Holy shit now I want to read your (future) books and everything else you’ve written? I adore your theory of what literature should be and ascribe to something similar. I think we need to bring Romanticism back. Let’s bring Romanticism back!!! And I think there’s a way to do so without feeling like trodding old ground. It’s a response to today’s cynicism and navel-gazing focus on identity above all else. Rather: characters over identity: characters building themselves and reaching for something greater. My personal goal is to write stories asking the question of where you fit in the world and how to make an impact beyond yourself.
I waited to read this essay until I’d finished Intermezzo myself-which I now have and share some similar feelings. The writing is so damn good, but at a certain point I looked at myself reading on the couch and got the same feeling I was watching a tv show. But I also think there is subtle Romantic quality to this book, more pronounced in Beautiful World Where Are You, in the relationship characters have with God. That’s something I would LOVE to see her focus on. She’s so good at relationships: let’s watch someone wrestle with God for a whole novel! Idk. I still enjoy these novels on a pure aesthetic level, which can be divine in its own right.
Love to hear it, Denise. Like watching a TV show--I felt that. I, too, dream of a new Romanticism. And I would slather this Substack up and down with pieces of my novel or my book of poetry, if I weren't busy tracking the constant submissions and rejections from institutional media/agents/publishers (gatekeepers whose high tower walls require new, modern siege tactics: journalism, editing, academia, experimental collaboration, this Substack; every weapon I can muster!). Besides, it's hard enough to get readers to stick around after pieces like this one for the little fictions, poems, or experiments I'm more interested in writing. Such is the reality of the market!
Sam, following on our earlier conversation about your first review, I think this is much more interesting.
Loved this: "So perhaps what people really want is just this—this very personal, vaguely meta, vaguely essayistic thing?" Ouch. Damn, I thought I invented that! Slightly more seriously, I kinda started with open letters as actual emails to people I actually knew or thought might be interested, which got too complicated, then spent some time on Medium, and have now migrated to Substack, so it has become a lot more public.
Fantastic: "The thing is, I really can’t stand twenty-first century behavior. I hate the social media uni-personality, the rotted Tik-Tok brain, the ultra-online idiocy, the misery and the privilege and the endless self-pity. I hate it because it’s in me, too. I want fictions that are aimed at helping us lift off the ground, that get us away from our myopia, instead of burrowing us further in." Please hold this thought.
Finally, you are right about Benjamin, not sure why he thinks he is a Marxist, maybe to impress Brecht but whatever. Do you know Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen"? I think you would like it.
McMurtry is of course an accomplished novelist. And played in the space between novel and film (in a different era). With a troubled relationship to his son, James, a very accomplished songwriter/poet. But Dairy Queen is about formal questions, maybe, so I recommended it. Also, relationship to Susan Sontag, and to book collecting . . .
Science does do all the things you say it can’t. One has to learn to do the reading for oneself.
I don’t think art or literature is stuck. I think some artists are stuck, maybe. But art is arting away out there, and there is so much of it we get a little lost and confused and dismissive. But we are overfull: we have eaten past satiety. The food is wonderful, but to the diner it has lost its savour.
I say, just write here whatever you want: poetry, writer’s diary, fragments of a short story or novel. Your voice develops through those exercises. Get started now, none of us have much time left.
Welcome to London! Great post! I totally agree with you on Adam Phillips: reading or listening to him always leaves me thinking I don’t know if what he says is true, exactly, but it seems significant.
... To step out of their suffocating airless rooms of endless psychological self-reflection and into the open air beyond themselves. Maybe that's what Sally Rooney wants too.
Btw, I watched Until The End Of The World. It absolutely bursts with life. I am not surprised that Wenders does not receive more honor than he deserves. He eludes the critical apparatus of the cinephile and the expert both. Let us not be critics. Let us speak what we want into existence.
I meant to add that I publish poems on Substack from time to time under a series called Holy Places Set Apart. They get "views" but no engagement so far. I also crosspost everything to LinkedIn, God help me. Talk about going against the grain.
