Something Good #107: The Was That Year, 2024
What else?
As my grandmother used to say whenever there was a lull in the conversation:
What else?
This year I wrote about chronic pain:
Physical pain has qualities of its own, it has quirks and contours and depth. It is an entire world of sensation to taxonomize. But as soon as we stop feeling it, we leave it behind and forget it. It’s not fun to think about and we’d just as sooner go back to the world without it—because the world itself really does change when you’re suffering. Maybe that’s why it’s so absent, as a topic, from our culture. And for that reason, none of us come to the experience really prepared for it. We enter the country of pain alone, and when we come back we never bring a map.
A few months later, I wrote about how that pain led to me learning to dance. The good news is, knock on wood, I haven’t had a resurgence of my nerve pain, and I’m still studying contemporary dance. My next recital is in early January.
I felt very fortunate to be able to interview writer John Higgs on the occasion of the North American release of his book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds. He said:
When something makes sense, you can read about it and go, that's interesting, I'm fascinated by this… but you can then move on. But it’s when things just don't make sense, that they just sort of stick in your craw and you can't really forget about them and move past. And from that point on, certainly the next 17 years until I actually wrote that book, it was always there, the notion that there was something interesting in the KLF that I would like to understand and I didn't understand.
I also unearthed an interview, the great shame of my journalistic career, a conversation with the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer for The Believer that went so poorly I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the recording for over a decade.
It was worse than I’d thought.
[Mark]
So, yeah, so thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. I thought I maybe wanted to start by asking you about your life, maybe sort of from the beginning.
[Dr. Ruth]
No.
[Mark]
You don't want to?
[Dr. Ruth]
No.
[Mark]
Okay.
What else?
Graeme Williams unmasked himself as Professor Chip, and wrote a travelogue of his journey to see his favourite band, Current 93, play in a small fisherman’s social club on the south English coast, accompanied by commentary on the potato chips he’d encountered along the way.
The last time I’d spent a significant amount of time by myself it was about five years ago when I attempted to walk the Cumbria Way in the Lake District of England; it was wet, miserable, I got lost more than a few times, my toenails turned black and eventually fell off. I realized that while the busyness of routine can feel stifling, it at least keeps the self-critical silence at bay. I got lonely, I bailed and caught a train back to be with my family. I worried that the intrepid parts of myself had withered. And was I putting too much on the live performance of a band I’d seen literally twenty years before, in a very different period of my life?
The other guest post this year was from longtime friend of the newsletter and former colleague Roxane Hudon, who wrote about Dervla Murphy for Barely a Book Club:
Being the son of adventurous British hippies, my husband has always loved travel writing. Along with banter and Would I Lie to You?, he brought into my life shelves lined with Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, Colin Thubron, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Theroux, you know, the lads. Don’t get me wrong, I love the lads, but after reading many of their books, I grew tired of some of their common traits. The most famous travel writers are often male, white, British, of a certain class. I started craving some otherness. That’s when a friend recommended Dervla. “You’ll love her,” he said, “She’s always looking for a pint.”
You’ll probably love her too. Over at the club, we also continued to read the above Patrick Leigh Fermor, and are setting out on a new winter reading adventure.
Over here, I wrote about a new favourite book of mine, Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Wrote about children’s books, and specifically Clare Pollard’s wonderful history of the genre, Fierce Bad Rabbits. Somehow this has turned into a very bookish newsletter. I did a lot of reading this year; it was not a big movie year for me, and I don’t have the patience for TV. Books and video games, at either end of the brow-height-spectrum, are what defined my 2024. To that point, I also wrote about Chants of Sennaar, a game that really resonated with me, and used it as a chance to unravel some of my many, frequently contradictory thoughts about games and what happens to us when we play them.
Speaking of, the next film from Sarah and myself, Scorpia, has a lot to do with games and their meaning(s). I put together a pitch video for it, entirely from archival sources, meant to give a sense of the general narrative vibe; you can check it out above. Title design by the great Lola Landekic.
What else?
Holiday gift guide, if you’re desperate—this goes out the morning of Christmas Eve and and the-first-night-of-Chanukkah Eve.
Pictures. Photographs and such. I wrote about taking pictures, specifically on film with an old plastic point-and-shoot. I’m still very happy to have 35mm film back in my life.
This year I moved both newsletters from Substack to Buttondown. All the big, important parts of this transition were relatively painless, but I’m still working out some details, mostly centered around the design of the emails themselves. Substack had a pretty agreeable house style, and I’m still struggling to find something I’m happy with; I’ve erred on the side of plain, but it’s a little too plain for my liking. And every time I try to mess with CSS I break something.
I don’t miss anything about Substack’s social features, which felt pretty useless to me, nor its growth hacking, nor its choice of ideological bedfellows. I do miss the CMS a bit, but Buttondown is steadily getting better and I appreciate how responsive the team is to questions and issues. I recommend it!
Oh yeah, I made a plaque. I stand by it.
There’s still time to contribute to my Doctors Without Borders fundraiser and get yourself some stickers and the like. Thanks to all who have donated so far, I have high hopes for this one.
Well, there you have it. The year. Mine. To some extent, yours.
Signing off for 2024, me. Health and happiness to you and yours.
