Oblivion, or A New Future Begins
Coverage Report 11-12/2022: The end of an era
Dean Kissick published his final column on Spike Magazine, bringing The Downward Spiral to a conclusion after six years. In this time, he (intentionally or unintentionally) became a modern-day Orpheus, descending into the depths of an artistic and cultural hellscape in search of beauty, “ecstasy and transcendence, and finally complete doom.”
He believes he hasn’t found “bohemia” but at the risk of reducing this newsletter to a Twitter format rambling, perhaps bohemia (his devotion to searching for visionary artists and artistic freedom and the psychedelic trip they can take him on, to the precipice of the abyss where the entirety of his experience and perception can be dissolved into nothingness) was the journey and the memories of that journey he made along the way.
“Where are all the weirdos? I do believe culture was more interesting when it was made by weirdos, when artists and writers were ostracized by society, rather than celebrated, rather than seen as having an important role in upholding its standards and norms.”
The reason I’ve remained hooked on Kissick’s column (and BARF fangirled when he turned up to one of my Venice events in April) is because I perceived early on he was asking the sort of questions I was looking answers for too and was, like me, in search of the kinds of people that seemed to no longer exist. In June, when I met Rob Doyle, it felt like whatever journey I had created for myself entered a new dimension (first glimpsed when I first read Threshold and Autobibliography, then experienced at super speed upon meeting him). I’m still working through it all half a year later.
Kissick’s Spike swan song is a reliving of the last six years, a ride from the “grand narratives collapse in 2016 to what he perceives is “the end of performative outrage as the major driving of culture.” He’s optimistic about the new future, looking ahead past his spiral at the possibilities of joy, beauty, and a “sense of renewal of purpose.”
Also hitting the six year mark, Ana Kinsella’s London Review of Looks has come to an end as its author will soon leave London for good. In her final missive, she rewinds the clock to her arrival in London in the early days of the 2010s and reflects on her decade+ tenure in the capital, where she attained what Proust referred to as having new eyes: “instead of the comfort of the familiar, I keep finding newness,” she writes. In a recent piece for Dirt, she agreed with Diana Vreeland that “the eye has to travel.” I can only hope wherever hers land once she relocates to Ireland, she’ll share her new vision with the rest of us.
The year hasn’t ended on the brightest note for writing and writers. Bookforum announced its demise, following the acquisition of sister publication Artforum by Penske Media Corporation, a conglomerate which has over the years made strategic acquisitions in the arts space, including ARTnews and Art in America. Bookforum’s closure is the latest example of the precarity of literary journalism in the age of consolidation. Only days before, Astra Magazine, not yet a yearlong operation, also bit the dust (axing its third issue in the process), a business decision from Thinkingdom Media Group, another media conglomerate that set up the magazine as a “prestige vehicle” for Astra Publishing House, the conglomerate’s US operation. The ever-shrinking literary landscape is nonetheless experiencing somewhat of a rebirth. As the NYT noted, a crop of new indie outfits have recently sprung up, including The Drift and Forever Magazine. These nimbler enterprises couldn’t have arrived at a better time, with Berfrois also pulling the plug, following in the footsteps of its sister publication Queen Mob’s, which shuttered earlier in the year.
Where will the writers that were given room to grow through these publications turn to now?
Patrick Nathan sees this as only half a question. In his newsletter, he sees literature — from book publishing to newspapers and magazines — as facing an existential threat, as part of which it is being dismantled as a public art form, strangled as an aspiration. “The shuttering of one magazine after another,” he says, “as well as the decline in editorial expertise, curiosity, and patience in those that have remained, has all but destroyed the forum in which literature’s professional audience once existed.” The decline of literary criticism has created a vicious cycle of dumbing down literary culture — dumb publications create dumb audiences who demand dumb stuff to read and therefore guarantee the creation and continuation of a dumb culture.
I see these endings collectively marking (inevitably) the beginning of something new — new things to look forward to from the various writers and editors who have called the aforementioned projects quits in addition to new voices entering the frame. One such example is Adam Coleman (another Irish man, charmed I’m sure), a contributor to Dublin Review of Books, who I can only describe as a philosopher-in-training, deploying missives through his eponymous Substack (adamcoleman.substack.com). My entry point into his project, titled Disjecta Membra, was a love letter to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, after which I devoured the rest of his back catalogue. The fav, to date, is a recent three part essay (of “a book that hasn’t worked out”), covering the Irish literary landscape from Finnegan’s Wake to Sally Rooney, continental philosophers (I’m still thinking through his Kierkegaard musings), neoliberalism and capitalism and their effects on the Irish state.
