(This very different but equally long Ear Mountain is dedicated to Mackenzie, who requested it! Your wish is my command.)
(Also, Mackenzie is an amazing adviser, confidante, and conversationalist, and she is now accepting coaching clients! Don’t sleep on the chance.)
(Also, a heads up that this post is “too long for email,” according to Substack’s editor, so if you start it in your email you may have to finish it, if you’d like to, by clicking “view entire message” or going to Substack itself. Fun!/caveat lector.)
2023: dark and cold to start; snow in Santa Fe; many middle-of-the-night walks with Hans, who was sick (I thought, in the dark, well at least it’s not raining—February was pretty dry); Andrew got COVID; I got COVID from Andrew; I taught twice a week at a Montessori middle school and found out that I loved Montessori school pedagogy and the kids; the William Kentridge show in LA; biking home from the Montessori school along the many waterways of Seattle (the canal, Lake Union, Lake Washington) and the glory of getting to live in this landscape; we did five nights of karaoke in four weeks to “prepare” Bei Hua and Emelio for parenthood/celebrate them; birth of baby Indigo!; a trip to the coast in June; a month of teaching at a UW summer program (my students did karaoke on the last day); I didn’t see Taylor Swift; trips cancelled because of illness; trips cancelled or changed because of a knee injury; we had an ice cream party; easy beach backpacking; a trip to the Tokeland Hotel (I read Charles Dickens at a picnic table); I started teaching at Cornish; a trip to the Hudson Valley and New York City with Anneka (we rode Citibikes with Hannah, put on aprons at the Tivoli bakery); the war in Gaza started and the world seemed grimmer and grimmer; we sang the Spice Girls at Thanksgiving; tons of residency rejections; we hosted our cookie swap, looked at holiday lights with Ramona, cut snowflakes and drank cocktails with pals; a two-inch thorn went through my hiking boot and into my big toe when I stepped up onto a curb; cooking, reading, more karaoke.
My five favorite books I read this year (in order of when in the year I read them):
Calamities, Renee Gladman. Molly sent me some very funny excerpts from this while she was reading it in 2022, so I picked it up in January, a month in which I always need delight. It is delightful, though it’s not only that; it’s also unclassifiable (is it an essay and/or poems and/or fiction?), exemplary in terms of the intense pleasure for readers of patterning and repeated form, interested in the doubling-back and layering way in which we experience time, and committed to exploring questions of art-making within the idiosyncratic ongoingness of a particular life and mind. There are parts of this that reminded me of Gertrude Stein, other parts that reminded me of Lydia Davis, but Gladman is doing her own brilliant thing and I mostly just felt like I would love to read an infinite series of these calamities. One very beloved passage among many:
What I wanted was for what I said to amount to “This is what I was seeing” but to do it in a way that what I said brought forth the thing I saw, rather than a representation of that thing. My words would reconstitute the thing I’d seen exactly as I’d seen it and create for the person reading those words a verisimilitude that enabled her to believe she’d also seen the thing and in that initial moment that I’d seen it. You wanted to write a whole book, where people were just seeing how you lived, and you did this for a long time. But then your living became a way of writing, and the events you wrote about, which were non-events in the crucial way that this is why you were writing of them in the first place—for much of the day nothing happens, nothing ever happens, you were trying to say—these events became structures for thinking: so you were walking and drinking coffee or not drinking coffee and your pattern of thought was changing. My sentences had changed somewhere between coffee and drawing, and then I was writing to try to catch up with the change but all the time making more change because to write was always to add to something that is going its own way.
The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard. Another one that came to me by way of a friend; during the summer of 2022, while I was teaching at Bard, a pal and fellow teacher (Sofia!) said she had been really loving this. I’d heard of it before, got curious, and finally started it this past winter. I read the first pages while passing Mount Rainier on the plane on the way to Santa Fe, and I said to Andrew, wow, this book is going to be REALLY good! It was distracting me from the mountain, which is hard to do. The language of the novel is so beautiful that it’s hard to describe. Every sentence is sharp and made with care, and the characters are drawn larger than life and also recognizable in their flaws and contradictions. The book made me gasp and also cry. Probably my very favorite of the year if I had to choose.
