2025 In Review

Grateful Reflections

Photo by Zachary DeBottis

The Tumult of 2025

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

— From “Year’s End” by Richard Wilbur

What a year 2025 has been, in America and the world.

The continuation of the AI takeover. Conflict in Asia. Historic fires in California. China’s weaponization of rare-earth minerals. Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists abounding. Conspiracies and conspirators abounding. DOGE. Epstein, continued. ICE. A jewel heist at the Louvre. War, and peace, and war in the Middle East. Ozempic. Planes falling out of the sky. The death of the Pope. A new pope, the first American, from Chicago no less. A recession—or we’re told there’s not one—but it sure feels like it. Tariffs. Terrorist attacks, assassinations, and massacres. TikTok. Trump’s stirring up of the world via foreign policy. Continuing war in Ukraine. Venezuela. X. The list goes on, and on.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

But we’ve been saying this since the Second Coming was first foretold.

Yet life continues.

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To Be Thankful

It can feel tasteless, in times like these, to speak of one’s self, to self-promote, to write poetry, and other such things. But when, in history, would this not be the case?

The world is too much with us. We know much too much.

When we know, via the Internet and other networks, things that are happening on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, better than we know our neighbors, it disorders are brains. It paralyzes us. We feel powerless, and we cannot act.

So what should we do? Well, for one thing, at the end of one year and the beginning of another, we can be thankful. Times are hard. They surely are. But look at all God has given us.

Anyway, what good will it do us, our kicking against these pricks?

As for me, I am thankful, here on the first day after Christmastide 2025.

I’m grateful for the 2025 I had. I continued working at a pretty good job, which pays the bills. My family was healthy and blessed, and we continued settling in, up here in Indiana. My family and I got more involved in a church up here, which we are beginning to love. I am slowly trying to help my family and me be a proper part of our community. I got to travel around the country, got to see some beautiful places, got to visit with some wonderful friends, and got to make new friends too. I continued learning, continued education. And I had one of my best years in the writerly side of my life.

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The Flummoxed

What was involved in 2025 being one of my best years, for the writerly side of my life?

A big part of that was my Substack, here, The Flummoxed. And all of you who have subscribed and read my work. Thank you!

In April, I moved my WordPress The Flummoxed site over to Substack, and made some big changes in the process. I had been a Substack user since early 2022, but always for other people’s sites. With The Flummoxed as my personal site, and now official platform, over here on Substack, I posted more, started a supplementary podcast, and made it my official place to record my work (highlighting for records: my bio, my publications, my books, my translations, and my “Preserving the Ozarks” project).

In 2025, my top post, according to Substack’s overall metrics, was my “Five Hillbilly Haiku,” made up of Ozarkian vulgarizations of haiku by Basho, Buson, and Issa. People seemed to enjoy it, and, truthfully, it had its origin in a gag gift I put together for a Christmas 2024 family gathering!

In other The Flummoxed metrics: My top post per view was “‘Cathay’ by Ezra Pound (1915),” my presentation of Pound’s complete Cathay Classical Chinese poems brought into English, with a short introduction, by me; this is a presentation I put together because I was having great trouble finding an online presentation of Cathay that both looked good and was complete. My top post per e-mail open percentage was my very long and very detailed negative review of Ari Aster’s 2023 film, “Beau is Afraid.” My top podcast episode per downloads was “Ep. 6: Love, Liberty, & the Color Blue,” my discussion of my favorite movie, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), as well as of my aesthetics (in an episode I put together, originally, for my friend Cameron Clark). The post that gained me the most subscribers was, unsurprisingly, my introductory “The New Flummoxed + A Writing Tour,” which contained an explanation of what I am doing here, a new Li Bai translation, plus a brief tour of my writerly work (via links) for anyone new to me; other than this introductory post, the one that gained me the most subscribers was my poem “Billy Collins,” which Katie Dozier of Rattle fame even enjoyed.

As far as metrics back on the WordPress version of The Flummoxed, which I migrated away from, in favor of Substack: My most popular post on the Substack Flummoxed which had been brought over in the migration was my artistic and theological collage “The Mind of God & the Mind of Man,” which Matthew Buckley Smith of Sleerickets praised and called “a thematic commonplace book that acts like an antidote to AI writing.” My top post per views back on the WordPress Flummoxed before the move was my concert review “Bob Dylan: The Troubadour Plays Mobile,” boosted by some big Dylan sites having linked to it. Narrowing my statistics, my top post per views back on the WordPress Flummoxed during 2025 before the big move was a little piece, “Self-Absorption in Fitzgerald’s ‘The Baby Party’.”

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The End or . . .

Sadly, 2025 saw me have to bring a few things to an end as well. One of the biggest things I ended was my site E.D. – Music, Movies, etc. (yes, the acronym is an intentional joke), which I started back in 2016 with my best friend, David. I owe this site, and David, many thanks. It, and he, got me back into writing, after my having taken a break toward the end of my computer science and information systems education and the beginning of my career in that field. But all good things must come to an end, I suppose. The site had been at TheEdBlog.com, and though David and I are no longer producing it (although it’s possible someone like David might from time to time post something additional there), we are leaving it up, at the free hosting WordPress allows, at edonlineblog.wordpress.com. I’m still proud of a fair bit of the stuff we did there!

