A summer wind

A quick newsletter for this full moon. It’s a beau­tiful summer day in the Bay Area, and I am deep in book work.

Yet there are links I must cir­cu­late!

Last week, I joined hosts V. V. Gane­shanan­than and Whitney Ter­rell on their Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast to talk about “social media after Twitter”.

I men­tion this in our conversation, and I want to under­score it here: where the internet is concerned, we are in a crisis of dis­covery. Anyone with inter­esting new work to share — their own or someone else’s — rummages in the tool shed, looking for a seed spreader or a slingshot, and emerges with an egg beater and a single unmatched glove. Is this all we’ve got??

Maybe it seems odd to make that argu­ment while the great algo­rithmic engines of YouTube, TikTok, etc., pump away, stronger than ever, pow­ering a whirl­wind of media unprece­dented in history. They do some­times cir­cu­late inter­esting new work; they do some­times sell books. But that’s the breath of the gods, and I don’t want gods. I want tools.

I sus­pect there is no easy remedy. Or, maybe I mean to say: if it’s easy, it’s not a remedy. For example, if the Twitter clone called Threads becomes widely used, if its dis­covery algo­rithm really starts to pop, if it becomes a place where a new writer can build a mean­ingful audience … won’t that solve this problem? Of course not! Anyone who has used Insta­gram for more than six months, and there­fore expe­ri­enced its slip­pery caprice, under­stands this.

The strategy is the same as it always was: cul­ti­vate small, sturdy net­works of affinity and interest. Con­nect them to each other. Keep them lit.

Book­stores and libaries have had this down for decades, of course. These days, their rock-solid reli­a­bility feels like a super power.

I always have a lot (too much) to say on this subject. You’ll find more such rumi­na­tion in the podcast.

Now — let’s light it up.

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

Alexis Madrigal has launched the Oak­land Garden Club, a newsletter that will grow to encom­pass pub­lishing and apparel. (This, on top of hosting the Bay Area’s essential call-in radio show every morning! He’s a dynamo.)

If you are plant-minded or plant-curious, this writing and thinking will res­onate with you powerfully. I loved the most recent edition with its cut-up art, cap­tured on a moun­tain trail.

Here is a com­pendium of trade secrets from Scope of Work, one of the really great newsletters. This edition, com­piled by Kelly Pen­der­grast and Anna Pen­der­grast, cap­tures “the secret recipes, the superstition, and the myths embedded in what we call ‘innovation.’” It ranges from cym­bals to cricket balls to (yes) how the sausage gets made.

Okay, I have to quote that last one; it’s sublime:

When Chicago’s Vienna Sausage Com­pany moved from its orig­inal premises which were “put together in a Rube Gold­berg kind of arrangement” to a brand new state-of-the-art facility, the sausages didn’t taste as good. For a year and a half, the com­pany tried to work out the problem to no avail. One day, workers were rem­i­niscing about an ex-employee, Irving, who didn’t come to work at the new fac­tory due to the long com­mute required. Irving’s job was to move the sausages from the filling room to the smokehouse, taking them on a half hour journey through a maze of rooms where other prod­ucts were get­ting produced. After noting this absence, it clicked that Irving’s daily trip was the secret ingredient — on his journey the sausages were get­ting pre-cooked and infused with flavor. The com­pany was even­tu­ally able to recreate the sausages’ orig­inal taste, building a brand new room onto the fac­tory which emu­lated the prop­er­ties of Irving’s trip.

Here is W. David Marx on the per­sis­tent gulf between internet fame and “real” fame: Why haven’t internet cre­ators become superstars?

Related, and per­haps par­tially explanatory: Max Read reminds us that the internet is for 12-year-olds. (Mostly he means YouTube.)

The Future of Trans­porta­tion newsletter from Reilly Brennan covers EVs and dri­ving tech­nology in a style that is the per­fect def­i­n­i­tion of “busi­nesslike”: crisp and comprehensive. I’m still rooting for robo-taxis, so I read this every week.

Anne Trubek argues that, no, book pub­lishing didn’t used to be better.

Bloomberg’s Screen­time newsletter, written by Lucas Shaw, is spec­tac­u­larly good. There’s no shortage of people opining about the busi­ness of streaming media; Lucas pro­vides an ongoing reminder that rig­orous reporting and careful writing do, in fact, count for a lot.

Taking up space

If you are a user of both (1) the library e-book app Libby, and (2) an iPhone, allow me to improve your life.

The Libby widget is simple but/and profound. It looks like this — nice and chunky:

The widget shows the e-book that’s cur­rently open. Tap, and you’re right back where you left off.

One deep draw­back of dig­ital reading is that e-books are so quick to disappear. If you acquire an e-book, either through pur­chase or library loan, you’d better read it immediately and without stopping. Otherwise … if you forget about it for a single day … that e-book will eagerly slink away onto the third page of a list you’ll never again review.

Print books behave dif­ferently, of course. They remain exactly where you left them. They take up space. They declare: hey, at one point, you were inter­ested in me … REMEMBER?

Obviously, this can become a burden, but, on balance, I think it’s a great gift: the elo­quence of the physical. So, the Libby widget’s very basic emu­la­tion of this behavior — the simple fact that it takes up space—is weirdly magical.

