Best Housekeeping Yet!

Overdue Thanks and Announcements; Some New Features; Some Fundraising; New Hinternet Merch (!); What We’re Listening To, Watching, &c.; the “Dead Souls” Problem; a Reader Survey

There is much housekeeping to see to, in this first installment of my column for 2025, so let’s get right down to it.

1.

To begin, we are all too aware we have gone far too long without expressing our gratitude to several people in the Hinternet orbit. The first of them is Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, who is a real person, and who conceived and wrote the fictional character of Col. Francis Cecil Cholmondeley Haslam GCM for us back when we were deep in the Bun universe (a period, to be quite honest, that we can now barely recall, from which there resulted a work we now regularly re-click just to assure ourselves it was not a dream). We loved Thomas’s contribution so much that we ended up putting him on our Masthead as an associate editor. Nor was that the end of the reciprocal gestures of good will, as, this coming February 1, our Founding Editor, JSR himself, will be traveling outre-Manche yet again to speak in a symposium on “Paranoia” and related matters at Verdurin, a “project space” in East London. If you are on that side of the Channel —dug out by the Druids themselves, if Thomas Sprat is to be believed—, and you have ten pounds sterling of disposable income to spare, then please do come join us.

Also, JSR wants me to add that if you are one of those several Londoners with whom he has vague and open plans to meet, whether for purposes of some project or other, or for a simple social call, please remind us and we will try to squeeze it in to his schedule. He is forgetful about such things, especially now that ChatGPT is around to “talk” to him for as long as he likes about, e.g., whether converbs and transgressive participles play overlapping roles in Chuvash, or whether Avogadro’s number is a mere convention for measurement or instead taps into something fixed and real about the nature of the external world. But we continue to impress upon him the plain fact that there is more to interaction than such transfers of pure information as these, and he at least seems to understand, nodding along with an air of comprehension, that actual human contact comes with some unique advantages. So please do reach out.

Speaking of Bun, you may recall that once we showed our hand as to the true nature of that particular mundus within the mundo of The Hinternet, we solicited submissions of “critical reviews” or “book reports” on what must truly be JSR’s most puzzling and enigmatic work yet. We received two such reviews that deserve particular mention.

One is from Judith Stove. There would be much to say about this rich and generous engagement of hers, but we will simply select one passage in which she treats of the scene, in “The Language Burrow”, in which JSR, or some version of him, visits the poissonnerie:

To our delight, JSR —a recovered convalescent, seeing as Seneca in Letter 64.6 says he often did, tamquam spectator novus, as if for the first time— catalogues the apples on sale at the market, the vegetables bearing the marks of the earth, and best of all, the fish in all their variety. We recall that one genre of ancient literature —most, naturally, lost to us— was dedicated to fish, a class divided (we are told by scholar Katharina Volk) into works concerned with catching fish, and those dedicated to their preparation as food. Not since sampling Oppian’s Halieutica have we enjoyed an account of fish so much as we relished JSR’s lingering on the denizens of both freshwater and ocean. The point of the market, however, is the sale of fish, and the point of the sale is that humans like to eat our fellow-organisms; and it is only practical that, after meditating on its startled and reproachful expression, JSR purchases some salmon. Without eating, embodied as we (currently) are, we could not be nourished in such a way as to continue to exist and to pursue what is appropriate for us as rational and virtue-capable beings (another matter with which the machines are not concerned, as they have no pursuits, appropriate or other).

Stove characterizes the whole work, correctly in our view, as an effort to thread together, through imagination, what we might call the different “planes of existence”. Bun, she writes, “has been a journey from the origins of JSR, through some ‘themes,’ via the cosmic, back to the everyday. But even the ‘everyday’ is, rightly perceived, remarkable if not miraculous.”

Lovely. Thanks for honoring us with this précis, Judith.

An equally penetrating, and in some ways more unsettling, compte-rendu was submitted by Kelly Truelove. His approach was to engage in a dialogue with GPT about Bun, but also more generally about metafiction. We will refrain from quoting it here, since you can read the whole thing at the very excellent site hosting his own writing, TrueSciPhi.AI. Once again we will just say thank you immensely, Kelly, for honoring us with this work.

2.

