(2024-12-31) Sloan Finisher

Robin Sloan: Finisher. ...composition will commence on the next book in the Moonbound series. All my notes call it simply M2, so we’ll use that codename here. M2 is plotted out, many of its major sequences vivid in my imagination, so this will be a season of Getting It Down. I’m excited — absolutely raring to go.

Here is some theorizing on the present and future of media for you to stew in, and with, over the holiday. My word choice is pointed: I believe the situation calls precisely for stewing: contemplation, reflection, deep strategy.

To begin: three different assessments from three different writers, all of which seem to “rhyme” in an interesting way.

I loved Max Read’s characterization of Substackers as “textual YouTubers for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.)... What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept — and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited. This means you have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally “being the main character” in your writing. (2024-10-18) Read How To Substack

ii.
Connect that to the clear-eyed new rules of media from Kyle Chayka and One Thing: Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small..... continues as a series of shaped charges that neatly demolish any lingering hope that We Can Keep Doing What We’ve Been Doing, where “We” is approximately Max’s Elder Millennials who hate watching videos, and “What We’ve Been Doing” is approximately, well, this. (2024-12-10) Chayka The New Rules Of Media

iii.
Textual YouTuber Sam Valenti extends the survey to music: How I perceived CharliXCX’s comment, after my late Gen-X knee-jerk annoyance subsided, is not that music doesn’t matter, but that music simply isn’t enough on its own to penetrate mass culture. (2024-12-15) Valenti Herb Sundays1371010benjaseason8 Finale

yet, lodged in the jaws of the wolf, there is a pearl of hope, if you can snatch it:

Yes: and everything has always been a cult....If you think that word has negative connotations, squelch them; make the label, for a moment, perfectly neutral. I’ve long believed that cults are central to books: their history and longevity

Who are the scholars of a novel like Ulysses, if not a cult? Who are the readers of Marvel comics, if not a cult?

The error is assuming cult membership must be exclusive. All of us, preoccupied by media in all its forms, we are members of many cults — dozens, hundreds — with densely overlapping memberships. (maybe tribe or movement?)

That’s all to say, cults: yes. They have been necessary, at all times in all places, for the long-term transmission of art of any/every kind. Maybe the difference, here and now in the short 2020s, is that you need one right from the start.

Sometime I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.
Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable

There’s a counterargument that goes: ah, but the feed, the flow, the dance between platforms … that’s precisely the new medium! Improvisation and evolution, sensitive response to audience and algorithm, nimble wavefront: that IS the work. Network performance! (2018-11-15) Books Vs Tweets

This argument seems compelling, in part because it plays the familiar, powerful trick of whispering “you’re just old”, but it cannot be correct, not in the long run, because of what we know for sure about technology, and time. (Lindy)

Time has the last laugh, as your network performance is washed away by the same flood that produced it.
Finished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, and a solid, graspable premise with which to recruit its cult.

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, foundation stone of puzzle fiction, favorite of twelve-year-olds for decades, is available for the first time in Dutch, in a new translation from the publisher Nieuwezijds. This was one of the most formative reads of my life; as a writer, I am still, in some sense, trying to match the energy on these pages.

Its instigator, Ionica Smeets, learned about the book from my tap essay Fish. That introduction led to Dirk-Jan Arensman’s translation, and to Iris van der Veen’s perfect cover, pictured above. Recall, this book was first published in 1978. The cult is patient. The cult is growing. (2012-10-01) Sloan House Of Cards

My whole storyline, “books win in the end!”, risks being too cute: just a feel-good consolation. I acknowledge that risk, and I consider it often. Yet the storyline turns out, sorry, to be factually correct.

Here are your directives from M. John Harrison, as provocative and productive as always. A sample: Never use the word “trope”, even pejoratively. In anti-formalist fiction there is no such thing as a trope & everything happens as if it has never happened before.

Here is Alexis Madrigal, about whom you’ll hear a lot more in 2025, on the overlooked lesson of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.... Tell you what: if any book has a cult, it’s this one. The cult comes spring-loaded inside! Octavia! You mad genius!

Alexis’s argument, his insight, is very close to my heart. Parable of the Sower is THE Great American Novel, I insist, because it matches its brutal darkness to a sort of insane hope, a sci-fi vision so huge it makes Star Trek look tame.