2022: Looking Backward

 


Another year gone. To this one, I am not quite so ready to say, “Good riddance!” as I was some other recent years, but I also have no great reason to want to hold on to 2022. I expect it is a year that will grow less and less defined in memory, its borders bleeding backwards and forwards, until it becomes the early 2020s and then sometime in the 2020s…

When writing the recent Archive Dive post about past year-end summaries, I discovered I had not done one for 2021 … and I missed it. I regretted the handful of years I had not done any sort of summary, even just a basic list of favorite books. Not wanting to miss another year, I started taking notes for this one, and kept taking notes whenever anything occurred to me. So even though I'm sure there are plenty of items I've forgotten, it all get pretty long. 

But the whole point of having a blog/newsletter/thing is to not be limited by the soundbite culture of social media, so I am going to glory in the opportunity to just go on and on and on here about stuff I enjoy—

The Self

2022 will probably remain for me defined by some deaths (my grandmother at age 100; Geoffrey Goodwin; Stephen Sondheim) and, more happily, by my selling my book The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories to Third Man Books. (2023 will be more notable: that will be the year I — much to my own astonishment — have two books released, About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community and The Last Vanishing Man. The former was originally scheduled for this fall from Punctum Books, but got delayed to early 2023. Last Vanishing Man is due out in spring, if the various gods of supply chains look kindly on it.) 2022 will also remain for me the year I finally stopped fighting with Blogger’s ever more antiquated system and made The Mumpsimus into this Patreon newsletter/thing.

2022 was, in fact, a pretty good year for me writing-wise, though you would not know it from my general lack of publications. My one notable publication this year was a chapter in The LGBTQ Comics Studies Reader about the great Howard Cruse. Fiction-wise, though, nothing got released except by me: on January 1 I put the story "At the Edge of the Forest" up on my website. (More on that at this Mumpsimus post.) In addition to doing some new work for the upcoming collection, I also wrote a couple stories that will be coming out next year (more info on that later). 

It was a frustrating year in terms of nonfiction. Generally, nonfiction has been easier for me to sell than fiction, but this year, for the first time in almost 20 years, I could not get anyone to publish any reviews or essays I wrote. Not that I wrote a lot, but two in particular, which I later published on The Mumpsimus, seemed worthwhile to me: “To the Lowest Hell with America: On James Purdy” and “Normality Is Monstrous: On It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror”. The world of literary conversation via book review publications is pretty well moribund, the few venues left tend to be overwhelmed and under-read, it’s something of a miracle even get a response to a query … so I think my days of trying to peddle reviews are over. I have zero taste for it anymore, and if I want to say things about new (or old) books, I can do it just fine here.

Also on The Mumpsimus, I published some essay-ish posts that perhaps are worth remembering:

The best and biggest nonfiction I published this year, though, was one I (again) published myself, though in this case I hadn’t tried anywhere else, because I knew it was too long and weird for any publisher to bother with it: “The Rats in Our Walls”, an obsessive investigation into H.P. Lovecraft, eugenics, the early conservation movement, rightwing ideology, etc. I think it’s easily one of the best essays I’ve ever written, but I recognize that I may be the only person who thinks that.

In the rest of this post here, I simply want to record what I can remember of the highlights of my reading, viewing, and listening for the year. This is as much for myself as anybody else, a chronicle of time passing, a brief pause to make the ephemeral less so.

Reading

From January to May, I read mostly things by, about, or related to H.P. Lovecraft, Madison Grant, eugenics, conservation, etc. — all the stuff that went into “The Rats in Our Walls”, and plenty of stuff that didn’t.

It was the pandemic that sent me wholeheartedly to Lovecraft. I have read him off and on my whole life (fell in love with the Michael Whelan covers to the old Del Rey paperbacks when I was a kid), had something of a love-hate relationship with him in early adulthood, nonetheless kept accumulating Lovecraft books over the years (even in one of my more Lovecraft-hating moods, I was not about to let a good deal on, for instance, a complete set of the Selected Letters go to waste!), and then began to find my way more consistently back into HPL via Paul LaFarge’s extraordinary 2017 novel The Night Ocean, a book which arrived at just about the height of my HPL hatred, and which I have now read a couple times and am getting ready to read again. (The gift La Farge’s novel gave me was the ability to think of Lovecraft through Robert Barlow’s eyes.)  And then in the early days of the pandemic, Lovecraft, for whatever reason, kept haunting me.