We have, as usual, huge plans for The Hinternet in 2025. We think it would take up too much space to summarize all of these for you, so let us just get down to the announcements that must be made in order for these plans to be fulfilled.

First, we reiterate our call for submissions. Our base rate of pay for accepted work is now $500 USD, but that amount can go up, even considerably, when the work has sufficient merit to justify such an increase. We would rather pay a bunch of money for rare excellent contributions than peanuts for multiple forgettable pieces. So give it a shot! Our acceptance rate is low, low indeed, and we strongly recommend that you thoroughly familiarize yourself with the idiom and vibe of The Hinternet before trying. But the truth is we cherish even the work we reject, and most rejectees eventually become integrated into the broader Hinternet ecosystem in some way or other.

We are also always on the look-out for regular featured contributors, who might do a monthly column focusing on a particular domain of interest (e.g., the AI apocalypse, Babylonian astronomy, memories of childhood). Pay, for any such new recruit, will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

We are also looking for two voice actors, a man and a woman, for a Hörspiel that is currently in the works under the banner of Hinternet Production Laboratories. Prospective collaborators on this project should at least sound young and physically attractive, even if in reality they are nearing life’s end and, at this point, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, look like nothing so much as iguanas. In other words, it’s okay to have a “face for radio”, as long as you also have a voice for radio. Remuneration for this gig is significant.

Another new feature you should know about, thought up by my colleague Olivia Ward-Jackson, is this: we will periodically be running a sort of “Ask Me Anything” feature, in which readers can pose questions, or just “make requests” for a few words on any topic that interests them, and our Founding Editor will reply… asynchronously. We are modeling this on the Right Hand Files by Nick Cave, who is somewhere in the broad constellation of which The Hinternet is another admittedly dimmer star, and who, like us, while he does love to engage with others, also prefers to maintain a certain distance. Given these constraints, any actual Reddit-style AMA forum or “office hours” or the like is out of the question. But we expect this feature will sound a sweet note on the scale somewhere between reclusion and sociability. Perhaps we’ll call it “Ligneous Left Hand”, fascinated as our Founding Editor is by the so-called “human tree disease” and its associated mythologies (please don’t Google that; it is almost certain that you will not be able to handle the images that turn up).

3.

We have been moving slowly, but we do not find, now, that there’s any good reason to keep our other big project secret, or to conceal its specific content. So here is the working title page of the inaugural issue of The Oort Cloud Review, which, if we really keep busting our asses, you may expect to see in print, from Hat & Beard Press, by the end of this calendar year:

How big a deal is this? We are confident that it will change the course of history.

4.

There endures among some readers, in spite of our best efforts, a question as to the “reality” of The Hinternet. Well here’s a question for them in turn: if The Hinternet were not real, then how would you explain the existence of Hinternet merch?

There is in existence only one Hinternet hoody, and it is worn by JSR alone, much as Captain Picard gets to wear the largest number of lapel pips.

There are in turn 36 Hinternet t-shirts, and there are at present only three ways of acquiring one for yourself: (1) you must be very close to the heart of Hinternet operations, in which case you will get one for free; (2) you must be some kind of “influencer”, willing to wear it as you pose in your very most influential attitudes; (3) you must sign up for a Founding Membership. That’s right. The least you might expect to pay for a Hinternet t-shirt is $200, though of course that comes with a whole suite of other benefits, and as we see it the price itself basically launches us into full-on Rick Owens territory or Margiela or whatever. It’s a rarity. You need it. Subscribe.

We’ve also made up some lovely little bookmarks, and you will be seeing these pop up in the coming months in bookstores and similar venues, first in New York, London, and Paris, but eventually also in coffeehouses in Sydney, Christchurch, the one slightly bohemian/lefty combination-coffeehouse/bookshop/open-mic venue in, say, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, &c. If you are the proprietor of any such venue as these, please reach out to us and we will send you some.

We suppose some of you are wondering by this point why we landed on the seahorse as the most frequently repeated totem of The Hinternet (though we also of course rely on a much larger iconographical palette than that). The answer is simple: it’s one of the few animal species in which it is the male that gives birth — or at least gives the impression of doing so.

5.

The truth is we’re all getting kind of tired of doing this “What We’re Listening To”, “What We’re Reading” routine, but we do try to keep up traditions here at The Hinternet, so let’s get this over with.

