This Beautiful 2015 of Ours

Because I'm numerically attracted to things that end in 0's and 5's, I've been waiting a solid four years for 2015. A couple weeks in, and it looks outrageously promising. Come with me.

In 2015, one of the greatest short story writers I've ever had the privilege to read is releasing a new collection. Kelly Link's Get in Trouble is due out in February. It's the first book I've pre-ordered in years.

This month, Selma sees a wide release. Today, it was nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards. The social media response? The people who've seen it were angry it didn't get nominated for more things.

This summer, Mamoru Hosoda will release his new movie, The Boy and the Beast. It's not a romance, but instead looks like Hosoda's first film set in an urban environment, a crossover between the demon world and ours that leads to fuzzy bonding. Hosoda's previously created three incredible films: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, and The Wolf Children. With just those three movies, Hosoda became my favorite living director. No one has the combination of his eye and imagination.

Later this year, Playdead Studios will release INSIDE, their second game as a group. Their first is one of the few perfect videogames in existence: LIMBO. Playdead needed private funding to make LIMBO, and then managed to profit enough off of it to buy their independence from their corporate parent. And this year, they're giving us this:

This is also the year that Nero will release its second album. Their first, Welcome Reality, is the only real reason that I say I like Dubstep. Turn up your noses at Dubstep's alleged lack of art, but at the end of that album, after all the tech beats and heavy drops, Nero rearranged all the themes of all the major tracks into a 17-minute symphony.

It's telling of my psychology that I present optimism for a year through art. Art is what swirls up inside me where the more moral or political mammals are fueled by events. This does not dismiss the importance of events and progress, though 2015 is scheduled to be a good year. 

We have every reason to believe there will be a continuation of a drop in violent crime in the U.S. around the world.

In the U.S., even more states will recognize gay marriage.

Around the world, more people will access the internet than ever. By the sheer amount of possible connections, more people will talk to more people than ever before. Somebody who thinks they are alone in this world will find somebody who understands them.

On Monday, I have an appointment to see what we can do about my body rejecting medication so frequently in 2014. It would be quite the year for me if we find a remedy, but 2015 will be a good year even if I don't make it all the way through.

#bestreads2013 - Favorite Short Stories and Essays Edition

In compiling my list for #bestreads2013, I came up with five short stories and essays that didn’t feel right to put beside all the novels on my list. My list of most affecting books will still go live on the 28th. Yet they absolutely deserve at least a paragraph praise. So for this Sunday I’m going to rant just a little bit at you about the essays that confronted me like no other, the fiction that opened my mind, and that one story that actually took my breath away. That doesn’t happen often enough.

And in all of it, I won’t ramble about how great Richard Matheson’s “Duel” is, even though I re-read it for the twentieth time this year and still find it hilariously paranoia-inducing.

So, five short pieces presented with hierarchy:

Roger Zelazny’s “Divine Madness”

A very short story, only perhaps 2,500 words, about a man living his life backwards. It’s not traditional time travel, as why he’s experiencing everything backwards is never explained or exploited; he can’t take advantage or change anything, either. Instead he hurtles across weeks of absurd reverse-time humor and his own bad decisions, culminating in a last line that actually left me breathless. Its payoff is simultaneously hopeful, clever and wrenchingly sad in a manner I refuse to spoil. Do yourself the favor of spending a few minutes reading this. It’s in several collections.

Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners”

The most poignant fiction bout fandom I’ve ever read. Another short story available in multiple collections (at least in Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters), it’s about a teenaged nerd in a small cluster of friends who all love a fictional TV show called The Library. They watch it at all hours, cosplay it, hypothesize how the heroes live, love, and could escape certain death, all while avoiding the unknowable complexities of their own lives. It’s much easier to figure out why the Librarian is played by a different actor in each episode than to discern the many and painful mixed signals about whether his parents are getting divorced, or why he’s been written into his father’s novel only to meet an awful fate. Here escapism is both positive and negative, getting kids to know each other and perhaps fall in love while also giving them other things to discuss so they can avoid admitting, acting or exploring it. It takes someone like Link to make this all work.

David Foster Wallace’s “McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”

My first exposure to Wallace and I was already enamored. Here is a long-form piece of journalism during McCain’s first real run at the presidency in 2000, when he lost the nomination to George W. Bush. It’s incredibly chewy journalism as it refuses to settle on one idea of McCain: he was a war hero who refused to leave his fellow captives, but also a screw-up and horn-dog; he took big money as he pursued legislation to shut big money out of politics; he was candid and self-effacing in ways that only built up his prestige. The easy way out is to call him a liar or fraud, but there are too many cases where he was actually honest. Wallace’s conclusion is antithetical to where bipartisan politics have gone: that McCain was shades of everything we saw, not wholly any one of them, both a role model seeking national change and a scoundrel who’d use a little kid’s grief for his own political gain.

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “The Logic of Stupid Poor People”

I can’t say I agreed with all of it, or even liked it, but it’s the finest essay of its kind I’ve read. We live in a culture where you are at every disadvantage if you cannot blend in with people who have much more than you. Cottom baldly tackles some of the reasons why someone behind on the rent and with no dinner would spend everything on a luxury item. On first reading, I resisted the essay to the point where I literally dug my heels into my carpet. The tone, and the notion that these might all be defensible decisions, put me against what is an exercise in releasing harmful judgment for empathy. It’s a valuable confrontation. Cottom’s blog is right here. 

Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

Mesmerizing prose that reads perhaps too much like fiction. Her rolling opening about notions of California would never have clued me into the murder case she was about to profile, and the way she captured circumstantial evidence never let me anticipate that the murder was a real life contrivance fit for CSI.

There are two key successes in the piece. The first is that Didion so rapidly captures the feeling of one side, until it must be right, only to then upturn it with evidence and another perspective.

The other success is language remixing cultural observation like this: "The graft took incurious ways.  This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew.  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.  This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school."