BEST OF TCR IN 2023
Jeannette Cooperman’s top-five picks:
Notes on Black Americans, Jews, and Israel
Gerald Early recalls two trips to Israel, invitations to influential Black Americans in the hope of countering antisemitism. Both trips included—in an act either of generosity or inevitability— opportunities to meet with Palestinian intellectuals who recounted cruel injustices of occupation. It was easy for the Americans to find common cause—yet they also left with positive feelings, for other reasons, about Israel. Early traces the causes of Black American antipathy toward Israel, analyzes the left’s long hatred of Israel, and explores the frightening ease of antisemitism.
Breaking the Flatness of the Present
John Griswold writes here about an existential loneliness particular to our free-floating, digitally dazed era: “the lie that things are settled and in their eternal forms—that past, future, and the rest of the world do not matter.” Though he captures the bleak quality of that solipsism, he punctures it with his usual dry observations. (“I think too often of the woman on social media who put all her books on the shelf with spines facing the wall so they were less distracting.”) Best of all, he gives us the antidote: “finding places where time, distance, and forces with changing vectors are not purposely hidden, where there are multiple uses, not hoarded ones. Difference makes life worth living.”
Flying Home
Howard Nemerov was a legend far beyond this campus. His son Alexander Nemerov, an acclaimed biographer and art historian, has something of his father’s poetry in his soul. He shows us what his father experienced flying in World War II and says his mother “once scraped her neighbor’s body off their front gate”; he quotes love letters between them but also admits his mother’s “gin-soaked tears of rage.” His is an honest nostalgia—a conjuring of the past in order to understand its hope and fragility—and it starts and ends with love.
Race Empress of the Air
I knew only Bessie Coleman’s name, and maybe a sentence worth of her fame, before I read this essay by Gerald Early. An aviatrix, she was the first Black person to fly a plane, and he heard stories of her long before he boarded one. “She seemed regal but kind, a sort of royalty but every older brother’s kid sister, assured but pulsing with energy,” he writes. “As a boy, I imagined her with a swagger, the only woman I ever thought of in that way.” Reading how she craved fame, how she shunned “Uncle Tom stuff,” how flat-out brave she was, “the heroine of velocity,” and how she had fun exaggerating her already stunning stunts, your imagination soars with her.
Visiting the Apple Orchard a Return to Eden—with Donuts
Griswold captures the surrealism of today’s foodways—“It feels strange in the body to see bunches of February basil in plastic coffins in the supermarket-chain cooler.” Then he takes us on a field trip, “fruit tourists” in an apple orchard: “Look kids: That’s where yer GoGo squeeZ’ers come from.” In one short eassay, you feel the sensuousness of living by the seasons. The counterculture inconvenience of it. The sweet, kitschy convenience of a commercial, family-friendly orchard. The weird way we live.
John Griswolds’s top-five picks:
Black History Month Note 1: Let’s Talk About Ethel Waters
This piece by editor Gerald Early, about the singer and actress Ether Waters, was written on the occasion of a talk in St. Louis about her autobiography. Waters was brilliant and difficult, not an unusual combination, and Gerald writes of her with respect, sensitivity, and good humor. “If many Black entertainers of an early time come across as hell on wheels,” he writes, “imperial, spiteful, backbiting, and often disdainful of newcomers, it must be remembered…a career in pop culture was…particularly tough on Black asses, to borrow an expression…. Only the strong survived, and the impression that Waters gives is that she was a strong, at times mean, woman who was not going down without a fight.”
Black Conservatives Finally End Affirmative Action
Similarly, in this piece about Black conservatives and affirmative action, Gerald brings the subject around to Black music and art: “I was listening to a lot of blues records when I wrote the piece. Those songs, that art, taught me that being Black ought absolutely to be unsentimental, devoid of outrage, self-pity, nostalgia, and chauvinism. The blues singers taught me that being Black is a discipline, tough, with a gimlet-eyed view of the world and committing to the endeavor to accept the condition, the cost of living in it. I aspire to be a bluesman.”
Naming Trees
Staff Writer Jeannette Cooperman has a journalism background and it shows in this profile of a professor of biology and curator of the Wash U arboretum, seen through his deep knowledge of the botanical quad. What people know is always interesting, and, for me, names and processes of other living beings doubly so. Cooperman also penned a mini-series of brief interviews of airline industry figures for our Aviation issue, including the CEO of Jet Blue; a flight attendant; a TSA security director; and the Director of St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
Flying Home
Guest writer Alexander Nemerov wrote a moving essay for our Aviation issue, about his parents’ lives during what we used to call The War, meaning World War Two. His mother experienced the Blitz in London; his father, poet Howard Nemerov, was an RAF pilot in that war. “Flying was a magic dream for my father,” Alexander Nemerov says. “Poetry was too, and so was being in love.”