For “The Rats in Our Walls”, I tackled Lovecraft’s letters beyond the 5-volume Arkham Selected and the only other collection I’d read, O Fortunate Floridian: H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow. Hippocampus Press has done a great service by publishing Lovecraft’s collected letters, a truly heroic task of scholarship by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and others — Lovecraft wrote literally millions of words of correspondence. The most revealing volume, both for my purposes in the essay and more generally, is the volume of Letters to James F. Morton. A Harvard grad with eclectic interests, Morton worked as the curator of the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. He was a man of progressive social and political opinions, in stark contrast to Lovecraft, which is what makes the correspondence so illuminating. Lovecraft really liked and respected Morton, and he works hard to try to make Morton agree with his white supremacist vision … but ultimately, Morton has more of an effect on Lovecraft’s view of the world than Lovecraft does on Morton’s, at least regarding things like heredity, race, and economics. For a while, Lovecraft comes across as utterly unhinged in his determination to hold onto ideas that it seems even he began to realize were absurd and hateful. While other collections of Lovecraft’s letters are full of interesting material, this collection has something a screenwriter might call a character arc. We really get to see Lovecraft growing and changing.

During the summer of 2022, I read some novels that didn’t do a lot for me, so I’m not going to mention them here, because it was probably more my own mood swings and distractions than it was anything to do with the books. I was in the midst of edits on The Last Vanishing Man and that close work on my own fiction definitely skewed my ability to see what other people were up to.

I also read a bunch of stuff to do with occultism, the paranormal, and cults, since I would really like my next story collection to be one full of ghosts and weirdness. (People keep claiming I’m a horror writer, so I figure I ought to write one collection of horror/ghost stories so I don’t feel like such a poser!) I reread The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson, which I first read years ago, and though I liked it back then I don’t think I really understood much of it. Now, coming to it from having recently read The Myth of Disenchantment by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm — a magnificent book, one that really affected my view of modernity and belief — and some other studies of similar topics, I was much better prepared to understand the ground from which Nelson launched her analysis. The Secret Life of Puppets is a beautiful book, rich with implications I continue to think about.

The best occult book I read this year was one that arrived at the end: The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, a large art book rich with Carrington’s illustrations for the major arcana and also her other artwork. This is an expansion of an earlier edition that went out of print soon after it was published, and it’s very much worth getting ahold of if you have any interest in Carrington’s work.

Perhaps the weirdest book I read, though, was Dead Names: The Secret History of The Necronomicon by “Simon”. The book’s a mess, but would we really want it any other way? It’s like The Illuminatus! Trilogy written by James Ellroy, though that actually makes it sound more energetically nutty than it is. But I really enjoyed reading it. If I were ever to teach a workshop on writing horror fiction, I would be tempted to assign this book because in the way it presents an almost-rational, conspiratorial, occultist view of the history of the second half of the 20th century it is so much better than most stuff that’s actually marketed as horror/thriller fiction. I could totally accept that the writer of this book thinks it’s all true. That’s rarely the case with narrators in horror fiction — often, they seem too deliberate to me, too crafted. What makes Dead Names work is that the tone is so matter-of-fact. It stays close to known reality and never really pushes hard to sell its paranoid vision, making it something of a trashy, muddled masterpiece. The repetitiveness, odd gaps, confusions of chronology, etc. are not so big as to be distractions — instead, they aid the verisimilitude. Reality is messy. Memory is untrustworthy. Ragged narratives are much more realistic than fine-tuned ones. All good lessons for anybody trying to write weird stuff convincingly. (Additionally, regardless of how much of this book is true, it presents a sometimes vivid portrait of the occult scene in NYC around the 1970s, a wonderful milieu.)

A fine companion to Dead Names would be Jarrett Kobeck’s two books on the Zodiac killer, which I wrote about a bit in my post on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Netflix Dahmer TV show. Kobeck’s books are obsessive and detailed, but the second, How to find Zodiac, is especially good in all it has to say about — of all things — fanzine culture. For anyone interested in science fiction fandom, subcultures, California in the ‘70s, and serial murder, these two books are catnip. And maybe also a solution to the Zodiac killings.

Of all the books I read this year, the one I would want the most people to read, however, is Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It collects more than 30 years of essays by Gilmore about racism, mass incarceration, and geography, but what’s most important is that it helps us think our way beyond current crises, helping us imagine a way forward instead of continuing in the same destructive manner. It’s the most challenging and invigorating book I read this year.

