The Lost Art of Stroppiness
Hello! I have surfaced!
First of all, I need you to know I have several half-written emails waiting for me either to work out what the actual point of them is, or to cut them down into something shorter than 3000 words. Nobody needs that. (Big old chonker on Muriel Spark coming your way soon, though - brace yourself.)
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This one doesn't have an ending yet, but I'd like to tell you the beginning anyway. Like many of my stories, it starts out as a twinkly little anecdote about serendipity in the library, and ends up with all-caps commentating on a fist fight.
It began a few weeks ago. When I started on this particular path, I was fully intending to write something about John Berger, the art critic and author of Ways of Seeing, a book which I have still not actually read. Off I trotted to the university library, located the shelf, found the book.
And then, I found a second book. My favourite kind of book. A sort that you don't find very often, especially these days, but when I do I will drop everything and pick it up. This kind of book is a few places further along on the shelf from a Famous, Often Beloved Work; it is about the same size, and its title is very clearly a blistering riposte by someone with an axe to grind.
I took them both home. As soon as I can get to them, I will be reading Ways of Seeing by John Berger, and then I will also be reading Seeing Through Berger by Peter Fuller.
There's an immediate question here, which is Who The Fuck Is This Guy? Who is this guy, who takes an extremely influential, Marxist work of art criticism, and responds to it like this? A brief Google says Peter Fuller was himself an art critic, originally a student of Berger's; that he became disillusioned with Marxism and drawn towards the premodern romanticism of John Ruskin; that he died in a car accident in 1990 at the age of forty-three.
That he was a raging bastard who gave as good as he got and picked fights on purpose.
"Like Warhol in the 60s or Hogarth in the 18th century, [Damien] Hirst escaped the critical discourses of the art world by appealing to a wider audience. Fuller wanted to do the same thing as a critic. He didn't write within any established language of art criticism. He was neither a newspaper columnist nor an academic theorist but something else - something weird and unhinged."
This Man Made Britart What It Is. He Would Have Hated It (Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, May 1999)
Perhaps it's because I'm also reading Rebecca West at the moment, but I feel like there's a certain kind of writer I'm instinctively drawn towards. They're self-taught to a large degree, and deliberately independent-minded. But their independence of thought doesn't lead them to the radical fringes. If you just glance at it, it looks like centrism or conservatism - but there is something "weird and unhinged" about it.
Maybe sometimes having a massive independent streak ought to lead you to the middle of the road. Maybe that's how you know you're not just being reactionary, but the thoughts are your own and you came to them honestly.
But also, the writers I'm drawn to like this - like West, and her anticommunism that led her to look favourably on McCarthy, like say for instance Christopher Hitchens - seemed remarkably happy to wade into the debate and be disagreed with, often vehemently. Perhaps it was a feeling of having put the intellectual work in to get to their positions, so that they were willing to defend them and test their limits. Perhaps it was a certain robustness in the face of disagreement and respect for meaningful differences of opinion. Perhaps they all just had flameproof eyebrows. It's different these days - in these days where public debate is immediately personal, opinions on art criticism might be tied to your worth as a person, and sending death threats to people's parents is a thing that happens on the internet at the drop of a hat. Sure, some of these folks wind me up as much as the next person, but I can't help feeling like we've lost something important along the way. Something interesting and useful.
Spikiness. Disagreeableness. A good old stompy dose of strop.
The other night when I was thinking about this, I wondered whether it means I'm going to have to give Will Self another chance. I'll start with Fuller, I think.
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Speaking of independent thinkers, the last film I watched in 2023 was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
The "Manifesto" of its directors is the sort of thing that I want to keep on hand, to remind me what it feels like to take your art seriously and to try and see it as clearly as possible.
Sometimes when I look at "art about artists", I feel like clear vision and respectful collaboration are often posed as a trade-off. Frankly I agree with the Archers.
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"[I]n other stories lighthouses are enigmatic remotenesses — Woolf’s To The Lighthouse — or sinister, even nightmarish locations: think of the 2019 Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson movie The Lighthouse. But, characteristically for her, Jansson uses a lighthouse to tell a story about healing, harmony and illumination."
Adam Roberts writing about Tove Jansson and the Moomins. File under "Nordic people using familiar motifs to represent very different concepts to those you might usually expect". - between this perspective on lighthouses, and remote forests to connote safety, I've stumbled across a few of these lately.
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The Comedy Wildlife Photography Award 2023 has been awarded. Superb job all involved. For thematic purposes, let it be noted that my favourite of the category winners is the one entitled "Dispute".
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Buttondown reminds me that this is a thing that exists:
So now we all get the excitement of seeing what that looks like in an actual email. It also tells me the final word count just before I press send, which frankly seems unfair, but there we are. This is why it should have been an email, see?
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I have one piece of writing-adjacent news, which is that I'm teaching one of the Spring Scares horror writing workshops - mine is on Tuesday 2nd April, on the subject of "dramatic irony in horror fiction" (can you tell they let me pick it?), but to be honest the whole course looks knockout.
Barnett over and out.