Matthew Cheney

News & Views

2023: Looking Backward

Ends and beginnings. I have no sense of 2023 as a particular thing, and I expect in the future that I will think back to various events and items of the year and not remember that 2023 was their year. Perhaps this is a post-2020 effect. The years feel indistinguishable. Still, much happened in my life, in the life of culture, in the life of the world. And the death of the world.

Self

First, to get it out the way, my own publications and such. 2023 will be a memorable year if for no other reason than that it was the year I, somewhat by happenstance, published not one but two books. I am not a prolific writer, and am rather amazed I’ve managed to publish even one book ever, never mind two books in one year. They were written quite separately and over very different timeframes, submitted to their publishers many months apart, and originally scheduled to be published almost exactly a year apart from each other. However, one’s schedule got moved up and the other’s delayed, so they ended out being published almost within a month of each other. They are:

They are very different books from very different publishers. Punctum Books (I really struggle with the lower-case styling they prefer, so will dispense with it here) is a radical open-access publisher of academic and quasi-academic/para-academic work; Third Man Books is associated with the Third Man Records business founded by musician Jack White. Working with both Third Man and Punctum was a real delight. Third Man publishes only a few books a year and puts the whole business behind them, which makes a writer feel like royalty. Punctum’s editors and designers provided some of the most thoughtful line-editing and design work I’ve ever encountered. Indeed, the manuscript I submitted was a bit of a mess, and it was through their excellent partnership that it became something I’m hugely proud of. Working with Punctum also let me achieve a longstanding goal, particularly for my academic work: to publish a fully open access book. Acaemic publishing is a swamp of exploitation, barriers, and bizarre practices; one strategy to reduce all of that is to go with real open access publishing, which Punctum has been a fierce advocate for (indeed, they’re even more radical about this stuff than I am) and has put their entire business behind.

For Last Vanishing Man, I did a couple interviews:

I also had the fun of creating a Last Vanishing Man playlist for Largehearted Boy.

For my academic work, I also did a podcast conversation on the Teaching for Student Success podcast. If you’re curious about my dayjob work, that’s a good overview.

In addition to the books, I published two new short stories this year:

Both stories are aimed toward my next collection, which will be stories of horror and weirdness. (Yes, most of my previous collections included stories of weirdness and sometimes horror, but the stories I’ve been working on since the Last Vanishing Man stories are more deliberately within the realm of what is generally thought of as horror fiction, occult fiction, etc. I thought it would be fun to try to shape a body of stories toward that, doing so within the queer lens I can’t help but see the world through, and bring in certain tendencies from my more literary side. It’s been a lot of fun and kept me going through some dispiriting times.) I’m especially pleased that “The Blind God’s Game” lets me say that I’ve published a Lovecraftian tale. Anyone who’s even glanced at my 2022 essay “The Rats in Our Walls” knows that my feelings about Lovecraft are complicated, to say the least, but it is Lovecraft’s complications that make him interesting and continue to make the playground he created one that attracts all sorts of people, including many of us whom he would have detested.

2023 was also the year when a movie based on my story “Blood”, titled Jill, was released in the U.S. It is still a surreal idea to me that my little story could have been read by strangers (in Switzerland, no less!) who were inspired by it to create their own adaptation and release that to the world. And it’s good! Indeed, my only disappointment is that it has not gotten a larger audience, because I genuinely like the movie and think other people will as well. I’m honored to have provided the spark for it.

Viewing

What I wrote last year at the beginning of this section remains true: A lot of my viewing can be seen via my Letterboxd page,  which I more or less keep updated, though the “reviews” I write there  are mostly quick notes to jog my own memory if I need to go back and see  what I thought of the film (I don’t really have an audience on  Letterboxd other than myself); the list is most complete for horror  movies because I keep thinking I’m going to write a book about horror,  abjection, revulsion, and vileness and since so many horror movies are  similar the only way I can keep track of them is via Letterboxd; I don’t  write about TV shows on Letterboxd, and especially during the school  year a lot of my viewing is just TV, since it’s easier to watch an hour  of an episodic narrative with dinner than to commit to a feature film.

Overall, in 2023 I was more or less satisfied with lots of what I watched, but rarely wowed.

Of newly-released films (according to Letterboxd’s dating), the ones that gave me the most thought and pleasure this year were:

I have plenty of 2023 movies still left to see, and some I already want to revisit — I look forward to seeing Poor Things again very much, for instance, and I expect I will appreciate Where Evil Lurks more on a revisit.

The 2023 movie I most disliked was Afire, which was a mix of annoyance at the film and surprise at how much I disliked a Christian Petzold film. I’ve had mixed feelings about some of his work in the past, but never actively disliked it, and some (Phoenix, especially), I revere. But I truly hated, hated, hated Afire. I couldn’t even write a review of it because having to think about how much I hated it was overwhelming. Melissa Anderson’s thoughtful review for 4Columns gets at most of what didn’t work for me about this movie.

There were a bunch of earlier films I watched this year and appreciated. Ones that were new to me (with links if I wrote anything about them):

Of those, the standout is This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. An astonishing film, one I expect to revisit for the rest of my life.

