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 😋

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 August 2024. 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 of 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

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; this blur of form and color 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 EnJoe Toh. It’s all super quotable; here’s just one part that struck me:

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.

Toh’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, always, 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