Inciting Joy, Ross Gay. I’ve been a Ross Gay superfan since he came to read from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude at the alternative school I taught at in Western Massachusetts. When I first started reading Inciting Joy, I thought for a second, do I already know and love everything Ross Gay has to say?—by which I mean I wondered if the book would feel novel to me. It did, even as it also had many (great) throughlines with his other work. I think the last essay in here is one of the most knockout pieces of nonfiction I can remember reading ever—and there are so many parts of other ones that I keep thinking about, like the idea, from the essay “How Big the Boat,” about covers, that “the cover is perpetual, we are perpetually covering, we are ever citational.” (Also the part in the one about teaching in in which he says, of students blowing off work, “As instructors, we get to practice not having our feelings hurt when they choose something else. Indeed, we might celebrate it as them choosing something. Many of us for the first times in our lives.” I thought of this one over and over again this fall.)
Dayswork, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. This was a book-equivalent of love at first sight for me—I hadn’t heard about it until I saw it as the “New Book of the Week” in the Phinney Books newsletter, and I yelled out “Oh my god!” to Andrew, who was in the other room. A collaboratively-written novel about a woman who becomes obsessed with Melville is a dream come true for me, and this, unlike many of my pre-hyped experiences, was just as good as I thought it might be from the blurb. Even as someone who has done a lot of reading and chatting about Melville’s work and life, there were tons of new discoveries in here, and the novel also made me think a lot about the strangeness of biography (the book almost is a Melville biography, but also, by way of its fictional form and deep investigation of Melville’s actual biographers, it challenges one of the key tenets of that genre: namely, the idea that someone else can understand and explain someone’s actions with certainty) and the power/charm of expertise or knowledge that’s explicitly situated in an individual (and thus subjective) self.
The Long Form, Kate Briggs. A digression to get at something I really loved about this novel: on an episode of The Culture Study Podcast about why the quality of clothes has degraded over the last 20-30 years, Anne Helen Petersen and her guest Amanda Mull swerve briefly into questions about what is fashionable or, as a listener has asked, what it means for clothes to be unflattering. Mull does a quick and smart pivot and says she has questions about what it really means to use the word “unflattering”—obviously what’s flattering or not is a cultural construct. She talks a bit about how her own feeling that something looks weird on someone is often just a response to not having seen it before: the surprise of that can feel akin to distaste. Petersen responds by comparing this to showing undergraduates avant-garde film, and says that while teaching she would say to her students that the most interesting thing for them about that kind of movie was going to be watching their own response to it.
I think Mull and Petersen’s points are both really great ones! And they also both made me think about innovation and form, and how sometimes the exciting thing about encountering art is that sense of unfamiliarity. I felt that with The Long Form, which was a bit of a slow burn for me as I first learned to read it. It’s a book about parenting, or more specifically about the phenomenological and relational experience of spending tons of time one-on-one with a baby; it’s also a book about novels and how they too are relational (and how their form shapes subjective time as the reader reads). Once I settled into it, I had so many moments of leaping delight at the language, the way the book moves, and the way it asks us to think differently about stuff we consider prosaic. It’s really awesome to be startled by a book in the way this one startled me. (Speaking about falling in love with books, I’ll freely admit that my connection with this one started superficially: I loved both the cover, which is a detail from this 19th century artist’s educational illustrations about geology, and the pleasingly square shape of it. Looks were not deceiving in this case! The book was as excellent as the design.)
(Also, a special shoutout to beloved Molly’s amazing chapbook STATE ZAP*, which I read ~in manuscript form~ in 2022, but which came out in 2023 and is an evergreen favorite of mine!)
