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I was going to post my five favorite books from 2025 today, but I'll give that a couple of days given everything going on. Instead, here's a song. Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul And I hope that you die And your death’ll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I’ll watch while you’re lowered Down to your deathbed And I’ll stand o’er your grave ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead We can only hope.
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The other day I listed my favorite TV shows of 2025. Now, I watch a lot of TV and my access to different kinds of shows is pretty varied--much more than my access to new movies. So now I'm sitting down to list my favorite new movies of the year and--y'all, it looks kind of normie. In fact, I would bet good money that the top two are on everyone's lists, in more or less the same positions. Ah, well. Again, these aren't my estimation of the best movies of the year--they're just the new movies I enjoyed the most. I'm certain that within the next month or so I'll watch something I missed that should be on here. This is the way it goes. 5. Superman Turns out I'm not tired of cape flicks. I'm tired of boring cape flicks. This movie is the most Supermanly Superman movie since 1978. Director James Gunn whips together Superman: Birthright and All-Star Superman and probably dozens of other sources into an enjoyable confection.The casting is perfect, the humor is exactly measured, the heart is warm and beating. Superman is a fantasy about the possibility of goodness, and Gunn understands that fact and delivers on it. 4. Frankenstein One day, I might put my thoughts on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein here, since it's a bit outside my professional wheelhouse. I've taught this book several times, and every time I come away convinced that [a] it's an absolutely brilliant book, one of the permanent works of English-language fiction, and [b] it's not really science fiction, and any attempt to make it such is a kind of back-projection. Shelley herself calls it a ghost story in the 1831 introduction, and that seems more likely to me. It's a work of occult literature about dabbling in the dark arts of alchemy. Victor Frankenstein isn't a mad scientist; he isn't mad at all, but if he were to be it would be more proper to call him a mad alchemist. It's also a novel about killing God. Anyway, so Guillermo del Toro has wanted to adapt Frankenstein for a long time, and in 2025 he finally got to release his vision to the world. The response--particularly from Frankenstein lovers--has been somewhat mixed. Apparently word on the street was that del Toro was making a "faithful" adaptation, and what he gave us is not "faithful" in the dully literal sense that term is often meant. To some degree, it's not "faithful" in a more abstract sense--it's a Catholic movie, where Shelley was Protestant and atheist; it's a masculine movie (whatever that means) where Shelley was feminine (whatever that means); etc etc etc. And yet, it's exactly what it needed to be, which is a del Toro movie. Princess Weekes has done a very thorough analysis of the movie that I encourage you to check out. I'm not going into details here--it's a gorgeous movie, Romantic in the best way, Gothic in the best way. If it fumbles the ending a little, that's also to be expected; del Toro doesn't make perfect movies--he makes perfect visions. This is one of his best. 3. Wake Up Dead Man Unlike Mary Shelley, detective stories about religious themes very much are part of my wheelhouse. I've written a whole book about the subject. And I've long entertained the theory that Rian Johnson has some Ellery Queen lurking in the back of his mind; Glass Onion feels too much like The King is Dead for it to be a coincidence (though, since I've never seen Johnson mention Queen, it's very possible that it is). So, obviously, I was ears-up when I found out that the third Benoit Blanc mystery would be an impossible crime (hi, John Dickson Carr!) with religious themes. I had, I must say, some expectations--based largely on my work on similar topics. Johnson surprised me. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; part of what I argue in my book (here. I'll link it again for maximum exposure) is that the religious engagement of post-WWII Ellery Queen is predicated on the Jewish identity of the authors and the subtextually Jewish identity of Ellery himself. Johnson, meanwhile, is writing from a post-evangelical perspective (not a Catholic one, which I've been informed very much shows in the movie). And his crisis is not the crisis of WWII but the crisis of seeing a faith that claims to be about love disintegrating into a religion of hate (if it's Christianity, its qlippothic Christianity). The result is not preachy or internet atheist; it's a sensitive exploration of the need for mercy in a world that often does not extend it. It's about the real miracle of spiritual resurrection contrasted to the false miracle of the impossible crime. It's about grace. It's probably my favorite of the Benoit Blanc movies and may well be the best detective movie of the past few years. Oh, right. It's also a fair-play mystery that hides nothing. Johnson makes this look easy. It isn't, but he's just that good. 2. One Battle After Another Here's where I start getting really normie. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our great directors, and his previous engagement with Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice, 2014) was pretty great. And if I felt that Licorice Pizza (2021) was kind of a miss, I still had hope that he would do something special here. Reader, he did. As might be expected, this movie generated discourse, some of it good and some of it bad. I'll leave that to the discourse-mongers. What I enjoyed most about the movie was its sense of lightness; for all that it deals with incredibly heavy themes (themes that feel particularly pressing with the fascist turn the US has taken under Donald Trump and his merry band of brownshirts), One Battle After Another remains committed to a complex humanity that includes the humor of imperfection--the best people have bad impulses, while the worst have moments of passing humanity. The viewpoint character, here--played by the always-excellent Leonardo DiCaprio--is a bit of a fool, perhaps a holy one, stumbling through a world he doesn't understand. The other characters are all grotesque in various ways--this is inspired by a Pynchon novel, after all--but Anderson never loses the moral clarity needed when dealing with issues of immigration or racism. It's a difficult movie, if you want noble good guys. But it's a vital movie. 1. Sinners
If doing a couple of Marvel capeflicks is what it takes for Ryan Coogler to make something like Sinners, then I hope he never keeps making them, because Sinners is one of the great movies of the decade. It's not perfect--I actually think it flubs the ending just a bit--but it's big and ambitious and so meticulously put together. Obviously, Michael B. Jordan is great because Michael B. Jordan is always great, and here you get two of him. But the moment that blew my mind is the moment that also blew pretty much everyone else's mind: that scene in the bar when music causes past to collide into future, causes cultures to mix, introduces for a moment a sense of the holy. This is a movie about art, about communication though art, and about the attempts to control art, to co-opt it (obviously, this too has led to discourse). It's a movie about scratching out some sense of belonging in a world that doesn't want you. It's clearly tied to multiple threads of tradition: the vampire movie (yes, From Dusk Till Dawn is in the bloodstream somewhere), but also the tradition of Black writing going back to Jean Toomer's Cane. It's an incredibly rich movie and one that will reward revisiting multiple times. **** Those are my five favorite new movies of 2025. Like I say, my access to new movies is a tad more limited than TV shows, so I tend to skew a bit normie in my picks. But I do think these are genuinely great movies and suspect that even if I had gotten the chance to watch more new movies they would still be somewhere in the area of my favorites. In the next couple of days, I'll try to do a list of favorite books. These will not be 2025 books, because I read basically no new books. But they'll be good. By the way, there's a bunch of new books in the Public Domain now. Check some of them out here. It's that time of year again, when I start putting together some top five lists (and desperately updating a website that I swore to myself I would keep current all year--I guess there's always 2026). This year I'm going to do three posts of top-five lists, just to give myself something to do over the holiday. I'm going to start with television because, y'all, TV has been good this year. A banquet, I tell you. For this list, outside of honorable mentions, I decided to confine myself to new shows. These are not the best shows, perhaps (except for my #1 spot), but they're my favorite from 2025. Counting from 5-1: 5. The Summer Hikaru Died A boy goes missing; he returns different. So far, so standard. If you thought about it much, you could probably come up with a meaty handful of similar stories. What makes The Summer Hikaru Died different is that this change--the transformation of a young boy into something monstrous--isn't really the plot of the story. It's not a twist, not a big reveal. The protagonist Yoshiki Tsujinaka clocks it within the first episode and the remainder of the series involves him trying to come to terms with the fact that his friend Hikaru--with whom he was covertly in love--has been replaced with a nonhuman entity and he (Yoshiki) is kind of ok with it. Kind of. He's willing to make the trade-off in order to keep something of Hikaru around. This show consistently surprised me. Every episode introduced a bizarre new element to the show's worldbuilding. The setting is a small town (hi!) in Japan, one of those small towns that have dark secrets embedded in their very geography. Much of the series follows these boys (or, like, the boy and his monster) as they try to figure out what, exactly the town's whole deal is. It's a fascinating, melancholy, and disturbing series. Well worth checking out. 4. Revenged Love I'll fully admit that this one might be a nostalgia choice for me. One of my very first Chinese dramas was Counterattack: Falling in Love with a Rival. Watching that show was a janky, weird experience because I was relying on YouTube uploads and they were pretty inconsistent in terms of having subtitles, for instance, or appearing in anything like a reasonable order. Revenged Love is a glossy remake of that admittedly unpolished original. It follows Wu Suowei (Zi Yu), a down-on-his-luck guy who is dumped by his girlfriend and proceeds upon a quest for self-improvement that ultimately leads to him seducing his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend Chi Cheng (Tian Xu Ning). Along the way there's snake kidnapping and more standard forms of kidnapping. It's a ridiculous plot and it's played almost completely straight. The lead actors are charming and talented and have more than enough chemistry to carry the series through multiple seasons (though, frankly, we're lucky to have gotten one). Especially with all the Heated Rivalry fans popping up, I really can't recommend this show enough. 