Thanksgiving Leftovers: A Year in Review

Yes, I'm basically doing a clip show

I’m jumping the gun a little bit here - we’re still about a month shy of the first birthday of this newsletter - but I made the frankly much-deserved choice of doing as little as possible this week beyond eating, drinking, and spending time with my family. Plus, the occasion of a perfect and easily-chosen title comes so rarely that I had to take advantage of it while I could.

I made the decision to actually start writing and publishing this newsletter in the manner in which most of my best decisions are made: completely on a whim and instinctually, before I have time to overthink. Overthinking is, in fact, what kept me from doing this for so long (I had the general idea to do something a few years ago). I published my first piece under cover of night last Christmas (ever the great promotional mind) and never looked back.

Until today, I guess.

I’m a little surprised and, I have to admit, proud that I was able to publish something every single weekend this year. Some were older pieces presented to a new audience, but most were new. There were a few weeks here and there where I thought I wouldn’t make it, where I assumed this whole endeavor would come crashing down around me. But it hasn’t. And so, in celebration of that fact and in recognition of the toll that copious amounts of food and alcohol can wreak (temporarily, let’s hope) on one’s mental fortitude, here is a selection of some of my favorite (or at least most noteworthy for whatever reason) pieces this year.

This is also a great place to start for new readers or anyone you may want to share this newsletter with (wink wink).

We have to start on a bittersweet note, I’m afraid. Silvia Pinal, the legendary Mexican actress, passed this weekend at the age of 93. She starred in three of Luis Buñuel’s greatest films: The Exterminating Angel, as one of the dinner party guests unable to leave the dining room without explanation for days; Simon of the Desert, in which she plays an incarnation of the Devil attempt to seduce the ascetic who has committed to living alone on top of a tower in the desert; and Viridiana, in which she plays the title character, which I wrote about at some length below.

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Overall, I didn’t write as much about movies as I would have expected, largely because as a working parent of two children under five I rarely had the time to watch any, but I did get to publish a long-form reflection on one of the most incredible movies I’ve seen in recent years.

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And I also took the first steps towards putting into distinct words a variety of thoughts I’ve had about the art of cinema at large, and how that stands in relation to the industry of cinema as it currently exists. I’ve become even more convinced that the latter cannot continue to exist and develop while in the thrall of the latter, so there will be much more to come on this in the next year.

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Many of the pieces I wrote ended up, despite original intentions, containing a great deal of self-reflection and memoir. This was something of a habit I fell into rather than a grand design, though I have leaned into the opportunity to discuss larger cultural institutions through the prism of my own experience, such as in the following piece, in which I discuss my evolving relationship with the Academy Awards.

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Or in my appreciation for opening lines in fiction:

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Or, finally, in my retrospective look at some of the major creative figures of my life, like Stephen King, who this year entered the fifth decade of his career.

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The most notable example of this, and perhaps still my favorite piece that 'I’ve written all year, was dedicated to nearly a lifetime spent listening to Pearl Jam.

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I took some steps in my own creative pursuits as well this year, reviving and continuing one long-dormant series, while also going back and finishing some previously-abandoned work, ranging from short fiction:

To something that I’m proud of attempting despite the results because the idea of it absolutely terrified me - poetry. I took my first stab at it here, revisiting and re-formatting something I wrote decades ago:

And followed up with some newer works here and here.

The last piece I want to highlight because it fits so well into what I wanted this newsletter to be while also representing a discovery I made early on in the process: that sometimes what I write about will reveal itself to me naturally through my experiences during a week, and that I didn’t always have to actively pursue it. The piece itself is fairly rough - I’m kind of afraid to go back and read it, but that also serves as a reminder of the whole purpose behind this thing - write without thinking so much about it that you start to get in your own way.

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Sincerest thanks to all of you for reading - however often or however completely.

-cs