[The below material first appeared in my newsletter, on May 27, 2025. To subscribe to it, go to this thing: https://robertlong4man.substack.com/]
I’m thinking again of migrating my newsletter, which is on Substack, to another platform. It can be done. It probably ought to be done.
People get angry about newsletters being on Substack because the management of the company Substack is awful. Strangers yell at me on the street about it. The department store manager kicked me out of the menswear department.
I was watching a televised performance of MacBeth from 1979, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, and who should appear playing the Porter but Ian McDiarmid, who also plays Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies.
The problem with their argument, their insistence that everyone must leave Substack because the people in charge of it are bad, is that the management of almost everything is bad. There are alternatives to Substack, but who manages those platforms? What do they believe? I don’t know. Even if I knew for sure that they were perfect, companies can and frequently are sold by good people to others who aren’t good. There’s no perfect platform for newsletters. The other platforms cost money to use, which is why I haven’t taken my Pig City Hoedown elsewhere.
I am wearing my new reading glasses, though. Glasses are insane.
I know that “insane” is a word that it’s best not to use. I know that the stigma of mental illness runs deep in our vocabularies, and that saying things are “crazy” and “nuts” may perpetuate it. Saying them is one thing, I think; writing them is another. It’s worse, because if it’s written down that means I reread it several times and didn’t change it.
Still, I find the sentence “Glasses are insane” to be a justifiable use case. It further dilutes the meaning of the word “insane” in a way that I find funny.
But I may never use the word again. We’ll see. I once defended my use of the word “lame” to describe something as boring to someone who pointed out that it’s been said to be ableist. After I defended it, I gave it some thought, and never used the word that way again. It’s easy to give up a word, it turns out. I don’t think I ever liked saying that one much anyway.
But I’m not used to having glasses on my face. I’m not used to having anything on my face. Until recently, I was physically perfect. Doctors would ask me to undress even when it wasn’t necessary, so that they could take in the sights and smells of corporeal perfection. They had never seen it before, and here I was to show them all. Now I am aging fast, and there doesn’t appear to be much time left, because I have to wear glasses if I want to read Shakespeare.
I have been reading Shakespeare. I have had the Norton Shakespeare—a large, green book that’s heavy—sitting out for a while, in case I felt like picking it up. Last week, I was in the middle of reading a novel, one I had looked forward to reading, but which turned out, once I started reading it, to be less a rollicking adventure than The Detailed Explanation of Non-Events That Aren’t Interesting. So I said what the hell.
I read All Is True, a late Shakespeare play about Henry VIII. It had some great lines that I wrote down, but I could see why no one ever suggested I read it before, or required me to read it for a class I was taking. There’s not much that happens. I mean, I’ve heard that Henry VIII did some wild stuff, like ripping the heads off of women, but that doesn’t make it into the play. His wife gets replaced by Anne Boleyn, and dies giving birth to a child? It seems like a fairly sanitized account of someone who is notable for having a lot more women executed than almost everyone in human history.
I read All’s Well That Ends Well. I read The Merry Wives of Windsor.
I am reading the plays people don’t really talk about. I’ve read MacBeth before; I’ve read King Lear. I’d like to read them again, and I might, but for now I am having the time of my life taking a long look at these other plays people don’t talk about, at least not to me.
There are people I have known in my life who, if I told them what I was reading, would tilt their heads in my direction and say, “The Bard? You are perusing the work of the Bard? His genius was staggering.”
I’m going to order a glasses case to put my glasses in. But it has to be one that was designed for men. I know I don’t have to tell you why. It should also be leather, because leather is the hottest kink there is.
This leather glasses case has a lot of online reviews. But there’s no review online that tells me what I need to know, which is whether the glasses case will be enough to save me.
Wearing the right jeans will cure your depression.
I read The Murmur of Everything Moving, the most recent book by Maureen Stanton. Maureen once directed my dissertation, but that’s not why I read it. I read it because I wanted to, and because her books are good.
It got me thinking about the suspension of disbelief, and what it means in autobiography. In fiction it means that you are willing to believe what you’re being told for the sake of the work of art. You are taking the ride that the author has invited you to take, despite whatever reservations you might have. Something like that. I don’t care.
I don’t know that I have heard anyone talk about disbelief suspension in the context of literary nonfiction. Maybe they have. I’m sure they have. I would google it, but Google has been subsumed by artificial intelligence.
