Summer reading

Included in my previous dispatch was the aside

(The newsletters are, in fact, too long … )

to which a great chorus rose in reply: NO, THEY ARE NOT!

On one hand, I’m glad to know that most people get the vibe here: buffet, not gavage. On the other hand … I’m not totally convinced.

In any case, while I ponder some ideas for newsletter evolution, here’s a good old-fashioned block­buster 😋

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.

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

• Moonbound news: dream respondents

• Summer reading: mostly nonfiction

• Summer watching: mostly anime

• The big link: Dan Bouk’s new essay

• More links and recom­men­da­tions: always

Moonbound news

Here is Alan Jacobs on Moonbound. He is a basically perfect “respondent”, given (1) his deep engage­ment with the work of, among many others, C. S. Lewis and Ursula K. Le Guin, and (2) his deep influence on ME! Several of Alan’s books reside perma­nently on the ground floor of my brain, and his wide-ranging blogging provides a rich ongoing input; his is the RSS feed I would give up last.

Here’s Dan Cohen with a canny discus­sion of AI music that he connects to an important moment in Moonbound, tiptoeing very carefully around spoiler territory. Impressive!

Here’s an interview of me by Marc Weiden­baum, who is a writer and editor and, notably, the convener of one of the 21st century’s great ongoing collab­o­ra­tive art projects. (That link is worth exploring if you’re a musician of any kind.)

In a very serious sense, one writes novels in order to have Alan Jacobs, Dan Cohen, and Marc Weiden­baum read and think about them. What an honor.

Summer reading

My reading has trended toward nonfic­tion, and within that category, it’s trended niche, even academic. This is simply because the strategy has been so fruitful for Moonbound—both the novel just published and the larger project in progress.

Here are some my favorites from the past couple of months.

How Life Works

My most dizzying read in recent memory has been How Life Works, by Philip Ball. It was recom­mended to me by Alexis Madrigal, he of KQED Forum and Oakland Garden Club.

The book is concerned with the central pillars of biology: evolution, DNA, the cell, the formation of tissue, the devel­op­ment of bodies, human and otherwise. Philip Ball’s premise goes something like this (my para­phrase entirely): The under­standing of DNA and biology you are carrying around in your head is stuck in, at best, the year 1990. Research has revealed it all to be richer, stranger, and more resistant to analogy than anyone expected. These systems are chaotic, probabilistic, and nonlinear — yet also robust, flexible, and productive.

So … how does all that WORK?

Reading this book, you realize that where biology is concerned, 21st-century story­telling is working well back from the frontier of knowledge. I can’t think of a work of science fiction I’ve encoun­tered in the past ten years, in any medium, that conjured as much richness and strangeness — DEEP strangeness — as I have found in How Life Works.

That strikes me as a bit sad.

The writing is graceful, but this book is not pop science; the material is super crunchy and rather unrelenting. But, if you’re inter­ested in synchro­nizing with humanity’s best under­standing of the subtle machi­na­tions that are, at this very moment, allowing you to read this, and think, and breathe, then you should add How Life Works to your queue imme­di­ately.

(If you’d like a gentle on-ramp, you’re in luck: Philip Ball did an episode of Big Biology, the podcast I have praised previously.)

Frostbite

The Nicola Twilley admirer has logged on! I have been a devoted reader for many years, and a listener, too, of Nicky’s work with Cynthia Graber on Gastropod. Her new book is about the cold chain, which is — I can’t recall if she ever quite makes this claim, but I will — the single most important system in the modern world, ferrying food around the planet in its uncanny shroud of preservation.

Put it this way: the shutdown of the internet would cause less chaos than the shutdown of the cold chain.

Frostbite is also, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally for Nicky’s work, a globe­trot­ting adventure, with a sort of sublim­inal spy thriller vibe, if only because her desti­na­tions all seem to be shadowed tunnels and icy vaults.

The systems depicted in this book are very human, in that they are (1) awe-inspiring, and (2) sort of gross. (After finishing Nicky’s magis­te­rial section about the transport, storage, and controlled ripening of bananas, you will find yourself wondering if North Americans really need to be eating these things.) Frostbite is a one-way door, and maybe a slightly dangerous one, because once you read it, you will no longer survey the grocery store in innocence. The frozen food, the fresh produce, all that milk: they become the protruding tip of a vast, brilliant — what else could it be — iceberg.

