I almost hit SEND on this thing before I realized it’s Halloween. Two Halloweens ago, the magazine hex published my 1,000-word short story “Spider.” It’s about a spider that follows a woman out of the dream she is having and into her life, making it more complicated. Read it now, or hear me read it at the start of the audio recording of this newsletter.
I dreamed I lived in a neighborhood where residents of four households near my house were angry with me. Why four? I don’t know. I had gone to their lawns, dug rectangles out of their grass with a shovel, and replaced the grass with bronze plaques I had made. They featured some of my original writing.
I don’t recall what the writing was, but everyone was upset. These people didn’t want bronze plaques, they wanted grass. I had to apologize to the homeowners, telling them I have these borderline-manic episodes where I feel so inspired, and so full of things I want to tell everyone, that I have to do something to get it all out. What I did this time was make bronze plaques and embed them in lawns.
I had to atone for what I had done. I had to remove the plaques and spread grass seed on the rectangles I had dug.
Much of the dream consisted of planning these corrective measures. I thought I should wake up in the middle of the night and undo what I had done under cover of darkness. That way, no one would see me out there working. I might not feel so ashamed.
This dream was plainly inspired by two things.
One is that not long ago some workers from Google Fiber went through our neighborhood, digging rectangular holes in the lawns of all of the people who live here. They didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The only communication we got from Google were signs sticking out of our lawns that read, “Thank you for your patience.” Patience with what? The little signs didn’t say. Later, someone came and spray-painted the parts of the lawns where they would dig. I didn’t know what the spray paint was for. A few days after that, the crews arrived and they started digging.
It didn’t take them long. They dug the holes, they ran cable through the ground, I guess, and most of the holes they covered again, while others, like the one on the edge of my lawn, now has a box of some kind embedded inside.
The other thing that I don’t doubt inspired the dream is that I once again have that cyclical misgiving—it may be a seasonal misgiving—that the creative work I do is an imposition on anyone it’s presented to. Writing something and making it available to other people is equivalent to tearing up someone’s property and shoving the thing I have made where the nice grass used to be. They didn’t ask for this thing to be there. Why is it there? Why haven’t I done something more useful with my time than this? Come on, man.
D.A.R.E.
I wanted to share something I saw in the news about a substitute teacher.
This guy in Minnesota apparently subbed for an English class where he—in order to help the students understand literature, I guess?—reenacted the murder of George Floyd. In the reenactment, he was the murdering officer, and the role of George Floyd was played by a high school student.
But that’s not all. He did a series of other things:
“According to the school’s statement, the substitute also:
Twisted a student’s arm behind the student’s back and showed pressure points on the chin
Fake punched a student with his fist “really close” to the student’s face
Mimicked holding up a gun and pointing it at students
Repeatedly made racially-harmful comments and told sexist jokes
Spoke in disturbing detail about dead bodies he had seen and shared explicit details about two sexual assault cases he investigated
Stated cops would be the best criminals because they know how to get away with stuff, adding that he once received an “A” grade on a paper about how to get away with murder
Stated police brutality isn’t real”
Apparently, he told the students he is a police officer. The story says that status of his has not been verified by the school district.
One thing I find really frustrating about the story is that it isn’t funny. Maybe I would laugh, if I heard these details in the right context, but it would be the way I laugh out of surprise. It would be mirthless.
Having been a substitute teacher on occasion for the last year or so, I know from on-the-ground experience that there is a great deal of potential humor in the concept of a substitute teacher entering a classroom, ignoring whatever lesson plans they’re given, and instead doing a bizarre series of things that make no sense.
If done properly, this person could be like Mr. G, the high school teacher in the film Bottoms, played by NFL running back Marshawn Lynch:
Alas, what happened at the school in Minnesota isn’t funny. If his classroom performance had been caught on video, I don’t doubt it would be horrifying. If we could hear the “jokes” he told the students, they would make normal people feel sick, and open our eyes a little to what’s going on in the dead souls of some of the people who share this country with us.
What I find baffling about the whole thing is that substitute teaching generally takes an entire day. Like, you go in at 8:00 and you’re not done until 3:30. So this creep must have spent seven or eight hours introducing new nightmares to a bunch of teenagers who weren’t allowed to leave the room he was in.
When I was in elementary school, a cop would come to school once a month, or maybe once every few months—I’m not sure—and tell us to never do drugs. He would also tell us about times when he had to fight guys and arrest them. He showed us that he wore a clip-on tie to work, in case someone tried to grab it and strangle him. It’s basically the only thing I remember learning in grade school.
How Do We Study Literature Now?
I wrote in the last Hoedown about NotebookLM and the AI resources people can use now for working with texts of all kinds. You can feed a novel, story, whatever, into Google’s new thing, and it will summarize it for you, give you discussion questions to ask about it, and provide answers to those discussion questions, with textual citations.
I have just made it read “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of my all-time favorite short stories. NotebookLM came up with the discussion question, “How does the text critique societal expectations of women in the late 19th century?” And that’s not a terrible question—but it’s not a great one, or even a very good one. The answer is pretty obvious. If I asked that question in a literature class, I could expect a couple of students to answer, but I would be surprised if the conversation went in any direction from there. It’s not a question that cuts into the story very deeply.
Gilman’s story critiques societal expectations of women at the time it was written in that it features a woman who is trapped in a room with nothing to do, because it’s thought that solitary confinement will cure her of her postpartum depression and of liking to read. Her husband, a doctor, forced her in there. It’s not a tremendous mystery, how this narrative critiques societal expectations of women.
There is quite a lot more to be said about that, of course. If I were teaching this story in a literature class, like I used to do, I might, in an opening mini-lecture on the story, bring this question up, and say that critiquing societal expectations of women is one of the things the story does. I might say that it’s a question we can come back to, because as obvious as the story is about doing that, there is potentially quite a lot to discuss there.
But I would want to start a conversation with students by looking past the most obvious thing and looking at a really specific thing that’s more obscure, maybe something I never caught onto in prior readings but which I can’t help noticing now. I don’t know what it would be. Every time I teach a text, even if it’s one I have taught before, I have to reread it in preparation, and when I do I end up having genuine, new questions about it, things I am just not sure about, things that strike me as ambiguous or confusing. It doesn’t matter how many times I have read it before; a good story, or whatever it is, always finds a way to puzzle me in a way that helps get a conversation going.
I like to ask questions when I teach that I genuinely don’t know the answers to. I like to start there, at least, and turn from there to the things I am already familiar with, which the students are seeing for the first time, if they haven’t read the story before.
I have been thinking a lot about teaching, for reasons I don’t want to get into right now. The other night, I sorted through all of my teaching evaluations from my last full-time teaching job, which I had for four years. I have about 200 pages of positive evaluations from that school. I haven’t taught much in recent years, but it looks like I was good at it, or at least I was able to convince around 200 students that I was. Maybe I am still.
Professors on Facebook were panicking last week, when they heard about what NotebookLM can do. And the latent professor in me has that same impulse, to freak out, because with NotebookLM it would be so easy for students to fake their way through a critical reading of a text like this one. Rather than take the hour or two “The Yellow Wall-Paper” requires to fully engage with it, and the additional non-reading hours it takes to digest that story, once they have read it, a student could give whatever they were assigned to read to NotebookLM, and just sit in class with their laptop open, repeating stuff that NotebookLM tells them. They would participate; they would engage with the rest of the class; but they would not be sharing their own questions and insights. They would be telling us what the computer told them to say.
But I also know better than to freak out about this stuff. Professors are smart people. They’re resourceful.
One option they have is to incorporate NotebookLM into the process of teaching literature. Have the students read “The School” by Donald Barthelme, then feed it to NotebookLM and see what it comes up with. Survey the results together, and probe those results for weak points or thresholds. The AI can pick up a lot; I’m impressed with how accurately it perceives humor and irony. But there is always something it misses; there are things that we, as human readers, with feelings and memories all our own, bring to every text. They inflect how we read it, and make our experience of it distinct from everyone else’s. Right? Something like that? And depending on your background, you may bring something to the text that’s very different from what I bring to it.
When ChatGPT can write an essay on Frankenstein that you can turn in for a decent grade—and if it can’t do that consistently, it soon will—that doesn’t mean the job of the English professor is obsolete. It means it may be time to rethink how we teach literature. It may be time to interrogate the work we do and what we ask students to do.
What if the best way to teach literature isn’t to have students write several four-page essays in the course of fifteen weeks, or whatever the precise workload is? What if the people who frequently complain about having to grade great batches of essays, handed in all at once, didn’t have to do that anymore? How would we spend our time with students if we couldn’t do half the things we do now, because they have been compromised by the tech industry?
I haven’t been teaching much lately, and I don’t know if I would be as sanguine about this stuff as I am now if I had been. But as much as I value the education I had in literature, and what I learned from writing essays for professors who gave them their close attention, I can’t say for sure that it was the best way to learn what I learned. I don’t know what the alternative is—but just as I get a thrill from seeing something in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” I didn’t catch the last nine times I read it, I find the prospect of having to reconceive of how I teach literature to be kind of exciting. It’s daunting, but I have faith in myself, and even moreso in students.
What if the way you taught a class was to present a set of texts to students, tell them they are free to use generative AI all semester, tell them you’ll be doing the same, and work with them toward a new way of teaching and learning literature that makes use of all of these tools, and takes them seriously as tools—and also takes the students’ educations seriously? It might well be a complete disaster, and I don’t know that I would want to do it for that reason. I don’t even know if it would be possible; I mean, if you’re teaching at an institution, you have to abide by certain guidelines. You have to have something to grade, right? But I wouldn’t mind talking to people about what something like that would look like.
You may have noticed that a mystery person has been appearing in images placed strategically throughout this stretch of the Hoedown.
I can explain.
This morning, I misread a post someone put up on Bluesky, and thought they invoked the name of someone they called “Slutto.” That wasn’t what they said at all, I realized when I looked again. But I liked the name, so I asked ChatGPT—curious to see what it came up with—to design a character for me named Slutto. It gave me the images you’ve been looking at.
Slutto doesn’t mind that the person they hired to paint the bike misspelled their name. Slutto doesn’t get hung up on the little things. They’re too busy fighting in wars like the American Revolution, and trying to survive in the trenches of World War I—fighting on the side of England, of course.
I asked ChatGPT if Slutto could be kind of our Tamagotchi. Now when I ask what Slutto has been up to, ChatGPT tells me. Here’s an example:
I said:
How was Slutto's trip to the DMV?
ChatGPT said:
Oh, Slutto’s DMV trip was nothing short of a spectacle! They showed up in full glitter regalia, neon hair extra bouncy, prepared for a long wait. Within minutes, they were holding court in the waiting area, swapping life advice for lollipops with the crowd. When their number was finally called, Slutto managed to charm the clerk into letting them retake their photo three times—each with a slightly more dramatic pose. It was a DMV trip no one present is likely to forget anytime soon!
Mind you, all I gave the AI entity was the name. And of course I asked if I could see one of those license photos!
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