Ben Fulton’s top-five picks:
Tales from a Train
In which Jeannette Cooperman boards a thirty-three hour Amtrak train ride to Chicago, through New York state, and on to Manhattan with lots of luxurious prose to show for it. This essay reminds us both of the days gone by in which travel was synonymous with time, as opposed to convenience, and also the sights in between. It is inside a train car that daylight and evening work their charms, where strangers have more opportunity to become familiar, and where the imagination is slowly unloosed and afforded free range to wonder—if you have the view of a window seat. As Cooperman demonstrates, however, the ultimate destination of a modern-day train ride is a frame of mind free of anxious hustle and bustle: “An hour’s flight delay is maddening, but when you know you will be somewhere for thirty-three hours, a few more cause no frustration. Expectations are what do us in.”
Socialism 2023 was the Sound of Grievances, but No Solutions
In an era in which almost all political writing counts for partisan exercises and even outright rhetorical warfare this essay by John Griswold puts a pragmatic and analytic lens to America’s beleaguered left-wingers to show that their perennial inability to gain traction with voters is mostly self-inflicted, despite any continual profession of good intentions. Beset by the menace of Trump-style populism, befuddled by how to organize disparate yet struggling gig workers, complaints ran deep during the four-day Socialism 2023 Conference in Chicago over Labor Day weekend. So did a few flirtations with conspiracy theories we might normally accept from the right wing. But at the end of the day, what does it mean that America’s current crop of socialists would prefer to publish books and play a board game rather than register voters?
007 at 70
Many businesses, cultural institutions, and erstwhile franchises—The Beatles, McDonald’s, Apple, Lord of the Rings—seem so entrenched in our collective consciousness that it is easy to forget that, if not for a few happy coincidences and sheer luck, many might not have happened at all. With this essay, Colin Burnett, associate professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis, chronicles more than the mere evolution of James Bond. He reminds us just how hard it is to launch one. The many minds that played their part to make Bond successful over seven decades happened only thanks to luck, and no small amount of dogged persistence. Ian Fleming is just the tip of the franchise iceberg. Burnett introduces the reader to a cast of other players, most centrally producer Kevin McClory and screenwriter Jack Whittingham, plus legal wrangling and future algorithms, to show us the past, present, and future of Agent 007. “A media franchise is an engine of two things: pleasures and profits,” Burnett writes. “For a franchise to endure, it cannot stand still. It cannot just repeat the same pleasures over and over.”
Ahmad Jamal Remembered
Commemorative pieces on the famous deceased are so rote that many readers, unless anxious to compare notes, avoid them entirely. (Most of us have our own preferred set of celebrities and luminaries, and our own memories of what made a musician, actor, or athlete great.) Upon the death of jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal Gerald Early eschewed the removed, distant view for a personal take. In the process, he said more about Jamal’s imprint on the genre than a truckload of remembrances. Tracing his first exposure to Jamal’s inimitable way with the piano from his sister’s record collection to witnessing the musician live for the first time, and on through an interview of Jamal himself for Jazz St. Louis, Early’s admiration of Jamal shines through in every sentence. So does the nagging thought that admiring great artists is never the same as understanding them. “The [Jazz St. Louis] interview taught me that I have a lot to learn about good art and about how to talk to the people who make it. There is, after all, a limit to what your sisters can teach you,” Early concludes.
A Sky Aglow With Death Machines
Growing up in Kent, England, UK-expat Stephen Dark rarely heard a word about what his family lived through, or the four family members who died, during the Luftwaffe’s World War Two Blitz bombings over their north London neighborhood. Tracing that history back, step by step, he learns for the first time how trauma crosses generational lines, but also how bombing campaigns evolved through history, starting with the dawn of aviation and continuing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It [the Blitz] was a moment in time, unrepeatable, until, as in Ukraine, you are facing overwhelming forces determined to terrorize you into surrendering,” Dark writes. Fusing the present with the past in measured portions, and with meticulous research throughout, this account offers bracing meditations on history, family, and how writing about both transforms the author.
• • •
BEST OF CULTURE IN 2023
Jeannette Cooperman’s top-five picks:
• Novels
Devil Makes Three, by Ben Fountain
Haiti, you think with a sigh. God, how depressing. And you shy away without knowing a damned thing about the place. But one smart, warm, funny, romantic, revelatory, and gripping novel later, the country is in your blood. Ben Fountain writes that well. He goes deep, his insights sometimes lyrical and always psychologically astute. He moves easily between huge issues and small, important lives. He is not afraid to tell the truth about the U.S. government—or to complicate the ethics. And he knows how to weave a huge tangle of facts into a clear, strong story whose characters stick in both head and heart.
Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese
Fourteen years, fourteen years, I waited for this book. Its predecessor, Cutting for Stone, was the saga I felt comfortable recommending to anyone—any gender, any age, any interests—because it is so deeply human. Covenant of Water works the same magic. A physician, Verghese has an uncanny ability to reveal the body’s mysteries, making the science both clear and poetic while staying just as faithful to the irrational: family curses, wild coincidences, buried emotion. You come to love his flawed, searching characters the way you love those closest to you, and you take their long journey gladly. Verghese does not worry—nor does he need to worry—about attention span. He is that good.
• Podcast
How to Destroy Everything
I do not automatically love any story set in St. Louis. But when something this wry and honest takes place in familiar restaurants and subdivisions, an unimaginable tale is at least easy to visualize. Danny Jacobs and his best friend since grade school, Darren Grodsky, are using How to Destroy Everything to figure out Danny’s now dead father, St. Louis attorney and con artist Richard Jacobs. His exploits were bizarre, often zany, but no fun for a little boy to watch. Now, though, as a study in human nature bravely undertaken by a man who is a father himself? The podcast is riveting.
• Streaming
Pandore, on MHZ
The issues matter desperately, but it was the quiet of Anne Coesens’ performance, as a Belgian investigative judge, that pulled me through. Sharply aware of injustice, she is unable to let violence against women, corruption, and political narcissism slide, even at the expense of her own happiness, status, marriage, and career. She (the character) pursues the truth with a quiet determination—no flair or showy antics, no bubbly proofs of personality—and she (the actor) inhabits her role completely. After the final cathartic episode, moved by Pandore’s integrity and finally able to separate the actor from the part, I went looking—and found out Coesens co-wrote and co-directed the series.
• Essays
“Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill,” The New York Times
For me, Jason Fargo’s argument—that this is “the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press”—pulled together a succession of gloomy, half-assed private critiques. Why are kids still listening to music that sounds like ours? Why are so many of our movies just franchise retreads, prequels, and sequels? Where are the challenging new techniques and approaches in painting, fiction, theater? His answer is both depressing and hopeful—a second-guessing of the role of innovation in a culture severed from chronology.
John Griswold’s top-five picks:
Maybe you felt more desire this year for things that could bring comfort over novelty. If so, we are simpatico. This is a list of things I appreciated in 2023 for their comforting qualities.
• Essays
There are thousands of free and paid newsletters on Substack now. The one I read daily is poet Sean Singer’s The Sharpener. Singer is a Yale Younger winner and a teacher, and from Monday through Friday he curates poems by other poets on a single topic, such as the idea of “fences.” The differences in ways of seeing and expression are enlightening and also serve as both reminder of and introduction to many poets living and dead. On Saturdays the newsletter is a craft talk on the work of a particular poet, such as Laura Ulewicz, “a peripheral Beat Generation poet whose poems were as fine as Robert Duncan’s, Lew Welch’s, Gary Snyder’s, Philip Whalen’s, or anyone else of that world you care to name,” or on an issue, such as “Things to Do Instead of Cycling Through the Same Fears About Civil Unrest.” If you have ever enjoyed some phrase I wrote here, there is some chance I was inspired by The Sharpener, a service to the literary community.
• Novels
I finally read the 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, this year after loving the film since 1995. The novel is wonderful too, a parody that could have been written by DH Lawrence if he had had a better sense of humor about himself. Our heroine, Flora Poste, is a young busybody who moves from London to live with country relatives in Sussex and sets about changing everything about them. In the film Kate Beckinsale plays the smart girl who meddles, with a cast that includes Ian McKellen as a farmer-cum-preacher prideful in his piety, Stephen Frye as a would-be Oscar Wilde with no genius to declare, and the late Sheila Burrell as Granny Doom, who holds the whole clan emotionally hostage because she once “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when she was “no bigger than a titty-wren.” The true comfort here is the catharsis that comes when things begin to improve and someone can finally retort, “Sure you did. But did it see you, baby?”
• Social media
Because I like houses with character, built with good materials and craftsmanship, I love to follow Cheap Old Houses on Instagram. What makes the listings particularly attractive are the apparent deal you might get if you bought, say, a Victorian brick house in St. Louis or Cleveland, with real wooden floors, stained glass, and original decorative trim, for under $70K. Though housing in some parts of the country is less inflated than on the coasts, there is generally a reason for the unbelievable deals, including bad neighborhoods, cracked foundations, etc. Still, it is comforting to browse, and I also follow similar pages for cheap old farmhouses in the United States and cheap houses in the UK, EU, Italy, Nordic countries, and Japan. Sometimes I even find a house that seems to sit between possible and probable.
