Some news and some links
To all my readers, both veterans and newcomers: I’m deeply appreciative of your interest in my work here at RUINS. It’s been a very rough summer for me, and the fault is all mine. Early in the summer I spent an enormous amount of time working on a poetry project which will, hopefully, be ready for the world to see sometime early next year. This got me off my blogging routine, though; also, I put together the second issue of Ruins: The Magazine, and that took up a great deal of my time as well. But then—I spent an enormous amount of mental energy thinking, reconsidering, going back to first principles . . . I got myself to the point where I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I even believed anymore about art and aesthetic theory and their relationship to Christianity, which of course meant I wasn’t ready to publish any essays. But now I’ve mostly thought myself out of the quandaries I thought myself into. There a number of nearly-finished drafts which will see publication in the coming weeks: the most important one will be a sort of manifesto / lament / confession, followed by an essay made up of one extremely long paragraph, which will in turn be followed by an essay which will start out about one thing but which will take a drastic and dramatic sudden turn at the very end into a totally different topic. I’m really excited about all of these, and about some others which are still in outline form. I hope you are too!
Meanwhile, here are a few other things happening:
I’m writing short reviews of local art shows for Midwest Art Quarterly. This St. Louis-based magazine, run by Troy Sherman and including the inestimable (who writes Vita Contemplative on this blogging platform) amongst its editors, embodies a number of the localist principles which are dear to my heart and which I’ve expressed on this blog a few times (here and here, for instance). The print edition is as beautiful as any scrappy little self-published zine could ever be. It’s well worth checking out!
I have a short story published today in The Soaring Twenties Social Club’s blog. I like to call it “Borgesian dream-realisim” because that makes it sound much, much more hifalutin and fancy than it really is.
If you want to get a copy of Ruins issue 2 delivered to the mailing address of your choice, you can do so by simply following the instructions found on the page linked below.
Recent / current reads: Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past: very thought-provoking but I disagree with his negative assessment of the “pop culture is turning into museum culture” situation. I’ll read this one a second time and probably write a response of some kind). Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie: very good. Taken in total this little collection of essays has a quiet, still, calm tone which I’m valuing enormously. Fisher has some insightful points to make about Lovecraft; I’m almost ready to respond to Harold Bloom’s statement, in The Wester Canon, that there is nothing that isn’t in Shakespeare somewhere, with the assertion that Lovecraft contains ideas about the human psyche that the Bard never thought of). Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action: Towards a Christian Aesthetic: my second reading of this fine book. It is a chewy read at times but it’s an immensely helpful book for sorting out our culture’s ideas about the role of art in society. Definitely there will be a lengthy review of this one published here at some future date.
Listening: this Ghost Box Records playlist on Spotify. Simon Reynolds’ book got me hooked on this British label’s quirky, unsettling electronic music. The songs featured here are almost never pretentious at all; they are mostly quiet, even boring sometimes, but in a good way.
The Necks, Athenaeum Homebush Quay and Raab. This album is more than three hours long but it’s amazing. If you have to do a big home-repair project or take a long car trip somewhere, might I suggest it as a musical accompaniment? It is very repetitive and sometimes almost unbearably tense and dissonant, but overall it is superb. The ending of part four is indescribably beautiful.
Here is an important look at the market for Christian fantasy by . She raises some valuable points about what Christians are accustomed to expect from the literature they read, and how those expectations sometimes don’t match up to the limits and definitions of the artistic disciplines of writing and literature. Although she doesn’t proffer any easy solutions, her essay is a good jumping-off place for both writers and readers seeking to critique their own practices.
Yo congrats on coming aboard the MAQ.
Which genres/traditions is he most often looking into? Are they all modern, or does he go farther back?