Sycamore Press 2024 Needlessly Long Year–in–Review Jamboree

I just want to say that I am not legally liable for whatever may have happened this month if you took my advice “don’t even pay rent until you’ve read the newsletter” seriously.

I have a wonderful life. I do pretty much what I want, and the only real problem I ever have is wondering what that is.

— Brian Eno, in the introduction to his published 1995 diary

Some December Updates

December was at once a marathon and a whirlwind, but mostly in a positive way (at least in retrospect). The events of that month illustrated a principle which I am trying to bear in mind more often: I always have to fail a little bit at something. It’s easy to get frustrated when I find myself coming up short in a certain area of my life, but, on reflection, I usually find that it can be explained by me putting more of my energy somewhere else. When I look back, I usually agree with how I prioritized things, even when the consequences of that compromise can be disheartening in the moment.

Suffice to say, it was not a super productive month for me at work. It seems to get this way in December. That’s OK — it afforded me the time and energy to socialize quite a lot. Or, I chose to prioritize socializing, I guess. I joined a cool student org for music discussion, which has been great so far even though most (all?) members are undergrads, which probably makes me the oldest at most of the meetings.

We also hosted friend of the email list Griffin once again! As always, he was a benevolent ray of light (even as he was recovering from a poorly-timed infection of the tonsils). Like so many of my friends, he’s always putting me on to something. Thanks to him, I can now appreciate some of the genius of TV’s Lost. Also, the They Might Be Giants cover of Bills Bills Bills, which has been stuck in my head this afternoon.

Holiday travel was a hoot and also saw me reconnecting briefly with a few beloved friends (although, really I have come to think of many of you as family, full-stop). I’m sorry to those of you I didn’t get the chance to see. I am reminded both how thankful I am for this newsletter for bringing us together over the great distance and also how much it pales in comparison to kicking it IRL. May we all live in adjoining row houses connected by pneumatic tubes one day.

Overall holiday stress, while substantial, was ultimately pretty manageable. That said, I now have to contend with all the year-end stuff that I put off. Writing this newsletter is definitely one of those, so let me try to recap this year a bit while you all still have the stomach for this sort of thing.

Oh, and in case you missed it, I published another webcomic. Griffin can attest to the amount of dust-related research I did to get this one just right for the fans.

My 2024 in Books

I’ll omit (except by way of paralipsis) the usual preamble about being happy to have read more books this year. I will make explicit however that, while I did not put up impressive numbers this year in the slightest, I often felt so grateful to have books both as a pastime and as objects. I love that not all of my sedentary hours have to be spent looking at a backlit screen (as I am right now — hmmm).

I played to my reading strengths a lot this year in terms of my preference for short chapters or other closely-spaced breakpoints in the text. It helps me to stay motivated and to keep my place. The vignettes offered in James Joyce’s Dubliners (which I think I actually started in 2023) not only introduced new characters and plotlines with each story but also varied the structure and perspective of the different narratives in interesting ways. This ended up setting the stage for some of my later reading, including Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was a whole different ball game and spoke to his boundary-pushing craft. I’ll give Ulysses a shot in 2025.

The first half of the year was packed with favorites. An easy standout was Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. It made me shake my head and chuckle — like, “huh?!” It made me think about Jacobean revenge plays. It made me think about the mail. I emphatically recommend this book.

A copy of The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza was entrusted to me by a very dear friend. The book was intriguing and stimulating in all the ways you’d hope, and, emotionally, it also just totally destroyed me. I think the words just found me at the right moment. Thank you.

The Brothers Karamazov seemed formidable at first but, while there were some slow, building passages, it was an out-and-out page-turner for most of the text. It's packed with tragic and hilarious characters who felt astonishingly vivid.

Kenzaburo Ōe is a big fave of mine (also gonna read more of his stuff in ‘25 — I got a copy of The Silent Cry for X-mas), but I can’t really recommend his 2000 novel The Changeling unless you’re somewhat invested in him already (or in the life and work of his brother-in-law Juzo Itami who created films like Tampopo and upon whose untimely death this narrative is based). It’s long, ruminative, and deeply personal. Thankfully, I was traveling and had a lot of quiet hours to churn through it.

