I found that many of the people I spoke with suspected the real changes at [The New Republic] would come at the expense of Leon Wieseltier — who had his own charmed life as the oldest young man in the room…. Wieseltier ruled a sort of archipelago of learnedness in the magazine’s back pages — haunted by its own testy thoroughgoing-ness, dense with type and argument, and deliberately off-putting. “In the old days, I used to get shit from certain people about difficult words or references,” Wieseltier says. “The irony now is that I just smile and say, ‘Google it.’ I have no conscience about that anymore.” His culture section, which often made up nearly half of each issue, was supposed to have nothing to do with the rest of the magazine at all.

But Hughes wants a single, readable magazine — with photographs! — not two stapled together, and this will entail treating Wieseltier, as one person familiar with the magazine put it, as an employee for the first time. This brewing tension was presumably why, when I was being regaled, quite pleasantly, by Wieseltier, we were interrupted twice by the magazine’s publicist, encouraging us to “wrap it up” by order of the “powers that be.”

— A little look inside the new New Republic, where the publicist is not doing things right.

Everyone in Britain is going to prison.

The long-expected death of The Daily, the iPad publication of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has finally come to pass. Layoffs took place over the summer, when the publication discarded 50 of its 170 workers. Eleven months ago, The Daily’s plans for becoming profitable were described as such: “A $30 million tablet-only news publication… with 100,000 subscribers paying 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year, and 250,000 unique readers each month, The Daily is on target to break even in five years.” The Daily cost $500,000 per week, and that was just according to the company.

Our best goes out to people who are losing their jobs because of the poor planning of millionaires. One of those people will not be the honcho of The Daily, Jesse Angelo; he will take over as publisher of the New York Post. Which also is not profitable.

by Seth Colter Walls

Hello and welcome, once again, to “End of Year List” season. Are you ready to hear from all of the critics you can even moderately stand to hear from during normal months? There will be pride, understand. There will be brand-management. It will feel a little obtrusive and overmuch. It will be natural to respond with some weariness — with a flick of the wrist as if to say “check please” and the concomitant desire to call the whole thing off and tune back in at some point during 2013.

Resist it.

You should resist the urge to unplug until 2013 — when the world will be not quite so followish-ly Gangnam in nature, or until it becomes hopefully permanently free of the news of Chris Brown’s Twitter leavings, or arguments over why Lana Del Rey’s lips matter — not because critics are awesome to listen to, but for this reason alone: You have not heard all the beauty that was loosed into the world this year. And now is the season when critics are most liberated (by editors) to just talk about the art itself, rather than the raging effluvia of controversy that surrounds cultural production these days. (Hah: “these days.” More like: ’twas ever thus.)

Oh, I have some ideas about the best stuff. Nicki Manaj’s “The Boys” has a cut-up aesthetic sufficient to make any John Zorn fan sit up and take notice — except all the parts are pop-memorable. That’s kind of new. Neneh Cherry’s cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” recorded with Scandinavian avant-jazzers The Thing, was pretty near perfect on their joint project The Cherry Thing. But then Four Tet came in and made it dance-floor worthy on the remix album, an 8-minute dream where the gradual introduction of house-y squeals all serves as a prequel to a big sax freakout that Angelo Badalamenti would have liked to have written for David Lynch’s Lost Highway. (Merzbow and Lindstrom also contributed remixes to that Cherry/Thing project, take note.)

And you can skip to that now, if you just want my album list and a Spotify-tracks playlist. But as I said in this space last year, to try to make a blanket argument about the best albums and tracks, and then to issue it like holy writ is to ever so slightly miss the point.

If you’ll allow a brief anecdote-y moment: last night on the subway I was reading Paul Nizan’s enjoyably pissed-off old book The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order, in which he rails against professional “thinkers” of France between the wars. (It’s also important to know that my on-headphones soundtrack was Nicki Minaj’s “Come on a Cone” at this point.) Rolling into the Classon Avenue station, I underlined and starred the following, in which Nizan recounts his childhood dreams of serving “mankind” through his rarefied thinking:

Because I stayed up late reading and could comprehend, more readily than a mechanic ever could, the “divertissement’”of Pascal and the “reign of reasonable wills,” I no longer regarded myself as an anonymous individual; docile creature that I was, I believed the worker on the street and the peasant on his farm were indebted to me, since I had dedicated myself — in a noble, pure, and disinterested manner — to the life of the mind, for the benefit of Man-in-general: a genus which includes, among its diverse species, workers and farmers. My instructors did everything they could to strengthen my attachment to this comforting illusion, so flattering to them. Whoever practiced a philosophy — its content did not matter very much — was in my eyes (why should I have thought otherwise?) a sort of physician or priest who periodically saved the world through the power of his headaches alone.

The reason it was fun for me to get to this particular part while “Come on a Cone” was playing in my ears is because I was simultaneously realizing I had been very wrong about the Nicki Minaj album for most of the year, and sort of prideful about my wrong position in a “I think about music very critically!” sort of fashion. My old boring argument went like follows: I like Minaj better as a rapper than as a pop star. (Sophisticated, I know.) The second version of Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (helpfully subtitled “The Re-Up”), which frontloads some new tracks, some of which feature more rapping induced me to give the earlier tracks another listen, last night, while on the subway, when I found out I was wrong about them, despite my supposed service to musical matters by thinking and writing about them, etc/kill yourself/zzzz.

This was a nice, all-around “get over yourself” moment. I am grateful for it. And, following the example set by NPR’s Ann Powers — who posted a year-ending atonement instead of chest-thumping the other day — I figured I should talk it out. It’s freeing, really. (Every critic should take ten deep breaths every afternoon and remember that the world is not saved through the power of our egotistical headaches alone.) I will posit that the most difficult listening isn’t premised in finding the noisiest thing — or, like Taylor Swift’s ex, in locating an “indie record much cooler than mine” — but in recognizing our own inescapably conditional experience of the world. Put another way: I bet you heard something good that I haven’t yet. There is no single philosophy of the year that can bear up under much scrutiny.

