A Pat Answer To The Inevitable Question

Dear friends,

Welcome to all the new/old subscribers who have joined us after I did that post to the old No Complaints list — it was both delightful and moving to see so many names roll in that I recognised from my newslettering a decade ago.

Thank you for being here. I didn't get this out last week as planned because I was busy having the kind of cold that makes strangers on the street fearfully ask if you are planning on coughing up a lung. Now that it has simmered down to something more appropriate to your average Victorian street urchin, I am back at my screens.

If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was the Alpha Guess game, with Paul Graham's "How To Do Great Work" essay coming second.

What I'm up to: I was on the Cluster F Theory Podcast talking about hypochondria. A Body Made of Glass made this Publishers Weekly list of "20 Books Our Editors Don't Want You To Miss This Year", which was nice. And the annual Pledge Drive for my podcast Shedunnit began yesterday, so if you are inclined to check that out I would appreciate it.

Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:

1. While I was in my sickbed, I spent some time wearing my best headphones immersed in The Greatest Matter podcast. Self-described as a "Victorian Gothic Audio Drama", this is a serialised fiction show set in 19C Dublin about a criminologist visiting the city who ends up getting drawn into a murder investigation. Everything about the show is pitch-perfect, in my opinion — the writing is excellent, the sound quality is superb, and the mixing/mastering is exceptional. As someone who has edited many hundreds of hours of mediocre audio, let me tell you that there is not a footstep or a breath out of place in this one. It's by an erstwhile Shedunnit collaborator of mine, Conor Reid, of the wonderful Words To That Effect podcast, and I know that he has been working on bringing this project to our ears for many years. It was definitely worth the wait.
2. I love to read about a storm-in-a-teacup within a highly specific online community. This row over the classification of anime on the film reviewing platform Letterboxd is a great example. It's made more fun by the fact that a lot of film industry types, some of them very high profile eg Francis Ford Coppola, are users of the site.
3. I've so far steered clear of having epigraphs at the start of chapters in my books for two reasons. One, clearing copyright permissions for them is both time consuming and expensive. Two, I'm not sure they add much. Do people even read them? This examination suggests that they are divisive, but that they are ultimately there for readers, not writers: "The pleasure the epigraph is meant to fulfil is not the writer’s own."
4. This is the kind of surveillance culture I can get behind. The "Bop Spotter" is a solar-powered box on a pole in the Mission district of San Francisco, containing an Android phone running the Shazam app continually. The website lists all of the songs it picks up in the atmosphere, whether being played by passing cars, people with phones, shops, and so on. Inspired by the grim "shot spotters" that US law enforcement use to get early warning of gun violence, this device is meant to capture the shifting soundscape of what people in the area are really listening to, independent of algorithms or charts. I love the mission statement: "This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time."
5. The Story of Drawing in Six Images is well worth a look. This depiction of a cat and a mouse is from c.1295-1075 BCE. I think all of the universal New Yorker cartoon captions work here.

6. I found this short story about an intense long-distance running camp in China to be compelling reading: My Five-Thousand-Meter Years.
7. It is rapidly becoming a newsletter tradition that I must find a new addicting, frustrating online game for each edition. This time, it is "What Came First?" from Google's Arts & Culture vertical. You are offered two cultural artefacts or moments and must pick which one came first. I was confident, but it's surprisingly hard. Do you know whether Dick Van Dyke, who was very old when I was a child, pre-dates Van Gogh's "Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette"? I didn't.
8. Long time readers will remember how much I love a medieval illumination. And I've got a new favourite: the "yellow silence" from a 12C copy of the Tractatus de Apocalipsin, an earlier commentary on the Book of Revelation. The artist chose to represent the moment when the final seal is broken and silence reigns in heaven for half an hour in the most perfect possible way:

9. I really enjoy the fact that most of the online tradwife influencers are making truly terrible bread.
10. I spent a long time with this series of short articles about "Digital Divinity", which looks at all the different ways internet technology are used by different faiths and religions. There's an AR app to help you always pray towards Mecca! Priests in the Phillippines are very serious about TikTok! In China, you can virtually sweep a tomb to pay your respects to the dead!
11. If I am in London and at a loose end before 16th February, I will definitely be going to this exhibition of replica Japanese food at Japan House. It does, indeed, look delicious.
12. A statistical analysis of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. (Extra points if you, like me, prefer on a long car journey to play the John Nettles-adjacent version of this game popularised by the comedian Will Smith on his 2007 radio show Tao of Bergerac.)
13. I enjoyed this take on not drinking, from someone like me who avoids all alcohol for no more reason than it doesn't taste nice and causes near-instant queasiness. Nobody should ever have to explain why they don't want an alcoholic drink or be made to feel uncomfortable for not ordering one, but it can be handy to have a pat answer to the inevitable question.

I send a few different types of post as part of this newsletter: personal essays, reading updates and book reviews, reflections on my own writing, and links round-ups like this one. If you would like to receive some but not all of these, you can adjust those settings in your account menu.

I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to sign up. Subscribe to my podcast, Shedunnit, in your app of choice, or if you are already a listener, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club. Buy my books — The Way to the Sea and A Body Made of Glass — or borrow them from your local library. Purchase a subscription for yourself or a friend to The Browser. Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

Caroline