The golden door

I’ve lived in Cali­fornia for twenty years now!

It feels like a good occasion to recount my Cali­fornia origin story, which I’ve told many times in person, but never written down. You’ll find that below.

What a sky this week: a full moon, with Saturn very close. A partial lunar eclipse last night! I’m back on schedule with these newsletters.

A special note for San Franciscans: I’m doing a Moonbound presen­ta­tion at Blackbird Bookstore and Cafe on September 28. I love the Sunset (you’ll see it mentioned again below); if that’s your part of town, please come out and say hello!

This is an archived edition of Robin’s newsletter. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

Here’s what’s ahead in this edition:

• An August of ideas: my Cali­fornia origin story

• The slow lift: a discovery

• Links and recommendations: not toooo many

• Checking in: what’s Robin doing?

An August of ideas

Here’s the story.

It was the summer of 2004. For two years, I’d worked at the Poynter Institute, a storied haven for jour­nal­ists in St. Petersburg, Florida; my first job out of college. It had been a trans­for­ma­tive time. Every week, a new cohort of reporters arrived, and whenever I wasn’t editing articles or writing code (ActionScript!) I sat in on their sessions, sponge-like. With my colleague Matt Thompson, I started a blog; together, we produced the short film EPIC 2014.

2014, because that sounded like the dizzy future.

But it was really 2004, and I was ready to move on. Here’s what I knew that summer:

• My work in Florida would soon conclude, and

• I would pack all my posses­sions into the back of my Toyota and drive to Cali­fornia, where

• a longtime friend had just arrived in Sacramento. (In the years since, that friend has followed an aston­ishing path; he is now the lead audio programmer at Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine and Fortnite!)

Why Cali­fornia? Well, because I had a friend there … 

 … and because of the rumor.

It went like this: Al Gore was starting a cable news network. It would use the internet in a radical new way; it would be partic­i­pa­tory, somehow. Its codename was INdTV.

It really was just a rumor. There was no website. There certainly weren’t any job postings. The venture was mentioned in perhaps four news clippings total; I read them over and over, gnawed on every stringy detail. The network would be based not in New York or Los Angeles, the rumors said, but San Francisco.

The rumors said Al Gore had a partner in this venture. I sleuthed Joel Hyatt’s email address.

The boundary between initia­tive and mania is fuzzy, and the plan I hatched that summer tres­passed freely. I was 24, obsessed with jour­nalism and the internet, their potential together. It was a different era, remember; hardly anything had been attempted.

On August 1, 2004, I sent a cold email to the address I’d found for Joel. My intro­duc­tion had been work­shopped for days. It went something like this: I think you’re working on the most inter­esting thing in the world, and I believe I have some skills and intu­itions that could be helpful. To prove it, I’m going to send you an idea every day in the month of August. Here’s the first one.

To his eternal credit, Joel replied immediately. His message was terse but not unfriendly. He said, basically: Let’s see what you’ve got.

I drove from Florida up to Michigan, from Michigan out to Cali­fornia. I had a bundle of ideas banked, but by day ten, I was grasping. I would drive along I-80, nothing but corn for miles, and I’d think about the future. Wi-Fi was harder to find in those days; sometimes I’d batch a few ideas into one email, knowing I was headed into empty country.

A sample batch:

Every few days, I’d receive a reply. Nothing too effusive. Interesting, Joel might remark. A myste­rious name might be cc’d.

I still remember the last part of the drive, through Nevada. I’d worn out my handful of CDs. I’d thought all the thoughts I was going to think. The radio was a blank hiss. So I drove in silence, and for a few hours, my mind was truly empty.

Then came the vertical shock of the Sierra Nevada, and the nearly alien landscape beyond. I had no visions of California, no expec­ta­tions at all. I wasn’t coming for Cali­fornia, but for this venture (which, to be clear, I had not been invited to join) and if it had been in Chicago or Seattle, I’d have turned the car around.

I arrived in Sacramento. My final email to Joel said this, of course:

He invited me into the city; incredible. I crossed the Bay Bridge, and my first stop in San Francisco was a Kinko’s in the Financial District, where I picked up three bound copies of my August fusillade.

At lunch, there were three of us: me, Joel, and Joanna Drake, who would become my manager and mentor — the best boss I ever had. It says a lot about those two, and the whole spirit of their venture, that they never once asked me where I went to college.

It helped, I think, that I had EPIC 2014 to show them: evidence of a larger theory of media. Evidence I knew how to tell a story.

Anyway, I became the seventh employee at INdTV, soon to be revealed as Current TV. For three months, I drove into the city from Sacramento — I don’t recommend it — and then I rented a room on Lincoln Way, across the street from Golden Gate Park.