• Books
My next entry is a much different kind of house porn that also combines nature porn and self-reliance porn. Martijn Doolaard is an interesting guy who rode his bike across Europe and down the Americas, and more recently has been renovating two stone cottages in the Italian Alps. He published art books on his trips and has all the social platforms covered with his endeavors; if you want a relaxing three hours have a look at his video compiling footage of the cottage renovations, as of a year ago, in which he does astonishing work on massive-stone roofs, timber fitting, interior framing, a garden, and more, all with the mountains of the Piedmont in the background. He apparently does his own camera work and editing too, and the end result looks like a cinéma-vérité documentary.
• Food
Cabbage was not in my foodway when I was growing up, and later I thought of it as either overcooked mush or something capable of producing cubic liters of gas. But a friend introduced me to it again this year—green, red, purple, Napa, Savoy—and I have found my way to loving it. Depending on the type, it can be eaten raw in salads, wilted in a vinaigrette, cooked in a homemade pancake, or sauteed by itself in good olive oil with salt and pepper. Tonight I cooked some in a very hot covered skillet with squash and onions, some soy, and a spoonful of gochujang, venturing into my new reaches of comfort.
Ben Fulton’s top-five picks for 2023:
Streaming television
• Beef (Netflix)
This ten-episode TV series initially received wide critical exposure for its rare showcase of an all-Asian cast, with Steven Yeun and Ali Wong in lead roles, plus the writing and directing talents of Lee Sung Jin, a Korean-American. That angle certainly matters in terms of the show’s impact—it is hard to recall even one other show that delves so expertly into the religious and family life of Asian Americans—Beef stands easily on its own for sheer dramatic impact. A charged scene of road rage in the parking lot of a Southern California hardware store sets everything in motion, as Danny Cho (Yeun), a young man struggling to make it big and also please his soon-to-emigrate parents with a new house, attempts to get the better of Amy Lau (Wong), a successful business owner with a marriage on the rocks, and an emotionally fraught family background. Class conflict, marriage, the Korean-American Church, and ambition all come into multi-dimensional play, as does a heist that goes terribly, gruesomely wrong. The concluding episode washes all the taught pain of its characters out to sea.
Documentary television
• Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC Two/iPlayer)
“The Troubles” gets little play these days, with the conflict largely managed to a low boil ever since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, but this five-episode BBC series, available for cost-free streaming via PBS (see link above), reminds us all of the hard-won lessons of peace following an intractable conflict. With amnesty granted to key players in paramilitary organizations, i.e., the IRA and UDA, directors James Bluemel and Sian Mcilwaine document shocking, yet passionate, eye-witness accounts at every turn. Civilians and surviving family members of those lost to the conflict get their say as well. Extensive historical footage—the conflict’s historical roots, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes—is matched with those who lived events first-hand. Few TV documentaries have given sectarian conflict a more human face, or a more hopeful one. Essential viewing for all humanity.
Film
• The Boy and the Heron, directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Quality animated fantasy films have been monopolized by Hayao Miyasaki and Studio Ghibli for decades, and this title is no exception. Tracing the tragic, war-time family history of a young boy, Mahito Maki, from Tokyo to the countryside, The Boy and the Heron is almost non-linear to the point of frustration but somehow ties up every loose end in its two hours of running time. As with his other films, many of Miyasaki’s visions go overboard with gruesome, fantastical effects and plot lines that have you rushing to keep up. Also as with his other films, the parable of peace and reconciliation at its heart is so gentle and beguiling that you cannot help but be charmed.
Books
• The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Whether it is his “rage,” “anger,” or “calamitous wrath,” every reader has their view on literature’s first great warrior, Achilles. The University of Pennsylvania professor of classics who wowed the literary world with her 2018 translation of Homer’s Odyssey returns, this time with the ancient bard’s epic of gory, brutal combat and machismo grudges. Where Wilson’s first take on the journey of Odysseus was playful and supple, this time Homer gets an almost ideal combination of delicacy and force throughout. Everyone who loves this cornerstone of western literature has their favorites—be it Alexander Pope, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, or Robert Fagles. Perhaps Wilson does not replace or surpass them in every instant, but she has most certainly joins them.
Websites
• Marginal Revolution, by Tyler Cowen
Good, daily blog sites by trusted experts that do not snag the reader on a paywall or prod for a Substack subscription are hen’s tooth rare these days. To the rescue comes Marginal Revolution, a long-running site authored and curated by Tyler Cowen, a prolific author of books both popular and academic who also teaches economics at George Mason University. Together with Alex Tabarrok, also a professor of economics at the same university, Cowen offers up the latest in published papers (along with his own summaries and critiques), trenchant commentary (with a heavy emphasis on contrarian views), and reading lists that include his own picks, plus those of noted academic personalities. In addition, his series “Conversations with Tyler” offers the best in vigorous, entertaining interviews—in both podcast and transcript form—with rising experts in virtually every field imaginable.