In fact, I wish I could install three Libby wid­gets, each one showing my progress through a dif­ferent e-book! I tried; unfortunately, the wid­gets all show the e-book that’s cur­rently open. I’ll take what I can get.

For dig­ital designers, I think this ter­rain remains rich for inves­ti­ga­tion. There’s been a decades-long emphasis on inter­faces that are exquis­itely polite, that recede when not in use; but there’s a place, in cer­tain contexts, for inter­faces that impose themselves, that refuse to go gentle into that dig­ital night.

Stand up for yourself!

Forthcoming

Eliot Peper’s new novel, titled Foundry, arrives in October. I’m very excited for this one, because it’s set in the milieu of semi­con­ductor manufacturing, an industry that is, in its real-world impor­tance and secrecy, totally thriller-worthy.

Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, is out TODAY! The “mobility” in its title is that of capital, and oil, and the people who chase both.

I am a long­time reader and fan of Lydia’s. I am also a fan of Lydia’s editor, the great Emily Bell. They worked together when Lydia’s first novel was pub­lished by MCD (my pub­lisher) and they are working together still: Mobility is the first book pub­lished by Crooked Media Reads, an imprint of the wonderfully-named ZANDO.

Edan Lepucki’s new novel, Time’s Mouth, is like­wise out TODAY! What a Tuesday! This line from the glowing Kirkus review wracked me with envy; here is exactly what you hope someone will say about your book:

This emo­tion­ally intense, wildly imag­i­na­tive novel is both down-to-earth and out-to-lunch. One of a kind.

She’s done it. Joanne McNeil has written the per­fect “I have a book coming out soon” newsletter.

I’m very serious about this: if you will ever be called upon to write a mes­sage of this kind, study Joanne’s work here as closely as you’d study a great short story. She is direct and inviting, without a hint of shuf­fling self-deprecation. It’s brilliant.

Her novel, due in November, is titled Wrong Way. Joanne writes:

If you’ve ever said some vari­a­tion of “why don’t they pub­lish books like X anymore?” well, this one’s for you … 

At last, it’s almost here: Menewood by Nicola Grif­fith will be pub­lished in October by MCD. This is the sequel to Hild, which I have praised before as the Great Mid­winter Novel: epic, English, a bit spooky, and, above all, utterly absorbing. Hild was, and remains, the kind of novel you can sink into for days; pure pleasure.

Soon, Menewood will con­tinue the story. Look at this COVER … 

 … and look at this HEFT!

I’ve had my advance copy for a while, but I have put off reading it, waiting for the weather to cool, just a little.

Dust by Jay Owens will arrive on August 31 in the U.K., November 14 in the U.S. I’ve written before that Jay is one of the writers and thinkers whose pres­ence basi­cally jus­ti­fies the internet. This project was incu­bated as an email newsletter, but/and it launched Jay out into the real world, tra­versing some truly remote and rar­i­fied ter­rain. A gritty (!) intel­lec­tual odyssey.

I wrote a bit about Deb Chachra’s How Infra­struc­ture Works in an ear­lier newsletter. That book is still forth­coming, in October — and, see, this is why I want to make that struc­tured list: so that books can remain, for me and for you, incan­des­cently forth­coming, rather than fade into the back­ground radi­a­tion of the internet even before they’ve arrived.

The truth is, this would make a ter­rific little web app: super simple, spring-loaded, a way for anyone to reg­ister forth­coming books of interest and receive an alert when they’re available. Someone should build that! (Not me: I’m strictly a home cook.)

A few more links of interest, and then I’ll get back to work.

Here is a graphic depicting the sprawling ancestry of Tolkien’s legendarium. You know it’s Tolkien when the trees have a lineage, too.

Here is Kevin Kline’s Great Amer­ican Sandwich. When I saved this link, I noted:

This essay is a work of art. Meta and looping. The way it ends is fabulous. Here is what writing on the internet is all about.

Here’s a new issue of ROMchip, “a journal of game histories”. This one is about maintenance; I am glad to know there is some­thing in the world called a CRT Rejuvenator.

This newsletter from Ken Whyte is a beau­tiful inves­ti­ga­tion of, and med­i­ta­tion on, the deep weird­ness of BookTok, which is: the scrum of fic­tion readers and pop­u­lar­izers who post videos on the fizzing algo­rithmic plat­form called TikTok.

I con­tinue to find the whole thing disorienting, but/and, hey: these readers are building a network. They are doing some­thing that, for example, the book review sec­tions of news­paper web­sites are not: they are selling books!

Here is a look at the typograpy of Akira, including sev­eral rejected logos. It’s all just eternally, unim­peach­ably cool.

“If I was drinking port, it’d be a per­fect job.”

Here is a ter­rific poem by Matthew Zapruder: As I Cross the Heliopause at Midnight, I Think of My Mission.

Good advice, as ever:

main­tain your distance, take care of your core ideas and aims, make sure you know the exact dif­fer­ence between what you do and any­thing else that’s going on, and move along qui­etly to the next thing

I would add: there is power and leverage in not being inter­esting in the stuff every­body else is inter­ested in — the stuff other people insist is urgent.

Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all rel­e­vant dimensions: intel­lec­tual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously!

From Oak­land,

Robin

August 2023