As a critic, confidence in a stance can be a professional necessity: you have to sell ideas and feel good about them. And, less selfishly, it can prove hard to endure to bad parts of media-world life if you don’t think you do something for an over-arching “reason.” (For the “discourse,” man.) But pretty soon this stance curdles into a Jesus Christ Pose not so dissimilar from the one Nizan describes in philosophy above. You think you’ve got causes, ideals that you’re riding for, and certain tenets that amount to a philosophy. Maybe you do. Most likely you have a zone of passions and a zone of received wisdoms, and an unconscious Venn diagram that tells you which of the ideas that fall within either zone might be sellable in your time and (market)place.

***

But right now, that’s mostly over for 2012. There will be new memes and debates galore for 2013, but now comes the season when we get to show our work and say: right or wrong, this is what I listened to, or read, or saw. My all-genres-included Top 50 albums of 2012 is below, with some notes and asides. After that comes the 100 favorite tracks I could find on Spotify. (Seven records from my top 10 weren’t available there, so it’s filled with stuff that would have put in places 51–100 of an albums list that long, if I’d been willing to do that.)

Like Nicki Minaj, I endorse the following strippers.

THE AWL’S DIFFICULT LISTENING HOUR 50 FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2012

50. Gangrene — Vodka & Ayahausca
49. Esperanza Spalding — Radio Music Society
48. Converge — All We Love We Leave Behind
47. Keyshia Cole — Woman to Woman
46. Roc Marciano — Reloaded
45. René Jacobs / Freiburger Barockorchester — Mozart: La finta giardiniera
44. Bob Mould — Silver Age
43. Neneh Cherry & The Thing — The Cherry Thing
42. ZZ Top — La Futura
41. Mario Diaz de Leon — Hypnos

Gangrene is on the bubble here, just in case Kid Cudi doesn’t ruin Big Boi’s album for me on Dec. 11.

I liked Channel Orange OK, though much prefer the committed intensity of the title track on Keyshia Cole’s Woman to Woman (or its official single “Trust and Believe”) than I do the studied enervation of “Thinkin Bout You.” The best songs on Cole’s album make you rather willing to overlook the patently boring appearances by Lil Wayne and Meek Mill that spoil its opening two songs. (Blame record company obviousness.) And the duet moments between Ashanti and Cole on the last half-minute of Woman to Woman are to die.

ZZ Top still does their schtick quite well. Not even sure they needed Rick Rubin, but the sound is right.

Mario Diaz de Leon writes arpeggios to suit doom-noise and dark ambient moods just as well as he writes them for music to be played by chamber ensembles.

Turns out Mozart wrote some other cool opera that basically no one’s ever heard and that Rene Jacobs finally got around to recording.

40. Baroness — Yellow & Green
39. Keiji Haino / Jim O’Rourke / Oren Ambarchi — Imikuzushi
38. James Ilgenfritz — Compositions (Braxton) 2011
37. El-P — Cancer 4 Cure
36. Rufus Wainwright — Out of the Game
35. Mariel Roberts — Nonextraneous Sounds
34. DJ Rashad — TEKLIFE Vol. 1: Welcome to the Chi
33. Taylor Swift — Red
32. Christian Wolff / Larry Polansky / Kui Dong — Trio
31. Patti Smith — Banga

I tried to read as little as possible about Taylor Swift’s Red before getting a chance to hear the record in full. It’s a fun record! Lots of pop styles, well executed! A little something for most everyone, though maybe not enough for everyone’s favorite pop-related hobbyhorse issues. And yet, now that I’ve heard it, I find that I’m still not terribly interested in reading a lot of overwrought pieces arguing for or against. Please don’t tell me anyone’s said anything too dumb about it.

By various laws of longevity and creative practice, Keiji Haino doesn’t have any right at all to still be finding interesting new things in his toolkit, like, on his 250th record. But dang if he doesn’t keep discovering new approaches: after lessons learned from his Black Blues and Seijaku projects, he’s almost a crooner at some points on the fourth track of his latest thing with Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi. But then there’s always the screaming.

Tristan Perich’s piece for cello and electronics — “Formations” — needs to be heard to be believed. You can hear it on Mariel Roberts’ Nonextraneous Sounds.

30. Leif Ove Andsnes — The Beethoven Journey: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3
29. Black Music Disaster — Black Music Disaster
29. Roomful of Teeth — Roomful of Teeth
27. Ravi Coltrane — Spirit Fiction
26. Death Grips — The Money Store
25. Joyce DiDonato — Drama Queens
24. Dan Deacon — America
23. Jeanne Golan — Ullmann: Complete Piano Sonatas
22. The Bad Plus — Made Possible
21. Pierre Kawka & Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain — Boulez: Memoriale / Derive 1 & 2

You should not need any additional context to want to listen to a self-titled album by a group called Black Music Disaster, but here is some: jazz pianist Matthew Shipp and Spiritualized guitarist J Spaceman named this group after a scathing review of a Anthony Braxton/Cecil Taylor gig. Everything about it is great.

LOL: Pierre Boulez added another half-hour to Derive 2 since the last time he added a big chunk of music to it, over a decade ago. I’d take his long-rumored opera of Waiting for Godot anytime now, but more Boulez music of any stripe is a welcome development.

Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards (sorry for not spelling it rIg-hT) wrote two pieces for the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth — “Quizassa” and “Ansa Ya” — and they will feel familiar (in a good, exciting way) to fans of her rock style. But Judd Greenstein’s “AEIOU” is just as good a piece, as are some of the other compositions delivered to this exceptional new ensemble.

