Little rooms

Trespassers!

This edi­tion arrives a bit later than expected; it has been a LONG season of work, during which I was basi­cally smooshed into a smooth paste along with the olives. Now, finally, we’re resting, with can­dles lit, the sound of rain on the roof.

Thanks, as always, for your enthu­si­astic response to my annual gift guide. I hear back from many of the com­pa­nies included, and — I know I keep saying this, but — your pur­chases are mean­ingful and mate­rial to them. Your open­ness helps make inter­esting work — inter­esting lives — possible!

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 December 2025. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

As usual, this newsletter has a few dis­tinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:

• Little rooms: The White Stripes, Outkast, and the dank cru­cibles of art

• Print rampant: the local renais­sance

• So let it be written: The Ten Commandments!!

• Links and rec­om­men­da­tions: blog binge

This year, I will NOT per­form a live reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on New Year’s Day. The reason is simple: I’m too pooped!

Remember, you can always read it your­self, even aloud: the allit­er­a­tive tongue-twisters will bring a smile to your face. Simon Armitage’s trans­la­tion is the one to get. Viewers of last year’s per­formance will recall that Marie Borroff’s trans­la­tion sort of did us dirty … it was very dif­fi­cult to per­form, and I might, in some sense, still be recovering. Next time around, we’ll return to Simon’s warm embrace.

Little rooms

I loved Jack White’s speech accepting the induc­tion of The White Stripes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You might find it at first a bit rote, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing, because it evolves into a pow­erful state­ment about artistic pro­duc­tion. Jack honors, above all, the people who endure the misses to find the hits:

I myself have been in a lot of bands you’ve prob­ably never heard of, but for some reason people espe­cially con­nected with this one two-piece duo project that I was in called The White Stripes.

His “for some reason” there isn’t false modesty; Jack is clearly aware that success — con­nection to an audience — depends upon, among so many other things, pro­found luck. Or, not luck, but: that which cannot be planned, cannot be engineered:

We don’t know why these things con­nect with people, but, when they do, it’s the most beau­tiful thing you can have as an artist or a musician, when people are responding and sharing with you. So, to the young artists, I wanna say, get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed — get obsessed with some­thing, you know. Get passionate.

Another inductee at the same cer­e­mony was Outkast, the epochal act — B.O.B. is my selec­tion for the next Voy­ager record — that emerged from the Dungeon, an East Point recording studio set up in the base­ment of Outkast’s producer’s mom’s house, into which a crowd of teenage musi­cians would reg­u­larly descend. It’s incred­ible to imagine the noise that must have emanated; the smell.

And so, near the con­clu­sion of a circuitous, joyful accep­tance speech, André 3000 picks up the theme of the night:

One thing that Jack said … he said some­thing about little rooms. And … we started in a little — 

Here, André chokes up. Ten sec­onds pass, his face shining with emotion, while his friends clap him on the shoulders. Finally, when he’s able to continue, he says:

Little rooms. Great things start in little rooms. That’s it.

That’s it.

I remember when I got a raise, way back in 2008, that finally allowed me to rent a place of my own, no roommates. It was just off Clement Street, a few blocks down from Green Apple Books. In what felt like a trans­gres­sive move, I rejected normal fur­nishing and gave the space over entirely to my desk and a wide wire shelf. In that shad­owed studio, I wrote the short story that became Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. I wrote The Writer and the Witch, and Annabel Scheme, and so many more.

More recently, the Murray Street Media Lab, which is very nearly Dungeon-dank, has become the little room of my dreams: a place with no vanity, only capability. (Often, I’ll see a photo of some artist or designer in their studio, big and clean, sur­faces immaculate, and I’ll think: “Lovely … but you def­i­nitely don’t do real work there.”)

Print rampant

It was gen­erous of roving reporter Cydney Hayes to describe the Murray Street Media Lab as “sunlit” in the opening of her story for Gazetteer about the print revival presently underway in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area.

