Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
My 2023 in Review
Some notes cobbled together hastily during this last week of a bruising, chaotic year, regarding what I read, saw, wrote, and edited:
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, by Sheila Liming. My first acquisition at Melville House was published in January, a fact that still seems miraculous to me, and that stirs up unapologetic feelings of pride and satisfaction; a specimen of that rarest of magical events, an unqualified professional success. Hanging Out was immediately greeted with almost unqualified praise, which was the beginning of an astonishing run of acclaim and media attention, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the Atlantic, Bookforum, People, Slate, Ezra Klein, and many more all giving substantial attention to this eloquent young writer and her pugnacious, erudite, yet charming account of a world gone somehow awry. The extent of this penetration into our attentional commons was startling; the book was a Jeopardy question, for God’s sakes. The author and her husband have since become personal friends, an unexpected but welcome bounty. Gifts; these things are all gifts.
Artless: Stories 2019–2023, by Natasha Stagg. This collection of short pieces from downtown fashion writer and It Girl manqué Stagg is like a concentrated shot of NYC at its most prickly and unhappy. I like it, but for all the wrong reasons; it is more enjoyable to think about than it is to actually read. Like its predecessor, 2019’s Sleeveless, the book is a reliable barometer of my mood. When I am feeling up, Stagg seems sharp, cheerfully amoral, a slumming postmodernist Joan Didion with unerring radar and a way with shorthand cultural critique. When I am feeling tired and confused, she seems borderline repulsive: shallow, reactionary, insanely self-absorbed, not particularly interesting. This probably says more about me than it does about the author, but since Natasha Stagg is mainly interested in Natasha Stagg, refracting her book through the miasmic prism of my own subjectivity and ennui seems fair.
Tännhauser, by Richard Wagner. Notable not just for a fine performance that vaulted this opera into my Personal Top Five but also for the climate-change protests that twice interrupted the performance of November 30. The New York Times’s account of the imbroglio mentions that “someone in the box below immediately tried to tear the banner down,” this being the one and only appearance, to my knowledge, of my friend’s wife and staunch fellow life-warrior Corinne in those august pages. There was something about sitting there in the vast dark bowl of the Met, listening to cascades of booing and shouting while the protestor chanted on, that seemed somehow, in some vague way, to perfectly capture this moment, this city, this world, in all its clashing ugliness and odd beauty.
The best new books I read this year were Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer, a tough, smart, hard look at the problem of good art made by bad people; Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, a stunning feminist re-reading of the great Romantic poet by Anahid Nersessian; and City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, by Abram C. Van Engen, which stands as the latest instantiation of my ongoing fascination with the Puritans.
The Detroit Lions are 11-3 and will be hosting a playoff game for the first time since 1993 and their historic first-round 38 -6 thrashing of the Dallas Cowboys, a game I watched in the living room of my parents’ townhouse in Plains, Pennsylvania, home from Boston for the holiday. This is putatively a reading log, not a diary about the sporpsball, but it is also in a sideways way a story about me, about family, about Michigan, about football, and about roots. The thread that connects a wide-eyed boy at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1978 to the young, hard-drinking editor celebrating that 1992 win to the person I am now, watching the games on television in the company of my aged widower father, is slender indeed, but also very real. The older I get, the more acutely such threads seem to vibrate, although often incommensurate to my ability to describe them.
The first work of fiction I have ever acquired and edited, a novel by Carolyn Kuebler called Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, goes on sale May 7. A reminder that prior to giving up the Aaron Boone home run in 2003, the late Tim Wakefield had already beaten the Yankees pretty much all by himself. Under repugnant clown-toad Eric Adams, New York City libraries are now closed on the weekend. The ones who love us least / are the ones we’ll die to please. Joe fixed my boat!
