Day 13: Elizabeth Bowen, Laura Luciana, Denise Levertov
Today I did not get out of bed til 5pm. I kept thinking, why should I? But, I did finish 3 of the books on the pile on my bed.
Todays writing wont have much thought or intel to it. My brain is flabbergasted.
Story: Elizabeth Bowen - The Demon Lover (1945)
The first short story in a while that I didn't enjoy.
Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Death of the Heart meant a lot to me, which I wrote about here but I did not care about this short story whatsoever!
It is set during the London Air Raids, in which the narrator has returned to her mostly-emptied house to pick something up, knowing she is in a zone-of-danger, and while this story could be suspenseful, it keeps cutting to vague memories of a fiancee who died in the previous war.
I guess I read it too early in the morning, nothing was grabbing me. What made Death of the Heart so good was the venomous characters and their knife-stab dialogue, but that is gone here. It is all descriptions and hazy recollections, up until the last page, which I admit was a pretty frightening ending if only for the description of the actions.
But the fantastical twist is so dull on paper that I'm not in a rush to reread. Maybe I will another time.
Essay: Laura Luciana - Artists Talking, or Posting in the Era of Doomscrolling (2025)
This was from the latest issue of un. magazine, an independent Australian art crit journal that is occasionally great.
Luciana asks the very optimistic question: "Can we promote a kind of online democracy, effectively self-publishing and circulating what mainstream media channels won’t?"
The flaw here is she champions Substack as the great new open-forum, which to me is just another gamified hustle-app, but at least the platform has many good writers and the potential to make some money.
The other focus in her essay is that these new social-media forms of art-criticism (see snarky local art-world accounts, or snarky personal substacks) allow a lot of interaction between the audience, institutions and artists, who often lash out at any negative review.
I know several critics in Perth whose negative reviews were widely seen as grenades of mustard gas, fired into the comfortable chambers of the nice, polite, wholesome scene. Social media allows anyone upset to rage in the comments or DM the writer, and institutions may go into damage control.
I remember writing a facebook post that was somehow the most popular thing I have ever written. it was something like "head curator? whatever. AGWA just means water in spanish". apparently the art gallery of wa brought this post up in their meeting, having googled my name, saying "whose this shithead who used to write for Pelican Magazine?"
Worse than confrontation is the confederacy of silence, but this is unlikely to happen on social media, where you always have the validation of like-counts. Publishing on an Old-web website, or in print is another story. It may be weeks or months before you get a reaction whatsoever. That this feels like a problem at all (which it does for me) is due to a decade of social media conditioning, where all reactions must take place within the 24hr period.
Although Substack prizes the archive, of the thrill of stumbling upon the collected works of some obscure genius, the way the platform operates is just more of the same app-era immediacy.
And as Luciana states, the art-world in Sydney is just as small and insular as Perth's. I wonder if there is any inter-city crossover of drama. If she ever somehow gets screenshotted my more critical comments, probably off-the-mark and self indulgent (its 2am!) well, please know I liked the essay.
I think there can be no satisfactory answer to "what is the best platform to build a community of discussion and criticism". Perhaps Substack, web 2.0 and physical media are equally condusive to building scenes of critical literacy. I think we just haven't figured out a way to adjust our expectations.
Poem: Denise Levertov - The Springtime
The red eyes of rabbits
aren't sad. No one passes
the sad golden village in a barge
any more. The sunset
will leave it alone. If the
curtains hang askew
it is no one's fault.
Around and around and around
everywhere the same sound
of wheels going, and things
growing older, growing
silent. If the dogs
bark to each other
all night, and their eyes
flash red, that's
nobody's business. They have
a great space of dark to
bark across. The rabbits
will bare their teeth at
the spring moon.
This poem is so cool. Her poetry reminds me of my four favourite sad country boy song writers: Bill Callahan, David Berman, Will Oldham and Jason Molina.
I don't know what the poem is "saying" overall, but it takes me to a place, of walking through a place at a certain time in a certain mood - what maybe they call psychogeography.
"The rabbits will bare their teeth at the spring moon" is a dope last line.