3. Shine I'm a simple man. Give me a historical drama full of politics and queerness and I'll probably dig it; Fellow Travelers was my favorite show of 2023 by a long shot, one I keep thinking about. Shine is kind of like Fellow Travelers in a Thai mode. Staring the powerhouse duo of Mile and Apo (from KinnPorsche), this series follows a university professor in Thailand right at the end of the 1960s as he deals with the political upheavals of the period. Now, look, I'm no expert at Thai political history. I've tried to dig around a bit and learn some and from what I can tell it was as complicated there in 1969 as it was everywhere else. This series explores some of that, asking important questions about what an individual's responsibility is in a time of political upheaval. Which means, of course, that it's not just relevant to Thailand circa 1969; it speaks to today as well, globally. 2. IT: Welcome to Derry It might be surprising, but IT: Welcome to Derry is not only better than its thematic rival Stranger Things; it's also better by a large margin than the movies it's spinning off from. The show accomplishes this by, for one thing, taking an actual interest in the time period it's set in. Taking its cues from the Stephen King novel, Welcome to Derry moves back in time to the 1960s to explore issues of race in Derry. Part of the theme of the novel is that the creature IT amplifies the darker instincts of the town's inhabitants. Thus, the novel (and the second movie) open (or at least partially lead off) with a queer-bashing, highlighting the homophobia of the story's original 1980s setting. In the 1960s, even in Maine, race would naturally be a major issue. The series doesn't tackle these themes perfectly; I find its utilization of the mystical Native American theme to be a bit troubling. But it's exploring ideas and themes that anchor it firmly in the tradition of small-town fiction--as well as in the King novel from which it derives. 1. Pluribus Pluribus is the best new show of the year by a substantial margin. I went into it knowing essentially nothing and, though I generally prefer to be spoiled, I'm kind of glad of my innocence here. The protagonist, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a spiky, unlikable figure. She reminds me a lot of the protagonist of The Prisoner in that her objections to being part of a hive mind are at once thoroughly reasonable and almost excessively abrasive. A lot of the discourse around the show, from what I can tell, revolves around poking at the meaning of this: is she a critique of American Individualism? American exceptionalism? American-- etc etc etc? And I think the answer, ultimately, is no. Carol is Carol--a deeply unhappy woman who has the one good thing in her life taken away from her and who struggles with that for the entirety of the season. One episode in particular resonated with me: when Carol, left to her own devices for something like forty days, slowly begins to disintegrate emotionally. Though the show was conceived well before the COVID-19 pandemic, it's difficult not to read Carol's response here as mirroring what so many of us went through in 2020. In the end, Pluribus is a show about love--not love in the abstract, but love for particular people. Collectives cannot love; and an individual cannot love a collective. Only when a person truly sees and responds to another person can love exist. That, to me, is the real point of Pluribus. HONORABLE MENTIONS
Obviously, these aren't the only shows I enjoyed this year. They're just my favorite. But here's a handful of honorable mentions, including returning series: Heated Rivalry: IYKYK Severance: I know I compared Pluribus to The Prisoner, but this is the show that gives real Prisoner vibes. The episode where they go on a work retreat is maybe my favorite of the year. Peacemaker: Gunn doesn't misfire. A masterpiece of character-work in a pulp mode. Andor: It's hard to believe that Disney, of all companies, put out a show this radical. Essential viewing. TV is good, y'all. I'll be back in a couple of days with my (much more normie) movies list. Meanwhile, have a good one. Happy New Year! [Note: none of the following is meant to take away from maybe the most salient fact of Kendrick Lamar's performance, which is its unapologetic Blackness. Nor am I suggesting that the performance was solely about Donald Trump, although he's an incarnation of the forces Kendrick Lamar works against. This is just me going over some stuff that I've been thinking about for the past couple of days] The fascism of the current moment continues apace. Trump has made himself the head of the Kennedy Center in order to bring about a so-called GOLDEN AGE of American art and culture. The NEA is laying out new rules for patriotic art. And, lest we forget, Trump started out this whole misadventure of 2025 with an executive order promoting a return to “beautiful” architecture for government buildings. All of these are disastrous examples of an artistically stupid man exerting his own bad taste; Donald J. Trump would not know a beautiful building if it landed on him, as we can only hope will eventually happen. If I keep banging on about this, it’s because I believe that art is vital. The mechanisms of capitalism and corporate greed have already desiccated the once-vital body of American cultural production. American culture, such as it was, has become increasingly flat and gray in spite