Year's End 2024: Looking Back, Taking Stock, Bumbling Onward, Ha!

I began these year’s end essays in the pandemic year 2020 with no thought they would become a regular feature. The focus is on what I have been up to and plans, intimations, hopes for bumbling onward into the coming year. A love of learning traced back to when I was eight years old and read with excitement and pleasure as if it were a storybook a seventh-grade U.S. history textbook Mom brought home from the school where she worked as a secretary is undiminished as I continue the edgy trajectory into my eighth decade of being here. Pursuit of intellectual adventure and the writing life remain at the heart of this improbable existence. So too does engagement in affairs of the day dictated by conscience and integrity. Running still figures into the mix that makes me up. Values cultivated as a boy growing up in a rural community in the South Carolina countryside more than half a century ago underlie it all.

I like to think that Portable Bohemia stands in an honorable tradition of pamphleteers, gadflies, and rabble rousers unleashed on Europe with the introduction of printing with movable type and the perfection of cheap paper in the 15th century. Launched in 2016, it is a successor to my previous blogs Memo from the Fringes (2005–2008) and House Red (2010–2016). In April 2023 the publication moved from my Portable Bohemia website to Substack with hope new readers would find me here. Earlier this year I set up an account at Bluesky Social with the same aim. Both moves appear to have borne modest fruit. I am deeply appreciative and grateful for each and every subscriber, follower, and fellow traveler who checks in from time to time. You encourage me to keep at it. I hope to give you reason to keep coming back.

I use the expression going to my desk as a trope for keeping faith with the dream of being a poet and not just talking about it. That extends to writing and revising essays and poems in talking to myself moments while at home dithering, at a cafe for an espresso and journal session, on the bus, or out for a walk. In the latter I stand in good company. William Hazlitt related being told by Coleridge that

he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption. (Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets”)

The poems do not come as readily as they once did despite diligent return to the desk in pursuit of them. The ones that make it onto the page too often appear as pale shadows of earlier, better poems. Maybe I have said what I have to say in that way. Maybe, though, recent tries just need more work. It is not uncommon to find in scribbles that did not pan out on first, second, tenth, or exponentially more drafts something that can be shaped into a poem that holds up. Something keeps me at it.

“The Bar Is Crowded,” a poem from way back in my Little 5 Points era, late 1970s, early ’80s, appears in the recently published anthology Ghost Town Poetry Vol. 3 celebrating twenty years of the Ghost Town Poetry open mic in Vancouver, Washington, founded by Christopher Luna in November 2004. For a few years I rode up to Vancouver with Ric Vrana for the monthly reading. I have not made it since Ric moved to Astoria a year or several before he stepped on a rainbow in 2015. It was a good scene and safe to say still is.

Kudos to editors Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige for a collection that captures the spirit of that scene. The table of contents triggers sweet memory lane action of comrades in poetry Tommy Gaffney, Melissa Sillitoe, Mike G (Michael Guimond), Michael Shay, R.V. Branham, M.F. McAuliffe, to name a few still with us, and two we lost this year, Patrick Bocarde and Dennis McBride.

“When We Flourished” appears in counterclaim review’s Issue 4: the Unknown published earlier this month. The poem was written back around the turn of the century and racked up more than a few rejections over the years. I kept sending it out despite the rejections because I rather like it. It is nice to see it loosed in the great, wide world.

Memo from the literary desk. Memorable reading for the year just passed.

Fiction

• Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins, Transcription, and Emotionally Weird. Gosh she is good.

• Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

For Diversion (mysteries)

• Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook (new one in the Jackson Brodie series)

• Sara Blaedel, Farewell to Freedom (also published as The Night Women), The Midnight Women, and The Silent Women, featuring Copenhagen homicide detective Louise Rick and her best friend, loose cannon crime reporter Camilla Lind

• Julia Dahl, Conviction

• C.S. Harris, Who Cries for the Lost and a slew of other novels featuring Sebastian St. Cyr set in London in the early 19th century. First rate.

Nonfiction

• Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought

• Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680–1790

• Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time

• S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

Memo from the cinema desk. Memorable films.

• Christian Carion, Driving Madeleine (2024)

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Winter Sleep (2014) and About Dry Grasses (2018)

• Jafar Panahi, No Bears: Khers nist (2022)

• Jean-Paul Salomé, La Syndicaliste (2022), with Isabelle Huppert

• Hong Sang-soo, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)

• Alice Winocur, Revoir Paris (2022), with Virginie Efira

These lists are by no means exhaustive. Our age is blessed with some fine writers and filmmakers.

At Portable Bohemia the year opened with reflections on revisionist history of the attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, issues related to speech and academic freedom against the backdrop of the savage Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal response, Silicon Valley techno optimist oligarchs, war in Ukraine, rejection of the Enlightenment, slouching toward theocracy, and of course Biden’s age and the presidential campaign, a contest for the soul of America whose outcome is a dark shadow that hovers over everything. More than a few times I asked, how did it come to this?