Want to read some of the E.D. stuff? A good place to start might be the five posts most viewed in 2025 on the site:

1. “Beach Boys Albums Ranked Worst to Best” by Ethan McGuire (June 2024)

2. “No Stranger to Controversy, Part 1: Metal, Stryper, and a Contentious, New Album” by Ethan McGuire (April 2018)

3. “Masterofoneinchpunch’s Top 50 Hong Kong Films – A Primer” by Twitter anon Masterofoneinchpunch, edited by Ethan McGuire (August 2019)

4. “Album Review – Corrosion of Conformity’s No Cross No Crown” by Ethan McGuire (February 2018)

5. “Mastodon, Heavy Metal, and a Cold Dark Place” by Ethan McGuire (October 2017)

Thank you, David. And thank you to all the people who read our work over there!

One other thing I had to end was a venture I started excitedly in 2023 but had to end in favor of new beginnings: a small press, Harmonia Mundi Books. I ran a site for Harmonia Mundi Books alongside the WordPress version of The Flummoxed, and I had big plans for it, including the republishing of some out-of-print or otherwise hard-to-find books and significant collaboration with the gonzo LA-based artist, historian, and publisher, Matt Wall. However, for a variety of reasons, these things did not turn out, and I chose to move on, as I said, to new beginnings. Before I ended it, though, I did put out two of my own chapbooks: Songs for Christmas and “Before Apokalypto.”

. . . the Beginning?

On the “in favor of new beginnings” side: I started my work as Contributing Editor at the quickly growing literary magazine New Verse Review (with NVR proper and its supplementary New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry Substack, from founder and editor-in-chief Steve Knepper). I helped Helena Feder save the prestigious and long-standing literary journal Tar River Poetry from the fate of extinction which so many great literary publications have fallen into recently, and I became the Web Editor at Tar River. At my (previously mentioned) good friend Cameron Clark’s behest, I joined the fantastic literary mag Literary Matters as a Contributing Editor. And, at my good friend Elijah Perseus Blumov’s urging, I joined the ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers) so that I could attend the 2025 ALSCW Conference in Columbus, Ohio, where I joined Elijah’s “Poetry and Mythology” conference panel, presenting my paper “Movies as Popular Poetry: Zhang Yimou, Zack Snyder, and the Mythological Imagination,” alongside excellent papers by Ryan Wilson, Zina Gomez-Liss, the aforementioned Matthew Buckley Smith, Brian Brodeur, and Elijah himself. (The others’ essays are not yet available to read, online or in print, but Zina wrote a nice essay post on the event for her Substack, The Beauty of Things—yes, she and I share a love for Robinson Jeffers’s poetry—: a post titled “For the Psychopomps and Famous Letter Writers”). I also attended Qualys’s 2025 Risk Operations Conference in Houston, Texas, for the purpose of presenting on a cybersecurity panel.

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Publications

So, I became an editor, but, hey, I still have to publish my own writing, right?

In early 2025, I finally published my debut poetry book, Apocalypse Dance! Buy it wherever good books are sold. Quite a long journey to physical form, this collection had, six years in fact (for that story, check out The Flummoxed Podcast “Ep. 4: A Book’s Long Journey to Publication”). But it’s out! I recently had a very thoughtful, mostly-but-not-entirely positive review of it in Radix Magazine by DW Baker too. I also began shopping around my book collection of poetry translations from the Classical Chinese of the Song Dynasty general Yue Fei (the book also contains, for contextual purposes, an introductory essay, many notes, and several other Classical Chinese poems in English translations). As far as shorter form publications go, I had all my The Flummoxed posts and podcasts, seventy-five in total. Also six movie reviews on my Letterboxd (of The House That Jack Built (2018), Three Colors: Blue (1993), Nosferatu (2024), Sinners (2025), Full River Red (2023), and Man of Steel (2013)). Elsewhere, I published the following three essays:

• Introductory essay to A Diner for David Lynch: Poems in Remembrance of a Master (which I also edited), New Verse Review (Feb. 2025)

• “Nietzsche and The Book of Mormon: Unexpected Philosophical Parallels,” Public Square Magazine (Feb. 2025)

• Introductory essay to Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie? And Other Questions About the True Meaning of Christmas Films, by Tyler Hummel (Nov. 2025)

And these two short stories:

• “Apocalypse Dance,” Alien Buddha (Jan. 2025)

• “Ozark Elegy: Six Scenes from a Funeral,” VoegelinView (March 2025)

And these eleven poems:

• “Ozarkian Seasons,” Poems for Persons of Interest (Jan. 2025)

