The best books I read in 2021

Lots of good books this year, with me thoroughly enjoying stuff I’ve read by Pynchon, Ishiguro, Petrushevskaya, Jhumpa Lahiri and Teju Cole, as well as several books from Steven Brust’s Taltos series and several more from Sjowall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series. But the best ones are:

И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years, Chinghiz Aitmatov, 1980) This is a wonderful book and I love it, but you have to admit the pitch for it is among the weirdest: do you want to read a social realist sci-fi novel, written by a party functionary who has no idea how space travel works, and that’s basically an orthodox communist writing a paean to conservatism? No? That’d be too bad, because unlike what it sounds like, this book actually has something interesting to say. It locates evil not in too much information, but in deliberate ignorance. The thing that Aitmatov rails against, again and again, is deliberate acts of forgetting or ignoring. He draws a parallel between the mankurt (a slave who’s had his memories destroyed), a government that decides to abandon a chance at alien contact, a son who disrespects his father’s memory, a functionary who persecutes a man for writing down his life story, a pointless desecration of a cemetery. It’s not a book that is against progress, but a book that is against forgetting. And it feels especially poignant that the narrative is interwoven with Kazakh legends. Legends of nomadic steppe people, for whom preserved landmarks are few and far apart, and the act of remembering must be deliberate. So even though the sci-fi part doesn’t make even the slightest amount of sense, this book is still so, so good, and highly recommended.

Я, бабушка, Илико и Илларион (Granny, Iliko, Illarion and I, Nodar Dumbadze, 1960, tr. Zurab Akhvlediani) I normally distrust books told from a child’s or teen’s perspective. It is too easy to cast the child as the straight man, the ingénu around whom the machinations of the adults swirl. But being a kid is not like that, and even to the extent that it can be, it’s not really an interesting thing to read about, or it isn’t for me, anyway. I unexpectedly loved this book from a youth’s perspective, but it’s in part because it’s nothing like that model of a book with kid as chief protagonist. The kid is as conniving and sly as his elder village neighbours Iliko and Illarion, and only plays up his innocence for greater hijinx. The three are really equals, as far as the book is concerned. As a result, less of the story is something that you understand before the narrator does. The humour is more varied and less about being a fish-out-of-water, the poignant moments less telegraphed. Truly a fun, funny, heartwarming book.

Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987) This is the best book I’ve read this year, and, possibly, in years. A story of a black family in Ohio just after the end of slavery that seems to be being haunted by ghosts. A particular kind of lore pervades this book, where each person’s unique, personal pain is also a component of that person’s mythology. So every character is simultaneously viscerally alive and fantastically larger than life. The only book I can think of as a point of comparison for the feeling is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. If the only book you can think of as a point of comparison for something is “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that already says a lot. Right now, to me, it’s so clearly the best American book I’ve ever read, that I am wondering how I ended up not reading it until this year

Red Plenty (Francis Spufford, 2010) A novel made up of vignettes from various “representative” people from the Soviet Union, some well-known, like Nikita Khruschyov, Leonid Kantorovich and Alexander Galich, some obscure, and some fictional. Concentrating on how cogs of a planned economy come together and on Gosplan itself, Red Plenty gives a sense, I don’t know to what extent illusory, of providing a general picture of how the Soviet economy worked, and how that impacted Soviet life. How appealing that sounds to you probably varies. Communists would likely see it as naked anti-Communist propaganda, and anti-Communists would likely see it as an irrelevant waste of time: it’s not whether or not they applied linear programming correctly that was the main problem with the USSR. For me, though, I really relished that style of a novel that gives a glimpse of the machinery of society, and I would be extremely excited to read such novels for other places and other economic systems.

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Alice Munro, 1974) Look, it’s a book of short stories written by Alice Munro, so of course it’s brilliant, you don’t need me to tell you that. There is maybe a handful of authors who have the insight to understand and then the courage and skill to put to paper what goes on in people’s minds in daily life, and then make that worth reading. Reading Munro, you feel completely “seen”, in both a good and bad way. But what I’ve been wondering lately is whether there is something in people who write the best realist fiction that stops them from ever being true believers. Whether to be a great author of realist fiction inclines you to a kind of ambivalence and uncertainty that hinders you from forming extreme convictions. More than anything, many of the stories here are written through the lens of such ambivalent characters looking at true believers with a combined admiration, scepticism and annoyance. They realize that some of them are faking it, and that causes indignation, but also a pleasant sense of moral superiority. But then they also realize that some of them are not faking it, and that brings frustration, but with it a sense of personal inadequacy. It forms a motif for this collection, but it’s also everywhere in Didion, in Pynchon, in Bitov, among others. And, perhaps appropriately, I feel ambivalent about it. It’s a great gift, but the inability to be unequivocal about anything is also an enormous limitation.

Рассказ о семи повешенных (The Seven Who Were Hanged, Leonid Andreyev, 1908) In a collected works of Andreyev, this novella about five terrorists who attempt a political assassination, as well as their proposed victim and two other criminals who receive the death penalty stands out by far. In the way that every character is treated differently, and every character is treated with humanity. Just a very strong, very emotionally powerful portrayal of people dealing with extreme stress. If Wikipedia is right, and reading this book inspired the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, then it’s also among the most historically important works of fiction ever written.

Serve the People! (Yan Lianke, 2005, tr. Julia Lovell) It’s a cult of personality satire set during the Cultural Revolution, but it’s not the satire that is the selling point of this book to me. Instead, it’s the prose. The book is bristling with more metaphors and similes per 60 than probably anything I’ve read, and these are always double-decker over-the-top constructions that just invite you to stop and marvel. But it’s not just individual phrases, the descriptions build up into something more, a wonderful picture of comic timing. And for how well it all works in English, Julia Lovell’s wonderfully arch translation must share a lot of the credit.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman, 2013) I somehow thought I had read this book and was recommending it to people, but it turns out I had read something else (maybe Coraline?) and my attempted “rereading” was actually a first-time reading. Lucky that it turns out to be great. There’s a sense of magic here that’s both comforting and old-timey as well as arcane and dangerous. Perfect for people who, like me, really loved the Tom Bombadil chapter in the Lord of the Rings and have been looking to scratch that itch ever since.