The Apple in the Dark introduced me to Clarice Lispector, and you wanna talk about ruminative? I have never read prose quite like Lispector’s, and she holds nothing back in this book. It is a tour de force of introspection. Every sentence seems like either a riddle, a deeply personal revelation into my life specifically, or an image of unspeakable beauty. More than any of the other books on this list, I wish I could read this in its original language. Damn if the thing didn’t take me a long time though.

My fall and winter reads were good too, but there were fewer standouts. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism seems more relevant than ever, which is a bummer given that it came out over 15 years ago. And also ‘cause, well, y’know. It was (one of?) the only non-fiction read(s) for me — something I’m planning to change. Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa was a delightful short read. There were a few others, which I probably mentioned in the monthly letter when I read them, but I have nothing more to say on this matter besides that I have a lot of great reads lined up for this year.

My 2024 in Music

This was the first full year that I tracked my listening on Last.fm. I actually contemplated quitting recently because I hate always thinking about the stats in the back of my mind while I’m trying to listen to music (I always put up puny numbers too because of the way I listen to music), but it ended up being a great resource for me while writing this section!

I didn’t keep up with that much new music, but I “got into” particular artists or genres in phases over the year which saw me discovering many of what I’d now call my favorite tunes. I had a big ~90s emocore and post-hardcore moment, a bit of an avant-prog/Rock In Opposition moment, a long Pinback/Rob Crow moment, et cetera. At the same time, I also had phases of obsessing over particular songs. Many were not even my most played songs of the year because my listening sprees were so specific to a particular span of time. Here are the earworms that I had on repeat through 2024 in roughly chronological order (also sorry for no playlist link).

Sea Life Park - Panel Beater
Steely Dan - The Caves of Altamira
Cheer-Accident - Smile
Cindy Lee - Kingdom Come
Jonathan Richman - Parties in The U.S.A
Carseat Headrest - Bodys
Quelle Chris & Chris Keys - GRAPHIC BLEED OUTS
Fennesz - Caecilia
Aksak Maboul - Palmiers en Pots
Portraits of Pase - Bang Yer Head
Jonathan Richman - Down in Bermuda
The Beach Boys - Vega-Tables
They Might Be Giants - Women & Men
Pinback - Tripoli
Salle Gaveau - Nullset
Heavy Vegetable - Cotton Swab
Built to Spill - Cleo

As for 2024 releases, I mostly listened to (and enjoyed, to varying degrees) the following records:

Howie Lee - At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery
Adrianne Lenker - bright future
Nala Sinephro - Endlessness
Still House Plants - If I don’t make it, I love u
RiTchie - Triple Digits [112]
Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee
*Kassie Krut - Kassie Krut
*More Eaze - lacuna and parlor
(*but only listened in the past week, i.e. 2025…)

I also took in a lot of brat, as you can imagine, by being a person living in the world. I love the music, but my weird habit of avoiding whatever the cultural zeitgeist is at the moment kept me from listening to it too much in my free time.

My 2024 in Life Accomplishments

More so than in previous years, I wrapped up 2024 feeling mostly proud of the months behind me:

I advanced to candidacy status in my PhD program. I started therapy.
I acquired more idiosyncrasies. (Toe socks, sitting on the floor…)
I “got into” a lot of stuff (tiling window managers, GNU Emacs, the aforementioned music, using a cheap old digital camera…)
I powered through some awkward hair growth phases.
I made time for creative endeavors in a way that was exciting and worked for me.
I shared the results of my creative endeavors, even when they kinda sucked.

That last point is actually worth dwelling on a second, so

My 2024 in Creative Endeavors

One of my first creative projects of the year was actually a gift: a little handmade variety Christmas zine I would deliver about two months late, to be exact. I wanted it to be a genuinely enjoyable read. I thought I’d include some little comics and doodles.

