(2024-04-02) Sloan Is It Drugs

Robin Sloan: Is it drugs? I’m producing a limited-edition zine that I will mail to folks who have preordered Moonbound.

A fusillade of frames

The only truly complete description of a novel is the novel itself. Every shorter description — every pitch — necessarily leaves something (most things) out

Here are a few ways of framing this new novel for readers of my previous two. Moonbound answers all of these questions, some obliquely:

What if the uncanny starter from Sourdough wasn’t the story’s subject, but its narrator?

A new note on influence

I’ve added a new note to my Moonbound mini-site: another appreciation of a writer who influenced me, and the novel in turn. This follows my notes on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. This time, it’s about Iain Banks

This time, it’s about muscular imagination. (2024-04-09 SloanMuscularImagination)

I’m an ardent booster of my little neighborhood.

There are also restaurants, of course, and one in particular has transformed and enlivened the entire neighborhood. Called Good to Eat, it is the brick-and-mortar realization of a pop-up that for many years offered Taiwanese dumplings at a local brewery.

The casual, friendly service and reasonable (for the Bay Area) prices don’t quite prepare you for the food, which exhibits a level of precision and creativity that approaches fine dining

It’s delightful to realize: all those years with the pop-up, slinging dumplings, THIS is what Chef Tony wanted to do. She had a secret plan!

Good to Eat offers the reminder, and the tangible argument: enthusiasm and care are not in short supply. They don’t need to be hoarded. They ought to burn bright, spill out onto the sidewalk.

Here’s something important to understand. It is, at this time, approximately impossible to open and operate a restaurant in the Bay Area

It’s not just restaurants. Every kind of physical establishment feels, presently, improbable

Yet, it is physical establishments — storefronts and markets, cafes and restaurants — that make cities (like the donut megalopolis of the Bay Area) worth inhabiting

this is not just a post-pandemic thing. The Bay Area has, for decades, been a daunting place to open your doors. Many of America’s urban hubs share this overheated deformity

It’s breathtaking to visit a country like Japan and find the most tenuous businesses (with the scantest hours) puttering along happily … simply because the rent is so low.

I read and loved Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes. This is serious physics, presented in an experimental way, deeply literary

Now, I’m onto an earlier book, The Order of Time, which is likewise captivating.

Here’s a note I tapped out while reading The Order of Time, indicative of the sort of thoughts this stuff encourages: Rovelli. The past is only a complex of traces. All physical. Craters in soil, memories in brain. Stone tablets, photographs. Now imagine: millions of years pass. More. All is dissolved and smoothed over. Washed away. Did anything happen?

I love these bits of thinking and language behind the original Macintosh, as captured in Dan Cohen’s newsletter:

• “the computer must be in one lump”
• “seeing the guts is taboo”
• “you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord”

Denis Villeneueve, against dialogue: I will say: in a perfect world, you should use dialogue only when there are no other resources

It will not surprise you to learn that I disagree — in fact, I might endorse the opposite view: use imagery only when you cannot use dialogue — but/and I love the sharpness of his opinion!

I appreciated this episode of the Search Engine podcast, in which the host PJ Vogt and his guest Ezra Klein wrestle with a whole load of meta media questions — my favorite kind.

Perhaps my favorite observation of Ezra’s was that it’s increasingly difficult to gather an audience from scratch, particularly outside the algorithmic mills (algorithmic feed) of the apps. He’s talking about this in the context of news operations, but/and I think it’s true for any kind of media production. (creator economy)

Oddly, physical goods have an easier time! Maybe media ought to just fade into a grand cross-subsidy. Want to start a magazine? Fine — design the merch first.

I’ve long considered launching a newsletter intended to get new projects their first hundred readers, or listeners, or viewers, or whatever. I’m cognizant of the catch-22: how would THAT newsletter build an audience?

Here’s Kyle Chayka attacking the same theme in a recent edition of One Thing.

Here’s Claire L. Evans, in a newsletter dispatch about lucid dreaming:As the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel writes, “perhaps dream-objects and dream-events are similar to fictional objects and events, or to the images evoked by fiction

Fuel for my argument — you’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it now — that novels are best understood as packaged dreams.

Maybe the lines above struck me because I’ve been thinking (again) (endlessly) about that fabulous phase change, when fiction goes from reading to dreaming.

I was most aware of the phase change as a young person, a novice reader. I remember being very conscious, sometimes, that it was NOT happening; that my wheels were just bumping along the runway. I remember giving up.

Considering the novels before her, Judge Thorpe offered a compelling rubric including dimensions such as:

• Characters: I know it’s not popular to say, but I want to like the fucking characters
• Does it vibrate strangely? This is the most ineffable category, but also the most important to me. Is the work so singularly itself that it has transcended in some way?
• Is it drugs? Did I lose consciousness while reading it? I’m still chasing the absolute narcotic of the Sweet Valley High books.

Reading the judgment, it was delightful and illuminating to see Judge Thorpe apply this rubric to the books under consideration. Even more delightful was the way her language infected the whole Tournament of Books. “Is it drugs?” became THE recurring question.