Things I liked in 2023

When I wasn't busy playing Zelda last year, I managed to read, play, listen to, or otherwise obsess over a good many other things. The below described are the most important or the ones I most highly recommend checking out for yourself.

Astarion Ancunín

Astarion is a fictional vampire that has occupied an incredible amount of my brainspace since Baldur's Gate 3's release, and get this – I haven’t even played the game. I don’t have the hardware. I’m waiting for the Switch 2 to exist and then for the game to get ported to it. In the meantime, I’ve been relying on let’s plays and gorgeous fanart and fanfics to get me through. (Do you want recs? I have recs.)

Astarion’s traumatized. He’s very dramatic. He’s 240 years old. He approves when you do cruel things in a funny way. He’s hellbent on revenge. In a past life, he went to law school. And all he wants is to never feel powerless again. All that to say, the long-simmered soup of his psyche is particularly delicious to me. I would be embarrassed about this obsession, but any person attracted to men is apparently going through the same thing, so I’m not. Also his theme was my top song on Spotify this year. Neil Newbon, his voice actor, deserves any and all accolades he’s gotten for his performance as the character.

This is not a recommendation necessarily (though I do recommend playing Baldur's Gate 3 and its prequels). He's just significant.

Sorry to all of my friends to whom I have not shut up about this.

Anyway, Look At Him.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It’s a bit of a joke at this point (dare I say…. a jest), and not one that needs to be elaborated on any further, that a certain type of “lit bro” really enjoys this book and the work of David Foster Wallace as a whole and will try to get the women in their life to perceive its virtue. This reputation, deserved or not, put me off finishing reading it for a long time and I wouldn’t have actually done so now without the book club formed by a couple of my friends this year. It was poignant and funny and very real and surprisingly prescient in some ways about its science-fiction future. As someone who used to work in the business of entertainment, it also rang true with many of the concerns I’ve had rattling in my brain about what art is supposed to do vs. what entertainment is supposed to do and how inevitably, entertainment is often an escape that is meant to be addictive.

Though I enjoyed the book and would read it again, particularly because its structure invites such repetition (isn’t that a joke, too?), I also couldn’t stop thinking about David Foster Wallace himself throughout, and how uncomfortable the hagiography of him as an artist makes me. David Foster Wallace was regarded as a literary genius, but he was also particularly abusive to women, both emotionally and physically, throughout his life. You can read more about this and his legacy in this essay by Mary K. Holland for Lithub, which I think does a very good job of grappling with sympathy for a man who had his demons, who was smart and talented, but who also hurt many people.

The Art Institute’s Remedios Varo exhibit, ‘Science Fictions’

I took a class in the last year of my MFA on surrealists (taught by the amazing Amy England), and from this I knew a bit about the artist Remedios Varo, a surrealist painter who eventually fled to Mexico after World War II. So when this exhibit opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was really excited to go.

Being in the presence of her work really felt like coming home. Her mysterious landscapes and fantastical contraptions and mother-of-pearl faces were so captivating. I felt in a way I haven’t felt often in front of an artwork that the person who made it might really understand me. I liked noticing the little details in each painting, like a ghostly poppy growing out of a chair, or a cat peering at a central figure from under the floorboards beneath their feet. I wished more than anything to reach out and touch the inset mother-of-pearl used on a couple of her paintings for faces, or to trace out the textures on a tree. Obviously, I couldn’t.

So I took all the pictures I could and my roommate Charlie got me the art book from the exhibit for my birthday, which I’ll treasure forever. The exhibit has now left the Art Institute, and I hope it travels so others might be able to feel the same way. But it seems like many of the paintings that were on view are in private collections, which to me is a tragedy. So I don’t know when they’ll surface again.

Every figure she painted seemed to have her own face.

The below was one of my favorites:

Hozier’s song “Damage Gets Done”

This was not my top song on Spotify this year, but it was definitely the new release of this year I loved the most. I love that it’s a duet, I love the lyrics, and I love the sound, wistful but also, I like to think, hopeful. The once-lovers Hozier and Brandi Carlile portray were once reckless and young, and they say it was hard but it was worth it, and they wish they could rediscover what the felt back then. I think they can! I want them to.

Listen here.

Scavengers Reign

Scavengers Reign is a ten-episode animated science-fiction show about hyperspace freight workers who end up stranded on a distant, unforgiving planet. Separated from their fellow survivors and uncertain of rescue, they try to find a way home. But the planet is beautiful, strange, and harsh, and what the main characters encounter there will change them forever, sometimes down to the DNA.

I don’t want to say much more about Scavengers Reign here other than to say everyone should watch it. There’s so much in it about grief and memory, unstoppable change, beauty in the midst of terror, and the value of life and connection above transactions and business. I also think this was something that could only have been brought to the screen as animation.

You can watch Scavengers Reign on Max.

Miscellany

• A friend of mine had a story published recently! You can read "Our Boys" by Evan Allen Wood here.
• I'll also have a poem out soon in Stone Circle Review! I'll also link to mine when it's out, but please do take a look at the archives of the publication in the meantime.
• I also enjoyed season 2 of The Gilded Age (the GOWNS) but I feel like that was pretty well-established as a favorite of many last year, so it doesn't need more from me. But I do think you should check out the costume-maker's Instagram here if you're curious about the making of the costumes. So much work goes into them!
• Over on Bluesky,there's a Moby-Dick book club going on. We're about halfway through, but it's not too late to join. Follow me for insightful literary analysis like the below: