The feeling of something waiting there for you

The other night, I pointed my tele­scope at Venus, which is cur­rently shining at peak brightness. (In a few days, it will reach its “greatest illu­mi­nated extent”—a ter­rific phrase.) Peering at the planet, I noticed that it seemed … rather … beany.

Beany? Yes, beany. Or maybe: like a bleary football.

I felt that I rec­og­nized this beany-bleary shape, and I thought: is it possible? Does Venus have PHASES?

Of course it does. Once you think about the way the planet moves through space, rel­a­tive to the sun and our viewing posi­tion here on Earth, it becomes obvious. I had never, in fact, thought about it. Galileo did: his obser­va­tions of Venus pro­vided impor­tant evi­dence for, you know, his whole deal.

VENUS HAS PHASES! I prob­ably should have known this already. Oh well — I know lots of other things. I’m glad, in a way, to have come by the knowl­edge honestly, through back­yard observation.

My simple tele­scope remains a pow­erful injector of cosmic aware­ness into my life. Venus is really out there, a three-dimensional object lit by the sun! It’s my opinion that humanity still doesn’t know what to do with this infor­ma­tion. It’s my opinion that astronomy’s shocking rev­e­la­tions of scale, planets to stars to galaxies, remain mostly undigested.

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 July 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

Here’s the shape of my work life lately:

• 50% writing, which is, in turn, 90% novel revision and 10% shorter stuff: stand-alone stories and the occasional piece of quasi-journalism
• 30% olive oil business
• 20% exploration, most of which feeds back into writing in some indirect way, at some unpredictable point. In the past, this exploration has tended toward the technical, but lately, I have been renovating my long-abandoned drawing habit. Of course, I also read a lot!

What’s notable, perhaps, is that these frac­tions don’t apply to days or usu­ally even to weeks; rather, it’s the year that gets por­tioned out. My life has become sea­sonal in a way I couldn’t have imag­ined a decade ago. October, November, and December are con­sumed entirely by the demands of olive oil pro­duc­tion and sales. Meanwhile, writing is granted its own stretches of unin­ter­rupted time, such as: right now.

This arrange­ment feels old-fashioned to me, in a good way. I’ve come to appre­ciate the “click” of shifting modes: set­ting one kind of work (maybe: one kind of life) aside for a few months, knowing I’ll return to it.

Ode to the Quick Computer

I’ve had an adven­ture in the archives.

Sev­eral years ago, I read a post by the former Apple exec­u­tive Jean-Louis Gassée in which he recalled the company’s in-house magazine, circa the 1980s, reserving par­tic­ular rev­er­ence for a half-remembered issue that fea­tured a poem by Ray Brad­bury. For Jean-Louis Gassée, the poem’s title was indelible: Ode to the Quick Computer!

Well, I found these coor­di­nates in aes­thetic space fairly tantalizing — so much so that I:

1. cast a net of own own, confirming that this poem exists nowhere online;
2. set up an eBay alert for Apple: The Personal Computer Magazine; and
3. corresponded with sellers to determine whether the issue(s) for sale contained this poem.

For years, the alerts were spo­radic and the replies all “sorry, I don’t see it in the table of contents”. Then, in late 2022: a hit! I pounced. The issues arrived; they are fun documents, totally of an era.

In the top­most issue, I found the poem, and, I regret to inform you: it is bad.

It’s also fairly long. Here, I’ll put it behind an expand­able panel:

I would deny
The right of those who terrify
And use as constant tools of trade:
"Aren't you afraid? Aren't you afraid?"
Of what? I ask.
"Computers! Aren't they monsters?
Aren't they bad?"

That makes me mad, that maddens me.
The fools! Good Grief, they're blind.
Refuse to find and see
What damned computers mean to me!
Their digitals which perk and hide
Inside electric circuitries,
Provide with ease such medicines
As we most need, and find within:
They make a digitalis!
Good!!
Which sums the substance in the blood
And quickens odd-shaped humanoid
To fill my void with swift replies.

Where boredom once let ennui in,
Computer says: take heart -- begin!
Much more than brute machine I'll be,
And constantly your whims attend,
Show ends where no ends were before;
And, more! Show starts as well as finishes.

Your Will diminishes at thought of sums?
So! quick computer this way comes!
As out in mystery of Space
We race a similar mystery: Us,
And need the plus and minor factors
To teach reactors how to stride
And fill lost human souls with pride;

And all by, quickly, under breath
Do Death in which such computations
As would force-feed nations of dreams;
Build schemes on air that ratify
Grand architectures in the sky --
Whole cities beehived in one ship
To solve a trip and save a Race,
And multiply Man's hopes in Space.

So microprocessor takes breath and air
And manufactures rare and simple words
That aviaries are to boys like birds
To fount them high in July rockets
With seedpod futures in their pockets;
Decisions bought from indecisions,
Collisions of free-fall thought fused one,
The fun of mathematics nimble
In thimbles plug-tamped in your ear
And cheerful wisdom played like drum
On listening learner's tympanum.

We are, at last, a traveling feast,
With yeast that spawns electrically,
And teaches children what they'll be
If with tape libraries they keep
And wake the processors from sleep.
To ask us questions, then stand mum
As proper answers thrive and sum.
So, look!
This is a book!
But no page turns.
Only beneath the metal burns
Such stuffs as all new times are made of.
So, Cowards, what are you afraid of?

I’m glad to have com­pleted this side quest. What’s dis­ap­pointing is that the poem doesn’t cap­ture any real “computer feeling” at all — cer­tainly not the kind that Apple com­puters inspired in the early 1980s. Ray Brad­bury’s ode is as abstracted, as rote, as the crit­i­cism he dismisses. Bummer!

I can imagine a much better poem with the same (lovely) title.

Maybe Craig Mod already wrote it.

You're in the right place

These days, when I’m inves­ti­gating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View Count Schol­arly YouTube, which is of course the ver­sion of YouTube you get when you append the term “lec­ture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety min­utes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.

As an example, I’ve just watched the first two lec­tures in this series from Jen­nifer Roberts: a com­pre­hen­sive con­sid­er­a­tion of printing’s role in art. As is often the case when I dip into schol­arly material, I have found myself mildly chal­lenged by her style — and so what? Does every bit of infor­ma­tion and provo­ca­tion that enters your brain have to fit its con­tours exactly, Sloan? Surely not. I sus­pect it’s pre­cisely the fric­tion of mis­match that pro­duces Actu­ally New Ideas, rather than the com­fort­able con­fir­ma­tion of ideas you already sorta had.

In this lec­ture series, Jen­nifer Roberts offers one dizzying, desta­bi­lizing reframing of printing after another — a new det­o­na­tion every two min­utes or so, boom boom boom. Printing as an event that is fun­da­men­tally secret, unseeable: you can only inspect the aftermath. Prints as “stains on one surface, attesting to damage done to another”! The Sudarium of Saint Veronica as an impor­tant early print! (Printing with the blood of a god!! See? That on its own is worth the price of admission.)

I should men­tion that these lec­tures are also rich with illus­tra­tive media. Just to choose one beau­tiful example, if you’ve never seen how mar­bling is done, as for a book’s endpapers … you gotta see this!

You know, there’s a role to play for those of us who aren’t formal mem­bers of Low View Count Schol­arly YouTube but nev­er­the­less grasp the value of the dizzying and the desta­bi­lizing. We can be translators, popularizers, metabolizers … or even just thieves: laying hands on a strange, glit­tering idea and making a break for it, with the boulder of thought tum­bling heavy behind us.

Jen­nifer Roberts main­tains perhaps the best account on Instagram, a graphic cornucopia. (I linked to this post in a pre­vious edition. Talk about dizzying and desta­bi­lizing — this image, and the story behind it, turns every­thing upside-down and inside-out. What’s analog? What’s digital? What is a picture, even?!)

After fol­lowing her there for a while, I thought: maybe I should see what her schol­arly work is all about. That led to a YouTube search, which led to the series linked above. Lucky me!

I liked this list of the greatest tech books of all time, and not only because my publisher claims the #1 and #3 posi­tions.

Dan Bouk has con­vinced me that the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives ought to have more mem­bers than 435: that its frozen size is, at this point, actively undemocratic. In his latest newsletter, he con­nects to a few thinkers making the same argument and con­siders a few inter­esting numbers.

If you want to really dig into this question, Dan’s com­pre­hen­sive report, titled House Arrest, is the place to start and prob­ably also the place to finish. He frames the (rather arcane) system for allo­cating House seats as an algorithm, which is both intel­lec­tu­ally useful and rhetor­i­cally clever, because here in the 2020s, just about every­body under­stands that they need to watch their algo­rithms closely.

The mafia might have orig­i­nated in the citrus busi­ness of 1800s Sicily:

The main hypoth­esis is that the growth and con­sol­i­da­tion of the Sicilian mafia is strongly asso­ci­ated with an exoge­nous shock in the demand for lemons after 1800, driven by James Lind’s dis­covery on the effec­tive use of citrus fruits in curing scurvy.

When I read this, I thought, aha, so the famous sym­bolism of citrus in the God­fa­ther movies — when an orange appears in the frame, death is close on its heels — has a deeper meaning. How clever! But … this turns out to have been a coincidence? All the sources I can find indi­cate that oranges took on this antic­i­pa­tory visual role simply because they were around, and colorful. Buuut I’m not quite ready to con­cede the pos­si­bility yet.

From lemons and oranges to cocaine and heroin — we were better off with the mafia of the 1800s!