of the infusion of exciting new voices from people of color and queer folk. This is because, frankly, capitalism is very very good at sucking up exciting new voices and grinding them into a consistent gray paste. In the face of such a mechanism, public funding and patronage of the arts is essential if we’re to have any sort of a culture at all. I’ve talked about this both here and on the podcast I co-host, so if you want a little more of my ideas on that angle, you can look here and listen here. Of course, what Trump et alia are objecting to isn’t the overwhelming mediocrity of the larger culture. They’re mad about architecture that doesn’t scream RETVRN. They’re mad about drag shows (a legitimately lively art-form even taking into account its mainstreaming in Drag Race). They’re mad about Black people (oh my god are they mad about Black people). They don’t want art; they want propaganda. Perhaps it’s this that makes Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance feel so very vital. Of course, the NFL won't let me embed it here, but here's the link to YouTube. I forgot that the Super Bowl was happening until it was happening. I didn’t even know that Kendrick Lamar, who just came off a spectacular year, was performing to an audience that included Donald Trump (in all of the flesh). When I saw the talk on BlueSky about the show, I was immediately eager to see it; I went to YouTube and found a crappy bootleg and watched it. Then I watched it several more times. I’ve lived with this halftime show in my head since that day. It’s a meticulously put-together work of art of a kind that simply doesn’t exist in the context of a Super Bowl halftime show. After I finally grew exhausted with rewatching Lamar’s performance, I turned to look at some older halftime shows. There were a lot of great ones: Bruno Mars, Beyonce, Madonna. There was Diana Ross, who was my first halftime performance and who entranced me so much that it should have been a clue of a certain lavender cast to my own personality. But the thing about all of these performances, even the very greatest, is that they were more or less just that—really good deliveries of popular songs. There was very little cohesive or intentional about them—they weren’t saying anything. Remember after Trump’s first election, when Lady Gaga performed? A lot of tongues were wagging beforehand with the usual suspects worrying that she would make it “political.” And she did, in a way; she positioned her show as a healing moment for America. It was a good show and totally flaccid, politically speaking, in spite of the fact that she performed her classic “Born this Way.” And, look, I love Lady Gaga. Nothing but respect for her. But it was a show wholly unsuited to the moment in which it occurred. Kendrick Lamar, here at the dawn of the second Trump regime (the last one, however it ends, and it will), delivered something much more to the point. I won’t here go into the various symbols overt and (possibly) covert; the YouTube Industrial Complex has churned out so many explainer videos over the past few days that you could probably watch them end-to-end until the next Super Bowl and not run out of material. I’ll link a few here that I found particularly interesting. See here, here, here, and here. A lot of talk about the messaging here specifically comments on the Black experience in America and it’s worth listening to these voices. Lamar’s performance immediately put me in mind of two things. First, naturally, was Alan Moore and his argument that poets and magicians are one and the same thing: anyone can put a hex on your cows, but only a poet can make your name mud for generations. It’s actually pretty rare to see this happen; even the songwriters and poets I regard in highest possible esteem, whom I think of as prophets in their own way (Bob Dylan, for instance, or Ezra Furman) rarely have a measurable real-world impact. It’s tempting to listen to Kurt Vonnegut’s words about writers versus the Vietnam War and say that art, however well-intentioned, is a pretty poor weapon for social change. But Lamar has done it; “Not Like Us” is an actual working. Lamar even (allegedly) begins the performance by flashing the cheat code for GTA: San Andreas that grants invulnerability, like a ceremonial magician performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The song has already so totally demolished Drake that at the Super Bowl 70,000 voices rose as one to the words “a minor.” But I’m not (necessarily) arguing that Lamar performed an act of ritual magic in the Golden Dawn, Crowley, woo-woo sense. Not necessarily. But it is a kind of working all the same. The show itself has a narrative (something that most halftime shows that aren’t the Indiana Jones one don’t have). It’s a story about Drake, of course, but it’s also about America (an America divided and built on the backs of Black men, as countless YouTubers and BlueSky posters have observed). It’s a story about artistic integrity battling against cultural mediocrity (“too ghetto” is what Uncle Sam says; “DEI halftime” is what the ignorant proclaimed online). It’s a declaration that the artist has the power. And it’s a statement of intent to remake the world; indeed, it declares that the world is already being remade. It’s “Game Over.” And it’s performed in front of the sexual-assaulter-in-chief. Kendrick Lamar is throwing down a gauntlet, here. That’s magic in precisely the way Alan Moore talks about it. Kendrick Lamar is manipulating words and symbols to create a change in the world. He tells us what’s up at the very beginning when he promises that the revolution is about to be televised. So of course this turned me to Shelley and his "Defense of Poetry":