I read a bunch of short stories and a handful of collections, few of which are coming to mind right now, which is embarrassing, but also a reminder that I should keep a better record of the stories I read. Craig Gidney’s Nectar of Nightmares comes immediately to mind because one of the stories in it originally appeared at The Revelator (which Eric Schaller and I edited,) I interviewed Craig for The Mumpsimus, and I got to see him again after much too long at Necronomicon in Providence in August. Additionally, my friend Robin McLean published a fierce collection of stories, Get ‘Em Young, Treat ‘Em Tough, Tell ‘Em Nothing, that got serious attention all over the place, as it deserved. I also interviewed Robin this year. 

Richard Butner is also a friend, and so I can’t say I’m impartial, but I thought his collection from Small Beer Press, The Adventurists, was one of the publishing events of the year. It ought to get way more attention than it has gotten so far. That could be said for a lot of books, I know, but this one really rewards your time. Gary K. Wolfe in Locus called the stories “wonder­fully insidious” — who wouldn’t want to read wonderfully insidious fiction?!

It was a good year for poetry books. The ones I was able to spend real time with, and fully enjoyed, were Bashō: The Complete Haiku translated by Andrew Fitzsimmons, Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki with the Waka Poetry translated by Shohaku Okumura (not to be confused with the monumental Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), and Late Summer Ode by Olena Kalytiak Davis. All highly worthwhile. 

The Bashō is particularly interesting in giving a decided queer interpretation to the poems, though without, as far as I can tell, distorting them. Fitzsimmons addresses this well in his introduction. It pairs well with Jane Reichhold’s edition of Bashō’s haiku, though I do think it’s important to also read something like Sam Hamill’s translation of Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings to get a sense of the haiku within their context. The Dōgen is not solely a poetry collection, and perhaps not even most interesting as a poetry collection — the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki collects brief, accessible lectures on Zen topics, and Dōgen was not as great a poet as he was a Zen teacher, but nonetheless it’s nice to have the waka poetry collected so well together, with significant contextual materials. Olena Kalytiak Davis is one of my favorite living poets, a writer with a unique sense of rhythm and language that can turn quickly from fun and funny to serious and hard-hitting, then back again. She’s like the love child of Stevie Smith and Frank O’Hara. I adore her work.

I also read around in Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand, but it needed more attention and brain power than I was able to give it at the time, so it is a book I will return to.

Finally, I spent a lot of the fall reading the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan, a writer I have long respected but I never quite caught the fever of her writing before. In July, I learned of the death of my friend Geoffrey H. Goodwin, and Geoffrey was a passionate fan of Kiernan’s writing. He got to know her and did some proofreading, etc. work on some of her books, and he contributed interviews to her Sirenia Digest — all of which I know gave him great joy — before the devastating car crash of 2014 that turned the rest of his life into one painful calamity after another. Missing Geoffrey, I picked up The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan and started reading, and it was like Geoffrey was there just behind me saying, “Isn’t it great?” Yes, yes, now I saw. Having spent so much of the early part of the year with Lovecraft, the story “Houses Under the Sea” particularly got me, with its Lovecraftiness and its occultist/paranormal scholar and all that jazz, pure melancholic bliss mainlined into the weird centers of the nervous system. I read and read and read. I picked up a novel I had bounced off of a couple times before, The Red Tree, and basically put everything else aside in my life until I had finished it, because suddenly it was everything I needed. I finished the year reading virtually nothing but Kiernan. Sometimes the writing you need finds you when you need it.

Viewing

Movies

A lot of my viewing can be seen via my Letterboxd page, which I more or less keep updated, though the “reviews” I write there are mostly quick notes to jog my own memory if I need to go back and see what I thought of the film (I don’t really have an audience on Letterboxd other than myself); the list is most complete for horror movies because I keep thinking I’m going to write a book about horror, abjection, revulsion, and vileness and since so many horror movies are similar the only way I can keep track of them is via Letterboxd; I don’t write about TV shows on Letterboxd, and especially during the school year a lot of my viewing is just TV, since it’s easier to watch an hour of an episodic narrative with dinner than to commit to a feature film.

