This Time for Real

The Hinternet Is Looking for New Featured Columnists and Talented Guest Contributors; Notices of Books Received; What We’re Reading; What We’re Listening To; What We’re Watching

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Because the first installment in my “Adequate Housekeeping” column two days ago was really just me cleaning up the terrible mess JSR left on his way back to his real job, which as we all know is that of a philosophy professor, and decidedly not a magazine editor —except perhaps as a mostly ceremonial “Founding Editor”, never an actual day-to-day Managing Editor like me—, I decided I would follow it up quickly with a real column in the format and style you can expect to see from me going forward.

Now this, below, is what I mean by “housekeeping”.

1. We’re Looking for New Writers!

The Hinternet is currently looking to bring on board two regular contributors, with two very different purviews.

The first is someone who can cover politics, particularly in the lead-up to the US presidential elections in early November. It should go without saying that we, at The Hinternet, absolutely loathe politics. No one currently on staff is willing to take on this rôle, even though we are all obviously ultra-high-information individuals who in principle could easily write a clever and entertaining piece every single day about whatever ephemeral thing just happened on the campaign trail. It’s not that we can’t, but that we feel, to be blunt, that it’s beneath us.

However, neither are we ignorant of the immense opportunity for growth that we would be passing up if we were to refuse to budge from our Olympian heights for this latest round of our national Grand Guignol. As Les Moonves, then CEO of CBS, said of Donald Trump’s candidacy on February 16, 2016: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damned good for CBS.”¹ For the past eight and a half years, we have been living not so much in Trump’s reality, as many people naïvely suppose, but in Moonves’s. That man was on the money. If we find the right columnist, the 2024 elections could be damned good for The Hinternet too.

We do not care what your political orientation is.² The only litmus test, if you wish to call it that, is one —shall we say?— of spirit. Our Founding Editor often claims of himself that he is a “Christian anarchist” — whatever that is! He says that there are at least some things about which one should be “solemn indeed”, yet he sees it as essential that any writing on politics in this publication should share in the spirit, namely, of Honoré de Balzac, which is to say that a politics correspondent at The Hinternet must take for granted that all of it, and we really do mean all of it, is just so much human comedy — not just the corn-dogs at the state fairs, not just the all-caps poasting from you-know-who, but every expression of sincere partisan belonging by anyone of either party, from the lowest phone-bank volunteer to the candidates for highest office themselves. Every instance of affective commitment to the curious rituals of these strange and colorful moïeties is to be looked upon with a cold and steady ethnographic gaze, yet one that never loses sight of the fact that these absurd and desperate people, ever on the make, ever struggling to get a little piece of it for themselves, are human, all too human, just like us. Even, or perhaps especially, the bad orange man.

We want someone with real talent, obviously, someone whose work we can look at and predict with strong confidence that 15 years from now people will say: “Can you believe ******* started out at The Hinternet?! They were such an enfant terrible back then! Now everyone wants to write just like them!”³

The second featured columnist we’d like to bring on is someone who has a talent for writing under pseudonymous personæ. You might study the body of work produced by, say, Jean Teasdale or Jim Anchower in the 1990s, or, say, the complete letters of Wanda Tinasky in the Anderson Valley Advertiser in the 1980s, or indeed this book that JSR (then JEHS) had a hand in producing in 2021, for a bit of an idea of how this special kind of character-centered fiction-writing works. That’s just a start, however. We have much more in mind than any of these authors ever accomplished. Perhaps as an initial submission for our consideration, you could try writing a piece that imitates the voice of our “Founding Editor”. But that’s only an idea. Just be creative. Wildly creative. Oh, and we can sniff out AI-assisted writing like a rutting bull moose sniffs out pheromones. So don’t even think of trying it.

If no one comes forth with the necessary aptitudes, we will leave these positions unfilled. If you think you’re cut out for one or the other of them, please write to us at editor@the-hinternet.com.

We are, finally, interested in publishing one-off guest pieces from similarly wildly talented writers, of whom we can expect to boast someday: “Yes, they started at The Hinternet!” We pay $300 US per accepted piece. Our acceptance rate is low.

We want to be as clear as possible: we realize that there’s a lot of horseplay and hooey here at The Hinternet, and readers are often uncertain whether what they find in this space is real or not. That is all by design. But at least as far as the present housekeeping item goes, we are 100% on the level. We’re looking to bring some new contributors on board.

2. Notices of Books Received

We receive many books here at The Hinternet, and we would need some kind of distant-reading machine, of the sort envisioned long ago by Franco Moretti, to absorb all of the information contained in them. But some really are worthy of note, so here we will do our best to offer but the succinctest comptes-rendus of only the most meritorious titles among them.

