Year in Review: Things I Loved in 2021
Welcome to my newsletter... and to an onslaught of recommendations that no one asked for.
If the past year has taught me anything, it is the sobering fact that most magazines, newspapers, and other ‘reputable’ publications do not care to publish every single thought that enters my mind. They do not, in fact, cater to sharing every opinion or pattern that I’ve noticed in culture, and are not an ‘appropriate’ place for me to rant my theories about the books, films, or music with which I am obsessed. Pitching can be exhausting and disappointing, and so freelance writing has moved to the backburner while I focus on grad school (which is exhausting enough as it is). But I am still occasionally churning up ideas for pieces that I want to publish, however half-baked most of them ultimately are.
To my knowledge, there is no better place for these half-thoughts than a newsletter. The email newsletter is like the older sibling of the blog and the vlog - the one who got married and moved to the suburbs and was never heard from again until a few short years ago, when there were rumours of a reinvention in the works, a new look, an album, a comeback tour. All the cool kids are starting newsletters (for instance, Hunter Harris’ brilliant “Succession Power Rankings” became an absolute Sunday night staple for me this fall, and I was also honoured to write a guest post for my friend Winnie Wang’s A Snack for Later). In 2020, Reuters declared the “the resurgence and importance of email newsletters,” while Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic investigated venture capital’s turn toward newsletter subscription services, including the one that I’m using, Substack, who boasted a $15.3 million round of funding in 2019. What goes around, comes around, etc. etc.
And so here we are once again, in the era of the newsletter, the era of reading each other’s petty little thoughts in long(ish) form once more. It feels to me like a refreshing antidote to the brevity and snark of Twitter, while also holding some of the intimacy of a quasi-epistolary form — it’s more personal than a blog, but somehow also less solipsistic? One of the things that I resent about social media is how it makes staying in touch with the people I love and care about, or even just sort-of know, feel like a forced social performance at best, or ethically compromising at worst. I have no reason to believe that newsletter services are necessarily better or worse on that front, but I do hope that I can thwart some of the emphasis on visibility or optimisation or sensationalism that are inherent to platforms like Twitter and Instagram. As Tiffany wrote in 2019, “it’s hard to think of anything less thrilling […] than email, a decades-old technology that essentially everyone is accustomed to using for free, all the time, rarely for fun.” And yet, there was something so enjoyable, so thrilling, so simultaneously adult and juvenile, about getting my first e-mail account in grade 2 (“tiarockz” forever) and sending messages to my friends after school, some of whom had commandeered their parents’ accounts. We transferred each other archaic precedents to the meme, forwarded chain mail and gossip, sent birthday messages, and put each other on blast. As Selin, the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, suggests, the e-mail inbox was once “like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives,” that was “constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it any time.” Maybe e-mail is coming back. Maybe I’m just writing this into the void. In these times of solitude and unease, maybe that is okay.
I am not yet sure what the tone of my newsletter will be like. A lot of the newsletters that I read walk a comforting line of wry humour, heavy pop culture/meme references, and personal journalism. My jokes rarely land in real life, let alone virtually, and so I am not convinced that I would be well-suited for this kind of writing. The snob in me instead harbours fantasies of a Virginia Woolf-like critical eye with a formal, elegant prose style, but I know my limits (and my audience), and pretending that I have anything particularly sophisticated or Woolfian to offer might end up equally embarrassing. Despite the fact that I love reading my friends’ newsletters or essays or blogs, when it comes to my own writing voice, I am confronted by the sense that there is something revealing and even somewhat shameful about digital writing — about assuming that anyone will care to read my thoughts, about thinking that they matter enough to occupy time and space in this crowded arena. I have no meaningful reason or excuse for going ahead with it, just some vague cluster of whims — to dump ideas for essays that never made it past the pitching stage, to find alternative ways of keeping in touch, to be a cheerleader for things that I care about, and to create a sense of community around shared interests.
If you have made it this far, I am grateful for your patient interest, and I hope that I can offer you something fulfilling or exciting in return. Without further ado, this is No Outlet (provisional title)!
