My Yearnotes for 2020

This year…What is there to even say. So many people have suffered, some much more than others. I’m as okay as anyone can hope to be these days, and mostly, I  just feel like everyone else I know: tired, anxious, alternative angry and scared. I tried to take stock of my year, and found some things that anchored me, or kept me going, or of which I felt proud. AND, I know that for many people, this was the worst year of their lives, or the last. Stay safe everyone, and take care of each other.

• Professionally, I did some things that were pretty fulfilling:

  • At the Yager Museum, we found ourselves with galleries, exhibits, and programs, and no way for people to safely see them. So much of the year was a substantial exercise in improvisation and frustration, but we did get some interesting work done:
    • We hosted John O’Connor for an evening of political folk music from the history of American radicalism.
    • After years (literally) of hard work, I was finally able to bring the artwork of Luke Swinson and Cathie Jamieson to the Yager Museum for an exhibit called “dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share Stories." We also interviewed Luke and Cathie live over zoom and facebook.
    • With an enterprising student (thanks Audrey!), we put together a video series called “The Yager Through Your Eyes” showcasing pieces of the collection that members of the Hartwick community found particularly appealing.
    • I taught Collections Management (partially in person and partially virtually) and co-taught Collectors and Collecting (hybrid). Teaching on-line sucks, and trying to balance on-line and in-person teaching sucks even more.
    • I coordinated the acquisition (and eventual accession) of material excavated from Hartwick Seminary, with the hope of making it usable for exhibits and research.
  • An article on Marxism and Historical Archaeology that I co-wrote with the mighty LouAnn Wurst, appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology.
  • I served as a panelist for DEC grant funding, awarding grants to Central New York arts projects and organizations.

• I watched, read, and listened to a lot of stuff this year:

  • Normally I’m a person who likes going to the movies, but of course that’s gone by the wayside this year. I did manage to see The One I Love, It Comes at Night, Coherence, Ghost Stories, Atterados, The Color out of Space,Tickled, and (finally) Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker. For TV, Alanna and I watched Sex Education, Schitt’s Creek, Atlanta, Letterkenny, and a lot of re-runs (MASH, mostly).

  • We did take the opportunity to share some movies we loved as kids with our son, on those Sunday afternoons where all of us were too tired to do much else. We watched Back to the Future, Clash of the Titans, Princess Bride, Home Alone, Ghostbusters (1 and 2), and certainly more that I can’t remember.

  • I bought a lot of music this year, largely on bandcamp Fridays, in which the website waived its fees so that artists would get more money while COVID is straining creative incomes. I picked up albums by Hallelujah the Hills, Rhiannon Giddens, the Mountain Goats, Our Native Daughters, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, Waxahatchee, Kimya Dawson, Shabazz Palaces, clipping, Special Interest, Dogleg, Bambara, Deadly Snakes, Windborne, Run the Jewels, Finest Kind, and John Fahey.

  • I read 58 new books, totalling around 14,000 pages. That’s a new personal best for me, at least for as long as I’ve been keeping track. Some particular highlights included:  

    • We Who are About to…” by Joanna Russ. This is a feminist critique of space exploration science fiction, wrapped up in a meditative, thoughtful novel about choice and freedom.
    • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff and The Broken Hours by Jacqueline Baker. Grouped together because they both tackle and revise HP Lovecraft in interesting and critical ways. For Ruff, Lovecraft’s racism and broad reach offer an opportunity for inversion–20th century genre fiction seen through an African-American lense. For Baker, the Lovecraft family’s experiences with mental illness present a vantage point for seeing early 20th century Providence as a space of haunted minds and listless, impoverished bodies, and people telling stories to stave off a reckoning of their failures.
    • The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, who continues to run away with the title of “best horror novelist” by managing to write creepy, unexpected, and deeply human works. “Cabin…” is no exception, utilizing a home invasion narrative as a way to ponder what architecture we build in our minds to make sense of suffering and chaos, and how 24-hour media both supports and warps that process. A prescient book in the age of science-denial, QANON, and conspiratorial racist violence.
    • I read some great non-fiction this year, including Epidemics and Enslavement by Paul Kelton, The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, and House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture by John Bloom.

  • My go-to podcasts continued to be WTF w/ Marc Maron, Intercepted, Greetings Adventurers, Why is this Happening?, and Pseudopod.

  • However, this year, I was delighted to also get hooked on

    • Explorers Wanted, a Numenera actual-play podcast run by my old friend The Minister of Intrigue and a delightful player-cast;
    • Double-Threat, a comedy-podcast with Tom Scharpling and Julie Klausner, which probably gave me more laugh-out-loud moments than anything else I encountered;
    • Blowback, Weird Studies, The Memory Palace, Our Opinions are Correct, Scaredy Cats, Louder than a Riot, and the BBC Radio 4 Lovecraft Investigations of Charles Dexter Ward, Whisperer in Darkness, and Shadow Over Innsmouth.

• This was a year of wild politics, alternatively hopeful and demoralizing. We tried to show up and support righteous people when we could, and gave money when we couldn’t. We took our kids to the Rallies for Black Lives in Binghamton and Delhi, which felt like a small but consequential thing. I also made some phone calls and wrote some postcards trying to help put decent people into positions of power.

• I tried very hard to hard to write fiction, but found that I had little time and little energy for creative endeavors. I finished one short story and am currently revising another, for a total of around 12,000 words. So much for my goal of writing ten stories (!)

• This was a year spent mostly at home, and as such, we tried to make our home comfortable and pleasant with some improvements to the interior, in furniture and fencing and growing our garden and backyard.

• I lost some weight; around 20 pounds. Of course, much of it was weight I gained towards the end of last year, but loss is loss.

• My wife and I celebrated our ten year anniversary. Here’s to ten, twenty, a hundred more!

• I got to see my friends, the Minister of Intrigue, and Nate (aka 1/2 of House Shuttle–Hi Emily too!) at friendly but safe distances.

Like many of us, I spent the year with my family.  I got to watch, be with, and be inspired by my children up-close, in ways I wouldn’t have if daycares and schools were up and running. My wife and I did our best to take care of each other, and it’s moments like this, when the times are dark, that I’m eminently grateful and lucky to have married someone so clear-eyed, funny, and loving.

Here’s to a new year as a new day dawning, for us all.