Zadie Smith, Author of the Year

I’m still working on my 2023 book list. Any day now. Meanwhile, I am delighted to announce that Zadie Smith is my Author of the Year for 2023. It was between Ms. Smith and my beloved Barbara Pym but Zadie Smith wins because she managed to convince me that I needed to read Philip Roth (an author I had assiduously avoided until recently) and EM Forster, and that I need to revisit Kafka and David Foster Wallace. In fact, I’m smack in the middle of Middlemarch right now because of Zadie Smith; and once again, she didn’t steer me wrong. Let’s not get started on how I managed to obtain a degree in English without ever having read Middlemarch. 

And where the heck are Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon? The first few chapters were all about Dorothea, and then she up and married Mr. Casaubon, and I haven’t heard another thing about her. That marriage isn’t going to work out, I’m afraid. Do not @ me with your spoilers. 

But I digress.  

*****

So not only is Zadie Smith wonderful to read all on her own, she has also furnished me with at least another year’s worth of reading material (not to mention some excellent TV and movie recommendations). Barbara Pym, on the other hand, has only managed to convince me to read more Barbara Pym, a thing that will soon (sadly) be no longer possible, as Ms. Pym is deceased. I’m hoping that there are a few intrepid literary scholars out there busily searching for secret Barbara Pym manuscripts. 

I read three Zadie Smith books in 2023: the novel On Beauty, and the essay collections Intimations and Changing My Mind. I floated through the early essays in Changing My Mind, just skimming and landing on an idea or an image here or there, but not really processing anything. Smith punches far above my intellectual weight when it comes to philosophy and literary criticism, and I have to read carefully to really understand what she’s saying about critical theory. Maybe I’ll re-read those essays because even on that topic, one of my least favorite, she makes me reconsider ideas that I once thought were wrong or silly. 

But on the subject of movies and comedy and her relationship with her father, she has me from the first word, and she doesn’t let go. A great essayist is both a great teacher and great company, and Zadie Smith is absolutely a great essayist. Her mind ranges over everything from writing and literature and philosophy and history to the joys of bad movies and TV, and every time I read her, I learn something or I discover a new writer or artist or musician, or something that didn’t seem possible before all of a sudden seems possible. She changes my mind. 

*****

Back in the village of Middlemarch, I'm wondering what the newly arrived Mr. Lydgate is going to do now that Dorothea is off the market, marriage-wise. He's going to need a wife - there's no way that the village is going to allow an eligible young doctor to remain single; and there are any number of possibilities. He could fall in love with the silly but beautiful Rosamond Vincy; or he could take notice of the plain but brilliant Mary Garth, for whom he would have competition in the form of Rosamond's layabout brother Fred. He could marry Celia, the other Brooke sister, just as beautiful but less complicated than Dorothea. Or Mr. Casaubon could die, leaving Dorothea a widow and thus available. 

No, DO NOT tell me. 

*****

Of course, Zadie Smith loves David Foster Wallace, another of my favorite deceased authors, God rest his soul. Commenting on Foster, she reminds us that reading is sometimes hard; that sometimes, we have to put some effort and thought and imagination into interpreting the ideas on the page, rather than just passively allowing our eyes to glide over the words. Read it again, and it’ll be a little clearer. Read it some more, and it will reveal new meanings. Keep trying, keep digging, and you might find a treasure that you would have missed by just skimming. She was writing about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men but she could have been writing directly to me, urging me to re-read her own essays. Maybe I’ll do that. 

I did start re-reading DFW, beginning with The Broom of the System, probably his most accessible fiction and one of my favorite books of all time. I even posted about it, but will not link it here because I read it in January and so it’s on the 2024 reading list. There are rules. Yes, they are completely arbitrary rules that I made up out of nothing but that doesn’t mean that I won’t enforce them. Meanwhile, congratulations to Zadie Smith, (parenthetical) Author of the Year. This title comes with zero dollars in prize money and confers absolutely no prestige or privilege upon its holder, but Ms. Smith does hold bragging rights until 2025. 

Bay Bridge

“Such a feat of engineering.” That's me to my husband, commenting on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, both because that's a true statement and because I needed to say something to distract myself from the panic that rose as the bridge span peaked several hundred feet high over the cold water of the Chesapeake Bay. It's a very long bridge; very long and very high. 