Current TV went live on cable systems across the U.S. on August 1, 2005. I worked at the company for five years, which doesn’t sound that long as I’m writing this, but those years were rich, packed with incident and invention — and not only inside that office. Recall that Twitter launched in March 2006, YouTube in December 2005. Recall that the founders of Facebook moved to Cali­fornia the same summer I did! (That this remains the essential dramatis personae of digital media tells you a lot about the times. The 2000s were all about invention; the 2010s, consolidation.)

In the long run, Current TV’s success was its diaspora. I wasn’t the only person attracted, moth-like, to the incan­des­cence of its partic­i­pa­tory premise. Over time, those people fanned out across media and tech. Many were pulled into YouTube’s orbit; just as many founded companies of their own. Today, Current TV alumni are everywhere, and they are, very often, the most inter­esting people in the room.

For my part, I’ll remain grateful forever to Joel Hyatt and Joanna Drake for an unlikely oppor­tu­nity that opened into so many more. When I crossed the Bay Bridge that first time, bound for my lunch meeting, I didn’t know I was entering a city I would write whole novels about.

A word on Al Gore.

He wasn’t around the Current TV office too often, but he was around when it mattered, and he was always curious and kind. Graceful. He told a story about the kernel of the network’s concept, which was a story about human evolution, the way visual media hacks our brains, and the urgent need, therefore, to make visual media that is actually good. He told the story over and over. I could never get enough.

The fork in the road is too far gone now, the cascading changes too many to imagine, but even so, the what-if scenario of a President Al Gore at the dawn of the 21st century produces powerful melan­choly. I saw him up close, just briefly, many years ago, and allow me to confirm: here is a great mind, and a great American.

The slow lift

For the past year, I’ve been doing a kind of strength training I never knew existed. Kathryn recruited me, after doing it for a year herself. For both of us, this routine has been trans­for­ma­tive, so I thought I might mention it here.

Here’s how it goes:

You lift weights, using big machines that isolate partic­ular muscles. You work at your maximum capacity — from the very first moment, you are thinking, uh oh, this is VERY heavy. You do this with a trainer; that’s crucial, because you simply would not suffer so much without supervision.

Your “reps” blend into one contin­uous motion, tran­si­tioning smoothly from pushing to pulling, pulling to pushing. There’s no jerking or heaving, no clanging or banging. You go slow.

But that “slow” is, in a way, fast. After 60-90 seconds, the muscle is spent: you can’t push (or pull) any more. I had never worked my muscles to failure before, so for me this was an odd feeling: the message being dispatched from my brain, push!, and nothing happening. It’s not unpleasant … just odd. A bit floaty.

The work is brutally difficult, but it’s over quickly. The whole circuit takes thirty minutes, and you do it: once a week.

Once a week!

At my gym they say, you’re not here to do reps. You’re not even here to lift weights. You are here to exhaust your muscles, as effi­ciently as possible, so your body under­stands very clearly that it’s time to get stronger.

Over the past year, I have gotten so much stronger!

I’m a child of the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s amazing to recognize that the consensus of that era was, essentially, backward. What was the epitome of health, as I learned it? A low-fat diet, with lots of aerobics.

Here I am, making olive oil, lifting heavy weights.

The results have been steady and satisfying. My body feels different these days. (Of course, my appre­ci­a­tion is twinned with the melan­choly of I wish I’d discov­ered this ten years ago.)

So that’s my report. It’s true, of course, that just about any kind of strength training is great, espe­cially if it takes you all the way to muscle failure. I thought I’d mention this partic­ular flavor only because it was entirely new to me, and totally different from every image of “weight lifting” I’ve ever seen or even imagined.

I’ve gone to the gym before. I’ve whirled kettle bells. What has been trans­for­ma­tive, this past year, is the intensity of the slow lift. I don’t claim to under­stand all the metabolic partic­ulars, but I do claim to feel them.

(You have a body, Robin. Life cannot be all words and symbols. It’s something I am always learning, always forgetting again … )

I go to Live Oak Strength in Emeryville, and if you live in my part of the East Bay, I recommend it unreservedly. There are compa­rable gyms around the country — the keyword seems to be “high intensity”.

Another golden door.

Links and recommendations

Here is a beautiful consid­er­a­tion of Moonbound by Christian P. Haines in one of the great science fiction magazines.

Okay, this will surprise no one, but I loved Rebecca Boyle’s book about the moon:

In these pages, Rebecca approaches her subject from literally every angle — mythological, ecological, astrophysical … it’s kalei­do­scopic and relevatory.

And she intro­duced me to this artifact:

It’s a disc of bronze with a beautiful blue-green patina, inlaid with gold, almost four thousand years old. Called the the “Nebra sky disc” for the place where it was discov­ered, its use isn’t fully understood, but clearly, this is a map of the sky. Those seven dots clustered together can only be Pleiades.

When I flipped to the book’s glossy insert to discover this picture, the Nebra sky disc leapt instantly into my personal top ten — of what? Of every­thing, I think. Certainly, of all images crafted by humans, anytime, anywhere.

