I wish that I’d seen this when it first came out, Helena Fitzgerald’s piece on the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, “All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year.” Fitzgerald praises this stretch of time where we celebrate
by eating cheese and cake for breakfast, getting drunk at inappropriate hours, not looking at calendars or clocks, forgetting what day it is, wearing outfits that make no sense, ignoring our phones, and falling into a pointless internet rabbit hole for hours. Lots of people have either just returned from family visits or are still there, stuck in the half-familiarity of being an adult in the spaces of childhood. We celebrate Dead Week by having no idea what to do during Dead Week and, within that confusion, quietly luxuriating in what might be the only collective chance for deep rest all year.
She writes that maybe “Dead Week” will catch on as the name for this, and this is the one thing about her essay that I disagree with. Once upon a time, I would have disagreed for the simple reason that the annual convention for the Modern Language Assocation once met annually from December 27-30. Thousands of English and language scholars invaded a different city each year to deliver papers, to interview and be interviewed for increasingly scarce jobs, replacing the contentment of the holiday season with the strained anxiety of performing knowingness. Fortunately, that special brand of torture ended a little more than a decade ago.
I understand the impulse to think of it as a dead week, but that implies the other weeks are “live,” when the opposite has always been the case for me. And that’s the chief source of my objection. I spend the first three or so months of December both giving and receiving books, and I look forward every year to that short time where I don’t have to answer emails, look at clocks or calendars, and I can just spend time with the gifts I’ve received. I can just lounge about and read whatever I’d like. For me, that’s not dead time. Quite the opposite.
As the title of this post suggests, I’m far more interested in thinking of that final week of the year in terms of optimizing my coziness. Even optimizing isn’t quite right there, because it implies strategy, when my strategy during that time is to sleep until I don’t feel tired, eat when I’m hungry, exercise when I’m feeling sluggish, and read/watch/play whatever tickles my fancy in the moment. Maybe it’s a little trendy/cringey, but I’m much more inclined to think of that final week as Hygge Week*.
Language was a serendipitous theme for Hygge Week this year for me. One of the books that I put on my wishlist and also gave to a couple of different people was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. It’s kind of a first contact story on multiple levels, a near-future thriller that imagines not only some possible (but perhaps not positive) advances in AI, but what it might be like if octopuses developed culture and language. It’s the first novel I’ve ever seen that cited Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”
This book reminded me of two things: first, it put me in mind of Arrival, which is probably one of my favorite scifi movies of the past 10 or 15 years, so I actually went back and found the Ted Chiang novella that the movie adapted, which I’d never read before. It also reminded me of a book that I’d gotten either last year or the year before but hadn’t read, called Semiosis by Sue Burke. Semiosis is another first contact book, although this one’s a little more traditional in the sense that a group of colonists leave Earth, find a relatively similar planet, and end up finding other sentient life forms. To say more would be to spoil, and language doesn’t play the same central role, but it was interesting to read it alongside the others.
Finally. another gift from Bookmases past rounded out my reading cluster. I’ve been meaning to get to David Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention for a couple of years now. Language (and linguistics specifically) plays a very central role in this book—it actually turned out to be much more of a reference book for other conlangers (folks who CONstruct LANGuages) than anything else. The chapters are punctuated with short case studies from Peterson’s experiences building languages for Game of Thrones and other shows, but it’s very much a primer for folks who are interested in following in his footsteps. It’s an engaging book, but I have to admit that I was really only there for the stories.
I don’t usually group my readings during Hygge Week as snugly as i seemed to this year. To be fair, though, I did watch some shows (Glass Onion, Wednesday, The Menu, et al.) that had nothing to do with first contact—I also blazed through Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a story set against the backdrop of video game culture/design/development, which i enjoyed. And to be lightly mercenary, it was kind of interesting to think about language in a way that may prime me to explore the whole AI/chatbot thing further, questions about what we use language for, how we learn it, etc. (I’ll be thinking more about accordions in the coming months.)
Oh, and before I forget, while I was winding up this set of reading, Matt Webb posted an interesting series of thoughts about AI-driven attempts at interspecies communication, just in case you thought this was purely fictional or scifictional.
*I harbor no illusions about Hygge Week catching on, but if this site is still rumbling and rambling on in a year’s time, you can bet you’ll see the phrase again.