This is just the place for a newsletter. It was pretty obvious, once I found it, so I landed the whole crew here. I don’t know whether I’ve explained before, but a proper newsletter needs a complete crew. Some newsletter authors aren’t entirely open about this, but it’s true. A good crew has a pretty standard makeup — there’s a sort of template, really. You’ve got the leader, of course, and in this case that’s me.

Newsletter leadership isn’t really the same as being the general of an army or the CEO of a company. It’s really more like being a bell captain in a busy hotel lobby. You have to keep on top of all the random requests that arrive at random times and make each guest — that would be you, the readers — feel like they’re the center of your attention and the whole reason you came to work this morning — or maybe why you even chose this career out of all the others.

The other roles you need to fill to make up a good newsletter crew include an expert in attitude analysis. Somebody to get everyone’s head right. At some slightly vague time far in the past this person would have been known as a “Boots,” but I’m afraid I have no idea why. It might have had something to do with the Great Misinterpretation. That, as you probably recall, was the shift that happened sometime between about 1832 and, roughly speaking, 1898. During that time the ancient understanding that the Boots was concerned with affairs inside people’s heads came to be inverted by some unknown process, so that afterward it was commonly believed that they were simply milliners. They made hats, hoods, bonnets, and the like, and only in that way exerted any influence on the heads of an audience. Some of us — and by “us” I mean the bellmen, of course — still know the truth, but effecting a reversal of the popular belief continues to exceed our abilities. Still, I’ve heard it said that our foray into the world of newsletters is chiefly due to our deep-seated desire to correct this strange perceptual recalibration.

But we were discussing the roster of a newsletter crew. It’s nearly obvious that you need a Barrister in our litigious environment, as well as a Broker to complete the transactions and settlements arranged by the Barrister. Those two, it goes without saying…oh, that’s right, it does go without saying, so I needn’t. There’s a third member of the Barrister/Broker contingent, and as you’ve probably intuited already, that would be a Banker. The newsletter game is right up there with Mergers and Acquisitions in the financial world, and numbers and valuations of that magnitude can really only be adequately dealt with by your Banker.

If you’re going to have a Banker in your crew, you’re making a tacit admission that what you’re really engaged in is something of a gamble. A game of chance. Your crew is going to realize that right off the bat, assuming you don’t hire a cast of fools. So you need to make a formal acknowledgement of reality by hiring on somebody who openly and honestly embraces the gambling lifestyle. In my case, it’s the Billiard man. He’s wicked good (none of the rest of us will even play against him unless he gives us a handicap). But he’s so skilled that he understands how far above us his abilities are, and he treats us gently.

It’s a little-known fact outside the somewhat cloistered world of newsletters that virtually every crew also includes a member whose duties are much more free-form than the others. Possibly because of that — I mean, there could be other reasons, but they’re nothing but riddles wrapped in mystery inside an enigma, so the less said the better — as I was saying, possibly because of the ill-defined yet vital duties undertaken by this particular crew member, that role is filled by someone who is, technically, nonhuman.

The nonhuman member of a newsletter crew isn’t traditionally any particular species or family of nonhuman. True, it’s more often someone mammalian than, say, reptilian — but as I’ve said before, that is entirely at the discretion of the newsletter’s Bellman, in consultation with the Boots (whose opinion is highly regarded in such matters). In the case of my own crew, we employ a Beaver, whose contributions are largely hidden from the rest of the crew members, but who has been singularly responsible on many occasions for saving the entire enterprise from ruin.

As you can plainly see, with the addition of the Beaver, this crew is ready to cope with nearly any eventuality that might befall a Newsletter. And yet those of you with the most perspicacious acuity have doubtless noticed something lacking. You are, of course, correct. And that is why our next crew member is a Baker. Because a Newsletter can satisfy many needs, both intellectual and emotive, but everybody’s gotta eat. I do feel I should confess that my screening and interviewing practices proved to be, perhaps, somewhat lacking in regard to this member, because I evidently omitted a key query or two. Thus it was only after our Baker joined us that I discovered that all we were going to get from his oven was wedding cake. And as it never occurred to me to provide the Newsletter larder with the required wedding-cake ingredients, well, you can imagine my vexation.

I managed to equip our Newsletter with another crew member, and this one, I suspect, may not be common to all Newsletter rosters. It’s indicative of the laxity I brought to the end of my staffing exercises that I made a mistake with this crewman similar to my key omission in assessing the capabilities of the Baker. Because while this role was Butcher, a position intended to create a complementary and well-matched pair, the Baker evinced a certain limitation of scope, and, alas, so did the Butcher. Because as it turned out, this particular Butcher was skilled at the preparation of only one variety of meat: beaver steaks. And as we had only the one Beaver, and that one was a full fledged member of the crew, I simply had to exert my authority as Bellman and keep the Beaver and the Butcher strictly separated.

Now, we do have another crewman at our Newsletter. I can’t entirely explain why I hired this one on, but it just seemed like the right idea at the time. After all, this Newsletter is really animated by the pursuit of a single notion, and this individual expressed a singular interest in that very notion right from the beginning. Right about now, of course, I’m beginning to wonder if that notion is the only word they actually know — or at least are capable of uttering. But at least it’s the right word, and we’re now a complete crew, so the decisions have been made and I’m going to navigate forward on that basis.

After the initial hiring of the crew, the Bellman’s job at a Newsletter is primarily to set the publication’s direction and keep the crew motivated. Naturally I accomplish this with PowerPoint slide presentations that are completely absent of any content, and thus are demonstrably the best PowerPoint presentations in history. My presentations amount to an information void equivalent to a map of an ocean with no reference points whatsoever. Since PowerPoint has been skillfully designed to reduce the information in any set of slides, when faced with an information value of zero, the result is a paradoxical and mathematically inexplicable generation of a fractal landscape of surpassing beauty. My crew is, as a result, extremely highly motivated. And I’m sure you can tell, as readers of a Newsletter devoted to the exploration of a semantic landscape entirely bereft of any sort of meaning.

Steering a Newsletter across the sea of meaninglessness is a difficult and demanding task, as I’m sure you can imagine. But we’ve managed to continue somehow. Sometimes I resort to jokes to keep the crew’s spirits up. Each one of them has his own tale to tell, and though space doesn’t allow me to relate them here, there is a place you can read their personal logs for yourself; I’ll include the link at the end of this issue. But remember that the Newsletter is steering in pursuit of that one central notion, and every so often we spot it on the horizon. Or it arrives, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, and lives right among us for a few moments. There was one episode, which I hesitate to relate because of an enormous and unintended consequence, but at one point when we felt we’d apprehended our quarry and expressed it in our own idiosyncratic way. But when we were done and the metaphorical and semantic smoke had cleared, one of our crew had simply vanished. I don’t know how to explain that — but then I suppose that’s pretty appropriate, because really there aren’t any explanations to be found here. Only tales related around a circle of crewmates isolated and alone in a vasty and unmeasured sea.

This issue is pretty obscure, so here’s the key. It’s a sort of retelling of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and today is his birthday. He was born in 1832. You can read an account of their voyage and the personal logs of the crew here.