At some point, I may write about Sick of Myself in comparison to the recent Saltburn, which has gotten a lot more attention. Both are satires of a sort, certainly dark comedies; both revel in cruelty; both rely on strong and quirky performances by their lead actors; both are carefully composed … and yet, for all its craft, Saltburn I thought  was a shallow exercise, while Sick of Myself is a nasty triumph. This probably says more about me than the films, or perhaps more about my distance from the prevailing American taste for a certain type of satire that seems to me too safe, too self-indulgent; stories that while ostensibly making fun of power and wealth mostly evidence a yearning for it — The Menu is another good example. It’s the A24 effect, I suppose, a distributor that has, with astonishing diligence, turned itself into an aesthetic statement, one that for me too often hews close to what Truffaut called the Tradition of Quality. I generally prefer the messier, the less polite, less well-behaved. (For all its depictions of debauchery, Saltburn is, from first frame to last, exquisitely well behaved. Saló or The Devils it is not.) I’ll take Ready or Not over The Menu, Rob Zombie over Ari Aster. And so, Sick of Myself over Saltburn.

I’m not going to go over all the films I rewatched and enjoyed, but I want to point to two that I watched both because I love them and because new, restored editions were available on The Criterion Channel, which continues to be the most essential streaming service for me (that and Shudder):

  • The Doom Generation (dir. Gregg Araki) — a film that’s important to me for a variety of reasons, really central to my sense of aesthetics and apocalypse, and the recent restoration does it justice for the first time. This is not an easy movie to watch, and the restoration makes it even more powerfully difficult, but it also makes it more essential.
  • Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento) — it’s probably no surprise that this is astonishing in 4k, given how much of its effect and meaning come from the colors and the sound design, but it exceeded my expectations.

Little of the television I watched seemed to me much more than an adequate way to pass some time at the end of the day. The show I enjoyed the most was The Witcher, which scratched some high-fantasy itches. The best television I watched this year was in the days after the death of Andre Braugher when I rewatched some episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street season 3. For writing, acting, directing, nothing else I watched for television shows this year came close.

Reading

I read fewer novels this year than probably any other year of my adulthood. Some reasons for this were practical — I was working on projects that required research through a lot of books that were not novels, and time is limited. But also, I felt a certain resentment for the dominance of novels in our culture, a feeling likely exacerbated by having published a short story collection in 2023, a book it sometimes felt impossible to get anyone interested in looking at for no reason other than that it was not a novel. 

It’s no surprise that this was the year I wrote a post about the vexations of novels. A lot of the novels I read in 2023 disappointed, annoyed, or bored me, including, and perhaps especially, recent US and UK ones that have gained a lot of critical praise. I don’t want to name them, because I’m sure it’s at least as much me as the books, but novel after novel I read seemed unconcerned with how much of a reader’s time it wasted. So much filler, so many endings that close off rather than open up possibilities, so much clunkiness and didacticism. It’s nothing I haven’t said before, particularly in “‘It’s Good to Hate Novels,’ He Said Lovingly”.

(All of which probably means I’ll try writing a novel again soon.)

The best novel I read this year that was new to me (I reread a few) was Conquest by Nina Allen. It does all sorts of things well, it’s thought-provoking, and it’s a book I look forward to rereading.

In preparation for a paper I’m giving this week at the MLA Convention on Virginia Woolf and Ursula Le Guin, I read a bunch of Le Guin, whose work I hadn’t revisited in five or six years, but which I’ve been reading since childhood. One that was most interesting was a novel I’d skipped before, The Eye of the Heron, which is not by any means a major Le Guin novel, but was nonetheless interesting and one I’m glad to have caught up with.

Clive Barker’s Sacrament was also an older book I first read in 2023, and enjoyed a lot. Again, a writer I’ve been reading for most of my life, and one who was formative for me, but a book I’d previously skipped. It’s well worth reading, a truly strange and affecting novel, and one that ought to be spoken of more frequently when novels of the AIDS crisis years are talked about. I’ve been thinking about Barker a lot this year and hope in the near future to do more writing on his work.

Another rewarding revisit to a writer who was important to me when I was young was reading (or rereading) some stories by Ray Bradbury, which I wrote about in the post “Calm Weather and the Melancholy Tide”. For some reason, I kept seeing people on social media this year ask if Bradbury is still read, if he’s still relevant. I don’t have access to Bookscan or sales data of any sort, but if you look at his sales rankings on Amazon, you’ll see he’s doing just fine — indeed, in their bestseller list for “Science Fiction Short Stories”, he dominates (today, at least), with The Illustrated Man at #1, Dandelion Wine (science fiction? short stories?) at #3, October Country at #11, Bradbury Stories at #14. Amazon’s weird rankings aren’t anything to place a lot of faith in, but nonetheless, it’s clear Bradbury’s work continues to sell (indeed, what I expect is his bestselling book, Fahrenheit 451, isn’t on that list, as it’s a novel), probably because it’s often assigned in schools, but also because people find it and like it. He continues to be read and he continues to influence writers. (Caitlín R. Kiernan’s new collection is titled Bradbury Weather.) This causes great annoyance to some science fiction critics, especially ones who are in the generation immediately after Bradbury’s, since in many ways they saw him as the doddery father-figure against which they set themselves — often, for instance, referring to Bradbury as a writer of children’s stories. My generation and younger, not having so much anxiety of influence, have generally been able to see the riches available in Bradbury’s work.