And a bunch of other things I read this year and thought were wonderful (also in chronological reading order):
The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
A Minor Chorus, Billy-Ray Belcourt
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
Saving Time, Jenny Odell
Hole Studies, Hilary Plum (my favorite essay from it here)
We Sailed on the Lake, Bill Carty (an excellent poem from it here, though my very favorite one is only in the book! Bill is also a friend and fellow Seattle writer/teacher)
Activities of Daily Living, Lisa Hsiao Chen
Funny You Should Ask, Elissa Sussman (I read some romance novels this year, inspired in part by reading about how similar Sally Rooney’s work is plotwise to the ways in which this genre operates—and this was the best one I read! Like Conversations with Friends, it features an impossibly hot/smart/sensitive actor as the love interest)
A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk
This Women’s Work, Julie Delporte
Alison, Lizzy Stewart
Information Desk, Robyn Schiff
Monsters, Claire Dederer (not perfect but extremely worth reading if you’re troubled by questions of artist biography and how they intersect with our experience of the work itself, and a cool model of embodied/subjective/personal critical writing)
Arrangements in Blue, Amy Key
Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley et. al (ask me about my unintentional 2023 deep dive into excellent Australian YA!)
Creep, Myriam Gurba
A Career in Books, Kate Gavino (all I need to say about why this was perfect for me:
Some rereads, also really great:
The Word for Woman is Wilderness, Abi Andrews
Six Drawing Lessons, William Kentridge
Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney (maybe twice this year)
Dear Knausgaard, Kim Adrian
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
Some thrilling food-adjacent experiences:
Eating pizza from Lovely’s 50/50 with Andrew and Hans in Overlook Park. This one warrants a bit of backstory. Between March and August of this year, Hans bit us each several times. As some of you know, for Hans biting isn’t out of the range of “normal” behavior, but the frequency of the incidents was abnormal, and we scheduled an appointment with the nearest veterinary behaviorist (see below for more info on that area of vet-specialty), which is in Portland. In order to make lemonade from a very sour and stressful situation, we booked an Airbnb and made the trek to the clinic into a little vacation, primarily oriented around eating great food (outdoors, since Hans was accompanying us). Andrew had learned about Lovely’s 50/50 from watching a Chef’s Table series about pizza and was sure I was gonna love it, and he was very right! We got two pizzas (way too much for us) and some amazing chilled corn soup and sat at a picnic table after the appointment, feasting. Then we went back to the restaurant for their ice cream, which is unbelievable and should not be missed (buckwheat honey toffee!!!).
Apples from Montgomery Place Orchard. In September Anneka and I went to the East Coast for a week; we spent half of it in the Hudson Valley, staying at my old baker-boss and his wife’s old and lovely house and visiting beloved people and places. Going to the area around Bard always presents an eating challenge for me: how can I possibly make room for it all? But one place that I will never miss is Montgomery Place Orchard, known to Bardians and locals as MPO. It’s a big farmstand on a two-lane highway that, along with some delicious bougie local goods, sells the best fruit I have ever had anywhere. Apple season is unsurpassed. One thing about MPO is that they have not only heirloom but antique apples (the descriptions in the link are very fun reading). These apples are often sort of scrappy-looking, with scabby patches and lumps, but they are divine. Sometimes it takes me a very long time to eat one because each bite is so flavorful. It can get overwhelming in a good way. My new discovery this time around was Karmijn de Sonnaville—unreal, so tart and juicy! (Also very into Little Rosybloom.)
“Guest baking” at the Tivoli bakery. This is directly related to the apple experience above. I worked at the bakery (which is called Tivoli Bread & Baking, but referred to as “the bakery” in town and by the superfans like me) after college and Mikee, the baker/owner, feels like a part of my chosen family now, as does his wife Laurie. The trip to the Hudson Valley involved a ton of bakery time/consumption, but we also got to take on a special project: Mikee wanted to make some apple dumplings, but wasn’t sure he had time. So Anneka and I donned aprons and, guided by the extremely precise instruction I so cherish from Mikee, filled a bunch of MPO apples (Allington Pippin!) with a crumble and covered them in pie dough. The baked dumplings were great, but for me the experience of being back in the mix—flour-covered, warm, chatting with a million people who’d come to visit Mikee—was the best part.