A Natural History of Empty Lots

A Natural History of Empty Lots is a book about the inbetweenlands, the sacrifice zones, the feral strips — landscapes shocked by humanity, quietly healing. The book pads unboth­eredly across the barrier between “urban” and “rural”, “wild” and “industrial”, and the one doing the padding, Christo­pher Brown, is a perfect guide: wise and ironic, observant and sensitive.

There’s another layer to this great new work of Anthro­pocene nature writing. The project began as a newsletter, one I have recom­mended here before: Chris’s ongoing Field Notes. His photog­raphy lights up those dispatches, and I’m happy to report that the book is threaded with photos, too. It’s a really nice treatment, and it adds a lot.

Put this on a shelf alongside Dust, by Jay Owens: evidence it’s not only possible but perhaps ideal to initiate and develop an intel­lec­tual project in this way. In both cases, long before they became books, these newslet­ters radiated a wholeness — the unmis­tak­able sense that Something Is Happening Here.

Contact

It’s here! Jennifer Roberts is one of the world’s great visual-intel­lec­tual researchers, and the lecture series I praised in a previous edition has grown into a book. Contact is a phenom­enal produc­tion, super luxe, aglow with images.

I tried to find a good repre­sen­ta­tive spread, and I failed, because the book is so wildly diverse! No spread is like any other. Instead, here’s a partial flip; the blur of form and color here is the book’s truest advertisement:

There’s a sprawling graphic multi­verse in these pages, woven together by Jennifer’s sharp theo­riza­tion of the print­making process, built around a series of obser­va­tions so simple yet powerful they thump into your brain like arrows.

But I’m mixing metaphors; on the back cover, you’ll find my blurb, invoking not arrows but bombs:

Previously, I enumerated a few of these detonations … 

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.)

 … and they have become even more exciting and impactful in the pages of Contact. This book is a must-read for anyone inter­ested in print­making specif­i­cally and/or visual culture generally. Thump! Boom! Pow!

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe is one of those char­ac­ters whose cartoonish famil­iarity under­mines the profun­dity of his actual work. He’s like Albert Einstein in that way; I imagine the face more easily than I reckon with the ideas.

But Poe’s contri­bu­tions to literature — not just American but global — are almost peerless. He was a one-man well­spring of genre: pioneer of science fiction and horror; inventor of detective fiction! Think of the spatial and temporal connec­tions in play as, for example, a writer archi­tecting mystery novels in Tokyo, circa 2024, is linked, through an unbroken chain, to Edgar Allan Poe scrib­bling in Philadel­phia, circa 1841.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night works as a biography of Poe; however, it’s much more than that, and the “more” is what really captured me. John Tresch wants to show us that Poe’s life was braided tightly into the galloping new scien­tific discov­eries and debates of his day — and that “day” is an inter­esting one.

I suppose this is just evidence of mise­d­u­ca­tion and/or incuriosity, but the first half of the 19th century in the United States has always been a sort of lacuna in my imag­i­na­tion. That’s not to say my under­standing of any period of American history is partic­u­larly deep … but at least I have little set-pieces I can conjure and inspect. Poe’s lifetime, 1809-1849, seems … vacant. Or, it did! This book populates the stage, makes the New York City and (espe­cially) the Philadel­phia of the 1830s and 1840s come alive. It’s really wonderful.

It’s impres­sive to see John Tresch operating across so many histories at once: of literature, of science, of ideas, of America. What a cool book.

P.S. Reflecting on the early 19th century, I often feel there’s a similar in-between-ness to our time; and on some days I feel certain the early 21st century will present a lacuna in the imag­i­na­tion of many citizens, two hundred years hence; and this makes me wonder: what Poe-esque feats of genre invention, braided tightly into new science and technology, might be possible right now?

From here, my recom­men­da­tions go niche, and I want to make a case for why.

For any writer, but espe­cially a writer of fiction, this is an arbitrage play. You don’t want to be reading the books that everybody else is reading. Possibly you don’t want to be reading the books that ANYbody else is reading. This is totally achievable; there are plenty of books out there, old and new, packed with fasci­nating details, with cumu­la­tive read­er­ships numbering in the single-digit thousands. Most of those other readers won’t do anything with those details; won’t feed the brightest gems into the metabolic machinery of their own creativity. If you venture suffi­ciently niche-ward, you’ve got it all to yourself.