Killing Commendatore (Haruki Murakami, 2017, tr. Phillip Gabriel/Ted Goossen) It’s odd that all Murakami is kind of the same, and yet some of it is really good and some of it is really mediocre. If you were to construct a “Murakami bingo” card, Killing Commendatore would definitely tick a lot of boxes: a disembodied concept that takes the guise of a known piece of culture, listening to jazz records on a record player, precise lyrical descriptions of a man living alone cooking simple meals, portals into other worlds. All of it is here, but rather than being annoyed at the repetitiveness, I was borne along by the plot. Lots of things are happening here, and there’s never so much of a lull that you have to look around and wonder whether it’s too similar to something else. The best parts are descriptions of the process of portrait painting, and combining this book with a visit to a portrait exhibition made it even more enjoyable.

My Nine Lives (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2004) In the introduction, Jhabvala presents the book as an autobiography of sorts. Which is not at all what it is, since the nine stories have very different characters, who are all mutually contradictory in some way. Or maybe it’s unfair to say it’s supposed to be autobiography: what she actually says is that every “I” in the book is her, but the other people are not actual other people. So it’s an exercise of deliberate self-insertion, thinking of ways life could have been, but wasn’t. Because Jhabvala feels at home (but also not quite at home) in the UK, in the US, and in India, there are many different lives that she can situate herself in. At the same time, her “I”s in the story are surprisingly flawed people, ones I, for example, would have difficulty admitting to. The fictional remove, rather than serving to sugarcoat real facts, gives enough distancing for unflinching honesty in terms of self-assessment. Interesting as an exercise, and even more interesting as just nine different very good short stories.

The best movies I watched in 2021

This was the first full year where I had access to some kind of streaming service for all of it. As a result, I watched a lot of movies this year, but in a lot more mainstream fashion than previously. I used the opportunity to fill the gaps I have in pop culture of movies that ‘everyone’s seen’, so now I’ve seen “Legally Blonde”, “Grease” and so forth. Unfortunately, most such movies are just OK, and it’s just some weird cultural coincidence that makes them of outsize importance. Still, I did see some good movies.

Minari (2020, dir. Lee Isaac Chung, trailer) I was hesitant to watch this movie after seeing the trailer, fearing the cookie-cutter immigrant-children-learn-a-lesson narrative arc. Here’s how it goes: they (we) start by wanting to assimilate and rebel against their roots, unsatisfied that their families are “weird” and “not normal”. But with time, as they themselves assimilate, they come to appreciate their heritage and cherish the differences and things that tie them back to their culture. As symbolized by the interaction of the kids and grandma, this movie is just that, in part. But there’s more to it, and a more interesting relationship that serves as the main structure underpinning the movie. It’s the relationship between husband and wife, and the conflict is that the husband’s risk-taking, adventurous spirit leads not to some great adventure but to a trailer in rural Arkansas. I suppose this is also a well-known story, but it was just different enough, and the interactions so precisely acted by Steven Yuen and Han Ye-ri that this movie is elevated above the cliché to something that rings true.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, dir. Robert Zemeckis, trailer) my extreme enjoyment of this madcap, lovable kids comedy action adventure was dampened only slightly by the suspicion that it was this very movie that created a formula that has been successfully co-opted by to make superhero blockbuster upon superhero blockbuster: short, fast-paced set pieces, action sequences that can best be described as zany, winking gags to ensure the viewers are aware that the moviemakers are smarter than they’re letting on, references to an extended universe of intellectual property for that warm glow of recognition. Still, I can’t think of a superhero movie with a gag as good as the Roger handcuff gag.

Dune (2021, dir. Denis Villeneuve, trailer) As V. says, one of the great things about this movie is the awesome sense of world depth: that there’s a lot more to this world than the snippets you’re shown. As this Thomas Flight video explains, this movie has great visual effects. The interesting thing is that it’s the visual effects that give that sense of world depth. You get to believing there’s a deep lore and some kind of internal logic that you as a viewer are ignorant of, and you want more, you want to explore further. Not since I first saw the first Lord of the Rings can I remember a movie where visual effects were used for this purpose, and so effectively.

The French Dispatch (2021, dir. Wes Anderson, trailer) I used to have an overarching theory of Wes Anderson: that his movies can be subdivided into two archetypes based on plot. Patriarch discovers that what he considers his lovable adventurousness is (viewed by others as) irresponsibility and derangement (Gene Hackman’s arc in the Royal Tanenbaums, Life Aquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox). Or, precocious youth discovers that being “serious” as in doing things that get you approval from adults is not at all the same as being serious in the sense of caring about meaningful things (the kids’ arcs in the Royal Tanenbaums, Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel). The fun thing about this movie is that there is a vignette that is each of these in reverse: the Chalamet/McDormand vignette is in part about precocious youth deciding caring about important things isn’t that important. And the Benicio del Toro/Léa Seydoux vignette is about discovering that what seems at first as derangement is actually appreciated by others as adventurousness. But I can’t claim that that’s why I liked it. It’s that somehow it felt less bloated and self-parodic to me than the Grand Budapest Hotel, even as the quirkiness and the depth of references and sheer density is at an all-time high. Reinforcing once again that, like most people, I don’t actually know why I like the things I like. Or maybe I just enjoyed getting the Mavis Gallant reference.

Cabaret (1972, dir. Bob Fosse, trailer) Although I’d heard of this movie, its plot and premise, and many of the songs from it for years and years, it still had the power to surprise. So if you think you know this movie just from osmosis, I would strongly suggest seeing it. In a way, it’s a paean to melodrama. The overwhelming sensation in this movie is that just because something is lurid and full of pathos and over the top, doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful and it’s not real. Cabaret is the best movie I saw this year and it wasn’t particularly close.

Get Back (2021, dir. Peter Jackson, trailer) The reason this movie is great is that it’s a cultural phenomenon. You can talk about it to almost anyone, whatever generation. But the reason behind the reason, why everyone is in fact talking about it, is that everyone digs a bit of Beatlology. Here’s zuuko’s take on it, which I also endorse: we got the munchies and were standing in line for some A&W after about two hours of the movie, and he explained what he’d write about it in the blog if he still did that. He’d title it “Schroedinger’s Camera”: over and over, the movie shows how the band are both at their musical best and their tempermentally most harmonious when the camera is least on them — when the film crew goes for lunch and so forth. And yet, by nature of it being a movie, you only get to see the parts where the camera was there to begin with. You kind of ask watching this movie: was it Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the person directing the original documentary, that broke up the Beatles? The answer is no, of course, but it’s not as clear cut as you’d think. The thing that I personally like most about this movie is watching the lyric creation process. Because the songs are so well known, you know just where they’ll end up, and it’s like you’re cheering them on as they’re trying to figure out a puzzle. The other thing is that the personalities are very different from what I was expecting. I thought, John is the cerebral one, Paul the silly fun-loving one, George the introspective, and Ringo the happy-go-lucky anything goes one. That’s correct for pretty much only Ringo. If you haven’t watched it yet, watch it so we can talk about it.

