Great post. And this made me literally LOL for a second: "Matthew Gasda being one of the fortunate few with the ability to succeed on either platform."
The taxonomy of the Romanticon needs much wider circulation!
It's a very elaborate and not-particularly-funny joke. ROL has more or less decided to make Philip Traylen its mascot. The photo is used on Philip's profile. The piece discusses wandering the early morning streets of London in which the only literary companions are the ghost of William Blake and Philip Traylen - so these two specters kind of fuse together. I had no idea who the photo was actually of (and Philip Traylen is a pseudonym) - so good eye recognizing Koudelka!
The truth is that it can sometimes be very hard coming up with an appropriate photo for a post.
Thank you! It's hard exactly to say how ghosts will materialize themselves, but Blake coming back as Philip Traylen pretending to be Koudelka seems as good a guess as any!
Thank you so much for providing a map of some of the voices here on Substack. I teach art history and writing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and I have to say my several months here have been bewildering. I haven't seen anything like Substack's neo-Romanticism (what I would call late Romanticism) or Modernist nostalgia among young visual artists. The closest was perhaps Timotheus Vermeulen's Metamodernism. It wouldn't be difficult to create a word cloud of authors mentioned here on Substack; it would be mostly North American and English fiction of the last five years, with a canon of big names in modernism and before, from Pound to Dante, a canon I associate with college classes in literature. It's as if MFA programs extinguish interest in reading widely outside the current literary scene or the list of classics proposed, ultimately, by curricular decisions that go back to the Great Books program.
Here on Substack these twin interests are mixed--possibly because literature can so often take its maker's life as its extensive subject--with a particularly incurable sort of anxiety about positioning in the literary world. It makes a peculiarly unpleasant stew, and creates the impression that it's crucial to capture the Zeitgeist (to be the next Ottessa), and the illusion that the free-floating discontent and insecurity themselves are the appropriate affective raw material for fiction.
So thanks for the road map. Hope you write another one like it, including some routes that lead off the map.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments and kind words! I'd be curious to know how the young visual artists you interact with articulate their ambitions and why they don't seem interested in joining literary writers in creating a "movement" inspired by the past. I too have been struck by the apparent obsession with capturing the Zeitgeist, but as far as obsessions go, it's probably largely benign. ("Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp...")
As for the narrow focus on “canonical” works, I do think it serves as an important foundation (since texts are always in conversation with other texts). John Pistelli’s Invisible College project has helped me fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, since I never attended a college course in English literature. There is merit to this back-to-basics approach as an antidote to the overpoliticisation of discussions about art. But it is less clear to me what we should be doing after we’ve all read Middlemarch. I am sceptical of the idea that if we can’t believe in Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s God, we can at least believe in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
If you don't mind my just addressing the first of your points regarding young visual artists and literature. There are intersections (my own institution has an MFA in writing), but there is also a fascinating andf pervasive disconnect. Artists tend to have their own canons, which often include writers like Kathy Acker, Unica Zürn, and Claude Cahun. The difference in music is even more pronounced. I think a majority of artists who have serious interests in music will be interested in John Cage, Morton Feldman, and others -- there is virtually no acknowledgment in the visual art world of the modern and postmodern traditions that go from Webern through Boulez to Carter, Ferneyhough and others, even though those composers often shared themes and compositions strategies with direct parallels to visual art practice. But all this is for some larger forum.
Romantic conservatism is implicit from the beginning. For every Hazlitt, a Burke; for every Byron and Shelley, a Coleridge; and so on and so on. The best embody both at once. Goethe or Mann or Arnold or Lawrence or Stendhal. The Romantics understand the decadent impulses latent in their idealistic desires, the most aware made an attempt at self-correction.
Yet another ritual stroking of Gasda’s ego-knob and not one of you motherfuckers even admits to knowing that Hermann Broch existed. Such shallowness of reference and such reverence from ignorance of the self-congratulatory navel-gazing of “literary” Substack.
Yes, I was wondering why there has been no reference in reviews to "The Sleepwalkers," which was up there with Musil and Mann in the 1960s and 1970s. I vaguely remember a passage about the time no longer being able to give birth to ornament. Stephen Spender via Wikipedia: "[Broch's] characters are sleepwalkers because their own lives are shaped by the forces of the nightmare reality in which they live." In Mann, Proust and Musil the time in which the characters live is the ground on which the figures appear. In American novels they sometimes seem painted on plexiglass.
I did think of "The Sleepwalkers" - although I confess I haven't read it. There are different possible responses to the end of empire - I'm more familiar with the British case: Lessing, Murdoch etc.
Philip every daily sends up a half dead finger pointing at the moon side of whatever Jesus is vague attention is looking to. We 'been had. Women all who refuse to act have also not been seen to participate in the punny funny dad jokes of their stated favorite person. Lendung us the clay materielle of raw power and did you maybe mean my x genre when said Boom? Ah Morvaigne is 19 years old, happy 19th Morvaigne! Carry on citizens, have you noticed that conditions being favorable- you could do acrobatic healing and yogic aerobics walking a rolling garbage can? Mister Nick Land has ssid Garbage mntn dissolved. But really where is your sense of humor?
My new word for grown adult zealous adherence to every scientific explanation: science - terrific! I mean 'commit no sociology' but we cannot help that, t' was what makes Audrn funny. Jane Eyre you are right to slur Paglia. She called poet Clay Eshleman a 'pornographer of s poet' but, who is this tar chicken to talk? Ugh, i melt, what a wet world!
Great post. And this made me literally LOL for a second: "Matthew Gasda being one of the fortunate few with the ability to succeed on either platform."