The Best of 2021
Since I have conceived of this project as a platform for the things in culture that I am enjoying, thinking with, and looking to recommend or discuss further, it feels appropriate to begin with a look back on the best of 2021. Some ground rules: everything that I have listed was new to me this year, meaning that there are no re-reads or re-watches included. I’ve also sectioned off the overall heroes of the year from the things that were newly released in 2021. I am eager to hear what you thought and liked too, and as a final reminder, don’t buy your books from Amazon — shop local!
The Best Books I Read in 2021
The Idiot, Elif Batuman: If you too have found that your dry humour is almost never appropriate for the occasion, rejoice! You will feel seen by Batuman’s novel, which I suspect was specifically written for awkward girls who often think things like, “I couldn’t imagine how I was going to dispose of my body in space and time, every day for the rest of my life.” It is also the funniest book that I have ever read, nailing the absurdity of learning a new language, but also of language and human communication more generally.
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino: Everyone loved this in 2019, which naturally made me unreasonably put off by it. I got four pages in and quit — but thankfully, I picked it up again a month ago and was completely stunned. Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is an incredibly perceptive, erudite critic of late-capitalism, the Internet, gender roles, and popular culture. Books that purport to diagnose the cultural malaise tend to be overhyped, but this is the real deal.
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson: Carson combines the sounds of screen doors swinging and used cars humming with the stuff of mythology — a winged boy, a volcano, a love story. Mesmerisingly written, this is a contemporary classic for a reason.
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Maryse Condé
Fight Night, Miriam Toews
Averno, Louise Gluck
Second Place, Rachel Cusk
Litany for the Long Moment, Mary-Kim Arnold
The Best Books I Read in 2021 (Released in 2021)
Fight Night, Miriam Toews: My obsession with Toews continues, and Fight Night brings together so many of the reasons that I love her books — a precocious and perceptive young narrator, Canadian-Mennonite families, women’s intergenerational bonds. Of course, she also makes me laugh so hard that I cry, and then cry so hard that I have to laugh.
Second Place, Rachel Cusk: While reading this, I could only think “this is capital-L Literature!” Cusk writes with the sharp confidence of a bygone era of writers, but with a distinctively contemporary eye toward fracturing relationships, atmosphere, and the invisible, inchoate forces that attract us to and repel us from one another.
Everybody: A Book About Freedom, Olivia Laing: This year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Laing, a brilliant essayist and art critic, about her new book on a subject close to my heart — bodily freedom! Laing’s copious research makes a strong case for the centrality of the body in political life, and vice versa. Her careful and responsible attention to a variety of sources and struggles is key here… it my view, this is what sets her book apart from a similar, but ultimately misguided, set of essays also released this year from Maggie Nelson (in brief: Nelson’s On Freedom starts off strong but quickly feels like it was written sloppily and in bad faith — such a letdown from a writer I have previously enjoyed).
All the Water I’ve Seen is Running, Elias Rodriques
Mouthpieces, Eimear McBride
The Best Theory Books I Read in 2021
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed: I love phenomenology and this is possibly the best book I’ve found on it since Iris Marion Young! Anything Ahmed touches is gold, for me.
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick: An original, accessible, and extremely helpful book on the ways in which spatialisation and the right to space are politicised, raced, and gendered. Pairs well with the Ahmed book too.
The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities After Man, Kandice Chuh: As the Humanities continue to be ‘in crisis,’ Chuh argues that instead of defending the field as it has been constituted (in a largely white, colonial, masculine framework), we might reimagine it from the perspective of those who have been considered ‘inhuman,’ so as to think anew about ethics, aesthetics, and the role of education.
Film Bodes: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality, Katharina Lindner
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman
The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng
Why Stories Matter: On the Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings
Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, Noelle McAfee
The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, Kara Keeling
The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning
The Best Films I Saw in 2021
New Waterford Girl (1999), Allan Moyle: There is an alternate universe in which Christine “Lady Bird” MacPherson saw this movie in freshman year and decided to base her whole personality around it. I, too, will surely find that lines, costumes, and images from this weird and sweet film will live rent-free in my mind for years. It’s steaming on CBC Gem.
