Our Belated Year: 2024
I am not going to have another original OBP ready before the New Year hits, so what better time than to do a clip show that allows me to wax poetically about all that happened in this year, the year of years, 2024.
The biggest highlight for me has to have been the publication of two books! It is kind of insane and surreal that both Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place and Raising Philadelphia came out this year, and people have actually read and seemingly enjoyed them.
They have also given me the opportunity to talk to a bunch of awesome people like the folks over at The Observer, the ladies at the High Tales of History podcast, Australian radio, and much more!
Top 3 Newsletters of the Year (as voted on by number of views)
The Greatest Conspiracy Never Told
The filthiest newsletter has also been the most popular. If time is a construct, then I am manifesting my will towards making the story of an Austrian officer draining his troops dry of their semen to the point of affecting the national security of the Holy Roman Empire a true one.
Rosy Vonich and the Cross He Rode In On
This is a story that I think has some legs and one I am most likely to revisit, because I keep stumbling across more connections between Rosicrucians and the Voynich Manuscript. The latest is the Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about a Rosicrucian like group that makes up a language that looks an awful lot like the text in the Voynich Manuscript.
On top of being a year of Lemuria for me, it has been a year of Henry Steel Olcott and primarily exploring his pre-Blavatsky exploits. I gave a presentation this past fall for Morbid Anatomy about his interest in spiritualism and seances. And with “Places, Please” I got to dip my toe into his time as an investigator for the War Department during the Civil War. If I were more academically minded, this would be a prime subject for a proper journal article.
Honorable Mentions
I am personally most proud of this story on. First off, I actually conversed with people to write this piece, which is pretty big for me. And what they had to say only deepened the mystery around how there came to be an Italian immigrant in Rhode Island in the late 19th century who was also a practicing Yazidi. And how that series of events is somehow more mysterious than his murder and disposal at the bottom of a river.
How AI Copyright Law Is Being Guided By Spirits From Atlantis
While technically not an OBP, I first toyed with the idea here and wrote pretty extensively about Frederick Spencer Oliver’s life here as well. Also, I like that this newsletter can act as a kind of incubator for me, my writing, historical topics I find interesting, and ways to bring that to a wide audience like I did for this Defector article. I hope to do that more in the future.
Top 5 Music Things of the Year
One of the most pleasant surprises of this year has been me falling back in love with music and the act of actively listening to music. I had fallen into a years and years long rut of just needing to consume information, so I was listening to lots and lots of podcasts or audiobooks. Trying to stuff all the information I could down my brain, and it wasn’t doing me any favors. But music has been doing me favors, so here’s five of my favorite music things from this past year.
I’ll label this as new to me, because it has been around for a couple of years, but this particular version of “Ka Bohaleng” from Later with Jools Holland bristles with so much life and passion. I love listening to it. I love watching it. And is the thing this year that has made me want to run through brickwalls.
Discovering new music was one of the great joys of my life. Throughout high school and college and grad school and afterwards, browsing through CD and record stores racks and issues of Mojo and SPIN to just be around music and see what’s new. Life’s responsibilities have elbowed their way in so that I don’t get to discover new music as much as I like. But luckily this time of year there are no shortage of albums of the year lists that I can cherry pick titles from to relive those days of yore. Tiger’s Blood was one such album. I had never even heard of Waxahatchee or Katie Crutchfield, but it has been on repeat now for the past month.
Writing about music is tricky, because the connections you make with an artist or a song or an album can be so specific to you at that moment in your life. And trying to capture that in words is a fool’s errand. I know though that I used to listen to a lot of albums like Tiger’s Blood and that’s part of what drew me to this album and got me thinking about why I did listen to this type of Americana-like music. I think it boils down to evoking a place, and the feeling of authenticity that comes from that. Though her songs may not contain specifics to a place, it’s there in her voice, her cadence, the guitars, banjo, harmonica, all of it suggests a place. That’s what floods over me when I’m listening to “365” or “Evil Spawn” or “Burns Out at Midnight” or any of the songs on this outstanding album.
Back to me discovering music. I know I would be able to listen to and find new artists or old artists’ new work (more on that later) if I streamed music. But I purposefully avoid that and look to buying the album either physically through vinyl or cassette or digitally (mostly on Bandcamp). Owning the music and sending the artists whatever amount they get from me buying their work is what I know and seems the most ethical way to enjoy music in an industry that’s anything but ethical.
I bring this up because Cindy Lee has made it a point to not release their album on Spotify and only cryptically released Diamond Jubilee through a YouTube link. Later it was made available to purchase on Bandcamp where I snagged it.
