Life is short, praise the groundhog
Groundhog Day, 2020
A year ago tomorrow, we went to go see Punxsutawney Phil. You surely know about him: he’s the famous groundhog—the ‘prognosticator of prognosticators’—who, on the basis of whether or not he sees his shadow, issues a vague weather forecast. The ‘holiday’ of Groundhog’s Day is without a doubt one of the most absurd traditions in America. But it happened to fall on a Sunday, and I didn’t have to teach on Monday; and Ellen acquired this amazing “Punxy” jacket at a thrift shop in Toronto a few years back, so we decided to make the drive from Beacon to Punxsutawney.
The event itself, or at least our particular experience of it, will probably strike you as an enormous waste of time. Since they bring out Phil at the crack of dawn, and given that tens of thousands of people come to see him, it is advisable to arrive as early at 3AM to get a good spot. As you can see in the above picture, even with our early arrival, we were still about twenty rows back. (There are some people much more hardcore than us, apparently.) Given that our plan was relatively last-minute, the only hotel we could find was about 45 minutes away, and—as luck would have it—it was snowing at about 2AM when we drove from our hotel to Punxsutawney, after only a couple hours’ sleep.
And, of course, early February in Pennsylvania is very cold, especially at 3AM. There aren’t seats; chairs weren’t really a feasible option. So we stood there, in the cold, as we watched a slew of vaguely Groundhog Day-related performances. My favorites were the song parodies: one was to the tune of Purple Rain (“ground-hog-DAY, grouuuundhog day”); another was surely recycled from several years prior—‘Groundhog Style’, to the tune of Gangnam Style. But surely the best-worst was the truly baffling parody of a song that is already a parody of itself—“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy”—entitled, “Life is Short, Praise the Groundhog". It was impressively bad.
So, just to recap: we are standing in the snow, in below freezing weather, in the middle of the night, after hardly any sleep, in a field in rural Pennsylvania, enduring mind-numbing parody songs, awaiting the arrival of a mythical groundhog who, it is told, will predict the future.
I’m telling you, though: it was by far the best day of 2020. (The Chiefs later won the Super Bowl that same day, which certainly helped cement the glory of this day in my mind, but still.)
There are multiple interesting threads that could be pursued here, if you really wanted to. How the ironic/detached enjoyment of obvious myth is, in general, surely a partial cause of the QAnon mess. How Phil’s prognostication of an early spring, and how the average onlooker takes that for optimism, now seems hopelessly naive in hindsight. How the film Groundhog Day has basically been our lives since just after Phil’s prediction was due to come true. But I won’t take up any of these here, though I’d be lying if I said they hadn’t crossed my mind. I’m just really grateful that we had a chance to take part in that silly, absurd little tradition, before having to endure the rest of this dreadful year.
I saw that this year’s Groundhog Day event is all virtual, which is sad but obviously the right call. Maybe we’ll tune in.
Recommendations
As in the last letter, I wanted to share a few recommendations. This time, a sort of Best Of 2020, if you’ll indulge me.
Best Movie from 2020: First Cow. I think technically it came out in 2019, but it was really only available to normies like me in 2020. It’s a surprisingly tender film, though a bit slow at the beginning. It stays with you for a while after.
Best Movie I Saw in 2020 (not from 2020 category): The Florida Project. Did you know we live in Florida now? Florida is weird. This movie is quite melancholic, and shows a side of poverty that I haven’t really seen captured elsewhere before.
Best TV Show of 2020: Succession. I think I like this quite a bit more than Ellen did, but I can’t stop recommending it. It’s HBO, so I suppose it’s not really TV; but it’s one of those great shows where every character is utterly vicious, and yet still deeply human. (Well, maybe not all of them are deeply human; but most of them.)
I’ll also plug McMillions and Heaven’s Gate, two great HBO mini-docu-series; and The Last Dance, which I believe is on Netflix now. Oh, and the improv series Middleditch & Schwartz. Those two are unbelievably good at what they do.
Best Music of 2020: Pinegrove - Marigold. I truly do not understand why this band isn’t bigger than they are. We saw them in Woodstock, NY in January for the release show of this record, and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. For the uninitiated, it’s basically emo sensibility, with the country flavors of banjo and pedal steel guitar, catchy harmonies, and just overall amazing instrumentation. This album has grown on me a lot, though I would advise new listeners to begin with their previous albums Cardinal and Skylight.
Spotify tells me we also listened to a ton of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion (definitely not from 2020, though); Four Year Strong’s Brain Pain; Caroline Polachek’s Pang (from 2019); and a lot of Talking Heads, Fleetwood Mac, and Against Me! We also went through a phase of listening to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters pretty regularly, until Ellen pointed out that that sounds like “vegetable cutters”, which rendered the title track (and, by extension, the whole album) completely unlistenable for a time—and then, ultimately, it was left out of the rotation.
Best Books I Read in 2020 (cheating and just listing the ones I really liked without declaring a ‘best’): They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraquib (thanks, Aaron!); The Topeka School by Ben Lerner; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong; Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks; Scarlet A by Katie Watson. Liked pretty much every book I read this year, but a few were much more tedious or niche, and wouldn’t be worth a recommendation.
I’d normally include some of my favorite articles from the year, but I didn’t do a very good job of keeping track of them this year for some reason. I hereby promise to do better next year. I will, however, advise anyone who doesn’t already frequent Aeon to give them a regular look. Some great public-facing work by philosophers and social scientists there on the regular. One of the best and most underrated sites on the web.
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I hope you, dear reader, are still enjoying these very intermittent email-letters from me. (If you happen to know someone who might be interested in reading them, please do invite them to subscribe. I’m not going to shift gears and start promoting multi-level marketing stuff or anything like that, I swear.) And I really do plan to keep them sparse; I’ve kept my word on that so far!
I’d love to hear from you as well, if any of what I say prompts anything. I’m hopeful to find an alternative to passively watching people’s lives on Facebook, which for me is overall a more corrosive and depersonalized experience than a force for good. So, please do get in touch if that’s your thing. I’d love to talk.
-JVD