23 of the best of '23

nostalgia is a disease, etc

Breaking with the daily ten to do something a bit longer and different. 2023 was a strange year, proving largely that for every visible success, something somewhere else suffers. I think about this a lot. I made a friend laugh last night when I told them the last six months had been some of the worst, they reminded me they’d read The Last Days. Maybe I was being hyperbolic. In an effort to feel better about the year, here’s 23 highlights across things I saw, heard, read and ate, as well as a preview of some things I’m really looking forward to in ‘24.

READ

BRET EASTON ELLIS - The Shards (Swift Press)

Sick, slick, playful and a little bit filthy, The Shards puts Bret Easton Ellis back at the top of his game, when a typically unreliable narrator named Bret throws reality into question in a similar way Patrick Bateman does in American Psycho. In The Shards, Easton Ellis acts again as a kind of archivist, capturing and recreating a lost LA.

NICK LAIRD - Up Late (Faber)

I’ve already said a lot about the titular poem in this collection, so I won’t say anything else other than the whole of Up Late marks a very good poet making a bid for greatness. I think with this collection Laird really hits his stride. There’s violence, there’s nature, there’s frustration, grief, and nostalgia. The poem, Property is a notable inclusion, especially the line; Cocteau was asked if his home was on fire, what one thing would he save? The fire, he said, only the fire.

RICHARD MILWARD - Man-Eating Typewriter (White Rabbit)

In a similar vein to The Shards, Man-Eating Typewriter is also playfully depraved. Working firmly within language, Milward deploys Polari as both a plot and character device, setting a game in motion over the course of 600+ pages. Normally I’m not a fan of footnotes, reading too much David Foster Wallace has that effect, but I’ll make the exception for Milward, whose use of footnotes ensures the emergence of a dual counter narrative. I detect a theme here in the fiction I was impressed by this year, no surprise since I’ve written two highly unreliable narrators.

OLIVER MOL - Train Lord (Penguin Michael Joseph) // JOE GIBSON - Seventeen (Simon and Schuster)

Train Lord tells the story of Mol’s near year long debilitating migraine and how working as a train guard helped him recover. It’s an odd premise for a book, so strange I was sure it wouldn’t work. I was wrong. Mol is an exceptional writer, the rhythm of the prose combines with the gorgeous way he tells a stark and at times unsparing story both of his own pain and the pain he often encounters on the railway results in a rare book. The rule I had when reading this was that I would only read it when I was on trains, I cried on the tube, on the way to Wales, on the way back from Edinburgh, afterwards evangelically pressing it on many people. I also have done similar with Joe Gibson’s startling Seventeen, a memoir of a boy’s affair with his teacher and the catastrophic fallout. I’m aware this sounds like I’m sensationalising it, but that’s partly the point of the book - what happens when a teenager’s fantasies come true, and who really wields the balance of power in a relationship like this. (These two books count as one entry otherwise my maths will be thrown of, made companion pieces by my evangelical tendencies.)

ADELE BERTEI - TWIST (Ze Books)

Ze Books, founded by Michael Zilka of Ze Records, launched here in April, the same night as Canongate’s 50th birthday, smack in the middle of LBF and the same week Ava Anna Ada was announced - it was some week. Bertei’s TWIST tells of her early childhood, a story of maternal madness, religious maltreatment and sexual intolerance. With such heavy themes, TWIST could run the risk of being brutal, but Bertei’s expert storytelling exists as a true testament to the imagination as a means of survival.

HEARD

Made an effort to try and see more live music this year, I used to be found at a gig most weekends before kids and living in the countryside meant I got out the habit. I left the countryside, the kids got bigger. Live music became easier. Regret not seeing Decius or Heartworms this year, but below are some highlights.

RICHARD DAWSON - The Barbican

A real sense of Dawson acting as a conduit to something truly ancient, more an act of divination than a concert, I sat awed by the intensity of what I was experiencing. Although to say that is also to undermine Dawson’s skill as a musician, he’s such a technically accomplished guitarist that watching him is the kind of mesmerising experience only made possible by watching someone at the top of their game.

FAT WHITE FAMILY - Electric Brixton

Not much that can be said about The Fat Whites, other than they’re consistently one of the most engaging live bands around. Punk often gets used in connection with bands it probably shouldn’t, but the Fat White Family channel the pure energy and ethos of punk live at the Electric Brixton in September, with Lias Saoudi more of a performance artist than simply frontman. In a way, Saoudi’s performance renders us all dirt, exposing and eliminating shame and the shameful charade of our daily performances. Afterwards, I’m subjected to the talk in the toilet line, he’s got a lot of vocal female fans, that Lias, who want to do all kinds of terrible things to him.

DAVID HOLMES - Andrew Weatherall 60 at Fabric

Beautiful night of celebrating what would’ve been Andrew Weatherall’s 60th at Fabric presided over by a slew of djs, but it was Holmes who stole the show in a room so packed dancing was difficult. Sometimes it’s the holy communion of a room full of strangers, all sweating in each other’s faces, that’s exactly what you need. Left around 2 under a full moon, felt auspicious. Likely wasn’t. Holmes’s subsequent album, Blind on a Galloping Horse (Heavenly) became one of my favourites of the year.

MULL HISTORICAL SOCIETY - Wigtown Book Festival

Maybe a book festival on the remote west coast of Scotland isn’t where you expect to find a great musical experience, but Wigtown specialises in the unexpected. There to chair and unable to get home due to train strikes, Saturday night found me in a tent as the wind stormed outside, Colin MacIntyre on stage singing an acoustic rendition of Animal Cannabus, a song that kept me company in Amsterdam in the early noughties. The line don’t leave me caged up, I’ll face it in my own little ways, was one I kept returning to after I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that keep you alive.