I first reached out to our resident music writer Mary Cadwalladr, and asked her: “So, Mary, what are you listening to these days? Some of that brutal Japanese noise? Some inter-war dodecaphonic squeaking? Morton Feldman throwing apple cores at a piano?”

“How wrong you are again, chère Hélène,” Mary writes in reply. “I am deep right now, perhaps irrecoverably deep, in what I like to call ‘that 2008 Starbucks compilation CD sound’. You know, M. Ward, Norah Jones, the Decemberists, Cowboy Junkies, all that. It is so poignant, I can’t even tell you. Such a lost world! Never to be recovered!” When I asked her whether she was being ironic with me, she replied: “What? Why? Mark my words. A year or two from now this is going to be the stuff that fuels the most fervid imaginations of young creative types, like the smooth mall soundtracks that not so long ago served as the raw material for vaporwave. I mean just listen to it. It’s hauntological af.”

OK, Mary. If you say so. We believe you.

Next I was going to ask Kenny Koontz what he’s been watching. But Kenny was visiting an actor/waiter friend of his who was cockateel-sitting for Kelly Clarkson’s eyebrow-waxer down in Pacific Palisades, if I’ve got the story right, and unfortunately no one has heard from him since the fires began. So I dared to shake up the usual order of things and to ask JSR what he’s been watching.

“Watching?” our Founding Editor winced.
“Yes, ‘watching’.”
“Look Hélène,” he said. “I’m not really much of a ‘watcher’ at this point in my life. Can we do ‘reading’ instead?”

When I explained what had happened to our resident entertainment correspondent, however, JSR ultimately agreed to do it “for Kenny’s sake”. He said that on a recent flight from Paris to San Francisco he passed the time by watching three movies, “all excellent”:

Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968), with Henry Fonda cast against type as a cold-blooded murderer, and the glorious Charles Bronson, just getting started in his career, in the role of ‘Harmonica’ that had been turned down by Clint Eastwood. This is not just any Spaghetti Western — it is the most consummately European contribution to the mythos and tragedy of the American West ever. The characters, even the ones played by American actors, seem about as American as the purportedly American mafioso businessmen in 1950s Havana as portrayed by God knows whom in Mikhaïl Kalatazov’s Soy Cuba (1964). And there is just something so grotesque about Agfa color film stock from that period — everyone was so ugly, covered with disgusting foundation make-up and beads of sweat seeping up through it. I’m sorry but everyone on set literally looks like they smell like murder. Great film.

Continuing with the Fonda clan, I re-watched Easy Rider (1969) for the first time in about 25 years. What can I say? It is immeasurably important for making sense of the world I was born into (so is Leone’s film, but in a way that is mediated by considerably more artifice and a somewhat greater temporal distance of the events portrayed). It’s a masterpiece. I loved the scenes of the theatrical performances for the feral children at the free-love commune, and the LSD montage in New Orleans seemed even rawer and realer than I remembered it being. Strange, too, to notice that one of the prostitutes on acid was played by none other than Toni Basil, of “Oh Mickey” fame. The ‘60s and the ‘80s are not nearly as far apart as we often imagine, if someone who played a call-girl in 1969 could, with only a small stretch, play some kind of high-school cheerleader in 1981. But it’s still somehow as if the two end-points of those 12 years belong to different dimensions, and not just because I was non-existent at the beginning of this period, yet have a living memory of the end of it. They are different politically, aesthetically, spiritually — whatever that spirit was that Dennis Hopper was trying to capture was entirely squelched by the time MTV came along.

The last of the three was Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the original and still the greatest contribution to the “psycho biddy” subgenre. I learned so much from it. For one thing, I confess my previous image of Joan Crawford was primarily shaped by seeing Faye Dunaway’s version of her, as an abusive fiend of a mother, in Mommie Dearest (1981). Here Crawford plays, against Bette Davis’s own fiendishness, a sweet and vulnerable paraplegic, whose struggle to get down the stairs to make a desperate phone call that would save her life I found deeply moving. I also recall now, since we are anyway dredging up old mediatic memories here, seeing Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” on MTV, also in 1981, and being confused at how those exophthalmic protrusions could possibly be the object of praise in song. I realize that while I had probably never seen, or at least never sat down to watch, Aldrich’s film, it is Bette Davis’s role in it that likely caused me to see her in my childhood not as a legendary Hollywood beauty, but, well, as some kind of psycho biddy. It is so impressive to see her throwing herself as an actress so fully, with so much game, into her ugliness, and into the truly complex psychology of an aging person who has no model of human excellence other than the one forged in youth. And it is also just so fascinating to me to see the ongoing reckoning, between, say, 1955 and 1975, with the disappearance of vaudeville — a reminder that other worlds too have been subducted before mine, and now lie at even deeper strata than the one I once took as fixed and eternal.

But please, Hélène, don’t ever ask me what I’ve “watched” again. I’m a busy person.

6.

We worry sometimes that we have hit some kind of silicon ceiling here at The Hinternet. We continue to see skyrocketing “free subscriptions”, most of which come from “in-network” effects, that is, from recommendations and other algorithmic boosts that Substack gives us. But we are finding it damned hard to turn these new subscribers into paid subscribers, and sometimes we even suspect that they are but a horde of Gogolian Dead Souls. Their investment in The Hinternet seems to be virtually zero, not just in a financial sense, but in the sense of having so much as the slightest interest in learning about, let alone delighting in, what we are up to here. We sometimes worry that Substack has figured out how to throw such low-investment free-subscribers our way in order to make the raw numbers go ever higher and thereby, they hope, to deflect from the fact that the profitability of this project has been flatlining for some time — not due to any particular failures on our part, but only because the blogs-with-payment-processors gold rush is over now, and folks are already off looking for the next Klondike.

To be perfectly blunt, we do not want any Dead Souls among our subscribers. This is an earnest appeal: if you are a low-investment free subscriber, you are most welcome to unsubscribe now. We want to do big and remarkable things, for subscribers who will know and care.

These big and remarkable things, we sometimes think these days, might end up happening somewhere other than Substack. We might end up going print-only. We might try some more conceptual Tino Sehgal-style art-out-of-thin-air bullshit. Increasingly, as we see things, the foremost imperative of writing in the present moment in history is to resist the AI takeover of our ancient craft, and the threat of this AI takeover is ultimately the same thing as the problem of Dead Souls we have just identified. As the networks of information circulation become ever more automated, we are going to see ever more confirmation of the truth of what is being called “Dead Internet Theory” — that is, the idea that what we take to be “engagement” is nothing more than a spectral illusion. Under such circumstances, it is starting to seem as if the only way for us to continue to affirm our humanity to one another is to pay each other for that comfort.

But such affirmations need not happen through the internet at all, and it is very easy to imagine new lo-tech writing practices emerging from the combined rubble of both the publishing industry and the now-cadaverous internet. One idea our Founding Editor recently had was to cultivate an elite cadre of writers in a position to propose a special customized service: you pay them, say, $4000, and the two of you meet on, say, four occasions for, say, four hours each. During those 16 hours, you tell the writer absolutely everything about you. The writer is not allowed to take notes during the session, but of course is free to jot down from memory whatever strikes him or her as most salient after each session is finished. At the end of the final session, the writer composes a “report”, of, say, 16,000 words, in which they give you a customized “language portrait” of who you are — a portrait so deep and penetrating and real that of course no AI could ever come close to its revelatory power. You are then free to share it with the world, or to take it to your grave, or to have it circulated narrowly or widely d’outre-tombe.

There are countless such practices as this, which might have existed, but, at least for now, do not. May they flourish.

Someday, perhaps, The Hinternet will become true to its name and literally go behind the internet, circumventing it altogether in order to keep human writing alive. Perhaps by 2030 we will become a high-end “language portrait” service. Stranger things have happened.

7.

We’ll keep it going at least through the end of 2025, and we may just figure out yet how to tap enough Living Souls out there to turn this into a base of operations for the multifaceted creative project we would really like for it to be.

To this end, we thought we’d run a very brief poll to take the pulse of our living readers, as we’ve done in the past on a few occasions, but at a time when we had far fewer readers, at least in theory, than we do now. So let’s keep things short, and get right down to it.

That’s it for now, you dear Living Souls (and back to the grave for the Dead among you!). Thank you ever so much for your loyal readership.

—HLG