And beautiful too. It's an astonishingly beautiful day, sunny and nearly 70 degrees less than a week after we saw high temperatures in the 20s. Maryland weather, man. I'll see your crazy ass in hell. 

As the warm air hit the cold water it created a shroud of mist that almost completely hid a tanker steaming through the bay, and only the tops of the steel girder towers were visible from Sandy Point as we approached the bridge. It's one of the loveliest places in Maryland. 

We're on our way to Salisbury for Marymount’s last regular season meet of the season. Saints vs. Seagulls at 3, and I don't like our chances. Salisbury is hot right now, but we don't care.  Win or lose, we're in those stands. 

*****

It's Saturday now, 10:30 AM, and we're driving through Delaware, a Google Maps detour that adds at least an hour to the drive. Roadwork, apparently. We won't cross the Bay Bridge today. 

Marymount lost to Salisbury, by a pretty wide margin, but it was still a good, fast, exciting meet with lots of great swims, including a pool record for one of our girls. The boys medley relay also finished with a time fast enough to beat the previous pool record in the event but the Salisbury A relay finished first with an even faster time. Most of the races were close, and although it can't be denied that Salisbury went in with a considerable advantage because they practice in a meter pool every day, it also can't be denied that they are just a really good team. That was the last regular season meet, and the boys finished 7-2 overall, and 7-0 in conference meets. On to the championship, 3 weeks from now. 

It's a foggy and gray drive across the Delmarva peninsula. The sun made an early appearance and for a few minutes it looked as though it would burn the fog away and leave us with a clear day but the sun is gone now and we're driving through the fog, with just a few feet of road visible before us. It's rather nice. Atmospheric. 

*****

The sun did come out, just a few minutes after I wrote this. And then we turned on a news radio station and learned that Google Maps detoured us not because of roadwork but because of a horrendous accident on the Bay Bridge, a 43-car pile up that sent dozens of people to the hospital and shut down the westbound span of the bridge for most of the day. If we'd left 30 minutes earlier, we'd have been on the bridge just as the accident happened. Thank God no one was killed, but I bet there are a bunch of people who are never going to cross that bridge again. It took almost four hours to get home via the Delaware detour around the Chesapeake Bay. 

It's Sunday now and I just left a watch party for the Ravens-Chiefs game. It seems that a lot of men have a lot of feelings about Taylor Swift “distracting” Travis Kelce, a highly paid professional who should be able to do his job no matter who is watching in the stands. Meanwhile, the stupid Chiefs are going to the stupid Super Bowl again, so I guess they learned to play through the distraction. Both the Chiefs and the NFL should be writing thank you notes to Taylor Swift, who made football interesting to many people who’d never have watched otherwise. Football needs Taylor a lot more than Taylor needs football. 

I don’t need football at all. I do need Division 3 college swimming, but I’ll have to live without it for a few weeks - no competition for the next few weekends, until the conference championship, a 3-day D3 swim-palooza. I’m looking forward to it, but it will be nice to have a few free Saturdays in the interim. We’ll also travel overnight for this one but we’ll stay on the western side of the bay. One foggy bridge crossing was enough for a while. 

Enough

I followed Cassidy Hutchinson’s January 6 Committee testimony very closely, and I believed every word she said, but I still felt compelled to buy and read Enough the moment it was published. They got me with the promise of “brand-new revelations,”, and the book does offer quite a few previously unknown-to-me details about life in the Trump White House, including the allegation  that Rudy Giuliani groped Ms. Hutchinson (an allegation that I believe to be 100 percent truthful). 

However, I was more interested in the behind-the-scenes story of how Cassidy Hutchinson came to testify before the J6 Committee, and what the experience was like. She writes about it in vivid and moving detail; everything from the desperate search for an attorney who would represent her either pro bono or at a reduced fee, to her first “I don’t recall” sessions with the Committee and her decision to ask for a second chance to tell the whole truth, to the security arrangements, including a move from Washington DC to Atlanta. 