Jack Lohmann, White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus — in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World, New York: Pantheon, 2025 (uncorrected proofs), 271 pp. This is a beautiful piece of genuinely literary science writing, very much in the spirit of John McPhee (one of Lohmann’s teachers). You can feel the love of nature, and the wonder before nature, pouring out from nearly every page. The Hinternet would have liked to see more on the early history of phosphorus, whose discovery was a crucial impetus for the development of modern chemistry. As our readers likely already know, it was the first new chemical element discovered after the scientific revolution, namely, by the alchemist Hennig Brand (nomen est omen), in 1668. Brand’s work in turn made our own patron philosopher G. W. Leibniz extremely curious about this new “luciferous” element, leading him to conduct experiments and to write at least two treatises on the topic. But Lohmann certainly conveys, with expert storytelling, just how different our natural world, and our modern history of science, would have been in the absence of the light-bearing element from Mendeleev’s table.

Douglas J. Penick, The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse Spirit — A Retelling, New York: New York Review Books, 2024 (uncorrected proofs), 172 pp. The good folks at NYRB know just the sort of things we like here at The Hinternet, and kindly sent us this extremely creative redux of the ancient Indian वेतालपञ्चविंशति, the Vetala Panchavimshati, a tale that has its earliest written source in a larger work dating to the 11th century CE, but that extends back in oral tradition likely to archaic times. The “corpse spirit” in question is a Vetala, a creature that gets up to all sorts of mischief, hangs upside down like a bat, will not leave a poor old king alone, but pesters him to no end with riddles. Penick understands very well how to make timeless legend live in each moment in which it is retold, and gives us no small hope for the continued vitality of folk literary tradition in the contemporary world.

Joseph J. Tinguely (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money, Volume 2: Modern Thought, Palgrave MacMillan, 2024, 775 pp. This is a project in which our Founding Editor, JSR, also had a hand — reminding us once again that he is, in fact, a professional academic philosopher in good standing. He contributed both an introduction to the first section, on “Early Modernity”, with 12 excellent chapters in total, as well as a chapter of his own entitled “The Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the Metaphysics of Capitalism: A reading of Joseph de la Vega’s Confusión de confusiones”, which is probably worth a read if you like studying the history of philosophy through its minor characters. But it was Tinguely’s passionate commitment and tireless yet ever-genial editorial work on this massive project that made it the great coherent whole that it is. He has provided a truly impressive and innovative contribution to this unjustly marginal field of research.

David Rieff, Desire and Fate, New York: Eris, 2024 (uncorrected proofs), 217 pp. We were sent this book, also, in the hope that JSR might provide a blurb for it. Rieff is a curious figure in our contemporary intellectual scene. He is among other things a masterful analyst of geopolitics, particularly in the Balkans. He is, as far as we can make out, something of a social-media fiend. He is also Susan Sontag’s son. It must be a real pain in the ass for a 71-year-old man, with so many accomplishments of his own, to be identified so consistently by such indexation to his mother. But if we do that here ourselves, this is in part because we cannot help but suspect that in his righteous philippics against all that is wrong with our current culture, we get at least some approximate idea of what Sontag would have become had she lived to the age of 91.

3. What We’re Reading

Well it seems that by “we” here we really only mean me, i.e., Hélène, as no one else on the editorial team got back to my request for even a one-paragraph summary of their recent top-picks. For my part I just got around to reading Willa Cather’s first true masterpiece, My Ántonia (1918). The novel relates the story of a childhood friendship between the Virginian Jim Burden and the immigrant Ántonia Shimerda on the Nebraska frontier in the late 19th century.

I agree with the broad consensus that this is a masterpiece, and one that is particularly valuable in its historical rôle as the first great literary voice of the Prairie. And yet, strangely, I find I have never resisted so strongly the demands made upon me by an author as I did those coming from Cather. For one thing —and this seems small, but it is actually huge, and gets right to the heart of the problem— I simply refused, at a fundamental information-processing level, to read Ántonia’s name with the stress on the first syllable. Is that how it actually is in “Bohemian” (i.e., Czech)? I haven’t checked, but given that we have already seen the Shimerda family (Google “Shimerda”, and you will find the name only exists in Cather’s literary creation), and the character of Otto Fuchs from Austria, and Peter and Pavel from “Russia” (i.e., Ukraine), so transformed by their new country, so denatured, so “translated” into their Western American setting, insistence on preserving correct Czech pronunciation of just one character’s proper name seemed to me supercilious in the extreme, and seriously disrupted the flow of reading.

Relatedly, I found, for a reason I initially did not understand, that I just couldn’t allow Jim Burden to replace the autofictional first-person narrator, who was plainly a representative of Cather herself. I needed for this story to be narrated by the true author, or at least by a fictionalized version of the true author, which excluded the possibility of her being replaced by a male character. So for the first 1/3 or so of the novel I simply pretended, as Burden told his story of childhood, that he was a woman telling a story of his girlhood. You all probably already know this, but only after I finished the novel did I read more about Cather’s life, discovering that she was, as far as we can tell, of a decidedly same-sex orientation, and that, indeed, her editor had discouraged her from pursuing an early version of the novel in which the narrator is explicitly female, while still guided by the same vague erotic impulse as the one artificially implanted into Jim Burden.

