Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #9

Beginning 2023 in hopeful fashion....

Hello, everyone! I hope this message finds you, and finds you well. It finds me in a certain sense of…well, 2023 hasn’t started badly but it hasn’t exactly started well, either—not on a personal level, where everything’s generally fine, but on a larger, societal level, things have been more interesting, in the not-great way, than I would have hoped. For those of us who live in or around Buffalo, 2022 ended with a walloping of snow as the third storm in six weeks put us on the national radar again, and the sense of Oooof lingers now, two weeks after that event, even with the high temperatures that have melted just about all of the snow we received in those storms. We haven’t seen the sun for more than a few hours at a time, in piecemeal fashion, and Lake Erie remains completely ice-free, which means that the dreaded “lake-effect” is certain to return at some point. We like to say “Bah, we can handle it,” but…three major storms in six weeks really put a dent in this region’s collective stiff upper lip.

Nationally, our new Congress is not sending encouraging signals about the next few years of American governance (not that there was any reason to expect encouraging signals about this, of course), and as I write this we’re six days removed from a fresh reminder that for all our love of sports, the athletes who play the games for our delight and entertainment are still human beings as frail and fragile as anyone else. I yield to no one in my relief at Damar Hamlin’s recovery thus far from an injury that could very well have literally killed him, but I am once again wondering if our elevation of inherently dangerous activities to sport-for-entertainment reflects well on us.

Well, I have thoughts about that, and I may still write some of them up for my site, but I won’t do so here. In this space I will simply say that I am very glad that Mr. Hamlin is still with us, that he is able to breathe and speak and tweet, and I hope he enjoys watching his teammates play today.

Meanwhile, 2023 is off and running in a lot of ways:

Recent Reading

I want to be more intentional in tracking my reading this year, over and above my recording of my reading on Goodreads. (Feel free to connect with me over there, but I really only use Goodreads to literally track what books I’ve read; I don’t use it at all for bookish discussion and I find its interface clunky as hell.) Here’s what I’ve finished already this year:

• Of Nightingales That Weep, Katherine Paterson. This lovely historical novel, set in medieval Japan, follows a young girl named Takiko as her life takes her from her small village to the heights of the Imperial court, where she plays music for the Emperor himself. But she finds herself drawn into court politics during a very dangerous time of civil war, and soon she finds love with a spy. The book takes place during the war between the Heike and the Genji, and if you remember your Carl Sagan (whose tale of the Heike crabs is used to illustrate artificial selection), you know how this played out. I enjoyed this novel immensely. Apparently Paterson wrote several other novels set in medieval Japan, so I may check those out at some point.

• The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. I’ve owned this for years and yet somehow I’ve never read it, which seems quite an oversight as it’s pretty much a virtual classic at this point. It was even adapted for film by Martin Scorsese, which is quite the pedigree. I found it surprisingly affecting, especially the blend of art and prose, which really did complement each other beautifully; Selznick’s compositions are redolent of early silent film, which is surely the point.

• Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock. This fantasy novel is short and dense. Two adult brothers find themselves confronted by the nature of the strange wood near their childhood home, a wood over which their father obsessed in their youths. As the forces within the wood begin to take shape—and as the two brothers shape those forces in return—the conflicts arise, conflicts which are rooted in centuries and even millennia of story and myth within the primordial forests of Britain. Holdstock packs a lot into his text. This is a book with layer upon layer of meaning.

What am I currently reading?

• Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music, by Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda. I have this and several other Rachmaninoff books lined up for this year, as 2023 marks 150 years of one of my very favorite composers. (Look for a heavy focus on Rachmaninoff in April, the month of his birth.)

• Melvina: How a Mulatto Woman Controlled Fargo, ND, by James Lee Nathan III. Nathan is an indie author who has been an online acquaintance of mine for several years, and this book has been on my TBR for too long! I’ve only just started reading it this morning, so I can’t say much about it beyond it being a novelized story of the life of a forgotten historical figure named Melvina Massey.

It hasn’t been all reading, though….

Recent Watching:

Some things we’ve watched of late, starting with a couple of movies:

• You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This ensemble movie, written and directed by Woody Allen, felt like a kind-of reaction against Love, Actually. It, like the earlier film, is set in London and it, like the earlier film, follows a small group of people though their travails in life and love. But with You Will Meet…well, I don’t want to give any of it away if you haven’t seen it, but…hell, the movie is 13 years old now. It’s oddly entertaining, mainly because you get to see a group of people, every one of whom is pretty much of an asshole, make bad choices and then have to live with the consequences. It’s shot beautifully and has a lot of wit and boasts a jaunty film score…all of which hides the pretty stark cynicism at the movie’s heart.

• Stay the Night. I chose this for our Saturday Night Movie on the strength of Sheila O’Malley’s recommendation, and her record for movie recs remains perfect for me. I loved this movie, in which a young woman who has been passed up for promotion and a young hockey player who is being sent back to the minor leagues find each other and spent one night together on the streets of Toronto. It’s the same kind of movie as Before Sunrise, with a different dynamic between the leads. It’s not a “one-night stand” movie, by any means; the connection is stronger than that, and the city looks wonderful here, as well. Loved it.

Television:

• We started Kaleidoscope, a Netflix series about a group of crooks who come together to pull off a big heist. So far—we’re three episodes in—there’s nothing earth-shaking here, but it’s really well-made and the acting is outstanding, so there’s that. Apparently the show is designed to be watched in no particular episode order, which is interesting; we’re watching it in whatever order Netflix is serving it up. I don’t know if they randomize it for each viewer, but that’s what we’re doing. So far all the boxes are being ticked off: the ringleader of the scheme who has motivations and secrets of his own, the crew he puts together and the tensions that make it clear that they might not be able to rise to the level of teamwork needed to pull all this off, the arrogant guy whose fortune they’re looking to steal, and so on. There’s even the scene where the ringleader walks the team through the impossible-to-crack security measures in place, so thus far, all the heist tropes are there.

• Competition shows: We still watch Hell’s Kitchen, even if by now it’s basically paint-by-numbers each time out with new faces running down the exact same playbook. Netflix has some unique competition shows, too; we particularly like Blown Away (a glass-blowing competition) and Drink Masters (a mixology competition). What’s nice about those two is that they’re shot beautifully—just some wonderful eye candy—and the contestants are all decent people who are doing their best work, so there’s none of the usual alliance-forming “drama” of these kinds of shows.

• While I have generally tired of the documentary-style workplace comedies like The Office, I do find Abbott Elementary an absolute delight. It also ticks off all the boxes as The Office did, right down to the boss who seems self-absorbed to the point of absurdity but who is often shown to be deeply perceptive and even wise in her own way.

• Last year we discovered Letterkenny, and now, in advance of watching the show’s newest season, we’ve been re-watching Letterkenny. It’s such a dense show that I’m discovering jokes and entire subplots and storylines I missed the first time through. I love that. (We also did watch, and will likely rewatch, Shoresy, the hockey-related spinoff, but that show is going to need its own post somewhere, as I’m quite sure that show is one of the best sports stories I’ve ever seen.)

That’s what’s been going on here…as well as writing and cooking and working and trying to plan some fun stuff to come in 2023. I continue to have high hopes for all of you this year, too.

Until next time,

—K