Several Newsworthy Items

A Podcast Appearance; an Essay Prize Competition; a Hinternet Summer Course; More Book News; Other Books Received; What We’re Listening to; What We’re Watching; &c.

1. Overture

Well it looks as if we’ve managed to get almost all the gang together for this month’s “Housekeeping” column: me, Mary, JSR. We even have a bit of input from Edwin-Rainer, who, unlike the rest of us, is not contractually obligated to show up for this part of the job. Alas, Kenny’s whereabouts remain unknown ever since he was discovered with a crossbow in the trunk of his rental car outside this year’s CPAC. We’ve contacted numerous human-rights lawyers —well, the three of them we happen to know—, and none has been willing to take on his case pro bono. It’s not that it lacks merit —“This is plainly an instance of unconstitutional extrajudicial imprisonment if there ever was one,” we were told by one of our three attorney-friends, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s just that no one really likes him.” Sorry, Kenny! We’re still doing what we can… I mean, within reason.

Otherwise, like I said, we’ve got a great line-up today, and so much to get to. So let’s not waste any more time!

Molière as Sganarelle, engraving by Claude Simonin, c. 1660

2. A podcast appearance

Some of you may recall Kevin LaTorre’s remarkable profile of our own JSR, “The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu” (we never did learn why that number, precisely). This piece helped to familiarize a broader public with JSR’s work, not just as an essayist and as a philosopher, but as a metafictionist. More than that, it helped to make clear what the role and purpose of the metafictions are within the broader Hinternet project. So precious! Reader, read it.

This prompted Daniel Oppenheimer in turn to have both Kevin and JSR on his eminent podcast, Eminent Americans, to discuss the piece and several other related and unrelated matters, from their respective class backgrounds, to JSR’s 2021 scooter accident in Paris, which in important respects, he claims here, was as it were the radioactive spider bite that set all the metafiction in motion. JSR tells me —in what appears to be antiquated social-media lingo from the early Biden era?— that throughout the show he really was doing his best to remain “sincere on Main”, while Dan meanwhile was enjoying sowing doubt about whether any of this was “real”, right down to Kevin’s original profile, and to that curious AI image that he, Dan, chose for the episode, which seems to combine features of the physiognomies of JSR and of the aforementioned former president, while making both of them appear, in combination, relatively more evil than either is separately. “You reap what you sow”, I told JSR, perhaps too gruffly, when he complained of the difficulty he now faces in “pausing the high-jinks” at will.

Anyhow, listen to “Justin Smith-Ruiu Is Not Who You Think He Is” on Eminent Americans now.

3. The Hinternet Essay Prize Competition

We’re trying to keep the signal on this item of business as undiluted by high-jinks as possible. So here, again, is the essence of it (yes, we used AI to generate this text, having prompted it to “be as un-funny as possible”):

Reviving a venerable tradition from the Enlightenment era, The Hinternet is launching an essay prize contest. The inaugural competition asks: “How might current and emerging technologies best be mobilized to secure perpetual peace?” There is a $10,000 USD prize for the winner.

The contest invites bold, independent, and engaging ideas from specialists and non-specialists alike. While acknowledging the historical connection between technological progress and warfare, the contest seeks proposals that explore how such advancements might instead contribute to lasting peace without excessive compromises to human freedom. Submissions are due by September 1, 2025, with the winner announced in October. Essays may be anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 words.

One new bit of information that we have not announced earlier: we welcome submissions in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Polish, and Turkish. We regret not being able to invite submissions in other languages as well.

We are dead serious about this, and we truly hope to see very good, potentially world-changing submissions. You do not need any particular credentials to participate, but you do need to take the contest seriously, and to understand that your competitors for the prize will be some of the cleverest people alive.

4. A Hinternet Summer Program

As JSR wrote in a paywalled piece a week or so ago, we are very pleased to announce the launch, in August, of The Hinternet’s first Summer Program, on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theory and Methods”. It will be led by our own Edwin-Rainer Grebe (or some suitable imitation of him). For the full explanation of our theoretical and practical ambitions with this program, please read the entire paywalled piece, “Creative Humanities”.