With those caveats noted, here are the movies that most excited me this year, with links to anything I happened to write about them, if I did…

Favorite films new to me in 2022 (with date of release [as listed on Letterboxd] if not 2022):

I revisited a bunch of films, too, and of those the most revelatory in terms of really making me appreciate the films more deeply were Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The first, I had not given a lot of thought to, despite having seen it a few times, because I very much love a number of Francois Truffaut’s films, and this one just didn’t feel to me like a Truffaut film so much as Truffaut’s attempt to make something popular. I suppose that in this era when rightwingers are really and truly burning books, the story hit harder. I also really watched the movie this time, and saw where Truffaut’s real achievement seems to lie in this particular film — as I wrote on Letterboxd: “So much of what we know about this place and time comes not from any dialogue or drama but from what it feels like to observe these people and situations. Moments verge on feeling Tarkovskian. It's not exactly satisfying, but it shouldn't be. We are left wanting to escape this quaaludeland as much as Montag is, and the beauty and energy of the final moments among the book people are powerful not just because of what they portray but because these scenes feel like a release from the stultifying world that Montag is now an exile from.”

Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a personal favorite because it was the first movie created by John Cassavetes that I ever really connected with. His earlier films were just too jazzy for me to find a way in early on, but I still remember seeing Chinese Bookie in a grubby theatre somewhere in Manhattan when I was in college, knowing nothing about it, and feeling like I’d entered an entirely new world. To this day, it’s a movie I can put on and in 5 minutes I’m back in that world. This time, though, what I saw was just how visually interesting it is, despite what a lot of critics say. It’s a perfect match of visual style to subject matter and mood. I’ve always loved that about it, but this time I had recently read some critics’ dismissals of the film — it’s what sent me back to it, because what they said was so different from what I remembered. I came away from the viewing with a feeling of needing to storm some barricades and shake some fussy old men by the lapels and yell, “Use your eyes!”

A few extra comments on some of the other films mentioned above:

  • Don’t Torture a Duckling: I am not a great appreciator of Italian gialli, and I know people who are appreciators of gialli who don’t much care for this film, or who prefer others by Fulci’s to it, but I’ve actually seen most of Fulci’s best-known films and this is the only one I really hold on to. It bring a sometimes vulgar style to topics that can be talked about in far more elevated or self-consciously serious tones — belief, prejudice, mass hysteria, power, madness — and the style feels cleansing, revelatory: what are at heart vulgar behaviors ought to be expressed as such. The movie is a bit like Brunello Rondi’s extraordinary Il Demonio, but a bit less focused, a bit more … well, a bit more Fulci. I don’t really know how to describe it. Which perhaps is why it continues to fascinate me.
  • Nitram I want to write about as part of a trilogy of films by Justin Kurzel (director) and Shaun Grant (writer) that I am fascinated by, with the other two being Snowtown and The True History of the Kelly Gang. Snowtown is the masterpiece, one of the most powerful and unsettling films I’ve ever seen. True History isn’t as focused and powerful, but it’s a fever dream of an epic, and continues Kurzel and Grant’s exploration of violence and gender in really interesting ways. Nitram is more like Snowtown in structure, but brings a focus to True History of the Kelly Gang’s exploration of the ways the world wounds and then gets wounded.
  • Tár may be the most critically divisive movie of the year — I saw multiple feature articles and podcast episodes pitting one movie critic against another on the film. That alone makes me happy, since it seems a sign of a healthy culture if we can have movies that incite strong, opposing passions in people. I’m on the side of the appreciators, at least tentatively — I’ve only seen Tár once, and it’s a movie that screams to be watched carefully multiple times. I got the strong impression that despite some of its scenes, this is not a movie offering any useful comment on the shallow zombie topic of “cancel culture”, though plenty of people (particularly ones who hate the film) think it is trying to be so. (This could be completely contradicted by statements from the filmmakers, but I have read nothing they have said because I don’t want their ideas to affect my own before I get a chance to see the movie again.) Instead, I see it as using whatever hotbutton topic was available to create a kind of distraction within the film. The whole thing is a magic act and a ghost story. It is rich with misdirection. This is what I loved about it.
  • This was a pretty good year for final scenes. Both Tár and A Wounded Fawn stunned me with their last shots. (What I liked most about A Wounded Fawn is that it is one of those rare horror movies that follows through to the very end with the logic of its consequences and does not impose a cheap and obvious moral or handwave with a bunch of cop-out ambiguity.)
  • Confess, Fletch is just pure joy. I felt about it what a lot of people seem to feel about The Glass Onion, a film that for me was fine but a bit of a dud. Confess, Fletch I just flat-out enjoyed pretty much every minute. It’s a new favorite feel-good movie. (So is Times Square, which I saw very recently with some friends. Pure joy!)