I miss Death Grips (as a major label act) already. But hearing the addition of electronics to the sound coming out of piano trio The Bad Plus restores my faith in the state of drum-machines used by improvisers with tunes.

20. Kendrick Lamar — good kid, m.A.A.d city
19. San Francisco Symphony — American Mavericks
18. Branford Marsalis Quartet — Four MFs Playin Tunes
17. Robert Glasper Experiment — Black Radio
16. Jeremy Denk — Ligeti/Beethoven
15. Killer Mike — R.A.P. Music
14. David Byrne & St. Vincent — Love This Giant
13. Steve Lehman Trio — Dialect Fluorescent
12. Esa-Pekka Salonen — Salonen: Out of Nowhere — Violin Concerto; Nyx
11. Mikel Rouse — Boost/False Doors

It took a tweet from Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua to articulate something I really love about good kid, M.A.A.D. city, which is that Kendrick Lamar tells stories in a way that will be appreciated by anyone who’s ever liked the Fiery Furnaces. Also, it’s very nice to have Pharrell and Dre doing well in public.

I remember thinking the horn arrangement on “The Forest Awakes,” by David Byrne and St. Vincent, was particularly good. Then I learned it was written by Ken Thomson, and was not surprised, given how frequently his own bands (Gutbucket, Asphalt Orchestra, Slow/Fast) deliver.

It’s a little obscene for pianist Jeremy Denk to be able to write so well about music and to have a fine solo album of Beethoven and Ligeti music out in the same year while also being the soloist in the San Francisco Symphony’s very exciting recording of Henry Cowell’s Piano Concerto. But really this is all for our benefit, so don’t be overly jealous.

Best tempo canon of the year: the competing beats in “Orson Elvis,” described in detail by the composer here.

I really thought Killer Mike had made the best rap album of the year (again), until I listened to Angel Haze’s mixtape Reservation (download here).

And see below…

10. Angel Haze — Reservation
9. Tim Berne — Snakeoil
8. Dawn Richard — Armor On
7. Miguel — Kaleidoscope Dream
6. Vijay Iyer Trio — Accelerando
5. Annie Gosfield — Almost Truths and Open Deceptions
4. Fiona Apple — The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
3. Henry Threadgill Zooid — Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp
2. Laurie Spiegel — The Expanding Universe
1. Wadada Leo Smith — Ten Freedom Summers

Not enough has been said about Dawn Richard’s independently issued album (it’s on iTunes and Rhapsody, but not many other places; a CD deal is reportedly in the works). Partly I think I’m placing it so highly because I regret not hearing Diddy-Dirty Money’s Last Train to Paris in time to celebrate it during one of these list-seasons past. But Armor On doesn’t need any sympathy points, either. Find a way to hear it.

If Mikel Rouse had the best tempo canon of 2012, the best basic “round” goes to the last minute of “Hot Knife” on Fiona Apple’s album, which was as great as everyone said.

People knew Miguel was capable of writing undeniable one-offs, but on Kaleidoscope Dream, he strung enough of them in and around two of the year’s best singles (“Adorn” and “Do You…,” duh) to make it the R&B; album of my 2012.

In the non-pop realms, it was a fantastically good year for jazz and classical releases that, as ever, rarely reach the audience(s) they deserve. Henry Threadgill remains a national treasure. Wadada Leo Smith completed his multi-decade, four-hour jazz/classical hybrid composition Ten Freedom Summers, and it has seemed to me for months like the most impressive achievement of the year.

Though the live premiere of all this music attracted notices in the LA and NY Timeses in 2011, the fact that the first CD release of this music did not get covered in any mainstream publications, this year, strikes me as a scandal. (I only wish it had been covered so I didn’t look like an obscurantist crate-digger for my #1 pick.) You’d think, in a year that saw widespread (and clearly stated) efforts to curb African-American turnout at the ballot box, a musical contemplation of the Civil Rights experience titled after the first voter-registration Freedom Summer would have been potentially topical enough to get some coverage. (I tried to sell that piece, but could not!) Still, I think it’s the music I heard this year that I could least do without.

Laurie Spiegel’s long out of print computer-music LP The Expanding Universe got its first issuing on CD this year, but with so much never-before-released material appended (over an hour) that I’m calling it a new release and ranking it in every poll I’m voting in this year. I did manage to place a couple of pieces on her in 2012: there’s a discussion of the use of her music in The Hunger Games in Slate, and this interview for The New Yorker website. (Some music from The Expanding Universe is available to stream at the latter link.)

Both The Expanding Universe and Ten Freedom Summers are not available on Spotify for streaming — following this year’s trend of less-commercial artists realizing that the promotional help one could attain through making music so easily available was actually cutting into their bottom line. No one gets rich off of Spotify royalties (obviously). But it might have become clear that, in 2012, giving it away for basically free online isn’t even a path to being written up or discussed more often — and that you should make sure your hardcore fans actually pony up for a proper digital download, or else a physical copy.

That’s a decision that’s hard to argue with, but as long as there is a fair diversity of music available on Spotify, I’ll be game for putting together my-year-in-listening playlists there. After all, it’s a backdoor way of supporting another few dozen of my favorite albums from 2012 that didn’t make the above list. That includes new music from the late Elliott Carter, jazz from the Elliott Sharp Trio, music from Kaija Saariaho, and a couple non-Taylor country songs.

