“People don’t sing like they used to sing…”

Every December I do a roundup of blog posts from the passing year, mostly as an easy index for my future self. This year has been the least prolific in the thirteen years I’ve been doing this, and I’m okay with that. Since January, I’ve been helping a local organization write a book that’s going to mean a great deal to people in my community, and possibly far beyond. It’s a good kind of busy.

In the meantime, I’m glad “Quid Plura?” still exists, in all its archaic glory, to serve as a notepad for notions that no one would foolishly pay me to write.

This year, the Old English poem “Deor” gave me insight into a botched Smithsonian exhibition about Maryland sharecroppers—and vice versa.

In November, I was involved in a ceremony with implications I’m still mulling over, but studying a medieval martyrdom half a lifetime ago helped me make sense of a modern lynching.

I took some time to look at some of the bigger artistic and cultural questions in “The Banjo Player” by Fenton Johnson, a poet who never quite found the audience he craved.

A pithy post about the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris held up better, so to speak, than blogging about the news usually does.

By contrast, we’ll see if these thoughts about speech, online mobbing, weird thinking, and bad faith in academia make sense down the road.

Happy new year to those of you who still wander this way! Check back in 2020. To my eternal surprise, there’s always more to say.