2021 in Review: Articles Part II

Here’s the second part of interesting articles for this year, where the fun stuff is.

Art, Reviews and Cultural Criticism

Here’s Why Liking Something I Don’t Like Makes You A Bad Person Damien Kronfeld at The Reductress has a … reductionist take on cultural criticism
Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic You may have noticed that revolution and rebellion in the abstract is incredibly popular in pop culture but remains nebulous and content-free. This realization leads Alister MacQuarrie to lament, in the New Socialist, that more pop culture is not explicitly Communist.
The Movie Assassin Sarah Miller takes about 20 years to write an incredibly scathing review of the English Patient in Popula, weaving in autobiography, economics, and contemplations on the idea of authenticity.
Kenan Malik writes interestingly on cultural appropriation in ArtReview (this is how I knew to put it in this section) and explains the problems with the concept.
“Consent” is the wrong framework for experiencing art is both the title and the thesis of Gretchen Felker-Martin‘s persuasive piece on complaints about video games in gawker.

Books and Translation

The “Heroic Translators” who Reinvented Classic Science Fiction in China the standards of translation have varied widely across times and cultures, and Ken Liu, himself an excellent translator, tells a tale of one such standard, for the translations of Jules Verne into Chinese, for Gizmodo.
Руководство по постройке мостов через безконечность [in Russian] S.B. Pereslegin introduces some Strugatsky Brothers translations by noticing that they are better than the originals, and building a whole theory of translation around that.
The ___’s Daughter Emily St. John Mandel discovers that a bunch of books are named that, and engages in some descriptive statistics in the Millions.
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [PDF] Eliot Weinberger interestingly and brutally, though not always convincingly, critiques many different translations of a Chinese poem.

Profiles, Narrative and Fiction

The Triumph of the Crayolatariat Greg Allen visits the crayola factory museum
What Happened to Lee? Sandra Upson recounts the strange and tragic tale of Cloudfare cofounder Lee Holloway in WIRED.
Ghosts of the Tsunami [partially paywalled] Richard Lloyd Parry in the London Review of Books investigates ghost stories that have sprung up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster
Apocalypse Meow the story, written by Bob Smetana for the Nashville Scene, is completely nuts, but it’s included here mainly for its wonderful title and cover illustration
The War to Sell You a Mattress is an Internet Nightmare [no longer available] David Zax gets offered a free mattress, and falls down a sordid rabbit hole of shady internet marketing, litigious corporations and fake reviews. He wrote this up in a very entertaining article at Fast Company that’s no longer accessible, probably because somebody at a mattress company sued.
There are Two Ways of Living, according to Robert Reed.
Однажды я вынес из Эрмитажа картины [in Russian] Vladimir Ufland recounts the story of an unsanctioned exhibition at the Ermitage in Ogoniok. Although I don’t get Ufland’s poetry at all, as a storyteller, he is excellent

Life in the Modern World

A Vast Web of Vengeance [paywalled] Kashmir Hill in the New York Times finds people who have fallen victim to a particularly online form of revenge.
Attack of the Zombie Baby Monitors is, sadly, not a story about zombies who look after babies, but rather a primer about security concerns associated with the internet of things written by Zeynep Tufekci for Scientific American.
The Anxiety of Influencers [partially paywalled] Barrett Swanson‘s essay about TikTok in Harper’s is a little bit smarmy, but still a really interesting read.

2021 in Review: Articles Part I

Here are some interesting things I read this year on the internet. It’s harder to make these lists as more of the stuff I read ends up being paywalled, so I can’t necessarily easily check back whether I still find what I read interesting, and the readers have to decide whether a click is worth the one thing per month they get to read for free. I’m not saying paywalling is unjustified or anything, I think it’s the least bad of the models possible. All I am saying is that it makes an exercise like this less useful and less fun. That said, here are some highlights, organized by topic. Please note that inclusion here does not imply my agreement with the article, just that I thought it was interesting and worth reading. But there are things I agree with here, too. If you’re curious about my opinion, feel free to ask me! In this first part, we tackle the important issues

Coronavirus

5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating [partially paywalled] Zeynep Tufekci in the Atlantic writes on lessons in communication to learn from the pandemic
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup that Helped Covid Kill and continuing along the same theme, Megan Molteni in WIRED writes about how the CDC and WHO failed to communicate information about covid spread correctly
The Origin of Covid I don’t know if linking this is useful or not, since I’m assuming most everyone has read it already and has their own opinion, but here is Nicholas Wade in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists suggesting covid may have originated in gain-of-function experiments in a Wuhan lab.
Fraud is no Fun without Friends [partially paywalled] Matt Levine in Bloomberg has a theory that explains how the pandemic has caused a big increase in whistleblowers: morale is down in all sorts of group projects, and that includes group projects that include fraud.
This is what it’s supposed to be like [partially paywalled] by David Roth in Defector is ostensibly an essay about sports, or, more specifically, sports fandom, but it doesn’t make sense to classify it as anything except a coronavirus essay.

The City

Henry Grabar in Slate is very good at explaining how city politics and urban planning intersect in often bizarre and depressing ways. Two of the highlights this year were where he explained the prevalence of parking minimums, even though no one likes them, and the looming disaster of condo collapses.
The Look of Gentrification Darrell Owens, who is an expert on what’s actually going on when gentrification happens, writes on his substack about one of those things which bothers me a lot about modern discourse — masking aesthetic concerns as social ones.

Climate Change

We’re Heading Straight for Demi-Armageddon [partially paywalled] Emma Marris in the Atlantic asks around to survey what experts think about how bad climate change will get, and finds everyone not knowing how to feel about something that will be neither apocalyptic nor benign
Good News on Climate Change In the Effective Altruism forums, John Halstead and jackva summarize recent updates to the likelihood of extreme warming.
Why a Political Philosopher is Thinking about Carbon Removal [partially paywalled] Robinson Meyer and Olufemi Taiwo talk about carbon capture and related politics in the Atlantic.