TV

A lot of TV disappointed me this year. Or, if not disappointed exactly, just fell flat. There’s so much overlong, mediocre stuff out there now because of the all-consuming command for content. I was most disappointed by 1899 on Netflix, because I love love loved the creators’ previous show, Dark, a show I have watched now multiple times. But 1899 is just a pointless bore, clumsy and obvious, hamhandedly portentous, and the ending of the first season pretty much ensures I will not watch anything more of it. It is a giant waste of talent and money.

Perhaps the best show I saw, though I had mixed feelings about parts of it, was Dahmer — Monster on Netflix, which I wrote about at length here, so won’t say more about now. Certainly, episodes 6, 7, and 8 were just about the best TV I saw in 2022.

On Amazon, I adored Reacher. I love the Lee Child books, and the show does a nice job with the character and story. The show is not a great contribution to world culture, it has few (if any) morally or socially redeeming qualities, and I watched the whole season twice. No TV show I saw in 2022 even came close to being as much fun.

Actually, on Netflix, The Lincoln Lawyer was fun. I remember virtually nothing about it except that it passed the time without too many longeuers. It lacked the pure pizzazz of Reacher, but it’s a different beast, and I hope there’s another season. Also on Netflix: Archive 81 had a lot of good moments, even if it didn’t add up to much. The Andy Warhol Diaries was far more captivating than I expected.

I subscribed to HBO for long enough to catch the third (and presumably final) season of His Dark Materials, the first two seasons of which I enjoyed. As adaptations go, it’s not bad, though it does in some ways tame the weirdnesses and sharp edges of Philip Pullman’s books to make them fit a contemporary idea of mainstream narrative and character development. There’s nothing innovative about the series, nothing especially original, except perhaps the beautiful way they melded puppets and CGI to depict the animals. That’s a highlight of the series for me — the daemons are characters we can care about, and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison is just about my favorite character in the whole series. In some ways, the show’s competent-but-not-innovative approach is its greatest strength. The casting is excellent, once it gets going the story moves along well, and some of the imagery is gorgeous. It’s not the books, by any means, but it’s not bad … and not bad was all I needed from it.

While I had the HBO subscription, I also watched The Outsider, a Stephen King adaptation from 2020 that was surprisingly good. (Surprising because I hadn’t heard much about it and because any erstwhile watcher of King adaptations knows that there’s a heckuvalotmore godawful dreck than shining stars.) I have not yet read the novel it’s based on, but clearly the match of Richard Price (who wrote most of the episodes and was a driving force behind the series) and King is a good one. Price’s tougher sensibility is a nice pairing with King’s basic sentimentality, and The Outsider is one of the few King adaptations that has a real sense of tragedy to it. (The adaptations of It try, but the original TV movie, fun as Tim Curry is, is pretty weak; the two feature film adaptations are almost everything I hate in contemporary prestige horror.) The casting is excellent, and if I hadn’t been familiar with Ben Mendelsohn and Paddy Considine before, I would have been shocked that they’re not Americans; similarly, until I looked up Cynthia Erivo (thinking, “Where have I seen her before?” and then, “Oh, of course: Widows and Harriet!”), I had no idea she’s English.  There’s something about non-American actors playing these characters that gives them a depth only a few American actors could reach. But all the performances are great, and actors like Mare Winningham gives roles that don’t have a lot of space on the paper of a script a tremendous gravity and sense of roundedness.

I did a month or so of AMC+ when they were offering it cheap and watched Interview with the Vampire, which was not as bad as I expected it would be. The leads were suitably nice to look at, and there was some neat stuff in it all. It was pleasantly diverting.

I subscribed to BritBox for a month to see season 7 of Shetland. This is the final season with Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez, but the show will (reportedly) go on, which will be tough — though I like the show overall, it’s Henshall who makes it a favorite. (Just the way he says the word murder I could listen to every day!) The best season by far was the third, which I wrote about back in 2017. This most recent season does a nice job of wrapping things up for the show we know; what it will be in the future … I’m curious to find out, but my heart will probably always be with Douglas Henshall.

