From Elisa Gabbert‘s book of essays “Any Person Is the Only Self,” which became a spring break find thanks to the local Venice, Fla., library:
If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it—what room, what chair. I read most of Rilke’s poetry while sitting by a north-facing window in our apartment in Denver, early mornings in 2020 when I woke before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep.…
A few poems I read in the sun, on our friend’s back porch. She and her husband and kids had fled north to be with family who could help out with the childcare while they worked. Every few days, John and I would drive to their houses and sit on the porch, late summer afternoons and evenings, and share a bottle of white wine while reading, a pencil on the table between us so we could underline and asterisk our books. I didn’t used to like pencils, or writing in books, but John does, and now I do too. I like to dog-ear favorite poems in a book of poetry, a cheat code for the future, so when I pull out a book that I haven’t touched in years, it tells me where to go. Whole experience of a book, any book, is spatial. For years sometimes, I remember which side, verso or recto, my favorite parts appeared on, how deep in the book, how far down the page. A book always feels like a place I’ve been to.
Nodded along to this, feeling a kindred spirit. Gabbert even keeps annual lists recapping the books she’s read that year.
Deeply reported NYT article by Lydia DePillis about St. Louis’s efforts to attract foreign-born residents, historically and within the current climate. A concerning, frustrating read, though it’s heartening to see a range of local leaders advocating for this issue nationally. Attracting, welcoming, and assisting immigrants and refugees has been such an important part of our city’s last few decades, and we’ll be worse off, as a whole region, without it continuing. (I’ve experienced this first-hand; the International Institute helped settle my wife’s family when they arrived more than 25 years ago.) Gilberto Pinela, who I was fortunate to get to know when he was at Cortex, sums up what this could mean for the region:
“We are experiencing the early stages of a winter demographic. It’s not only affecting the city and the region, but soon it will affect the entire state,” said Mr. Pinela, sitting in the mayor’s office at City Hall, in a part of downtown that feels deserted on a weekday afternoon. “The same politicians that are trying to isolate the state are going to be suffering the consequences of this later on.”
Enjoyed John Warner’s new book, “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the AI.” A writer and teacher (and a former McSweeney’s editor), Warner has beliefs and ideals, but he’s not a scold, or an alarmist. With good humor and a clear-eyed sense of the positive uses of technology, he describes how ChatGPT — which he calls “automated text,” not “artificial intelligence” — encourages the circumvention of the nourishing, difficult work of both writing and reading. And what ChatGPT’s doing is not writing, he points out; it’s syntax. And he’s here in these pages to celebrate what’s lasting and human about real writing.
“What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent.
ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text.
Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?”
At Princeton, Caro wrote his senior thesis on Hemingway. It was so long—235 pages—that after Caro submitted it, the school capped the size of future submissions at 25,000 words. It was informally known as “the Caro rule.”
Just finished Assembly by Natasha Brown. A sharp, slim, piercing novel narrated by a young Black British woman, working in finance, preparing to attend a garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate. Here’s an evening work scene, from the opening:
After the Digestif, He Gets Going
She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set. Because it was night, now, and he was drunk. He felt very small, perhaps only a mouth. A lip or a tooth or a rough, inflamed bud on a dry white tongue slick with phlegm at the back, near the throat. The throat of a man with a sagging gut and thinning hair cropped so short. So , when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target. She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and — in the meantime — quietly, politely, she understood him.
There is a rootlessness to the very wealthy in the twenty-first century, a floating ease in both place and time that is mirrored, or perhaps emboldened, by a certain kind of space. Oases devoid of responsibility or obligation allow one an escape from reality that is almost womb-like in its comfort. In the Connaught Bar, if you can bag a table (it was named ‘Best Bar in the World’ by a panel of so-called experts in 2020, the year in which, as I recall it, everyone had to stay home in order to get a load on), you will be surrounded by an international array of players united by one thing only: money.
As you walk in you will be greeted by a server in a school-uniform grey dress, black-patent-leather-belted primly at the waist. You’ll note the way piped music seeps into the room like an odorless gas, and the way the lighting, which manages somehow to maintain a crime scene luster whatever the weather outside, pools between the tables and chairs and glances off the glass table tops and brass fittings and the painted silver paneling. Think air travel in the 1960s with a touch of netherworld glamour. You’ve seen it in a movie. Have you got a reservation? We’re rather full tonight.
The guests are ensconced in cashmere and softly shrugging leather; crisp, dark denim in stark juxtaposition to the falsetto glint of diamonds and the low-energy glow of rose gold. Their torpor is somehow moribund, Bourne of the ennui that will always affect those for whom any kind of satisfaction is gratuitously imminent. The room shimmers non-Don status – the financial equivalent of diplomatic immunity — and they talk of elsewhere, always elsewhere, as if the present moment were fraught with some kind of difficulty.
As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months:
Hitting the road with the kids:
2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.C. Muir Woods, Presidio Tunnel Tops, the de Young, the Glenstone, MLK Memorial, National Gallery, and so much more. Great ages for the kids to experience both. Fortunate to have been able to do it.
