And Your Little Dog Too

Even though I work in a bookshop I almost never buy new books. Okay, sometimes. I did buy the new Rainbow Rowell last week but only because it was signed and she has such a nice signature. And I didn't pay actual money for it. Just magic money I got for free because I have some of that.

In fact, thinking about it, I doubt I've spent real, out of my pocket, in cash or by card, out of my bank account money on a book for a decade. Maybe two decades. And even before I worked in a bookshop I very, very rarely went into one and if I did even more rarely came out with a book.

All my life, most of my book-buying has been done on the cheap or for free. I've tended to avoid used book stores, or second-hand bookshops as they were called when I was growing up, almost as much as shops selling new books because the owners are often unpredictable and the prices wildly inflated.

I've always preferred to get my books from charity shops (Thrift stores for the American reader.) or car boot sales (Yard sales I guess is the US equivalent although it's not quite the same thing.) Remaindered bookstores used to be an option, too, but you don't see those so much any more. 

On the other hand, quite a few churches seem to have set aside an area where books donated by parishioners are sold for very small sums, so that's a relatively new source for me. Go in for the architecture, come out with a book. Churches don't have to be all about God. Or about God at all, apparently.

Those are all good sources of cheap books but why pay even that much when you could pay nothing at all? I'm drowning in free books at work but even if I wasn't a surprising number of the old, red telephone boxes have been re-purposed into repositories for given-away books looking to be re-homed. You're supposed to leave a book and take one although I don't think anyone's keeping track.

Even before I worked in the trade and when phone boxes still had phones in them, I used to get books for nothing. It's surprisingly easy to do. In the 'eighties, a friend of mine took over the editing of a small semi-pro comiczine. Either it already had a column reviewing Sci Fi and Fantasy books or he instituted one, I can't remember which, but he started getting review copies from publishers and pretty soon he had far more than he could cope with so he farmed them out to anyone willing to write reviews. If you contact publishers even now and tell them you write for some website or book blog they'll most likely send you stuff. They seem almost desperate to give the things away, sometimes.

I read a lot of books that way, books I would never have read otherwise and that's the big benefit of buying books the way I do. If you buy new you'll most likely get the latest by authors you like or those who've been recommended to you, either by friends or reviewers or - if they're doing their job properly - booksellers in the stores where you shop.

You can browse, of course, but because so very, very many books are published, even when they're still in print, outside of the obvious, you'll be lucky to run into a copy of any particular one on the shelves of your local bookstore Even in a big bookshop the range is limited to What's New, What Still Sells and Classics. Books are an iceberg. Most of them are invisible, forgotten, out of print, gone. 

Anyone who's hung around here for a while will likely know I choose chance over certainty. I prefer random drops in games to points systems where you save up and buy what you want. By and large, I'm less bothered about missing out on things I know I'd enjoy than I am about missing out on things I don't know about. 

If you look up to the right, you'll see the Inventory Full Mission Statement, which I'll wager many regular readers have never noticed. After all, it's barely readable in lilac on deep seagreen blue because I also cherish obfuscation.

I came up with it all the way back in 2011, when I named the blog Inventory Full and it sums up what I believe to be the Explorer's raison d'etre: Opening boxes, looking inside. I meant it almost literally back then but over the years it's expanded to become a mantra. 

It's why this blog has come to focus more on endless First Impressions of games I'll never stick with and long reviews of demos for games I'll never play in full. It's why the music posts are scattershot collections of apparently unrelated genres and artists. It's why so many posts start out seeming to be about one thing then end up being about something else entirely.

This is one of those posts. It starts off looking like it's going to be about books then it turns towards blogging before finally heading to where it was always meant to end up: Marilyn Monroe, her dog and Chappell Roan.

Marilyn Monroe is eternal. I was four years old when she died and by the time I was at college she'd been dead for almost twenty years but she was still on my wall along with Che Guevara and Humphrey Bogart, who were dead as well. Forty more years and I don't know if students still put up posters of Che and Bogie but I doubt it. Marilyn, though, shines ever on.