Isn’t that exciting? The feeling of a treasure hunt.

How to Read Superhero Comics and Why

My favorite kind of used bookstore find is the book that you would never have found anywhere else; the book you would never gone looking for; the book you would never have guessed existed.

The more niche the better, obviously.

Geoff Klock’s book goes deep, deep, deep on the looping meta energy of superhero comics, and there is one partic­ular section that will, I believe, stick in my brain forever. He’s discussing the ways in which comic book conti­nuity is constantly revised and undone — the stubborn refusal of comic book char­ac­ters to stay dead — when he makes the case that, just once, Warren Ellis, in his tenure writing for Image Comics, did the impos­sible: he sealed a cata­clysmic event against revision, perma­nently. The narrative-legal mechanism is too subtle for me to explain here, and nearly too subtle for Geoff Klock to explain in the book, but explain it he does, and though his case is a bit wacky — I suspect Warren Ellis would say: I did what now? — it’s very fun to contemplate. Marshall McLuhan would have loved this.

This is very specific stuff. Reading my graf above, I feel like there are exactly two possible reactions, with absolutely nothing in between:

1. Whoa! Tell me more!!
2. wut

You are presently having one of these two reactions, revealing, with perfect precision, whether or not this book is for you.

Fight, Magic, Items

Back in the 1990s, I was capti­vated by video games like Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger. This was, it turns out, a formative aesthetic experience; these games, of this genre, at that time, provided one of the three pillars of my imag­i­na­tion, alongside comic books (see above) and fiction.

Fight, Magic, Items is Aidan Moher’s history of the JRPG, from the earliest pixelated premo­ni­tions all the way through to the gleaming 21st-century incar­na­tions that I will never play. The book is capacious and discursive, and my favorite parts, easily, are the profiles of the people (mostly but not exclu­sively Japanese) who toiled over these games, revealing the influ­ences and expe­ri­ences that provided the pillars of their imag­i­na­tions. (The interplay between American and Japanese media throughout is fasci­nating; the JRPG has never been a one-way transmission.)

This book will only be inter­esting to readers already engaged by this genre; luckily, there are many millions of those.

Die Klang Der Familie

This is, very straightforwardly, an oral history of the rise of techno and the fall of the wall in Berlin. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, insensate to most of the refer­ences here, but/and I still found this book totally compelling, simply for its rendering of Berlin in that moment. All the inim­itable details; little things about the days before and after the wall came down. The feelings: excitement, sure, but also disappointment. Is this it?

Reading the book, you hear again and again about a partic­ular radio show. Hosted by Monika Dietl, it was the great convening force of this scene. Her show told you who was cool; it told you where the parties were. And it strikes me that this is probably ideal: an aesthetic movement the size of a weekly broadcast.

Could a 2020s Monika Dietl — producing, say, a podcast — marshal culture with the same confident authority? It’s difficult to imagine. Even the funkiest, most piratical radio broadcast implies a sense of difficulty, of cost, that’s impos­sible to conjure in the mushy infini­tude of the digital. It’s like a print zine that way.

There’s inter­esting material waiting here for anyone inter­ested in how culture grows and changes, partic­u­larly in a real place — a city on the brink.

The Daughters of Ys

A single dose of fiction! Nothing incisive to say; just, this graphic novel is wonderful. The protean M. T. Anderson is as good as ever, and the art by Jo Rioux is limber and transporting; I caught flashes of Studio Ghibli and Yoshitaka Amano. The story is based on a real Breton folktale, one that was new to me.

P.S. Here’s Jo Rioux showing off her drawing process for this very book. It’s inter­esting to see her start with the terra cotta pencil — a ghostly base layer.

P.P.S. The Daughters of Ys is published by First Second, which is, for my money, the most successful publishing imprint of the 21st century, at least in terms of, like, setting out to do a thing, and then … doing that thing! What a triumph.