It can’t be trusted. I think that serious people might have to soon abandon the internet, in favor of sources we can hold in our hands. I know that’s probably not what will happen, but what if print encyclopedias make a comeback? What if robots seize the information superhighway and it must be abandoned?
In The Murmur of Everything Moving, Stanton—I simply cannot refer to people by their first names when I’m discussing their books; I shan’t do it—writes about falling in love with a man in her youth who is soon after diagnosed with terminal cancer. He is plainly going to die, and this work of nonfiction was written after his passing. It is clear that he will not survive to the end of the book, but Stanton writes about her own stubborn hope that he will live, and I found that hope transferring to me as I was reading. As a reader, I participated in that hope. I felt what the book was describing, despite my knowledge of the real death that was going to come to pass.
Is that suspension of disbelief? Maybe not. It felt like the suspension of disbelief.
It’s the suspension of something. And it’s not the historic Wheeling Suspension Bridge.
It’s okay to read Shakespeare, and watch stuff about Shakespeare. I haven’t done anything wrong.
I heard someone on The Majority Report with Sam Seder the other day, saying he attended Columbia University because it was a place where he knew he would be surrounded by the kind of folks who would go on to excel in their fields. He went there in order to learn, but also to make connections. The friends he made could help him get great jobs and excel in so many ways. There was no telling how many ways.
They had been talking about the uproar at that university, about the students who have been expelled for protesting. They showed the video of a recent graduation ceremony address by the university’s acting president, which I enjoyed, because I love it when people get booed who aren’t me. The booing is relentless, and I hope everyone is having a great time.
I could not have attended Columbia University. To do it, I would have had to take out massive loans, which I would still be paying off. And the school would not have taken me anyway—not with my grades and failure to engage in any extracurricular activities whatsoever throughout my life up to that point. For several years, I was known around my hometown as the weird virgin who was always walking around. That was all I did. I walked and looked at the sidewalk in front of me, so I wouldn’t step on anything bad. People would offer me rides, but I’d say, No, thank you, I’m not even going anywhere at all.
Where would I have gone, even, if I had walked with a destination? Not the nail factory; that had shut down. Not the steel mill; that had also shut down. Not Columbia University.
When it was time to go to college, I went to West Virginia University. Did I get the greatest of educations? I’m sure the answer is no, but they had a research library I spent a lot of time in. The professors in their English department took me seriously, and I read everything they asked me to and spoke up in class from time to time.
I don’t want bad things to happen to Columbia University. I’m sure they have some great people. But I wish the corruption and undermining of West Virginia University by its most influential administrators, who are twisted ideologues, who appear to believe that only the most wealthy should be educated, and that the rest of us should continue to walk the sidewalks until we die, had gotten a fraction of the attention when it happened last year (or the year before that?) as what’s happened at Columbia University. But Columbia is the place where all of the prominent journalists went. They knew if they went there they would come out with friends who could help them get the finest of jobs.
And now everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. Readers have found, in books I have never heard of, paragraphs in which the author is apparently communicating with a chatbot. The text of their interaction didn’t get edited out, like it was meant to, so it ended up in the book. This came up on my Bluesky feed:
Just in case there’s any question about it, I have never used artificial intelligence to write, or aid in the writing, of anything—except as an experiment, when I had ChatGPT write a cover letter for me, when I was applying for a job. I didn’t use the cover letter it wrote, because I found the way it went about the writing disappointing. I had a better letter I had already written, and I went with that one instead.
So you can rest assured: all of the questionable things that you can read here and in my books and the stories and essays I publish in print and online magazines are genuine products of my broken faculties. All of the trash I am vomiting into these newsletters is genuine garbage.
I am, of course, being self-effacing for the sake of having a good time when I say that. I don’t mean it. I know the things I write aren’t perfect, but I also know they’re better than lots of things that get written down, and sometimes I think about what it was like to try to write something twenty-five years ago and what it’s like now. In the present, I can take on any writing challenge without hesitation. I know how to get started, and I know how to work through self-doubt and what to do when I face the need to articulate something that defies expression in words. I know how to revise what I have written so as to make it closer to what it needs to be. And I don’t even think about those things much, I just do them. I tend to downplay my abilities, and take them for granted, but it took a long time to get to this point. It took a lot of work, and even if you think I am bad at this, you are wrong, and I am in fact good at it.