Because she's never far from my mind, when I saw a book in a charity shop last week with the entrancing title "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe" I bought it immediately. The dog, who is real, was called Maf as shorthand for Mafia Honey, which is what Marilyn named him after Frank Sinatra gave him to her and you may read into that what you will.

I recommend the book, which is still in print. The author is Andrew O'Hagan and here's an interview he gave about it to The Paris Review in in 2011  which I also recommend. It's a lot shorter so there's no excuse for skipping it.

At this point you might imagine I would be about to review the book but I'm not. I will say it's funny, smart and over-written to the point of hilarity. I very much enjoyed it for what it is but even more for what it told me.

The author very clearly did a lot of research, something I often find off-putting but which, in this case, I found fascinating, Maf, like all dogs, reads minds and therefore knows all that everyone he's spent time with knows, meaning the book is stuffed full as a sausage with quotes, anecdotes and facts, many of which I did not already know.

Of all the new stories, the most fascinating to me was the tale of the Monroe Six. These were half a dozen adolescents in New York in the mid 'fifties, who took to following Marilyn everywhere she went. Rather than calling the police or going to the courts for a restraining order, Marilyn, perceiving they were different from the ordinary order of celebrity seeker, welcomed their attention. 

At the time, Marilyn was working on her stagecraft and also attending numerous celebrity events that had her traveling about the city, providing the Six with numerous opportunities to meet her. According to an excellent post at The Marilyn Report, referencing another piece in the French edition of Vanity Fair (Issue #105 if you want the original. In French, naturally.) she "called them by their first names whenever she met them, asked about their lives, and always agreed to pose with them". 

Not only was she gracious, she was unguarded to a degree that's hard to imagine now. Marilyn already knew from experience how grasping and greedy for attention fans could be and yet she not only made time to chat to the six teenagers and pose with them for pictures, she even "invited them upstairs for a soda in the apartment she had just rented with her new boyfriend, the novelist Arthur Miller."

If you need any proof that the world was very different then, there it is. I was struck most forcibly by the way things have changed since then by reports I was seeing on my news feeds at the same time I was reading about the Monroe Six concerning some things this summer's blow-up star, Chappel Roan, was saying on Tik Tok about "creepy behavior" by so-called fans.

It's worth reading - or better yet listening to - Chappell's rant in full. It's not even a rant. It's a considered, thoughtful, argument. She is clearly both right in calling out the kind of intrusive behavior she's concerned about and justified in highlighting the extent to which it has become - or at least is becoming - normalised.

Whether she'll be able to hold back that tide is another question. It'd be nice to think people would listen and maybe re-assess their attitude but then if they could do that they'd probably not be a problem in the first place. 

Chappel later expanded on her reasoning, saying "I want to love my life, be outside, giggle with my friends, go to the movie theater, feel safe, and do all the things every single person deserves to do."

It's hard to argue that's not a valid ambition. The chances of her being able to achieve it in a world where millions of people know her name and her face seem slim but I hope she can.

Marilyn Monroe in 1955 was both more famous than Chappell Roan and more recognizeable. It's quite amazing she was able to go about with such freedom even then although it's probably fair to say that New Yorkers might have been too cool to freak over a movie star. 

One advantage she had was that everyone who knew her knew her from how she appeared on film. When she would go out and about she'd wear a headscarf to cover her famous blonde hair and apparently that way she could walk right on by without being spotted. 

Marilyn was finessing the rift between public and private to her advantage. Chappell Roan only wishes she could: "When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press…I am at work. Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out." She looks as different - more different - in her regular make-up and clothes from her stage persona than Marilyn did in her headscarf but it's not helping. 

If it was the 1950s, Chappell could walk down your street and you'd never know it. But it isn't the 1950s. Her off-stage look is as well-documented as her on. She's in her street clothes in the videos she's made saying the things she's said. If you saw her, you'd know her.