Cassidy Hutchinson grew up very working class, with a very difficult and borderline-abusive father. With very little help from her family, she got through college and found her way to Capitol Hill and then the White House, fulfilling her childhood dream of living in Washington DC and becoming part of the political power structure. Not only do I believe that she told the truth about January 6, I also believe that she genuinely believed that she could make a difference within the Trump Administration. She’s only 27 now. She was barely past adolescence when she began working on Capitol Hill and not much older when she joined the White House. She is different from the cynical enablers - the Chris Christies and Mitch McConnells and Mike Pences and Nikki Haleys - who knew from DAY ONE who this man was, and who chose to support him anyway, because he was the surest conduit to power for them. And now that there’s no reasonable way for them to ignore what he is, they pretend that they didn’t know. But they knew. They all knew. I’ll never forgive the Republican party. 

And this is why I don’t write book reviews. I can’t stay on topic for five seconds because the topic is supposed to be this book, and not the fact that Donald Trump was the worst President in U.S. history, and that he was and is a vile and contemptible person. Enough was very good, and I recommend it, as both an expose of the Trump Administration, and a personal story of a bright young person forced to choose between her ideals and her ambition. 

Punctuation

I'm trying to finish all of my book notes from 2023. We're exactly three weeks into 2024, and I'm already writing about books that I am reading this year, even though I haven't finished with last year yet. So typical. So me. 

Last September, I read Mary McGrory's Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. If you like literary memoirs, especially of the small town girl in NYC variety (and why would you not), then the first few chapters of this are great, almost reminiscent of Helene Hanff, and this is very very high praise. In the early chapters, McGrory writes about her early life in Ohio (where she was the first woman to drive a milk delivery truck, which is no easy job anywhere, especially Ohio in winter) and her move to New York City, where she joined the New Yorker as a copy editor, a job she would hold for decades.  I don't know if it's possible now for a young person from a working-class background to show up in Manhattan, find a poorly paid literary job, and then build a life full of books and friends and adventure and fun. America has gotten better than it was when I was young, in so many ways, but some things have changed for the worse. Some things have been lost and won't be found again. 

Anyway, the rest of the book is fine, too - it just turns out that I don’t care as much as I thought I did about correct usage of the serial comma (I agree, though, that we in the United States should refer to it as the serial comma and not the Oxford comma) or the distinction between the relative pronouns which and that, or even appropriate case vis a vis “between you and me” (correct) vs. “between you and I” (incorrect). Or that is to say, I do care, but I don’t care enough to do anything other than to always use the serial comma and enforce its use when I’m in charge of style decisions, always use a comma before which when the word begins a non-restrictive clause, and always know the difference between the subject and the object. I’m no longer inclined to correct other people’s grammar and usage unless I’m asked to do so professionally (this actually happens fairly often). 

McGrory, though, does not come across as dictatorial or pedantic when she makes her case for correct use and style. And her stories - about style debates at the New Yorker (whose house style is odd to say the least) and her relationships with quirky editorial staff and her encounters with famous writers - are entertaining and good-humored. She writes with love and affection but also honesty about New York in the 1970s as it was for a young person pursuing a literary career and a literary life. I’d have enjoyed more of that and more of the stories of the inner workings of the New Yorker, and maybe less of the arguments in favor of the serial comma and against incorrect use of “me” in a phrase that calls for a subjective pronoun, but maybe that’s because I am already on board with these positions, as I suspect anyone would be who chose to read the work of a self-professed comma queen. We’re the choir, is what I am saying. There’s no need to preach to us. Technically, “between you and I” is not grammatically correct but it’s not unclear and it doesn’t bother me when other people say it. Age has mellowed me, I suppose. 

Journalism

It’s Friday, a WFH day, and I’m not particularly productive right now. I have several big projects to tackle and I have to panic for a bit, and beat down my adult ADD, before I can really make progress. I wish I wasn’t like this but I am. It’s a holiday weekend, so I plan to get some things done to clear some space in my head. If you’re going to declutter, then you might as well start with the messiest place. My house is pretty neat; and now that Christmas is over, it’s pretty free of clutter, too. My brain, however, is like an episode of “Hoarders.” I might not be able to dig out on my own. 