Science and Health

‘Last Hope’ Experiment Finds Evidence for Unknown Particles Natalie Wolchover in Quanta magazine reports on muon g-2 news in an accessible, yet thorough, way
How Life Sciences Actually Work Alexey Guzey surveys life science academia from an outsider’s perspective
The maddening saga of how an Azheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades the late Shannon Begley in STAT details an example of groupthink in science academia.
The Science of Terrible Men Kathryn Paige Harden in aeon wonders what to do with the fact that most of the pioneers of genetics were eugencists and whether that means we can dismiss their contributions to science.
Is Sunscreen the New Margarine Rowan Jacobsen in Outside suggests that everyone is free… not to wear sunscreen

Race and Identity

The Identity Hoaxers [partially paywalled] Helen Lewis writes about the phenomenon of people who fraudulently pretend to have marginalized identities for the Atlantic.
Identity Fraud Jenny G. Zhang in gawker writes about using actually having marginalized identities as a vehicle for grift
Doing the Work at Work [partially paywalled] Bridget Read in the Cut looks at efforts at corporate DEI initiatives, and finds something that has much more in common with other kinds of “corporate ____ initiatives” than either proponents or detractors would like to think
The right-wing attack on racial justice talk [paywalled] Randall Kennedy in The American Prospect writes on CRT and the anti-CRT backlash
And more specifically on the 1619 project, Matthew Karp has an essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled History as End [partially paywalled].

Politics and Government

The Myth of Panic Tanner Greer in Palladium magazine writes against the advice not to panic. Relevant to the discussions of coronavirus communications above, but also more broadly.
The Triumph of American Idealism Alex Hochuli in Damage Mag writes about the incongruous globalization of specifically American causes and discourse topics
Making policy for a low-trust world Matt Yglesias at his substack has suggestions for how politicians should react to the public no longer trusting them: with simpler-to-explain policies.

2021 in Review: Quotes

Martin Buber believed that the foundation for human existence is relational. People can create between-zones of resonant meaning. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist, he wrote, “Dialog in my sense implies the necessity of the unforeseen, and its basic element is surprise, the surprising mutuality.” Isn’t this what happens when I hear the words spoken to me in the room as alive, not dead. Isn’t it always a surprise?
This is the zone of transference and countertransference. The between must be felt. The words arrive as an embodied surprise.
—Siri Hustvedt Inside the Room

This story is a sort of leading indicator of a breakdown in morale and group cohesion generally as so much work is done from home. That is probably bad for a lot of projects; it’s just that one of the projects it’s bad for is fraud. —Matt Levine, Fraud is no fun without friends

it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. There is an obvious parallel here with archaeology. The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects. —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

Работавший в министерстве иностранных дел Асадолла-мирза, призывая собеседников не спешить с выводами или обратить на что-то особое внимание, всегда восклицал: «Моменто, моменто!» Позже я узнал, что в переводе на нормальный язык, это означало: «Минуточку, минуточку!» — Ирадж Пезешкзод, Дядюшка Наполеон (tr. Kondyreva/Mikhalyov)

– Дорогой мой, вы стали жертвой покушения. Замышлялось членовредительство… Обвиняемая была намерена отрезать вам… э – э… фрагмент вашего уважаемого организма, а вы не можете даже назвать час этого прискорбного события!
Дустали-хан, окончательно выйдя из себя, взорвался:
– Знаете что, ага! Я на этом, как вы говорите, «фрагменте» часы не ношу!
—ibid.

I once worked in an office building in which some troubled anonymous soul took to destroying the lavatories. It seemed like motiveless, insane destruction, until one day, on a wall next to a wrecked water-closet, we read the scribbled words: if the cistern cannot be changed, it must be destroyed —Salman Rushdie, The Location of Brazil

Dans un contexte terroriste, il faut considerer une femme comme individu. —Jacquard to Merlaux in “Au Service de la France”

What is not poetry cannot be a translation of poetry —Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Один пижон
Имел ПИ жен
—Ефим Мандель

В такую погоду, не только водку, и термометр проглотишь, лишь бы градусы были —Нодар Думбадзе, Я, Бабушка, Илико и Илларион

The man in Princeton asks his way to Columbia. “If I were you,” he is unhelpfully told, “I wouldn’t start from Princeton.” —Denys Turner, All Will Be Well

Charlie: You’re a Fourierist?!
Tom: Yes.
Charlie: Fourierism was tried in the 19ths century and failed. Wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? It failed.
Tom: That’s debatable.
Charlie: That Brook Farm failed?
Tom: That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you. Whether it was really a failure, I don’t think can be definitively said.
Charlie: For me, ceasing to exist is failure. That’s pretty definitive.
Tom: Everyone ceases to exist. That doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure. —Metropolitan

Первая песня я думаю она была более похожа на “дыр бул щил” чем на “румяной зарею покрылся восток” это точно, потому что авангард был явно раньше чем классика —Юрий Олеша, Книга прощания

Я как-то предложил Маяковскому купить у меня рифму.
— Пожалуйста, — сказал он с серьезной деловитостью. — Какую?
— Медикамент и медяками.
— Рубль.
— Почему же так мало? — удивился я.
— Потому что говорится “медикамент”, с ударением на последнем слоге.
— Тогда зачем вы вообще покупаете?
— На всякий случай.
— ibid.

“I’ve come to the view that we shouldn’t trust scientists more or less than we trust other people,” Lipsitch said at the event. “We should trust science. And when scientists speak science, we should trust them, because we should recognize that they are speaking in a way that is based on evidence. When scientists express political views or policy preferences or even claims about how the world is that are not citing evidence, we should not give those scientists undue deference.” —Mara Hvistendahl quoting Marc Lipsitch

When we say a crime was premeditated, for example, that doesn’t mean that the perp chanted a mantra or practiced mindfulness meditation before doing it —John Michael Greer on meditation

Sir Arthur Harris was notorious for driving his Bentley at high speed through the streets from his headquarters in High Wycombe to the Air Ministry. Upon pulling him over late one night, a policeman purportedly admonished Harris with “you might have killed somebody, sir.” “Young man,” he snapped, “I kill thousands of people every night!” —tumblr user @youzicha quoting Lt. Col. Jeffrey Schnakenberg’s thesis

Память человеческая — как газ, заполняет все доступное ей пространство. —Мария Клейнер, Между небом

“What I want to avoid is to think from our parochial 2015 view—from my own limited life experience, my own limited brain—and super-confidentially postulate what is the best form for civilization a billion years from now, when you could have brains the size of planets and billion-year life spans. It seems unlikely that we will figure out some detailed blueprint for utopia. What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens—pros and cons—and they had listed, on the pro side, ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’? Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there is more to the human condition than that.” —Raffi Khatchadourian quoting Nick Bostrom

Faithfulness in Translations

I thought I would expand a little on what I meant when I said accuracy/faithfulness in translation was multi-faceted in the previous post. I recently tried to translate Roald Mandelshtam’s poem “Новая Голландия”. Here is the poem:

Новая Голландия

Запах камней и металла, 
Острый, как волчьи клыки, 
– помнишь? – 
В изгибе канала 
Призрак забытой руки, 
– видишь? – 
Деревья на крыши 
Позднее золото льют. 
В Новой Голландии 
– слышишь? – 
Карлики листья куют. 
И, листопад принимая 
В чаши своих площадей, 
Город лежит, как Даная, 
В золотоносном дожде.

What I like about the original is threefold: the parallelism of —помнишь?—видишь?—слышишь? the imagery of “листопад принимая/в чаши своих площадей”, and, as dad pointed out, the out-of-its-own-time “Silver Age feel” with its tight metre and rhyme, classical allusions, and nonlinear, broken narrative structure. But these are disparate elements that I soon realized I might not be able to keep all of in a translation. So what does it mean to translate the poem “accurately” at that point? Is it just trying to list all of those things and get as many of them in? Or is it being primarily faithful to the imagery? To the parallelism? To the feel?

My own feeling is that making this choice is an important (the important?) part of a translator’s job. But in this post, instead of making a single choice, I’m going to try to illustrate how different initial choices might lead to different translations.

For instance, if I think the imagery is paramount in the original poem, I might sacrifice some of the parallelism and some of the crispness of the rhyme to be very precise in conveying that imagery. Note that this doesn’t mean the translation should be close to literal. We might (literally) translate “призрак забытой руки” as “phantom of a forgotten hand” for example. However, imagery-wise, this doesn’t work. It’s being compared to the turn of a canal, and so what we need to convey that image is a wrist, rather than a hand. Here is how such a translation might look:

New Holland 1

The scent of stone and of metal,
Sharp as a wolf’s canine teeth.
—Do you recall?—
In a canal’s turn,
The ghost of a forgotten wrist.
—See?—
Poured onto the rooftops
Is the late gold from the trees.
In New Holland
—Can you hear it? —
Dwarves are forging the leaves.
And, receiving the leaf-fall 
Into its goblets of Squares,
The city lies like Danaë,
Caught in a gold-bearing rain.

As you can see, this version loses some of both the parallelism and the feel that we wanted to keep in the original poem. However, for me, it does a good job of evoking the same mental images as the original. But maybe that’s not what we want most of all. Alternatively, we might decide that conveying the triplet of помнишь? видишь? слышишь? as exactly as possible is what we want to do. That might lead to a poem like this:

New Holland 2

The scent of stone and of metal,
Sharp as a wolf’s fangs.
—Do you remember? —
In a canal’s bend,
A ghost of a forgotten hand,
—Do you see? —
The trees are drowning
The roofs with belated gold
—Do you hear? —
On New Holland Island
The dwarves are getting leaves forged.
And, receiving the leaf-fall 
Into the cups of its Squares
Like Danaë herself, the city
Lies in a gold-bearing rain.

This version is weaker, in my opinion, than the previous. In part it’s because after getting those three lines how I wanted them, I wasn’t sure what else to concentrate on. So what if, instead, we concentrate on ensuring the rhyme and rhythm are as exact as possible? And we decide that, really, it’s not the meaning of the triplet that we want to retain, but the immediacy of its brief intrusions. That is, both for the triplet, and for the poem as a whole, we pay more attention to form. We might get a translation like this one:

New Holland 3

The scent of stone and of metal,
Sharp as a direwolf’s fangs.
In a canal’s bend,
—Remember?
The ghost of a forgotten hand,
—See? —
How the trees are pouring
Belated gold into the eaves
—Listen!—
On New Holland Island
Dwarves’ hammers strike at the leaves.
And, receiving the leaf-fall 
In chalices of its terrain,
Like Danaë herself, the city
Lies in a gold-bearing rain.

In terms of cadence, this version is the most like the original. However, in return, we have to live with some semantic changes that aren’t ideal. You can tell that there’s not really a good reason for the wolf to be a “direwolf” here, except as a way to add another syllable in a convenient location. And though “terrain” rhymes with “rain” a lot better than “Squares” does, we’ve weakened one of the central images of the poem.

The final result may be a combination of these three attempts, or none of the above. But the point I want to make is that it’s not really tenable to claim that one of these translations is more “accurate” or faithful than another. They’re just trying to reproduce different aspects of the original. Which is not to say that they’re equally good! If you have an opinion on which is best, I’d really like to hear it.

Some thoughts on translation philosophy

Recently, well, not very recently, but the timeline of this blog is what it is, let’s let that slide, I made a book of translations of my grandfather’s poetry, and showed it to people to comment. As a result, I’ve been in a position to talk about translation styles and try to defend my own. As I’ve been trying to translate more between Russian and English, I’ve started to notice that the translation “cultures” that (non-specialist. I don’t know anything about what actual professional translators think never having talked to them on the topic) English speakers and Russian speakers have with respect to translation are very different. For an English speaking person, their first division of translations are often between a good ”accurate” one that shows understanding and a bad “inaccurate” one that doesn’t. For the Russian speaking person, their first division is often between an artless “literal” translation that google can do, and a skilful “artistic” translation. I think this isn’t actually the criterion that people use to judge translations. But it is often how they frame their preferences in their mind.

The reason that I don’t think this is what people actually base their opinions on is that their preference for one translation or another doesn’t seem to correspond to how I would describe “accuracy” or “artistry” of a translation at all. I was recently reading Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz’s “19 Ways of Looking at Wan Wei”, which is an examination and critique of 19 very different translations of a single poem, an extremely interesting exercise that I encourage anyone interested in translation to look at. What I noticed, though, is that what Weinberger is complaining about in translations he doesn’t like is still present in the translations he does like. In other words, what he frames as inaccuracy or artlessness in one translation doesn’t bother him in a different translation that he likes better. All of us fall prey to the same introspective fallacy, of course, but I think it may be especially prominent in evaluating translations. And in part that may be because trying to think in terms of these divisions is tricky. 