For short stories, I read around a lot in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series of anthologies. They’re full of surprises and delights. For more recent writing, I’ve enjoyed reading around in various collections from Valancourt by Lisa Tuttle, Stefan Grabinski, Michael Shea, Karl Edward Wagner, Anders Fager, Luigi Musolino, and Attila Veres.

2023 was also the year my partner in many crimes, Eric Schaller, published his second collection, Voice of the Stranger from Lethe Press. I am not the least bit objective about the book, but will say I think I would enjoy the stories even if I didn’t know Eric, and so I recommend buying at least one for every room of your house. They are strange, sharp, smart tales that will consistently surprise you.

It was also a year when the importance of supporting magazines publishing short fiction became especially clear. The rise of AI submissions nearly brought down some magazines that couldn’t keep up with the firehose of work clogging their systems, and then Amazon ending its support of Kindle magazines left publications like Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and The Dark without one of their major sources of revenue. In the literary world, we saw multiple journals lose their institutional support, and even venerable publications like The Gettysburg Review were not safe. It’s a chaotic time for periodical publishing, and I hope that readers will support venues that publish short fiction, essays, reviews, poetry, etc. because the landscape is going only going to get bleaker. In the United States, there is a strong attack on the humanities, on culture, on education, and on imagination, and that attack is having brutal effects.

In the second half of the year, for whatever reason, I finally learned how to read and appreciate the work of Arthur Machen. Machen has been something of a blind spot for me — I’d read most of the famous stories, and appreciated them at a certain level, but I’d never been able to get through “The White People” until this fall, and it completely blew my mind. Sometimes you just have to wait to be on a work’s wavelength, and when it happens, it’s glorious. I’ve become obsessed with this story in particular and will be writing about it soon, once I’ve finished working my way through Machen’s strange but oddly compelling aesthetic narrative Hieroglyphics.

For nonfiction, I was fascinated and moved by two very different books about Zen practice, life, and art: Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple by Kaoru Nonomura and Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. Both are valuable books for our days of crisis and destruction. I haven’t written anything about Larson’s book because I just finished reading it and want to keep thinking about it for a while. I knew next to nothing about John Cage when I began reading it, and what I so appreciated in Larson’s writing was her ability to convey his artistic process to someone who is not a musician. Anybody could read this book, regardless of knowing or caring about John Cage, and come away with greater insight into ways of making meaningful art, ways of seeking meaning in life.

Though I mostly read it in 2022, at the beginning of 2023 I wrote about Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, which continues to be a book I think about. The book ranges all over, and gets a bit diffuse at times, but it’s such a wonderful provocation against settled ideas of history and philosophy that I keep finding myself thinking back to it. Relatedly, I’ve also been thinking about Hilma af Klint and Julia Voss’s fascinating biography of her. Talk about enchantment! 

I’ve been thinking my next academic book project may be something on what I’m calling “weird modernism” — the links between visionary, Romantic, Decadent, and Modernist literature in particular, but not exclusively — and to seek some sort of ground for that, I steeped myself in the work and life of William Blake for a lot of this autumn. There was Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful biography, which portrays Blake and his geography so beautifully. There was the amazingly detailed investigation of Blake’s artistic process in Blake and the Idea of the Book by Joseph Viscomi. There were various exhibition catalogues (I am hugely grateful to whoever ordered all the Blake books years ago at my school’s library!) There was John Higgs’s recent William Blake vs. The World, which is very helpful as an introduction to Blake’s imaginative and poetic universe. And then of course there’s all of Blake’s own writings and artwork, utterly unique. It’s been a real joy and thrill to explore.

I was also captivated by Dan Flores’ Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America. I read it as I was revising my novella Changes in the Land, and it probably influenced some of the details there. It’s not a book to read if you’re seeking to gain a more optimistic view of humans, but it is an important corrective to many assumptions about human and animal history.

Listening

Some favorite new music this year:

I listened to a lot of instrumental, classical, ambient, etc., but I don’t think any of it was newly released in 2023. (I’ll perhaps do a later post about some of that stuff.)

I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to podcasts while cooking and cleaning. I especially enjoyed these podcasts this year:

And that pretty much wraps it up for 2023. I’m sure I’ve forgotten things — it was a long, lively, chaotic year. But for now, this will have to do.

Thanks for joining in the adventure!

—–

Images: 1. photo by Matthew Cheney; 2. Taylor Mac; 3. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection; 4. photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash; 5. photo by Lukas Boekhout on Unsplash; 6. photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

Return to News & Views / Occasional Writings

Creative Commons License
Unless otherwise noted, all content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

css.php