The lemon cheesecake at Bad Roman. It seems like going to New York was the food highlight of my year (though I also had a really good run of eating in LA; one runner-up for this list included getting some free olives from a waiter who looked like the off-brand version of Ryan Gosling’s Ken at Kismet, also with Anneka). Once we departed the Hudson Valley we stayed a few very lovely days with Hannah L., beloved Bard pal, and her partner Ismail, and as an early celebration of Anneka’s birthday we went to an opera at the Met (unbeknownst to us, the opening night of the season—we were regaled by astonishing fashion that turned me into a goggling tourist!). Afterwards, Hannah, who is excellent at delighting her guests, took us to Bad Roman for dessert. Bad Roman is a rococo restaurant in a mall, and/but the lemon cheesecake there was so astounding that I talked about it for weeks afterwards. Behold:
The Mezzanotte bathroom. Andrew’s parents came to visit in October, and we tried Mezzanotte with them, which we had heard was great (thank you for the tip, Bei Hua and Emelio!). And it was really great! Loved the salads, loved the pasta (especially the tomato nectarine marinara, wowow). But the highlight was my incredible trips to the bathroom, which is mirrored on all sides except the floor and which features different, louder music than the restaurant and multiple disco balls! It obviously prompted some dancing (and, like the lemon cheesecake, a lot of retelling in the weeks after).
Columbia City Bakery stollen, sliced and fried in butter, and a cup of coffee with amaro in it on Christmas morning. At the end of 2022, I did some shopping on Christmas Eve with Anneka, including a stop at Persephone (which, I will just say it, is my favorite bar in Seattle!). In the course of Anneka’s quest to find the best panettone to bring to her parents, we got into a long conversation with Meredith, the very cool and knowledgeable owner of Persephone and neighboring restaurant La Medusa, and she told us that every year she buys 12 stollen from Columbia City Bakery (also a food obsession of mine) and freezes them so she can have them year-round! She also told us that her Christmas breakfast is CCB stollen that she fries in butter and then eats alongside a cup of coffee spiked with amaro. I’d been pretty disinterested in fruited holiday breads as a rule, but my perpetual-student-of-experts brain latched onto this idea, and when Andrew and I saw that CCB was still open later that day, we bought a stollen and replicated the ritual! We did it again this year and shared the tradition with Bei Hua, Emelio, and Emelio’s visiting family. It’s an intense and heavenly combo: the stollen is almondy, soft, not too sweet, and the coffee is multidimensionally bitter from the added amaro. I would like to do it every year. (But only once per year. For specialness and because alcohol in coffee is wild.)
A few recipes:
We ate radicchio salad with apples, toasted pecans, parmesan, and this dressing, at least once a week.
In the spring, we (and by we I mean Andrew, who makes a lot of dinners for us both during my eras of evening teaching), got super into pairing fava beans and pecorino. It’s an amazing flavor combo! An example (made without the salami for us). Shoutout to Andrew for his many hours of shelling and blanching favas!
At our ice cream party we made a lot of our own stuff… this crème fraiche ice cream was our fave!
Andrew discovered these fritters/savory pancakes late in the year, and we both fell in love.
Bei Hua and Emelio made us this at their house and then we made it again for Christmas dinner!
(These receipes are sourced from all over linkwise, but the original source for three of them was Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden… good cookbook!)
Subjects of deep dives:
William Kentridge. In October 2022, Andrew and I made a plan to go to LA in February 2023 to see a big Kentridge retrospective at the Broad. The original plan got submarined by Hans getting sick and a noncancellable Airbnb reservation, and so we ended up going separately—I went with Anneka in March. In preparation for the trip I reread Six Drawing Lessons, a series of lectures Kentridge gave at Harvard (and a really gorgeous book). We spent almost a full day in the exhibition, which had a lot of Kentridge’s films to watch, and having reread the lectures felt like it boosted an already amazing experience into something sublime for me! The thinking behind his formal and material choices—stuff like using old reference books, reframing canonical Western works of art within a critique of settler colonialism, and leaving lots of erasures and preparatory marks visible on the page—is really thrilling, and it was so cool to see example after example of it in the giant exhibit (and to hear some of the lectures directly referenced in the awe-inspiring installation The Refusal of Time). Later in the year I took another trip with Anneka—the one to New York mentioned above—and got to see a gallery presentation of a new film and some other work, including a series of photogravures about his studio practice that I still Google over and over just to look at. (I also bought another book at the gallery, a collaboration with Jane Taylor—thank you for the recommendation of their work together, Hazel!—that I hope to read in 2024.) I think what I really love about Kentridge’s art is that it takes seriously the way that everyday life is always interwoven with questions of politics and justice (or injustice)—and, at the same time, it’s always playful and threaded with beauty. It’s a model of the kind of work I’d really like to make.