*****

One of the things I hope to do this weekend - maybe not finish but at least work on - is my 2023 book list. I’ve already written about a book that I read in 2024, so I’m out of order as usual, but I am making progress on finishing the 2023 list and maybe I’ll publish it in January not February. 

It’s Saturday morning. We’re leaving for a swim meet in a little while (Marymount @ Gallaudet) but right now I’m just enjoying the three-day-weekend Saturday morning vibe. I love my job but there’s nothing better than a holiday weekend. It’s even better than vacation because a paid holiday is just a pure, unearned gift. Marymount hosted Catholic last night, our first evening meet as a Marymount swim family, and the boys’ team’s first loss of the season. But it was close and competitive and a lovely way to spend a Friday night, sitting in the Rose Bente Lee Center pool as the late winter afternoon faded into twilight. 

And see, there’s the problem right there. If I’m ever going to finish that book list, I need to write about books, not swimming. 

*****

“... what they had wanted all these years was not for concrete things to happen but for abstract possibilities to remain available.” This is Lea Ypi, writing about her parents’ ambivalence about Albania’s first post-Communist election. I’m reading Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, her very extraordinary memoir of her life as a child and teenager in late Communist and post-Communist Albania, a country about which I know practically nothing. Ypi’s family kept secrets about their “biography,” including the fact that her great-grandfather was one of the country’s last pre-Communist Prime Ministers. When Communist rule ended, Ypi had to relearn her own family’s history, and re-examine everything she knew and believed and thought that her family believed. How does a young person, already whipsawed by adolescent confusion, regain her bearings when she finds that the country, the belief system, and the family that she thought she knew turn out not to be a sturdy structure with a rock-solid foundation but a rickety makeshift shack held together with spit and glue and lies? Who are you if your family isn’t who you thought they were? What are you if your country no longer exists?

******

And what are you if you can’t seem to get up off the couch? It’s Monday now, MLK Day so I’m off although I did plan to do some work today to make up for a planned short Friday. But it’s 10:30 and although I have showered and done some housework, I’m nowhere near my desk. I can’t seem to pull myself off the couch right now, physically or mentally. It’s very cold, and snowing lightly. I don’t have to leave the house today and I probably won’t. MSNBC is on as background noise in my family room, the warmest room in the house. 

Oh my gosh what is wrong with me and what am I doing? It’s 10:45 now and I’m wearing pajama pants and a hoodie, curled up on my couch, my hair still wet from the shower and absolutely no plans or ideas or energy or inspiration for this gift of a day off that I don’t want to waste but am in fact actually wasting. I need to pull myself together. Or maybe I just have to accept that today is one of those proverbial days, filled with lots of abstract possibilities. I just don’t seem to have the energy to make any of those possibilities concrete. 

*****

I’m back at work now. It’s Tuesday, a day on which I almost always work from home, and everyone else is working from home today too thanks to the unexpected snow accumulation. Why unexpected, I don’t know, because the forecast was clear, and it is January, but it’s been so long since we have had actual winter weather that I didn’t think that a real snowstorm was possible. I thought the forecast was just weather-industrial complex hype. I thought it was just another media narrative. 

We only got maybe five inches or so, but this is the DC suburbs of Maryland, not Buffalo. We’re famous for freaking out at the smallest accumulation of snow. I haven’t left my house since Sunday but I’m sure that if I ventured out to a grocery store today, I’d find shelves stripped bare. Thankfully I didn’t run out of milk or toilet paper because I’m always ready for the worst case scenario. Rain, snow, whatever - I seldom run out of anything. 

And speaking of the worst case scenario, yesterday was also Iowa caucus day and of course Trump won by a landslide. Not that Haley or DeSantis are anything other than repugnant to me, but the idea of another Trump presidency,  which is a very real possibility, fills me with something close to despair. I just can’t bear the thought of looking at his face and hearing his voice every day for four more years. I dread the rest of this election season. I used to love election years, too. Sad!

*****

But I’ll tell you what. An entire childhood and youth obsessed with political repression and dictatorships had its upside. I’m prepared. No matter how much I hate what might be happening a few miles from my front door in Washington, I am prepared to live my life and do my work and go on with my daily existence without regard to politics. Unless it gets really bad and they start rounding up dissidents and I end up in a detention camp. 

