The year in first paragraphs
It was the year we learned even more about people we’ve never known. The year skinny fit could be classic or modern, the year a pair of Seven for All Mankind could cost $249 before tax and trimmings. It was the year we ran out of options and used all of our points. The year, in America, that AI had a better chance at being offered a soul than a cow. It was the year the first sip from a Peroni still tasted like the first pull on a girlfriend-rolled spliff. The year sober people reached another anniversary of not getting fucked up, at least in that way. Twitter changed hands and out shook the transhistorical. This was the year, more than any other, the armchair leftist informed us: THAT’S NOT WHAT NIETZSCHE MEANT! This was the year we left intact the address labels on our small magazines before leaving them for the next unlucky contestant in the rigged game of wisdom contemporary. The other night Julie told me she went out with this interesting guy, he was tall, and the next day she looked at his feed and it was just “stacks of books” and “blocks of texts” with no “pictures of him doing, you know, things, with the people he knew.” I told her I was familiar with these kinds of people. I might even be one of them. It was the year people kept on letting us know they had a very creative pandemic, and Kendrick Lamar confessed he “doesn’t blink like he used to.” You might have missed it.
The year in reading
I read several books called Origins. I read more of the Old Testament, King Philip's War, Boyle’s Goethe, Casey’s Place, Slotkin’s Violence, Kramer’s Schubert, Proust’s Combray, and the New Testament, almost unreadable given the domestic political situation in my country. Perhaps I need to go deeper into the text. I read Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self, he’s Canadian, and longed to reread Anthony Powell’s Books do Furnish a Room. They certainly do. I longed to reread Natasha Stagg’s Sleeveless but instead faced it out on the shelf so I could see the cover. I did reread Antin’s Cage, Kundera’s Immortality, Turgenev’s First Love (in early spring, a sensuous experience I recommend) and Levé’s Autoportrait. I’m worried I can no longer be moved. I’m worried I can no longer be guided. I would rather be stuck in an elevator with two Kristin Cinema than read one Cormac McCarthy novel. I donated well over 100 books of critical theory, but not Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy. I read Dean’s contribution to 2022, Hatred of Sex, and heard thirteen podcasts about it. It was a good year for hatred and the podcasts were better. But I read very few books published in 2022, sticking mostly with that MotherTimberStuff.
I read the internet. “Fast, through a slow-motion landscape,” as Mark Sandman wrote about Kerouac. I read 198,000 words through the Pocket app according to an email Pocket sent me this December. On the internet I read about young people. I need to study youth culture when I crash, need to understand who’s trying to get in. I like to read young people who have newish takes about things they were too young to understand in the original pain they occurred, such as Crumpstack on the 2014 Isla Vista killings, or NYC vs: MFA, which correctly points out the MFA thinks we’re all on drugs. When I was having chemsex with my wife I often thought about Substack in general, but never when I came. On the other hand, I asked a New York-based writer at a classic Chicago hangout (bullets flew overhead) what he thought of Dimes Square and he asked, very nicely, “do you mean Times Square?” I imagine the same exchange took place in Manhattan, above and below 23rd Street, more than once this intergenerational holiday season. It was another year I lived in the wrong city for my professional goals, for my attitude, but not for my well-being. The bestselling novel Fleishman Is in Trouble became a TV show, demonstrating Wallace’s point that television is an “incredible gauge of the generic.”
What I’m most amazed at is how you all keep going. Doesn’t my energy rob you of yours? Or do you find this kind of writing inspiring? I hope the latter. I feel this amazement whenever I scroll Twitter and see the huge stacks of books from Julie’s dates. Our categories so often Missionary, my overworked husbands, but sometimes Lesbian, Very Pale, even Fetish. It was the year Dwight Garner typed Kathy Acker into Amazon.com and Whole Foods sent him a bag of dill pickle almonds. I saw the fiercest female writers of my generation find their fullest expression on the mat. Baudrillard wrote in 1990 that people barely have time to consume their own cultural products, never mind other people’s. But I don’t mean to turn this on you.
The year in sound
All summer long I walked the beach listening to right-wing podcasts. Sometimes, for no reason, my cancellers would go from “quiet” to “aware” and I would hear the waves, the children, the sand. I spent $79.50 on a new bathing suit. Right-wing podcasts are very serious. I love that about them. It reminds me of going over to the metalheads in high school to see what they were up to. Sometimes they make me physically queasy. When they say “the n-word” I shiver and shake. They too use the words “Trump” and “DeSantis” but those words mean something different to them. Sometimes the podcasters discussed the coming of “Red Caesar” which made me taste, on my sunburnt lips, the saltiness of Red Robin fries. For a bit there the Red Caesar was Blake Masters but then he was Elon Musk. Red Caesar always made me hum the Conor Oberst lyrics
Children they fill the bleachers
One is the next Caesar
Keep all their minds collected
Until he comes, until he comes.
In Arizona, after the election, I saw more Blake Masters signs than signs for whatever person beat Blake Masters. It’s too bad the name “Blake Masters” will die with 2022, but that’s why we accept 2022 forever the way Kerouac accepted loss forever and taught us to write autofiction and be in love with our own pain, our bodies, our selves. During the hora, Libby told me she didn’t use social media and kept up a print subscription to The Drift and, she whispered, Jewish Currents. I can’t remember if she lives in Brooklyn, campus Florida, or Austin. This year I continued to think the sound of my door creaking sounds like the first song on Radiohead’s Amnesiac which sounds like the beginning of “Allentown” on Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain. Jerry informed me the chorus of R.E.M.’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight” is not “ponytail wiggler, ponytail wiggler.” What a great tune.
