Tim Winton’s Eyrie begins with one word standing alone like a defiant minimalist paragraph: ‘So.’

Not so strange, because ‘so’ is a popular, usually sarcastic or ironic opening gambit in the argot of twenty-first-century Letters to the Editor – ‘So Tony Abbott has refused to …’; ‘So Michael Clark thinks his team can …’, etc. – and likewise many of the Twittersphere’s strangled aperçus begin or pick up some imagined, assumed, or phantom continuity with ‘so’.