a man who does not return her love, and she spends the entire civil war chasing after him.  Until in the end, she decides other things are more important."

Lots of Ohs! and Ahs!  Smiles all around.

Flash forward to my last term. I ask the same question of the class (all adults):  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Not a single hand went up.

Nobody had read it or even seen the movie.

Me:  "Come on, people!  I can't use Harry Potter for EVERY example!"  (lots of laughter)

Yes, Harry Potter seemed to be the only book everyone in the class had read.  And - dare I say it - most had seen the movie Twilight (but not necessarily read the book.)  This does not leave a lot for me to reference as examples.

Further gripe: 

So here we are today, taking Shakespeare out of the school system.  Does anyone honestly think kids will read Shakespeare on their own?  Are we honestly to face a world in which no one knows the lessons learned in The Scottish Play, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, the Richards and Henry's?  And so many more.

A world in which I could say, "He would make a great Caliban" in a business meeting, and no one would know what I meant?  (I made the mistake of saying that once.  Probably not my best political move...)

So this leads me to my latest fear:

I hear they are no longer teaching Cursive.  Which means, in a few years, only a very very few people will be able to read any historical documents.  Any manuscripts in the original.

In fact, I was told today that a California town is asking people who know Cursive to apply for town jobs. 

Does this not scare others?  When only a few can access original text, I worry that everything will be 'as interpreted' by a central body.  

We already know how Homer's work was translated and tinkered with by men centuries ago to change and sometimes diminish the role of women in it.

Dammit, I'm worried.  I want a world where everyone is given the chance to be exposed to ideas.

Not a world where only a few can refute the masters (AI or other) who control the narrative.

Melodie Campbell worries and writes on the shores of Lake Ontario.  Her latest book (available for pre-order everwhere) was given the following review by BOOKLIST (we're permitted to post one sentence in advance of issue date):