It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In our postmodern (or post-postmodern) age, we are perhaps rightly skeptical of this sort of language; it takes no great knowledge of history or literature to know that poets are often ineffectual and that the best dreams of the poets are often phantasms. But every once in a while there’s Kendrick Lamar. And he comes along and energizes symbols that the Right has tried to claim (the flag, Uncle Sam) and deploys a working initially intended to take down a rival, now reconfigured to combat the principalities and powers and the rulers of the age. What we witnessed at the Super Bowl halftime show was a sacred moment in which a powerful artist declared himself and uttered a resounding “no” against the cultural decay that is most concretely, though not exclusively, seen in the decaying undead corpse of the molester-in-chief. That’s pure poetry. That’s magic. And if there’s any hope to be had these days, this is where it is. In my book on American small-town fiction, I try to articulate an idea I called “redemptive nostalgia.” This is an idea designed to push back against the popular belief that nostalgia—looking back to a fantasy past—is inherently regressive. An obvious contemporary example of regressive nostalgia is, of course, MAGA. It derives its power from energizing nostalgia for a “better time”—that’s the again—but the “better time” is one that excludes people of color and queer people. To make America great again is to make it white, straight, cisgendered again. What I want to suggest in my book is that there’s a counter-nostalgia, or a competing nostalgia, possible. This is where people on the Left, in my observation, tend to fall down; they’ll explain in detail why and how Trump’s nostalgic vision is evil, but they don’t feel very comfortable suggesting an alternative nostalgia, a nostalgia that will push us forward. As I see it, the dilemma of nostalgia is similar to the dilemma of the superhero. Alan Moore sees an adult fixation on superheroes as infantalizing and implicitly fascist. Meanwhile, Grant Morrison sees superheroes as nothing less than our salvation, as they express in the introduction to Supergods: We live in the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations. They’re not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark. They’re about as far from social realism as you can get, but the best superhero stories deal directly with mythic elements of human experience that we can all relate to, in ways that are imaginative, profound, funny, and provocative. They exist to solve problems of all kinds and can always be counted on to find a way to save the day. At their best, they help us to confront and resolve even the deepest existential crises. We should listen to what they have to tell us. I feel no need to take a side—at least on the question of the value of superheroes—in what Elizabeth Sandifer has dubbed The Last War in Albion. I think they’re both right. Moore is absolutely correct that the contemporary fixation on superheroes, especially as they appear in the total domination of the cineplex by the MCU, is basically bad for culture and probably bad for humanity in general, because it represents a rejection of complex thought and a loss of appetite for difficulty. It becomes a kind of cycle: the world is hard, so we turn to light entertainment; and, turning to light entertainment, we find that we don’t have the tools to rectify a hard world. So it gets harder. On the other hand, I think Morrison is also right. There’s a value to a superhero like Superman because he represents something aspirational: a neverending battle for truth and justice for everyone. And in dark times like these I think it’s useful; certainly, I’m glad that the character is out of the hands of Zack Snyder who—whatever his other merits (or lack thereof) as a filmmaker—simply doesn’t vibe with Superman. The recent teasers for the new movie look like what we really need. I’ve been a Superman fan since I was a child; those Fleischer Superman shorts (still, to my mind, the definitive version of the Man of Steel on film) were a part of my mental furniture for as long as I can remember. It was later that I came to the Christopher Reeve movies; later still that I came to the comics—first through the President Lex storyline and later through the fantastic and (to my mind) unbeatable A Superman for All Seasons. I’ve had All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietely for a while now, but never read it for whatever reason. And then, the other day I decided to finally crack it open. I did this for two reasons: first, because I’m going to be teaching it in my “Cultures of English-Speaking Countries” class; and, second, because...well, look around you. If anything looks like a job for Superman, it’s this. Morrison gets a fundamental optimism in Superman, not only about humanity in general but about particular characters—even about villains. Late in the book, Superman confronts Lex Luthor, who has engineered a serum to give himself the powers of Superman. It’s a fairly typical bust-up between these rivals; on film it would be interminable and dull. But during that fight, Lex has a sudden revelation; he sees the world as Superman sees it and, for a moment, he is almost a changed man.  