I started this blog last winter after I read Fake Accounts and it bothered me enough to try to write about it. It was the first contemporary fiction book I had read in a long time, and I was surprised at its inventiveness and annoyed at its arrogance. It had caught me in its metafictional trap and I wanted revenge. So I tried writing an essay, which I hadn’t done since college days.
I had also started reading Substacks like Freddie deBoer’s, whose book reviews and other pieces I found inspiring, and, for the first time, literary journals and magazines. I started playing a game where I would read through all the pieces about a contemporary book to see if there was something I felt was important that hadn’t been said. This was the approach I used for Fake Accounts, The Netanyahus, and for Normal People. (The same for Dimes Square, but there was less written about it than the others).
I’m not quite at home in writing book reviews, and I’m happy to see most of the essays I’ve written here as an attempt at poetry’s revenge on that genre. I prefer analysis and interpretation to value judgments. I often feel that the right interpretive stance has to be arrived at first before a proper judgment can be made. I think this must make me too cautious a critic at times. I think it also comes out of my temperament, which has me too open to every alternate perspective. I am a little mentally blank, maybe even naive, and let the aggressing world impress all its ideas upon me.
Eventually this gets to be too much, and so another voice erupts as a defense, and through its excess I find my way back to myself. In the best cases this tendency toward excess leads to the fullest possible confrontation with a book, where the book is an image of a whole human, a whole worldview or a way of life, and I am whole while confronting it. I come to know myself even as I know the book, and it knows me. (In the worst case maybe I just end up ranting).
I am not so good at politics or knowing which superhero movie Karl Marx would have liked, but I try hard to learn from those ways of reading. I hope I can produce writing that absorbs lessons from politics and theory and historicism or whatever and then transcends them. Maybe that’s too ambitious for someone whose writing is so personal, but I don’t know how else to read and write. Books are made by persons and the things in them are a part of us, politics and theory included. So we will continue to confront each other, and to confront ourselves.
Around the time I started writing here, I had also just finished a group of poems I had been working on, and I felt it was time to try putting them in public. For years I wrote poetry by myself, sharing with nearly no one. I am a bit of a weirdo in this regard. It was my own private spiritual practice that I used to explain my life, for me alone. Maybe you can tell from how opaque some of it is that I have spent a lot of time talking to myself.
Anyway, I wanted to write this little statement so I could wave hello at you. I find that I come to like writers and artists better if they offer themselves to me once in a while. I like cultivating enigmas and I don’t like being pinned down, but one cool trick is that you can reveal the basics in a straightforward way and a sense of mystery can still abide. Reading and writing themselves are mysteries, as is our life.
Here are some facts: I am male. I am 33 years old. I was raised in New England and still live there. I was an English major but regretted it. I have never been to Buenos Aires. I am happily married and have two small children.
I hope this blog can retain a sense of mystery. I set no limits on what I do here. It could be poetry (simpler or more cryptic) or book reviews (lyrical or more straightforward) or writing about movies and TV or going wild like I did with T. S. Eliot recently. I hope it’s all seen as a trying-it-out, whatever thing comes next, as the energies in us war and converge. It’s all just me, or what’s inside of me.
Because this is just me doing in public what was previously done in private, I have to admit that I am a little blinded to its meaning at times. I don’t know what you the reader will like about it. I’ll do my best to pace things in such a way so that there aren’t too many posts in a row of, like, poems spoken by ghostlord shadow voices foreseeing the apocalypse or prose poetry about volcanic libraries and imaginary trips to South America — but anyway I hope you find something that appeals to you amidst the variety. It’s strange for me to have anyone reading at all, so I’m grateful you’re here.
Thank you — you’ve been very generous to give this your attention! This thing will be a year old in January. You can also email me at andrew.rosa@protonmail.com.
The red on blue polls. can't see them.