The English division into accurate and inaccurate is hard in large part because accuracy is actually a multifaceted criterion. You can say that a translation is more or less faithful, but how you think different translations compare depends on what you think is worth preserving about the original. The poem is not just its meaning, but its meaning, register, sound, rhythm, rhyme etc., etc. You cannot give an objective score of accuracy. Of course, you can do something like that in checking semantic accuracy only. This approach has its own problems, however. A lot of translations that are “accurate” semantically end up being insipid, because total accuracy in all facets of language is impossible, and something has to be sacrificed. Often, it’s the meanings of individual words that are kept ,as that is the easiest thing to verify, and the strongest thing to object to. The problem with this approach is that the music of poetry can be lost. Here are some snippets of Russian poetry in English:

Били копыта, пели будто/Гриб грабь, гроб груб: “The hooves hit, as if singing/Mushroom, loot, coffin’s rough”

Дым из-за дома догонит нас длинными дланями: “Smoke from behind the house will catch up to us with long hands”

Буря мглою небо кроет: “The storm covers the sky with darkness”

I don’t think anyone could seriously defend these examples as the right thing to do.  And yet when you step away from the very most obvious cases, a lot of translations into English read like this.

The Russian division into artistic vs. not, on the other hand, is nebulous enough that it fails to differentiate between translation and original writing. Here is an essay by Sergey Pereslegin (in Russian) arguing for an “anagogic” translation and giving as an example Strugatsky brothers’ translations of sci-fi that (it claims) are better than the originals (thanks Eugene for the link!). Russian poetry readers have seen this phenomenon in Pushkin’s Cromwell (тихо запер я двери…), Lermontov’s Zedlitz (по синим волнам океана…) and Pasternak’s Baratashvili (цвет небесный, синий цвет…). Those are fantastic poems that significantly change the original. But it’s also easy to see the potential problem with this approach to translation, even apart from noting that most translators are not Pushkin, Lermontov, Pasternak, or the Strugatsky Brothers. Here, for instance, is an anecdote from the life of translator Jean Ray: 

Between 1933 and 1940, Ray produced over a hundred tales in a series of detective stories […]. He had been hired to translate a series from the German, but Ray found the stories so bad that he suggested to his Amsterdam publisher that he should re-write them instead. The publisher agreed, provided only that each story be about the same length as the original, and match the book’s cover illustration.

(from Wikipedia)

I don’t think this is a practice we want to engage in either. If you are a commissioned professional, you may have no choice, but if you have latitude in the choice of material for translation, and are translating something that you like, you have some responsibility to the original text, and forgetting that leads to a bad translation. For example, here’s a stanza from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is not All”:

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

And here is the same stanza in Margarita Aliger’s translation: 

Не заменяет воздуха любовь,
Когда дыханья в легких не хватает,
Не сращивает кость, не очищает кровь,
И без любви никто не умирает. 

On the topic of the connection between love and death, the translation says the exact opposite of what St. Vincent Millay does. You may think otherwise, but in my opinion that’s a big weakness in this translation, and something a more “English approach” would have avoided.

So some idea of faithfulness needs to be kept. Where I think the “Russian approach” is correct, though, is in recognizing that the translator’s responsibility is foremost to the reader. For my part, I think it’s clear there’s no “correct” philosophy of translation, and, ideally, the same original can lead to many different approaches and many translated works, that show the original in different facets. The job of the translator is to determine what is the most vital thing to keep in the translation, and work to retain that to the utmost of their ability.

Canada Day

Yesterday was Canada Day, and I was reading David Frum’s column in the Atlantic arguing for preserving the legacy of John A. MacDonald. Frum’s point was that “things are forms” and being a symbol of Canada, cancelling Sir John A. delegitimizes Canada.

His analysis of the underlying dynamic was the 60′s era hippie-punching one: some people in Canada are excited to stick it to the man and topple statues, but don’t realize that doing so undermines the structure of society. I think he’s got it exactly backwards and most people involved in this argument don’t at all care about MacDonald specifically, but are just using him as a means of deligitimizing Canada as a nation. 

And, with the finding of the residential school graves that is sure to continue, Canada as a nation is not exactly on firm ground in terms of legitimacy. This Canada day (I was heartened to see) there were definitely many more people wearing orange than red. My neighbourhood was full of “consider not shooting fireworks in support of genocide” posters and online, several times I saw my friends sharing messages aimed towards immigrants: “just because you enjoy living in Canada much more than you enjoyed living where you came from, doesn’t mean you should celebrate Canada”.

I think this means that people like Frum, who want to ensure the legitimacy of Canada as a nation (which I think I, ultimately, do too) should willingly forfeit any compromised symbols like Sir John A. MacDonald. Canada-as-a-thing is a lot easier to celebrate if its symbols are Terry Fox, or if it’s Leonard Cohen singing “Un Canadien Errant,” than if it’s about being slightly less efficient than the Americans at killing native people. In any case, civic nationalism is an exceedingly hard needle to thread without turning to ethnic nationalism. No need to up the difficulty level.

The best books I read in 2020

Given that there wasn’t much else to do, I read a lot of good books this year, but there was no single standout. I would have trouble picking a best book I read this year, and that means I also had a lot of trouble deciding what to include here, and what to omit.

Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon, 2009) I saw it pitched as Pynchon, literary star, tries genre for the first time. But that’s not it, because it’s the same FBI conspiracy story and burnout-sellout divide dynamic as Vineland. Maybe you say then Inherent Vice is not enough of a progress to something new, but this is wonderful stuff and no one else does it quite like this. The thing about Pynchon is that at heart he is not a cynic, and neither are his characters, no matter how hardboiled. Inherent Vice features P.I. Doc Sportello as he investigates a huge conspiracy at the border of the burnout-sellout world of the end of the 60’s. What at first seems like a way-too-wise attitude that suspects everyone and everything is transformed upon closer inspection into a tender compassion. This compassion and affection includes the sellouts, and is actually not at all predicated on not being sold out by them. It’s the ones that they’re being sold out to, that Sportello, and Pynchon, reserve their real hatred for. Pynchon this accessible, this mellow, and this — dare I say, almost optimistic, is a real gift.