• “After Jon Andrews,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “After Joseph Fasano,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “At Lake of the Ozarks,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “Montage Religion,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “The Peacock,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “Short Poems are Best for Dark Days,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “Vote Rooster,” Fevers of the Mind (Jan. 2025)

• “WRITE!,” Poetic Anarchy’s Our Time is Now Anthology (Feb. 2025)

• “Old Gods,” The Blood Rag (March 2025)

• “Flying through the Rockies,” VoegelinView (April 2025)

Podcasts

I also appeared on the following podcasts:

• Ep. 195 “The White Guy Publishing Vortex,” the Sleerickets podcast (May 2025)

• Ep. 3 “Poems and Insults w/Ethan McGuire,” The Bukowski Pod podcast (June 2025)

• Ep. 210 “Middle-Aged Witches,” the Sleerickets podcast (Aug. 2025)

• “Schopenhauer Cocktail Hour, Parts I & II,” the Versecraft podcast (Oct. 2025)

A busy year!

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Books, Movies, Music, and TV

Not so busy a year, however, that I didn’t have time to read books, watch movies, listen to music, and watch some TV!

I read fifty-three books in 2025. Very few of those were new books, so I am not qualified to present to you a “Best Books of 2025” list. However, these are the five best new-ish books (five-years-old or newer) that I read and/or re-read in 2025, and these I do recommend:

• The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Music Criticism)

• To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry, Beginnings to 1800, in English Translation edited by Burl Horniachek (Christian Poetry in English Translation)

• Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie? And Other Questions About the True Meaning of Christmas Films by Tyler Hummel (Christmas/Film Criticism) [I must admit a bias on this one: I wrote an introductory piece for it, as you can see above, and Tyler is my friend; even so, the book is really good!]

• Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 by Ryan Wilson (European Poetry in English Translation)

• In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood (Travelogue/Literary History/Classical Chinese Poetry in English Translation)

Those of you who know me will not be surprised to learn that I watched quite a few films in 2025! However, I did not watch enough good new films to give you a “Best of 2025” list either. (Also, my average movies per week was down to two—oh, the life with young children!) So I will just mention the best 2025 film I was able to see during the year: Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (Black Comedy/Adventure/Thriller). Really great. My wife and I watched it three times in a row!

I also watched a few TV shows, but, again, not many shows released in 2025, and those released in 2025 that I did watch are not necessarily ones I give a ringing endorsement, except, very surprisingly, coming from me, one Adult Swim animated show: Joe Cappa’s Haha, You Clowns (Animated/Comedy/Drama), an unironically wholesome show about three, super buff, teenage boys and their super buff, widower dad, who looks like Tim Allen. It even tackles things like the ridiculous tyranny of the TSA and flight attendants! And it does a little sort of anti-Andrew Tate type plot better than the King of the Hill revival did. I don’t think so but I could be forgetting something, as I record my books, films, and albums, but I do not record when I watch TV shows. Oh, except I am forgetting one of my very favorite still-airing shows! Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef (Culinary Competition). Not kidding.

And then for music, I listened to many, many albums in 2025 (796, I think), including numerous new ones. Here are my top ten favorite albums I spun in 2025 that were also released in the year:

1. SADDEST TRUTH by KayCyy and sign crushes motorist (Hip Hop/R&B)

2. The Price of Admission by the Turnpike Troubadours (Country)

3. Let God Sort Em Out by Clipse (Hip Hop)

4. Songs of Hiraeth by Panopticon (Black Metal)

5. MUSIC by Playboi Carti (Hip Hop)

6. Amidst the Ruins by Saor (Black Metal)

7. Excelsior by Benny the Butcher (Hip Hop)

8. The Splintered Oar by Weft (Black Metal)

9. Arcadia by Alison Krauss & Union Station (Bluegrass)

10. Cabin in the Sky by De La Soul (Hip Hop)

Outside of 2025-released music, for fun here are some of my listening stats from Stats.fm:

The five albums I spun the most in 2025:

1. Hammerheart by Bathory

2. Rumours by Fleetwood Mac

3. The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: No Direction Home by Bob Dylan

4. Load by Metallica

5. SADDEST TRUTH by KayCyy and sign crushes motorist

The five single songs I spun the most in 2025:

1. “Battle Belongs” by Phil Wickham

2. “Second Hand News” by Fleetwood Mac

3. “Southern Nights” by Glen Campbell

4. “Police & Thieves” by The Clash

5. “Hey Jude” by The Beatles

The five artists I listened to, most, in 2025:

1. Testament

2. Meshuggah

3. Kendrick Lamar

4. Bathory

5. Bob Dylan

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Now, On to 2026!

What a crazy, busy, tumultuous, blessed year 2025 was. And, now, I am preparing myself for 2026.

Let me leave you with a poem of my own, my own little New Year’s poem, which appears in both Songs for Christmas and Apocalypse Dance:

“New Year’s Eve”

Let the wind whip the world’s bones.
Let the snow build into banks.
Let our earth freeze beneath ice.
Green spring will arrive in her time.

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How did your 2025 go? Let me know!

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