The enneagram. Not a lot to say about this except that it continues to be an astonishingly frequent and interesting topic of conversation in my Seattle social world. Lots of analysis, lots of reading about various numbers. Andrew is currently taking a yearlong enneagram class! We also made a model of the enneagram out of blackberry friands and sour punch straws for an edible sculpture party. (There was another representation of the nine numbers as well! See how endemic the subject is in my life?)
Sally Rooney and Conversations with Friends. I (finally!) finished a draft of my minibook in dialogue with Rooney’s first novel at the very end of 2023. It’s a strange and interesting experience to be in such sustained contact with a book; I feel like I have parts of it memorized and, in the way one can feel about family or close friends, my responses to the novel and to Rooney felt like they ranged wider and wider as I got closer to it (and have also become sort of a litmus test of my mood and/or how I currently feel about myself). I hope to finish working on the project in 2024, and it’ll be weird and a little sad to stop thinking so much about CwF, like moving away from a friend who used to live next door.
Taylor Swift. I’m very aware that my deep dive into this pop icon corresponded with basically the whole rest of the world’s… and maybe as a community-loving enneagram 6, that’s part of why I got so into her? I was a fan before this year, but I would say that the tantalizing experience of trying and failing to get tickets sent me to an escalated level of intrigue, which crested as I entertained the “delulu” idea (trying that word out) that I would get last-minute tickets to one of her Seattle shows. I did not, and I experienced a large-scale mood swing. But! The happy ending is that in November, by grace of luck and Andrew marshalling a large number of friends to enter the lottery to be able to try to buy tickets, we secured some (at normal price) for Vancouver in December 2024. A joy! Something to look forward to for the entirety of the year! 2023’s preoccupation took many forms, including but not limited to listening to an Eras Tour playlist almost every time I showered, going to the movie on opening night, , googling “Taylor Swift news” as a daily procrastination, offering my first-year writing students the option of writing in dialogue with Miss Americana (lest you think I am a coercive teacher, they unilaterally chose this over an Adam Curtis documentary—and then almost all of them destroyed Taylor in their essays for pretty good reasons. Lesson learned: Taylor isn’t cool to 18-year-old art students, which makes sense!) … but the best thing I did was listen to almost all of Every Single Album (I still have some of the “Taylor’s Versions” left to hear), a podcast in which two very temperamentally and generationally different Taylor fans go in meticulous detail through, well, every single album made by Taylor (they also do some completist takes on other artists, which I haven’t listened to). In addition to getting into some of the deep cuts listed below, I loved the way I started to absorb a comprehensive biography of Swift both in terms of her life and her art-making. For a second I daydreamed about writing a serial novel about the rise of a Swift-like pop star and all the people around her (our book club was reading Dickens). Things that especially intrigued me: do all artists who get super-famous reflexively start writing more and more about their fame (cf. “Anti-Hero” or “Mastermind” on Midnights)? What must it be like to not be able to walk outside to get a coffee without a huge commotion? Why is it fun to like something basic in your 30s and anathema to like it when you’re younger? How much of Taylor’s genius/appeal/success is her art and how much is savvy and attentiveness to her image? (I think Taylor is an enneagram 3, wing 4.) It was fun to let my mind wander in the vast cave of easter eggs, gossip, and aesthetic evolutions, and equally fun to listen to “Cruel Summer” and “Getaway Car” one million times.
