Birds
Species observed: 166 (down from 229 in 2022)
Birding checklists: 91 (152)
Photos posted: about 358 (743)
Lifers (species first seen in 2023): Northern saw-whet owl, marsh wren, Northern harrier, Lapland longspur, Swainson’s hawk, Western meadowlark, swallow-tailed kite, anhinga, broad-winged hawk, Bicknell’s thrush, black scoter, common tern, purple gallinule, dunlin, black-chinned hummingbird, American woodcock, great horned owl
Blog posts
(Ones that weren’t just bird photos or links to items published elsewhere)
“Marginalia”
“More entries in an online commonplace book”
“My new body, three years later”
“A novelist visits the Trump Presidential Library”
“Readings” (26 June)
“Other means”
“Readings” (25 August)
“The most dangerous intelligence”
“Infinitely fine”
Books
Read to the end: 49
Abandoned: 5
Blurbed: 1
Essays
“Re-reading Raymond Carver,” The Paris Review Redux newsletter, 25 June 2023
Some products of the eighties are immortal, I realized the other night, while I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys and thinking about Raymond Carver’s short story “Careful.”
“Lost Letters,” The Paris Review Daily, 21 July 2023
Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Elizabeth Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock?
Lifts
Deadlift, 1-rep max: 290 lbs. (up from 225 lbs. in 2022)
Back squat: 240 (205)
Front squat: 160 (145)
Overhead squat: 88 (63)
Shoulder press: no 1-rep max recorded
Push press: 145 (not recorded in 2022)
Push jerk: 145 (115)
Power snatch: 83 (73)
Power clean: 135 (130)
Clean & jerk: 145 (115)
Bench press: 185 (155)
Movies seen
M3gan
Winged Migration (2003)
Showing Up
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 3
You Hurt My Feelings
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Past Lives
Asteroid City
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Barbie
Shortcomings
Oppenheimer
Passages
Killers of the Flower Moon
Afire
Priscilla
Coach to Vienna (1966)
Anatomy of a Fall
May December
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Maestro
The Holdovers
Godzilla (1954)
American Fiction
Die Hard (1988)
As will surprise no one, I am at heart a very basic sci-fi nerd, with bursts of highbrow pretension. There must have been more old movies, but this list is reconstructed from datebooks, ticket receipts, and inadequate memory.
Poems
“Sallies,” New York Review of Books, 9 February 2023
In the afternoon four black-throated blues
Tossed themselves up from the pavement at nothing.
“Pemaquid Lighthouse Revisited,” The Atlantic website, 13 August 2023
This is a place we don’t seem to mind returning to
after the dog, without him, maybe because
it looks like time made walkable.
Recipes
(Ones that were new to us, and that we liked)
Bombay frittata
Black lentils with crispy onions and labne
Rosemary white beans with frizzled onions and tomato
Buttered salmon with red onions, capers, and dill
Coconut fish and tomato bake
Za’atar roasted tofu with chickpeas, tomatoes, and lemon tahini
Mattar paneer
Sweet potato hash with tofu
Reviews
Of The Dissident by Paul Goldberg, New York Times Book Review, 6 June 2023
Weirdly, after a third character is ax-murdered, he, too, is posthumously revealed to have been gay. These fellows should be more careful!
Of Day by Michael Cunningham, New York Times Book Review, 13 November 2023
If the kindness between Cunningham’s characters stretches beyond strict verisimilitude, it’s part of their charm.
Of The New Life by Tom Crewe, New York Review of Books, 7 December 2023
Sex in Crewe’s novel, it turns out, is not so much an object of recovery as a touchstone that helps the story bridge the interval of time separating Symonds’s era from ours—the functional equivalent of a spring day, the same in 2023 as in 1894, adjusting a month or so for climate change.
Short stories
“The Ellipse Maker,” n+1, spring 2023
In another house, one is a different person, but at first one doesn’t always know who.
“The Letter,” The Paris Review, summer 2023
The paper that the letter inside was written on was college-ruled, with blue lines. Fringe ran down the left edge, where it had been ripped out of a spiral notebook.
“Keats at Twenty-Four,” The New Yorker, 11 December 2023
Maybe he had come to prefer things that resisted being brought to an end, that could be repeated or extended as long as one wanted. Birding. CrossFit. The scroll of a feed. Sometimes it seemed as if all the habits of his middle age had this character.
“Recognition,” McSweeney’s, December 2023
Away from Brooklyn, he discovered, not only did no one seem to know how he, personally, lived, but the writing life was so largely a matter of fantasy that no one even seemed capable of guessing what it was really like.
Social media
Hours of my one and only precious life, wasted: innumerable (but not on Twitter, at least)