The Drunken Canal announced the encore to its two-year reign as the supreme DIY project, but the city’s art and art adjacent milieu is likely to regroup around Downtown Critic, a “semi-anonymous, non-topical newspaper” also occupied with the LES. I forgot how I came across it in late December, but my introduction to it was an anonymised text the author of which takes a self-reflective approach to considering two works on show at a gallery. “Did I waste the prime of my youth?” he asks, reviewing the present state of his sex life — or rather the disappearance of whatever sex life he had at one point in the past — before continuing, “is this why I still fall for straight men?”
Another fella asking big questions is Blake Smith. “‘Do I have to think about this shit to have a career?” he asks in his latest, remembering a time not so long ago when he found himself perplexed by other writers’ intricate knowledge of the “literary production” complex [he’s not wrong, whoever he’s referring to comes across more as a PR than a writer, perhaps the line between the two is increasingly blurring]. “I have no idea what’s going on, who anyone is,” he says. He’s the sort of critic who may LOVE an essay, a book, or any kind of writing for that matter, but will still find something in it to take a stab at; that is my fav kind of critic. In this piece, he turns his attention to the work of Ann Manov contrasting her triumph for The Paris Review and an earlier work on Joan Didion for Unherd. He thinks highly of the former but not so much of the latter; the newsletter then is a negotiation of what that means:
“Only in retrospect was there a problem of how to unite these different impressions, or doubts about the validity of my judgments in both cases (that the Didion piece was crap and its author a glib scribbler; that the fur piece was great and its author an interesting new talent).”
Is it possible to be utterly objective? To not be influenced by any other factors other than what’s on the page, divorced from anything you may have previously heard or read about the author? Smith thinks so and sees that as the work of becoming a true reader: “Tear down the rood screen of everything I’ve already heard about the author, and encounter each essay for the first time.”
Finally, central to this idea of something new is (even if he has been writing for a while) the incendiary Barry Pierce, who recently returned to Dazed for round two of his twitter-melting essay on the decline of young male novelists in the UK. “We need more fun and frivolous books from young men,” he writes in his latest. The few that succeed in breaking through the publishing industrial complex are reduced to publishing idpol garbage around concepts of masculinity and identity that have infected the book market for far too long. “Every book by young men now must be a portrait of modern masculinity,” Pierce continues, signifying that no real progress has been attained since the original missive. Still, in an uncharacteristically hopeful note, he sees 2023 as a possible turning point.
The New York Times declared Marseille the new artistic haven, so you know it is in irreversible decline already (locals partly credit its appeal to its Greek past, so I guess I can’t be all that mad about it). Always one step ahead of the mainstream, Ed Luker visited the city where “everyone smokes cigarettes, all the time” to work on a novel, which turned out to be elusive. The trip inspired his signature ethereal style, lyrical thoughts on disconnecting from routines, breaking habits and enjoying the freedom of…well, being free to do nothing. Luker has something of the chanteuse in him. Reading his work, I involuntarily imagine Lana Del Rey narrating. “The work of disentangling takes a period of concentration and rest,” he said of his time out of London, the latest of his musings that seems straight out of Lana’s famous/infamous monologue for Ride.
READ IT BEFORE THE SCREEN ADAPTATION DROPS: “After 13 hours unpacking art and storing crates I meet up with a writer around 11pm who drives me to Nathan’s, a kind of Hell’s Kitchen-lite gay bar in Miami Beach…We walk with our drinks to the beach…When we reach a shack they strip and sprint into the ocean. I follow.” Paul McAdory got down and Dirt-y (soz) at Art Basel (Miami, not Basel Basel).
Fitzcarraldo published its 100th book. Annie Ernaux, one of its principal authors, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, meaning the prevalence of romanticising one’s own life might be entering its latest era of decline. Sex Inevitably Sells: The Drift published a blockbuster essay on Ernaux’s Getting Lost and knock-off contemporary novels portraying millennial desire by Noor Qasim. Christian Lorentzen reminisced about his stint at The London Review of Books and promised an upsurge of writing in his newsletter. Rachel Connolly has had enough of pronouncements of emotional intensity. Patrick Sproull is flat out bored of Hollywood’s obsession with ‘eat the rich’ flicks.