The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean (1966), Juleen Compton: Randomly caught this during a UCLA archive screening that streamed this summer and I cannot recommended it enough to all cinephiles. A charming and bizarre blend of 60s rock culture, feminism, and the supernatural. It will screen again at TIFF Lightbox in February.
The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), Radha Blank: I missed this Netflix film last year, but I’m glad to have caught up with it! Blank has a lot of smart things to say about ageing, but I’m particularly interested in her commentary on ‘selling out’ and on what white, moneyed, liberal audiences expect from racialised people’s art.
Nausicaa (1971), Agnès Varda
Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Jared Hess
The Souvenir Part II (2021), Joanna Hogg
C’Mon, C’Mon (2021), Mike Mills
Shirkers (2018), Sandi Tan
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), Todd Haynes
Spencer (2021), Pablo Larraín
The Best Films I Saw in 2021 (Released in 2021)
The Souvenir Part II, Joanna Hogg: A heart-warming sequel to a first instalment that left me icy cold! To call Hogg’s autofictional film a story of a young artist finding her voice and coping with trauma — as many critics have — is to not give the full picture of every micro-feeling or question that is gently and precisely probed here. Absorbing, surprising, patient, and smart down to the final (brilliant) “cut.”
C’Mon, C’Mon, Mike Mills: If there is one thing you can count on in these uncertain times, it is for Mike Mills to make a film so warm that it needs carbon offsets. If I ever made a narrative film, I would want it to feel the way that his projects do. I would also beg Robbie Ryan to shoot it.
Spencer, Pablo Larraín: Decidedly not a biopic, Spencer is a weird compote of melodrama, historical fiction, psychological portraiture, and art project. It’s chronically uneven — some lines feel like they were plucked from the scripts of soap operas, others from great novels, but the byproduct of all this reeling ambition is something very interesting (two sequences stand out: Diana eating pearls from a bowl of pea soup, and a non-narrative montage of Diana dancing/running on the beach/falling/flying/driving).
Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson
All My Puny Sorrows, Michael McGowan
Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve
Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma
The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson
Beans, Tracey Deer
Dune, Denis Villeneuve
The Best Songs I Listened to in 2021*
“Gothenburg English,” Alyssa Gengos
“Punisher,” Phoebe Bridgers
“Chaise Longue,” Wet Leg
“Shark Smile,” Big Thief
“Color of the Pool,” Lala Lala
“Diver,” Lala Lala
“Blue Banisters,” Lana Del Rey
“The Real Me,” Radio Stars
“Monster,” Lola Kirke
“Going Going Gone,” Lucy Dacus
*I am not — by any stretch of the imagination — a music critic and primarily listen to the same 15-20 songs on repeat for years at a time. But I started gingerly branching out some more this year.
What is Current:
In this section of the newsletter, I plan to drop a few final lines about what I am in the midst of.
Reading: Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix, a story about Marie de France and her 12th-century abbey of outcasted and starving nuns; Woolf’s Three Guineas, a polemical follow-up to A Room of One’s Own in which Woolf argues against war, fascism, patriarchy, and capitalism on the eve of World War II.
Watching: Succession with my parents — this is my second viewing this fall of the best show on TV; the Apple original show Dickinson, a slightly modernized take on Emily Dickinson’s life in which Emily says things like “nailed it!” after writing a particularly good poem and has really great, unwieldy gestures; NBC’s Superstore, which is honestly pretty mediocre, but I’m interested in the show’s mainstream depiction of low-wage retail work and how it even manages to occasionally say some scathing things about corporate America.
Listening: I’ve just become obsessed with the British band Wet Leg — think art-punk meets French disco with a lot of jokes about university, Mean Girls, and punning. I like them so much that their single “Chaise Longue” has already shot to #3 on the list above of my top songs this year.
I’ve never been great at conclusions, so we will leave it here — happy new year!