A Few More Things: Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 5

I have officially run out of gas on my self-appointed task of doing a blog post a day for five days, and so I turn to the last refuge of the lazy writer: a list. It’s a catalog, an odds-and-ends, a deadline listicle...it’s Johnson’s Veritable Miscellany!

So anyway, here’s ten more things I have found vaguely pleasant amidst this (insert your favorite synonym for “bad”) year:

*Dragon Inn 3’s cover of Fountains of Wayne’s “Sink to the Bottom.”

*The fact that the Rutgers tomato plant Ruth bought for our garden is actually producing tomatoes. We buy a Rutgers tomato plant every year, because I love the Knight life, but usually our Rutgers plant does about as well as a drunk freshman trying to hold down his first Fat Darrell. But this year our plant is a suitable tribute to the Garden State.

*Rhea Seahorn’s performance as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul. 

*Bear Review editor Marcus Myers’ recitations of his favorite poems by Kansas City poets (which he recorded and posted during the late spring). It was a lovely celebration of great writing, and introduced me to a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

*The book came out 30 years ago, so it’s only a 2020 thing for me, but a few weeks ago when I just needed to read a damn novel, I finally got around to reading AS Byatt’s Possession. It’s outstanding—lots of po-mo research/mystery novel stuff a la Nabokov or Pynchon, but put in the service of a more realist and even humanist aesthetic sensibility. I dug it.

*Joshua Weiner’s new translations of Nelly Sachs’ poetry (which appeared in Poetry in April—the full book comes out next year). I wasn’t previously familiar with Sachs, which is kind of embarrassing—she won the Nobel Prize in 1966—but I’m glad to be introduced to her elegiac, formally inventive poems. Anyone who is interested in the modernist literary response to WWII, or in Jewish literature in general, should give her a read.

*The takeout Easter dinner from Pot Pie. Ruth and I got like four meals out of that thing. I flash back to the lamb whenever I need to go to my happy place. Which I guess means I think about the lamb a lot.

*Having friends who bought a house with a pool. Folks, swimming in a pool you do not have to maintain is truly the American Dream.

*My students in the spring semester. I’ll forever be sad that the in-person semester was cut off in the middle, as all of my classes had students who were thinking, saying, and writing interesting things, and I really enjoyed our discussions. That said, I still got to read a lot of very interesting papers my students wrote even after we went virtual. They did good work, and I learned a lot from them.

*Sporting KC signing a competent striker. Who could have guessed that paying for talented attacking players would lead to more goals?

*And finally, this picture of my dad’s quarantine hair: