Thank you

(but not goodbye)

Not being American, I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.¹ So, please allow me, in the grand homosexual tradition of being fashionably late, to end the year with a few personal expressions of gratitude for making my year on Substack a true Gesammtkunstwerk.

Thank you to

Henry Begler

for including me in his year-end round up and inspiring this post.

Thank you to

John Pistelli

for Major Arcana, The Invisible College, his Weekly Readings and general magnanimity.²

Thank you to

Gnocchic Apocryphon

for the loyal support and profound reflections.

Thank you to

Paul Franz

for his tough love and transcendent prose.

Thank you to

Julianne Werlin

for her infectious enthusiasm for knowledge and warm encouragement.

Thank you to

Philip Traylen

for his philosophical wit.

Thank you to

Gemma Mason

for her philosophical rigour.

Thank you to

Blake Smith

for helping me clarify my own position on (queer) liberalism.

Thank you to

becca rothfeld

and

BDM

for not taking things personally.

Thank you to

Naomi Kanakia

for claiming in a Substack Note that humans are not animals, a statement that offended me so deeply that ever since I’ve been trying to articulate why we shouldn’t forget that we are.³

Thank you to

Sam Kahn

for being a champion of experimental writing and independent thinking.

Thank you to

Daniel Oppenheimer

for his stimulating conversations with Eminent Americans and his openminded curiosity about the contemporary intellectual landscape.

Thank you to

Kevin LaTorre

for his Christian charity.

Thank you to

Sam Jennings

for his intellectual verve and music recommendations.

Thank you to

Udith Dematagoda

for his bathetic redux of Internet discourse in Agonist.

Thank you to

Owen Finlay

,

Ben Zalkind

,

David Sessions

,

Secret Squirrel

,

emmah godd

and others for their gracious and thought-provoking responses to my writing.

And finally, thank you to my long suffering gen Z boyfriend and these two furry souls, for reminding me that there is a world beyond Substack.

1. My gen z boyfriend has enough trouble getting me to celebrate Xmas, as the little heathen likes to call it.

2. As I had already nominated John as my personal writer of the year for 2023, I will keep the simping to a minimum, but I would like to echo what Henry wrote:

Reading John’s work, both criticism and novel, has also taught me to take pride in my own writing and advocate for it.

An apt comparison may be what is said about The Velvet Underground in Tod Hayne’s excellent documentary: they never attracted large crowds, but almost everyone who saw them perform was inspired to start their own band.

3. My love language is holding on to grudges.