The rough plan is this: we will meet using Substack’s live-streaming option, which, we believe, facilitates instantaneous two-way communication (if not, we’ll revert to Zoom). This is subject to change, but we think the best format will be to meet six times, for two hours each time, Friday and Saturday August 8, 9, 15, 16, 22, and 23, at 11:00 Pacific, 14:00 Eastern, 19:00 UK, 20:00 CET (sorry, Australasia!). Participants will have the option of doing appropriately “fabulous” final projects, a selection of which will later be published at The Hinternet. The only rule for these projects is that they must be works of creative art, in the broadest sense, that contain within them a work of scholarship. These can be old-fashioned hand-crafted documents, or they can be tech-aided multimedia innovations. You can rely on AI, if you like, or on any other mental prosthetic available. It’s all up to you.

Confirmed guest speakers include Ken Alder (an important intellectual forebear of our whole approach here), and D. Graham Burnett. We are also hoping to reel in Catherine Hansen for an appearance. The readings, which will be provided in pdf format to participants, will include (but will not be limited to):

• Ken Alder, “History’s Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud along the Seine,” Critical Inquiry 30/4 (Summer, 2004).

• P. R. Coleman Norton, “An Amusing ‘Agraphon’,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 12/4 (October, 1950): 439-449.

• D. Graham Burnett, Jeff Dolven, Catherine Hansen, and Justin E. H. Smith, “Metafiction and the Study of History: Makerly Knowledge in the Archive,” Rethinking History 27/3 (2023).

• Easter McRaney, “The Rülek Scrolls and the Practice of the Door: Marton Bialek (1892-?), Central Asian Syncretism, and the Guardian of the Threshold,” Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), New Series II, Vol. 6 (2005): 19-37.

• Edwin-Rainer Grebe, “Cetacean Philosophy,” in The Oort Cloud Review Vol. 1, Issue 1 (forthcoming, Summer, 2025).

• Kristen Roupenian, “Works and Days,” in The Oort Cloud Review Vol. 1, Issue 1 (forthcoming, Summer, 2025).

In addition, there will be a list, begun here but expected to grow, of recommended readings to be done prior to the meetings, including:

• Lucian of Samosata, True History (1st Century CE).

• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Book II (1615).

• Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing-World (1665).

• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941).

• William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955).

• Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (1984).

• Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao (1996).

• Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996).

We had initially hoped to cap participation at 10 people, but interest has been overwhelming and we’re now rethinking the format to figure out a way to accommodate a larger number. Participation is open to anyone who holds a paid subscription to The Hinternet. If you are interested in joining us, please send us an e-mail (editor@the-hinternet.com), in which you explain a little bit about who you are, why you are interested in participating, and what kind of final work you anticipate submitting.

5. JSR’s new book

As you probably already know, JSR has written yet another book. Here it is:

Sorry. My mistake… that’s just a little project JSR’S been working on on the side. Let’s pretend you didn’t see it.

As we were saying. JSR has written yet another book. Here it is, in all its splendor:

The official publication date is September 18, so it’s just a little early yet for us to begin our full-on media blitz. But for now, we would be so happy if you were to help us hit the ground running by pre-ordering here. Also, if you are interested in writing a review for at least a medium-circulation publication, please contact us to see about receiving an advance reader’s copy.

6. T-shirts and bookmarks

Hinternet merch has now been spotted on five of the seven known continents. If you are on either of the other two, or even if not, please write to us and we’ll try to send you what we’ve got left — which is, basically, two L t-shirts, 5 XL’s, and a few hundred bookmarks in need of being lovingly placed in strategic spots on the counters of bookstores and cafés in the besieged Bohemian neighborhoods of our crumbling metropolises… or anywhere, really — such as these, which a kind reader photographed and sent to us after placing them on a display table at Grand Valley State University, in, we believe, Michigan:

7. Books received

It’s hard for us to keep track of all the books people send us, especially because a good half of them go missing in some Postes France package warehouse, never making it to our Hinternet country manor just outside of Quimper. We suspect this is part of a concerted effort to keep English-language materials from penetrating the Hexagon, and in light of this we strongly advise would-be senders of books to deliver them to us as pdf attachments instead.

