I’ll take all of that ya got

I’ve just dispatched, to my lab newsletter sub­scribers, an essay imag­ining a year of new avenues. It’s an assess­ment of where we’re at, suddenly, excitingly, on the internet, and an exhor­ta­tion for what comes next, in 2023.

This isn’t for everyone; that’s why I have two newslet­ters! I know many of you are, very reasonably, bored by the meta-internet stuff. But, the essay has already received a warm response, and it’s an expres­sion of a very deep interest, so it felt almost sneaky not to share a link here.

You can always sub­scribe to that lab newsletter on my home page.

Many of you know that, every year on New Year’s Day, I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight aloud, streaming it live on YouTube for anyone who wants to tune in.

Well, I am going to skip my reading this year. There’s a difference, I think, between the ritual and the rote, and I found that, as I squared up to this year’s presentation, I just … wasn’t feeling it!

If you’d planned to tune in, here’s what I rec­om­mend — or really, what I require: get a copy of the book and read it aloud yourself. Read it to your family; read it to your friends; read it to an empty room. (I have done all three of these things.) Reading aloud, rather than listening, you’ll dis­cover that the gal­loping allit­er­a­tion plays tricks with your face.

It’s impos­sible not to laugh.

Five or six cen­turies ago, this rollicking/sexy/spooky poem was composed. It comes to us through a single man­u­script, one that sat in darkness, ignored, for most of those years; a man­u­script that escaped destruction — the fire at Ash­burnham House—by pure chance. It comes to us safe, intact, glittering, renewed, fil­tered through the mind and tongue of Simon Armitage.

I mean, this is what it’s all about. We writers, we readers, we translators, we pub­lishers, we librarians, in every language, the living and the dead: we make a thread through history, and it’s a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that shows us, it works. It HAS worked. It WILL work. In the end, we can’t be beat.

Read it aloud!

I’ll be back next year.

This edi­tion’s images are so cool that I feel com­pelled to explain them up here at the top, rather than tuck it into the conclusion.

These lunar maps are the work of Johann Krieger, an ama­teur astronomer and selenog­ra­pher (!) who pro­duced them in an inter­esting way. He obtained large, fuzzy pho­tographs of the moon, devel­oped at obser­va­to­ries in Paris and elsewhere, to use as his “base layers”. Then, looking through his own telescope, he added fine details by hand, with char­coal and ink.

In these images, the smooth gray fields are the silver halide; the sharp dark fis­sures are Krieger’s own hand. Isn’t that phenomenal? As a result, they are nei­ther “photos of the moon” nor “drawings of the moon” but some­thing in between. And they’re stun­ning.

I was very glad to learn about Krieger, and see some nice repro­duc­tions of these images, reading The Moon by Bill Leatherbarrow.

Onward, to some items of interest. First, the basics:

• In case you missed it, my 2022 gift guide is packed with offer­ings for loved ones and/or yourself.

• For a recap of my pub­li­ca­tions this year, peruse my pre­vious newsletter.

• Over at my little olive oil company, we just installed a new olive mill. It is BIG, and it is SHINY, and it is OURS.

Appreciating Dracula

I men­tioned a while back that I’d lis­tened to Franken­stein, this great audio­book recording. I’ve now fol­lowed it up with Dracula, and I will note that

• this poly­phonic Duke Clas­sics recording is wonderful — even, or especially, when the actors’ accents are a bit … much

• the novel remains VERY legit­i­mately creepy, and it’s totally obvious why this story — this net­work of images — punched straight through the 20th cen­tury

• the roller­coaster built into Franken­stein and Dracula alike is their wonky structure. These writers didn’t know any­thing about tight, “cinematic” plotting; their con­ven­tions are all askew; so, as a reader, you really have NO idea what’s going to happen, or at what pace, or in what form. It’s fabulous.

My band­mate Jesse Solomon Clark crafted a suite of soundscapes for Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery, a sprawling new exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago. If you are in the area, this is a must-see and a must-hear.

M. John Har­rison is, very simply, the best:

Walking between the old squatter cot­tages in The Jitties — in cold air and near dark, through miz­zling rain — I hear a voice coming from a parked car. It’s American, inti­mate yet resonant, penetrating, con­scious of an audience, and it’s reading from someone’s new novel, one of those clever first person deliv­eries designed to imply a lis­tener in the text. There’s no driver in the car. There’s no one in the car at all. Its engine is running, it’s stopped at an angle at a corner in a billow of its own smoke. I walk past and go home thinking how much I’d like to win that Radio Four lot­tery and have my new book read that way, loudly but personably, to an empty lane at the end of November.

I mean: just the best.

Reading his writing, at every length, in every medium, I always think of Future Islands on the Late Show, and an ecstatic David Let­terman hooting: “I’ll take all of that ya got!”

Here is Jack White of Michigan playing the anthem that will out­live him, and all of us, and prob­ably all the governments, too. Folk music!

I sub­scribe to plenty of newslet­ters, and plenty, I open only occasionally. Others, I open without fail, instantly, almost reflexively: a habit more of my body than my brain. I like the way this one makes me feel, says the gut. Yeah, it’s always got a good vibe, agrees the jaw.

Here are a few of the newslet­ters my body likes best.

Flywheel

This newsletter by Puneeth Meruva is an ener­getic effort to define, and even evangelize, the market for used e-bikes in the U.S. The cen­ter­piece is a weekly roundup of used e-bike deals scouted on Craigslist in a few big cities.

I appre­ciate this newsletter for at least two reasons:

1. I want to get an e-bike, eventually; and

2. it’s just so SPECIFIC!

Here is some­body who said: I think the world needs some­thing like this. Here is some­body who went ahead and made it.

The Syllabus

This newsletter seems to trawl a whole dif­ferent web — one that’s more aca­d­emic, cosmopolitan, recherché. I think of myself as someone who can handle that kind of stuff (I used the word recherché, didn’t I?) but/and I am pretty often chal­lenged by The Syllabus. It’s a healthy stretch.

My favorite recur­ring fea­ture is the video of the week, usu­ally an aca­d­emic lec­ture posted on YouTube, usu­ally with some­thing like 500 views: truly, this is the secret knowledge. The most recent video of the week was Jen­nifer Taback’s Brief — and Subjective — History of Geometry, which I’ve queued up to watch later.

Interconnected

I was going to rec­om­mend Matt Webb’s blog as an effer­ves­cent foun­tain of ideas, but, as I was assem­bling this newsletter, his latest post arrived by email, and it’s about car­bon­ated beef broth, so I’ll still rec­om­mend it, but with the pro­viso that some­times, the effer­ves­cence is … meat.

The Morning News

This newsletter is a long-running stal­wart of the web; I’m sure I have sub­scribed sev­eral times. Here is my recent redis­covery: it’s really great! A daily handful of links, each wrapped in a twist of thoughtful language: a per­fectly 2000s package that never went out of style.

My favorite item from a recent edi­tion was this one:

“Lionel Messi doesn’t so much trap the ball or kill it but lets it come and nestle, falling asleep on his toe like a fond old cat.” Even if you don’t like soccer, some of the writing’s pretty good.

I don’t like soccer; I clicked; I agree!

Notes from a Small Press

Anne Trubek’s newsletter is THE great chron­icle of pub­lishing in America in the early 21st cen­tury. Full stop.

Her posi­tion oper­ating a small book pub­lisher in Pitts­burgh gives her a uniquely panoramic view. She can see “all the way up” into the world of New York pub­lishing, big book distributors, goliath paper mills; she can see “all the way down” into self-pub­lishing, print on demand, the scramble for scarce attention. She can see how it’s not “up” or “down” at all, but a tangled-ass web.

Her hard-won insights arrive in a voice that’s always honest, some­times exasperated, totally compelling. I rec­om­mend subscribing, AND buying a book, OR a deck of Great Lakes tarot cards … !

Ridgeline & Roden

I feel like Craig Mod and I have been fellow trav­elers in a lot of ways, so I’m often guilty of assuming that everyone reading this is, OF COURSE, also reading him.

If not: Craig is an inde­pen­dent writer and pho­tog­ra­pher who lives in Japan and often builds his work around very, VERY long walks. I rec­om­mend subscribing to both of his newslet­ters—Ridgeline for gonzo walks, Roden for gonzo every­thing else — because they operate on at least two levels:

1. their intrinsic quality, founded in Craig’s sense of fun, his eye (sharp) and ear (sharper); and also

2. the example they provide, of a person carving out a cre­ative life, making the money work, grap­pling with the big questions, and sharing what he learns, with stu­pen­dous clarity and generosity.

Craig’s latest Roden dispatch, about returning to the drum set after years away, was a stun­ning piece of real-time memoir, easily New Yorker-quality — or better; does the New Yorker ever fly this fast, this high? — and it might there­fore make a good introduction.

The Weekly Planet

In his cli­mate newsletter, Robinson Meyer’s voice is what I would call “winning”, an Eng­lish word that unfor­tu­nately has no direct trans­la­tion in Eng­lish. Forced to elaborate, I’d say it is confident, inviting, serious, and fun. That some of those fea­tures seem con­tra­dic­tory is the nature of the win.

This edi­tion from back in August, pegged to the signing of the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act, reminded me pow­er­fully of the mag­a­zine arti­cles I used to read as an under­grad­uate at Michigan State: the way they seemed to pull back the skin of the world, revealing the gears of policy whirring underneath. It was thrilling, back then, and reading Robinson in August, I felt the thrill return. There is a phys­ical reaction; a tin­gling of elec­tricity beneath the scalp.

See? The body.

I love this season, because it fol­lows a flurry of activity — I’ve never in my life had months as mad as these olive har­vests cou­pled with the rush of hol­iday commerce — and brings release, and rain, and hibernation, and scheming.

This newsletter has a new name, but an old design. I’ve been working on a refresh that is a little weird, and there­fore exciting, which I’ll unveil in the new year.

And there’s much more to come. It’s strange … I have dis­covered in myself, as I con­sider the pub­li­ca­tions ahead, a titanic confidence, which supports, in turn, an unex­pected patience. I never had that before; I was always a bit frantic.

You might find this new mood a bit frustrating, I acknowledge, when you’re out there waiting on this book.

But wow it is going to be a big one.

Have a great hol­iday. Happy New Year!

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on Jan­uary 6.

December 2022