The year in review, or

The final newsletter of the year, thank you.

Schubert’s “Six German dances: D820, No 2,” played by Mitsuko Uchida, is playing; according to Spotify, it’s the piece I played the most this year. I played plenty of Bach and Brahms, too, and the London Philharmonic Choir. In recent months, I have had “The carnival of the animals” by Camille Saint-Seans on repeat. This month, a couple of weeks ago, I was by the sea with Emmanuel Esomnofu—the prolific cultural journalist—I had had a few sips of wine and plenty of palm-wine. The sea was crashing, making noise, and “Carnival” was playing on the Bluetooth speaker that Emmanuel brought. It was a moving moment. I shared some of it on my WhatsApp—as a voice recording.

What does my taste in music say about my year? (My face is itchy. I just had my bathe. Weird. Maybe the heat: I can’t turn my fan too high because it makes noise and I hate noise, so it’s at two, doing nothing.) This year, I was haunted by my desire for silence. I feel a great controversy in my life: there is nothing I want more than quiet, I hate words, too much of it, I hate it because I feel terrible after talking or tweeting too much, I feel vapid, vain. I covet silence, and yet I want to be talked to, I want to be contemplated by music. That desire to have music read me—that was the presiding desire of my year. And classical music does that: it reads me without using words. (The only other way of being talked to without words would have to be kissing—out-out until the woman comes.)

I fell in love—“fell” is just the right verb—and got heartbroken. I broke my own heart, as you can imagine a poet would do. One of the iconic lines I experienced this year was in Journey to Italy, a 1954 film by Roberto Rossellini. Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) says to her husband Alex (George Sanders, whose role in All about Eve (1950) as a critic is played here as an overly critical husband), “He was not a fool. He was a poet!” She was describing a young Italian man she seems to have loved (or, if “love” is too strong, a young man she infatuated about). And Alex responds, “What is the difference?” What is the difference between a poet and a fool? It is not a strange question, T. S. Eliot said of himself (I believe he was speaking about himself) in “Prufrock”: “At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.” There is something ridiculous in the definite article and the capitalized “F,” and something playfully arrogant: I am the Fool, not any kind of fool. This year, have I been a fool? Many times. A few times I have been “the Fool.”

I learned this year, that is the best thing that has happened to me this year. I’ve learned. What have I learned? That is between me and my God. But I’ve learned. I published a few things, too. My poem, accepted by The Sun, in 2022 or 2023, got published this year, although I find the poem too sentimental and so did not share it. I had three poems in No Tokens, one of them, “Notes on Ambition” (my favorite of the lot), led to a gracious essay by Isaiah Adepoju (here). I had a poem recently in Poetry Sango-Ota: it’s too Eliot-ish, but it’s a good poem (I feel ashamed at one word in the poem, the word “stringent,” it means something entirely different from what I intended: it feels like a stripe of poo in the pant when you are at a date, that’s how uncomfortable it makes me).

I did not publish any critical essays anywhere this year. I wrote stories. Each story I sent out was rejected, but I sold a reprint to the wonderful Kristi Peterson Schoonover: “Christmas chicken,” forthcoming in Darkness most fowl, and in my collection of stories. I have been at work on and dreaming about this collection for two years. I sent it to the publisher recently, advance offered, contract in the works. If all goes well, as all is bound to go, the book of stories will be released next year. An anthology I was in, Mooncalves: an anthology of weird fiction, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award this year.

Yes. I picked up a BA in history and international studies. I also wrote three craft essays here—thank you for reading them. The three essays were recently recognized in Afrocritik’s list of notable essays, and I was surprised to find them there. The most (un)popular thing I have written, perhaps, the essay on contemporary Nigerian poetry was on the list too last year. I find that interesting: that you can do “relevant” work with whatever you have in your hand. The newsletter has grown by about sixty more readers this year; we are about forty more people away from 400 readers. I don’t like to shop for subscription. If the work is good, it will find those who need it, or they will find it. All told, the craft essays have been read about 200o times. Not many but much.

Next year, I hope to be more deliberate about the newsletter. I should publish more conversations with my brilliant friends (one with Ancci, our finest poetry critic in the country, will be out in January / February), and I hope to do more craft essays and teach more workshops. At least two workshops next year. One in May, the other in October, maybe. The craft essays should appear once every month. Trusting the Lord for grace.

I have mentioned some movies I loved this year already. I saw old films more—I love old things: older women, old books, old movies, and old money (whatever that means), anything old, old but not stale. Here are fourteen movies I enjoyed seeing this year: (1) Martin Scorsese’s “Mean streets” (1973); (2) John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970); (3) Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All about Eve” (1950); (4) Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” (1954); (5) Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” (1964); (6) Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012); (7) Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom thread” (2017); (8) Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” (1975); (9) Charlie Chaplin’s “The great dictator” (1940); (10) Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the roof” (1971); (11) Antoine Fuqua’s “Training day” (2001); (12) Arie and Chuko Esiri’s “Eyimofe” (2020); (13) Terrence Malik’s “Tree of life” (2011); and (14) “The Thin Blue Line” by Errol Morris (a life-changing documentary from 1988). Some of these films are very intense (like “Phantom thread”), though they are all very quiet films (silence is an event in Tarkovsky’s “Mirror,” whose other movies I have tried to see but not finished). Even in the rowdy village where “Fiddler on the roof is set,” the landscape contains silence.

