Unforgiving Years

Best book I read: A Dark Matter
Best book I translated, amateurishly: Four Years in the South Orkneys
Best movie I saw in a theater: Get Out. No contest.
Best movie I saw not in a theater: 12 Years a Slave. I really liked Mad Tiger, too.
Best album: Hmmm. I don't know. In the Dead Of Night, maybe? Or maybe The Incessant.
Best song: EMT Police and the Fire Department, easily. But Guts was real good, too.
Best cover: Don't Change
Best show I went to: A Giant Dog at Rough Trade. But Downtown Boys at Saint Vitus was pretty much ethereal, too. Not to mention Sleaford Mods at Warsaw.
Best podcat: Your Kickstarter Sucks
Best television show: GLOW. But American Vandal was pretty good, too. And so was Dark.
Best board game: Betrayal At House On The Hill


A lot of it was bad. The feeling of a wave function collapsing. The stars winking out, like someone spoke the nine billion names of God.

But of course that's just a feeling. And the year was so full of material comforts that it's pretty ridiculous for me to complain about anything. So I worked doggedly on projects: I released a big new version of my software. I completed a final edit on the José Manuel Moneta translation I'd been low-key working on for the past two years, then laid it out and printed up the smallest number of physical copies possible. I'm pretty sure I have no right to distribute them, but let me know anyway if you want one.

Beyond all of that, though I devoted myself to left-wing politics. Motivated by anger and fear and quite possibly this specific Rob Delaney tweet:

We've learned we can't fix things online. 2 great places to start the work are w/ the @NAACP & @DemSocialists. Meet these people in person.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) November 10, 2016

...I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. At first, I couldn't see what work there was to be done. Clint and I went to a stifling meeting at Mayday Space on a damp, chilly night at the beginning of December last year - maybe two hundred people sweating shoulder-to-shoulder in the big studio on the third floor; all three air conditioners engaged - and listened to report-backs from well-meaning organizers who seemed pretty overwhelmed by the crowd of angry, eager new members. "Of course they have no idea what to do with us," said Clint on the walk back to the L. "They've been losing for decades."

And the general weakness of the Left was certainly a reason I'd stayed away from political organizations before. I have only the flimsiest grasp of political concepts - really only what I've picked up from Handsome Caveman and Twitter - and I'm so dominated by aesthetics and emotion and my own vanity that losing always felt like too bitter a pill to swallow. I mean I can't even play competitive board games.

But I started sorting and mailing membership cards and merch from the DSA national office across the street from the Federal Reserve. I went out to knock on doors, first in Bay Ridge for DSA's field operation for the Khader El-Yateem campaign for city council, then for DSA's campaign for Jabari Brisport - something I hadn't done since 2004 and never imagined I would actually look forward to. And I found that I wanted to work hard for the people emerging as leaders within the local organization because they were universally smart and hard-working. (Crucially, they were almost universally kind and funny, too.) The aspect of left-wing organizing that had always filled me with hopelessness was that way in which you seemed to wind up - metaphorically or literally - sitting around the table in the freezing kitchen of an off-campus house, arguing over who's gonna do the dishes. I reckon that's still there. But I've decided that not only is there a straight-up moral obligation to organize and do this work, it's also the only thing I'm actually excited about right now. And I've started to think that we can win.