And this is why I shouldn’t be reading political memoirs, or doomscrolling my newsfeeds, or listening to MSNBC all the gosh darn livelong day. I should probably just go outside except that it’s literally 12 degrees out there, which is absolute nonsense. This weather is trash. This weather is for penguins and polar bears and ice fishermen. 

*****

Have you seen “The Holdovers?” A friend and I had planned to see it in a theater, back in November or early December; and what with the round of one damn thing after another that constitutes life for middle aged ladies, we ended up postponing our plans multiple times and ultimately missing the short theatrical run. And then we had to cancel three consecutive planned dates to watch it at my house. One damn thing after another, I tell you. Last Saturday, I realized that my husband had to work in the evening, and my friend’s husband was going to be glued to an NFL playoff game, so we made a last-minute plan to watch the movie together with another friend, and we were all free, and no one got sick and no one had a last-minute work obligation or family emergency, and we actually got to sit down with wine and popcorn and watch the movie. 

I don’t know why, but I can’t get enough of movies and books about exclusive boarding schools and colleges - preferably in New England in the middle of the 20th century, but any story about a boarding school or prestigious college will do. The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Prep, The Secret History, Brideshead Revisited, “Rushmore,” even “The Dead Poets Society” - I love them all.  I also adore Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (absolutely hilarious in “Only Murders in the Building”) - and so I knew going in that I’d love “The Holdovers.” And I did. It is hilariously funny, but also heartbreakingly sad, with its little band of outcast characters stumbling through a cold and gray holiday season full of empty days, loneliness, and grief. And the cold and gray and emptiness are sweet and human and really beautiful. It’s a beautiful, perfect little movie. I hope it wins everything. I can’t wait to watch it again. 

*****

It’s Friday again, and in my original plan, I’d have been driving to Fredericksburg for a late afternoon meet between Marymount and University of Mary Washington; but there’s another winter storm, and the college swimming powers that be cancelled the meet. It’s just as well. The idea of my son and all of his teammates riding on snowy roads in a charter bus was making me very anxious, and although I had been looking forward to the meet, I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. I’m hopeful that tomorrow’s meet at St. Mary’s of Maryland will proceed as planned. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing this for a whole week and I’m still looking for the unifying theme that will give me an excuse to paste the whole mess into my blog editor and press publish. Didn’t I say something about brain decluttering? Not only have I not decluttered my own brain, but now I’ve dropped a whole bunch of junk off in yours. Sorry. 

****

At the end of Free, Lea Ypi shares some of her teenage journal entries from the year 1997, a violent and chaotic year in Albania. It was my favorite part of the book, just a person thinking and feeling and writing it all down knowing that it’s possible that someone might read her journal one day but that it’s just as possible that no one ever will. And that is my unifying theme, for this post and for every word that I write on this blog. Sometimes people read this stuff, which is lovely; and sometimes they don’t, which is fine. I write because it’s the only way that I can begin to make sense of things. I write because I have to. 

Regulation

It seems that I am not the only person who struggles with anxiety. My newsfeeds are filled with advice from experts real and self-proclaimed on how to regulate my stress response, activate my parasympathetic nervous system, stimulate my vagus nerve (what?), drop my shoulders while engaging my core and practicing breathwork, and just calm the heck down. I don’t do any of this. I look out the window instead. 

If we ever left this house, the view outside my office window is one thing that I would really miss. And it’s not a particularly spectacular view. It’s just pretty - a large number and variety of trees on both sides of the fence between my neighbor’s house and mine, the hanging birdfeeders and the visiting birds, and the sky, which is wintery pale bright blue today, with a few fluffy pink-edged clouds. There are many window views that are more beautiful but few that are more soothing. 

*****

I wrote that yesterday, which was a rather bad day. Today is much better. It's Friday afternoon and I'm in the stands at the Rose Bente Lee Center pool at Marymount University, watching the first meet of the second half of the 23-24 season. Marymount is hosting Randolph Macon and my son's medley relay just scored its first victory of 2024. As the B relay they should have finished second but someone forgot to tell them that. 

The women's 1000 yard freestyle is just finishing up, and the men will follow. Distance events are not my jam but I certainly admire the athletes in a better them than me kind of way. 