Excuse the self-quotation, but when I read Cydney’s tight reca­pit­u­la­tion of our conversation, I was like, hey … that’s pretty smart:

“The value of print is actu­ally not about paper. It’s about the set of demands and offer­ings that that paper has,” Sloan posited. “Privacy, stability, reliability, sovereignty.”

Sloan offered other adjectives, too: Print was tactile, giftable, col­lectible, durable. Print can also be a little mischievous, whether as notes passed in class or samizdat cir­cu­lated under author­i­tarian regimes.

The wave of print accom­pa­nies a gen­eral surge in media pro­duc­tion, mostly from orga­ni­za­tions that didn’t exist three years ago. There’s the San Fran­cisco Standard, COYOTE, the Oak­land Review of Books, the San Fran­cisco Review of Whatever, Bay Area Current, the Approach … you have to under­stand, Bay Area media has felt, at times, shock­ingly thin. This is an embar­rass­ment of riches.

Gazetteer is my favorite of the new wave, not only for its cov­erage of my zines; and not only for its clean, FT-ish design; but for the spirit of the old-time city news­paper that moves within it. One feels that if Herb Caen was writing for a web­site, that web­site would be Gazetteer.

So let it be written

Recently, we watched The Ten Commandments, which I sup­pose I have seen, long ago … but that was with dif­ferent eyes, a dif­ferent brain. This viewing was so much fun: mag­netic, delightful. True spectacle!

Earlier, I’d watched the new Franken­stein on Netflix, and I agree with Brad East’s assessment, espe­cially this part:

I regret the short­com­ings that hold back this par­tic­ular adaptation — the con­trived first half, the horrid and unnec­es­sary CGI, the monster’s out­landish fights and brutal ram­pages that feel torn out of some other movie [ … ]

Like many modern movies, Franken­stein splashes the screen with miracles, yet they all seem dull; a kind of awful reverse alchemy. Con­trast this with The Ten Commandments, in which the spe­cial effects are raw and jagged — the chroma­key work apparent in bright buzzing outlines — yet they remain, seven decades later, totally transporting. Magical.

Somehow, more has become less. Pro­tean pos­si­bility has cur­dled into mush. This is a puzzle that 21st-century tele­vi­sual pro­duc­tion needs to solve ASAP.

Watching The Ten Commandments, the colors alone make you wistful. The colors, plural: all of them!

Yul Brynner is the star, of course. Every acting choice is per­fect, every ges­ture con­sid­ered and graceful — like one long, four-hour dance.

Links and recommendations

At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame cer­e­mony men­tioned above, Twenty One Pilots pro­vided a worthy cover of Seven Nation Army. Readers of Moonbound know this song looms large in my imag­i­na­tion, and in the future his­tory of the world.

Here’s Alan Jacobs on teaching and learning in the era of LLMs:

I don’t know what’s hap­pening elsewhere, but in the Honors Col­lege here at Baylor — or rather among those of us who teach the humanities — it’s been fun to see what we’re doing to banish the LLM demons. Most of us are incor­po­rating a lot of hand­writing into our teaching: sev­eral col­leagues have been doing blue-book exams, a couple have bought their stu­dents cheap com­po­si­tion books from Wal­mart and are making them create com­mon­place books, and I am reg­u­larly handing out pas­sages from the texts we’re reading, printed out with very wide margins, and asking stu­dents to anno­tate them. I tell them I want their pages to look like Balzac’s galley proofs.

Click through to see one of those proofs — iconic.

More from Alan Jacobs: a scin­til­lating mul­ti­media post that is, honestly, the most “hypertext” thing I’ve seen in years. Beau­tiful and provocative.

