Best of the Year of the Dragon

"It's New Year Somewhere!"

To all new readers: Welcome to Earthly Fortunes! 😄 Helen here. If you've received this, then you either subscribed in the past (thank you❤️), or a friend shared it with you. I'm honored that you are here! I write about the fortunes that come from the Earth: geography, medieval farming, music, the Unseen, and more!

Today’s theme song: Toccata No. 1 (composer: Girolamo Kapsberger, performer: Hopkinson Smith).

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16 months later, and only 4 days before the Year of the Snake begins — I’m finally in good enough health. I didn’t have a massive burnout or meltdown in late 2023, but I did get many warning signs and alarms from my body. What followed was a long, sometimes encouraging, sometimes painful process to rebuild my health.

Substack has a special place in my heart — I love the readers and writers here, and already have quite a few drafts banked up. Now I’m in better health, I should be back on Substack more regularly: between twice a week to every other week, and for the most part, weekly.

To see you into the new Year of the Snake, I curated my favorite media — books, screens, sounds — I came across up until mid-January 2025. Coincidentally, the oldest of them dates back to 1925. Also, no self-help or business media on this list. I have nothing against them, but because they tend to dominate recommendation lists, I want to do something different for you here.

Enjoy, and wishing you and yours a very joyful New Year of the Snake! 🐲🎆

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📚LITERATURE: The Silent Cry (Kenzaburo Oe, 1967)

I had to look up this novel’s English title, and it turned out to be The Silent Cry — very different from the literal meaning of the original Japanese title, Football in the First Year of Man’en Era. Title issues aside, the novel is a masterful tale of psychological, historical, and hallucinatory depths. The story is set in a village in a dense forest in 1960s Japan, but I think its entanglement of history, myth, memory, deception, and all-too-human struggles are just as relevant today. If you liked Kafka’s The Castle, I think you’d like The Silent Cry.

Caveat: Oe pushed us to confront very uncomfortable subject matters — in many places, I could tell he did unpleasant effects on purpose. I love Oe’s craft and courage (they didn’t award him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature for nothing), but if this is your entry point to Japanese literature, it can be a rough ride. Also, I read the Chinese translation and some Japanese excerpts, so I cannot attest to quality of English translations.

P.S. I feel Japanese literature, contemporary and classical, doesn't get nearly enough attention in English-speaking circles. Murakami is hardly the only game in town! Let me know if you’d like a serious deep dive into the real gems of Japanese literature, cross-matched with anime / manga comparables.

📽️FILM: Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Early January 2025, a filmmaker friend began watching Sergei Eisenstein’s entire extant film creation, and I tagged along. Battleship Potemkin is more heard about than actually seen, and trust me — cropped stills and segments don’t prepare you well enough. The silent, black-and-white intensity and sheer force of the full, original film bled through the screen all the time. The Odessa Steps sequence is as great as it is reputed to be.

Tsar's soldier's boots on Odessa steps. Cropped still from Battleship Potemkin. Public domain.

▶️ Best Anime / Manga series: Delicious in Dungeon (2024)

I used to organize anime-manga-cosplay conventions, so it feels good to see anime and manga are getting more viewers in the English-speaking world. I just love Delicious in Dungeon’s original manga series: it has every element of great comedy, and the anime adaptation is as fun as it gets.

It’s a cooking show in a literal dungeon, but without Gordon Ramsay breathing down your neck.
It’s a fantasy adventure story without gimmicky setups.
It’s a well thought out comedy full of humor and zero gags.
It’s a wholesome and dark series at the same time.

In short: I recommend Delicious in Dungeon as both anime and manga.

🎶LIVE PERFORMANCE: St Matthew’s Passion (staging: Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2024)

I saw ~20 live performances in the Year of the Dragon, this one takes the cake for three reasons.
#1: St. Matthew’s Passion is mostly performed as concerts. You rarely see a theater presentation of it.
#2: The staging was thoughtful and inventive, and made me think of new aspects of the music.
#3: Perfect timing — J.S. Bach intended to have St Matthew’s Passion performed on Good Fridays. I saw this performance on Good Friday 2024 in Berlin.

And it gets better. It was an immersive performance: plain-cloth choir members sang from auditorium seats, and short sections of sheet music was given to audience members willing to sing certain parts. Also, my cheap up-stage seat was next to the focal point of the entire musical drama. After the final part opened, the cast carried a giant physical cross and hoisted it next to me. Before the climactic moment, the bass singer (as Jesus) solemnly walked from central stage to the foot of the cross, and stood there in complete silence and stillness. Then, at the climax, this slim, clad-in-black gentleman flung out his arms, and bellowed in a loud, painful cry: “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?” His voice sealed the entire auditorium into a motionless amber for a few seconds — until the tenor (as the Evangelist) on central stage followed up, in understated sorrow: “Das ist: ‘Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?’” (“That is: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”) Only after that, did everything start moving again.

My seat’s view of the central stage, at standing ovation time. Photo and by me.

Here’s a trailer of this staging. Here’s a concert performance of the music. I’ll never forget Good Friday 2024, and if I find a complete taped performance of this staging, I’ll share with y’all.

🎧RECORDING: Annunciation Triptych (Liza Lim, 2023)

Liza Lim is one of my favorite contemporary classical music composers, and this recording made me like her even more. Her mastery of sound colors and textures of different conventional and unusual instruments for the orchestra is on full power here. I especially love how she produces new sounds and effects from the usual orchestral music instruments: we’d think, “Instrument X, Y, and Z are already pushed to their limits”, but Liza Lim always finds a way to go around or go further than what was possible.

📖NON-FICTION: The Art of being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (Michael Szonyi, 2017)

A better title should be, “How to Game the System in Ming Dynasty China”. This is a historian’s history book, and I probably read too many of those. Most historian’s history books are not very friendly to non-historian readers, but this book is different: it has both rigor and story. Based on several families’ documents from the Ming dynasty, Szonyi pieced together how common folks — who lived 500 years ago, in seaside and mountain towns of China, under a strict bureaucratic system answering to an emperor — gamed a system set up against them, in many ordinary and inventive ways.

🔮NON-SURPRISE: No “peak coal demand" (International Energy Agency)

Mid-2024, IEA predicted global coal consumption would reach its all-time high, then decline. But they revised the prediction in the December 2024 report. New prediction: global demand of coal will stay flat and not declining for a few years, because demand from Asia — Vietnam, Indonesia, India, China — remains strong and growing, thanks to power generation and industrial production needs.

Graph on global coal demand, from IEA report linked below.

This new forecast is not surprising at all. In fact, I was puzzled when the earlier report came out, and IEA’s logic didn’t convince me. It is clear that coal still has a dominant role in power generation, and the fastest growing renewable energy sources are still going to play catch-up for a while. Here’s the full IEA December report.

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That’s all from me! What about your favorite reads / watches / listens / surprises / non-surprises in the Year of the Dragon? Let me know in the comments or DM!

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