The album is long but not in an obtrusive prog-rock opera sort of way. Graham Coxon once said he likes listening to music on cassettes because it allows you to stop and then pick right back up where you left off. Diamond Jubilee definitely feels like one you want to listen all the way through even if it takes you a couple of days. And I’m glad I own it digitally since that allows me to pick right back up where I left off. I couldn’t imagine trying to listen to this on vinyl, because you lose that ability to .
Think the Velvet Underground trade Lou Reed and Nico to Buffalo Springfield for Neil Young and you’ll get Diamond Jubilee.
I was a hypocritical jerk, because when White released No Name as a free record store day release in Third Man Records only stores he encouraged those who received it to rip it and put it online. Which is where I downloaded it off of some rando’s Google Drive. I have since bought it off of Bandcamp.
I had no thought about Jack White for a decade or more before reading about this, so kudos to him for breaking through and spreading the word about a new album. And what a great fucking album. Probably him being the most White Stripes-ish since The White Stripes were a thing. “Archbishop Harold Holmes” sounds like him having fun again.
This is another one where I arrived a little late to the party as it came out in November 2023, but it took them 20 some years to record another album so I think I’m off the hook.
For nearly 30 years now, I have been telling anyone I know that one of the great, criminally underrated albums of the 1990s was Feeling Strangely Fine. “Closing Time” is a fine, catchy hit, but the rest of the album are nothing but fine, catchy songs.
Feeling strangely nostalgic earlier this year I picked up a copy of their first album, Great Divide, and goddamn if it isn’t also a great listen. A little looser than Feeling Strangely Fine but in a pleasant, shaggy way. Pure 1996.
This of course led me to look up to see what they’re up to only to see “holy shit” they just released a new album, Little Bit of Sun. And they just picked right back up where they left off. Bright, airy, and reflective, listening to this has always brought a smile to my face this year.
Top 3 Books I’ve Read This Year
After finishing up and turning in Raising Philadelphia early this year, my mind was pretty fried. The process for researching and writing that book was an intense one for me, and I took a few mental months off from reading as a result. Only in the past couple of months have I gotten back into the routine of doing some pleasure reading.
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
I fucking love New York Review Books, and that’s probably how I came about owning The Hearing Trumpet. It was on some bookstore shelf and I saw the NYRB on the spine and picked it up with little to no thought.
As a historian, I read a lot. And much of it is incredibly tedious or dense or just not that much fun. When I do read for pleasure, I will tend to gravitate towards trashy dad-fic that’s easy and I can fly through (I’m looking at you Matthew Reilly who writes the shittiest books that I can’t help but love).
So the times that I do have the mental capacity to pick up something outside of that realm, I often find myself luxuriating in that world. The Hearing Trumpet was one such book. A pleasantly weird story, told in a strange way, about odd old people. There’s nothing not to love.
Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia - Emily Hilliard
I am a sucker for West Virginia. This beautiful, brutal state where I was born and raised and still live has turned itself into some cruel inside joke within me. But I love it nonetheless and love reading about it.
I had known about Making Our Future for quite some time, so when I saw at Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown it was a no-brainer. Like what I said about Waxahachie up top, I’ll say about Making Our Future and how Hilliard, who was the former state folklorist of WV, does an amazing job of capturing the people and the traditions of modern West Virginians.
I can’t help but feel some sadness at all of that, because most of the people she’s chronicling are older West Virginians. Who are preserving the ways of their parents and those before them. And it’s not even a slight on the other generations not wanting to carry those on, because those generations (X, Millennial, and Z) aren’t here anymore.
The Occult: A History - Colin Wilson
This is one that I read for research, and typically I do not include those in my reading list. I think maybe because I’m in a different headspace while I’m reading for research, so I just treat those works as being separate and as work.
The Occult though stood out in its accessibility. Wilson is a good writer who knows the subject matter and that helps tremendously. Part of the problem when you are into weird or esoteric history is that there are plenty of books and material out there for you to consume. There is no shortage. Most of it is crap though. That goes for all eras and ages.
The problem lies in a writer/creator’s ability to ingest the knowledge and synthesis it into a relatable format. With the byzantine nature of occult/esoteric/hermetic/paranormal/extraterrestrial/etc. ideas and beliefs, it is incredibly important and equally as hard to present those ideas and beliefs into a coherent format. A lot of these works just spew at you centuries of unfiltered BS, and what they really need is a good editor to tell them to tighten that shit up. So I cherish a book like The Occult and a writer like Wilson that actually accomplishes to make the difficult understandable.
I hope everyone has a wonderful new year and thank you so much for sticking around and reading this newsletter throughout this year. It’s fun for me and I hope you take some little bit of enjoyment from it. Onward to 2025.
If you have any music or book or TV show or movie recommendations, please feel free to pass them along. I’d love to hear them. Drop a comment or send an email (contact@justinjmchenry.com).