THE DIFFICULT LISTENING HOUR TOP 100 SPOTIFY TRACKS OF 2012

• Neneh Cherry & The Thing — “Dream Baby Dream (Four Tet remix)”
• Nicki Minaj — “The Boys”
• The Bad Plus — “I Want To Feel Good Pt. 2”
• Joyce DiDonato — “Antonio e Cleopatra : Morte, col fiero aspetto”
• Mikel Rouse — “Professional Smile”
• Taylor Swift — “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”
• American Contemporary Music Ensemble — “Future Shock: I. — “
• Keyshia Cole — “Woman To Woman”
• Brad Wells — “Quizassa”
• Solange — “Losing You”
• Elliott Sharp Trio — “The Grip”
• Converge — “Sadness Comes Home”
• DJ Rashad — “Feelin’”
• Nas — “The Don”
• Fiona Apple — “Periphery”
• Salonen, Esa-Pekka — “Salonen: Movement One: Mirage — Movement One: Mirage”
• Salonen, Esa-Pekka — “Salonen: Movement Two: Pulse I — Movement Two: Pulse I”
• Salonen, Esa-Pekka — “Salonen: Movement Three: Pulse II — Movement Three: Pulse II”
• Salonen, Esa-Pekka — “Salonen: Movement Four: Adieu — Movement Four: Adieu”
• Patti Smith — “Banga”
• Lindstrøm — “Vōs-sākō-rv”
• Big K.R.I.T. — “Yeah Dats Me”
• Branford Marsalis Quartet — “The Mighty Sword”
• Mario Diaz de Leon — “Oneirogen”
• Miranda Lambert — “Fastest Girl In Town”
• Jeanne Golan — “Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Op. 49b (arr. H. Brauel for piano): Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Op. 49b, Scene 2: Menuett, ‘Totentanz’” (arr. H. Brauel for piano)
• Bob Mould — “Silver Age”
• Frank Ocean — “Pink Matter”
• Mariel Roberts — “Formations”
• Killer Mike — “Big Beast — feat. Bun B, T.I., and Trouble”
• David Byrne & St. Vincent — “The Forest Awakes”
• Cassie — “King Of Hearts”
• Rufus Wainwright — “Montauk”
• Robert Glasper — “Afro Blue (feat. Erykah Badu)”
• Jesse Stacken — “Bagatelle No. 2”
• Lee Ranaldo — “Waiting On A Dream”
• Esperanza Spalding — “Crowned & Kissed”
• Roc Marciano — “Thread Count”
• Dan Deacon — “USA I: Is a Monster”
• Dan Deacon — “USA II: The Great American Desert”
• Dan Deacon — “USA III: Rail”
• Dan Deacon — “USA IV: Manifest”
• Miguel — “Adorn”
• Jessie Ware — “Running — Disclosure Remix”
• Death Grips — “Hacker”
• Cloud Nothings — “No Sentiment”
• Kendrick Lamar — “Compton”
• Anssi Karttunen — “Je sens un deuxieme coeur: I. Je devoile ma peau”
• Anssi Karttunen — “Je sens un deuxieme coeur: II. Ouvre-moi, vite!”
• Anssi Karttunen — “Je sens un deuxieme coeur: III. Dans le reve, elle l’attendait”
• Anssi Karttunen — “Je sens un deuxieme coeur: IV. Il faut que j’entre”
• Anssi Karttunen — “Je sens un deuxieme coeur: V. Je sens un deuxieme coeur qui bat tout pres du mien”
• Neneh Cherry & The Thing — “Cashback”
• Oh No — “3 Dollars (feat. MF Doom)”
• E-40 — “On the Case”
• Four Tet — “Ocoras”
• Leonard Cohen — “Darkness”
• El-P — “Tougher Colder Killer”
• Rick Ross — “Sixteen”
• Jeremy Denk — “Beethoven: Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111: Maestoso; Allegro con brio ed appassionato”
• Jeremy Denk — “Beethoven: Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111: Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile”
• Neil Young & Crazy Horse — “Walk Like A Giant”
• Calvin Harris feat. Ne-Yo — “Let’s Go”
• DEV — “Take Her From You”
• Killer Mike — “Reagan”
• Brad Paisley — “Southern Comfort Zone”
• Ravi Coltrane — “Roads Cross”
• Jeanne Golan — “Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 10: I. Molto agitato”
• Jeanne Golan — “Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 10: II. Andante (quasi marcia funebre)”
• Jeanne Golan — “Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 10: III. Adagio — Presto”
• Dinosaur Jr. — “Watch the Corners”
• Norah Jones — “She’s 22”
• Gangrene — “The Groove”
• Sleigh Bells — “You Lost Me”
• Matthew Shipp — “Raw Materials”
• Jeremy Denk — “Ligeti: Piano Etudes [Book Two]: XIII. L’escalier du diable”
• Rufus Wainwright — “Rashida”
• Big K.R.I.T. — “Praying Man”
• Henry Cowell — “Synchrony”
• Miguel — “Do You…”
• Bob Mould — “First Time Joy”
• Kendrick Lamar — “Swimming Pools (Drank) — Extended Version”
• Brad Mehldau — “Got Me Wrong”
• Baroness — “Take My Bones Away”
• Jonny Greenwood — “Alethia”
• Esperanza Spalding — “Radio Song”
• Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up — “Double Lake, Defined”
• Keyshia Cole — “Trust And Believe”
• Nashville Cast — “No One Will Ever Love You”
• Elliott Carter — “Two Controversies and a Conversation: I. Controversy 1”
• Elliott Carter — “Two Controversies and a Conversation: II. Controversy 2”
• Elliott Carter — “Two Controversies and a Conversation: III. Conversation”
• Patti Smith — “Amerigo”
• Nas — “Daughters”
• ZZ Top — “I Gotsta Get Paid”
• The Bad Plus — “Wolf Out”
• Mikel Rouse — “Orson Elvis”
• Azealia Banks — “1991”
• Third Coast Percussion — “First Construction (in Metal)”
• Brad Wells — “A E I O U”

Now you show me your lists.

