Thoughts for the beginning of 2025
Resolutions, strange statistics, and a media roundup for 2024
Here is a customary and overdue post about what I read and watched last year, and what I am thinking about in January!!
Before I start properly, some relevant links:
A few recent pieces for the New Statesman:
on 4chan /lit/ and its autodidact culture (featured in last week’s Saturday Read newsletter - thanks, FMcR!)
my brilliant but puzzling time at the largest-ever UK exhibition of Marilyn Monroe’s possessions
My Saturday issue of Kit Wilson’s Eclectic Letters Substack, with plenty of interesting stuff I am constantly soapboxing about, like Wordpress classic movie blogs and Felliniesque takes on the Scopitone (please check out the other ones too, it is such a cool project!!)
Academic and musician Ian Pace quotes me at length in a very well-conceived article for the Critic
Polemicist Joanna Williams calls me ‘shrewd’
I read 72 books in 2024 and these were my favourites:
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The GOAT. Compact and brilliant. I read in one day. Really interested in the way his narrative narrows around a single person and takes nothing else in, feels like the end of a ‘50s cartoon where everything is black apart from one circle. How does he do it?? One day I will reread and make very specific notes on this
(My reading is really historically asymmetrical and swayed by sudden urges, my film viewing is not, thus I cannot help but process book stuff in cinematic terms - was also saying the other day I wanted to be the Frank Tashlin of the contemporary novel)
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
I prefer this to Pnin (other wry campus novel I have read), it is kind-hearted and very funny in a mannered post-Wildean way. I forgot about it for a few months but it has stuck with me somewhere secret and had a huge influence on the way I’m running my fiction project now. (Also really chimed with me because I read it at a time when I was still struggling to get my writing published and chasing editors up every day, etc. Je suis Jim)
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Nobody told me Dickens was so funny!!! David’s tenement flat felt so modern and so did Jip, the little dog with his own pagoda. The final storm carried more than an echo of late-40s elemental Hollywood melodramas (films again). I would like to watch the 1935 MGM adaptation in 2025!!
Little Me by Patrick Dennis
This is a niche pick - a cult classic by the man who also recorded the misadventures of Auntie Mame (big fiction influence too in several respects). It’s the highly unreliable autobiography of a Golden Age actress who thinks she is making it big. Anticipates Madonna’s mid-00s sojourn to the British countryside and also the best bit of John Schlesinger’s film Darling, which is apparently a favourite of Madonna’s. And it’s illustrated with several posed and ridiculously-styled photographs! (I now reflexively pronounce ‘fan’ as ‘Featherstone’).
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Another thing nobody told me: Bellow’s syntax is wild and masterful. And he is FUNNY. I don’t think he is read enough. You can probably diagram his sentences into the sort of tree you’d put in a Chinese brush-and-ink painting. EG. from Augie March:
“Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic.”
From Herzog, which I am reading now and which will probably be a book of the year for 2025:
“The human soul is an amphibian, and I have touched its sides. Amphibian! It lives in more elements than I will ever know; and I assume that in those remote stars matter is in the making which will create stranger beings yet.”
“But I was poring over Spengler now, struggling and drowning in the oceanic visions of that sinister kraut.” (!!!!!)
Bellow is becoming a role model for me because of his embrace of autodidactism and learned multiculturalism. In 2025 I would like to read more of his non-fiction too!
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen (I already wrote about here)
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
It took me ages to finish this and I left without really feeling satisfied. This is basically because there is no single narrative. We jump around from one place and time to another, following sets of characters that only occasionally converge, and the only real link is style. But I LOVED the style - perfect idiosyncratic parody of about a million things at once, a boy’s adventure novel and the intertitles of a film by D.W Griffith and a grammar of a language spoken by three people in the world and a guide to tying knots…
An influential phrase out of many many Kindle highlights: “Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals.”
Was very interested in the fact that some sentence comes in to describe the state of ‘the day’ every ten or so pages, and that each sentence has very similar prosody. Has anyone read any good commentary on this? What is going on?
Special mention - Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn, which I read in the space of one evening and which still gets at me mostly because I’m trying to work out whether we’re related???!!?