This is fairly optimistic, to be honest. I don’t imagine that our contemporary and real-world Lex Luthors (Elon Musk, Donald Trump, et alia) would actually be changed by the vision gifted to Lex. Lex, like Superman, is designed by Morrison to be mythic in scope; he is smarter than we are, grander than we are—in his own title he might even be a tragic figure. His hubris drives him to take on the powers of a god and, having taken them on, he is undone by the realization that they grant him. Neither Elon nor Donald have the intellectual, moral, or spiritual substance to rise to this level. But there’s something here all the same that I find terribly compelling. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe—I want to believe that it’s possible for anyone to glimpse the fundament of creation and be changed by it. I want to believe that we can create these godlike beings who are better than we are and that they can then drive us, all of us, even villains, to be better (one fascinating section of All-Star suggests that a world without Superman would have to create him). As I type this, Elon Musk and his twink brownshirts are deleting the US government. Donald Trump just this day (5-Feb-2025) announced his plan to evacuate Gaza and turn it into an American zone—once again proving that, however bad Biden was on Gaza, Trump will always be worse. At moments like this we need some kind of hope. We need something to believe in, something to aspire to.  I’m not suggesting that Superman is some kind of god, that we should treat him with the same respect as Attis or Osiris or Christ. But these symbols are valuable, as all symbols are. The neverending battle for truth, justice, and (sure, why not) the American way is worth fighting. In the face of tech billionaires and self-appointed lords of the earth; in the face of the rough beast in the White House and his enabling cohort; in the face of the grundies and the fundies and the TERFs and the SWERFs; in the face of the utter inhumanity of these enemies of culture and human flourishing; it’s useful to have Superman there, in our mind, urging us forward. I think that Superman can be a form of redemptive nostalgia. In his earliest forms he was a social justice warrior, fighting landlords and bankers on behalf of the common man. When he fights for truth, justice, and the American way, it’s on behalf of the common man. That’s part of the American heritage, too; and rather than concede the past to Trump and his fascist cohort, rather than saying “yes, America was always awful and that's the end of it,” we should be looking to the past to find this sort of energizing fantasy that can push us on into a more truthful, more just world. Superman doesn’t exist; he’s a fantasy. But he’s a fantasy that we create and that, therefore, creates our world. It’s a world worth creating.  Gore Vidal once said that the sweetest words in the English language are "I told you so." Unfortunately, in spite of my consistent and vocal dislike of Donald Trump and his fascist policies, I can't really say that because the reality of the first...two, three weeks?...of his current term is so much dumber than I could have anticipated. And I don't just mean the flurry of executive orders attacking immigrants, people of color, and queer folk; I don't mean the blatantly unconstitutional attempt to destroy birthright citizenship and stop the flow of funds allocated by Congress. Those I could have called. What I didn't expect is that shadow president Elon Musk would stick around this long, long enough to start his own private little coup. Make no mistake, these are bad people and they are profoundly stupid people. Watching them run around enacting their dictatorial little fantasies is a bit like watching the classic Three Stooges short You Nazty Spy, if the Stooges were less competent and more malicious. (Apologies for the awful colorization; it's the only version I could find) Mocking Elon Musk and his puppet president is easy and brings little joy. Mocking their deluded christofascist and white nationalist followers is about as satisfying. Still, it's life's little pleasures that make the whole rambling trainwreck endurable. I don't have much to say in the way of conclusion, here; this disaster is very disheartening. I recently re-read The Odyssey for the first time in years, in Emily Wilson's translation. I grew up with the Fagles version; more specifically, I grew up listening to Ian McKellen's recording of The Odyssey. I've not quite done the kind of excavation needed to say exactly how this shaped my imagination and later intellectual life, but certainly McKellen's reading (of which I can find no clips on YouTube) shaped the way epics should sound to me. Wilson's translation is a good one, I think; at any rate, it scratched that particular Odyssian itch I had. Reading it, I couldn't help but draw certain strained parallels in the state of Ithaca in Odysseus's absence and the state of DC in the absence of anyone with the will or power to stand up to these buffoons. Here's Telemachus to the disguised Athena:  As it turns out, of course, Odysseus does come back and the results are cruel and bloody; even the "good" suitors are judged to be complicit in the wrongdoings of the others. Justice is done; the good king returns and the goddess Athena steps in at the last moment to prevent a cycle of bloody reprisal. This is a fantasy, of course; the idea that bad and stupid people will eventually get what they deserve is one that only children and mystics have the convenience of indulging in, at least consistently. For the rest of us, especially those of us with little or no access to the levers of power, there is only the bemused horror of watching the genuinely least insightful people in the world given the power to force their obscene fantasies on the rest of us. Over at The Projectionist's Lending Library we have a new episode--our season finale--about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and the 1980 PBS TV adaptation of it. Check it out. Toward the end of this episode, Erik and I go on a tear about public funding for the arts. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I grew up in the rural American South and there was at that time a kind of reflexive distrust for arts funding; I think the controversies over Piss Christ and things like that were still fresh in everyone's mind. I absorbed that at the time, but gradually I kind of just slipped into thinking that, no, public funding for the arts is probably a good thing. I didn't feel that passionate about it, though. That's changed. If the past ten or twenty years have shown anything, it's that culture in general has become dull and mechanical. In my previous post I shared a video of Alan Moore talking about Harry Potter. I'll post it here again because I think Moore's right. Moore's right. It's not that there isn't anything good coming out at the movies; Luca Guadagnino's Queer and Robert Eggers's Nosferatu are two movies that I enjoyed a lot and that I think are positive contributions to the culture. In the podcast, I talk about Piranesi by Susanna Clark and Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira. There's good stuff out there. But lately I've been overwhelmed by a sense of general depression covering most forms of media, where the truly strange or interesting is either pushed to the sidelines or mimicked (sometimes convincingly). We need more strange stuff out there. We need more weird art. And the corporate model is very difficult for this sort of thing. That's why I'm so passionate about public funding for the arts. Back in the day, one argument against public funding is that it was going to works that people didn't understand or that might offend some people and "why should my tax dollars" etc etc etc. But, of course, that's precisely why we need public funding. Because art, lots of it, simply isn't commercial. But it's good. It's a public necessity. Because art is what pushes us to imagine new realities and explore beyond what we normally experience. Public funding for the arts puts interesting art in the sight of the people, some of whom might be confused or enraged, but all of whom would not have the opportunity to encounter it otherwise. These are very un-organized thoughts. And with the ascent (reascent) of the philistine administration of Donald Trump, which is anti-human and so anti-art, it's unlikely that we'll see PBS or any other public services get substantial increases in funding. But it's a dream worth having. To close out, here's a video of David Lynch (RIP) talking about making art. Lynch was one of the true masters of the strange and the illuminating. He's meant a lot to me for a long time and I'm sorry to see him go. 2024 was a year that I felt like I had finally climbed back on the reading horse, as it were, after a few years in which reading anything seemed to be a struggle. Looking at the total number of books read, that seems to have been more of a matter of vibes than anything else, but I did read some absolutely fantastic books, including one that I'm pretty confident is going to be part of my personal canon for a long time. But I'll get to that. Below are five books I read this year that I loved in one way or another. Ascending order from the fifth to the first.  5. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs I read this in preparation for the Naked Lunch episode of the podcast I co-host, The Projectionist's Lending Library. My co-host Erik is a Burroughs fan and has done quite a bit of work on the Beats in general. I, on the other hand, have not; indeed, it took several years after my first reading of On the Road for me to warm to the Beats at all (outside of Ginsberg, who has always convinced me). (I tell this episode on the podcast, but my first exposure to Burrroughs was kind of a negative one in that I was as a child a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, at a time when finding copies of his books in the local Books-A-Million--outside of the first Tarzan book and maybe sometimes A Princess of Mars--was very difficult. William S, on the other hand, got an entire shelf. I hated him without reading him because I was a strong partisan as a child). Anyway, Naked Lunch. You can check out the podcast for my extended thoughts on it, but the short version is that this book is very weird in a way that I sympathize with. The plot, if there is a plot, is super thin; the characters, if they are characters, have virtually none of that roundness that we're told to expect from a novel. The content is obscene, bizarre, even sexy (in a way that makes people side-eye you if you claim to find the book sexy). It's a very bold book and one I simply can't imagine being released today; it breaks up your expectations of what a novel should be or do and forces new modes of reading on you. And that's just cool.  4. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin Here's another book I read for the podcast (actually, the next episode of the podcast, dropping later this month). Well, and for my English Language Novels class, which this year I themed around science fiction. It's also the very first Le Guin novel I've ever read, though hopefully it won't be the last. (I say "hopefully" although I theoretically can control what I read...). The plot here is simple: a man can dream dreams that alter reality. He asks a psychiatrist to help him only to find that the psychiatrist is wanting to harness his powers to change the world. Hijinks ensue. For the record, I re-read this book while I was also reading Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which appears below, and there's a kind of occult sympathy between the two books. I don't think Le Guin was an occultist, though she was a Taoist and an Anarchist, and I rather suspect she's more interested in themes of control and resistance than she is in dreams as such. Still and all, it's a wonderful, beautiful book and one that sticks with you.  3. The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore Let me not right out of the gate that this is not a book for children. Like, at all. What it is is Alan Moore (and his deceased friend Steve Moore, no relation) laying out his particular theory of magic, one which centers the act of creation at the heart of the magician's work. Put another way, Moore seems convinced (and I'm not unconvinced) that magic ultimately boils down to art: the creation of art, the dissemination of art, the promotion of art. Moore claims at one place that he began to develop his theory of magic while writing From Hell, when he has his villain say something like "the one place where gods can be said to truly exist is in the human mind." So for Moore magic, whatever else it is, is about accessing the potential of the human mind. Actually, I'll go further and suggest that, insofar as this book is itself a magical spell, its a spell by Moore to convince more people to create interesting art. Moore has been very open in his dismay at the trajectory of contemporary culture; this exchange is emblematic of his stance: He's not wrong. Anyway, this book moves well and it's compelling. If you're interested in Moore as an artist, there's a novella and several pages of comics (presumably his farewell to the medium); if you're interested in Moore as an occultist, he carefully lays out the system developed by himself and his friend Steve Moore; and if you care for neither of those things but really want to know how to do basic ceremonial magic? Well, you'll find that here too. It's a grimoire as only Alan Moore could do it.  2. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke I never read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, though I did watch the TV adaptation a while back. It's not exactly that I didn't want to, but it just kept slipping from my attention. But I had heard so much good buzz about Piranesi--and it is comparatively short--so I decided to finally read it in the last weeks of 2024. It wound up being the last book I read that year and, let me tell you, it was a high note to end on. As a treat, take a look at this interview with Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore: This book, like The Lathe of Heaven, isn't really one that relies much on plot per se. The book is really more about mood, as the initially-unnamed narrator wanders through a vast house and describes it and its inhabiting statues. It's dreamlike and Borgesian and I really can't recommend it enough.  1. Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira I first encountered Anthony Oliveira through his Twitter presence, and then through his Patreon-funded podcast about Milton. That project has long since moved on, but I've still kept up with Oliveira (I even bought an issue of a Marvel superhero comic because he wrote it). I bought this book when it first came out in...(? April 2024? I was sure it was longer ago). But I didn't get to it until toward the end of the year. And then, one day, I picked it up and started reading and was almost immediately in tears. I read this book, all 432 pages of it, in a single Saturday; I could not stop. So, what is this book? It's hard to describe. On the one hand, it's a kind of historical fiction about the Beloved Disciple--here imagined as Jesus's lover (and Lazarus, incidentally; Oliveira obviously knows all the potential identities of the Beloved Disciple and he manages to use all of them). But the "historical" bit here is very loose; Jesus and his beloved are depicted as watching TV at one point, for instance. And it's not really a novel at all; it's more of an extended poem, or poetic meditation. It's a work of queer Christian mysticism in which union with the Divine is conceived of in explicitly homoerotic terms. It's irreverent and sometimes obscene. And it's also a grappling with disappointment--being disappointed by God, by life, by the people around you. It's amazingly beautiful and it's not only one of my favorite books I read in 2024; it's probably one of my favorite books of all time. If you're curious, here's a sample of the audiobook (which Google, inexplicably, won't let me embed).  So that's my top five reads of 2024. I'll probably get a movie list put together sometime soon; oddly, I don't seem to have gotten much done in terms of new television, so there probably won't be a list for that (Ripley was swell, though). Also, with the social media rapidly going fash, I'll probably be posting here a lot more. I know, I promise that every year, but I'm hoping that if I actually eliminate Facebook I'll need somewhere to post random thoughts, and that's exactly what this website is for.
Anyway, happy 2025 y'all. Be safe out there. Steve Steinbock has graciously reviewed God and the Great Detective at EQMM's "The Jury Box" and given it five stars. Check out his review here.
I'm late posting this here, but I was honored to be asked to contribute a piece to Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction as a West 87th Street Irregular. You can read it here.
A Website on Deduction is the best resource for information about Ellery Queen on the web and it has been for decades. I'm proud to be featured on the site. |
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