YOUNG FATHERS - Somerset House/Hammersmith Apollo

Being from Edinburgh, Young Fathers have been on my radar for ages, but this was their breakthrough year. Although musically they’re very different to The Fat White Family, the same don’t give a single fuck attitude pervades their live performances. There’s something startling about Young Fathers live: the energy, the tension, their sheer stage presence. I think their performance at the Apollo was better than Somerset House, partly sound is hard in an outdoor performance but also because the second time around they engaged the crowd more, the whole crowd was dancing. It was pretty special. Not bad for some boys from Leith.

SAW

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD - Complicite, The Barbican

An astonishing adaptation of Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel with expert staging and lighting using minimal props, I could barely believe what I saw. It was one of those live experiences that stops you in your tracks. If it’s a cliché to say I left changed, it’s also true. Each performance varied depending on the day, so you had a real sense of just how temporal and provisional what you were watching was, this ephemeral nature of the performance only heightened how special it was.

PAST LIVES - Celine Song, Barbican cinema

Past Lives should come with a warning not to see it in the wake of, I don’t know, a breakup, or a big life event, or just when feeling raw. Celine Song’s directorial/writing debut is a masterpiece of understatement. I wrote, after I saw it, about how daringly she uses silence in the now famous Uber scene. I think often of this scene, and how so many people left before the lights came up, everyone trying to conceal the fact of many tears. One friend described to me later how the friend he was watching it with thought he was having a fit, he cried so much. Certainly, there was some ugly sobbing going on. Definitely not from me.

PHILIP GUSTON - Tate Modern

It was the earliest works in the Guston show that got to me the most. His later work felt pervaded by a sense of sadness, the repeated colours and motifs spoke of an artist stuck, dissatisfied with his work, unable to move on until he exhausted the subject at hand. Perhaps this discomfort was intensified by a feeling of stuckness with my own work, but Guston’s early figurative painting came as a surprise. His willingness to make himself ugly and to subject himself to the same degree of scrutiny he subjected others to is something I will take into my own work.

LAMB - Valdimar Johannsson

Telling the story of a couple recently bereaved of their daughter Ada, Lamb reads like the synopsis of Ava Anna Ada, I love this strange coincidence, but this is where the similarities end. When a ewe gives birth to a lamb with human characteristics, horror slowly unfolds. The Icelandic landscape serves as a character, adding to the sense of the couple’s isolation, although this isolation also serves as a sanctuary. Usually I’m pretty good at guessing where a film’s going, but this ending was so unexpected I had to watch it twice just to check I’d really seen what I just had.

BRAIN FOREST QUIPU, Cecilia Vicuna, Turbine Hall

Was lucky enough to see Cecilia Vicuna direct the hanging of this in 2022, laying out and delicately unwrapping long metres of Quipu as a mother might a child, or an undertaker would enshroud a body. The use of hanging textiles seeming to disintegrate as they hung spoke both of the body and my personal circumstances. The first time I saw them hanging, I began to cry, hastily concealing the fact it moved me to tears. Something deeply disturbing and moving about the use of Quipus, the impossibility of decoding any communication but also the subversion behind how every day objects have been used to carry messages for centuries.

ATE

In a recent posthumous interview in The Paris Review, Louise Gluck is quoted as saying all anorexics love food. She’s not wrong. I love the conviviality of eating food with people I love, the conversation, the anticipation, the night getting long, but really, just the pleasure of it all. No one says that do they, that they just like a thing because of how it makes them feel. It strikes me now this whole run down is centred around the senses, although, thankfully and wisely, I will not outline five things I enjoyed touching this year. No. Five excellent places I enjoyed eating at were, in no particular order:

Trullo, Islington

Rochelle Canteen, Shoreditch

Wavey Bar, St Leonards, East Sussex

The Good Life Society, Hawarden, Wales (I love this place passionately)

Compton Arms, Islington.

This was much harder than it sounds. Bayte in St Leonards also gets an honourable mention for the best cake I’ve encountered in a very long time, perhaps ever, and I hardly like cake.

In anticipation, 2024

Two books I think people will love in ‘24 are I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (Little Brown) by Keiran Goddard, a beautiful book I read when I was waiting for scary (and all fine) tests results alone in August, which isn’t what makes it good. It’s good because Goddard is pathologically incapable of writing a bad sentence, drawing together the lives of five characters to build a portrait of class, change, and what happens when dreaming’s no longer possible. The second, is a memoir, Strange Things Are Happening (White Rabbit) from Richard Norris, which I’ve been anticipating ever since I knew it was in the works. Strange Things are Happening is so vibrant, so full of colour and life, that I recommend buying it when it comes out in March and then re-reading it in the depths of a nasty damp winter.

The other thing I’m anticipating isn’t a book, but is more an overall list from Ortac Press. Ortac are a young indie publishing house consistently publishing innovative, high quality work across fiction and non-fiction that should be the envy of larger publishers.

And those are the highlights of 2023. Of course there were other things, but culturally, those are the things that stuck in my mind. Often a good litmus test. I won’t be resolving anything for next year. Although I’m not content with being the mess I often (think) I am, barrelling from one disaster to the next, I’m not about to make any proclamations about changing it. I think it was Jonathan Safran Foer who said people don’t change, they just reveal themselves to you, which is true and something many people would do well to remember, both in relation to themselves and others. I have revealed new parts of myself to myself this year, likely will next, but have I changed? Well. And thinking now of Jonathan Safran Foer, reminds me that this year I also saw for the first time a Joseph Cornell birdbox, the kind Safran Foer structured a whole story collection around. I could not believe I was in the same room as it, but I also can’t tell the story of it, so I’ll stop.