In Real Time (6)

Previews, preoccupations, & proclamations

[Image: “The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine,” 1864-65, Sanford Robinson Gifford, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., in honor of John Wilmerding. In the public domain.]

Greetings and happy Feast of the Transfiguration from the conclusion of a true mountaintop experience, the Genealogies of Modernity colloquium in Pittsburgh this past weekend. I had the great good fortune to be invited to talk about the work of David Foster Wallace and Samuel Johnson—and, by extension, questions of whether and how fiction writers can talk in a substantive way, within their fiction, about the human effort and desire to live a moral life, without lapsing into didactic moralism.

The contemplative realist answer to the core question here is a deep resounding yes: yet while telling how and why this is true might be simple, it is by no means simplistic. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the weekend’s conversation, and its engagement with historicity, we ended up focusing more on some ways in which, and reasons why, it becomes more apparently difficult to write moral concern in the twenty-first century than it seemed in the eighteenth; and also ways in which this set of questions relate back to perennial human concerns about the identity of the artist, the mutability of society and history, and the everpresent awareness that the conditions of peace and prosperity that make any art possible are themselves fragile and cannot by any means be taken for granted. When the full version of the conversation surfaces, I’ll be sure to share it with you.

Anyway, as I also had occasion to tell a lot of people, my short story collection is out later this month from Wiseblood Books, and I hope you’ll consider preordering if you’re in a position to do that. If you are a reviewer who would like to see a review copy in order to write about it for a publication, please message me privately; it’s difficult to quantify the exponential difference the work of a good reviewer can make, especially for small-press authors.

Finally, about that series of close readings I mentioned back in July: those are still in the works, and (here we’re getting to the “real time” aspect of these posts) should start appearing within the next few weeks (which not coincidentally also mark the start of the American school semester). To the list of authors I want us to investigate together, I’ve just added Rumer Godden, Iris Murdoch, David Foster Wallace, and Francois Mauriac. If you have a request for a book on which you’d like to hear (well, read) a contemplative realist take, please drop it in the comments, and I’ll add it to my list.