I read one or two great books this year. I read little philosophy, finished only two of the four or five novels I started. Anyhow, based on what I read this year, here are twenty books I would recommend: (1) The odyssey by Homer and (2) Beroul’s The romance of Tristan—great books; (3) Michael Hoffmann’s selection of the poetry of W. S. Graham, (4) Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae, (5) Atsuro Riley’s Heard-hoard, (6) Seamus Heaney’s Field work, (7) Afam Akeh’s Letters home and Biafran nights, (8) Richard Wilbur’s Things of this world, and (9) Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam—poetry. In anthologies, Michael Hoffmann’s Twentieth century German poetry (10) and Christian Wiman’s Joy: one hundred poems (11). In prose: (12) Adewale Maja-Pearce’s memoir, The house my father built; Adam Golaski’s story collection from NO Press, Stone gods (14); Roger Scruton’s lecture, On human nature (15), Hill’s mighty brilliant collection of critical essays, Style and faith (16); Juan Ramón Jiménez’s The Complete Perfectionist (17); Franz Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms (18); The Harvard classics (19), a collection of great essays from the 19th c. edited by Charles W. Eliot (still at it); and (20) Amos Tutuola’s classic The palm-wine drinkard.

I said I’d share my favorite newsletters in this piece. I have published sixty (this is the sixty-first newsletter). I like, not unusually, the newer ones better than the older pieces, there are some of them that I can’t read. But I have to confess that writing every week on Substack has improved my writing, and it has helped my sanity. As promised, here are nine newsletters I love, which you should check out if you haven’t, and why I love them:

· “A Meditation on Time, Memory, with Some Thoughts on Thomas Hardy”: I love this piece because, one, it’s the first thing I published here, and it’s one of the finest. It’s argument is quite seamless, it’s very tightly woven, and has a brilliant ending. (It was one of the first things I wrote after I came to Christ in 2021, during the same time when I wrote most of the poems in my chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis).

· “Songs from a Garden of Ghosts: On Wale Ayinla’s To Cast a Dream”: You probably don’t know, but I reviewed Wale Ayinla’s poetry chapbook about two years ago. I think it is a nice review, less heady, and fairly insightful.

· “Rebecca’s Absence”: It’s a fine essay, it’s the kind of thing I want to write more of, in a better way. I find I can do well with literary essays when I have interesting material. (I recently wrote a profile of a secondhand bookseller.) In “Rebecca’s Absence” (I see now that it is a good title), I had nice material, and I wrote.

· “Is Contemporary “Nigerian Poetry” Nigerian?”: There’s only one thing I cannot understand: how anybody did not send me money or buy me a drink for writing this essay. I don’t rate it much, but people have called it “seminal,” have used the word “important,” maybe even “groundbreaking,” around it. It was petrol and tarpaulin when it came out. It stimulated a conversation (read Ancci’s “Reading the great Nigerian literary debate”). Re(re)ad it for the rave.

· “Notes on Craft No. 2: Language”: It’s the best of the craft essays.

· “Notes toward a definition of culture”: It’s a subject I am interested in—how do we define or conceptualize culture, as Nigerians and Africans? It’s an important question to ask because, until we have a good answer, we won’t get anywhere. Did I answer the question? I don’t know if I am in a position to answer the question.

· “There Will Be a Light: On Friendship”: This is a sentimental newsletter, I have not reread it and I am not sure I will, but it’s about my friend Jesuyon and the sort of love David had for Jonathan. Read it and see if you like it. Also, it includes a song recommendation. (Even if I can’t read this, I should return to that song.)

· “The Quacks of Quack-O: Notes on Ambition”: I complained a lot this year, but this has to be the most elegant one, and I think that title is gold. Hopefully, it gets a book somewhere along the line.

· ““Spring, summer and all that”: Conversation with Emmanuel Esomnofu”: If you have not read my conversation with the brilliant Emmanuel Esomnofu, who published more pieces than we could keep up with this year, you should. It is a delight. (Someone on X shared a printed version of the interview, they said they kept going back to it.)

Now the Vote of Thanks: Eyin eyan mi. Thank you. Thank you for reading, for sharing, for commenting (Isaiah Adepoju, Gathering of Gilded Kinsmen, Peter Adetunji), for liking, for restacking, for—what for? For enduring the Fool. I hope you have a great year next year and that wonders attend you even this year. I pray you find love if you need one (I need one, but I am not finding one). I am grateful for you. Forget about all the bashing in “The battle of Lepanto”—truly, the world needs people like you. (I just channeled Johnny Depp, but, hehehe, I am no actor. I mean what I say.)

Merry Christmas, and a happy new year to you. 🔹