Summer watching

Shirobako

I recently rewatched Shirobako, the anime about … making anime. Its protag­o­nist is a plucky assistant at a strug­gling produc­tion studio; her friends are all strivers in their own disci­plines (animation, 3D modeling, writing, voiceover) while her coworkers span gener­a­tions and idiosyncrasies.

For anyone who loves or has loved anime, including the films of Studio Ghibli, Shirobako adds a deep, fasci­nating dimension to the medium. The show lays out the entire produc­tion process, barely bothering to coat its instruc­tion with the sweet film of story. This is inter­esting enough on its own! Shirobako seems to insist, and of course, it’s correct.

Here is one of the great workplace dramas, in any medium: every character wrinkled in their own way. Here is, additionally, one of the great documents about creative collaboration. Shirobako makes you want to run out the door and find a team.

Some basic fluency is probably required; I fear the show will seem irre­triev­ably silly to anyone without a fondness for anime and its genres. (Too bad for you.) Along those lines, the show’s satire of fan service is sharp but/and well-rendered, so it is, unfortunately, not appro­priate for kids.

Years ago, Shirobako was available on Crunchyroll, but that doesn’t appear to the case anymore, so I finally bought the Blu-ray edition, and I’m glad to have it in my permanent collec­tion.

P.S. I’m a fan of subtitles generally, and in this case I believe they are mandatory: Shirobako’s English dub is totally unsatisfying.

Ping Pong the Animation

Another short and perfect anime is the terrific Ping Pong the Animation, just one season, based on the manga by Taiyō Matsumoto. Ping Pong repre­sents the best of what animation can do. Emotion and effort warp space and time, and every­thing becomes elastic.

It’s a joy to watch — weird and thrilling. And just eleven episodes!

Jujutsu Kaisen

I can’t recommend this block­buster anime with whole­hearted enthusiasm — it’s pretty dopey, defi­nitely not on the same level as the two above — but/and sometimes you’ve got to pause to appre­ciate a really good mechanism.

In this anime’s world, sorcerers duel with magic derived from “curse energy”, plus cool martial arts moves. There’s a key technique called Domain Expension, in which a sorcerer (1) uses a super cool hand gesture to (2) establish a closed-off bubble of reality that is (3) themat­i­cally linked to their personality, in which (4) their attacks cannot fail.

I mean. That’s very seductive!!

Of course, I love the way this echoes the gambit of the manga creator, the fiction writer, whose “domain” is the imag­i­na­tive world of the book, and whose “attacks”, when that domain is established — disbelief fully suspended — cannot fail. The analogy feels too apt to be a coincidence.

P.S. The overall arc of Jujutsu Kaisen’s story has to do with the retrieval of the severed fingers of an ancient demon king. That’s a pretty good checklist … !

Ocean and tincture

Dan Bouk’s latest newsletter is a surprise essay about the trap of profiling titans, with an absolutely gimlet title: Oceans of Power and a Tincture of Reproof.

It’s worth book­marking this piece and spending some time with it. Dan has his finger on something deep here: a tendency that runs through nonfic­tion and journalism, fiction and tele­vi­sual drama alike — any and every story that chooses a titan (wealthy, or powerful, or both) as its subject. The nut of it is this:

What if a bit of moral outrage simply makes the pleasure of worship­ping the powerful a bit more palatable?

Dan’s examples are Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s treatment of Napoleon. He could as easily have invoked the TV drama Succes­sion or Christo­pher Nolan’s great Oppenheimer.

Oceans of power … a tincture of reproof. When you spend so much time (and, in the tele­vi­sual case, money) luxu­ri­ating in these extremes, it’s a bit rich to claim it’s only a cautionary tale.

There’s a real tension here. Dan writes:

This is the funda­mental problem of a well-constructed critical expose. The act of exposure can attract at the same time that it condemns. (See also, every book or film about Wall Street. I’m thinking espe­cially of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, which asserted the emptiness of invest­ment banking and still drove masses of its readers to seek out jobs on the street.)

Michael Lewis himself has noted this effect, with exasperation; can’t they see it’s a critique? Likewise, the great sci-fi writer William Gibson has expressed his dismay upon discov­ering that many readers (including this one) seem to find his icy futures, in some respects, appealing; can’t they see it’s not supposed to be COOL?

In these and other cases, there is, IMHO, a note of “they doth protest too much”. If it’s appealing: the writer made it so. They fell into the trap. It’s worth consid­ering why, and how, and the alternatives. Dan’s essay is a terrific start.

Link and recommendations

Here is Bebop, a new note-taking app for iOS designed and programmed by Jack Cheng, who also happens to be a great fiction writer!

Jack was, like me, a longtime user of the app called Captio, which allows you to quickly capture a note and send it as an email to yourself. Bebop keeps the speed — improves upon it, actually — but drops the email, instead saving the note as a text file to the folder of your choice. This can be an iCloud or Dropbox folder, in which case it syncs to your laptop: perfect.

Bebop is a lovely piece of work, as inviting and imme­di­ately useful as a spoon or a chair. If you’re a note-taker (or imagine you might become one) with an iPhone, you should give it a spin.

Gather your gossips!

See also: my defense of gossip.

Here is a fabulous post detailing the “layers” of Japanese script, of which furigana is, to me, the most inter­esting. Orig­i­nally and mainly used as a pronun­ci­a­tion hint (for, e.g., young readers) these marks have been repur­posed by manga writers as a kind of “subvocalization”—you’ll find examples in the link above, and on this page.

It’s inter­esting to imagine how you might achieve a similar effect in English … 

Here is a rich, provoca­tive interview with the Japanese science fiction writer Toh EnJoe. It’s all super quotable; here’s just one part that struck me:

EnJoe: Trans­la­tion is, so to speak, the customs duty to literary trade. It’s an obstacle, and the goods must be worth the high tariff. If you can replicate the same stuff in your country, you don’t need to import it paying a high tariff, no matter how useful the item is. It’s certainly an irony that being special is a prereq­ui­site of trade, but that being too special hinders it.

EnJoe’s newly-published short story collec­tion Moonshine sounds fabulous — at least judging by the automatic trans­la­tion of its marketing copy. I wish I could read it; in the meantime, I’ve just picked up Harlequin’s Butterfly.

Here is the clerihew, a truly unhinged kind of poem.

Here is the surprising etymology of “contrite”!

Here’s Max Gladstone on the demands of form, novel­istic vs. epic:

It is impossible to write the events of the Lord of the Rings as a novel without Sam standing forth as one of the great heroes of the story. Without Eowyn’s (and Pippin’s) defeat of the Witch-King assuming pride of place as the story’s great triumph of arms. Without Gollum. Yet in the epic mode, in the saga mode, it’s almost impos­sible to mention Samwise Gamgee, the old Gaffer’s son, gardener of Bag-End — let alone to praise him with great praise.

Recently, I had the pleasure of providing inter­locu­tion for Lev Grossman on his tour for The Bright Sword, which answers the question: what happened after King Arthur floated away to Avalon? The novel is terrific, and Lev’s newsletter, Last Stop Corbenic, is a stealth course in writing grit. The posts chron­i­cling his Season in Hell, producing this work, are candid and bracing.

In the 21st century, we — the vast “we” of the U.S.—have forgotten how to build things. Big, real things. Bridges and railroads. Housing!

So the story goes. And yet, even in the exis­ten­tial rush of World War II, with the federal purse fully gushing:

Despite the enormous amount of attention given to Ford’s Willow Run factory that mass-produced B-24 bombers, its perfor­mance was mediocre at best. For the first two years the plant produced virtually nothing as it struggled with the diffi­cul­ties of aircraft production, and the time it took to reach volume produc­tion was slower than many existing aircraft manufacturers. At one point oper­a­tions were going so poorly that the govern­ment consid­ered taking over the factory. And while the factory even­tu­ally worked out its issues and produced aircraft in large volumes with impres­sively low labor inputs, by the time it did so it was too late: The army no longer needed B-24s — what it needed were the larger, longer-range B-29s.

Two years to make the first airplane! Today, we’d be calling it a failure after two months. Now: I do think the U.S. of the 21st century has problems building things. But context is useful.

It’s strange that it is defin­i­tively World War II, not World War 2. The latter just looks weird. Super Bowls and wars get the Roman numeral treatment.

John Maynard Keynes, through J. W. Mason:

The capacity for reorganization is what matters, in other words. The economic problem is not a scarcity of material wealth, but of insti­tu­tions that can rapidly redirect it to new opportunities. For Bagehot as for Keynes, the binding constraint is coordination.