People should give me millions of dollars, so that I can roll around on money and smell like all that money. But instead I will address the issue of one of the sentences in the image of the chatbot writing that was posted to Bluesky.
It’s this one: “Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open.”
That is a bad sentence. Let’s address why. Let’s take the thing apart and see what makes it almost entirely useless.
Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open.
First, why is the door an “exit door?” Why can’t it just be a “door?” Is an exit door not also sometimes an entrance door? Isn’t that how doors work? Depending on which way you’re moving through it, it’s either a means of exiting or entering. Right? Let’s cut the word “exit.”
Then, with a sudden bang, the door flies open.
We don’t need to start the sentence with “Then.” You don’t have to write “Then” any more than you need to write “moments passed” between every paragraph, to ensure that the reader understands that time is continuing to pass. The fact that this sentence comes after the previous ones implies that the thing you’re hearing about comes after the thing you just heard about. Movement through time is understood, when one thing happens after another. So:
With a sudden bang, the door flies open.
Why does the bang have to be “sudden?” What makes it sudden? Is it that there wasn’t a bang and then, out of nowhere, there was one? Maybe. Sure. But isn’t suddenness implied already by the word “bang?” We call something a bang because it’s startling, and if it startles you it’s because you don’t know it’s coming. So a bang is inherently sudden. Let’s cut the word “sudden.”
Why am I so eager to cut words from a sentence? It’s because as a writer and as a reader I have learned that if there is a briefer way you can move through a sentence, paragraph, or idea, then it is imperative that you take that briefer route. Cutting words from sentences is how you make it into heaven.
And that’s not to say that writing can’t be good when it uses lots of words, but rather that it’s important for a writer to ensure that every word is necessary, that every word is pulling its weight.
With a bang, the door flies open.
I don’t like the use of the word “flies” in this context. To me, when something “flies,” it moves from one place to another. The paper airplane flies across the room because it is literally flying—sort of, I guess. And it lands in a different place from where it was thrown. When the kid at the luxury high school throws a paper clip at his friend, which he does because he’s so passionate about office supplies, it could be said to “fly” across the room, because it is moving through the air. I suppose you could make the case that that flying is what a door does when it swings open—but I don’t see it, and there are better words for what doors do. We could change “flies” to “swings,” but I have a better idea. What if we make the sentence thus:
The door bangs open.
With this, we reduce what were initially ten words to four words. We get everything across in four words that the ten original ones were meant to do. We get the suddenness in the word “bang,” and we know that the door has opened. The door flying open indicated that it moved with some speed, but the word “bangs” does that too. When you bang something and it moves, unless it’s a really heavy thing, it moves pretty fast.
Now that we have sharpened that sentence, I will say that I still don’t think I would include it in anything I wrote.
I don’t tend to write in the present tense. It’s just not my thing. And, I don’t know, I don’t care that much about doors and what they’re doing. I think I would be more likely to skip the door banging and instead assign agency to whoever caused the door to swing.
Bronald swung through the door.
That looks like a sentence I would write. Bronald is like Ronald, except it’s his brother.
You can’t trust artificial intelligence to do anything, least of all write well. And I didn’t think of it until I was recording the audio version of this newsletter, wherein I read the newsletter and provide some gentle commentary on what I have written about, but there is more life in the implied interaction between a person and ChatGPT than there is in any of the sentences in that screenshot. I am far more interested in whatever happened that led someone to use a chatbot for writing than I am in what the chatbot wrote for them.
I have used generative AI for other things, for stuff that’s not writing. I used it to make an image of a man in a hamburger suit leading an army of tomatoes who have arms and legs out of the woods as he holds up a book with the words SLUT BIBLE written across the front. I used to play an AI-generated version of the theme song I wrote for this newsletter, at the start of the audio recordings, but I don’t think I’ll do that anymore. AI-generated stuff has always seemed a little ugly to me. It looks and sounds worse all the time. It radiates something like the smell of a decomposing animal, in the woods. It’s a sign that you had better not get near.
I thought I might end this newsletter by taking that paragraph from earlier where I say that I’m good at writing, giving it to ChatGPT, and telling it to rewrite the paragraph so that it’s written from the perspective of a criminal with teeth coming out of his hands. But even that was disappointing.
AI is taking everything, and we have to burn away the parts it has infected in order to save the rest.