Дом в котором (The Grey House, Mariam Petrosyan, 2009) This long, weird novel set in a boarding school for disabled youth is possibly as compulsively readable as a book where nothing really happens can be. One reason is that its interweaving timelines make it kind of a mystery: you try to pair the boys in their older avatars to some of the same boys earlier in their schooling and find pleasant surprises of recognition. But this doubling isn’t just fun in and of itself. It is also reflected in a wider spirit that pervades the writing: treating the school (referred to as the House) as a place apart, where the rules, the legends, the stories and the walls themselves are constantly rewritten, outside of the rules of time and of normality. You feel part of a lore, as if you found a manuscript of someone’s diary. And this sense of the House being apart is also seen in how Petrosyan treats the supernatural. It’s just that the House is Different: if things that wouldn’t make sense in the outside world happen there, then that’s just The Way It Is. Supernatural events are treated in a way that’s rarely seen in fiction: both as special and worthy of awe, and yet not as something that’s unexpected or up for doubting.

The Dregs of the Day (Máirtín Ó Cadhain, 1970, tr. Alan Titley) The Dregs of the Day is a novella that follows N., a man who has to plan his wife’s funeral even though two things are true: before one can do something, one must do something else first; and, one cannot rely on any help from bureaucracy or officialdom, whose first instinct is to shunt one off elsewhere and say to come back next Monday. Following N.’s meandering inability to achieve anything while he is smashed against the rocks of these two predicaments, and while he is also smashed full stop, is immensely relatable and immensely frustrating. Which feeling wins out probably has to do with how you personally feel about achieving things, and the kinds of people who do so.
Oh yeah, the fact that he is smashed the entire time is also pretty important. In other words, you can also call the Dregs of the Day the meandering comic-lyric-philosophical thoughts of a put-upon drunk who sets out on a mission, and ends up in the same place he started. Of course, as Russians, we are well-aware of this genre. But then again, it’s a mistake to think of the Dregs of the Day as essentially similar, because it is just very, very Irish. The wording is so reminiscent of jocular Joyce and especially of Flann O’Brien – and it’s unbelievable that this is kept even though Ó Cadhain wrote in Gaelic and O’Brien in English. I don’t know if that similarity would still be there if I knew Gaelic and was reading in the original, but it’s amazing to see. To unite writing traditions of the same culture but different languages in this way is a stunning achievement, and it’s a huge credit to Alan Titley’s translation how it comes through.

Sarajevo Marlboro (Miljenko Jergović, 1994-1999, tr. Stela Tomasevic) Archipelago Books is a publisher that specializes in translations of world literature, and they had a big giveaway early in the pandemic. Two books on this list (and several others I read and liked this year) are from them. If you are interested in reading more literature in translation, you should check them out. I made a point of trying to read books translated from languages I haven’t read translations from this year and I think it made my reading more interesting. Jergović is a Croat from Bosnia, who was around 30 years old at the time of the Balkan wars. In this set of mostly darkly comic stories set in Bosnia in and around the war, what stands out is a focus on the extremely minor detail. Some stories are bathed in tragicomic pathos, but most aren’t. They’re just very precise and full of odd, incongruous imagery, and an informal, realistic approach to chronicling human interaction.

A Useless Man: Selected Stories (Sait Faik Abasıyanık, 1936-1954, tr. Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe) There’s apparently a cross-cultural phenomenon of early 20th century, compassionate stories of the mundane life of the underclass and various city misfits put together with romantic lyrical descriptions of cityscapes and of nature. Everything I’ve read in this genre I’ve enjoyed, and Sait Faik is its representative for Istanbul. Stories of neighbourhood oddballs mix with tragic portraits of illness and love. Not only beautiful prose, but also an interesting window into how social relations in Turkey worked at the time. Plus, as we covered earlier, in the quotes section, Sait Faik got expelled from school for putting a needle into his Arabic teacher’s sitting cushion, which is pretty funny.

В Питере — жить! (In Piter — We live!, various authors, 2017) One of my favourite things in the world is cities. I love their intricate, interweaving connections. Human lives great and small rubbing shoulders. Grand architecture and important history, but also how the mundane palimpsest of shops and cafes, and so on, changes over time. Seeing and being in cities is definitely one thing that I missed a lot in 2020. And so I was extremely gratified to get that dose of city-ness in this book, a series of geographically themed essays by Russian writers. Given how enjoyable it was for St. Petersburg, a city whose geography I know very poorly and to which I don’t have a particularly strong connection, I think that a book like this on basically any of the great cities would be a good thing. The essays themselves are very varied, from memoir to literary criticism to song to politics. Bykov’s and Nikita Eliseev’s essays, full of allusions and quotes that send you searching names of poets, historical incidents, and everything in between, are the highlights. Tatiana Tolstaya’s essay, much like all of her political polemics, is a lowlight.

One Good Story, That One (Thomas King, 1993) I normally think I have an aversion to anything that is too preachy, and yet I loved these stories, which are, well, quite preachy. But it’s King’s gift for the cadence of storytelling that makes them worthwhile. If writing can emulate the experience of that distant relative, or just some guy you meet at some gathering who you have no idea who they are, who gathers a small group around them and goes: let me tell you a story, and then holds your attention through it all with aplomb… then it should! And well, if it turns out the story has a moral, so be it, that’s not such a bad thing, I think.

A Time of Gifts (Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1977) the account, compiled forty-some years after the fact, of an upper-middleclass Englishman who decides, at the tail end of 1933, to forgo university and instead sets out to reach Constantinople by foot. This first volume goes from the Hook of Holland to Hungary (which means, among other things, that we get a firsthand account of a foreigner travelling through Germany in early 1934). Fermor combines a talent for beautiful, lyrical prose, an amazingly large vocabulary (I have never had to look up so many words outside of a Joyce book), unparallelled erudition when it comes to art, architecture and Western European history, an admirably imperturbable attitude that accepts anything as it comes (being put up in castles, Nazis yelling at him at a bar, busking as an artist, getting wrongfully arrested for sugar smuggling, etc.), and that total obliviousness that only an Englishman or a teenager (or in this case, both) can have. An often beautiful, but at times exasperating read.

