DIARY // year in review
“historically, this is not an altogether rich area for me.”
Hey folks. This the fiftieth post on Failures of the Avant-Garde, which has been wheezing along on a mostly-weekly basis for just over a year now. In view of these and other healthily modest achievements--and because those of you who subscribed more recently may have missed out on some OK posts from earlier--I figured this week we’d go ahead and do a “Year in Review” deal, in which I run through some of what’s gone on around here lo these past 13ish months, threading in links, images, and my own classic brand of pretend-casual-but-weirdly-tense metacommentary.
I’ve got another DIARY entry coming next week, after which I’ll probably go dark so I can focus all my energy on riding out the really psychically destabilizing week between Christmas and New Years. We’ll resume new programming in January.
Also, one announcement:
❄❄❄ I was lucky enough to contribute a pair of top ten lists to Screen Slate’s Best Movies of 2025 feature, which compiled the “New Releases” and “First Viewings/Discoveries” entries of 100+ contributors, many of whom really, really know their shit. Find my picks here.
But OK, recap time:
Puccio by CF.
The first post I published here, on—for some reason—Election Day 2024, was an older piece about Glenn Gould’s “The Prospects of Recording,” one which used Gould’s 1966 essay on studio trickery and tape splices to do some thinking about authenticity and referentiality via detours to some all-time touchstones, namely The Recognitions and Pussy Galore’s full album cover of Exile on Main St. It’s a writeup I’ve always liked, and I’m glad the first post on the site made equal reference to literature, history, and music, since I knew those were gonna be my primary beats here. But the real reason I led with the Gould post was because I was still working on what I knew would be my first real essay for the site, namely a piece on Rachel Kusher’s Creation Lake, which I finished and posted at the end of January:
I’ve done a lot of writing this year, much of it under the kinda generalized umbrella of the “book review”/”literary essay” market stall, to the extent that it’s hard to remember that prior to this period I had never seriously considered writing about the books I read (and, in fact, I entertained a lot of obnoxious gripes and preconceived notions about that kind of writing, but like who’s counting). The Creation Lake piece—which gave me permission to spread out across 6k+ words, dig into Kushner’s whole oeuvre, and bring in a whole mess of counterculture history via my eternal crushes in the Situationist International—allowed me a totally new perspective on the form, and served as a solid object lesson in what I could do with this page. I’m still pretty psyched on it.
The piece also set the tone for the other bigger-ticket essays I’ve posted, which tended to run decently deep along the “literature” + “counterculture” axes. I wrote about the Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca; picked up the Situationist thread in posts on Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, on the Gruppe Spur, and on the all-time nightmare avant-gardist Dieter Kunzelmann; and continued to stress-test the literary essay form for myself with lengthy textual walkabouts on Peter Weiss’s multivolume epic The Aesthetics of Resistance and, most recently, Shadow Ticket.
The fact of my getting to place those latter two relatively ambitious pieces in truly sick outlets—The Whitney Review and n+1, respectively—is also a huge part of the story of this year for me, along with other output and “new releases” that I sometimes catalogued here under the “PSA” header. For now, suffice it to say that this page—the demands of maintaining it, and the momentum I felt it accrue in my writing practice—is why some, or most, or all of that stuff happened.
Also, while we’re here, worth re-noting that The Aesthetics of Resistance—and the attendant dive into Weiss on which I spent last winter—was, unquestionably, one of the great reading experiences of my life. Here, again, is the piece on it:
In addition to the essays, I was very psyched when this page began functioning as a workable means of sending excerpts of my fiction to readers, some of whom were actually into it. Historically, this is not an altogether rich area for me, so obviously it felt like a dopamine ice luge when I posted short stories about, like, stableboys and comic strips and Italian spies and got nice notes back from readers. Ditto for the excerpts of ancient novel manuscripts—which I’ve been stripmining for weekly content all damn year—as well as some translations of heroes like the aforementioned Luca, Octave Mirbeau, and um, Jean-Louis Costes.
But for all the the features of my 2025 Blogaissance on which I’m now looking back and feeling a certain tender December tug, none is sweeter than the fact that I was able to use this page—which is ostensibly about the history of counterculture, I guess?—to account for work and relationships from inside my own underground community, the set of interlocking crews of genius artists and musicians I’ve rolled with since I was like 18 years old, when they saved me from a life of being an actual pretentious idiot. In recognition of this auspicious development but also of my lingering self-centeredness, this year I posted a bunch of my own music on here, but I also stumbled on yet another form in which—before this Substack showed up, anyway—I didn’t think I had much to offer: the shaggy, deeply informal but hopefully not-that-podcasty interview. Getting to talk to dear old friends about both the insanely sick work they make and their path through this unsettled, altogether nebulous iteration of counterculture is, I’m pretty sure, the only way in which this page might constitute an actual resource.
It is for me, anyway, and it’s thanks to the below conversations, which is why I’ll use them as a signoff—also, I’ve officially triggered the Substack “Post too long for e-mail” popup alert, which has been another steady feature of this heady lifestyle.
Thanks for reading this year. More to come.
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