The conservation of
angular momentum

At this point in a book’s publication, the pieces come together and the pace accelerates — like a figure skater pulling their arms close to spin faster.

Nothing I like better than a gnomic screenshot. Here are a few, cap­tured in recent days, of works-in-progress and work dis­carded (and I won’t tell you which is which).

Behold, the view from the cockpit: not only text, but also letterforms, elevations, astrometrics … total mul­ti­media overreach. This is exactly the kind of work I have always wanted to be doing.

For the novel arriving in June 2024, I am racing to finish a map … 

 … and a lan­guage … 

 … and a sky … 

 … and a manuscript:

RIP, contango.

Meanwhile, FSG’s art department — objectively the best in the business — is cooking up a cover. What a dream.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in October 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

A new haunt

Here is the beau­tiful new edi­tion of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India! The inte­rior is unchanged from the edi­tion I have pre­vi­ously recommended, but the binding is new (and gorgeous) and, most importantly, the logis­tics have been simplified. Thanks to Watkins Publishing, readers in the U.S. and U.K. can obtain a copy without ship­ping it halfway around the world.

And look at this great blurb 😉

If you missed my breath­less rec the first time around, you can find it here. Take a peek at the excerpts in that newsletter, and I think you’ll quickly under­stand this book’s pow­erful appeal.

Nearly perfect non-fiction

Another book with a new edi­tion is Ametora: How Japan Saved Amer­ican Style, by W. David Marx, which remains one of my favorite non-fic­tion books of the past … decade? Longer?? I think it’s nearly per­fect.

You might have to be a little bit inter­ested in fashion to find your way into this one … but, I don’t know! It’s also about media, in a very deep way — lots of magazines, gonzo pho­tog­raphy expedi­tions — and commerce, too. Through the super spe­cific lens of men’s fashion, the book dra­ma­tizes the ping-ponging process of global cul­tural production, a process that touches everything: not only clothes, but movies, music, video games … FOOD, of course … manufacturing … I mean, really. Everything.

Here is Ametora’s place on my shelf:

Sitting side by side

Here is a beau­tiful exchange recounted by Mark Slutsky, who, for many years, main­tained Sad YouTube, a mon­u­ment to the moving, melan­choly com­ments on music videos.

Recently, Mark received a mes­sage out of the blue, asking if he had any details about a par­tic­ular com­ment he’d published. The story of what hap­pened next is wonderful, and it will remind you how little it takes to refor­mu­late a person’s theory of themself.

Why are YouTube com­ments such rich terrain? Here’s my theory. Watching a YouTube video, per­haps reading the com­ments at the same time, the feeling is “sitting side by side, facing the same direction”—as in a theater, or, better yet, a moving car.

Con­trast that with the feeling of “facing each other straight-on”: the death stare of social media.

YouTube’s users aren’t stuck looking at each other; rather, they look at this other thing (per­haps a scratchy dub of a music video that played on MTV in 1987) together. Per­haps that arrange­ment sug­gests different, and gen­er­ally better, ways of speaking online.

Here, Mark Slutsky — HIM AGAIN? — gives a name to a feeling I know very well. I sus­pect you do, too:

I’ve written about good-handedness before, the imme­diate feeling on reading the first lines of a book, or starting a movie, etc, that you are in good hands.

I’d say good-handedness is among the top 2-3 big things I try to achieve in my fic­tion (and I’m sure I neglect 2-3 others in its pursuit). As a reader, I have become more sen­si­tive to its lack; in the last year, there are many novels I’ve put down because their opening pages simply were not good-handed.

In my pre­vious newsletter, I asked for links to great exam­ples of the “writer’s web­site” genre. Here are some of the nom­i­na­tions I received:

• Greg Egan (delightfully dense)
• Austin Kleon (truly a pro)
• Jasper Fforde (sort of like a giant home screen)
• Maggie Stiefvater (look at that COLOR)
• Luke Healy (nice and simple)
• James Somers (I am a longtime reader and fan)

That’s a great list, but/and a short one. There ought to be more!

