Some things you are a sucker for even though you understand in your head that the object of your affection is, you know, messed up. (That is my idea of the way with-it people talk nowadays. The Republicans win a lot of elections and with-it people, such as myself, are apt to say something such as, "That is, like, you know, fucking messed up. Seriously!")
Anyway, like sports. My wife has patiently explained to me, more than once, that it makes no sense to care who wins ball games, that they're just fleeting and meaningless competitions between the multimillionaires of one franchise and the multimillionaires of another, and that it is a fantasy to imagine that the guys in the one colored uniform are "our guys." No, they are not our guys, they are from Texas or California or possibly the Dominican Republic, and soon as the season is over they will go to one of their multiple residences somewhere away from here and daydream, when not patronizing strip clubs, about selling their services for several million more to another franchise. Who cares? She doesn't, and neither should I, says she.
Okay, maybe she is right, technically, but to me it is sort of like arguing that the actor playing Hamlet is only an actor, he's going out after the performance to knock a few back, and you are crazy to be affected in any way because it is not as if anyone really suffered or died, it's just a play, did you not notice how the actors revived to take a bow? It's not exactly like that, but it's sort of like that, and if being interested makes time pass pleasurably for me then time is passing pleasurably for me.
The above is all prologue. The subject of this post is all the year-end rituals, the resolutions and the list-making and the journalistic retrospectives. All quite stupid, I think. If you are going to resolve to do better, you should start doing better, now, instead of waiting for the calendar to turn. The chopping up of time into years, for such things as Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards and the "ten best of this year"--how much sense is there in that? There is no logical connection between the time it takes for the Earth to travel around the sun and these human activities. Also, it seems unfair in a random sort of way. If your book is published in January, it creates a little buzz, and then, eleven months later, it's time for the year-end retrospectives, so it gets a second little buzz that crowds out any initial buzz for the book just published in December, which December book will not ever have a chance to get a year-end buzz because it was published "last year." Two buzzes to none, and for no very good reason at all.
Notwithstanding, if you are a reader, you might enjoy going here as much as I did. "Here," for those of you who kept reading, instead of clicking, is the New Yorker's Book Bench Blog and their year-end retrospective, "The Year in Reading." Compare Tad Friend's breezy look at Franzen's Freedom with those, here and here and here, of Eric the Blue. Notice that the only book that gets mentioned by two different contributors is The Imperfectionists, a first novel by Tom Rachman--I missed the "initial buzz" on this one. Find out that Malcolm Gladwell is a self-described lover of "thrillers and airport literature," whereas Rebecca Mead spent a good part of the year with George Eliot. Also, I did not know, but do now, thanks to Richard Brody, who enjoyed Saul Bellow's letters, that the author of Augie March was still having a hard time making ends meet a decade after that great novel was published. (Editorial comment, accompanied by mournful string music: Don't whine to Melville about it.)
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