One Year of Staring

a letter, a manifesto, a few sentimental remarks

James Nasmyth, An Alchemist in a Long Robe Standing Reading above an Open Chest of Books Which He Has Rifled Through; A Large Vaulted Hall Surrounds Him, Littered with Alchemical Apparatus

Hello,

Usually this newsletter contains no news, and is not exactly a letter. I prefer, somewhat pretentiously, to treat it as my own evolving collected works, hopefully good enough to be read and reread. And when I try to adopt the cheery “hey subscribers!” tone I feel some horrible spirit has taken up residence within me and is speaking through my mouth, like The Exorcist.

But exactly one year ago today I posted an essay on Christopher Logue’s long poem War Music which, if one discounts a few false starts and early attempts, began A Good Hard Stare. On that day, I pledged I would keep at this on a regular basis, even if only for a dozen people, for as long as it was productive and fun. There are, to my surprise, substantially more than a dozen people here now. So for the first anniversary, allow me to briefly step out from behind the curtain and address everyone directly. I can hear the Academy Awards get-off-the-stage-music playing faintly in the background already, so I’ll keep it (relatively) short.

A Statement of Intent

I grew up reading Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, who led me to Burroughs and Pynchon and Philip K. Dick, who led me to the wider world of literature, so I have always believed that magic is, in some sense, real, and that writing is fundamentally a magical act, perhaps the most basic magical act there is. In the past twelve months I’ve written more than I ever have in the rest of my life combined, and I now have even more cause to believe that is the case. Channeling my energy into the word and then sending these essays out as sigils, as charged objects, has changed my life in unimaginable and unpredictable ways. I feel as if I have tapped into a stream of energy or ambition that I didn’t know was there, which I had suppressed because I thought that I would never have any outlet for it. It’s funny to look back on your life and see the signs that were there all along: my family of screenwriters and copywriters, or my chronic haunting of used bookstores and dreams of opening one, which I now realize was a sublimated desire to live among the ruins of the past because I thought literature and literary community held nothing for me in the present.

It’s given me cause to think about what I am doing here, exactly. Most of my writing is about books, but there is a certain aesthetics of bookishness, a certain literature-as-secular-religion tendency I have tried hard to avoid. I am not interested in dim libraries and dusty tomes for their own sake. There are many besweatered and bespectacled young men on YouTube and Substack telling you about the Western Canon; all due respect to those people but I am not trying to be one of them. I think literature is more important than that. What I want to do is to use it as a tool with which to investigate the higher questions, as a series of mirrors that show the different angles of the oversoul. I don’t want to subordinate myself to literature, I want to make it work for me, to rise to the level of my own thoughts and aspirations. To create, out of raw material, a narrative, a secret history, a world.

It’s a little embarrassing to make these grand mystical claims about critical writing, which is obviously below the novel and the lyric or epic poem in the grand scheme of things. “I will not Reason and Compare, my business is to Create,” said Blake. Many of my friends are writing or have written actual novels and lasting works of art, while my attempts at those have thus far felt halfhearted somehow, incomplete, vestigial, false. Sometimes I worry I am like my beloved twentieth century critics, able to define and sort and categorize but lacking the spark of inspiration or the touch of the divine, doomed to forever be looking longingly up into the higher spheres.

But I don’t know. Why climb some self-imposed imaginary ladder? Is being Samuel Johnson, or Emerson, or Janet Malcolm, or Joan Didion, or Eliot Weinberger such a bad goal to aim for? And in my best work, the work I’m most proud of, I really did feel like I was not entirely in control, like something was speaking through me and it was all I could do to get everything out onto the page in time. So, while I reserve the right to change my feelings on a dime, I do feel, for the moment, as if I am traveling the right path, doing what I’m supposed to do.

A Revealing Anecdote

A few months ago, I attended the AWP Conference & Bookfair for my day job. AWP, if you don’t know, is like book Coachella. All the small and academic presses and all the MFA students and adjuncts and assorted industry professionals come together in a big convention center; there are official panels like “Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift” and “The Intimate Podcast: A Path to Community” as well as “cool” “underground” off-site readings in which poetry students and novelists gather to express the exact same inculcated bourgeois values, only they smoke cigarettes while they do it, I guess.

I won’t lie, though I had some good times and met some nice people, I found the whole thing rather depressing. All these writers scurrying around the convention floor, schmoozing and catching up and waiting in line to buy $24 chicken tenders. It reminded me that writing is truly an industry, there is essentially no difference between AWP in Los Angeles and a convention of tire manufacturers in Akron. All these dutiful little technicians, exchanging tricks of the trade! All these bad outfits (it’s still Williamsburg circa 2010 out there in MFA-land), all this quiet desperation, all these small stakes, all these professional structures that churn out memoirs and chapbooks and novels that exist just to exist¹.