The Wages of Fear (1953)
I have moved away from the BFI cinema now (☹️) but when I lived on the same Tube line I used to regularly buy under-25s tickets for films I knew absolutely nothing about, and this was one of them. (Another ended up being actual porn). I had no idea of the runtime before I went in and it ended up being two and a half hours long. The last hour had some of the coolest lighting and framing I had seen in a film of that period - thinking mostly of the truck at night, with its two drivers conveniently lit from below in film-noir style (it was too down-and-dirty to really qualify as a film noir - not enough talking). A brilliant first introduction to Clouzot!!! (Les Diaboliques has moved up my watchlist)
La Notte (1961)
I already wrote about here, re. modernist wandering and why I think Antonioni might be my favourite director. But I think of the rain scene every day!
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Claudette Colbert is a GENIUS comedienne - as Bush might say, I have been misunderestimating her. (Later on I went to see It Happened One Night at the BFI - Capra was my Classic Hollywood blind spot and his visual style is beautiful, but I prefer her in this!)
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
I actually had an old Tumblr mutual recommend this film in a guest post ON THIS VERY BLOG during the pandemic so I’m not sure why it took me four years to watch it. It’s the sort of thing you could reasonably poststructuralise to death, but it triumphs by also being one of the most beautiful and sensual films ever made. You will never ever find a more excessive example of baroque Orientalist production design, not even in von Sternberg…
Marie Antoinette (1938)
I finished this in 2025 but I started it in 2024 - it’s that long. I watched it as research for the book I’m writing and expected to be put off by the Norma Shearer casting, which I had always assumed to be a regular bit of studio nepotism. No it isn’t! She’s perfect - I thought she wouldn’t translate into the late-30s epic from the mannered early-30s Pre-Code, but that actually ended up being a spectacular bit of metanarrative. Think of the rioting peasants as an early version of the Box Office Poison craze, and of Louis XVI (played endearingly by Brit character actor Robert Morley) as the dying Irving Thalberg. Still - if I could cast anyone, living or dead, as Marie Antoinette it would probably be Brigitte Helm!!
This film was meant to be in colour, but MGM spent too much on costumes to afford it - and I’m happy about that. It would have ruined the film’s textural opulence - the interplay of mirrors, topiary, textiles, jewels, etc. (And look at the incredible composition in the scene just before its intermission, with the stairs extending into the horizon - these things are perfect as they are!!). When I see filmmakers use black-and-white cinematography as a stand-in for the bleak, the boring, the hopeless, etc., I can tell they have only had a cursory engagement with this period. Big-budget studio films from the pre-Cinemascope era sometimes feel especially sensual because they are in black and white - good cinematographers can use this to magnify texture, tone, and composition without the imposition of colour. A lot of my favourite shots from the late 20s - late 40s are of particularly glittery glasses and bottles, which look unreal with the right focus. I would personally be in favour of levying extra taxes on colour film productions today, just to see what would happen - I’d use the money I raise to search people’s attics for that lost Garbo silent).
My two main resolutions, but more later:
Read 7 (relatively short) argumentative/philosophical texts in depth
My biggest shortcoming as a reader is that I am really bad at doing close, focused readings. My second-biggest shortcoming as a reader is that I have a very minimal first-hand basis in Western philosophy barring Marxism (🫤) and also the Roman Stoics (I did a Latin A-level, Seneca was my extremely unusual set text for one paper, most other students in the country did De Bello Gallico). The two shortcomings are almost definitely intertwined.
In 2025, I’m going to make a bigger separation between my ‘fast casual’ reading (‘general reader’ nonfiction, novels for pleasure, fleeting bits of research for my fiction projects) and my actual focused reading, in which I spend a long time on each page and follow arguments properly and sit down at a desk taking proper notes and summarising things in my own words. I have chosen to use philosophy self-study as a pilot project here, because it will be a two-birds-one-stone situation if done successfully. I’m doing this now because I am 100% sure that it will get worse the longer that I’m out of formal education, and because I now measure my reading in hours and not in books (thus focusing on a few is equivalent to going quickly through a lot).
I’m trying to do Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy now - mainly because lots of people have said it is a good place to start. It was funny how quickly the arguments became clear after I started summarising them for myself into a new Obsidian tab (I am going to have to go back over a few of the first Meditations). I know I also want to try:
de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity (I won a paper translation after losing the Christmas debate at work…)
Aristotle, Poetics (I’m interested in dramatic structure and the history of drama via. film, and I think a solid grasp of this would help me understand a lot of later writing. I may also read a few Greek dramas in tandem, following this very cool 1999 syllabus for guidance)
2. Establish total equilibrium between social media and reading
I got back on Twitter in 2023, shortly after doing the Spectator internship (thought it would be a waste if I didn’t try and maintain my connections in some way - this was sensible). In 2024 I gained something like 700 new followers from a combination of University Challenge, Olfactory Oppression-gate, and a viral-ish post I made about learning Latin. I think my presence there has definitely helped with visibility and opportunities, but I also think I’m now capable of preserving the effect while cutting my time on the platform to about 10% of what it has been.
I’ve been trying for ‘equilibrium’ since the autumn of 2023, when I started tracking my hours doing directed ‘activities’ (reading, jobs, art, cleaning, etc.) against my daily mobile screen time to establish a minimum 2:1 ratio. It’s great to have a criterion for things like this, but that one backfired, mostly because it gave me a new expectation but no methodology through which to modify my behaviour to meet the expectation (ie. I expected inaction but proposed no clear alternative route). So a few days ago I started something different:
I actually count all the ‘posts’ I see. This means timeline posts on social media, short-form videos, and comments on videos and forums.
I preserve my daily reading goal (1h, on a habit-tracking spreadsheet), but for every post I see, I read for an appended minute. (Not a minute at a time, I wait for them to stack up and set a timer!)
The big thing about 2025 social media is that it’s set up to push you as much stuff as possible - but the more this happens, the longer I spend NOT logging ‘user seconds.’ So I am playing it at its own game
I keep track of the posts/reading minutes ratio using a single number in a single cell of a spreadsheet. I add to it when I see posts, and I subtract from it after I’ve read for a bit. High numbers are bad and low numbers are good - my goal is always zero, which would be total equilibrium. It also means I always have direction in some form - ie. ‘I must read for twelve minutes!!’
This is very much a two-birds-one-stone thing - I can still use social media for research and communication, and to advertise my work, but I have effectively cut out tangents of ‘doomscrolling’ through algorithmic feeds - I am intensely conscious of how ‘useful’ the posts on my feed are, and feel I must use my allotted time wisely. I get all the mental benefits of my time going cold turkey (for about seven months in Taiwan) without the weird purity thing of never being allowed on certain apps or sites - no more nightmares about accidentally opening Facebook, true story. Also I am reading WAY more, including first thing in the morning on a consistent basis (something I wasn’t managing before - it feels counterintuitive, but I think it might wake me up more effectively than a phone!).
And this means I still get my 2:1 ratio without really needing to try. On two consecutive work days I tracked over ten hours of focus (in a healthy way, not all ‘deep work’!) and under an hour of screen time. I’ll update after a year of this - it’ll be great to see how much more I can achieve using the system…
This is weird but sort of cool to look back at. I track on an app called Forest. It SEEMS time-consuming but it takes a few seconds each side and maximises focus, so I don’t mind at all!
I spent:
533 hours reading in English (this is good. A lot of it was on my commute and even more of it would probably otherwise have been spent on my phone.)
My nichest 2025 resolution is to divert a slightly larger fraction of my income specifically to print media (magazines, the LRB, etc) and then divert a fraction of my phone time to that in turn.
348 hours on writing jobs for paid outlets, as well as on this Substack (generally including research in this, but not pitching). This seems like a lot but I’ll probably beat it in 2025, although I won’t say EXACTLY why yet
265 hours finishing off my degree (I got a 1:1!!!). This included my HK film dissertation (I started research the summer before, but started writing in January), two final assignments from the term before, and all coursework for two other classes.
110 hours reading in Chinese - I kept dropping this and picking it back up again, so it’s not consistent at all throughout the year.
I’m actually lowering my 2025 goal to 30 mins of daily reading, so prioritising consistency over total time. And also prioritising Japanese, see below. I generally use Chinese for research on pet projects re. pop culture in Cold War-era ‘Free Asia’ (HK, Taiwan, Singapore) - not really to communicate. This is actually fine with me - I think it is a totally valid way to use my degree after realising my academic/personal interests lay outside of the mainland. I will be using them to help me with my reading in 2025 by setting myself some research questions and actively searching for relevant bits of non-fiction.
My reading is in a really unexciting spot - I rarely see new characters in what I read, and I have basically full comprehension, so it’s hard to spot ‘minor wins,’ but finishing an entire book is still hard. I’m hoping to make it so I am forced to read in Chinese to carry out activities I need to do, ie. looking for info that only exists in Chinese
106 hours playing music (guitar and eventually piano. I took this up as a ploy to get myself off my phone and it worked really well! In 2025 I want to be able to read the bass clef as fluently as I can read the treble)
77 hours a) pitching articles, b) applying to jobs, mostly at the start of the year (most of my job apps were ghosts or rejections, I had one unsuccessful interview but it was actually fun and amicable so I’m glad I did it. I’ve been working consistently in events/content since slightly before my graduation (269 hours), but I never filled out a paper application or had a proper interview. This was a mixture of luck and also getting out of the house and saying yes to things). On top of this - I spent fewer hours pitching than I thought I would, because I had an editor contact me and then commission me quite a bit to write about stuff already in the news (you probably know who you are and you’re the best!!!!! Although I fear it is making me complacent)
37 hours studying Japanese (this dropped off, but I’m going to try and pick it back up again in a structured way with graded readers - mostly because I’ve found myself really missing Japan after my slightly unorthodox solo trip in 2023. And because I think there are more cultural highlights there than in mainland China for someone with my interests/values. Can never truly get into anime beyond a few things but really interested in their film scene (a lot of similarities to my favourite parts of Hong Kong’s from 1950s on, and lots more contemporary stuff to look forward to), fiction, various musical enclaves, magazines (!), architecture (! I am fascinated by anything Meiji-era), etc)
It’s meant to take 2,000+ study hours to get to the N1 level for an English speaker, but being literate in Chinese puts me at a huge advantage - some have said to halve those hours - far easier to memorise Sinitic vocabulary, most kanji already make sense in my brain, etc
23 hours studying chengyu from flashcards (I am not doing this anymore, it was helpful for a bit and has led to a few gains in reading comprehension, but now I officially think it sucks the fun out of Chinese… I will divert this time to Chinese-language research instead)
My favourite author knows who I am!!!! That in itself is quite frankly insane but we have also had many enlightening conversations. Of my piece on Hollywood voyeurism she says “British journalism at its witty best” (!) and also says my career “will rise in the East, like the sun” - which is exactly what someone says about Marilyn Monroe’s character in All About Eve (1950), which is also INSANE because that’s coincidentally the only film I have ever used as an analogy for my writing career, except usually I am Bette Davis instead (jaded, resigned to eating celery in a threatening manner). After reading that I had to lie down on the floor for a bit. Anyway… she is the Madonna of 90s Academia so I would like to be the fledgling Britney Spears of 21st Century Autodidacticism.
I started writing a novel!! (I am being very serious about it - this means, for the first time ever, I am having to balance excessive amounts of writing work, all of which I actually want to do…). In its current state it is nearly the longest thing I have ever written (there’s something longer but I do not dare to speak of it). I’m learning more and more about the powers of a) consistency, b), being happy with an imperfect draft, c) Syd Field’s book Screenplay, which I am glad I read back in Taipei - it’s a masterclass in plot. Also, novels are great because you can use them as an excuse to do things you secretly want to do and to avoid things you secretly don’t. Not on dating apps, too busy writing a novel - also, reading a lot of trashy gossip in case any of it’s useful for my novel.
I got a job!!! (Technically the day before my graduation, which might be some kind of record).
I was on University Challenge! (I am now out of University Challenge). It was fun while it lasted and I made a lot of friends through practice and filming. I tried out in my first and second years too, and never ever thought we’d make it to TV!
In 2024 I began to assemble my own canon of ‘prestige K-pop.’ This ended up in the top spot and it will probably never move. I think it might actually be one of the best pop songs ever made - something to do with the parallel key change between the verse and second chorus (which in turn might be K-pop’s greatest chorus - the ‘sarangeun teukbyeolhan ichaweon’ one)? It’s been eight years and I can pick out all of its ancestors, but it still feels fun and new! And sonically cohesive, despite multiple moving parts
Could I recommend Harry Frankfurt's 'On Bullshit' as one of your 7 pieces of (analytic aka "Western") philosophy? It's a good showing of contemporary analytic philosophy at its most powerful, and entirely accessible without any sacrifice of rigour.
I think Lucky Jim and Augie March are masterpieces of the twentieth century. I'm glad you liked them.
And Claudette Colbert is criminally underrated.