My Penguin Classics edition of the novel includes, as an appendix, a 1955 letter from Anna Pavelka, who passed her adult life on a farm in Nebraska, with innumerable offspring and only a faint memory of the English she had learned in childhood. Pavelka is the woman on whom Ántonia is based, and indeed most of the events of the novel are drawn from her life. She writes for example of her father’s death:

[T]he sherif said it was a suiside there no cemetery or nothing one of the near neghbors had to make a wooden box and they had to make his grave in the corner of our farm but my brother him moved and him and my mother and brother are sleeping in Red Cloud cemetery and they have a tumb stone I hope they are restting sweetly.

Sometimes it’s a tough call, in the great competition for primacy of power between art and life. But in this case I have no doubt: Pavelka’s letter was by far the most moving moment in the pages of this edition of Cather’s novel.

We asked JSR to tell us what novels he’s been reading recently, and received only this text in response: “I’m a philosophy professor. Why would I be reading literature?! Just tell them I’m reading, uh, ‘How to Assess Claims in Multiple-Option Choice Sets’.”

4. What We’re Listening To

And this time “we” really means our own Mary Cadwalladr. Here’s her brief report:

I just can’t stop listening to Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadors these days! Tubb had long been on my radar, but I never knew how central he was, in the 1960s, to fostering a community of country artists who together were without doubt the most “avant” and adventurous in the genre. Among these artists, we find Willie Nelson trying out some of his early attempts at jazz phrasing, and we find the virtuosic Leon Rhodes on guitar. Consider for example this incredible performance on The Ernest Tubb show, I believe from 1965, of “My Window Faces the South”, featuring both Willie and Leon. Hear those notes that the latter plays around 55 seconds in, with that defiant, proud look on his face as he moves altogether out of anything like a recognizably country scale. Or just listen to this performance of “Rhodes-Bud Boogie”, likely from the same year, with Leon on guitar and Buddy Charleton on steel guitar. Just two virtuosi, shredding beyond genre, happily under the radar of the high-culture taste-makers in their silly low-status cowboy costumes. Wonderful! —MC

5. What We’re Watching

And this time it’s our own Kenny Koontz who got back to my request:

Here is one case where I fully agree with The Hinternet’s official editorial line, which holds, in JSR’s words, that “if you are currently watching streaming TV series on Netflix or whatever, when there is a free, practically infinite archive of recordings from the entire history of film and television, you are literally wasting your lives.” Good old JSR haha, doesn’t mince words. I’ve been watching a lot of those variety shows that were on between, say, 1965 and 1975, catering to an audience too old to have any fellow-feeling with the hippie generation. They are just so poignant! I’m stuck in particular on The Dean Martin Show, with its host’s increasingly tragic attachment to the lost world of louche sophistication, of sub-Hefnerian outrance and seemingly inextinguishable cigarettes; and on The Dinah Shore Show, where she and Bing Crosby can sit and reminisce for hours about Louis Armstrong’s (d. 1971) endless good cheer. I’ll have to write more about these soon enough. But for today I’ll just give you one concrete recommendation. YouTube’s algorithms know me too well by now, of course, and they could not hold back from sending my way, after a certain number of clicks on Dean and Dinah, this delirious clip from 1970, featuring John Wayne and friends singing “God Bless America”. I would recommend approaching this performance as follows: take an edible, and wait an hour. Then lie back, hold the screen close to your face, and get ready especially for the sequence that begins with Ed McMahon and climaxes gloriously with Lucille Ball. Rowan and Martin come along right after her and ruin this string of banger performances, but then soon enough the old Duke himself reappears to sing, or rather to shout/cry, “God Bless America!” one more time. And with those ghostly superadded notifications of the years of death of most of these characters, I guarantee you will come away thinking: What a strange place, America! What a civic religion! —KK

6. Varia

We really need to wrap things up, but very quickly, let me note that we have certainly not forgotten about those 100 of you who quickly signed up on the socials in response to our offer of a free annual comp to our earliest pioneers. It is taking us some time to activate those comps, and in some cases we are having trouble determining who you are from your X or Instagram handles alone. If you are among the first 100 (i.e., the first 50 on X or the first 50 on Instagram), and you have not received your comp by, say, October 1, 2024, please let us know.

Also, if you’ve signed up for a “Hinternet Symposion” subscription, you’re not going to regret it. We’re currently in the development phase of the podcast branch of The Hinternet. JSR is hard at work on this right now (only on evenings and weekends, of course). We’ll be releasing new material within the next month, and will be launching our “Deep Dives” in the spring.

Please remember to subscribe, and to follow us on the socials!

That’s all for now.

Love, HLG

1. We wonder what’s been going on with Moonves more recently. Alas, no time to Google!

2. Within reason of course. Whose reason? Ours!

3. None but the elderly will want to be writing like anything 15 years from now.