“I’ve always tried to create a body of work, where things can…piss on each other.”
In his interview on Forever Magazine, Scott McClanahan revealed he’s working on two books, poetically coinciding with the end of Sarah, The Berliner Ensemble’s London production of his most famous book. I caught the one-man play on closing night, exiting transfixed at the directness of the performance (although no actor will ever be as hot as Scott, soz).
Best of the Month that was? https://usreview.blog/2022/10/23/on-the-calvin-klein-billboard-off-broadway-lafayette-st/
Mirroring Bailey Slater’s thoughts on how celebrity has ushered in the death of fashion that I wrote about in this newsletter’s previous missive, FF. Felix (no idea who this person is, please enlighten me if you know) sees the present state of Calvin Klein ad campaigns, and particularly the giant billboards in downtown New York, as void of sex, a total and utter elimination of sexuality and “a castration of the actual act of sex,” but “just a celebration of the idea of celebrity itself.” Felix paints a picture of a New York that has been extinguished, the New York of VFILES and GHE20G0TH1K, of Elias Tezapsidis and his brilliant modern epic [HARDCORE OSCAR], paying tribute to the brand’s “porn star casting couch inspired” ad campaign and its progenitor Glenn O’Brien.
The Chad Molly Bloom vs The Virgin Stephen Dedalus
Sally Rooney considers Ulysses feminist literature in The Paris Review, peering into the novel’s sexual culture: “With a lover, or with her husband, or with her recollections and fantasies of other men, Molly is always in bed with someone; just as Stephen, no matter much time he spends in brothels, never is.” That is the author’s own understanding of Joyce, which she believes cannot be taken as objective truth, inviting everyone to produce their response to what she perceives as the book that started the “death of the novel” debacle.
The essay’s only faux pas, if it has one, is that Rooney was far too measured when she referenced Virginia Woolf instead of calling her out for being the elitist, classist, hibernophobic bitch troll she was.
Rooney’s approach, that of personal interpretation, is one I imagine Patrick Nathan to be in support of. In Connectivity Error, he uses the now done-to-death ranking of cultural artefacts and/or moments as a jumping off point to critique the perceived inaccessibility of art, a byproduct of social media that he considers as intrinsically malevolent. Focusing on film, Nathan puts the ever-enlarging Disney on blast for creating vapid filler that passes for art and as a consequence creating an audience allergic to interpretation, a
shockingly passive, distressingly unengaged audience—an audience that no longer wonders, that no longer thinks, but merely reacts
that can only ever have one conclusion: “to extinguish the imagination itself” and see the audience “disinvited from their own inner lives.” This is hardly a new topic for Nathan. Image Control, his first work of non-fiction and second overall, occupied similar terrain. A week prior to this missive, he noted that anyone you love can be replaced by the vacancy of “entertainment values.” Where Rooney sees this interpretation as particularly important for writers, Nathan finds it imperative for audiences.
A difficult film is a sensitive film: it asks you about yourself and invites you to ask questions of your own. It wants you to walk away changed, and if you’re lucky, you will. There’s nothing elitist in this at all. There’s nothing inaccessible either. There’s no bar, no gate, no password, just as there’s nothing physically stopping a person who reads tweets to sit down and read Ulysses. A difficult film or book wants to give you something; a connective product wants to use you as walking ad space. Tell me which sounds more elitist, more inaccessible.
Over the last two months, I’ve been reading and thinking about Paris, ballet, how hot Pierre Clementi was (as Marcel and Benjamin in Belle de Jour and The Diary of an Innocent Boy respectively), how hot Pascal Greggory is, diaries and Anais Nin (shock); I’ve been thinking about immortality, exemplified by a peculiar play by Czech writer Karel Capek that I came across by accident called The Makropoulos Secret; and I’ve been thinking about something Dan Fox wrote recently on the legacy or the artistic scenes of Dublin and New York. “Someone always gets more credit than they deserve, someone else is always unjustly forgotten.”
As the end of 2022 marks the conclusion of so much and the opening of so many possibilities, I wonder what we’ll keep in our minds as we leap ahead and what will fade into oblivion.
Particularly enjoyed this one ✨
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