Veterinary behaviorists. As mentioned above, the first half of the year was a biting time for Hans. At the recommendation of our vet, we scheduled an appointment with the Animal Behavior Clinic in Portland (which, again, is the closest one to Seattle—there are fewer that 100 people in the US who practice this veterinary specialty). Veterinary behaviorists are full-fledged vets who specialize in behavioral issues, often with animals who haven’t responded to interventions from trainers; they are, in essence, pet psychiatrists, and can offer both medical advice and practice-based interventions. We had taken Hans to another one of these professionals when he was about a year and a half old and it was becoming clear that he was going to require a lot of special attention. That first appointment was a game-changer, so we were hopeful and also super nervous about the one this summer. We came out of our two-hour (!) meeting with lots of recommendations and so relieved that we both felt exhilarated; we walked around North Portland exclaiming about how amazing Dr. Krug (no relation to the esteemed Simone) was. I really wish more medical care for humans looked like the work we’ve been doing with the clinic and Dr. Krug—the initial session involved a full history of Hans’s life, lots of empathy for us as his caregivers, comprehensive thinking about his other medical issues, and strategies for supporting Hans and us on several fronts: medications, management, education for us, and training. Veterinary behaviorists are positive-reinforcement-oriented (there’s no force or punishment in their repertoire, in part because there’s no strong evidence that it works long-term), and they’re really into helping owners build trust with their pets; one of the things Dr. Krug said that I’ve kept thinking about is that dogs live in a world where almost all their choices and options are determined by someone else. For a dog like Hans, the prevalent cultural narrative might be that we need to “get him under control,” but her suggestion was that we work with him on consent and find places where he can make more of his own choices (like deciding to try to walk to Anneka’s house almost every single day… just an example). I’m surprised by how challenging it is to think in this way, even as someone who’s treasured dogs for my whole life. I’d like to write about veterinary behaviorists; I’m in awe of their combo of skills, their decision to work in a super-high-stress job, and their openness to emotion within conversations. My experience with them has also made me think a ton about the power differentials we accept as normal in relationship to animals. (Also: Hans is doing way way better! No bites or even growls since August.)
Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling and why its release date was delayed twice this year. Andrew wants me to say that this was more his deep dive than mine, and that’s true re: the release date. But first, the backstory: since 2020, I’ve really wanted our bookclub (which leans towards long books) to read this extremely big novel by Marguerite Young (which I first learned about by seeing it on my wonderful teacher Mary Caponegro’s bookshelf in her office at Bard; she used to teach it!). It was out of print when I first thought of this idea, but for the past two years it’s been slated as a reissue by Dalkey Archive, and there have been three (three!) release dates that have been pushed back at the last minute. This has caused some chaos in a) our bookclub (also known to me as “the minibig”) as I try repeatedly to arrange for us to read it and b) my emotional life. On October 24, 2023, I woke up with a cold and with a desperation to get to the bookstore to pick up my long-awaited and preordered copy… it was the release day!! So imagine my despair when I learned that it was AGAIN delayed. At this point, the bookclub’s text thread activated:
Theoretically MMMD will come out on March 5. I want to say I won’t be holding my breath, but let’s be honest, I 1000% for sure will be!
A few Taylor Swift songs that I got really into that are not the most famous ones:
“Clean” (melancholy! cathartic!)
“Dress” (come-hither/steamy!)
“Message in a Bottle” (great for getting ready to go out… or to teach, if you’re me and like to exhilarate yourself with some pop music before class starts. This one entered my list of favorites after it was a surprise song at one of her Seattle shows… again, didn’t see it, but I still longed to participate.)
“Dancing with Our Hands Tied” (elegant!)
