2023 in Review
2023 has been one of the bloodiest years in recent European history. The situation globally hasn’t been all that much better. The bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine (and elsewhere) has been appalling and viscerally disturbing. It’s also been one of the hottest years on record. It feels unfair to be able to say that 2023 has been quite a good year for me personally — but it has. I’ve written 127,153 words of a new book on a fascinating topic. I visited the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. I saw Bob Dylan live, probably for the last time. I managed to meet up with several friends I hadn’t seen in years — no mean feat when you live abroad — and have generally had a nice time living in Lisbon, a city I find just as beautiful and interesting as when we first moved.
2023 was the year I became an early modernist. Almost everything I’ve read this year was written in or about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and almost all of it concerned the Americas and not Southeast Asia. This isn’t as dramatic a pivot as it may seem, and this new project is just an extension of interests I’ve maintained for decades. I’m not sure I’d have been able to get away with such a radical move had I remained in academia, though, and it feels good to have the freedom to follow one’s passions in one’s own way on one’s own time. I’ve learned a lot this year — about flying fish and pit vipers and polysynthetic languages and much else. That can only be a good thing.
The worst parts of this year, which weren’t really all that bad, came near the beginning. They all involved scholarly things, or rather academic things (i.e. the dull busywork that surrounds and gets in the way of scholarship). This being a scholarly blog, it’s probably worth discussing some of those a little. I doubt it’ll make terribly interesting reading but it’s good to get these things out of the system once in a while.
Right at the beginning of the year I went through the edits on my book, which I believed would be published in 2023. It might be published in 2024; I truly have no idea. I don’t think academic publishers are used to authors being as intransigent as I am. Most academic authors are desperate to publish for the sake of their careers. I think it would be nice to see the thing in print, but ‘nice’ is not the same as ‘essential’, and I’m only going to sign a contract when it looks broadly favourable to me.
I’ve decided not to attend any more academic events or write any more papers. (Not that I wrote many of those anyway.) Around the beginning of the year I was contacted by a kind and generous Australian academic who asked me to collaborate on an article with her. I thought about it for a bit and decided that I would do it if I had enough material for the topic. So I sat down and managed to write a few thousand words over the course of a day or so, so I said yes. The article was for an edited volume, not a journal, and a meeting had been scheduled for the writers and editors to discuss the articles and the volume as a whole. For timezone reasons my collaborator was unable to attend, so I was supposed to give a short presentation on my own, which wasn’t a problem as I happened to have a free afternoon and evening on the day.
The meeting took five hours or so. I was the last speaker. I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite as bored as I was towards the end of that meeting, and I had half a mind to quit then and there. I spoke for five minutes or so about the paper, which involved my concept of the ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’. Every presentation up to that point had been received cordially and with minor and usually enthusiastic comments, so I wasn’t expecting to have to defend the idea in any serious way, but apparently a couple of people found the idea of abandoning the ‘Global Middle Ages’ difficult to accept, and I was confronted in a far more hostile manner than any of the other speakers were. Perhaps everyone was as bored as I was by that point and wanted to get their energy out somehow. One person seemed particularly incensed. The questions weren’t very helpful and seemed designed to dismiss the idea I was proposing to use in the article instead of seeking to understand it.
The idea of the ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’ is an old one, as you’ll know if you’ve followed me on Twitter or on this blog for the past few years. I’ve been working with the concept for six years or so and first wrote about it on here back in 2018. It forms the backbone of my award-winning doctoral dissertation. In 2022 I gave a well-received talk about it at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. (I think it would be fair to say that it stole the show on the panel I was on.) This was not an idea that I had come up with for the volume and it didn’t need much feedback.
I suppose it might be helpful to receive commentary on the idea from people who understand it and who aren’t absolutely desperate to use the word ‘global’ in their work, but unfortunately the feedback I received at this meeting demonstrated very clearly to me that my interlocutor had not even grasped what I was talking about. I knew she didn’t understand the idea because she mentioned Elizabeth Lambourn’s Abraham’s Luggage (2018) as an example of ‘global’ medieval connectivity. Abraham’s Luggage is a wonderful book about a Jewish merchant from North Africa and his voyages to and life in India in the twelfth century. (If you’re familiar with the ‘Hemispheric Middle Ages’, you’ll see immediately why it does not make sense to raise this as an objection.) It’s not a problem if someone doesn’t understand something after having been introduced to it in the briefest possible way only moments earlier, but I’d say that good scholars try to understand things before being openly hostile towards them.
It was also clear to me that the person in question was only speaking to me in this way — not listening to what I was saying, interrupting me when I was speaking — because I did not have an academic job and hadn’t spent a long time introducing myself at the beginning of the meeting. I felt that my contribution was being dismissed in such an aggressive way because I wasn’t considered worthy of respect, being lower in rank than anyone else at the meeting. I have to say that this stuck in my craw a little bit. I wondered why I was dedicating so much time and effort to what was in effect a stressful hobby.
I eventually decided to pull out of the volume. I was dealing with publishing issues at the same time and I had also been invited to Paris to give a talk that I wasn’t prepared for and didn’t really want to do — but the institution to which I had been invited was paying for my tickets and accommodation, and the event was intended as the prelude to the Aditia Gunawan’s Ph.D defence, to which I had also been invited. Aditia is both a friend and an excellent scholar. I couldn’t really say no. We also had some difficulties at home after a loud neighbour made some xenophobic comments to my wife after she asked him to turn down his music in broken Portuguese. (This neighbour is the only openly rude Portuguese person I’ve ever encountered, I think. Very odd man.) I was a little overwhelmed at that point, so I pulled out of the article collaboration after having committed to it and after having written a few thousand words. Not a nice thing to do but a necessary one (for my sanity). I’ve since decided not to go in for any other similar events or publications in future. There’s always some silly nonsense to deal with. Perhaps there’s just something about me that pisses other people off.
None of this is all that bad. It’s all fine, really. Just minor disagreements over academic matters and people exercising their status anxiety in public. But it made me decide not to engage any further with academic work per se (as opposed to scholarship) and so is worth discussing here. I never enjoyed that sort of thing at the best of times and find it actively unpleasant now that ‘Independent Scholar’ appear after my name instead of an institutional affiliation.
I also left Twitter around the same time, mostly out of disgust at what Musk was doing with the site. Doing this cured my social media addiction, so I think I can say that Elon Musk has had a positive effect on the quality of my life as a whole.
Anyway, after I came back from Paris at the end of May, after most of my academic commitments had been turned down or otherwise resolved themselves, I started writing a book. It won’t be a profitable book (money-wise, I mean), but the last half of the year has been a frankly fascinating journey into areas I’ve always wanted to explore and now have the freedom and skills to do so. I’ve worked hard and written over 100,000 words, but I’ve taken regular breaks, managed to fit in trips to Kazakhstan and England and to various parts of Portugal, and spent plenty of time reading and relaxing in the sun. I don’t feel burned out or stressed, and if I do find that I’ve been overworking I just take a couple of days off. No pressure. I’ve also booked a trip to Paraguay for next spring. I expect I’ll have a complete draft of my book before the trip and will polish it up afterwards.
I’m sure 2024 will involve just as much bloodshed as 2023 — I’ll be surprised if more pointless war isn’t on the cards — and like many people I’m quite certain the world in general is getting worse and has been for some time. It will certainly continue getting hotter. It can seem futile to attempt to remain alive and well in a world like this. Still, I’m going to do my best to make the world better in my own small way. I might even have a book published next year. Possibly more than one.
Best film(s) I’ve seen this year: Silence (2016); Sorcerer (1977); Tár (2022). Oppenheimer and Barbie were the only films released this year that I’ve actually watched, I think. They were both fine.
Best book: Sob os tempos do equinócio (2022), a book on the archaeology of central Amazonia by the Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves.
Best dish: I finally tried a (gluten-free) francesinha when we went to Porto earlier this year and it was worth the trip on its own.