Born A Crime (Trevor Noah, 2016) I was surprised how much I enjoyed Trevor Noah’s memoirs. Frequently funny, and a window into apartheid-era South Africa that is both frightening and fascinating. On one hand, it’s a totally unlike anything I knew about, because Noah is, you know, a world famous comedian, and also a mixed-race South African. But on the other, he felt close in spirit because of how in so many situations he’s most interested in language, and language styles in the interaction. And, here once again, the gift for an oral style of storytelling comes through in writing.

From the Fifteenth District (Mavis Gallant, 1979) I always thought of Mavis Gallant as some sort of knock-off brand Alice Munro: look! she’s an old Canadian lady too! And writes realist short stories too! For the New Yorker, too! And, in truth, Munro is the better writer. But Gallant’s stories are not actually very similar to Munro’s. Instead, it’s better to think of Gallant as an Italian neorealist that somehow got put in the body of a Canadian living in Paris. If, like me, you’ve read all of Natalia Ginzburg’s short stories and started to wonder where next, Gallant has you covered. The stories are all about lives that can easily be described by one word: “desultory”. That hard disconnect between expectations of life and its realities. Gallant’s collection is a series of masterful portraits of people caught in such lives, told with understated, journalistic detachment.

The City & The City (China Miéville, 2009) China Miéville’s strength is always his absolute commitment to his invention. Here, the invention is an Eastern European city that is actually two city states whose borders overlap so thoroughly that the only way citizens can live is by “unseeing” the other city. This causes problems when an unsolvable crime is discovered in one city, and we follow detective Borlú, as he is torn between following some clues, and having to strenuously ignore others. Some might come up with that, and then use it off-hand as a metaphor for something they want to talk about in our world. Not Miéville. He is committed. When bizarre consequence after bizarre consequence of this arrangement is revealed, it doesn’t seem like a writer’s ad hoc addition, but as a natural consequence of the rules he set up. The mystery itself at first seems he thing is that is going to let this book down. Miéville is one for grand, sweeping gestures rather than subtlety. He’s the one whose political system in his first book was basically a shadowy cabal of higher-ups having meetings about how to be more evil. And so you worry that you can tell exactly where the story is heading. But he pulls off the plot masterfully, and, combined with the unique talent for setting that I mentioned, that is more than enough to make a wonderful book.

The best movies I watched in 2020

A lot of a year late and a dollar short flavour to these picks, but you know, not that much came out in 2020 so what can I do?

Parasite (기생충 2019, dir. Bong Joon-ho, trailer) I saw this movie in a theatre (remember when you could do that) and it made it more lifelike, which in this case helps a lot. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, if you haven’t seen it, you’ve read about it 100 times. It’s not a subtle movie, but neither is it a political manifesto. It is a good movie taking as its topic relationships between classes, with satire clear enough that you get it across language and culture, but never obvious enough to grate. An early-Tarantino level pace that keeps things entertaining, and lots of twists. Is it the best non-English language movie ever made? No, but it’s a really good movie, and better than 95% of Oscar winners.

Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し, 2001, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, trailer) I saw this movie when a friend hosted a movie night (remember when you etc.) and although I’d seen it before and saw several more Miyazaki movies this year (of which Porco Rosso was a highlight), Spirited Away continues to be the best one in my eyes. Our heroine Chihiro is a young girl who gets lost and whose parents get bewitched in a nighttime town which is centred around a bath complex for ghosts and spirits. The town is both warmly familiar and otherworldly strange, with a breathtaking imagery that is neither suggestive of pure evil nor of anodyne toothlessness. In fact, it is this dreamlike atmosphere where things are neither evil nor benign, that suffuses the memorable characters, and that makes the movie as great as it is.

Knives Out (2019, dir. Rian Johnson, trailer) I saw this movie on a plane (remember etc.). First and foremost, Knives Out is a hilarious and wildly entertaining Agatha Christie-esque crime thriller. Daniel Craig is having so much fun that it’s contagious, and the jokes and yarn of the plot counterbalance each other well. It also tries its hand at social commentary, but, well, what does it mean when you make what seems like a vicious skewering of the upper-middle class that everyone in the upper-middle class would delightedly agree with? It means it’s not actually landing any punches. An answer to Parasite this is not. But that doesn’t take away from how entertaining the mystery is, or how fun Daniel Craig’s performance is, or how well it all ties together. A great feel-good movie.

She’s Gotta Have It (1986, dir. Spike Lee, trailer) Please baby, please baby, baby baby please! Watch this movie! A story of a young woman who has three men and doesn’t try to hide this from any of them. The setup leads to great comedy as she ends up playing straight man to the individual foibles of each of the three, the earnest romantic, the rich playboy who’s overly into himself, and the hipster, played with jokey panache by Lee himself. It slips in and out of mockumentary format, and is shot in extremely stylish black and white with 80’s New York signifiers everywhere. It’s a little dated and kind of marred by a rape scene, but if you can forgive it that, then it’s fun and stylish and memorable.

Uncut Gems (2019, dir. Safdie Bros., trailer) Imagine having 2nd hand fight or flight response for 2 hours. Or maybe I can say it’s like having an anxiety attack, but entertaining. Adam Sandler is brilliant as a smarmy, deeply unpleasant jewelry dealer who is addicted to the rush of pulling everything off just when it looks like it will collapse. This makes him make stupid decision after stupid decision as he puts himself farther and farther out on this tightrope. This movie had me hooked the whole way, but you do feel like taking a shower afterwards just to calm down and get it out of your system.

Мой друг Иван Лапшин (My friend Ivan Lapshin, 1985, dir. Alexei German Sr., fan-made trailer) apparently Elem Klimov, when trashing this movie, called it more like brownian motion than cinema. And I would agree! For large stretches, no one is talking, or many people are saying disconnected things all at once, and it’s difficult to follow the plot, which, such as it is, is perhaps best classified as a crime drama. And yet, there is just something about this movie. Even though this movie is made in the 80’s, it feels like as real a picture of 1930’s as it’s possible to have. It feels more true than a documentary, and more real than an actual movie made in the 1930’s, or any other movie made about a particular spirit of the times that I’ve ever seen. It just feels like being transported to the 1930’s and a story people just after that time would want to tell about themselves as an illustration. My overwhelming feeling when watching this movie was gratitude that it exists, and a deep regret that cinema was invented so late in world history that we can never have movies like this about other epochs. This was my favourite movie that I saw this year.