I love the mucoid provocations of Bari Weiss, the way her voice drips with leading questions.
I love it when an always-be-interviewing Rebecca, w/ that glottal Ivy League bling, hashes out trends on a Vox Media podcast.
I love it when the hottest guy on Pod Save America says, “alright, let’s get to the news.”
I loved the quickened breath in Christian Lorentzen’s voice when he recorded his White Noise recap outside of Lincoln Center for The Last Thing I Just Saw podcast. It totally captured just getting out of the pretty good last thing you saw.
At the movies, I thought a lot about how Bret Easton Ellis thinks the sound of people eating popcorn should be banned at the movies.
It makes proper British sense one of the year’s chart toppers, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A deal with God),” came out in 1985 and is about the desire to trade places w/ God. In Toronto, Uncle Richard showed my son his Tesla, and we learned the car’s computer can make fart sounds, and that’s the sound I now make when a Tesla cuts me off in a Chicago parking lot. An old quatrain I sang to myself a lot this year was
brief encounters in Mercedes Benz
wearing hepatitis contact lens
bed and breakfast getaway weekends
with Sports Illustrated moms
from the opening track on Beck’s 1999 album, Midnight Vultures, which has tarnished quite well.
My favorite musical genres included Death-Metal-w/-under-20-monthly-listeners, Ian Cohen’s Recommendation Corner, Black Without Drums, 2009ish-8.4-Best-New-Music, and the equalizer setting Small Speakers as compositional ethos. In the cafes, I listened to an “Underrated Shoegaze” playlist to drown out the Wilco and the Big Thief. I watched the Wilco video for “Everyone Hides” with my son at least 150 times. Surprising fact: children are not good at hiding. The few times I gave the new Beyoncé album a shot I just shuffled over to Madonna. Perhaps I am too old for new Bey. In moments of agony I recalled dumping a good girl while the Destiny's Child song “Irreplaceable” played on her clock radio. That actually happened. I can still hear the sound of her left creaking stairs as I walked down them, out to my digressive freedom, and the stairs sound like “Allentown” and my soul door feels packed, like sardines, in a crushed tin box.
The year in the rise in antisemitism
In 1943 Antonin Artaud dedicates The New Revelations of Being to Adolf Hitler. In 1959 one of his doctors publishes an article entitled “I treated Antonin Artaud” which cites the dedication as an example of Artaud’s mental derangement. A simpler answer, according to the editor of Artaud Anthology, Jack Hirschman, is that over those years of its composition, when Artaud dominated the madhouses, Hitler dominated Europe. It’s not a peer-to-peer dedication, like T.S. Eliot calling Ezra Pound the better Jew-hater, but a head nod across fields, like Ye to Trump, or Trump to Tom Brady. “Artaud was in fact a much more radical revolutionary,” David Rattray contends in his wonderful essay ‘Artaud’s Cane,’ “than any of his friends or enemies, proclaiming total revolution, not only of production modes and political and class structures, but of the family and sexual mores. He went even beyond that, to prophesy an unimaginable radical physiological revolution: If the flesh is weak, said the logic of Artaud, we must revolutionize the flesh — and our first step will be to burn it.” Hitler, no stranger to burning flesh, would no doubt agree for some folks, although he might not have called it the first step. J.D. Salinger, there for the liberation of the camps, later told his daughter you never do get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose, and published a perfect novel about a boy who wants to save the children, for which, like Christ, he is adored and mocked.
I read a tweet early this year that said, “if you believe in the bullshit of some crucified rabbi you are a weak person,” and it was the only thing that made me feel weaker this whole year than the world war in Ukraine.
The more “the Jews” becomes singular, the worse “they” get. Late at night I stream Henry Bean’s 2002 master script if not masterpiece of cinema, The Believer. The Jew is a Nazi, played by a slim and shifty Ryan Gosling. A rumpled Billy Zane co-stars as Curtis Zampf, a Bannonesque intellectual who, in the film’s opening parlor scene, squares a circle of mumbling Nazis who want to believe they are beyond race and into Nazism for the econ-populism. (That’s like reading PornHub for the “what a lovely dick” comments.) But then Gosling, as Daniel Balint, storms in, wearing an American Apparel fitted swastika tee, Fugazi bottoms, and Ludwig Van suspenders. He makes a speech. A speech that starts with Jews. For it must always start with Jews. People will always eventually want to kill them. Even if they can’t articulate precisely why. And that’s just it. The negro is concrete. Everyone knows this when they step on him. But the Jew “represents abstraction.” The Jewish Nazi suggests the main bullet point on the new Nazi agenda should be the same as before: killing Jews. Curtis Zampf pushes back. “It’s not yet time for that. Nobody cares about Jews anymore.” The Jewish Nazi disagrees. He suggests killing a Wall Street banker first. Zampf’s wife, Lina Moebius, played by Theresa Russell, knows Daniel is dangerous, but makes a good point about his potential influence on the party. “Nazism has always been a romantic movement,” she says.
The year in girls
Another good year for girls. As The Dare’s Girls versifies. Which is this year’s Drunk Girls, this year’s Girls, this year’s Girls, and Girls, Girls, Girls, last year’s Girls, Girls, Girls, cis het Girl, or the girls with the cellophane chests, this year’s Laura and the girls go wild on the west coast. So many girls! Gossiping like Winogrand’s slumpers on a Central Park bench. When you’ve got girls you know you & your bitches are playing your part in capitalism’s soirée. You’ve reached Milo’s
and for following
every rule
all you received
were applause
so take a bow. The year is over.