I have never read a word of Sally Rooney. You are my guide to her work.
"It’s a dirty sin to judge a book based on what you wish it would be, but I couldn’t help it. I kept wishing it would do something else,"
This is untrue. It is not at all a sin. It is at heart of what artists in any medium do. They read, they interpret, they make marks and doodles along the way, they are always rewriting in their heads, then they speak what they want into existence, so to speak. Which is the harder part.
That's not judgement or criticism of Sally Rooney. What we want is for these finely drawn characters to step out of their airless
There's more than enough here, for all your (well-founded) worries about form. It seems like capacious expanse cohering around a capacious voice does legitimately make for the best use of the email form of Substack, if not the web-based version. That said, I'm also rooting for your physical book(s) as the best, stubborn, and continuing form for literature.
Re: your discourse on poetry corresponding with science but then gesturing beyond it — have you read any Annie Dillard? She descends pretty self-consciously from Thoreau, and her early poetry led her to some blindingly good essays on nature, reality, scientific advances, and other gigantic subjects. "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek" (1974) was my entry way, but she followed it with searing work on theodicy and reality in "Holy the Firm." She didn't suffer our contemporary graceless solipsism.
I wouldn't say so, they have a different viewpoint, and it is useful to learn, but not necessarily better. Basically, more empathizing than systematizing, and yes I do understand that in this super systematizing civilization learning empathizing ways of thinking is useful. But ultimately we need both.
Holy shit now I want to read your (future) books and everything else you’ve written? I adore your theory of what literature should be and ascribe to something similar. I think we need to bring Romanticism back. Let’s bring Romanticism back!!! And I think there’s a way to do so without feeling like trodding old ground. It’s a response to today’s cynicism and navel-gazing focus on identity above all else. Rather: characters over identity: characters building themselves and reaching for something greater. My personal goal is to write stories asking the question of where you fit in the world and how to make an impact beyond yourself.
I waited to read this essay until I’d finished Intermezzo myself-which I now have and share some similar feelings. The writing is so damn good, but at a certain point I looked at myself reading on the couch and got the same feeling I was watching a tv show. But I also think there is subtle Romantic quality to this book, more pronounced in Beautiful World Where Are You, in the relationship characters have with God. That’s something I would LOVE to see her focus on. She’s so good at relationships: let’s watch someone wrestle with God for a whole novel! Idk. I still enjoy these novels on a pure aesthetic level, which can be divine in its own right.
Love to hear it, Denise. Like watching a TV show--I felt that. I, too, dream of a new Romanticism. And I would slather this Substack up and down with pieces of my novel or my book of poetry, if I weren't busy tracking the constant submissions and rejections from institutional media/agents/publishers (gatekeepers whose high tower walls require new, modern siege tactics: journalism, editing, academia, experimental collaboration, this Substack; every weapon I can muster!). Besides, it's hard enough to get readers to stick around after pieces like this one for the little fictions, poems, or experiments I'm more interested in writing. Such is the reality of the market!
Sam, following on our earlier conversation about your first review, I think this is much more interesting.
Loved this: "So perhaps what people really want is just this—this very personal, vaguely meta, vaguely essayistic thing?" Ouch. Damn, I thought I invented that! Slightly more seriously, I kinda started with open letters as actual emails to people I actually knew or thought might be interested, which got too complicated, then spent some time on Medium, and have now migrated to Substack, so it has become a lot more public.
Fantastic: "The thing is, I really can’t stand twenty-first century behavior. I hate the social media uni-personality, the rotted Tik-Tok brain, the ultra-online idiocy, the misery and the privilege and the endless self-pity. I hate it because it’s in me, too. I want fictions that are aimed at helping us lift off the ground, that get us away from our myopia, instead of burrowing us further in." Please hold this thought.
Finally, you are right about Benjamin, not sure why he thinks he is a Marxist, maybe to impress Brecht but whatever. Do you know Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen"? I think you would like it.
