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
for including me in his year-end round up and inspiring this post.Thank you to
for Major Arcana, The Invisible College, his Weekly Readings and general magnanimity.2Thank you to
for the loyal support and profound reflections.Thank you to
for his tough love and transcendent prose.Thank you to
for her infectious enthusiasm for knowledge and warm encouragement.Thank you to
for his philosophical wit.Thank you to
for her philosophical rigour.Thank you to
for helping me clarify my own position on (queer) liberalism.Thank you to
and for not taking things personally.Thank you to
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.3Thank you to
for being a champion of experimental writing and independent thinking.Thank you to
for his stimulating conversations with Eminent Americans and his openminded curiosity about the contemporary intellectual landscape.Thank you to
for his Christian charity.Thank you to
for his intellectual verve and music recommendations.Thank you to
for his bathetic redux of Internet discourse in Agonist.Thank you to
, , , , 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.
My gen z boyfriend has enough trouble getting me to celebrate Xmas, as the little heathen likes to call it.
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.
My love language is holding on to grudges.
Thanks for the mention. I was just thinking recently of that post where you discuss bird formations. At long last, I thought when I read it, someone is bringing the sensibility of Thomas Browne to the internet! Exactly what I've been waiting for!
Studious Observators may discover more analogies in the orderly book of nature, and cannot escape the Elegancy of her hand in other correspondencies. The Figures of nails and crucifying appurtenances, are but precariously made out in the Granadilla or flower of Christs passion; And we despair to behold in these parts that handsome draught of crucifixion in the fruit of the Barbado Pine. The seminal Spike of Phalaris, or great shaking grasse, more nearly answers the tayl of a Rattle-Snake, then many resemblances in Porta: And if the man Orchis of Culumna be well made out, it excelleth all analogies. In young Wall-nuts cut athwart, it is not hard to apprehend strange characters; and in those of somewhat elder growth, handsome ornamental draughts about a plain crosse. In the root of Osmond or Water-fern, every eye may discern the form of a Half Moon, Rain-bow, or half the character of Pisces. Some finde Hebrew, Arabick, Greek, and Latine Characters in Plants; In a common one among us we seem to reade Acaia, Viviu, Lilil.
Thank you MJE, and thanks again for coming down to our reading in London - wish I'd had the time to chat more. Next time!