*****

We’re midway through the meet now, and the swimmers are warming up for the second half. It's a close, competitive meet, fun to watch. I think we're winning but I'm not sure. But we're not running away with it. Marymount completely dominated its early season opponents, so much so that it was almost like watching an intramural meet. Winning is great and all but I'd rather see a real race. I like a good old fashioned duel in the pool. 

*****

Saturday morning, cold and very pale gray. It’s January 6, and we’re waiting for the threatened or promised winter weather that was supposed to begin this morning. So far, it’s nothing but January cold and a silvery gray sky that looks very soon-to-snowish. The rest of the house is asleep, and I’m back in front of my window, watching the birds enjoy breakfast at the just-refilled feeder. The seed mix that comes out of that big Costco bag must be delicious because it’s a scene out there, bird-wise. It’s a bird party. I could sit in front of this window all day. 

Yesterday’s meet finished in a split decision - a win for the men and a loss for the women. My son won one of his individual events, too. Today, I’ll work for a bit to catch up. I had had some vague idea that I’d try to work for a bit during the distance events at the meet yesterday but that was just silly. But I don’t mind working today. Yesterday was almost a day off. It felt very Saturday-ish. And the weather today is dreadful, so I’m not going anywhere unless I have to. 

*****

Saturday was a gloomy gloomy day. Not unpleasantly gloomy, just weather gloomy, with an ice storm vibe. It wasn’t quite cold enough for ice, but almost. I got my hair cut in the morning and then came home and worked and did housework and read my book (The Broom of the System) and watched a movie (“Leave the World Behind”) and hung around the house, now pretty much completely clear of all signs of Christmas except for a few boxes of chocolate that still remain in the kitchen. It’s sunny and bright today and the place feels wide open. The day feels wide open. It’s Sunday and I don’t have any particular plans other than to get out of the house. An indoor day is nice once in a while but one is enough. 

*****

Have you seen “Leave the World Behind”? It’s a disaster movie, kind of, but we never really find out what causes the disaster - a foreign attack, a cyber event, an environmental catastrophe - but the world goes haywire just as an affluent Manhattan family begins its impromptu vacation in a beautiful rental house in the Hamptons. The owners of the house, a Black man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter, show up in the middle of the night after escaping from chaos in the city, and the tenants (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) must decide whether or not to trust them, having never actually met them face to face. Things get increasingly chaotic and terrifying - strange animal encounters, and self-driving cars going haywire, and a mysterious illness that strikes one of the vacationers’ children - and the two families are forced to overcome their mutual suspicion and mistrust, given that they appear to be the only people remaining, except for an angry, armed survivalist played very well by Kevin Bacon. 

Most of the action takes place in and around the beach house, and with the very small cast (the two families and Kevin Bacon) it has a closed-off, quasi-theatrical feel. But it’s still realistic, and scary. I liked the movie very much, even though dystopian disaster movies are the last thing I should be watching right now given my pretty fragile grip on reason. Julia Roberts is especially good as the everywoman wife and mother who is angry at the world and racked with guilt over her own ill temper and bad disposition. She shares the movie’s best scene (in my view) with the very talented My’hala Herrold as Mahershala Ali’s done-with-these-damn-white-people daughter. Surrounded by a pack of wild deer and other animals who appear to be poised to attack (and I keep telling you that the deer are going to turn predator), the two women stick together, face down the animals, and ultimately scare them away. They hold hands, clinging to one another as they realize - to both their relief and dismay -  that they need one another, and that even though people are the worst, it’s far worse to be without them. 

*****

I like to re-read books sometimes, especially at times like now when my mental health is not great. I hadn’t thought about The Broom of the System - or David Foster Wallace in general - in years, but Zadie Smith reminded me to revisit Wallace, and The Broom of the System was my favorite book for a short time during my twenties. I wanted to see if it held up. 

