Prospect and Retrospect

New Year’s Eve and a traditional moment to look back in review and forward with a measure of whatever  optimism can be mustered. Time for a little navel-gazing self-indulgence and an opportunity for some random comments and observations on some of the bright spots. 

I wrote 55 blog posts in 2021 including this one and the most fun to write was a spoof on T.S.Eliot. Crime Past, Crime Present, and Crime Future  But of course to anyone not familiar with Eliot’s poetry and The Four Quartets it makes very little sense. 

My most read post of this year was Bertie Wooster v. Christopher Robin about the literary feud between A.A. Milne and P.G.Wodehouse. None of this year’s crop made the top ten most-read (or clicked on) for the year. That dubious honor belongs to the ever-green Beneath the Surface: The Hokey-Pokey and Jump Jim Joe  That’s a post from 2012 that has held that position for nine consecutive years. It’s about the racist origins of an innocuous-seeming children’s musical game so it has a claim to be of some value out there in the world. 

This was the year I discovered John Ashbery’s Nest – a digital delight tour of his house in Hudson that is interesting even if you don’t enjoy Ashbery’s poems. And if you do, there is a very good selection of the poems associated with the house and its objects.

Another recent visual discovery has been the creartfuldodger  – the Canadian collage/mixed media artist Wilma Millette

“I see beauty in everyday objects from the past and like to re-purpose them in  artful ways in my pieces.”

Her online Galleries are a trove of visual delights.

I have a daily stream of intriguing art of all kinds and from everywhere thanks to the Twitter account Women’s Art that celebrates women’s art and creativity. Many thanks to the curator – freelance writer and art historian @PL_Henderson1 (I recently noticed a gratuitously offensive rival account offering “TERF-free” art. No thanks.) Here are just two of so many examples that brightened my life this week:

And to keep me well stocked with literary links there is the indispensable and indefatigable Book Jotter. Every week Paula Bardell-Hedley posts Winding-Up the Week –  a trawl of connections.  If you like books and all things literary then you have to follow the Book Jotter

Here are two of her links I followed this week:

BBC Culture: The best books of the year 2021 – “From award-winning fiction to moving memoir, here are BBC Culture’s top reading picks of 2021.” I’ve actually read one of them: Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. It was really good but did not make my best read of 2021. That title belongs to Walter Kempowsky’s brilliant All for Nothing. 

LARB: What If?: New Insight into the Friendship of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot – A newly opened archive of Eliot’s letters sheds light on his friendship with Woolf. Thanks to Paula I didn’t miss this. 

The Gallimaufry Book Studio is another reliably rich resource for reviews and ideas about books and Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books invariably illuminates some odd and worthy corner of the book world. 

And now my mind is filling with all the other discoveries and delights that keep me going. But I’m going to have to save them for other posts.

There wasn’t much socializing going on in 2021.

A summer lull in the lurgy did enable me to attend a lovely lunch in Rhinebeck in memory of Frank Furio. (Thank you, Victoria.)

We did manage to get to a friend’s outdoor poetry reading by the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn in August.

And just before Omicron took hold we were able to attend Rosemary’s 90th birthday party. (Featured image)

Hope everyone has a good passage into 2022 and thanks to the many people – near and far – who have brightened my 2021.