This is the third in an ongoing series of weekly letters discussing what’s on my mind, what I am looking at or reading, and an opportunity for everyone to ask me questions or respond to something I’m saying or something I have written. This letter is aimed more in the direction of my literary readers, though all are welcome to respond. This is a thread so responses will become part of an ongoing conversation viewable on my Substack site.
I am currently writing several posts on both artists and writers. I am developing articles by series. This change in the way I present my articles is similar to the way I changed my curating a few years ago. After nearly two decades of organizing themed group exhibitions, I simply tired of always having to come up with some idea. I wanted more from language than to come up with a snappy title and then a couple of paragraphs on the general theme and a sentence on each artist. I wanted to go deeper into the psyche of each artist, their affinities, and in extensive written expressions. So a series on paper based art (Paper Rage), on genres of Abstraction (Abstract Intentions) and methods and visions of photography (Photo Reality) will tend to characterize my posts.
I want to be very focused in the manner of my engagement, and I want to give every specific subject, whether living or not, their just due. It’s a strange brew that inhabits my mind, for the concept of contemporary means something different to me when either art or literature are concerned. I’ve always been extremely fascinated by newness in art, but books are altogether different. In books I am looking for something decidedly classic, a link from the past to the present through seriousness of intent. In college we read the stories of novels by writers who came to visit, do workshops, and give public readings: Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Andre Dubus, and many others. It was magical to meet these writers and glean some inkling of wisdom from them—to feel connected to a community that we ourselves continued. I also had great teachers who were writers, and who are still influencing me today.
Despite a literary snobbishness that has stayed with me over the years, I find that I am more and more alone in my convictions. I’ve always considered myself a “literary” writer when I wasn’t writing art reviews; and even my critical style has benefited from my literary experiences and the biases they have established in me. I have come back to writing about books because for a time I was very uncertain as to whether or not art writing would continue to be important to me. When I discovered Substack I realized that the accessibility of a platform that I could build around my own critical thoughts would naturally take the form of whichever subject framed my interest. The general state of crisis that pervaded 2020 and forward created a need for me to engage subjects much closer to my private self than ever before.
Writing about literature, especially historically recognized figures, could never be confused with “reviews” in a professional sense. I have evolved a personal style of writing, erudite but not pedantic, combining concrete details and tight syntax with rhythmic narrative flow. I am writing critically, or rather speculatively, yet adding a language that’s not merely analytical. If one reads a lot of fiction, especially the “great writers” of any era or locale, as diverse as say, William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, one begins to see into the fabric and structure of their writing to discover how they get out of plot, characters, and the moral compass of the story, what they want to achieve in their writing and for their vision. Speculative criticism is much the same. It contains agendas and drives toward an open-ended knowledge rather than merely categorical conclusions. It’s at this point where the writer can write about any subject, and in any genre.
The difference between writing about radically different subjects like visual art and novels, for instance, is due to the different experience that necessitates the need for speculation, and the logical vocabularies that arise from them. Writing about each of these subjects forces the writer to bend his mind to them. While visual art seems more independent, literature makes demands upon the writer to establish an authority in their writing. Each subject exists within a community for whom I ostensibly write. However, I also at all times write to improve myself as a writer and to make some sort of cultural impact. Here is where you will see it. Please suggest my Substack to others and please follow it as a paid subscriber so that I can keep writing for only the best readers.
This post is a thread. Who has a question or reply to anything I've said? You can also reply to other Letters in the same way.