Lexical Gap No. 58: Arsch Mit Ohren
December 2024 summary
And so we come to the end of another year.
The holidays are always a busy time for me, mostly because I’m constantly traveling, and have every year since I was 18.1 Growing up in Los Angeles and going to NYC for college meant that every December I was flying back to California to see my family before flying back to the East Coast in January. Now that I live in North Carolina and have married Bear, that means we add an additional trip back to NYC to see his parents.
There is a rhythm and ritual to this sort of travel that I love. I have many homes: my hometown (Los Angeles), the home of my formative adult years (NYC), and my physical home (North Carolina) and I love spending time in all of them. Emotionally and spiritually, this sort of homecoming is both enriching and nourishing, but physically and practically, it also means that I’m in a state of constant limbo, never quite able to settle into a routine, until I return to my actual place of residence.
Plus I miss Castor and Pollux, who are having the time of their fuzzy lives at camp.2
But it feels right to close at the end of one year and begin another with the same rituals as I have always done. Tomorrow, on the first day of the year, my family and I will watch the Rose Parade from the warmth of our couch, eat 떡국,3 visit my grandparents’ graves, and prepare for 2025.
In this issue
1. JJ’s magical world
2. Lexical gap
3. This creative life
3. What I’m reading
4. What I’m watching
5. Other things of note
lexical gap: arsch mit ohren 🧩
As I told my father this morning, the problem with social media is that at any time, I am subject to the worst takes from Ärsche mit Ohren.
this creative life ✨
It always astonishes me how much people want to know about the creative process of an artist4 because if I am honest, I frequently find myself with very little to say about the subject.
I can’t possibly talk about a novel I’m writing, because everything beyond the sentence I’m writing at the moment is provisional, and I’m not even sure how I’m going to end the sentence.
—Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices
At best, I can only talk around it—what inspires me, my feelings and frustrations with the labor and tedium of it—but of the work itself, I find myself without words. But as 2024 winds to a close, I find myself looking back on a year that has felt, well, less creative than I had wanted, and I think I know why.
But that is a conversation for another time.
what i’m reading 📖
Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion and Constant Change by W. David Marx. This was an incredibly depressing yet enlightening read that illuminated much of my current malaise toward *gestures vaguely* culture. I’m currently on a culture hyperfixation; that is, I am reading and absorbing absolutely everything I can about theories of economic, social, cultural, and moral capital. I feel as though I can now contextualize why I’ve been the feeling the way I have about the state of media and my inability to connect with a lot of it and I feel…invigorated?
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson. More hyperfixation indulgence.
“Liking What You See: A Documentary” by Ted Chiang. I can’t quite remember how I stumbled across this short story, but I think it was in the course of my hyperfixation about how social media is affecting our brains. I love the work of Ted Chiang; I think he is one the best thinkers and philosophers—as well as sci-fi writers—alive today. This particular short story is about technology that prevents humans from feeling anything about human beauty, and the arguments for and against it. Chiang is, at heart, deeply humanist, but he is always grappling with how human nature and technology interact and this story is no exception. I highly recommend all his other works too.
Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman. I think, perhaps, there is a difference between “favorite” books and “formative” ones. There are so many things about His Dark Materials that I could criticize, and yet. And yet. I can’t deny the impact Philip Pullman’s storytelling had on me as a child, and reading this book of essays (and some speeches) by an author whose voice I admire was very illuminating—not only of Pullman’s processes, but how his artistic worldview has seeped into my own merely by reading and loving The Golden Compass when I was twelve.
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. This was a Christmas gift from my little brother, and it is exactly the sort of nonfiction I love: a deep dive into a single subject. It gave me a lot of think about with regards to my own journaling practice.
what i’m watching 📺
DanDaDan. This is the best romcom I’ve watched this year don’t at me. I saw someone describe this as being part of the “paranormal goober” genre and I can’t disagree.
I Slept with 100 Men in One Day. This was…bleak tbh. Don’t really recommend it; I only scratched my curiosity itch because it was all over Twitter and I have regrets.
Nosferatu. Loved this. This was sincerely and earnestly gothic in a way I haven’t seen in a long time, perhaps since Crimson Peak. Perhaps the world wasn’t quite ready for Crimson Peak when that first released, but I think there is the glimmering of an appetite for more, well, sincere genre media. I feel we are all weary of the irony-poisoned media landscape, the nod-and-wink-at-the-audience teeheeing most genre pieces seem to indulge in, particularly comic book adaptations. Or maybe that’s just me.
other things of note 💾
Farrell, Neil and Oeffler, Sarah. “When Your Hero is a Monster.” The Leftist Cooks, YouTube. Dec 2024.
Keary, Martin. “What Facebook Has Done to Us.” Tantacrul, YouTube. Oct 2024.
“The Internet is All Over.” We’re in Hell, YouTube. Sep 2024.
See you next year,
Barring 2020, for obvious pandemic-related reasons.
What Bear and I call their boarding facility, which is located on a farm where they can run around to their hearts’ content.
Tteok-guk, or Korean rice cake soup.
Myself included! Some of my favorite parts of many, many, many BTS documentaries are the bits that show the members writing, producing, and recording their music.