Here is a font engi­neered expressly for scholars of medieval literature. It’s a truly cool, thoughtful project; go play with all the options!

Did you ever wonder where the terms “tem­per­a­ture” and “degrees” came from? Well, I didn’t either, but/and now I’m glad to know:

According to Galenic medicine, the ref­er­ence point for a tem­perate state — the “tem­per­a­ture”—was the body’s healthy bal­ance between four Galenic “degrees” of both hot and cold either side of it. When we talk about tem­per­a­ture today, we thus still use the Galenic vocabulary.

I found that nugget embedded in the wild his­tory of the steam engine.

The Ani­ma­tion Obsessive’s recounting of the making of The Last Unicorn is a cap­ti­vating tale: of com­mer­cial calculation … of art-making … of finding an audi­ence over time … and espe­cially of trans­la­tion and mutation, which you know I love.

I think sto­ries of this kind are essential, because they cap­ture the real uncer­tainty of cre­ative work. And, I have to confess, I like this par­tic­ular story because there’s no pre­sump­tive auteur, no tyrant artist. It’s more like a chain of committees, each making their own mistakes, adding their own genius.

The arsenal

It’s been too long since I last rec­om­mended Writing Tools, the indis­pens­able arsenal of tech­nique from Roy Peter Clark.

Books about the craft of writing are tricky. I think most of them are fine; not worse than that, but also not better. Writing Tools is an exception, and it is per­fectly titled, because its offer­ings are exactly that graspable. You can put them to work immediately.

And, though this book’s suc­cess has now deliv­ered it to writers of every kind, in every niche, Roy’s orig­inal audi­ence was journalists, which means his advice is deeply practical, with a refreshing sense of, “What can I do today — right now — to make my writing better?”

There are tech­niques in this book that I use every day — right now — to make my writing better, and anyone who has talked to me about craft for five min­utes or more has heard me invoke one of Roy’s ideas.

Zelda and the infrastructural sublime

I was delighted to read an advance copy of Deb Chachra’s forth­coming book, How Infra­struc­ture Works. I’ve been fol­lowing Deb for many years, and it’s bracing to encounter not only her wide-ranging eru­di­tion but also her real-world explo­rations crys­tal­lized on these pages. The book arrives in October; you’ll find my blurb over here.

I’d just fin­ished reading How Infra­struc­ture Works when I booted up The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the new Nin­tendo game that you have almost cer­tainly heard about. (Just in case you haven’t: this is a video game of adven­ture and explo­ration set in a vast, painterly out­door world that con­sis­tently rewards the simple act of snooping around.)

While playing, I jotted this note, which I’m not sure I can improve upon with “newsletter prose”, so I’ll just present it raw:

The feeling of a game like Zelda

The gen­erosity of it!

It gives and gives

The sense of capacity and power

(We have to acknowl­edge the infan­tiliza­tion too. Hard things are easy in this game. Climbing and building and traveling, etc.)

The feeling of “some­thing waiting there for you”

The breath­taking knowl­edge that people made this for you

But that’s the real world too! Every single thing, every big infra­struc­tural system, was authored by people. Who are just as anony­mous in their way as Zelda’s many creators. We can acknowl­edge and praise the geniuses at Nin­tendo … can’t we acknowl­edge and praise these other groups?

The infan­tiliza­tion, also, of infrastructure? Hmm, maybe it’s not so bad

Zelda and the infra­struc­tural sublime!!

The long 2010s

I love the opin­ion­ated peri­odiza­tions that his­to­rians some­times propose, like the “long 19th century”, which might have run from the French Rev­o­lu­tion in 1789 until the begin­ning of World War I in 1914, or the “short 20th century”, from 1914 until the dis­so­lu­tion of the Soviet Union in 1991. They are all totally made-up, of course, but/and that doesn’t mean thinking and arguing about them can’t be productive.

Here’s my pitch: “the long 2010s”, which actu­ally begins in 2008, with the finan­cial crisis (and the release of the first Iron Man movie, which feels impor­tant, somehow) and ends in 2022, with the pas­sage of the IRA and/or the inva­sion of Ukraine. I think the simul­ta­neous crises in streaming TV and social media form an impor­tant bookend, too.

Other vari­a­tions are possible. In a note, I wrote:

Maybe “the long 2010s” begins in 2007 with the iPhone, ends with Apple’s announce­ment of the Vision Pro. If you put Twitter inside a device like that, you would go insane. Time for some­thing different.

Either way, wel­come to the 2020s, at last!

This edition’s art is gleaned from a beau­tiful cat­alog dis­trib­uted by Hirayama Fire­works of Yokohama, Japan, in the late 1800s. Notably, the co-founder of the company, Jinta Hirayama, received Japan’s first for­eign patent: for his inven­tion of “daytime fireworks”.

These images are old friends: I used them on magnets back in 2019.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on August 1.

July 2023