Among the best TV I saw in 2022 was 10 minutes of Penn & Teller Fool Us, a show I enjoy because of a longstanding obsession with magic, particularly sleight of hand. Dani DaOrtiz’s performance on the most recent series is already legendary. I am a sucker for the Spanish style of chaotic magic, and Dani DaOrtiz now rivals his teacher Juan Tamariz, who many magicians will tell you is the best in the world. I know most of what DaOrtiz did on Fool Us — he’s using principles he has developed and shared over the last decade, at least — and honestly that makes it even more impressive, because he does it so damn well it’s still enough to make me believe it’s real magic! Chris Ramsay’s reaction video is a useful one if you want to know why this performance is so mindblowing to people who know what DaOrtiz is doing. Ramsay makes the point that DaOrtiz is taking risks, and that’s absolutely true. They’re the risks a great improv performer takes. And that’s part of what makes him so great — he not only has astonishing skills of sleight of hand, misdirection, and such, but he is also really nimble at improvising which routine he’s going to move to once he sees where the risks take him. It’s the magic equivalent of watching Michelangelo paint.

The last TV show I watched in 2022 was an episode of Columbo (season 3, ep. 3, “Candidate for Crime”), which I enjoyed on New Year’s Eve. Still some of the best TV ever made.

Listening

Podcasts

I used to avoid podcasts, but, again, the pandemic has changed everything. During lockdown, they became something of a lifeline for me. And then I kept listening, though not with anything like the regularity I did in the spring of 2020. 

I’ve kept, though, something of a tradition of listening to a podcast episode or two every Sunday morning. I think this feels comforting because when I was a kid, a family ritual was to watch the CBS Sunday Morning show (with my beloved John Leonard as a book and media critic) and podcasts fill that space of cultural conversation in some way. It’s also nice to not always have to be looking at a screen.

Here are the podcasts I listened to at least occasionally in 2022:

Against Everyone with Conner Habib: So genially bonkers, I can’t resist it. But thoughtful and humane, too. And literate! In amidst a bunch of woo-wooers, there are other folks like horror writers (Habib published his first novel, Hawk Mountain, this year, with endorsements from Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Paul Tremblay, etc.). I subscribed on Patreon for a while, then stopped because there was too much about Christianity and I couldn’t stand it, but I think it’s past the Xtian stuff now, so I may go back. It’s such a fun and engaging show if, like me, you’re interested in the various ways people understand the world.

Bad Gays: So good.

Conspirituality: A good counter to the more credulous stuff I sometimes listen to, Conspirituality is a thoughtful, sober exploration of how “spiritual” and “alternative” can often just mean “grift” and “exploitation”. I would pay money to hear a sustained conversation between the hosts of Conspirituality and the hosts of Weird Studies, because they have a lot in common in their approach to their work, but both shows also occasionally fall into a trap of creating straw people to argue against philosophically. (This is generally less true for Conspirituality than Weird Studies, I think; the Weird Studies guys have a particular defensiveness about “skeptics” — understandable, since professional skeptics are about as thoughtful and appealing as professional atheists [the two often overlap], but there are plenty of thoughtful skeptics with nuanced views, as Conspirituality demonstrates.)

Weird Studies: I’m putting this here out of alphabetical order because it is such a great pairing with Conspirituality. As annoyed as I can get sometimes with the hosts, it’s a friendly annoyance. Their choice of topics is engaging, their discussions generally informed and thoughtful. And we all need more deliberate weirdness in our lives to combat the general weirdness of living in these awful times.

The Ezra Klein Show: I know, Ezra Klein is sort of the human embodiment of bland liberalism, and he’s sponsored by the terminally both-sides-addicted NY Times, but Klein’s a good conversationalist and gets some excellent guests. I can’t help it, I like the guy.

Fiction/Non/Fiction: From LitHub, with a really good collection of guests (mostly from the mainstream lit’ry world).

Hermitix: Really interesting choices of topics and guests, with thoughtful and probing discussion, mostly from a perspective of philosophy and of religious studies. My recent post on “The Horror of Belief” was at least partially inspired by episodes from this show.

Horror Vanguard: Smart discussion of horror (mostly movies/tv). I sometimes get frustrated with the ideological, academic lens here, as it can sound a bit too much like grad students working hard to sound smart in a seminar, and I don’t share all of the hosts’ aesthetic proclivities, but that actually is what makes it interesting — it’s good to hear stuff I don’t appreciate get appreciated and stuff I do appreciate get questioned. I have definitely warmed to this podcast over the last year, and some of their recent episodes are some of the most compelling.

Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan: I love Bob Dylan and this is a podcast all about talking to a wide range of interesting people about Bob Dylan. Go to it now, it calls you, you can’t refuse — let it roll like a stone!