Keep up the very good work, and thank you!
Never actually read McMurtry. More good suggestions. Thank you, man!
McMurtry is of course an accomplished novelist. And played in the space between novel and film (in a different era). With a troubled relationship to his son, James, a very accomplished songwriter/poet. But Dairy Queen is about formal questions, maybe, so I recommended it. Also, relationship to Susan Sontag, and to book collecting . . .
Science does do all the things you say it can’t. One has to learn to do the reading for oneself.
I don’t think art or literature is stuck. I think some artists are stuck, maybe. But art is arting away out there, and there is so much of it we get a little lost and confused and dismissive. But we are overfull: we have eaten past satiety. The food is wonderful, but to the diner it has lost its savour.
I say, just write here whatever you want: poetry, writer’s diary, fragments of a short story or novel. Your voice develops through those exercises. Get started now, none of us have much time left.
Welcome to London! Great post! I totally agree with you on Adam Phillips: reading or listening to him always leaves me thinking I don’t know if what he says is true, exactly, but it seems significant.
Thank you MJE! He's a good friend for sure.
I'd be interested in your poetry.
Careful what you wish for
Fumble fingered on the device.
... To step out of their suffocating airless rooms of endless psychological self-reflection and into the open air beyond themselves. Maybe that's what Sally Rooney wants too.
Btw, I watched Until The End Of The World. It absolutely bursts with life. I am not surprised that Wenders does not receive more honor than he deserves. He eludes the critical apparatus of the cinephile and the expert both. Let us not be critics. Let us speak what we want into existence.
All very well said. So glad to hear of your experience with UTEOTW.
What appears as the second comment was really the first part of one comment. That's what I mean by fumble fingered. I am old
I meant to add that I publish poems on Substack from time to time under a series called Holy Places Set Apart. They get "views" but no engagement so far. I also crosspost everything to LinkedIn, God help me. Talk about going against the grain.
I have never read a word of Sally Rooney. You are my guide to her work.
"It’s a dirty sin to judge a book based on what you wish it would be, but I couldn’t help it. I kept wishing it would do something else,"
This is untrue. It is not at all a sin. It is at heart of what artists in any medium do. They read, they interpret, they make marks and doodles along the way, they are always rewriting in their heads, then they speak what they want into existence, so to speak. Which is the harder part.
That's not judgement or criticism of Sally Rooney. What we want is for these finely drawn characters to step out of their airless
There's more than enough here, for all your (well-founded) worries about form. It seems like capacious expanse cohering around a capacious voice does legitimately make for the best use of the email form of Substack, if not the web-based version. That said, I'm also rooting for your physical book(s) as the best, stubborn, and continuing form for literature.
Re: your discourse on poetry corresponding with science but then gesturing beyond it — have you read any Annie Dillard? She descends pretty self-consciously from Thoreau, and her early poetry led her to some blindingly good essays on nature, reality, scientific advances, and other gigantic subjects. "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek" (1974) was my entry way, but she followed it with searing work on theodicy and reality in "Holy the Firm." She didn't suffer our contemporary graceless solipsism.
Kind words, Kevin. I've heard of, but not read, Annie Dillard. That's a great recommendation, I'll have to look into some of her work.
I hope it has more of what you're interested in reading and writing; she's definitely becoming an indispensable touchstone for what I want to do.
>women, and how they know so much more than we do
I wouldn't say so, they have a different viewpoint, and it is useful to learn, but not necessarily better. Basically, more empathizing than systematizing, and yes I do understand that in this super systematizing civilization learning empathizing ways of thinking is useful. But ultimately we need both.
Fair enough, I'm very consciously writing too broadly, but also I didn't say better.
Really enjoyed this.
Thank you, Helena! Means a lot, since I've enjoyed several of your writings as well.
Lots to unpack here, and it's very well written. I'm going to have to do a deep dive later. Good shit my dude.
New subscriber.
Thank you so much, man! Means a lot.