Volume continues to impress. Though each book starts with a funding progress bar, this isn’t Kickstarter, because it’s totally curated, the work all consis­tently high-end. I suppose it’s a throwback, then, to the earliest days of publishing, when a critical mass of readers would “subscribe” to a book ahead of time, ensuring its publication.

Previously, Volume has published the noir-ish photog­raphy of Liam Wong and a beautiful compendium from the Public Domain Review, as well as The Finishers, an odd and intense vision of the Barkley ultramarathon. (I don’t like marathons of any kind, yet I was still totally capti­vated by this book.)

The current progress bar is attached to a history of video game speedrunning. Follow that link and you’ll find glimpses of a design that looks absolutely gonzo. Strong WIRED-in-the-1990s energy.

What an anecdote:

This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all govern­ment contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

That database engine is now built into every single iPhone, and much else. Here is SQLite’s creator, Richard Hipp, with all the fasci­nating details.

Here is Victor Hugo, What the poet said to himself in 1848, as circu­lated by Adam Roberts.

Here is a gallery of beautiful places for books!

Here is the blue cube. “When near the blue cube, one stops at the blue cube.”

Here is a discussion, by the physicist-philosopher David Albert, of the ways in which the deep puzzle of quantum mechanics cuts to the heart of the scien­tific project. That link goes to the interview’s conclusion, but the entire thing is worthwhile; he’s a super engaging speaker.

After watching this interview, I picked up his book and really enjoyed it.

Here is Taste Notes, the recurring roundup of cool stuff from the newsletter One Thing, which is quickly becoming the sort of mini-Monocle of my dreams. Sharp, cosmopolitan, super fun.

If you haven’t ever read Ray Bradbury’s tale of Mr. Electrico, and his origin as a writer — maybe as a person — then go rectify the situation immediately. I don’t even want to quote anything; it’s a thrilling, iconic sequence of memory. Another golden door.

Here is the truest post, oof.

Here is Christo­pher Brown on a story too good to check:

This week I stumbled upon the story of how, while exploring the Orinoco River in Venezuela in 1800, Alexander von Humboldt met a parrot who was the only living speaker of the language of an Indige­nous people whose popu­la­tion had otherwise been extinguished. Whether it really was a dead language seems to be a matter of debate. But true or not, the story tells a truth we can all intuit.

Note that Chris’s new book A Natural History of Empty Lots, which I have praised previously, is now available to purchase and read!

Here is Floren­tyna Leow’s report from the first Onigiri Summit of Japan.

The first! Onigiri Summit! Of Japan!!

I loved Floren­tyna’s book How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, available from the Emma Press, an absolute dream of an independent publisher.

Here’s Jim Rion on translating Uketsu, coming soon from Pushkin. Very weird, very cool, and very possibly the next big thing. (I loved Jim’s trans­la­tion of The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, also published by Pushkin.)

Here is the Animation Obsessive on the history of limited animation, which is to say, every­thing that wasn’t, and isn’t, the lush motion of early Disney films.

Rather than block or obstruct, limi­ta­tion seems always to become a portal through which one might squeeze to discover … what? Whole new aesthetic countries!

Sorry, but I still love this: Running Up That Hill, performed in Old English!

Checking in

It’s useful, maybe, to return every so often to the simple question:

What’s Robin doing?

As many of you know, in addition to writing novels, I help operate a small olive oil company. The olive harvest runs through October and November; it’s an intense season, as mandated by nature. For a company like ours that does both produc­tion and distribution, the harvest segues delightfully — relentlessly — into the holiday scrum. So, where writing is concerned, it’s really “pencils down” until Christmas.

Back when I had office jobs, I never dreamed that seasons could matter this much. Now, it is Earth, THE FREAKING BIOSPHERE, setting my schedule, and I’m happy to obey. For me, the harvest brings a change of scenery; a change of pace; a change of clothes. It’s very hard work, yet it’s also refreshing.

And it starts soon.

Okay, but more broadly, what’s Robin doing?

My writing project continues, of course. What is that project? The produc­tion of books that mix the genres and styles I love most, while adding something new — pushing those genres and styles forward — in a way that attracts a large, enthu­si­astic read­er­ship around the world. These books always encourage their readers to contem­plate scale, in one way or another. These books make scale undeniable. That’s it! That’s the project.

Between those two pillars, the company and the composition, there is the fun of daily life (substantial) and the fizz of other fasci­na­tions (held barely in check) (as evidenced by these newsletters). Put all those things together and … that’s what Robin is doing!

It’s almost TOO Cali­fornia, I realize. Novels and olives; the ferment of the San Francisco Bay Area and the fecundity of the San Joaquin Valley. I didn’t see any of this coming in the summer of 2004, driving across the country. I had no visions of this place. Without realizing it, I passed through the golden door.

From Cali­fornia, twenty years later,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in late October.

September 2024