Pretty soon after I was having a lot of fun just playing around drawing little cartoon freaks. It was a kind of escapism too. When I was feeling lonely, I thought of all of the unique and quirky personalities of my friends from college and imagined imbuing a fictional cast of friends with those characteristics.

I played a lot with JS Paint (which I continued using up until very recently) and eventually started sharing bits and pieces on the newsletter. It was nice to start with a small and relatively nonjudgmental audience.

At the same time, I wanted to overhaul my web presence. My Neocities page from the year prior had fallen into disuse. Cohost was fun, but none of my friends were on it. It was also becoming evident at the time that it would be a short-lived platform. The newsletter had increasingly become my outlet, and I remained skeptical of social media sites like Bluesky. Still, I wanted a persistent space for myself online.

With lots of talk on the dying Cohost about people making blogs and setting up RSS feeds (I was just starting to follow many of those with my RSS feed reader), I decided to throw together a website. My big idea at the time (since the weather was about to improve after a long, dreadful summer) was my walking blog. For better or worse, this is not the part of the site where most of my effort goes these days, but it was huge for getting the whole thing off the ground.

Now the webcomic is of course my baby. I’m still looking to do some write-ups too. Maybe also some totally different stuff! Music, zines, videos, short fiction — who knows? But I’d honestly be pretty happy if I could just keep up with the newsletter and the webcomic at this point (and continue improving my writing and drawing skills in the process).

I also want to add how happy I’ve been to keep up with all of your creative endeavors as well. I hope you’ll continue to share them even more in 2025. A big shout-out specifically to those of you who’ve started email lists and websites. It’s going to be a good year for the text-based side of the web!

My Vision for 2025

For the most part, I’m going to keep my plans and “resolutions” to myself. Not because I don’t wanna overshare (you know me) but because telling you kinda makes me feel like I’ve already done it (and then I don’t). But rest assured that I do have a lot planned. I want to grow and change even more than I did in 2024. You’ll eventually get to hear about the results, which will be even more exciting!

In the meantime, here’s one thing I won’t do (but thought about), one thing I might do, and one thing I will do:

- I won’t (but considered) keeping an updated “note in case of my accidental/unexpected death,” just so my loved ones could have some closure no matter what if anything were to ever happen to me, God forbid. Honestly, maybe I will do this after all, haha. It’s just kind of morbid.

- I might start setting an alarm for super early in the morning every day and just see if I ever feel compelled to actually get up when it goes off. I really want to start experiencing those cool, quiet hours of the day more. First, though, I’ll need to stop staying up so late.

- I will read Brian Eno’s 1995 Year with Swollen Appendices over the course of the year a tiny bit at a time so that roughly every day I can compare what I’ve been doing and thinking about with what Brian Eno was doing and thinking about 30 years ago to the day.

As for the newsletter in 2025, I think I’m going to start playing with the format so that it’s a bit more focused and (hopefully) entertaining to read. A little less trivia, and more self-contained and fully-assembled thoughts. It could also be a way to workshop stuff for the blog. I haven’t really been keeping up with the text part of that as much because I love doing the webcomic so much. Actually, a big part of the reason this was so late was because I kept working on the webcomic instead!

Metamucil Update

Finally, since Metamucil was basically the only thing I talked about in last January’s newsletter, I guess I’d better give an update. I started taking psyllium husk capsules instead, which is basically the same thing. I kind of miss my weird little nightly orange drink though, even if it has artificial colors that are “bad for you.” Either way, I still recommend taking fiber if you don’t already. It made my year a lot better. At least the parts I spent on the can.

It’s good to talk to you again. Thanks to everyone who signed up for the newsletter this year and to everyone who read. Sending this out in the dead of night (one o’clock in the morning my time) means one less lingering to-do for me, and this one was a doozy. I’m excited to focus on the year ahead (including the February newsletter, which I’ve already got some plans for).

Happy Belated New Year! I love you!!!

DTFLLY YRS,

—N