Seth Colter Walls is a culture critic and reporter for Slate, NewYorker.com, The Village Voice, Washington Post, Capital New York, and lots of other places.

★★★ Dawn threw a wall of pink onto the face of the apartment tower across the way; sunset found a way to throw pink the same place, on the bounce. Between, there was blue sky, with a sort of lilac haze behind the uptown skyline. The safety-orange of construction signs popped in the low flood of sunlight. In the schoolyard, the last colorless leaves on the sycamores shook stiffly in the breeze. The flags of the city and the Parks Department unfurled from their guy wires, flapped northward for a while, then fell back down. The gentle gust was not quite enough to lift the United States flag or the POW flag trapped under it, at the top of the pole. Then a new gust came, and the Stars and Stripes briefly roused itself.

My Burned-Out New York Apocalypse Novel

by Jessanne Collins

National Novel Writing Month comes to an end tonight — at midnight! But our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished will carry on. Here’s the next entry.

Where are all my End of the World Party invitations? The characters in the novel I never finished — the promotion for which I foresaw myself being very busy with this month, incidentally, the timing of the book’s publication being part of my brilliant meta marketing concept — were buried in End of the World Party invitations by now. In the mid-pre-post-apocalyptic world I imagined, December 23, 2012 was the new New Year’s.

These parties would be taking place in spackle-spattered lofts with windows held together with duct tape in foreclosed luxury apartments on the Williamsburg waterfront. People would be snorting generic pharmaceuticals off those glass cutting boards that look like orange slices. They would be wearing disco ball dresses pillaged from the dumpster behind Buffalo Exchange, which had gone out of business, and pumps from Payless, which had come into style.

That’s how I envisioned it in 2009, anyway, when one morning I awoke from a sort of lucid dream in which the End of the World festivities are interrupted by an unexpected televised event. I should say here that at the time I had three stalled novels in progress. The fatal flaw in all them was my abysmal plot-developing skills. But that dream had a plot. And it felt like a gift from the Universe. A Universe that, at least in REM state, I occasionally ruminate on the end of. It felt like a novel.

My dream even had a protagonist, a woman I could still see when I was awake, standing behind a splintered MTA door, staring very directly ahead. She was an unfulfilled professional who’d lost her unfulfilling profession in the economic collapse, but not before an unfulfilling workplace affair cost her her solid (but unfulfilling) relationship. She’d started shoplifting from Duane Reade and abusing her pharmaceuticals along with other substances. She didn’t believe in the End of the World. Well, nobody did, really. They were all jaded from the incessant hype and horror of it, and also the only type of parties in these days were ironic parties, because authentic celebration had, because of all the irony and the bad economy, become impossible.

The only end of the world my character believed in was the end of her world. Which was why, as the rest of Brooklyn partied “like it was 1999” again, she was planning to wash down a bottle of clonazepam with as many vodka cranberries as it took. (Couture cocktails had gone out with the last millionaires from the Williamsburg waterfront, and retro “trashtails” were back in.)

She was a nostalgist and a kind of vintagey narcissist (exactly the insufferable type who’d aspire to write a novel, come to think of it!), and she didn’t think it proper to leave a ❤able Tumblr suicide post, as had become customary, so she’d shoplifted a memo pad from Duane Reade (the kind moms might have left by landlines, in theory, in history) and now she was holed up in a coffee shop (they still used those really fancy espresso machines, only they brewed Cafe Bustelo in them) ready to compose her last thoughts on the ancient medium of lavender lined paper. Only something crazy happened right then. “AC 360” was streaming on somebody’s laptop, because CNN was, for some reason, really important now, and all of a sudden masked guerillas stormed into the studio with heavy artillery and took Anderson Cooper hostage! Throughout the ordeal, he remained totally silvery foxy and journalistically stoic and unruffled. It was hot. But this was bad. The whole coffee shop gathered around to watch and be like Whaaat together. It was the most human contact our heroine had had (other than with her coke dealer/yoga friend) in months. She felt something funny. It wasn’t love for humanity or affection for Anderson Cooper or even generalized fear. It was a strange stirring she didn’t immediately recognize. She couldn’t quite place it but it reminded her of her childhood, which took place in a town with a hyphen in its name in New Jersey.

It was curiosity.

She wants to find out what happens next. And so, instead of penning her suicide note, what she ends up writing is an analog diary of the End of the World. And — so cute — this is the structure of the novel. It begins in the coffee shop at the moment Anderson Cooper has been led away and something in the air has shifted. She’s annoyed, because she’s real type A and her carefully plotted out suicide has been foiled by fucking history.

After this, the plot gets kind of vague. It turns out, the world is ending. Not because the Mayans said so, but because, and this was all pretty TKTK in my mind, some kind of crazy guerilla political organization evil world conspiracy had planned it that way. Wait, but, maybe the organization had been inspired by the Mayans actually. Maybe there is something pseudo-ancient and ludicrous and fantastically JJ Abramsy in there. (Maybe this would make a better TV show actually? JJ, do you want to have coffee sometime?) In any case, she decides to stick around to see what it’s like. It’s not like you can miss this sort of thing, you know? And it’s not like she has anything left to lose.

For a few months I wrote committedly, first thing every morning, while my inner editor was still too bleary eyed to interfere, developing the characters and, mostly, the setting, which is always the fun part for my waking brain. But then life happened the way it does, and momentum slowed. But I know how the story ends, and I promise it’s not reminiscent of one of those nights on a roof with all your friends where the sky is so bright with ambient street light it’s like it hardly matters if the sun ever comes up again, but then the sun does come up and it obviously matters, and not only that, it’s blinding and uncomfortable and suddenly you have a splitting headache and desperately need to be alone. Well, it’s maybe a little bit like that. I’ll tell you about it some other time, if there is a some other time.