One more from Alan:

Only grad­u­ally did it occur to me to ask why, if the past is an utterly for­eign country, we laugh at the places in Shake­speare that were obvi­ously meant to be funny, and cry when the char­ac­ters on stage were crying — even yes, even cry when reading some­thing as ancient as the Iliad, for instance when Hector tells his beloved wife Andro­mache that what grieves him the most about this ter­rible war is the cer­tainty that someday he, being dead, will be unable to rescue her from enslavement.

Absolute his­tori­cizing cannot sur­vive the expe­ri­ence of reading. Lament that if you wish.

Can you tell I indulged in a blog catch-up binge recently? Like returning to your favorite restau­rant after months away from home. (I did that recently, too.)

Here’s a recording of Alexis Madrigal’s recent talk, a Social Sci­ence Matrix Dis­tin­guished Lec­ture at Berkeley: metab­o­liza­tion and exten­sion of his research and thinking for The Pacific Circuit. It won’t sur­prise you to hear that I loved Alexis’s con­juring of city life here:

Cities are so good at building sol­i­darity. Not the hard sol­i­darity of get­ting into the streets in the interest of others, but the soft one of building human alle­giance for no reason at all. With an exchange of money, there’s also the inef­fi­cient inter­changes of life.

City life is filled with all kinds of little gives and takes, with gro­cery checkers, the book­store people, a Japanese steel spe­cialist who car­ries obscure gar­dening tools, the vin­tage store lady with an eye for French chore coats, the guy selling Street Spirit out­side the café, the barista with an eye­brow ring and heart of gold, the woman who says, smiling, “Why, this dog? He’s a Maltipoo.”

(audience laughing)

It is, honestly, a thrilling presentation, and you won’t regret lis­tening on some quiet morning before the year ends.

Here’s a sam­pling from the archive of Christmas cards sent to Paul Rand. I would love to browse the whole col­lection … !

The Resonant Com­puting manifesto is terrific: totally solid and sane. Scroll down to the five principles, which in a better uni­verse would be as obvious and uncon­tro­ver­sial as bread, water, air, light, life.

For the past year, I’ve been blogging hap­pily on tech­nical topics, i.e. sparing this newsletter the burden of ter­minal dorkitude. You’re welcome!

Here’s a recent post that con­nects a lesson of the olive har­vest to LLMs; here’s a clarification of some con­fusing behavior in Cloudflare’s pro­gram­mable cache; here’s my rec­om­men­da­tion of a new ser­vice that helps you track release notes and changelogs.

Matt Pearce quotes Mem­oirs of Hadrian by Mar­guerite Yourcenar. He writes:

My irri­ta­tion with rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms found an echo in an (imagined) Roman emperor’s irri­ta­tion with his shame­less supplicants:

[ … ] It dis­pleases me to have some crea­ture think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, auto­mat­i­cally adapting him­self to what he sup­poses to be my taste. At such moments the absurd and deformed reflec­tion of myself which a human brain returns to me would almost make me prefer the ascetic’s sorry state.

I might be mis­re­mem­bering this, but I believe that former FSG pres­i­dent and pub­lisher Jonathan Galassi called Mem­oirs of Hadrian the most FSG-ish of all FSG books.

Here is Adam Roberts on Saturn and the paint­ings by Chelsey Bonestell — what a name — of Saturn as viewed from its own moons.

Saving the link, I noted:

The idea of Saturn as viewed from its own moons is human imag­i­na­tion at its best: a kind of tele­scoping what-if, rig­orous visualization, dreaminess. So great.

Note also that Bonestell, iconic illus­trator of mid­cen­tury sci­ence fic­tion, was born in San Fran­cisco … in 1888.

And, coming in 2026 from Adam Roberts: Franken­stein Rex!?!?

The monster, having sur­vived the events of Shelley’s novel, and proven not only highly intel­li­gent and driven but func­tion­ally immortal, has over the last two cen­turies risen to become King of the World, ruling a benign world-state. Hilar­ious hi-jinx ensue, etc etc.

Here is Honk, “a riotous dig­ital inter­pre­ta­tion of the bold and bois­terous let­tering seen on Indian trucks”. Sooo fun.