Know Your Enemy: My favorite political/social podcast. It’s devoted to exploring the history of rightwing politics from a generally leftist perspective (it’s sponsored by Dissent). The hosts are nerdy historians. They get great guests, including some (not-foaming-at-the-mouth) conservatives.

The Laydown: A podcast from the local indie bookstore! I adore Gibson’s Bookstore and their smart and engaged booksellers. It is a tremendous blessing in rural New Hampshire to have a truly excellent independent bookstore here.

New Books Podcast: Critical Theory: The quality of the various podcast series in the New Books Network varies, but I have found myself returning more and more to the Critical Theory series, partly because it’s rare to hear even vaguely in-depth discussions with people who publish scholarly books with academic presses, but also because the choice of books and guests is compelling. There’s more I want to listen to than I have time to listen to.

The Outer Dark: From the wonderful Anya Martin and Scott Nicolay via This Is Horror (which has its own quite interesting podcast), The Outer Dark often offers recordings of discussions and readings from conventions, allowing people who weren’t able to attend to hear some of the most current work in the fields of horror and weirdness. If you want to get a sense of the vanguard of weird fiction, this is the podcast to check out.

The Secret History of Western Esotericism: When I discovered this podcast a year or so ago, it blew my mind how rich, detailed, and strange was the history discussed here. This isn’t people who’ve read a book or two and think 19th century ideas of Egypt as a magical wonderland are actually true; this is scholarly discussion of complex texts and contexts in ancient history. Just listen to the recent episode on the Mandæans. If you aren’t already a Classicist and so have a better grounding than I in the wealth of material that rarely gets discussed in mainstream culture, you are likely to feel, after listening to a few episodes of this show, that your view of human history was woefully narrow. Be sure to check out the Oddcast, too.

Teaching in Higher Ed: Obviously, I have professional reasons for listening to this, and also personal, since I was once a guest on it. But this is a podcast I come back to because host Bonni Stachowiak has such a great ability to bring a broad group of people together, giving us a wonderful range of ideas but still holding on to a basic set of values about teaching and about higher education. Great stuff.

Tricycle Talks: From the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, this podcast series is wonderfully diverse and has a particular bent in favor of writers who may or may not be practicing Buddhists themselves — recently, for instance, they have conversations with Sandra Cisneros, Ben Okri, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Sarah Ruhl. If you listen to only one, listen to Ocean Vuong in the conversation titled “Getting Close to the Terror”.

The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week: From Popular Science, a podcast that lives up to its name.

Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes: MSNBC is mostly awful, but I’ve liked Chris Hayes since back in the times when he was writing for The Nation and not yet a media personality. Unlike pretty much everybody else on MSNBC, he seems to have held on to some of his original integrity without getting too brain damaged by the culture of soundbites and BREAKING NEWS!!!!. And Hayes on this podcast has time to really talk with people — and he gets interesting people, like China Miéville.

Zen Studies: I’m not a Zen practitioner, but I like Zen practitioners and find their worldview basically congruent with my own. And Buddhism is the religion that most interests me. This podcast from a Soto Zen priest is friendly, accessible, and thoughtful; it has depth without being so detailed that nonpractitioners are left out.

Music

I don’t often write about music because I prefer to keep music a realm of personal appreciation. So I don’t have a lot to say, but will point to a few things I particularly enjoyed this year.

Franz Nicolay released a new album, his best solo album yet, I think, New River. Franz and I grew up together in the wilds of New Hampshire, then both headed off to New York. He stayed out there in the world, I ended up back in the land of sticks and granite. He’s always been amazing, eclectic, daring, and down to earth — and the new album is all of that. If you’re not familiar with his music, listen to the song “Players in Wheat and Wine”. (If it doesn’t get you tapping your foot or somehow otherwise moving your body, you might be dead.)

One of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats, released a new album, Bleed Out. I love it so much I bought the limited edition vinyl. Splatter vinyl, baby!

Since it came out, I’ve been playing Big Thief’s newest album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, a lot, particularly the songs “Change” and “Simulation Swarm”.

This year, I discovered the work of Jake Blount a few months before his album The New Faith came out. He describes it as an “Afrofuturist concept album”. It’s wonderful, as is all of his work, which mixes deep traditions of folk music with great imagination, scholarship, and social commitment. If folk music has a future, he is at the forefront of it.

The great John Moreland also released a new album, Birds in the Ceiling. It’s a step forward even more than his previous album in terms of production, but it’s still that great John Moreland storytelling and melancholy.