The taxonomy of the Romanticon needs much wider circulation!
Can you explain the reference to Koudelka as Blake? I don’t see the similarity.
It's a very elaborate and not-particularly-funny joke. ROL has more or less decided to make Philip Traylen its mascot. The photo is used on Philip's profile. The piece discusses wandering the early morning streets of London in which the only literary companions are the ghost of William Blake and Philip Traylen - so these two specters kind of fuse together. I had no idea who the photo was actually of (and Philip Traylen is a pseudonym) - so good eye recognizing Koudelka!
The truth is that it can sometimes be very hard coming up with an appropriate photo for a post.
I for one found it funny! And it also informed me about Koudelka in the process. So a perfect choice, I’d say. Will told me he approves.
Thank you! It's hard exactly to say how ghosts will materialize themselves, but Blake coming back as Philip Traylen pretending to be Koudelka seems as good a guess as any!
I see. Thanks for the response. I imagine Blake was also a flaneur.
Thank you so much for providing a map of some of the voices here on Substack. I teach art history and writing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and I have to say my several months here have been bewildering. I haven't seen anything like Substack's neo-Romanticism (what I would call late Romanticism) or Modernist nostalgia among young visual artists. The closest was perhaps Timotheus Vermeulen's Metamodernism. It wouldn't be difficult to create a word cloud of authors mentioned here on Substack; it would be mostly North American and English fiction of the last five years, with a canon of big names in modernism and before, from Pound to Dante, a canon I associate with college classes in literature. It's as if MFA programs extinguish interest in reading widely outside the current literary scene or the list of classics proposed, ultimately, by curricular decisions that go back to the Great Books program.
Here on Substack these twin interests are mixed--possibly because literature can so often take its maker's life as its extensive subject--with a particularly incurable sort of anxiety about positioning in the literary world. It makes a peculiarly unpleasant stew, and creates the impression that it's crucial to capture the Zeitgeist (to be the next Ottessa), and the illusion that the free-floating discontent and insecurity themselves are the appropriate affective raw material for fiction.
So thanks for the road map. Hope you write another one like it, including some routes that lead off the map.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments and kind words! I'd be curious to know how the young visual artists you interact with articulate their ambitions and why they don't seem interested in joining literary writers in creating a "movement" inspired by the past. I too have been struck by the apparent obsession with capturing the Zeitgeist, but as far as obsessions go, it's probably largely benign. ("Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp...")
As for the narrow focus on “canonical” works, I do think it serves as an important foundation (since texts are always in conversation with other texts). John Pistelli’s Invisible College project has helped me fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, since I never attended a college course in English literature. There is merit to this back-to-basics approach as an antidote to the overpoliticisation of discussions about art. But it is less clear to me what we should be doing after we’ve all read Middlemarch. I am sceptical of the idea that if we can’t believe in Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s God, we can at least believe in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
If you don't mind my just addressing the first of your points regarding young visual artists and literature. There are intersections (my own institution has an MFA in writing), but there is also a fascinating andf pervasive disconnect. Artists tend to have their own canons, which often include writers like Kathy Acker, Unica Zürn, and Claude Cahun. The difference in music is even more pronounced. I think a majority of artists who have serious interests in music will be interested in John Cage, Morton Feldman, and others -- there is virtually no acknowledgment in the visual art world of the modern and postmodern traditions that go from Webern through Boulez to Carter, Ferneyhough and others, even though those composers often shared themes and compositions strategies with direct parallels to visual art practice. But all this is for some larger forum.
I love cold brew!
Romantic conservatism is implicit from the beginning. For every Hazlitt, a Burke; for every Byron and Shelley, a Coleridge; and so on and so on. The best embody both at once. Goethe or Mann or Arnold or Lawrence or Stendhal. The Romantics understand the decadent impulses latent in their idealistic desires, the most aware made an attempt at self-correction.
Yet another ritual stroking of Gasda’s ego-knob and not one of you motherfuckers even admits to knowing that Hermann Broch existed. Such shallowness of reference and such reverence from ignorance of the self-congratulatory navel-gazing of “literary” Substack.
Yes, I was wondering why there has been no reference in reviews to "The Sleepwalkers," which was up there with Musil and Mann in the 1960s and 1970s. I vaguely remember a passage about the time no longer being able to give birth to ornament. Stephen Spender via Wikipedia: "[Broch's] characters are sleepwalkers because their own lives are shaped by the forces of the nightmare reality in which they live." In Mann, Proust and Musil the time in which the characters live is the ground on which the figures appear. In American novels they sometimes seem painted on plexiglass.
I did think of "The Sleepwalkers" - although I confess I haven't read it. There are different possible responses to the end of empire - I'm more familiar with the British case: Lessing, Murdoch etc.
Philip every daily sends up a half dead finger pointing at the moon side of whatever Jesus is vague attention is looking to. We 'been had. Women all who refuse to act have also not been seen to participate in the punny funny dad jokes of their stated favorite person. Lendung us the clay materielle of raw power and did you maybe mean my x genre when said Boom? Ah Morvaigne is 19 years old, happy 19th Morvaigne! Carry on citizens, have you noticed that conditions being favorable- you could do acrobatic healing and yogic aerobics walking a rolling garbage can? Mister Nick Land has ssid Garbage mntn dissolved. But really where is your sense of humor?
My new word for grown adult zealous adherence to every scientific explanation: science - terrific! I mean 'commit no sociology' but we cannot help that, t' was what makes Audrn funny. Jane Eyre you are right to slur Paglia. She called poet Clay Eshleman a 'pornographer of s poet' but, who is this tar chicken to talk? Ugh, i melt, what a wet world!
Cold