Other music I listened to a lot and loved (in no order):
Caroline Polachek (obsession with her new album—a saving grace while Andrew and I both had COVID!—led to obsession with the older album, and then we saw her in concert; too many favorite tracks to name but I’m currently extremely into “Door”)
Charli XCX (favorite song: “Lightning”; bonus love to Kurt Vile and his daughters’ cover of “Constant Repeat”)
Big Thief’s new songs (“Vampire Empire” obviously, but also this currently unreleased one, which I saw them play)
Weyes Blood (a little bit of a cheat because the obsession started in November 2022, but we saw her in March, it was amazing, and we would have seen her again in September were it not for a confusing and still-mysterious tour bus snafu! Fave song: “Hearts Aglow”)
Courtney Barnett’s cover of the Chastity Belt song “Different Now”
Gabby’s World (just fully sinking into this album, but especially loving “33,” “Fabby,” and “Open the Door”—maybe 2023 was my year of songs about doors?)
Olivia Rodrigo (duh! Favorite song: “Vampire.” Summer 2023 was also the summer of vampire songs.)
The Roches, “Big Nuthin” (another great recommendation from Molly)
Karaoke songs performed:
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears
“Lovefool” by the Cardigans
“Can’t Hardly Wait” by the Replacements
“The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World
“Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer as a duet with Maia
“Barbie Girl” by Aqua as a duet with Andrew (this one was a crowd pleaser and we did it four times!)
“Yellow” by Coldplay, also as a duet with Andrew
“One of Us” by Joan Osborne
“Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis Morrissette
“Dancing in the Dark” by Bruce Springsteen
“Wannabe” by the Spice Girls as an impromptu duet with Carey
Karaoke songs practiced but not (yet!) performed:
“We Are Never Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift (some parts are a little too high for me! But maybe 2024 will see its debut)
“Beautiful Day” by U2 (as someone who asks Hans if he wants to go “see the world in green and blue” almost every day before I walk him, I feel ready for and excited about this one)
“Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis
“You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morrissette
“Hot N Cold” by Katy Perry
I’m terrible at remembering movies after watching them, but a few I do remember watching and liking:
You Hurt My Feelings
Past Lives
The Straight Story (seen at SIFF!)
Happy Together (also at SIFF)
Barbie
May December
Dream Scenario
Three Colours: Blue (not new or in theaters but very good)
Areas of material obsession/preoccupation/longing:
Bedding. This was a new one for me, prompted by Hans digging through our two sets of sheets (both old and thinned by years of washing) and, regrettably, some of our mattress pad during his witching-hour “wanna play” moods. We replaced the sheets with these ones and these ones from Schoolhouse, which are great with a yellow blanket gifted to us by my parents several years back. Andrew also got me an extremely lovely Schoolhouse coverlet for Christmas. These beautiful fabrics are, to my semi-surprise as someone not always super conscious of décor, bringing me intense joy every day! I really love looking at them and often wake up excited by… the colors of my sheets and blankets. Please note that I am not sponsored by Schoolhouse, but if they want to sponsor me by sending me this quilt in twin size (for my side of the bed—I sleep cold) I wouldn’t say no! And maybe someday I will move into the upper echelons of the bedding world and get linen sheets (got some great recs on this front while researching options). But not while our dog likes to demonstrate his joy by digging indoors…
Bikes. I would like a bike that can accommodate bigger tires for gravel touring, and thought 2023 would be the year I got one. For financial reasons it was not, and it remains to be seen if 2024 will be any different! But I spent a ton of time considering bikes and longing. Some top contenders: this one (in lilac), this one (in blue), this one, and this one (in “winter bracken,” of course).
Bags. I am, as some of you readers know, extremely into things made of waxed canvas (see: my coat, my backpack, many of my existing bike bags). I love browsing bike accessories of this nature, even though I don’t need any more bags and many of the ones I’ve been coveting won’t work on my current bike. Becky of Makeshifter makes my very favorites—I would love to, once I get a basket-compatible bike, get a Basket Case. Fellow bag-and-other-cool-stuff connoisseur Hannah E. also showed me these basket bags, which I love! Randi Jo Fab and Ron’s Bikes make very enviable stuff too (I have the Randi Jo Fab ceramic mug and handlebar-holder combo, which was much admired by others and appreciated by me on a 2022 bike trip).