Wallace wrote The Broom of the System, his first novel, when he was in his 20s and it created quite a stir - critics recognized Wallace as a genius right away. I think it was popular too - my friends and I all read it, at least. What still works - the book is still very funny, hilariously so; and very imaginative. Wallace juxtaposed the real (Cleveland, Ohio; Amherst College, Gerber baby food, Bob Newhart) and the imagined (the Great Ohio Desert, Stonecipheco Baby Foods, the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes) seamlessly, and creates a world that is both absurd and believable, and that the reader recognizes and understands almost immediately. The dialogue is hilarious, and the characters are flawed and neurotic (or downright crazy) and interesting. 

The book still holds up, for the most part, though of course I saw it very differently as an almost-old woman as I am now vs. a very young woman (maybe 22) when I first read it. I really loved Lenore Beadsman, the main character, when I was in my 20s. She was different from every other female character in books and movies and TV. She was quirky and fiercely independent. She was not glamorous or fashionable but she was obviously beautiful, being the object of desire for at least four of the novel’s male characters. She was, of course, an early Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which explains why I loved her so much. Even before we had a name for her, young women in their 20s were (and remain) very susceptible to the allure of the MPDG. She’s not like all the other girls. 

*****

I started writing this a week ago, in the midst of an anxiety spiral that has mostly passed. Writing about it and then thinking about other things - like swim meets and books and movies - helps me to get a grip and to calm down a little. It helps me to regulate my nervous system, as the influencers like to say. Of course, who am I to need regulating? I’m not walking on a beach or digging in a peaceful green garden but I’m also not fighting for my life in the middle of a war or disaster. I’m not facing down a pack of attack deer (I promise you, they will be a thing very soon). I’m not lost in the middle of the Great Ohio Desert, handcuffed to a madman (Wallace reference, IYKYK). Everything is fine. Everything is grand. Reading and writing are all I really have any business doing anyway. 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

“One never knows at Christmas time, does one?” That is Miranda’s mother in the Christmas episode of the first season of “Miranda,” commenting on the dateless and timeless quality of the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s December 28 in my life, a fact that I can only cite because I looked at the date on the bottom of my computer screen. Absent that reminder, I would have had no idea of the date. And I think it’s Thursday. 

And I’m pretty sure that I forgot to write anything yesterday, too. So that’s two days out of 365 in the year 2023 when I failed to write any words. And it’s fine. There are enough of my words out here; a few days missed production won’t make a difference. 

It’s been a weird, though not unpleasant Christmas break. We didn’t really go places as we normally do because my husband is sick with the flu, and it rained for two days straight. We’ve been watching movies and sports. We’ve been eating cookies. We ventured out to the bookstore and the grocery store. It’s been low-key but kind of nice. 

*****

Have you seen “Saltburn”? Starting at the end of the year, I try to catch up with movies that will likely garner major award nominations, and Christmas vacation is the perfect time to do this. “Saltburn,” which is expected to be an awards contender, is streaming now so I watched it. 

Much has been made of “Saltburn.” It’s violent, sexually transgressive, mean-spirited, sharply critical of British upper class social snobbery, and full of beautiful people wearing beautiful clothing in beautiful settings; so naturally, critics have praised it rather lavishly. 

Spoiler alert: “Saltburn” starts with a scholarship student at Oxford, a student named Oliver Quick whom we are at first supposed to believe is a poor and clueless outsider, completely out of his depth among his aristocratic classmates, unable to cope socially in a world of money and privilege. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Oliver, scorned and ostracized by Oxford’s elite, who grew up with an arcane and complex code of etiquette with which he is totally unfamiliar. Poor lonesome Oliver longs to belong, and he falls in love with the upper class in general and with one person in particular, the beautiful and charismatic Felix, who is the center of everything, the most inside of the insiders. 

Does this sound familiar? It will if you saw “The Talented Mr. Ripley” or if you read Brideshead Revisited, both of which tell the stories of middle-class outsiders invited into the inner circles of the rich; and both of which are far more interesting and nuanced than the stylish and misanthropic and hateful “Saltburn.” Of course, nothing is what it seems in “Saltburn,” and the series of tragedies that follow Oliver’s invitation to join Felix and his family at Saltburn, their country estate, are not chance occurrences. You’ll have to watch it if you want to find out what actually happens and how. Or you could just read the Wikipedia plot summary, which might be a better idea than sitting through this movie. I did that after I watched the movie. This is how I learned that the movie was filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the more conventional 16:9. I’m sure that there was an artistic reason behind that technical decision, but I didn’t notice it when I was watching the movie, but I don’t tend to notice details like that. I’m not a critic. 