Rereading “Gilead”: Endures. Recommended for when you’ve just read two books about Twitter.
The William Gass Centenary: I spent many years writing about and promoting awareness and discussion of Bill’s work, and I had the great fortune of getting to know both Bill and Mary during the last decade of his long and productive life. In October, WashU organized a day-long event to mark what would have been Bill’s 100th birthday. While the Gassprojects I launched over the years are set on a kind of permanent simmer, it was meaningful to re-immerse myself in the world of Bill’s writing. Videos and resources are available on the university’s centenary website.
Movies: I was deeply impressed and moved by “The Zone of Interest”; “The Taste of Things”; “Past Lives”; “Anatomy of a Fall”; “Petite Maman”; “Saint Omer”; “Aftersun”; and “His Three Daughters.” Also enjoyed “Killers of the Flower Moon”; “American Fiction”; “You Hurt My Feelings”; “Between the Temples”; “May December”; “Barbie”; “Oppenheimer”; “Maestro”; “Janet Planet”; “She Said”; “Showing Up”; “BlackBerry”; and “Dumb Money.” Temporarily engrossing: “Conclave.” Interesting docs: “Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story”; “Martha.”
Satisfying rewatches: “Marriage Story”; “Heat”; and “Kicking and Screaming” (prompted by The Rewatchables). Plus, with the kids, “Spellbound” and “The Princess Bride.”
TV shows: The show that made me smile the most all year was “Girls5Eva” (all seasons are streaming on Netflix). Huge fan as well of “Beef”; “The Bear” seasons 1 and 2; “Ripley”; “My Brilliant Friend” season 1; and “Fargo” season 5. Enjoyed “Magpie Murders” and “Bad Monkey.”
New Music: “Oh Smokey” from Clem Snide; “Manning Fireworks” from MJ Lenderman; “Charm” from Clairo; “Patterns in Repeat” from Laura Marling; “Hit Me Hard and Soft” from Billie Eilish; and “Chromakopia” from Tyler, The Creator. Doechii’s Tiny Desk performance was fierce.
New podcasts: My favorite new-to-me podcast this year was Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. The host is wise beyond is years, does superb research and prep, and seems to quietly relish his good fortune of gently steering weighty conversations. (You can’t go wrong choosing an episode, but Fragoso’s conversation with Ocean Vuong was especially memorable, particularly for the author’s insights about youth and masculinity in America.) Another new discovery I enjoyed, as a former magazine EIC, was Print is Dead (Long Live Print). I can’t remember if I discovered it last year or this year, but I enjoy Jarrett Fuller’s Scratching the Surface podcast (as well as his blog).
Connecting with two living artists: Any year when my wife Tamara presents a new exhibition is a good one, and this year saw her open “Delcy Morelos: Interwoven," at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Having our kids meet the Colombian artist, and hearing her talk astutely about her work, were highlights from the year. Grateful as well to meet Julie Blackmon, one of my favorite living photographers, and hear her discuss her distinctive Midwestern work at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Home tour with Laura Dewe Mathews: I have such admiration for Matt Gibberd and what he’s built with The Modern House — from the real estate listing website to the Homing In podcast to the publications, each one presented handsomely and with soul. In the summer, Matt shared a video interview and tour he did with architect Laura Dewe Mathews. I was thinking back to this one in particular, because Mathews' lovely home is known locally as “the gingerbread house” — and our kids are asking to begin nibbling away at theirs.
With that, sending best wishes to you in the new year.
Announcing the text and creating a conduit between imaginary and real space are two key tasks of the book cover. They are what the book cover does, first and foremost, but they are not all that it does. The cover’s job is not over when you begin reading the pages. A good book cover has that timed-release quality; it changes with you as you read.
“Jesse Eisenberg Has a Few Questions” — An excellent interview at The New Yorker’s website. I can still remember seeing him for the first time in “Roger Dodger” in the early 2000s. A committed, inquisitive art-maker.
Suddenly, some experience that previously seemed distant or impossible becomes something we’ve watched happen — not with distance or solemnity on the evening news, but mixed into the jumble of images of everyday life that scroll across our feeds. The details move rapidly from the inconceivable to the familiar, from things we would never expect to things we can easily picture, things we almost feel that we’ve experienced ourselves. Yes, this is what it looks like when you film through a car window while everything around you burns. This is what it looks like when the ocean crashes through the window of your living room. This is what it looks like when a riverbed tries to carry nearly two dozen times more water than it usually holds, or when houses bob downstream like rubber duckies. To quote a viral tweet about a previous calamity: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
“The Zone of Interest” was an astonishing film. How it shows what it chooses to show; the sounds we hear of what it chooses not to show — it’s just an incredible work of art made with deep sensitivity by everyone involved. If you’ve already seen it, I recommend this Vanity Fair interview with writer/director Jonathan Glazer and director of photography Łukasz Żal. It’s streaming on MAX. Plan to rewatch soon.
Just finished a quick read of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. A single sentence from the final third, describing yet another moment of chaos and spite, revealed something larger about the repugnant title character’s worldview: “And yet, Musk enjoyed the madness.”
