2023: Year of Culture

 

La Mer at the Boston Ballet

 

The Books I Most Enjoyed in 2023 (Only One of Which Was Actually Published That Year)

• A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968 onward)

  I'm rereading my way through the big, beautiful 2018 omnibus edition. I originally read Tombs of Atuan first, when I was eleven, having found it on the little bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom. It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life; it's been with me ever since, and it's still my favorite of these four. The others are richer than they were, though, coming back to them for the first time in a long time (I reread them a couple times as a teenager, and maybe in my early twenties, but it had been a good fifteen years at least). I appreciate the Taoist influence, especially in The Farthest Shore, a lot more than I did when I was younger.
  

• The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975)

  Anybody Samuel Delaney, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Gene Wolfe all counted in the inner circle of their most important and talented peers must be worth reading, even if she is mostly out of print now, right? No big twist here: Yes. She was brilliant. Bitter, hilarious, wildly creative. (And out of print no longer; the Library of America just published her collected works.)
  

• Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard, 1982)

  Wonderful little essay collection. It was one of the first things I read in 2023, and “An Expedition to the Pole” and “Aces and Eights” in particular stuck with me all year.
  

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, 2017)

  It's unsettling how effectively she conjures up the foggy, mercurial emotional and intellectual world of a teenager, the simultaneous fragility and stubbornness, the know-it-all idiocy.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk, translated 2018)

  Uproarious, defiant, righteous, truly unique. Janina is an all-time great unreliable narrator. Probably the best thing I read all year.
  

• The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti (Meryle Secrest, 2019)

  Did the CIA assassinate Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou to prevent Olivetti from leapfrogging IBM and becoming the world’s most important computer company, thwart the sale of advanced technology to China, and let General Electric buy the now-distressed company for a song? Yes. They totally did.
  

• The Employees (Olga Ravn, trans. 2020)

  Foreign, in multiple senses, science fiction that follows almost none of the familiar rules of the genre. Kind of an anti–Blade Runner, setting humans and replicants alongside each other and then estranging the former rather than humanizing the latter.
  

• Matrix (Lauren Groff, 2021)

  Not-quite-historical fiction that builds an awesomely fully realized little corner of medieval Europe. Transportive, right from the first sentence.
  

• Mona (Pola Oloixarac, trans. 2021)

  Seems a witty, funny, dirty, and rather gentle satire of academia and the literary world but for the occasional surreal vision or half-remembered hint of something much more disturbing. The weirdness accelerates so smoothly and swiftly that, even though you can sort of see it coming, the climax hits you like a truck.
  

• A Man of Two Faces (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2023)

  Part memoir, part polemic, part history, part eulogy. Beautifully written.

The Book I Got Angriest About in 2023

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin, 2022)

  I'm torn, because I don't have any serious ill will toward the author (a little scolding will, maybe) and I think it's very easy to be negative (and have fun being catty about it) and much harder to, you know, write a whole fucking novel and send it out into the world to be ripped apart by jerks like me. My general policy is (or at least I know it should be) “If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.”
  
  However, I have a lot to say about this one, most of which is negative and some of which actually feels important. Maybe I'll do a big post on it later and then delete the whole thing if this blog ever attains any kind of significant readership? For now I will say that although this novel is not alone among contemporary media in portraying the 1990s as a lost golden age, and it's not even alone in scrubbing all the rough edges off that benighted decade, the way it belatedly introduces to its plot racism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other form of bigotry it has bizarrely elided for hundreds of pages is uniquely dishonest and disturbing.

 

My Personal 2024 Oscars

• Best Picture: Past Lives

• Best Actor: Natalie Portman in May December

• Best Animated Feature: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

• Most Tasteless (Complimentary): Bottoms

• Best Frankenstein Retelling: Birth/Rebirth

• Best Scream Meets Sci-Fi Comedy Classic Mashup: Totally Killer

• Special Achievement in Odious Protagonists: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Special Achievement in ACAB: Only the Good Survive

• Biggest Success in Spite of Itself: Oppenheimer

• Best Cannibal and Best Mukbang: Cannibal Mukbang
  

Notable Older Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

• The Color of Pomegranates

  I'm going to film a fifteen-hour-long adaptation of The Book of the New Sun in exactly this style.
  

• Picnic at Hanging Rock

  Indelible. I want to turn this into a TTRPG setting, somehow.
  

• Midnight Cowboy

  Incredibly fresh and powerful, despite have been referenced, imitated, homaged, and memed a thousand times over.
  

• The Handmaiden

  It's Picnic at Hanging Rock, but Korean. I will not be taking questions at this time.
  

• Videodrome

  With each passing news cycle, the New Flesh looks more and more appealing.

 

My Favorite Dumb Little Letterboxd Reviews I Wrote in 2023

• Abstract Expressionism Comedy Hour

• Somebody Studied Too Much Critical Theory

• An Actual Attempt to Do Film Criticism

 

My Favorite Series of Reviews I Found on Letterboxd in 2023

• This absolute queen watched Carol twenty-two times in a three-year period.

 

Most Embarrassing “Why Haven't I Been Listening to This for Years?” Musical Discovery

• Du Blonde

 

Best Unexpected Record Release by a Long-Beloved Artist

• Formentera II (Metric)

 

Best Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Big New England Bias)

• Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (MASS MoCA)

 

Best Not-Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Even More Powerful New England Bias)

• Fashioned by Sargent (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

 

Ballet Bummer of the Year 2023

• La Mer (part of the "Our Journey" program at the Boston Ballet)

  Again, I don't want to be a jerk about it. Parts were cool, some great images (the siren rock, the light swinging through the depths), some lovely performances. My gripe is a very big, very broad one, and this dance performance just happened to exemplify it: The audience at the Boston Ballet, in the year of our Lord 2023, does not need to be convinced that global warming is happening, or that it's bad. Or that the oceans are in danger. Or that we need to change our relationship with Mother Earth. If there are people who still need to be convinced of these things, they're probably not going to the ballet, and they're probably not in Boston, and they're almost certainly not going to the ballet in Boston.
  
  What Boston Ballet-goers need is to be convinced that they are still culpable. That sorting their recycling and composting their food waste and driving their Prius and going to see eco-conscious Art doesn't absolve them of anything. That the same system that affords them wealth enough to go to the ballet and cultural instruction enough to appreciate it is the very thing killing the planet, poisoning the oceans, and blocking any effort to change our society or our values in a meaningful, enduring way. That change might discomfit them, but is nonetheless necessary. That they need to act, not just spectate and consume.