The November election unleashed a staggering procession of scoundrels, scallywags, cranks, clowns, and wantwits tapped to fill cabinet posts and other positions in the next administration. The welcome overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was offset by Israel’s move into the Golan Heights in furtherance of Netanyahu’s goal of regional hegemony. The once and future president is maneuvering to claim credit and promote himself for the Nobel Peace Prize if a ceasefire in Gaza comes to pass.

The Russian tyrant so admired by the man who received a plurality of the popular vote in November continues his unrelenting campaign of devastation in Ukraine at tremendous cost to his own country. The strategy appears to be to keep it up until January 20 in anticipation that the new regime will turn its back on Ukraine. Betrayal is in the offing.

Into December the year grinds down on the grim note that is its mark with a terrorist assassination in Midtown Manhattan and a shooting at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin. The assassin is feted on social media. The school shooter is a fifteen-year-old girl who then took her own life. I cannot fathom what might have brought her to this terrible place or the nihilism that prompts celebration of terror. Unlike J.D. Vance I refuse to accept that such acts are facts of life.

Drones over New Jersey. December also brought a wave of mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey and along the Atlantic coast. Speculation from one member of Congress has it they are “coming from an Iranian ‘mothership’ in the Atlantic” (Jeff Van Drew, R-NJ), while another opines there is a “non-trivial” chance the Chinese commies are involved (Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill).

• Bernd Debusman Jr, What we know about mysterious drones over New Jersey and other states, BBC News, December 19, 2024)

This is a textbook case for application of Ockham’s razor: “Plurality should not be posited without necessity”; or, don’t go looking for a more complicated explanation when there is a simpler one that will do. In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, I am satisfied what we have here are small manned aircraft and idiots playing with drones. Unless they are spacecraft from Mars come to take Elon Musk home.

Gosh, this stuff just keeps coming:

THE MONROE MORON DOCTRINE:…Trump, over the weekend, directly threatened to take full control of the Panama Canal after the country’s president insisted that it would remain under Panamanian sovereignty…As for Greenland, Trump has previously mused about buying the autonomous territory from Denmark. And he did so again, calling it an “absolute necessity” for national security. (William Kristol, Andrew Egger, The Credulity Olympics, The Bulwark, December 23, 2024)

Throughout the year many good citizens were called by a sense of civic responsibility to volunteer with groups like Indivisible Oregon, canvassing, phone banking, and writing letters to get out the vote in November. In a message to the Indivisible community after the election (The 2024 Election), the group’s organizing team assessed our efforts and the outcome without flinching:

For eight years, we’ve been activating volunteers, advocating to our Members of Congress, and working to elect our chosen leaders by knocking [on] doors, phonebanking, and writing letters. Together, we flipped the House in 2018. We defeated Trump and won a federal trifecta in 2020. We beat back the much-vaunted “red wave” of 2022.

This year’s election didn’t yield the results that we needed nationwide.

Nonetheless, in Oregon we helped defeat a MAGA Republican and elect the state’s first black representative to the House, Janelle Bynum. In the last two weeks of the campaign volunteers knocked on 75,000 doors for Bynum. She won by roughly 10,500 votes, a margin of 2.8 percent.

• We defended Oregon's other competitive congressional race (OR6), re-electing Representative Andrea Salinas

• We defended the competitive congressional race across the river (WA3), where our volunteers first teamed up with locals to run canvasses and knock [on] doors in 2018

• We called swing voters in Arizona, where our State Legislative candidates are poised to win and our Congressional candidate came within a handful of votes

The team’s message closed with this salutary advice: “As we look ahead, we encourage you to do what’s right for you. You may need to take a break from activism to catch your breath. Or you may be ready to take action right now.”

I will continue to pass along information and suggestions for activism in newsletters on the first and fifteenth of each month for those ready to get back into the fray. This sort of thing:

• Jessica Craven, Chop Wood, Carry Water: newsletter “dedicated to saving democracy, addressing the climate crisis, preserving our freedoms, electing better lawmakers, and, in general, creating a better country—one simple action at a time.”

• Indivisible Oregon Calls to Action

• Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink

I would love to hear about what others are doing and any tips you have to offer that I might share.

Bumbling onward, ha! Things will likely get worse on the political front before they get better. No doubt much that is written here will be anything but “a cheering light unto our souls” (Keats, “Endymion”). My intention, my instinct, is to persist nonetheless, to throw what light I can on efforts to undermine our constitutional republic that is at once noble and flawed, to appeal to the better angels of nature, to stand steadfast in our fight for freedom, justice, the general welfare and common good, plain decency.

The year’s dreary slog through the political muck was lightened by moments of grace found in books and film, in coffee shops and museums, at Portland Japanese Garden, Gresham’s Tsuru Island Japanese Garden, on the slopes of Mt. Tabor, chance encounters wandering around my city, books by friends, Greg Bigler’s Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest: Tales from the Euchee Reservation and Jim Stevens’s memoir Mill Hill Scientist, the camaraderie and magnificent spirt at Indivisible Oregon events, and most of all family and friends, my brother and sister-in-law, nieces and nephews, cousins, some painters and some poets scattered around the country, and others too many to name. I look forward to more of this too in the coming year.

With Emily Brontë “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading.” And I write, think, and engage in the inescapable fray of this moment in the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt