14 of My Favorite Things of 2022
in no particular order
1. Party Down
The return of comedic greatness.
One of my favorite TV comedies of all time—a great show that was cancelled far too early—is being rebooted. It won’t hit the air until 2023 so I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival. Here’s a clip from the first episode back in 2009:
You can watch the original Party Down on Hulu here.
2. Therapy Me
I spent approximately 170 hours in Dialectic Behavior Therapy this year. I didn’t do it from my childhood home but this tweet cracked me up.
Mental illness is terrible, demoralizing, often debilitating, and also hilarious.
3. The James Webb Telescope
All that infinity.
This is enough for an atheist like me to doubt his doubts about God.
4. Crime Novel
I love this novel. It reads like 1920’s private detective film noir movie updated for our time.
Here’s a good review.
5. Banshees
An amazing and devastating movie about male friendship and loss.
It features two incredible performances. Watch the movie please.
6. Bernadette
Bernadette Mayer: 1945-2022
More about Mayer here.
7. Ghosts
The ghost of our love…
More about Salvant here.
8. The Joker
The man has VISION.
I think I love basketball even more than I love poetry. If you’d like to watch an 11-minute highlight reel of Joker’s best passes of his career, go here.
9. Lucia Berlin
Her book of stories was published posthumously in 2015 but I read it for the first time this year and it’s astonishing.
Here’s a story of hers you can read online.
10. My Sister’s Reservation Updates
I get so nostalgic about Eastern Washington snow. It always meant high school basketball season.
That fence poking out of the snow is four feet tall.
11. Baseball, Baseball, Baseball
Our Seattle Mariners making the playoffs for the first time in 21 years.
We watched the away games against the Blue Jays on the big screen in our home stadium.
Here’s the game-winning homer that clinched the playoff spot:
Diane and I were in the stadium for that home run and, yes, I cried.
12. The Existentialism of Cooking
The Bear is my favorite TV show of the year.
This show will make you nervous and hungry at the same time.
13. Nepotism Alert
My good and great friend, Jess Walter, publish an incredible book of short stories this year.
The title story will quietly and subtly wreck you. Here’s a great review.
14. Surreal Realism
Ling Ma’s stories are stunning, crazy, and wildly unpredictable. There’s one about a woman who lives with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends!
You can read one of her stories here.
So glad you discovered Lucia. I met her when she first came to Boulder to read at CU, and, as a grad student, had the pleasure of recording her reading my favorite story of hers (at the time--nowadays they're all my favorites). It was in an earlier edition of Diary of a Cleaning Woman or Phantom Pain, I think, because I can no longer find it anywhere. And it's not in Angel's Laundromat either.
So if anyone can help me find this story again, please please do.
Berlin's story is about a group of women who meet for regular "salad socials," each bringing their dish to share; homemade "potluck" tomatoes in aspic, etc. The story is constructed around these meetings, their relationships, and particularly the competition between them over their dishes (and over their lives). It's an incredible piece of work, claustrophobic, tragic, and hilarious. I recorded Lucia reading it and she flubbed the ending, so I re-recorded her corrected version of the ending right on the cassette tape, with middling success. We laughed over that and had a great time together; I miss her still.
Also, if you like her work, read the amazing story Lucia Berlin penned, set in South America, where she actually was the bilingual, teenaged, debutante daughter of a rich (at that time) American oil man. Most of LB's work is derived from autobiographical material; but with lots of style. Which is okay with me.
I discovered much later on that Lucia, when I knew her, had just conquered the alcoholism that had dogged her previous life. She became a beloved teacher in the writing program at CU-Boulder, then returned to her family in Oakland CA where she passed, from cancer.
I'll be checking into this list further asap. Already have that small town hoops fever as always. Thanks for including. Yes, the snow over there is pretty incredible at the moment right? Great list brother.