Editor’s Note: It’s important to be candid in saying that however arduous it is to feel what I’ve written here, the act of putting words together has always been a joy to me, as it has been even here.

This backwards (and inwards) looking post would probably have been better timed for before the new year, though let me promise a very expansive forward-looking post some time very soon.

If “navel-gazing” is your pet-peeve, skip this one. I went chimney-sweeping up there and present now these dust-clods from my brainpan.

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2017 was a difficult year for me—though I question even my motives for saying that. When I see other people write about their difficulties, I sympathize with them, but I am also acutely aware that difficulty-writing is a genre heavily dependent for success on presuming the existence of a sympathetic audience. It is a privileged position to have people listen to you (or even to operate with the assumption that they will), and because of this website, I am privileged to have a score more sympathetic listeners than I had a year ago, though I am not unmindful that I am as perfectly capable of squandering my readers’ sympathies as I am of gaining them. Past experience tells me that talking about other things seems to attract people to me, whereas talking about myself seems to repel them—which means this post is a terrible idea, oy veysmir!—and I should extract a doleful self-warning from this that my lively manner of expression can only do so much to compensate for a (by some lights) terribly unattractive personality.

Less than a year ago, when I was fired from my job and became once again a superfluous person (might the unattractive personality have had something to do with this? you are very astute, reader); and then in the months following, when it felt an almost indifferent matter to the world whether or not I packed up my mortal coil and disappeared altogether somewhere out of frame; and later, when I decided to create a new website, a new identity intruding into the ongoing conversations of strangers like some unasked-for demon of mirth and neediness ostentatiously inserting himself into human affairs: at all these times of my year, I was well-served amid the many disadvantages of my profound, deep-seated arrogance by at least one positive: unwavering self-belief, a sense that I would always have something no one could take away from me as long as I could write.

This year, I married my (to me, all-along unquestionable) ability to write to a variously-motivated subject matter, though initially I was drawn to books I thought could console me as I once more felt alone and adrift in the world; two of these books that I ended up reviewing were The Tanners by Robert Walser and Vol. I of History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova. The first spoke to a lot of what I was going through, from the Walser stand-in main character’s perpetual inability to hold down a job to the struggle of each member of the Tanner family to find some measure of satisfaction within the context of a society in which “respectability” carries so much importance, in which a sense of dignity is so tied up with one’s occupation (and by “one” I mean me, which shows how weakly I recoil against fessing up to my own vanity.) The book didn’t provide any easy answers to the problems a character like Simon (or yours truly) faces, but I laughed and felt heartache and disappointment with Simon, and that was so cathartic for me. This was also my first attempt to cross-promote my writing on Twitter, and I can’t say it wasn’t inspiriting to discover that people out there on the Interwebz actually found value in something I wrote.

I confess (this post is rather confessional, isn’t it?) that up until this year I’ve been somewhat reclusive, and I’m reclusive because like Golyadkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Double, I have some reason to believe I cut a most laughable figure in public, and am one of those characters you would be hard-pressed to avoid if at all possible, or franticly await the first opportunity to exchange for a more perfect model—with the same functions but fewer complications—if avoidance proved impossible. After many years I’ve decided it’s impossible for me to not seem ridiculous to most of those around me; I’ve settled on some combination of keeping to myself and not opening my mouth in public, as well as obtusely ignoring how ridiculous and conceited I sound when I do deign to speak.

I’m also reclusive because of guilt and shame, because there’s a substantial argument that I did many things to deserve my ignominy, and there are other things that have happened that I’m ashamed about that I did nothing to deserve, but which are ignominious all the same; I imagine two people assigned the task of saying at whose feet to lay the blame for my ill fortune, me or my environment, could come to completely opposite, yet equally dubious conclusions: one saying that I am largely to blame for what’s happened to me, the other that I’m not. The first (my prosecutor) would say that I had a great thing going but I threw it away because of my arrogance. The second (my defender) would counter that the thing in question was only superficially great, that in fact it was a very shitty thing I had been grasping onto for dear life, the dying limb of an already dead tree. The first would demur and point out that I had only grabbed at that dying branch in the first place because I had no other branches to grab, and that was because I was an arrogant person who had a pattern of throwing good things away. The second person, my defender, would say the truth is more complicated than that, would say that I didn’t choose to be a person who finds only dead branches to climb. The first person would say, “Are you sure about that?” The second would say, “Damn right I am.” And they would go on like Aeschylus and Euripides in the Underworld with a whole pageant of dueling episodes of bad decisions I made or shitty things that happened to me that I couldn’t control. And after hours of this squabbling, Dionysos would wave his wand furiously to get their attention and say, “Lads, gents, ministers of innocence and condemnation! I don’t think we’re going to resolve this lifelong clusterf**k in a day. Let’s just stop thinking about it and tell Abe to start a book website.” “Of course, a book website!” will say the first person. “It involves writing, which Abe has always wanted to do.” “Yes, writing,” the other agrees. “He’s always been good for that.”

(Just to be clear, so readers don’t misunderstand me on the issue of my “bad decisions”: I’ve been too boastful, too low-energy, too high-strung, too needy, too hi-fallutin’, and too insecure, and on some occasions I also just didn’t look the part; I’ve been brusque to the occasional bully who saw me as a soft target and/or got it into his head that I needed to be taken down a notch, though arguably the only person I’ve ever done any real harm to is myself. I once taught a class where a white student stormed out the room because of a [I thought inoffensive] point I made about racism and the urban/suburban divide in our local school districts, and that was the beginning of the end of my teaching career. Then later I told a millionaire no, he couldn’t have what he was asking for, and that was the end of my non-teaching career; so I’ve destroyed my prospects by doing silly things that really shouldn’t destroy a person’s prospects. Then too I’ve also been passive, lethargic, and often paralyzed by shame; if I were paying myself to be my own advocate, I ought to sue myself for malpractice.)

And so I created this website, and I wrote. And I decided to take up reading a set of the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, a big 8-volume box set I had bought at a going-out-of-business sale by a rare books dealer in Cincinnati; it sounded racy and escapist, which was what I felt I needed to relax and decompress and stop brooding over what had happened. I was surprised to find myself connecting on some level with the infamous raconteur (and when you find yourself forming emotional bonds with an occasional rapist/year-round sexist creep, it’s time to check yourself.) But what appeals to me about Casanova is his honesty–or rather, his granularity. He simply says so much that he cannot help but tell the truth, to reveal both the world and himself with exhilarating exactitude; I fear if I am ever called upon to write my own memoirs my memory will prove in no ways as heroic as Casanova’s. But I was surprised to find a kindred spirit in Casanova, that he—the famed Casanova, a man of such incredible-seeming competence at all the faculties of life!—was driven in part by uncontrollable desires, in part by profound shame. How wonderful is it that greatness can be born of shame! How great is it to discover one doesn’t have to have lived immaculately (or even been born into wealth and fame) to achieve eminence! Let Casanova serve as inspiration to all us scoundrels and muddleheaded half-made children of fate the world over: let him tell us how it won’t be easy, but if you are talented, you can make your luck, you can find a way.

I’m still in the process of finding my way. 2017 was the third of what I call my “Years of Vulnerability.” During my years of invulnerability, I held onto certain absurd teleological ideas about my destiny or all the great things I would invariably do, it was just a matter of time; now it feels like time is working against me. Three years ago—it’s such a stupid thing!—I was riding an upright exercise bike with a pair of in-ear earbuds on, when suddenly I caught the cord up and ripped the headphones right out of my ear; yet I discovered—it seemed really silly—that one of the earpads was stuck inside my ear, and while I was trying to use tweezers to pull it out suddenly the darkness rushed over my eyes, gravity threw me to the floor, and when I came to I had this big bruise on my jaw from where I had crashed into the carpet. I had fainted, there was no permanent damage resulting from this minor episode, and yet nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It was like a warning sign sent from the heavens, telling me that the body that had heretofore been the accomplice of my recklessness would soon turn traitor. Today it feels like my body is actively fighting against my ambitions, so that whether I get another book read and reviewed today becomes a matter of perfectly aligning the doubtful factors of getting sufficient sleep, keeping my blood sugar low, and staying on task during the hours I’ve committed to that purpose; I have of necessity adopted something like Franz Kafka’s work schedule and am grateful for those hours of grace when it yields positive results.

I suppose there is more I could confess, though what I’ve written perhaps implies enough for you to follow Henry James’s example and imagine a good deal more. Part of why I normally eschew autobiography is that I have a lot of bitter memories to retail, and even the positive ones are tinged with some degree of sadness; and so in order not to wallow in negativity (and make voyeurs of my readers) I simply choose not to write about such things. Instead, I write book reviews (and wallow in other people’s bitter memories! :D)

I am so thankful to everyone who has read and shared my posts. Two of the first were Melissa Beck (@magistrabeck) and Susan Bernofsky (@translationista), and I am incredibly grateful to them and to everyone else who has taken an interest in my writings along the way. You have bucked me up and given me a renewed sense of hope for this new year.

As stated at the top, I will have an expansive post tomorrow or the next day in which I will lay out my big plans for this website in 2018 and beyond; at which time I, like the bearded lady making her grand entrance at P.T. Barnum’s circus, will reveal to you the full awe-inspiring scope of my ridiculousness. (Stay tuned!)