And here is Mangosteen, a Malay­alam font from the same foundry. Gorgeous.

Here is Max Glad­stone on leaving Substack:

The other day I logged in and could not find the button for posting a newsletter.

Nobody has the power to make you famous anymore. Joanne McNeil writes:

[ … ] Those kind of shadowy figures, “producers” and “execs,” the kind you’d hear about from the 80s or 90s or even the 00s or 10s, who could ruin your career if you crossed them — who has that power today? Per­haps some people have con­structed Good Bye, Lenin!-style but evil sim­u­la­tions of 2003 or 1983, and believe they still have that power now, but you can only lie to your­self for so long. Like I said, I don’t know if it helps, but I have found myself thinking about power dif­ferently lately as I realize there are no kings, if there ever were — just people who rep­re­sent ideas with pur­chase over the minds of others, with hands on var­ious levers to reach these minds. Levers that have grown rusty.

I think this is a real chal­lenge for book pub­lishers. The power and promise of publishing, as I see it, is the ability to say: I can find readers for this. I main­tain the appro­priate network; I pos­sess the appro­priate influence.

Of course, that promise was only ever par­tially true … but nowa­days it is simply: not. Which isn’t to say books don’t find readers — obvi­ously, they do — but I don’t believe any pub­lisher presently feels they can manage the process with confidence; with (as Joanne conjures) the snap of a lever. Nowadays, it’s all raffle tickets — all pachinko flow.

This is, by the way, the main thing that pre­vents me from becoming a (very small) pub­lisher myself. I don’t believe I could say to another writer, with confidence: I can find readers for this.

Here are Erin McKean’s things learned while looking up other things, as won­derful as always.

My ideal news­paper is simply Ingrid Burrington’s Per­fect Sentences paired with Erin’s newsletter.

Per­fect sen­tence nomination:

(note 9:00 am start time for all access. Excep­tion for people with nib grinding appoint­ments before 9 am)

Per­fect sen­tence, per­fect scene; Linda Liukas wit­nessed both:

At Hatchard’s I was waiting for B. who had van­ished into the the first and modern edi­tions section. An older hus­band was already exasperated: I’ve been calling you sev­eral times, he sighed down the stairwell. His wife emerged, unbothered, brushing past him: Oh, it’s books, darling, as if that set­tled not only the argu­ment but the entire ques­tion of how to live.

It’s great fun to browse the expan­sive archive of Hans Thoma, espe­cially his avatars of the calendar. His work ranged freely from real­istic to mythic. Here is his journey of the magi, fabulous:

You gotta love the magi, in all their ren­der­ings and incarnations — char­ac­ters as mag­netic and mal­leable as comic book superheroes. Of all the versions, “kings” seems, to me, obvi­ously wrong. “Magi” means magi­cian and astrologer, and these guys are pretty clearly fringe weirdos, not pow­erful emissaries. Who else but weirdos would have been watching the sky; who else would have dropped every­thing to chase an uncanny light?

Inter­esting to think of the journey of the magi as def­i­n­i­tion­ally linear: they had a vector, not a distance. There’s fan fic­tion to be written about some false stops along the way, and/or the cradle they never reached, way beyond Bethlehem.

The ado­ra­tion of the magi is inter­esting because, for all its sup­posed singularity, the scene is not strange at all. The opposite: this image feels deeply, obvi­ously correct. We see the magi in all their awe, and we under­stand that, yes, every infant ought to be greeted this way: by a crowd of people who had per­haps for­gotten a human could be so small; by old men yanked, for a moment, back into youth by the raw power of birth; by learned mas­ters oohing and ahhing at the ulti­mate puzzle of life.

The magi adore the mustardseed, too.

I have tons of inter­esting stuff to share with you soon, early in 2026 … I can’t wait. The print revival has only just begun.

Happy New Year!

From Oak­land,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-January.

December 2025