A fresh start

Hello! It’s a new year. I hope yours started well. We had a couple of friends over for dinner, and Tom made carbonara. He got interested in learning how to make it — a simple comfort food, but also one you have to feel out because the eggs can cook weird if you don’t — after eating a very good one in Italy last summer, and so I just sat back and watched and ate (and roasted some broccolini but that does not require any skill at all). Our friends left around 10pm and we watched some of Miley Cyrus’s New Year’s Eve show, in part because she was co-hosting with Dolly Parton, and who doesn’t love that? David Byrne performed, for some reason Paris Hilton showed up, it was weird and fun.

At midnight we went out on the patio to see the very tops of the fireworks a mile away in Prospect Park, and shouted “Happy New Year!” to our neighbors, who were shouting it back. And then we got a text from our upstairs neighbors (three recent college grads, as it happens) asking if we’d like a celebratory shot of tequila, which of course, so they came down and we wound up sitting around talking about everything under the sun until about 3am.

I did not take this and we were not there but that’s where they were happening.

It was a lovely evening / morning.

So here we are in a New Year. I know this newsletter has gone in fits and starts over the past few years. It’s hard to come up with something to write after a full week (and sometimes weekend) of also writing, but for (a moderate sum of) money.

But 2022 taught me some lessons. One was that I have to remain my own best advocate for my work, because that’s simply not going to come from anywhere or anyone else. Another is that building a body of work that belongs to me — that feels as if it is mine — requires more than just relying on whatever I’m doing for hire. And a silly man who took over Twitter and has made everything kind of a mess, which reminded me that I don’t really like social media anyhow, and that I was a better and maybe happier and certainly more creative writer when I used to blog, long ago.

Substack isn’t a blog, but it reminds me of it, so here I am. You can expect more in the new year. I would like to write about writing, and about criticism, but also throw together the kinds of reviews and reflections that I don’t get to do for my day job, and also just short anecdotes that mean something to me, like I used to when I blogged. I inhale a great deal of culture and like having somewhere to think about it. I am like many writers in that I only think by writing, and the thoughts that often emerge when I’m writing surprise me.

Also, I’m slated to finish my book draft in August, and I need to start thinking about what comes next.

So anyhow, here we are, in a happy new year, I hope. You can expect a midweek-ish post from me that has paragraphs, and a weekend post with a few quick links and recommendations with stuff I think you might like, plus whatever I’ve written that week.

And if you have something you’d like to hear about, please don’t hesitate to ask. Idea generation is really hard for me (that’s why I write about culture, which has a built-in starting point), but one of my aims is to be better at it this year.

Glad you’re here. Glad we all made it.