We did receive, shortly after publishing JSR’s magnificent piece on Chateaubriand a few months ago, the no less magnificent volumes 1 and 2 of New York Review Books’ English editions of the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Volume 1 covers the years 1768 to 1800, with a very rich introduction from Anka Muhlstein. Volume 2, with a most revelatory afterword from Julien Gracq, covers the period from 1800 to the fall of Napoléon. The third and final volume will appear in December. It would go against the spirit of The Hinternet to pretend otherwise than that you would do best to read Chateaubriand in French, and that if you can’t read French yet then, well, you should really get busy. But short of that, we cannot imagine any more beautiful or faithful vehicle for delivering Chateaubriand to Anglophone readers than what NYRB has delivered to the world.

We likewise received an advance copy of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I don’t think we’re allowed, yet, to comment on its particular contents, but here is what JSR was able to say to me about Kingsnorth in general, upon reading this parcel which, as if by some great providence, did make it through to us in France: “I am decidedly not a Kingsnorthian. I resonate with perhaps 40% of what I read in him — and most of that is the part that overlaps with Wendell Berry. Kingsnorth sometimes describes himself as greatly transformed since his years of ecological militancy. But what I see as the through-line into the most mature period is the utter firmness of his commitments. I’m a vacillator by nature, and I confess I just don’t get people like him. I hate ‘the Machine’, too. Yet if you happen to spot me at Taco Bell, or cranking up the a/c, or beaming with joy at my new pair of Nike Airs, or relishing some flagrantly neopagan electronic dance music or other vulgar and wayward entertainments, you will not therefore have ‘caught me’ in a contradiction. I have already explained to readers openly, repeatedly, over the course of several years that I am a walking contradiction. I love the Machine! That’s the whole problem for me. That’s why it’s all so interesting and so worth writing about! I don’t know what it would be like to be capable of such purity as seems to come to Paul naturally, whatever the various sources, at different times of his life, of the purifying waters (environmentalism, Orthodox Christianity). This is not to say he’s not an interesting writer. He’s a fascinating writer, but not a ‘relatable’ one, nor, I think, one who can serve as any real kind of model for very many people. My favorite Christian thinkers have done more to come to terms with the delirious variety of human beings, and can see God shining through in all of them in subtle ways. Kingsnorth is more a ‘one path’ sort of thinker, not generous, but ‘righteous’ — and this not in the new sense of ‘arrogant’, as if a ‘self-’ were implied, but in the old sense of ‘upright’, with, I think, at least an implied connotation of ‘unwavering’, and also of ‘unaccommodating’. I suppose the world needs at least some people like that. Good luck with your new book, Paul.”

We also received a very appealing book by Nadia Asparouhova called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. It was published by the Dark Forest Collective, which we confess at first we took to have a Kingsnorthian vibe, but which turns out rather to be a publishing initiative begun by Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter fame. We’re reading it now, and perhaps our inability, at present, to summarize its argument might be understood as itself a sort of proof of that argument’s truth.

8. Round-up

HLG: Alright, Mary, what are you listening to?