Erin McKean:

Green­landic mythology is not for the squeamish. “The qivittoq (the moun­tain wanderer) is a person who has left their vil­lage or set­tle­ment in shame and wan­dered into the moun­tains. For a qivittoq to gain mag­ical powers, the person has to freeze to death over the course of five days.”

Here is an amazing name for a bureau­cratic divison: the Celestial Ref­er­ence Frame Department.

Their work is amazing, too: nothing less than the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of time and space in a system that works everywhere, all the time.

Using black holes.

Here is Run­ning Up That Hill, the Kate Bush classic, performed in Middle English. At the risk of being an absolutely titanic dork: I think this is SO COOL, trans­la­tion and per­for­mance alike.

I love hearing Middle English — the “foreign” lan­guage lurking inside our own.

Here is Matt Webb writing about all the ways, over time, that humans have sought to keep imposter spirits away.

The phys­ical world was ghostly once; or seemed so; and then a sequence of pow­erful global processes (e.g. the Indus­trial Revolution) dis­en­chanted it. Maybe. You can read books about this.

Either way, I’d argue the internet remains ghostly. Per­haps this is where enchant­ment found refuge, and built a new (scary) kingdom.

Per­haps (I’m really freestyling here) the internet is still, on its own terms, pre-modern. Its disenchant­ment is yet to come, and when that occurs, the ghosts will flee.

In the meantime!

Here is a painting by Remedios Varo, who lived through a wild swath of the 20th century:

What an image! I’ll confess: Instagram’s algo­rithm deliv­ered this painting to me. A selec­tion good enough to bal­ance many sins.

Sovereignty

The writer and singer Lorde abjures social media; instead, she sends an email newsletter, though that term does it a disservice. When a mes­sage arrives, it feels like (and this requires real pre­ci­sion and control) you have just received a long rambly email from a (very smart, hugely successful) friend.

Lorde’s mes­sages do not belong to the internet of Twitter or Instagram; they don’t belong to the internet of Substack, either. You can’t link to them! So they aren’t even part of the World Wide Web. They con­sti­tute their own spe­cial thing.

They are sovereign!

No pun intended — it’s a word I keep coming back to, thinking about com­puters in the 21st century — but, yes, it’s per­fect that Lorde is the one showing us what dig­ital sov­er­eignty can look and feel like.

Per­haps it’s frus­trating to hear about this pur­port­edly inter­esting com­mu­ni­ca­tion without being able to see it — but that’s the essence of the thing. If you’re curious, go use the stark signup form. The mes­sages you’ll receive (unpredictably) (eventually) have the vibe of printed zines, or John Darnielle’s tapes in the mail.

Con­text is key: the stark signup, the sin­gular design. The same text and pic­tures exactly, deliv­ered in a generic Substack-ish wrapper, would be stripped of their magic.

Disenchanted!

Of course: you might have to be Lorde to make this work. You would cer­tainly ben­efit from a pre-existing legion of sen­si­tive, curious fans. It does not seem to be a replic­able model … UNTIL you realize the model isn’t this spe­cific approach. The model is having a spe­cific approach, tuned to a par­tic­ular person, a par­tic­ular group of fans, or readers, or whatever.

Anyway! I had this in my notes because I wanted to share a line from a recent mes­sage.

Lorde’s newsletter is so point­edly sequestered that it feels weird to quote it, and I wouldn’t do so at length, but I think I can repro­duce a few sentences:

I go online and look at everyone. Beau­tiful people sing to me. Everyone’s gotten really good at the same thing. I look at arched backs and wet flower mouths, the right bag, the right sunglasses. I wonder if it feels as good as it looks, it’s been so long since I chose the best pic­ture from a hundred, lined it up like pulling an arrow taut in a bow, and let it go.

“Everyone’s gotten really good at the same thing”: as sharp as a song lyric (no surprise) and as good a scalpel for this moment, the meat of the 2020s, as you’ll find.

“Everyone’s gotten really good at the same thing”: which means it’s time to get good at some­thing else.

No public domain art in this edi­tion, because it was so stuffed with other imagery.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter around October 28.

October 2023