Previously in series: My Books Of Sad Jews

Jessanne Collins watched 54 episodes of “Alias” this month. Photo used for faux book cover by Zach Zupancic.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

A Crime at Pattaya

The following year, in a highly publicized case, four transvestites (one a transsexual)
robbed a Hong Kong businessman and others by first inducing their victims to suck
on their nipples, which had been coated with a tranquilizer.
 — Holly Brubach, Girlfriends: Men, Women, and Drag

I would do it again. I felt
paradoxically adult — 
each chevron on each wave on that warm ocean
pointing backwards and up the pale twist
in the shadow below concrete stairs. I was led by my wrist.
There was a great oval mirror,
the hush of a closing door,
two earrings unhooked and a square plastic bottle of lotion.

There was a bare smooth shoulder, and suppler hands
than mine on the buttons around my collar and neck,
my clavicle, my sternum, and points just south.
There was an oversized rocking chair, and a rock
that shone like a wet star-opal around her throat,
her fuchsia lips, her softer mouth,
and commands that could never have felt like commands.
She was a moonless night at the prow of a boat,
and I was a pilot, a ghost in the womb: I obeyed.

I woke up to mopeds, car horns, and particulate haze.
I had wet myself. I had slept for two days.
The consul had come and gone, leaving ill-fitting shoes,
but I walked away shaking and barefoot. I would have paid,
and happily, twice as much as I lost, to lose
my reason again so utterly: how could I choose
to leave this beach forever, this tideless fold
with its plain rice and its thin shade,
where for the first time I lost it all, got rolled,
erased, knocked out, taken for granted, and was not afraid?

Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Belmont, his latest book of poems, will appear from Graywolf in 2013: he’s also the author, most recently, of The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (Harvard UP, 2010), and Why I Am Not a Toddler and Other Poems by Cooper Bennett Burt (Rain Taxi Editions, 2011).

After months of costly and dangerous exploration — the expedition lost ten men in the first three weeks alone — we have finally located the hidden trove of poetry of which the legends speak! Enter if you dare! You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Thirty years ago today a pop music album came out that, for those of us who can count ourselves as members of the Star Wars generation, was a lot like Star Wars. Meaning that it was so culturally dominant for a stretch of our formative years that it became a part of the way that we would think and talk and view the world for the rest of our lives. Regardless of whether or not we even liked it back then, or of how we have come to feel about since, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is closer to something like an objective truth than anything else in music history: it is, no matter that the Recording Industry Association of America has the The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits, 1971–1975 listed above it on its all-time sales ranking, Thriller the “biggest” album of all time. It thus makes a strong claim, by at least one verifiable metric, to being the most important collection of music ever recorded. Has any single album affected more people than Thriller? (Unless there’s an equivalent in China, with its mind-boggling advantage in population scale… which, jeez, maybe there is? How many copies did Teresa’s Teng’s biggest album sell? I don’t know enough about China — this whole essay might be a pile of provincial, tunnel-vision, America-centric garbage, like most everything I write.) But in my provincial, tunnel-vision, American-centric over confidence, I will say the answer is no.

By other, less verifiable metrics, I would think that works by Elvis or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or Madonna might be able to make such a claim. But I would argue that no single album has ever had the same impact as Thriller. Advances in technology and distribution systems between 1967 and 1982 allowed far more people to hear Thriller than ever heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for example. (And again, I am talking “bigger” as opposed to “better.” I personally prefer Purple Rain to Thriller. And really, verifiable metrics and “bigness” be damned, there’s no way Thriller is more “important” that Sgt. Pepper.)

Why should we stop to take note of this kind of anniversary? That’s maybe a better question. People who were say, older than seven years old on November 30th, 1982, people who had access to a television or a radio or went to school or walked down the street in the ensuing, oh, 24 months, and so who understand what I’m talking about — people who experienced the life-encompassing mania that surrounded Thriller, the seemingly universal love that society had for this album, its ubiquity, we’re all right up around 40 now. That is old, old, old, old in pop music terms. Way past the age of trustability. None of us really matter any more. We should probably all just go and moonwalk our way towards whatever retirement community we’re going to sit and drool into until we die, anyway, and leave the world to “Gangnam Style.” Michael Jackson’s dead. And of, course, his story got very grim on its way to conclusion.

But here’s the thing: I have listened to Thriller more times this year, by far, than I have listened to any other piece of music. That is because I have a 7-year-old kid, one who is startlingly obsessed with it. Now, surely part of this is because his parents like the album so much, and presented it to him as “good music.” But that’s not all of it: I make great effort to get Purple Rain into heavier rotation. He’s not really having it. He’s stuck on Thriller. His favorite song is the title track, no matter how hard I try to convince him of “Billie Jean”’s superiority. (I mean, come on.) He loves that album more than anything. I don’t know exactly what it is. The ineffable magic of pure, exquisitely written, perfectly produced pop music, I guess. Exactingly calibrated to please the greatest possible number of people on the planet. No album has ever done it so successfully. Thriller is Thriller for a reason.

“Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make decisions about how you will live your life and then beguile you into thinking that it was all your choice. Compact discs are not superior to vinyl. E-readers are not superior to books. Lite beer is not the great leap forward…. I also believe that everything that happens to you as you grow older makes it easier to die, because the world you once lived in, and presumably loved, is gone.”
 — Humorist Joe Queenan has some thoughts on books, and also describes Ayn Rand as “a fascist and a creep, either of which could be forgiven. But she also cannot write.”

by Ken Layne and Carrie Frye

Carrie: So Ken, I understand that you recently purchased a Prius and are pleased with your purchase! And I bought one several years ago, and am likewise very happy with it. So my first question would be: What do you think the plural of Prius is: Prius-us? Pri-i?

Ken: Well, did you know that Toyota asked Prius owners to vote for the plural form of Prius, because the actual Latin plural (priora) was already taken by a crappy Lada? I just read this on Wikipedia, so I am pretty much an “automotive journalist” now. Anyway, the plural is officially and legally prii.

Carrie: I did not know that! Very good then. So let’s discuss our “prii,” mine old, yours new. What has been the most surprising thing to you as a new Prius owner?

Ken: I HAVE NOT GONE TO THE GAS STATION. Not once. It’s incredible. How does anyone buy any other car? I mean, I knew about the “good mileage,” and that was an obvious reason to buy a hybrid when I live in the land of $4.85-per-gallon gasoline. But I was not quite prepared for going 10 days without a painful visit to the gas station. (And I still have a third of a tank, another 130 miles or so of budget cruising.)

Carrie: It’s really noticeable, yes! I thought it would be a mild difference when I got one. But I notice it, especially on long car trips. Like, on a cross-country trip that used to take, say, five tanks, I now can get there on two. The side effect of that, though, is a fixation on monitoring the dashboard statistics; has that set in for you yet? (My husband, otherwise very mellow, gets extremely focused when the mileage dips down, like he can defeat it through sheer driving wizardry /avoiding traffic/ not allowing the air conditioner to be run. It’s like a video game.)

Ken: There is so much audio-computer-maps stuff on the video screen console right now, I’m just kind of dazzled by that. Still, I’ve seen it enough to realize I’m basically looking at a perpetual motion machine… that still needs some fossil fuel, but what an incredible leap from a generation ago. (I haven’t bought a new car in eight years. Things have gotten very sci-fi out there.)

Carrie: What was your last car?

Ken: Oh god… well, the one that I traded in at 120,000 miles was a Nissan small SUV, which, I don’t know, I bought it used from a rental car yard, and I lived at the end of a dirt road at the time. And the last new one was… it’s kind of too shameful.

Carrie: Tell!

Ken: (whispers, looks down) A Chrysler Town & Country. I feel like I have to explain this now.

Carrie: Sure, but as the former owner of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera I’m in no position to mock you.

Ken: It was eight years ago, Choire and I were working on an exciting new web hit called “Sploid,” I had acquired a new baby and a large dog and it seemed a *minivan* was the only passenger vehicle that could hold all these creatures and their baggage.

Ken: And the “good minivans” were like $32,000, the Toyota and whatever, so I bought this horrible Chrysler, which died exactly the day after the extended warranty expired, and then Chrysler went bankrupt. Did Obama rescue Chrysler? If so, impeach him.

Anyway, so you replaced a 5mpg Oldsmobile with a sprightly and futuristic Prius. Did life seem instantly more futuristic?

Carrie: The Oldsmobile was intensely geriatric and generic to drive around (a friend then called it “the Spymobile”), but I have to say, LUXURIANT inside. Like riding around on the world’s most expansive, comfortable couch.

But I went from Oldsmobile to the other car you can own in Asheville if you vote Democrat: the Subaru Forester. Then sold that for the Prius. Next I will get an old Mercedes that runs on biodiesel and complete the odyssey.

Ken: So the Subaru is basically a gateway car to the Prius, and eventually… yes, biodisesel Mercedes with giant trailing balloon collectors for the carbon exhaust.

Carrie: I think you just rotate between these depending on your inclination. Now, if you thought your family needed a minivan to fit you all, how are you all fitting in the Prius?

Ken: The children got big enough so that they no longer require a mobile army of strollers and diaper bags and toy chests. Now they are just slightly smaller versions of humans, so they don’t need all this paraphernalia. Also I don’t take them anywhere.

Carrie: And the dog?

Ken: I put the dog to sleep.

Carrie: … [Pause while Carrie feels TERRIBLE]

Ken: Kidding! The dog fits. We actually waited for Prius to put out the little hatchback model — it’s like a little Euro rental car minivan, small but kind of like the Tardis inside — so now the dog can have his spot in the back.

It’s the kind of “family car” that civilized European people have been driving for a decade or more, tiny little cars that are completely functional and also fit in half of an American parking space.

Carrie: And roughly 500 cars fit on a city block.

Ken: It’s interesting, and shallow, that the Prius in America is seen more as a cultural marker for environmentally-minded upper-class people and not as the biggest technological advance in mass-produced affordable passenger cars.

Carrie: Well, yes. It is hard to walk up to yours in public without feeling like you should be swinging a NPR tote bag.

Ken: I’ve heard a little about the Prius as some kind of liberal elite-mobile, which is mostly surprising to me because they’re cheap cars. I mean, it’s about the cheapest new car you can get that will fit four people.

When I see a Tesla, I think, “eh, showoff Brad Pitt” or whatever, but a Prius?

Carrie: Plus the saving-money-on gas part.

Ken: Yes. The money I’m saving on gasoline alone is enough to make the car payment. Financially, that’s remarkable.

Carrie: And they’re pretty reliable. (Spits on ground superstitiously.)

Ken: So, when I was looking around for evidence of the apparent Culture Wars involving an inexpensive and safe car that gets really good mileage, I found this interview with James Woolsey, the hard-ass hawk former CIA chief. It’s from Motor Trend, which I assume is a magazine about trends in motor development, which would definitely cover the Prius hybrid drive:

[Woolsey] become one of Washington’s most hawkish hawks, agitating early for the removal of Saddam Hussein, pointing a finger at Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and calling for the bombing of Syria. By rights, Woolsey ought to drive a big, bad Hummer. Instead, he drives a Prius, and he says that if you live in a country dependent on imported oil, it’s your patriotic duty to do the same. His argument is simple: It’s a bad thing for transport to depend on oil when the great majority of that oil lies in volatile parts of the world whose governments are hostile to the West. Moreover, he argues that, by making the Middle East so wealthy, we’re indirectly subsidizing terror. For Woolsey, the cash register at your local gas station is a collection box for Al Qaeda.

Carrie: This is why you’re the automotive journalist of the two of us.

Ken: I take my beat very seriously, Carrie.

And thinking of my local redneck gas station / sub shop / Bud Lite outlet / American flag t-shirt minimart as a “collection box for Al Qaeda” is one of the more enjoyable mental images I’ve had in a while.

Carrie: It’s nice to imagine Woolsey stalking the parking lot… and I dunno, tearing off an American flag sticker from some giant golden SUV bumper. “I deem this vehicle unpatriotic.”

Ken: And yet, the hybrid market is 3% of the new passenger-car market in the United States.

Carrie: Only 3%????? The Asheville bubble gives me an inflated view of how many drive them.

Ken: I know the sales were relatively huge during California’s last gasoline price spike, but it’s still such a tiny part of the market. I can’t imagine willingly buying a car that gets less than 40mpg when they’re cheap and available and proven.

Carrie: Why do think more people haven’t bought?

Ken: Well, when you have voices of reason like Rush Limbaugh on the radio to a couple million people telling them *not* to buy a hybrid or an electric car because it makes them look like an effete liberal, that sort of has an effect. Although it seems to be fading a bit; most of the “culture war” stuff about the Prius dates back to 2007 or so, the end of the Bush era and the beginning of our new permanent semi-liberal African-American government.

Carrie: I also think bigger still equals safety for a lot of people, so SUVs. My major fear about buying one was that while it was very affordable, I worried that if it ever needed repairs, it was going to cost lots of $$ to replace the battery.

Ken: Right, the battery fear. That’s what people talked about, 10 years ago. “Oh well it’s all fine and good to save the environment, but that battery pack costs $10,000 and will die in five years.” Which… never happened?

Carrie: Exactly.

Ken: And all the hybrid components, including the battery, are covered for 10 years. (I think it’s 8 years/100,000 miles in the non-California markets.)

Carrie: My model’s a 2002 with 100,000-plus miles on it now, but I found a mechanic who collects the batteries from wrecked… prii (vocabulary!) and he can replace individual cells if your battery dies so you don’t have to buy an entire new one.

Ken: Wow! This is very Blade Runner to me, somehow. I envision a guy in overalls in back of some rusted and kudzu-covered 1940s gas station, extracting battery pods with his robot helper, named for a state college sports mascot.

Carrie: That image… is not entirely off!

Ken: My Prius has sort of boosted my psychic abilities, I’ve noticed.

Carrie: This mechanic, he’s just very fascinated by the technology. Which goes back to your point: That it’s amazing.

Ken: NOW, importantly, what has failed on your Prius?

Carrie: I’ve had mine six years, and so far it’s needed only routine-type maintenance, like a fuel filter cleaning, etc. I bought it from a friend who was moving to Colorado and thought the Prius would burn out on the mountains there (which are obviously more radical than the mountains here). Which I mention because while not exactly a failure, uh, I would not describe the Prius as a car with a lot of pick up. So I’ve had to stop challenging people to drag races on any sort of even gently ascending hills… which, there goes a hobby.

Ken: Sometimes I wonder if you are truly in North Carolina. (Also a Prius with a General Lee custom paint job would be kind of awesome, no?)

Carrie: Mildlythunderousroad. And with the doors sealed shut so you have to leap in and out.

Ken: So that this doesn’t read like a Toyota sponsored post (which costs money, please contact the publisher, etc.!), let’s briefly talk about why the Prius and not whatever other hybrid or EV currently on the market, the Volt and the Leaf and such.

Carrie: My Prius purchase was based completely on the opportunity of my friend selling hers. What tilted you toward it?

Ken: $75 per fill-up, that’s what settled it for me, a year before the Nissan died.

Carrie: And by comparison a Prius costs, what, $40 to fill up?

Ken: Oh, it’s almost comical. You can pay cash to fill up, with the change you dropped on the floor in the taco shop’s drive-thru lane.

Carrie: But why the Prius and not another hybrid?

Ken: The Prius is everywhere in California, even out here in the Mojave Desert, hours from Hollywood and its limousine liberals in… a compact hybrid car. It’s even the standard car for county government out here, which makes sense because this county is the size of Ireland, stretching from the edge of L.A. to Death Valley and the Nevada state line. So we see this car everywhere, and never see it on the side of the road with the hood up.

And because of the vast distances one must travel when living in the vast Mojave Desert, plug-ins just wouldn’t work. I did check out the prices on some other hybrids, though, and they were just way too expensive, even with the incentives. The Prius was priced just right for someone who didn’t have any money to spend on a car.

Had my old car lasted until my move back to San Francisco in a few months, I would’ve considered a plug-in EV. But, it didn’t, so the Prius was it. Plus, I do like to take 500-mile drives alone every few months, to get out of the house.

Carrie: The other vehicle in our household is a ’66 Chevy pickup, which gets 12mpg — maybe, if it has a good wind behind it. So the Prius evens out the balance.

Ken: What will you get next, assuming your Prius ever dies? (And I have read that 98% of Prii were still on the road a decade later.) Maybe a *bigger* pickup, to carry your old pickup?

Carrie: God, let it be a motorcycle with a sidecar for the dog.

Ken: Hahahahah that is the New Smug Environmentalist Vehicle, I hope. With both driver and dog wearing those leather biplane caps and goggles.

Excuse me, pleather biplane and goggles.

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