Mary Cadwalladr: I still barely have time for anything but brushing my feral ânes de Poitou, but my partner Miguel and I did offload three of them to a sanctuary up in Tracy, California. And after we’d left them there we drove right through Altamont Pass to get on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge over to 101 South, and then we stopped at the Stargazer Motel near Carmel-by-the-Sea for the night, and Miguel was pestering me, I mean not aggressive like, you know, just sometimes a man has his needs, but I was really just too tired after all that mule-skinning, so I put on my headphones and finally, after all these years, watched the complete footage of the Stones at Altamont, and heard how Mick said to the Angels: “Alright now if you cats don’t cool it we’re gonna split,” and I saw that single frame of Meredith Hunter appearing in his lime-green suit, and that flash of what may have been a gun, which was already in the “Under My Thumb” part; but the most amazing moment of all, maybe 12 minutes before that, is when they momentarily halt “Sympathy for the Devil”, and Mick says — Mick actually says: “Something very funny always happens when we start that number.” Like, he knew, man. He knew that song wasn’t just a song. He knew, Hélène!

Meredith Hunter, upper left, moments before his murder, December 6, 1969

HLG: Yes, well, thanks Mary, no one can say you didn’t show up to work today. JSR, what have you got? What are you reading?

JSR: You’re making me nervous, Hélène. You want me to tell you what I’ve been reading, but you also tell me privately we’ve already been going on for too long so I have to “keep it short”. Well what if I can’t keep it short?

HLG: Just tell us what you’ve been reading, JSR.

JSR: Molière. I’ve been reading the collected plays of Molière.

HLG: And do you have anything to say about them?

JSR: If you like Three’s Company, you’ll love L’École des femmes.

HLG: Anything else?

JSR: It’s wonderful stuff. It fills me with joy, the farces and the comedies of manners alike. I find I’m almost spontaneously speaking French in Alexandrine couplets these days. I love all of it: the doctor spoofs, with their pseudo-Latin, their arguments against the circulation of the blood, the cuckoldry theme, the interludes with dancing “Egyptians”. I also think I have an essay burgeoning in me that will finally explain why comedy invites moral censoriousness, even when, under slightly different circumstances, it is held up and revered for its power of moral instruction — all on the example of the fate of Tartuffe in the years following its command performance for Louis XIV. Finally, Le Médecin malgré lui — here we have Molière at his pure farcical best, yet I also see something almost like a prefiguration, which I cannot yet trace out and would not yet dare to put into an essay, of the what would become the avant-garde. If Père Ubu is the first rumbling of the implosion of sense that would come some decades later with the dawn of World War I, in Molière’s farce we have something like the distant prophet of it.

But I’m busy, Hélène, you know that. I’m trying to start a non-profit. I’m on a mission these days. Can’t you see that?

HLG: I can see it, JSR. I can see it, and I’m proud of you.

Now, Edwin-Rainer, as I’m sure you know, Kenny’s been extraordinarily rendered, or whatever they call it, so we’re hoping you can tell us what you’ve been watching instead.

ERG: Speaking of extraordinary renditions, I was trapped on a 12-hour flight with like three centimeters to move my head forward or back, and about as much to the left or the right, so I passed my time watching Robert Eggers’s recent version of Nosferatu (2024). I watched it four times in a row, in fact.

HLG: What did you like about it?

ERG: I didn’t say I liked it.

HLG: Why did you watch it?

ERG: My esteem for Weimar cinema, and for Murnau in particular.

HLG: And did you like it?

ERG: I think when Lily-Rose Depp, on the brink of death, mutters, “More, more”, and Orlok complies and eats just a little bit more of her heart, before the cock crows and blood pours from his eyes and he collapses on her, the same decayed corpse he had in fact been all along when untransfigured by night — all of that expresses something fundamentally true about eros.

HLG: Would you care to say more?

ERG: No.

9. Conclusion

And with that round-up, dear readers, I suppose I’ve done my “Housekeeping” duties for this month. We thank you for your continued support. Please don’t forget to subscribe.

Oh, and one last thing. You know, it’s not easy being a Managing Editor at The Hinternet. I have to take care of all the mundane business, while my underlings get to show off the excellence of their wits and imaginations. But this doesn’t mean old Hélène has no feelings, and I admit to loving engagement as much as the next Hinternet writer. If you appreciate my work, don’t be afraid to show it with one of those sweet little hearts.

—HLG
Quimper, Bretagne