What Grabbed Me This Year

A short, non-curated list

Photo: Bart Gulley

How do we want to live this coming year? The question is more loaded than usual because of the non-choices the pandemic has foisted upon us. These in turn have led us to make conscious choices that are in the process of changing our very culture. 

For example, The Great Resignation we’ve been looking at this last month has been shaped by these massive cultural changes, including the discontent that led millions of people to decide, “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

In a reflective mood as this unpredictable year draws to a wildly unpredictable close –– holiday plans blown up, students in quarantine holding Covid-only parties that require positive test results–– I decided in this newsletter to offer a decidedly non-curated list of cultural contributions that have shaped my thinking and inspired me during the rollercoaster that was 2021. 

Favorite New Newsletter: Jay Caspian Kang

Kang came to my attention last year with Ball Don’t Lie, his insightful review of Robert Scoop Jackson’s excellent book The Game is Not a Game, which offers a black journalist’s perspective on power dynamics in the NBA. As a young Korean-American trying to place himself in the confusing dynamics of American culture, Kang found inspiration in Jackson’s riffing, jazz-inflected style to which he gives his own distinctive cultural twist.

This year, he premiered a weekly newsletter in the New York Times, which I’ve avidly followed. Topics range from how big city mayors of color are leading the effort to re-fund the police to the role of debate in teaching kids to think, from the impact of new immigrant communities on suburbs to how #vanlife is reshaping travel. I value Kang for his eclecticism, his range, his youthful perspective and his cool yet engaged perspective. He’s expanded my appreciation of diversity while giving me intimations of how the next generation will call the shots.

Columnist of Note: Sally Jenkins

Sally Jenkins writes about sports for the Washington Post. To my mind she has as much to say about leadership as anyone writing about the topic. I’ll be exploring her columns on the polar opposite approaches of NFL coaches John Harbaugh (Baltimore Ravens) and Urban Meyer (Jacksonville Jaguars) over the next month, but I also want to give her a shout out for taking sports commentary to the next level. 

When I was young in New York in the 70s, people were always asking “why are the best writers drawn to sports?” It was the golden age of sportswriting, dominated by giants like Frank Deford and Red Smith––  white men, often southern, who wrote beautifully but were often reluctant to consider sports in the kind of political and social context that is front and center today. Jenkins could not offer more of a contrast. A superb stylist who goes right to the issues, she’s truly a sportswriter for our times.

Who I’ll Miss: Joan Didion

Speaking of being young in New York in the 70s, it’s almost impossible to overstate the impact Joan Didion had on me and all the aspiring female writers I knew in that decade and beyond. Yes, her personal style beguiled us––the glamorous marriage, the frangipangi leis from long stays at the Royal Hawaiian, the export china inherited from countless aunts, the banana-colored Corvette, the black turtlenecks, the gorgeous baby. But it was the sheer poetic weight of her words on paper that kept us spellbound. 

I can recite by heart about half the sentences in her classic 1968 collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Its intimations of the unsettling impact the 60s would have on the next half century proved prophetic. And as many of the obituaries that appeared following her death December 23 noted, we now live in the divided and often rootless world that she foresaw. Fortunately, the typical “Didion woman” who populated her fiction–– chic, frightened, aimless and given to spectacularly poor decisions–– is far less in evidence these days. To me that only underlines how women have been able to rise during the time of uncertainty that Didion captured for the ages.

Surprising Film: Being Julia 

I love movies– on the big screen. Not on our medium-sized tv and certainly not hunched over my computer. The immersion, the darkness, the complete lack of temptation to multitask or hit the pause button, the strangers in the seats around me and of course the hot buttered popcorn are all key to the movie experience for me. In the pandemic, the Crandell, the wonderful old theater in our village of Chatham NY, was closed, but it reopened last fall with limited seating. I returned with joy and saw some enthralling movies, but my favorite was this documentary on Julia Child. 

I’ve been cooking Julia’s recipes for many decades and have always been captivated by the story of how she moved to France in the late 1940s, discovered French food and let her life be changed by that discovery. But this documentary introduced me to Julia the media innovator, the sharp businesswoman with a firm commitment to ethics, the astute negotiator and the skilled and generous mentor. It showed me Julia as someone who gracefully accepted setbacks and disappointments (she couldn’t have children, her friends didn’t much like her husband, she endured painful and disfiguring cancer, she got old), never giving a moment to self-pity. Instead, she positioned herself as pioneer, leader, transformative influence on the culture and–– to me–– a hero for all time.

Contrapuntal Music: Afro Cubano

The lockdown took me off the road, where I’d been spending about 40 weeks each year. Suddenly, I was home all the time, working through the day and making dinner every night. I love cooking for its own sake but also because it frees me to assign KP duty to my husband Bart, who stepped up and made the kitchen sparkle. He dealt with the boredom of night-after-night clean up by downloading all the Afro Cubano music he could find. Together we blasted through everything from 1930s son music to classics like Reuben Gonzales, Cachao, the Afro-Cuban All Stars, and Ibrahim Ferrer and on through the hip hop influenced Orishas. Bart, who’s spent the pandemic learning Spanish, whales on pots and pans with wooden spoons and steel spatulas, turning clean up into drumming practice, while I flounder with the complex rhythms of clave as I try to improvise dance steps. It makes for lively evenings in our old country farmhouse. One more unexpected, literally contrapuntal gift in an unexpected time.