Crossing the
Sunshine Skyway

First, I want to thank you for the lovely reac­tion to the short story I shared in my pre­vious edi­tion.

Many readers said it made them cry. Good — it made me cry, too.

Here’s the web edi­tion again, in case you missed it.

The story fea­tures a par­tic­ular music synthesizer — one I’ve really used. If you read it and you find your­self won­dering, “but what does that sound like?” then you should watch this per­for­mance by the great Cate­rina Barbieri. It starts simply enough, but 15 min­utes later … whoa. (You might open a new tab and let it play while you read the rest of this newsletter, or do what­ever you’re going to do for the next thirty min­utes.) (The per­for­mance begins at 17:20, in case my YouTube time cue doesn’t work.)

Alternatively, here’s Suzanne Ciani oper­ating a huge Moog system—very sim­ilar to Maisie’s synthesizer, both son­i­cally and ergonomically.

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

This will be a short edi­tion. I just devoted all of Jan­uary to a big revi­sion of my new novel. It was a ton of work, a great success — and I think I might be, for the moment … out of words!

I have plenty of weak­nesses as a writer; happily, “doing the work” and (eventually) “finishing the work” are no longer among them.

I can remember very clearly a time when this wasn’t the case.

Back in 2004, I heard about an event called 24-Hour Comics Day, the inven­tion of Scott McCloud, whose book Under­standing Comics I’d recently found electrifying. The idea was: gather at a comic book shop; stay up all night; write and draw a 24-page comic. That’s it!

At that time, I was very inter­ested in comics and, in my own estimation, not totally without talent.

I had, of course, never drawn more than a page.

I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I dis­cov­ered that a comic book shop in Sarasota, about an hour’s drive south, was par­tic­i­pating in this obscure event. So, I packed up some Bristol board and crossed the Sun­shine Skyway. The pro­ceed­ings were set to begin in the after­noon and con­tinue overnight. The shop ordered pizza. I didn’t know anyone else there. It was fabulous.

24-Hour Comics Day stipulated: no pre-planning! Always a rule-follower, I asked my coterie of col­lege friends to sug­gest bits of story, which I printed blind and then, in Sarasota, with horror and delight, duti­fully integrated.

I fin­ished my improv comic in the allotted time, feeling loopy and exultant. I was pleased with the result, and, more than that, I was incred­u­lous that there was a result. That I had pro­duced a com­plete comic book.

At age 24, I spent a lot of time thinking about writing and drawing, and sig­nif­i­cantly less time actu­ally writing and drawing. I had fin­ished exactly one (1) short story, sev­eral years prior. This comic expanded my ouvre by a sig­nif­i­cant percentage. It was a tiny revolution.

When you start a cre­ative project but don’t finish, the expe­ri­ence drags you down. Worst of all is when you never deci­sively abandon the project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades gather; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things.

When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is pow­erful fuel that goes straight back into the tank. When a project is fin­ished, it exits the realm of “this is gonna be great” and becomes some­thing you (and per­haps others) can actu­ally evaluate. Even if that eval­u­a­tion is disastrous, it is also, I will insist, thrilling and productive. It’s the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one.

Unfin­ished work drags and depresses; fin­ished work com­pounds and accelerates.

(I ought to clarify: sending an edi­tion of a newsletter does not pro­vide this fuel. The internet works against the feeling of starting and finishing, against edges, because those things all imply endings, and the internet never ends. To pro­duce the fuel of com­ple­tion with a newsletter, you’d have to start one … send some number of edi­tions … and shut it down.)

Here is a PDF scan of my 24-hour comic from 2004, titled Ornithology. This is juvenilia: rushed, truncated, silly bor­dering on nonsensical. At the same time, it rep­re­sents one of the ear­liest chugs of an engine that is, today, run­ning strong and hot. It means a lot to me.

Here is an essay by Nirmal Verma about Jorge Luis Borges, from his 1976 book titled Shabd Aur Smriti, or Word and Memory.

The translator’s note is fascinating:

In this essay, as in all the rest of his work, Verma leaves absolutely no markers to estab­lish that he is a Hindi or an Indian writer. There’s no dis­tance between the author and the subject. Just as Borges could, in Verma’s words, “freely relate to the Euro­pean tradition”, Verma him­self could freely relate to Borges’s Argen­tine past and Anglophile taste — enough to claim Borges as part of his own, self-created tradition. It’s rare to come across writing like this in our glob­alised world, where nei­ther Verma nor Borges would have felt at home.

When I cap­tured this link, I wrote:

Some­times I think the academy is just a mutual agree­ment to take each other seriously. A kind of real­time mutual myth-making. A group of people who all want to be in impor­tant places, dis­cussing things which will be recalled later. Who wouldn’t!

Here is J. R. R. Tolkien recalling a con­ver­sa­tion with C. S. Lewis, and articulating a sentiment that I recognize:

Lewis said to me one day: “[T]here is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.”

“Inter­lace” is a lit­erary term new to me. From the paper Galadriel and Wyrd: Inter­lace, Exempla, and the Passing of Northern Courage in the His­tory of the Eldar by Richard Z. Gallant:

Inter­lace is “the device of inter­weaving of a number of dif­ferent themes … all dis­tinct and yet inseparable.” The device is thought to have orig­i­nated with Ovid. Denis Feeny in his intro­duc­tion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, notes that the “haphazard chain of asso­ci­a­tion is entertaining, but it also rein­forces the Ovidian theme of the very con­tin­gency of connectedness.”

Of course I like the view of C. S. Lewis, who is quoted in the paper, writing that “the con­tin­gency of connectedness” lends a work

depth, or thickness, or density. Because the (improbable) adven­ture which we are fol­lowing is liable at any moment to be inter­rupted by some quite dif­ferent (improbable) adven­ture, there steals upon us unawares the con­vic­tion that adven­tures of this sort are going on all around us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will con­tinue after we have left.

I think this is the soul of “worldbuilding”—more impor­tant than any number of maps or genealogies. Or, to say it another way: you could draw all the maps you wanted and still find your story thin and unconvincing. Conversely, a “worldbuilding” that con­sisted of three gnomic phrases could feel per­fectly thick and capacious, deployed amidst “the con­tin­gency of connectedness”.

This is an oppor­tu­nity to link to M. John Harrison’s notes on worldbuilding, and to quote a post on his blog:

With deftness, economy of line, good design, com­pres­sion & use of modern materials, you could ram it full of stuff. You could really build a world. But for all the talk, that’s not what that kind of fan­tasy wants. It wants to get away from a world. This one.

Print that out and pin it to the wall.

THIS, in turn, is an oppor­tu­nity to men­tion that M. John Harrison’s “anti-memoir”, Wish I Was Here, will be pub­lished later this year. (The real Harrison-heads stand poised to import it from the U.K.)

Adam Roberts is rereading The Lord of the Rings, and his con­sid­er­a­tions as he goes have been, for me, absolute catnip: the most absorbing and “actionable” (!) lit­erary crit­i­cism I’ve read in many years.

Par­tially this is because I’ve just com­pleted a reread of LOTR myself: a beau­tiful one-volume edi­tion with Tolkien’s own (slightly wonky) illus­tra­tions included, plus some lovely rubrication:

Mostly, though, it’s because Adam is so brilliant — his mix of admi­ra­tion and engage­ment with crit­ical con­sid­er­a­tion and expan­sion so pow­erfully generative. Here is the spec­tacle of a reader fully “in it” with the author, oper­ating in good faith but/and with no bullshit, a kind of intel­lec­tual amplifier.

Adam has pub­lished three install­ments now (part one, part two, part three) and I cannot get enough. They have sent me scram­bling back to my illus­trated edi­tion, rereading my reread.

This is the good stuff.

Jump button makes Jumpman jump.
—Donkey Kong arcade cab­inet instruc­tions (1981)

That’s from I Am Error: The Nin­tendo Family Com­puter / Enter­tain­ment System Platform by Nathan Altice, a “material history” of the NES “focusing on its tech­nical con­straints and its expres­sive affordances.” I found this book totally engrossing and inspiring.

“time to post again the best user inter­face i’ve ever seen”

Here is a beau­tiful edi­tion of Herodotus, shared by Andy Matuschak. What a TOOL, for reading and exploring.

Here are some phenomenal black­letter type samples. I want — nay, DEMAND — a dig­ital ver­sion of Sloping Black. (Update: a cor­re­spon­dent found one!)

Here is Jay Owens on a new strain of “nature writing” that takes non-human intel­li­gence seriously. She con­nects two books from 2022 that I loved, and speaks to their authors, James Bridle and Ray Nayler; in this way, the piece sug­gests a vir­tual cafe-table con­ver­sa­tion that you absolutely want to join.

I have been a devoted fan of Jay’s writing and thinking for years; she is one of those people whose pres­ence basi­cally jus­ti­fies the exis­tence of the internet. It’s no coin­ci­dence she is such a canny observer of that same internet and its sub­tlest games.

Her forth­coming book, titled Dust, expands hugely on a newsletter that I fol­lowed avidly during its dust-y run. If you’re won­dering to your­self, “was this newsletter really all about dust? Is the book really … ?” the answers are: yes, and YES. The U.S. edi­tion will arrive in Sep­tember of this year, and I truly cannot wait to read it.

Jay is newly-installed as the Head of Audience for the London Review of Books — lucky them.

I always leap when a dis­patch from Jackie Luo appears. She is a sen­si­tive chron­i­cler of her milieu, diaristic and polit­ical in the deep sense — I wanted to write “in the French sense”, I don’t know why — just end­lessly readable. Her recent New Year newsletter artic­u­lates a widely-shared feeling of stuckness:

there’s a run­ning joke (is joke the word?) on twitter that we’re all still stuck in 2020, or that we’re about to begin year eight of 2016. in my own life, at least, that has felt true. 2016 is the last year i can recall feeling deeply opti­mistic about what the new year would bring, for me and for the world at large. since then, the fragile hopes i bore for each new year have been flat­tened again and again into the form­less same­ness of a world where time means nothing and yet somehow every­thing man­ages to keep get­ting worse. the future began to feel less like an unbounded space of poten­tiality and more like a pre­cious resource that kept diminishing, untouched. eight years is a long time. where did it all go? how did i get here? it’s hard, living in such per­sis­tently unprece­dented times, to know what is the nat­ural process of aging and what’s the spe­cific pecu­liarity of aging in this time.

Jackie’s “stuckness” makes me think of Zyg­munt Bauman, the soci­ol­o­gist who saw it all with such clarity, way back in 2000:

We feel rather than know (and many of us refuse to acknowledge) that power (that is, the ability to do things) has been sep­a­rated from pol­i­tics (that is, the ability to decide which things need to be done and given priority) [ … ]

Read Jackie; read Zyg­munt.

The art in this edi­tion is the work of Nikolai Astrup, who was kinda all over the place, not in a bad way. This self-portrait struck me pow­erfully:

Couldn’t that be, say, a car­toonist in Chicago, circa 2004? Don’t you feel like you already know him? I think I saw that dude at 24-Hour Comics Day! Nikolai Astrup printed this image from a woodcut in the year 1904. Here we are, almost 120 years later, meeting his gaze.

Out of words!

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on March 7.

February 2023