Not waxed canvas, but great: when I started teaching at the Montessori school for the spring, I also bought myself this convertible backpack/pannier—I have some very old Swift panniers that are great, but I knew I would be going to the Westlake lightrail station, which is underground and because of often-broken elevators can involve carrying your bike up several flights of stairs, for part of my commute. Having a backpack for that and for walking around seemed (and was) crucial. I have nothing but praise for this bag, which converts SO fast, is comfortable and roomy, and looks great. North St. was also awesome to work with and made this in a special bright teal color for me when I asked about other options for fabrics!
In terms of non-bike bags, I bought this one (in blue and black) at Lauda, a GREAT stationary store in Tacoma, and while I was initially horrified by my own impulsive spending, it’s been a truly excellent tote. I also got intrigued by these quilted bags (and the quilted stockings!) this year. But truly between the new Wheeler bag, the zillion canvas tote bags we have, and my extremely wonderful and durable Duluth Pack backpack, I don’t need any more bags. Nonetheless I will keep hunting for them.
Coats/Jackets. I’m not the best at acquiring clothes in general, but some items call to me more than others. This year I bought a new raincoat that I’m very into and also a cropped jean jacket that is great for summer evenings; I’m currently coveting this one from Alex Mill, the same company as my jean jacket. (I also got this shirt from Alex Mill during a sale; it’s the only item I own that has received compliments from both a Cornish student and an adult student… though I guess it’s also the only item that a Cornish student has complimented ever.)
Books I want to read in (early) 2024:
Radical, A Life of My Own, Xiaolu Guo (a very exciting recommendation from wonderful student/writer Vivian; listen to a great interview with Guo here!—and RIP my beloved Literary Friction)
Landscapes, Christine Lai (also a recommendation from Vivian, who is a top-notch discoverer of books)
The New Naturals, Gabriel Bump (Gabe’s a friend! And his first book is great)
The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook, Jay Aquinas Thompson (Jay is also a friend! I love their poetry and can’t wait to read this)
Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young (please god)
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici (given to me by Violet, with whom I want to talk about it!)
The Longcut, Emily Hall
Children of Rivers and Trees, Elissa Favero (another awesome writer-friend!)
Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe
This Little Art, Kate Briggs (her book of nonfiction before The Long Form—about translation!)
Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, Nicholson Baker (as a Baker devotee, this is the most exciting big-press release of 2024 that I know about)
Other things I’d like to do in 2024:
Get involved with FEPPS again in some capacity; go backpacking in the Olympics; see more visual art in person; go back to Chain Lakes; do more of my errands by bike and maybe even go on a bike trip; babysit for our friends; put on records more often at our house; find or make more pockets of unscheduled time in my days.
And a passage for you all (some of you may know it):
“Surprise describes the beauty and risk of correspondence: how a note arrives in your inbox or crosses the screen of your phone and you can’t predict it, a voice addressing you no matter what you are, in your own small life, doing. The voice sounds like itself; it’s not yours. Surprise because whenever you send such a note you can’t say how or if another might reply. In what forms does friendship take place? There’s an ethos and an eros to the question. Correspondence is writing: it’s the work of literature but not a product of literature. It’s not concerned with production – a text that’s known only intimately, not published, not for the public. Its language and thinking, the process of corresponding, informs whatever work you’re doing, whatever day you’re in, whatever books we may later, or never, read or write. But you still can’t quite say: this produced that. There was no author, not even of one text or another, not quite; each act of language was a response.
In those years in that office I was a correspondent. I took on that work or the work took me from myself, relieved me of myself. I needed friendship and friendship was offered. A note arrived. What happens next? The question is a sensation of trust – next we will say something else to each other, we will be talking as we are now and yet differently, together amid differences to come.” - Hilary Plum, “Work, or the Swet Shop Boys”
Two things: first off, I would love nothing more than to hear YOUR responses to these categories or anything else about your year.
Second off, Substack is being (at best) cowardly and mercenary in their response to hate speech on this platform. I’m hoping to bring Ear Mountain back a little more this year and it will always be free, so no money is going to Substack obviously, but I might move it elsewhere nonetheless. Just gotta do more research.
Thank you for reading some or all of this, and happy New Year!