Fame isn't a light you can switch on and off but then neither is recognizing a famous person in the street a license to behave like an ass, let alone like a sex-criminal. The Monroe Six figured that out and they were just fans in their teens. So should anyone else who isn't a sociopath. 

 

*** Some Notes On AI Used In This Post ***

The only AI here is the image at the head of the post. It was produced at NightCafe using Starlight XL. The prompt was "Marilyn Monroe's (small, white, fluffy dog 1.5), Mafia Honey, with Marilyn beside a swimming pool. (1950s line drawing 1.5)". All sliders were pushed right back to try and maximize adherence to the prompt. The numbers in brackets are supposed to give added importance to those elements although I may not have parsed that part properly.

Having obtained the result I wanted after several less than successful attempts with other image genearators and settings, I then ran it through the upscaler at NightCafe to increase the resolution. The original image had a second, weird-looking dog on the tiles behind Marilyn so, before I upscaled it, I used NightCafe's Selective Edit function to remove it. 

I was under the impression that all the upscaler did was enhance the definition but apparently it also makes improvements of its own choosing because it put the second dog back, only this time much better rendered and looking like an actual dog. Still, I didn't want Marilyn to have two Mafs so I downloaded the upscaled image and took it to SnapEdit, where I removed the excess canine. Image enhancement there also uses AI, by the way, so this is one AI correcting another AI's mistakes.

While I was looking at the enlarged image there, I realised Marilyn had grown an extra knee. It's easy to miss these things. I used the AI image remover to clean that up and then I noticed another flesh-toned patch behind her actual knee. That could have been her hand - it would have been a natural position for it to be in - only it might have meant her arm was a bit longer than you'd expect so for safety's sake I took that out as well.

Two dogs and three knees.

With all that done, I was reasonably happy with the outcome. It's not really a 1950s line drawing as I imagined it, more like a magazine illustration, but that's close enough. The woman doesn't look exactly like Marilyn either but I'm pretty sure if you asked ten people who it was supposed to be, eight or nine of them would say Marilyn Monroe.

At this point you might well be wondering why I bothered with AI at all. Couldn't I just have used an actual photograph of Marilyn and/or her dog? There are enough of them online after all. The reason for that is a slight nervousness over copyright. I usually don't worry about it  because the kind of images I tend to use are mostly of things or people who I wouldn't expect to draw much attention or for the owners to be much interested if they knew.

Photos of Marilyn Monroe are a different prospect altogether, though. People get very touchy about that sort of thing. I did at one point have a couple of photos taken from the session shown in the YouTube video but I took them out for that reason and put the video in instead because as I understand it, Google have arrangements in place to cover copyright issues on YouTube, provided all of their protocols are followed correctly. Since I use Blogger's internal Add Video From YouTube function I think I should be good there. They are both owned by Google after all.

The advantage of using an AI image is that, as Wilhelm pointed out in a reply to my comment on his excellent rant about AI yesterday, (Hi, Wilhelm and congrats for making this far down the post if you did! Perseverance rewarded!) is that under current law, at least in the USA, AI images aren't copyrightable and in most jurisdictions the whole legal position is utterly unclear and likely to remain so for a very long time. At the very least, it's safer to use an AI image than to "borrow" an existing one off the internet.

I would also say at this point that a good deal of the criticism about the generic look and feel of AI images, something I've been guilty of endorsing more than once, does tend to reflect a lack of interest in doing the necessary work to improve those images and make them better. AI is just another creative tool. You still have to do the real work. 

I'm not saying the picture at the top is anything special but it is pretty much what I was imagining when I thought of the idea and it's only good enough for me to be reasonably satisfied with it because I spent half an hour working on it. We are very much not yet at the "Press a button and get what you asked for" stage and maybe we never will be but to write the whole thing off as a failure because of that is like throwing away your brushes because you can't be bothered to mix the paint.

Or something.