Barry Keoghan is mentioned in all of the critics’ “best of” lists and is sure to receive many nominations for his performance as Oliver. But he left me cold, as did the entire movie. Even Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike, whom I normally adore, are wasted here. “Saltburn” is a two thumbs down for me, but what do I know, other than the difference between right and wrong?

*****

Thursday was the first nice day all week, so we drove to Harper’s Ferry for the afternoon. West Virginia sounds so dreadfully far away but on a good traffic day, Harper’s Ferry is a one-hour drive, even when I’m driving. Harper’s Ferry is a little gem of a town, rich with history, architecturally very interesting (especially the WPA-era train tunnel), and surrounded by stunning natural beauty. It sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and at the intersection of the Appalachian and C&O Trails, with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a natural backdrop. You can hike or stroll or bike or canoe or poke around in little shops and get your National Parks passport stamped, all in just an afternoon. We had a lovely time there, basking in the unseasonable warmth and clear bright late December sunshine and clean mountain air; and we were home before dark. 

*****

I had to work on Friday, oddly enough. At least one person needs to be in the office during business hours (why, I don’t know) and Friday was my turn, so I left my house at 7 and breezed on to the base at 7:25. There’s always an upside of working on December 29. The streets were near-empty. And the office was near-empty, too. I worked in fits and starts, finally hitting a groove at about noon, with a burst of energy and concentration and inspiration that allowed me to finish a project that’s been hanging over my head for a bit. At 2:30, the only other person on the floor stopped by my desk to wish me a happy new year. “Don’t stay too late,” he said. It had already been unnaturally quiet on the floor, but now that I knew for sure that I was the only person left on the floor (and likely the only person left in the building) the quiet was a bit eerie. I finished my work listening to holiday-week NPR on my headphones and then packed up at 4 and walked across the empty brick courtyard for the last time in 2023. By 5 o’clock, I was home in cozy sweats, back in holiday mode. 

*****

After one pretty bad movie, I watched a pretty good movie. Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” which was slightly controversial because of the prosthetic nose that Cooper wore to play Leonard Bernstein. I suppose I can see both sides of this little uproar, but the movie is really quite good. Cooper manages the macro and the micro very well; the micro being the story of Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montelegre (Carey Mulligan in an absolutely lovely performance) and the macro being the whole American century that made a life like Leonard Bernstein’s possible. The movie is beautiful to look at and listen to, with outstanding performances from the entire cast, especially Mulligan. 

*****

So it’s late December (well it’s January now) and what would late December in the post-COVID era be if at least one member of the household wasn’t stricken by a hideous upper respiratory infection? Three of the four of us were sick to varying degrees, with one person going down just as another began to recover. A bunch of COVID tests, dozens of oranges, a bottle of zinc tablets, two urgent care visits, Tamiflu, amoxicillin, and a partridge in a pear tree. Everyone’s fine now. For now. 

****

Clutter is delightful for exactly two weeks of the year, and not one second more. From about December 19 to about January 3 or so, our house is full of presents wrapped and unwrapped, treats homemade and store-bought, Christmas decorations and knick-knacks and trinkets, wrapping and baking supplies, and a big fat Griswold family Christmas tree that takes up half the living room. And it’s lovely but when it’s over, it’s over. It’s January 3 now, and it’s over. Two days ago, my house felt sparkly and magical and cozy all at once, and today it feels like a very special episode of “Hoarders.” It’s time to break it down. 

I’m always a tiny bit sad when I start taking down the Christmas decorations, but once all the Christmas stuff is packed away and all of our pictures and paintings and books and objects are back in their proper places, freshly dusted, the house seems calm and peaceful and welcoming again. The tree will stay until January 7. Its exit will clear a ton of physical and metaphorical space for a new season and a new year. The past few years have taught me not to tempt fate with hilariously snide “don’t let the door hit you in the ass” messages to the departing old year. I don’t want to encourage “Hold my beer” energy from 2024, know what I mean? I'll just leave you by saying Happy New Year.