Ani DiFranco released a remastered 25th anniversary edition of Living in Clip, her brilliant live album. This was the first Ani album I ever owned and it sounds amazing on vinyl (not all live albums do). I saw her in concert toward the end of the year and she remains one of the most powerful and dynamic performers I’ve ever seen.

Pink Floyd finally released the 2018 remaster of their 1977 album Animals, which had been held up for the most Pink Floyd of reasons: Roger Waters and David Gilmour couldn’t agree on the liner notes. Die-hard traditionalists will not like the remix, but I think it solves some of the problems of the original recording. It’s a clearer and a little bit warmer sound.

I will admit I paid a bit more attention to Third Man Records this year than usual, since my collection is coming out next year from Third Man Books, but I’ve long kept an eye on them, since they do interesting stuff. (There's a reason I submitted the book to Third Man in the first place.) It was a big year for Third Man’s founder, Jack White, who released two records: Fear of the Dawn, a blistering (and often experimental) loud rock album and Entering Heaven Alive, a gorgeous and more acoustic/traditional album. Both have much to recommend them, but your mileage will very much depend on whether you prefer the louder and weirder or the softer and more melodic. While there are individual songs on Fear I really love, Entering Heaven Alive is the one I most embrace as an album (I’m old; don’t do as well with the loud stuff as I used to!), and that’s the one I picked up on vinyl — it’s a stunner in that format.

But Third Man is a lot more than Jack White. The big revelation for me from this year was The Paranoyds’ Talk Talk Talk, which is a mix of pop, post-punk, and riot-grrrlishness. And Luke Schneider’s Altar of Harmony is a few years old now, but is lovely and I’ve probably played it more than anything else from Third Man this year. They describe it as southern new age steel guitar, which I guess is as good a description as possible, but you just kind of have to give it a listen and let it enfold you in its world.

Though now its current release is 10 years old, Dust to Digital’s Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African-American Music 1977-1980 is something I only started listening to this year, and it’s really marvelous. Field recordings can sometimes feel more like something to appreciate than really enjoy musically, but these are wonderfully produced and powerful. Astonishing stuff, and a nice reminder that Florida is more than political nightmare, Disney, and Florida Man.

John Luther Adams released a new recording, Houses of the Wind, music strange and Arctic (literally: it’s built from recordings Adams originally made there in 1989). It’s like listening to singing bowls as they freeze to death. But beautiful!

This year I also discovered Derek Bermel’s Intonations, a wondrously wide-ranging album of instrumental music. He draws from all sorts of traditions and inspirations, and the result is wildly unpredictable and fascinating.

It’s from 2017, and I’ve known it more or less since then, but this year I listened to the Danish String Quartet’s Last Leaf a lot. A lot. There’s something about it that feels to me like music for coming out of a pandemic. (Their Wood Works also an old favorite.) (And not that we’re actually out of the pandemic. We’re just more indifferent to sickness and death. There’s something of that beneath the friendly surface of this music.)

2022 was, as all the pandemic years have been, one in which I listened to more ambient and drone than I ever had before. It’s becoming something of an addiction. One recent favorite is the Kenyan KMRU. (I adore Kenya, so am naturally inclined to like anything Kenyan, but KMRU is very much worthwhile for anyone who is interested in ambient and electronic music, sound art, etc.) Here’s a good piece from Pitchfork last year about Joseph Kamaru/KRMU.

I also spent a lot of time with Clint Mansell’s score for In the Earth on repeat. And Kammarheit. Lots of Kammarheit. (It was that kind of year, I guess. But then, since 2020, they’ve all been that kind of year.)

Finally, I haven’t had much chance yet to really listen to the new Advisory Circle album from Ghost Box, Full Circle, but from quick snatches of listen here and there, I know it’s got that very Ghost Boxy feeling, half future and half 1972, half parody and half very serious instrumental electronica. Ghost Box is one of the most interesting music labels I know, with such a clearly defined sound and vision that it’s hard to believe they can still exist in a capitalist system that seems day by day more structured to wipe out everything odd and ungainly.

And now, onwards to 2023!

-------------

Images: Top: Cellar Stories bookstore, August 2022 by Matthew Cheney. Wilderness photo by Svetlana Gumerova via Unsplash. Georg Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia (1583) via Public Domain Review. Bottom: Wood bark, January 2022 by Matthew Cheney.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more