Writers: A Room of Our Own

I confess I can’t remember. When I reject something, I usually forget all about it. I have too small a mind to keep much more – well, consciously – than I want to remember. I suspect that most contemporary “New Yorker” poets would leave me longing for a V8.

Yes, of course, everything is taste. The trouble with just saying that, though, is that it leaves Mr. A free, in his column in the New York Review of Books, to declare something wonderfully worthy even if it’s clearly junk, so long as he’s respected among the “in” people and, in turn, respects them. By far the best thing someone who cares deeply about art can do, I suppose, is to sync his thinking with that of the right crowd.

The New Yorker has changed. The name’s the same, but it’s now a political magazine, with poetry, as I recall, that’s trendy, not sweet.

Humans are all hypocrites, I suppose, at least if by “hypocrite” we mean someone who says one thing and does another. But I think what we usually mean by that derogation is someone who behaves that way egregiously, not just normally, the way we all can’t help behaving.

Many years ago, I subscribed to the New Yorker, then I didn’t, then we did, and now we don’t. It’s certainly a pretty publication, but so are many others. A few of the cartoons are very funny, but many are deliberately directed far over the heads of the little old lady in Iowa and me. I can live happily without succumbing to the temptation to pay for them.

Do we live in humorless times? Have we lost the gift of laughing at ourselves?

I’m a complainer. As a child riding a bicycle to an art gallery and a contemporary crafts store, I discovered that there was beauty in my world, intuitively recognizable, tangible, and obtainable at a price I could afford. A little older, riding a bus to a movie theater, I stumbled on “foreign films”, and found that a movie could connect with something inside me in much the same way. Once you’ve discovered beauty, you can’t go back. Whenever you come across something that falls short, as you do a thousand or a hundred thousand times a day, you’re deeply disappointed, and, if you were an only child, reared to expect the world to meet your expectations, you complain. Non-beauty is so unnecessary. Meeting it makes you sad, and not a little angry.

It’s personal, of course, and it’s intuitive. I don’t define it. Defining is for overthinkers. A few adjectives off the top of the head will have to serve. Simple, spare, clean, rich, elegant, intelligent, balanced, colorful, harmonious, joyful or somber or sad or serene, and complete.