Okay, the U.S. might have problems building things … but look at the great golden WHOMP of solar power through the Cali­fornia energy system during the day:

We can have it if we want it.

(I really like this platform, Grid Status; their content marketing is sublimely nerdy. Here’s a blog post about what happened when a nuclear power plant went offline in Texas?! Yes, please! More of this!)

Here’s W. David Marx with an unex­pected measure of cultural stagnation: the produc­tion of embar­rassing relics.

With the great (terrible [great]) Rocky IV as his example, he suggests that such relics are a sign of a healthy cultural ecosystem, rather than the opposite. I found this argument genuinely surprising and provoca­tive. Here is some fun, fresh thinking!

Did the world’s great revo­lu­tions matter?

In the long run, do these titanic struggles between classes and nations make any difference? Do they really change how produc­tion is organized, and for what, and by whom?

What a great, provoca­tive question. J. W. Mason does not pose it rhetor­i­cally here; this is a live one. The whole newsletter is brisk and worth reading.

This will almost certainly go into my 2024 gift guide, but/and here’s a preview: I’ve become devoted to the Ramielust T-shirt from Outlier. I think it’s probably the best T-shirt I’ve ever owned. (Note that Cut One is the cut for me. I think if you’re under thirty, you’re allowed to wear Cut Two.)

Two stray obser­va­tions:

1. Basically all you want in your wardrobe is cloth derived from the real living world. Can we coin a Pollan-esque maxim? Wear natural fibers. Mostly linen. Choose nice colors. (Ramie is sort of an alt-linen.) I’ve become increas­ingly suspicious, even resentful, of the sneaky blends with like 5% stretchy plastic.

2. I’ve praised Outlier before, and I’ll now do so again: what a rare thing, the totally inde­pen­dent clothier, cutting a bright, bold path through the world. As a company, Outlier seems to me almost singular.

I’m entranced by the complexity of time in space. The warp and bulge of gravity is everywhere. The effects are minute, but they matter.

The muscular control on display here is almost too much to process—the move at 0:26 somehow 100% stiff and 900% thrilling.

P.S. This is how I imagine all those Berlin techno parties back in the 1980s looked. No … ?

Here is a hawk equipped with sensors to inves­ti­gate bats!

That is all!!

Here is an exemplary personal website—truly like diving into someone’s brain.

The Convivial Society remains essential:

In his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s protag­o­nist, Binx Bolling, makes the following observation: “I have discov­ered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.” Percy is writing as the first movement of deper­son­al­iza­tion I mentioned above was reaching its apex. But Bolling goes on to say that “when it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

What there is to see is the look of someone remem­bering a profound truth about themselves, a vital truth without which we cannot hope to live in full. I suspect, or at least I hope, that we have all been on both ends of such encounters, and we should be intent on making such encoun­ters more, rather than less frequent.

And: I wish you could have seen the little wave of surprise, then the Cheshire cat grin spreading, as I discov­ered a footnote addressed to me directly.

If you have ever thought admir­ingly of some flinty acquain­tance (or perhaps even of your flinty self) that they (or you) “do not suffer fools”, I encourage you to recalibrate.

The problem is that everyone is a fool to someone — many someones — along some axis. Perhaps not the axis of cleverness; it could instead be sensitivity, thoughtfulness, precision. It could be etiquette, or kines­thetic grace. The point is: everyone is suffered, all the time, by others. Possibly they don’t realize it, because they are suffered so gladly; so transparently.

How small-minded, then — how foolish — to be the one link in this great chain of forbear­ance who “does not suffer fools”.

Just … relax, and suffer. It’s the least you can do.

P.S. Of course there’s a linguistic attrac­tion here; “suffer fools” is a weird phrase with an ancient origin; and what the heck happened in the 1980s??

See? Way too long 😉

The rush of Moonbound’s publi­ca­tion turbocharged my newsletter-ing schedule, which has otherwise been, for the past few years, roughly linked to the full moon. That’s a rhythm I really enjoy, for Various Reasons, so I’ll tack in that direction over the next few months. The moon is a fat waxing crescent as I’m sending this.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter sometime in September.

August 2024