My company’s booth was a few tables down from New Directions’s. When I first discovered New Directions, it was like a bomb going off in my consciousness. In those stark black and white spines with their impassive centaur logo lay my gateway to modernism, to the Latin American boom, to classical Chinese poetry, to vast and intricate cathedrals I had apparently been living next to and never noticed. I went up to the nice intern or staffer or whoever it was working at their booth and expressed as much and she said “Oh… that’s great!” in the tone of the restaurant host when the party of four walks in five minutes before closing. I don’t blame her, of course. I was tired of talking at that point too. It was just a strange moment, to see this powerful sigil, which to my youthful self acted as the mark of a secret commonwealth and as a portal to aesthetic experiences beyond my imagination, reduced to a halfhearted interaction and to another table covered with a cheap cloth on a stuffy, bright air-conditioned nightmare of a convention floor.

The last day of AWP also happened to be my 30th birthday and I was so overcooked and tired and frazzled that I couldn’t work up the urge to celebrate, couldn’t imagine seeing another face or having another conversation. Instead I went home and got straight into bed and read 100 pages of Howards End, which I was reading at the time, a wonderful novel, a novel that reminds you why you love novels. Immediately a weight was lifted. It was like a cool tide washing over me. I came back to myself. Oh, right, I thought. This is what it’s all about.

I stress that this is not a reactionary tirade against the publishing industry or the MFA system or anything so tired as that; I work in, or at least adjacent to the industry, after all, and believe the art/commerce tension is in many senses useful and productive. Obviously if there were no publishing industry there would be no Howards End or New Directions, if there were no commercial apparatus there would be no Shakespeare and maybe even no Homer. All of this stuff is mostly necessary and basically fine.

But I keep thinking about the secret world, about Blake again, the golden string which leads you “to heaven’s gate / built in Jerusalem’s wall,” the string that stretches from the Eleusinian mysteries even to the latest Romantasy saga or Dimes Square tell-all. When I think about literature, as you may have noticed in this letter, I think about portals, sigils, secret orders. I think about the esoteric, the mysterious and occult. I was drawn to Morrison and Moore as a teenager because they suggested that there were other worlds out there to be explored, rich, dangerous, and alluring, and that writing could be an act of self-creation and of glamour. I think about feelings I don’t have names for, and about strange moments in which an impossibly intimate connection to another mind is made via staring at marks on paper and hallucinating vividly. I don’t feel like any of that can square with the harsh fluorescent world of deals and reviews and grants and gossip. It all seemed so small, and I know that art is big, bigger than any of us.

So I’ve been thinking about our thing, whatever you want to call it, a certain group of writers and critics that have coalesced around this corner of this platform and who I am lucky enough to call colleagues and even friends. Is there really a “New Romanticism”? I’m not sure. Can a literary movement really be based around what is essentially a social media platform with a payment processor? Probably not. Is this all just playing the last few bars of “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship goes down into the bottomless fathoms and a torrent of AI slop and short form video content puts an end to the Western literary tradition forever? Quite possibly.

Nevertheless, for all its flaws and all the tiring and sinister and corny aspects of timelines and algorithms, I feel for the first time as if I am among a community of people who Get It, who respect the mystery and want to act as its caretakers, who know that art is not a career path or a fashion statement, it is… well, I don’t think we have figured out exactly what it is. Pure aestheticism has its own traps and dead ends. I don’t think I can articulate in plain language why all of this is anything other than a way to idle away your time before you die. But nevertheless, beyond my more rational instincts I am convinced it is something more, and I know the people I’ve befriended on this platform share that feeling, and all of that makes me feel a little less alone than I did twelve months ago.

A Few Sentimental Remarks

The get-off-the-stage music is beginning to blare now. It’s always a little irksome when people act all humble and aw-shucks and thank all their wonderful readers. So I’ll just reiterate briefly that the past year has been one of the most extraordinary and transformative periods of my life. I feel as if, after many dead ends and false starts, I have found something I am truly suited for, and I want to follow it wherever it leads. Every time someone subscribes, I am amazed anew that anyone is interested in all this. If you, for some reason, have decided to send me five dollars a month despite getting no premium content for your troubles, you are one of the elect and your name will be etched in the golden halls of literary Valhalla. It’s doubly irksome when people start shaking the tin cup, so I will only say that if enough of you were to do this, I could write an awful lot more.

Lastly, among many people whose kind words have meant more to me than they will ever know, I want to mention John Pistelli and Julianne Werlin, who read and complimented that first Logue essay. That day I talked to my friend and he said I seemed really over the moon about something, and I said it was because two of the finest literary minds in America had praised my work. I meant it utterly.

And especially to John, il miglior fabbro, a true magus. Without his work, I (among many of us, I think) would not be doing this. Among other things, I think finally finishing Ulysses under the sign of the Invisible College was what gave me the inward authority to start writing. You get to that final Yes and you’re filled with generative energy, which manifests itself in strange and wonderful ways. Like I said, it’s magic.

Okay, enough logrolling, they’re cutting off my mic. My sincere thanks to everyone for reading and commenting and here’s to another year of—(pulled off stage with giant vaudeville hook).

1. Incidentally, I get the same low feeling when I get a glimpse of the “Home” tab instead of the “Following” one on this website.